A Primer on Philosophers

Plato was born to an aristocratic family in Athens. His father, Ariston, was believed to have descended from the early kings of Athens. Perictione, his mother, was distantly related to the 6th- century BC lawmaker Solon. When Plato was a child, his father died, and his mother married Pyrilampes, who was an associate of the statesman Pericles.

As a young man Plato had political ambitions, but he became disillusioned by the political leadership in Athens. He eventually became a disciple of Socrates, accepting his basic philosophy and dialectical style of debate: the pursuit of truth through questions, answers, and additional questions. Plato witnessed the death of Socrates at the hands of the Athenian democracy in 399 BC. Perhaps fearing for his own safety, he left Athens temporarily and traveled to Italy, Sicily, and Egypt.

In 387 Plato founded the Academy in Athens, the institution often described as the first European university. It provided a comprehensive curriculum, including such subjects as astronomy, biology, mathematics, political theory, and philosophy. Aristotle was the Academy's most prominent student.

Pursuing an opportunity to combine philosophy and practical politics, Plato went to Sicily in 367 to tutor the new ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius the Younger, in the art of philosophical rule. The experiment failed. Plato made another trip to Syracuse in 361, but again his engagement in Sicilian affairs met with little success. The concluding yers of his life were spent lecturing at the Academy and writing. He died at about the age of 80 in Athens in 348 or 347 BC.

Works

Plato's writings were in dialogue form; philosophical ideas were advanced, discussed, and criticized in the context of a conversation or debate involving two or more persons. The earliest collection of Plato's work includes 35 dialogues and 13 letters. The authenticity of a few of the dialogues and most of the letters has been disputed.

Early Dialogues

The dialogues may be divided into early, middle, and later periods of composition. The earliest represent Plato's attempt to communicate the philosophy and dialectical style of Socrates. Several of these dialogues take the same form. Socrates, encountering someone who claims to know much, professes to be ignorant and seeks assistance from the one who knows. As Socrates begins to raise questions, however, it becomes clear that the one reputed to be wise really does not know what he claims to know, and Socrates emerges as the wiser one because he at least knows that he does not know. Such knowledge, of course, is the beginning of wisdom. Included in this group of dialogues are Charmides (an attempt to define temperance), Lysis (a discussion of friendship), Laches (a pursuit of the meaning of courage), Protagoras (a defense of the thesis that virtue is knowledge and can be taught), Euthyphro (a consideration of the nature of piety), and Book I of the Republic (a discussion of justice).

Middle and Late Dialogues

The dialogues of the middle and later periods of Plato's life reflect his own philosophical development. The ideas in these works are attributed by most scholars to Plato himself, although Socrates continues to be the main character in many of the dialogues. The writings of the middle period include Gorgias (a consideration of several ethical questions), Meno (a discussion of the nature of knowledge), the Apology (Socrates' defense of himself at his trial against the charges of atheism and corrupting Athenian youth), Crito (Socrates' defense of obedience to the laws of the state), Phaedo (the death scene of Socrates, in which he discusses the theory of Forms, the nature of the soul, and the question of immortality), the Symposium (Plato's outstanding dramatic achievement, which contains several speeches on beauty and love), the Republic (Plato's supreme philosophical achievement, which is a detailed discussion of the nature of justice). The works of the later period include the Theaetetus (a denial that knowledge is to be identified with sense perception), Parmenides (a critical evaluation of the theory of Forms), Sophist (further consideration of the theory of Ideas, or Forms), Philebus (a discussion of the relationship between pleasure and the good), Timaeus (Plato's views on natural science and cosmology), and the Laws (a more practical analysis of political and social issues).

Theory of Forms

At the heart of Plato's philosophy is his theory of Forms, or Ideas. Ultimately, his view of knowledge, his ethical theory, his psychology, his concept of the state, and his perspective on art must be understood in terms of this theory.

Theory of Knowledge

Plato's theory of Forms and his theory of knowledge are so interrelated that they must be discussed together. Influenced by Socrates, Plato was convinced that knowledge is attainable. He was also convinced of two essential characteristics of knowledge. First, knowledge must be certain and infallible. Second, knowledge must have as its object that which is genuinely real as contrasted with that which is an appearance only. Because that which is fully real must, for Plato, be fixed, permanent, and unchanging, he identified the real with the ideal realm of being as opposed to the physical world of becoming. One consequence of this view was Plato's rejection of empiricism, the claim that knowledge is derived from sense experience. He thought that propositions derived from sense experience have, at most, a degree of probability. They are not certain. Furthermore, the objects of sense experience are changeable phenomena of the physical world. Hence, objects of sense experience are not proper objects of knowledge.

Plato's own theory of knowledge is found in the Republic, particularly in his discussion of the image of the divided line and the myth of the cave. In the former, Plato distinguishes between two levels of awareness: opinion and knowledge. Claims or assertions about the physical or visible world, including both commonsense observations and the propositions of science, are opinions only. Some of these opinions are well founded; some are not; but none of them counts as genuine knowledge. The higher level of awareness is knowledge, because there reason, rather than sense experience, is involved. Reason, properly used, results in intellectual insights that are certain, and the objects of these rational insights are the abiding universals, the eternal Forms or substances that constitute the real world.

The myth of the cave describes individuals chained deep within the recesses of a cave. Bound so that vision is restricted, they cannot see one another. The only thing visible is the wall of the cave upon which appear shadows cast by models or statues of animals and objects that are passed before a brightly burning fire. Breaking free, one of the individuals escapes from the cave into the light of day. With the aid of the sun, that person sees for the first time the real world and returns to the cave with the message that the only things they have seen heretofore are shadows and appearances and that the real world awaits them if they are willing to struggle free of their bonds. The shadowy environment of the cave symbolizes for Plato the physical world of appearances. Escape into the sun-filled setting outside the cave symbolizes the transition to the real world, the world of full and perfect being, the world of Forms, which is the proper object of knowledge.

Nature of Forms

The theory of Forms may best be understood in terms of mathematical entities. A circle, for instance, is defined as a plane figure composed of a series of points, all of which are equidistant from a given point. No one has ever actually seen such a figure, however.

What people have actually seen are drawn figures that are more or less close approximations of the ideal circle. In fact, when mathematicians define a circle, the points referred to are not spatial points at all; they are logical points. They do not occupy space. Nevertheless, although the Form of a circle has never been seen—indeed, could never be seen—mathematicians and others do in fact know what a circle is. That they can define a circle is evidence that they know what it is. For Plato, therefore, the Form “circularity” exists, but not in the physical world of space and time. It exists as a changeless object in the world of Forms or Ideas, which can be known only by reason. Forms have greater reality than objects in the physical world both because of their perfection and stability and because they are models, resemblance to which gives ordinary physical objects whatever reality they have. Circularity, squareness, and triangularity are excellent examples, then, of what Plato meant by Forms. An object existing in the physical world may be called a circle or a square or a triangle only to the extent that it resembles (“participates in” is Plato's phrase) the Form “circularity” or “squareness” or “triangularity.”

Plato extended his theory beyond the realm of mathematics. Indeed, he was most interested in its application in the field of social ethics. The theory was his way of explaining how the same universal term can refer to so many particular things or events. The word justice, for example, can be applied to hundreds of particular acts because these acts have something in common, namely, their resemblance to, or participation in, the Form “justice.” An individual is human to the extent that he or she resembles or participates in the Form “humanness.” If “humanness” is defined in terms of being a rational animal, then an individual is human to the extent that he or she is rational. A particular act is courageous or cowardly to the extent that it participates in its Form. An object is beautiful to the extent that it participates in the Idea, or Form, of beauty. Everything in the world of space and time is what it is by virtue of its resemblance to, or participation in, its universal Form. The ability to define the universal term is evidence that one has grasped the Form to which that universal refers.

Plato conceived the Forms as arranged hierarchically; the supreme Form is the Form of the Good, which, like the sun in the myth of the cave, illuminates all the other Ideas. There is a sense in which the Form of the Good represents Plato's movement in the direction of an ultimate principle of explanation. Ultimately, the theory of Forms is intended to explain how one comes to know and also how things have come to be as they are. In philosophical language, Plato's theory of Forms is both an epistemological (theory of knowledge) and an ontological (theory of being) thesis.

Political Theory

The Republic, Plato's major political work, is concerned with the question of justice and therefore with the questions “what is a just state” and “who is a just individual?”

The ideal state, according to Plato, is composed of three classes. The economic structure of the state is maintained by the merchant class. Security needs are met by the military class, and political leadership is provided by the philosopher-kings. A particular person's class is determined by an educational process that begins at birth and proceeds until that person has reached the maximum level of education compatible with interest and ability. Those who complete the entire educational process become philosopher-kings. They are the ones whose minds have been so developed that they are able to grasp the Forms and, therefore, to make the wisest decisions. Indeed, Plato's ideal educational system is primarily structured so as to produce philosopher-kings.

Plato associates the traditional Greek virtues with the class structure of the ideal state. Temperance is the unique virtue of the artisan class; courage is the virtue peculiar to the military class; and wisdom characterizes the rulers. Justice, the fourth virtue, characterizes society as a whole. The just state is one in which each class performs its own function well without infringing on the activities of the other classes. Plato divides the human soul into three parts: the rational part, the will, and the appetites. The just person is the one in whom the rational element, supported by the will, controls the appetites. An obvious analogy exists here with the threefold class structure of the state, in which the enlightened philosopher-kings, supported by the soldiers, govern the rest of society.

Ethics

Plato's ethical theory rests on the assumption that virtue is knowledge and can be taught, which has to be understood in terms of his theory of Forms. As indicated previously, the ultimate Form for Plato is the Form of the Good, and knowledge of this Form is the source of guidance in moral decision making. Plato also argued that to know the good is to do the good. The corollary of this is that anyone who behaves immorally does so out of ignorance. This conclusion follows from Plato's conviction that the moral person is the truly happy person, and because individuals always desire their own happiness, they always desire to do that which is moral.

Art

Plato had an essentially antagonistic view of art and the artist, although he approved of certain religious and moralistic kinds of art. Again, his approach is related to his theory of Forms. A beautiful flower, for example, is a copy or imitation of the universal Forms “flowerness” and “beauty.” The physical flower is one step removed from reality, that is, the Forms. A picture of the flower is, therefore, two steps removed from reality. This also meant that the artist is two steps removed from knowledge, and, indeed, Plato's frequent criticism of the artists is that they lack genuine knowledge of what they are doing. Artistic creation, Plato observed, seems to be rooted in a kind of inspired madness.

Influence

Plato's influence throughout the history of philosophy has been monumental. When he died, Speusippus became head of the Academy. The school continued in existence until AD 529, when it was closed by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, who objected to its pagan teachings. Plato's impact on Jewish thought is apparent in the work of the 1st-century Alexandrian philosopher Philo Judaeus. Neoplatonism, founded by the 3rd-century philosopher Plotinus, was an important later development of Platonism. The theologians Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Augustine were early Christian exponents of a Platonic perspective. Platonic ideas have had a crucial role in the development of Christian theology and also in medieval Islamic thought .

During the Renaissance, the primary focus of Platonic influence was the Florentine Academy, founded in the 15th century near Florence. Under the leadership of Marsilio Ficino, members of the Academy studied Plato in the original Greek. In England, Platonism was revived in the 17th century by Ralph Cudworth and others who became known as the Cambridge Platonists. Plato's influence has been extended into the 20th century by such thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead, who once paid him tribute by describing the history of philosophy as simply “a series of footnotes to Plato.“

Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosopher and scientist, who shares with Plato and Socrates the distinction of being the most famous of ancient philosophers.

Aristotle was born at Stagira, in Macedonia, the son of a physician to the royal court. At the age of 17, he went to Athens to study at Plato's Academy. He remained there for about 20 years, as a student and then as a teacher.

When Plato died in 347 BC, Aristotle moved to Assos, a city in Asia Minor, where a friend of his, Hermias, was ruler. There he counseled Hermias and married his niece and adopted daughter, Pythias. After Hermias was captured and executed by the Persians in 345 BC, Aristotle went to Pella, the Macedonian capital, where he became the tutor of the king's young son Alexander, later known as Alexander the Great. In 335, when Alexander became king, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his own school, the Lyceum. Because much of the discussion in his school took place while teachers and students were walking about the Lyceum grounds, Aristotle's school came to be known as the Peripatetic (“walking” or “strolling”) school. Upon the death of Alexander in 323 BC, strong anti-Macedonian feeling developed in Athens, and Aristotle retired to a family estate in Euboea. He died there the following year.

Works

Aristotle, like Plato, made regular use of the dialogue in his earliest years at the Academy, but lacking Plato's imaginative gifts, he probably never found the form congenial. Apart from a few fragments in the works of later writers, his dialogues have been wholly lost. Aristotle also wrote some short technical notes, such as a dictionary of philosophic terms and a summary of the doctrines of Pythagoras. Of these, only a few brief excerpts have survived. Still extant, however, are Aristotle's lecture notes for carefully outlined courses treating almost every branch of knowledge and art. The texts on which Aristotle's reputation rests are largely based on these lecture notes, which were collected and arranged by later editors.

Among the texts are treatises on logic, called Organon (“instrument”), because they provide the means by which positive knowledge is to be attained. His works on natural science include Physics, which gives a vast amount of information on astronomy, meteorology, plants, and animals. His writings on the nature, scope, and properties of being, which Aristotle called First Philosophy (Prote philosophia), were given the title Metaphysics in the first published edition of his works (60? BC), because in that edition they followed Physics. His treatment of the Prime Mover, or first cause, as pure intellect, perfect in unity, immutable, and, as he said, “the thought of thought,” is given in the Metaphysics. To his son Nicomachus he dedicated his work on ethics, called the Nicomachean Ethics. Other essential works include his Rhetoric, his Poetics (which survives in incomplete form), and his Politics (also incomplete).

Methods

Perhaps because of the influence of his father's medical profession, Aristotle's philosophy laid its principal stress on biology, in contrast to Plato's emphasis on mathematics. Aristotle regarded the world as made up of individuals (substances) occurring in fixed natural kinds (species). Each individual has its built-in specific pattern of development and grows toward proper self-realization as a specimen of its type. Growth, purpose, and direction are thus built into nature. Although science studies general kinds, according to Aristotle, these kinds find their existence in particular individuals. Science and philosophy must therefore balance, not simply choose between, the claims of empiricism (observation and sense experience) and formalism (rational deduction).

One of the most distinctive of Aristotle's philosophic contributions was a new notion of causality. Each thing or event, he thought, has more than one “reason” that helps to explain what, why, and where it is. Earlier Greek thinkers had tended to assume that only one sort of cause can be really explanatory; Aristotle proposed four. (The word Aristotle uses, aition, “a responsible, explanatory factor” is not synonymous with the word cause in its modern sense.)

These four causes are the material cause, the matter out of which a thing is made; the efficient cause, the source of motion, generation, or change; the formal cause, which is the species, kind, or type; and the final cause, the goal, or full development, of an individual, or the intended function of a construction or invention. Thus, a young lion is made up of tissues and organs, its material cause; the efficient cause is its parents, who generated it; the formal cause is its species, lion; and its final cause is its built-in drive toward becoming a mature specimen. In different contexts, while the causes are the same four, they apply analogically. Thus, the material cause of a statue is the marble from which it was carved; the efficient cause is the sculptor; the formal cause is the shape the sculptor realized—Hermes, perhaps, or Aphrodite; and the final cause is its function, to be a work of fine art.

In each context, Aristotle insists that something can be better understood when its causes can be stated in specific terms rather than in general terms. Thus, it is more informative to know that a sculptor made the statue than to know that an artist made it; and even more informative to know that Polycleitus chiseled it rather than simply that a sculptor did so. Aristotle thought his causal pattern was the ideal key for organizing knowledge. His lecture notes present impressive evidence of the power of this scheme.

Doctrines

Some of the principal aspects of Aristotle's thought can be seen in the following summary of his doctrines, or theories.

Physics, or Natural Philosophy

In astronomy, Aristotle proposed a finite, spherical universe, with the earth at its center. The central region is made up of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. In Aristotle's physics, each of these four elements has a proper place, determined by its relative heaviness, its “specific gravity.” Each moves naturally in a straight line—earth down, fire up—toward its proper place, where it will be at rest. Thus, terrestrial motion is always linear and always comes to a halt. The heavens, however, move naturally and endlessly in a complex circular motion. The heavens, therefore, must be made of a fifth, and different element, which he called aither. A superior element, aither is incapable of any change other than change of place in a circular movement. Aristotle's theory that linear motion always takes place through a resisting medium is in fact valid for all observable terrestrial motions. He also held that heavier bodies of a given material fall faster than lighter ones when their shapes are the same, a mistaken view that was accepted as fact until the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo conducted his experiment with weights dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Biology

In zoology, Aristotle proposed a fixed set of natural kinds (“species”), each reproducing true to type. An exception occurs, Aristotle thought, when some “very low” worms and flies come from rotting fruit or manure by “spontaneous generation.” The typical life cycles are epicycles: The same pattern repeats, but through a linear succession of individuals. These processes are therefore intermediate between the changeless circles of the heavens and the simple linear movements of the terrestrial elements. The species form a scale from simple (worms and flies at the bottom) to complex (human beings at the top), but evolution is not possible.

Aristotelian Psychology

For Aristotle, psychology was a study of the soul. Insisting that form (the essence, or unchanging characteristic element in an object) and matter (the common undifferentiated substratum of things) always exist together, Aristotle defined a soul as a “kind of functioning of a body organized so that it can support vital functions.” In considering the soul as essentially associated with the body, he challenged the Pythagorean doctrine that the soul is a spiritual entity imprisoned in the body. Aristotle's doctrine is a synthesis of the earlier notion that the soul does not exist apart from the body and of the Platonic notion of a soul as a separate, nonphysical entity. Whether any part of the human soul is immortal, and, if so, whether its immortality is personal, are not entirely clear in his treatise On the Soul. Through the functioning of the soul, the moral and intellectual aspects of humanity are developed. Aristotle argued that human insight in its highest form (nous poetikos, “active mind”) is not reducible to a mechanical physical process. Such insight, however, presupposes an individual “passive mind” that does not appear to transcend physical nature. Aristotle clearly stated the relationship between human insight and the senses in what has become a slogan of empiricism—the view that knowledge is grounded in sense experience. “There is nothing in the intellect,” he wrote, “that was not first in the senses.”

Ethics

It seemed to Aristotle that the individual's freedom of choice made an absolutely accurate analysis of human affairs impossible. “Practical science,” then, such as politics or ethics, was called science only by courtesy and analogy. The inherent limitations on practical science are made clear in Aristotle's concepts of human nature and self-realization. Human nature certainly involves, for everyone, a capacity for forming habits; but the habits that a particular individual forms depend on that individual's culture and repeated personal choices. All human beings want “happiness,” an active, engaged realization of their innate capacities, but this goal can be achieved in a multiplicity of ways.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is an analysis of character and intelligence as they relate to happiness. Aristotle distinguished two kinds of “virtue,” or human excellence: moral and intellectual. Moral virtue is an expression of character, formed by habits reflecting repeated choices. A moral virtue is always a mean between two less desirable extremes. Courage, for example, is a mean between cowardice and thoughtless rashness; generosity, between extravagance and parsimony. Intellectual virtues are not subject to this doctrine of the mean. Aristotle argued for an elitist ethics: Full excellence can be realized only by the mature male adult of the upper class, not by women, or children, or barbarians (non-Greeks), or salaried “mechanics” (manual workers) for whom, indeed, Aristotle did not want to allow voting rights. In politics, many forms of human association can obviously be found; which one is suitable depends on circumstances, such as the natural resources, cultural traditions, industry, and literacy of each community. Aristotle did not regard politics as a study of ideal states in some abstract form, but rather as an examination of the way in which ideals, laws, customs, and property interrelate in actual cases. He thus approved the contemporary institution of slavery but tempered his acceptance by insisting that masters should not abuse their authority, since the interests of master and slave are the same. The Lyceum library contained a collection of 158 constitutions of the Greek and other states. Aristotle himself wrote the Constitution of Athens as part of the collection, and after being lost, this description was rediscovered in a papyrus copy in 1890. Historians have found the work of great value in reconstructing many phases of the history of Athens.

Logic

In logic, Aristotle developed rules for chains of reasoning that would, if followed, never lead from true premises to false conclusions (validity rules). In reasoning, the basic links are syllogisms: pairs of propositions that, taken together, give a new conclusion. For example, “All humans are mortal” and “All Greeks are humans” yield the valid conclusion “All Greeks are mortal.” Science results from constructing more complex systems of reasoning. In his logic, Aristotle distinguished between dialectic and analytic. Dialectic, he held, only tests opinions for their logical consistency; analytic works deductively from principles resting on experience and precise observation. This is clearly an intended break with Plato's Academy, where dialectic was supposed to be the only proper method for science and philosophy alike.

Metaphysics

In his metaphysics, Aristotle argued for the existence of a divine being, described as the Prime Mover, who is responsible for the unity and purposefulness of nature. God is perfect and therefore the aspiration of all things in the world, because all things desire to share perfection. Other movers exist as well—the intelligent movers of the planets and stars (Aristotle suggested that the number of these is “either 55 or 47”). The Prime Mover, or God, described by Aristotle is not very suitable for religious purposes, as many later philosophers and theologians have observed. Aristotle limited his “theology,” however, to what he believed science requires and can establish.

Influence

Aristotle's works were lost in the West after the decline of Rome. During the 9th century AD, Arab scholars introduced Aristotle, in Arabic translation, to the Islamic world (see ISLAM). The 12th-century Spanish-Arab philosopher Averroes is the best known of the Arabic scholars who studied and commented on Aristotle. In the 13th century, the Latin West renewed its interest in Aristotle's work, and Saint Thomas Aquinas found in it a philosophical foundation for Christian thought. Church officials at first questioned Aquinas's use of Aristotle; in the early stages of its rediscovery, Aristotle's philosophy was regarded with some suspicion, largely because his teachings were thought to lead to a materialistic view of the world. Nevertheless, the work of Aquinas was accepted, and the later philosophy of scholasticism continued the philosophical tradition based on Aquinas's adaptation of Aristotelian thought. The influence of Aristotle's philosophy has been pervasive; it has even helped to shape modern language and common sense. His doctrine of the Prime Mover as final cause played an important role in theology. Until the 20th century, logic meant Aristotle's logic. Until the Renaissance, and even later, astronomers and poets alike admired his concept of the universe. Zoology rested on Aristotle's work until British scientist Charles Darwin modified the doctrine of the changelessness of species in the 19th century. In the 20th century a new appreciation has developed of Aristotle's method and its relevance to education, literary criticism, the analysis of human action, and political analysis.

Not only the discipline of zoology, but also the world of learning as a whole, seems to amply justify Darwin's remark that the intellectual heroes of his own time “were mere schoolboys compared to old Aristotle.”

Aquinas

Aquinas, Saint Thomas, sometimes called the Angelic Doctor and the Prince of Scholastics (1225-74), Italian philosopher and theologian, whose works have made him the most important figure in Scholastic philosophy and one of the leading Roman Catholic theologians. Aquinas was born of a noble family in Roccasecca, near Aquino, and was educated at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples. He joined the Dominican order while still an undergraduate in 1243, the year of his father's death. His mother, opposed to Thomas's affiliation with a mendicant order, confined him to the family castle for more than a year in a vain attempt to make him abandon his chosen course. She released him in 1245, and Aquinas then journeyed to Paris to continue his studies. He studied under the German Scholastic philosopher Albertus Magnus, following him to Cologne in 1248. Because Aquinas was heavyset and taciturn, his fellow novices called him Dumb Ox, but Albertus Magnus is said to have predicted that “this ox will one day fill the world with his bellowing.”

Early Years

Aquinas was ordained a priest about 1250, and he began to teach at the University of Paris in 1252. His first writings, primarily summaries and amplifications of his lectures, appeared two years later. His first major work was Scripta Super Libros Sententiarum (Writings on the Books of the Sentences, 1256?), which consisted of commentaries on an influential work concerning the sacraments of the church, known as the Sententiarum Libri Quatuor (Four Books of Sentences), by the Italian theologian Peter Lombard. In 1256 Aquinas was awarded a doctorate in theology and appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. Pope Alexander IV (reigned 1254-61) summoned him to Rome in 1259, where he acted as adviser and lecturer to the papal court. Returning to Paris in 1268, Aquinas immediately became involved in a controversy with the French philosopher Siger de Brabant and other followers of the Islamic philosopher Averroës.

Study of Aristotle and the Averroists

To understand the crucial importance of this controversy for Western thought, it is necessary to consider the context in which it occurred. Before the time of Aquinas, Western thought had been dominated by the philosophy of St. Augustine, the Western church's great Father and Doctor of the 4th and 5th centuries, who taught that in the search for truth people must depend upon sense experience. Early in the 13th century the major works of Aristotle were made available in a Latin translation, accompanied by the commentaries of Averroës and other Islamic scholars. The vigor, clarity, and authority of Aristotle's teachings restored confidence in empirical knowledge and gave rise to a school of philosophers known as Averroists. Under the leadership of Siger de Brabant, the Averroists asserted that philosophy was independent of revelation. Averroism threatened the integrity and supremacy of Roman Catholic doctrine and filled orthodox thinkers with alarm. To ignore Aristotle, as interpreted by the Averroists, was impossible; to condemn his teachings was ineffectual. He had to be reckoned with. Albertus Magnus and other scholars had attempted to deal with Averroism, but with little success. Aquinas succeeded brilliantly.

Reconciling the Augustinian emphasis upon the human spiritual principle with the Averroist claim of autonomy for knowledge derived from the senses, Aquinas insisted that the truths of faith and those of sense experience, as presented by Aristotle, are fully compatible and complementary. Some truths, such as that of the mystery of the incarnation, can be known only through revelation, and others, such as that of the composition of material things, only through experience; still others, such as that of the existence of God, are known through both equally. All knowledge, Aquinas held, originates in sensation, but sense data can be made intelligible only by the action of the intellect, which elevates thought toward the apprehension of such immaterial realities as the human soul, the angels, and God. To reach understanding of the highest truths, those with which religion is concerned, the aid of revelation is needed. Aquinas's moderate realism placed the universals firmly in the mind, in opposition to extreme realism, which posited their independence of human thought. He admitted a foundation for universals in existing things, however, in opposition to nominalism and conceptualism.

Later Years

Aquinas first suggested his mature position in the treatise De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas (1270; trans. The Trinity and the Unicity of the Intellect, 1946). This work turned the tide against his opponents, who were condemned by the church.

Aquinas left Paris in 1272 and proceeded to Naples, where he organized a new Dominican school. In March 1274, while traveling to the Council of Lyon, to which he had been commissioned by Pope Gregory X, Aquinas fell ill. He died on March 7 at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova. Aquinas was canonized by Pope John XXII in 1323 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius V in 1567.

Assessment

More successfully than any other theologian or philosopher, Aquinas organized the knowledge of his time in the service of his faith. In his effort to reconcile faith with intellect, he created a philosophical synthesis of the works and teachings of Aristotle and other classic sages; of Augustine and other church fathers; of Averroës, Avicenna, and other Islamic scholars; of Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides and Solomon ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol; and of his predecessors in the Scholastic tradition. This synthesis he brought into line with the Bible and Roman Catholic doctrine.

Aquinas's accomplishment was immense; his work marks one of the few great culminations in the history of philosophy. After Aquinas, Western philosophers could choose only between humbly following him and striking off in some altogether different direction. In the centuries immediately following his death, the dominant tendency, even among Roman Catholic thinkers, was to adopt the second alternative. Interest in Thomist philosophy began to revive, however, toward the end of the 19th century. In the encyclical Aeterni Patris (Of the Eternal Father, 1879), Pope Leo XIII recommended that St. Thomas's philosophy be made the basis of instruction in all Roman Catholic schools. Pope Pius XII, in the encyclical Humani Generis (Of the Human Race, 1950), affirmed that the Thomist philosophy is the surest guide to Roman Catholic doctrine and discouraged all departures from it. Thomism remains a leading school of contemporary thought. Among the thinkers, Roman Catholic and non-Roman Catholic alike, who have operated within the Thomist framework have been the French philosophers Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson.

St. Thomas was an extremely prolific author, and about 80 works are ascribed to him. The two most important are Summa Contra Gentiles (1261-64; trans. On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, 1956), a closely reasoned treatise intended to persuade intellectual Muslims of the truth of Christianity; and Summa Theologica (Summary Treatise of Theology, 1265-73), in three parts (on God, the moral life of man, and Christ), of which the last was left unfinished. Summa Theologica has been republished frequently in Latin and vernacular editions

Augustine

Augustine, Saint (354-430), greatest of the Latin Fathers and one of the most eminent Western Doctors of the Church.

Augustine was born on November 13, 354, in Tagaste, Numidia (now Souk-Ahras, Algeria). His father, Patricius (died about 371), was a pagan (later converted to Christianity), but his mother, Monica, was a devout Christian who labored untiringly for her son's conversion and who was canonized by the Roman Catholic church. Augustine was educated as a rhetorician in the former North African cities of Tagaste, Madaura, and Carthage. Between the ages of 15 and 30, he lived with a Carthaginian woman whose name is unknown; in 372 she bore him a son, whom he named Adeodatus, which is Latin for “the gift of God.”

Intellectual Struggle

Inspired by the philosophical treatise Hortensius, by the Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, Augustine became an earnest seeker after truth. He considered becoming a Christian, but experimented with several philosophical systems before finally entering the church. For nine years, from 373 until 382, he adhered to Manichaeism, a Persian dualistic philosophy then widely current in the Western Roman Empire. With its fundamental principle of conflict between good and evil, Manichaeism at first seemed to Augustine to correspond to experience and to furnish the most plausible hypothesis upon which to construct a philosophical and ethical system. Moreover, its moral code was not unpleasantly strict; Augustine later recorded in his Confessions: “Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.” Disillusioned by the impossibility of reconciling certain contradictory Manichaeist doctrines, Augustine abandoned this philosophy and turned to skepticism.

About 383 Augustine left Carthage for Rome, but a year later he went on to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric. There he came under the influence of the philosophy of Neoplatonism and also met the bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, then the most distinguished ecclesiastic in Italy. Augustine presently was attracted again to Christianity. At last one day, according to his own account, he seemed to hear a voice, like that of a child, repeating, “Take up and read.” He interpreted this as a divine exhortation to open the Scriptures and read the first passage he happened to see. Accordingly, he opened to Romans 13:13-14, where he read: “…not in revelry and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” He immediately resolved to embrace Christianity. Along with his natural son, he was baptized by Ambrose on Easter Eve in 387. His mother, who had rejoined him in Italy, rejoiced at this answer to her prayers and hopes. She died soon afterward in Ostia.

Bishop and Theologian

He returned to North Africa and was ordained in 391. He became bishop of Hippo (now Annaba, Algeria) in 395, an office he held until his death. It was a period of political and theological unrest, for while the barbarians pressed in upon the empire, even sacking Rome itself in 410, schism and heresy also threatened the church. Augustine threw himself wholeheartedly into the theological battle. Besides combating the Manichaean heresy, Augustine engaged in two great theological conflicts. One was with the Donatists, a sect that held the sacraments invalid unless administered by sinless ecclesiastics. The other conflict was with the Pelagians, followers of a contemporary British monk who denied the doctrine of original sin. In the course of this conflict, which was long and bitter, Augustine developed his doctrines of original sin and divine grace, divine sovereignty, and predestination. The Roman Catholic church has found special satisfaction in the institutional or ecclesiastical aspects of the doctrines of St. Augustine; Roman Catholic and Protestant theology alike are largely based on their more purely theological aspects. John Calvin and Martin Luther, leaders of the Reformation, were both close students of Augustine.

Augustine's doctrine stood between the extremes of Pelagianism and Manichaeism. Against Pelagian doctrine, he held that human spiritual disobedience had resulted in a state of sin that human nature was powerless to change. In his theology, men and women are saved by the gift of divine grace; against Manichaeism he vigorously defended the place of free will in cooperation with grace. Augustine died at Hippo, August 28, 430. His feast day is August 28.

Works

The place of prominence held by Augustine among the Fathers and Doctors of the Church is comparable to that of St. Paul among the apostles. As a writer, Augustine was prolific, persuasive, and a brilliant stylist. His best-known work is his autobiographical Confessions (circa 400), exposing his early life and conversion. In his great Christian apologia The City of God (413-26), Augustine formulated a theological philosophy of history. Ten of the 22 books of this work are devoted to polemic against pantheism. The remaining 12 books trace the origin, progress, and destiny of the church and establish it as the proper successor to paganism. In 428 Augustine wrote the Retractions, in which he registered his final verdict upon his earlier books, correcting whatever his maturer judgment held to be misleading or wrong. His other writings include the Epistles, of which 270 are in the Benedictine edition, variously dated between 386 and 429; his treatises On Free Will (388-95), On Christian Doctrine (397), On Baptism: Against the Donatists (400), On the Trinity (400-16), and On Nature and Grace (415); and Homilies upon several books of the Bible

Rene Descartes

Part1

Descartes, René (1596-1650), French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, sometime called the father of modern philosophy.

Born in La Haye, Touraine (a region and former province of France), Descartes was the son of a minor nobleman and belonged to a family that had produced a number of learned men. At the age of eight he was enrolled in the Jesuit school of La Flèche in Anjou, where he remained for eight years. Besides the usual classical studies, Descartes received instruction in mathematics and in Scholastic philosophy, which attempted to use human reason to understand Christian doctrine (see Scholasticism). Roman Catholicism exerted a strong influence on Descartes throughout his life. Upon graduation from school, he studied law at the University of Poitiers, graduating in 1616. He never practiced law, however; in 1618 he entered the service of Prince Maurice of Nassau, leader of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, with the intention of following a military career. In succeeding years Descartes served in other armies, but his attention had already been attracted to the problems of mathematics and philosophy to which he was to devote the rest of his life. He made a pilgrimage to Italy from 1623 to 1624 and spent the years from 1624 to 1628 in France. While in France, Descartes devoted himself to the study of philosophy and also experimented in the science of optics. In 1628, having sold his properties in France, he moved to the Netherlands, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Descartes lived for varying periods in a number of different cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Deventer, Utrecht, and Leiden.

It was probably during the first years of his residence in the Netherlands that Descartes wrote his first major work, Essais philosophiques (Philosophical Essays), published in 1637. The work contained four parts: an essay on geometry, another on optics, a third on meteors, and Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), which described his philosophical speculations. This was followed by other philosophical works, among them Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641; revised 1642) and Principia Philosophiae (The Principles of Philosophy, 1644). The latter volume was dedicated to Princess Elizabeth Stuart of Bohemia, who lived in the Netherlands and with whom Descartes had formed a deep friendship. In 1649 Descartes was invited to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden in Stockholm to give the queen instruction in philosophy. The rigors of the northern winter brought on the pneumonia that caused his death in 1650.

Part 2

Descartes attempted to apply the rational inductive methods of science, and particularly of mathematics, to philosophy. Before his time, philosophy had been dominated by the method of Scholasticism, which was entirely based on comparing and contrasting the views of recognized authorities. Rejecting this method, Descartes stated, "In our search for the direct road to truth, we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstration of arithmetic and geometry." He therefore determined to hold nothing true until he had established grounds for believing it true. The single sure fact from which his investigations began was expressed by him in the famous words Cogito, ergo sum,"I think, therefore I am." From this postulate that a clear consciousness of his thinking proved his own existence, he argued the existence of God. God, according to Descartes's philosophy, created two classes of substance that make up the whole of reality. One class was thinking substances, or minds, and the other was extended substances, or bodies.

Part 3

Descartes's philosophy, sometimes called Cartesianism, carried him into elaborate and erroneous explanations of a number of physical phenomena. These explanations, however, had value, because he substituted a system of mechanical interpretations of physical phenomena for the vague spiritual concepts of most earlier writers. Although Descartes had at first been inclined to accept the Copernican theory of the universe with its concept of a system of spinning planets revolving around the sun, he abandoned this theory when it was pronounced heretical by the Roman Catholic church. In its place he devised a theory of vortices in which space was entirely filled with matter, in various states, whirling about the sun.

Descartes's study of optics led him to the independent discovery of the fundamental law of reflection: that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. His essay on optics was the first published statement of this law. Descartes's treatment of light as a type of pressure in a solid medium paved the way for the undulatory theory of light.

Part 4

The most notable contribution that Descartes made to mathematics was the systematization of analytic geometry (see Geometry: Analytic Geometry). He was the first mathematician to attempt to classify curves according to the types of equations that produce them. He also made contributions to the theory of equations. Descartes was the first to use the last letters of the alphabet to designate unknown quantities and the first letters to designate known ones. He also invented the method of indices (as in x2) to express the powers of numbers. In addition, he formulated the rule, which is known as Descartes's rule of signs, for finding the number of positive and negative roots for any algebraic equation

René Descartes, French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, sometimes called the father of modern philosophy, was born in La Haye, Touraine (a region and former province of France. Descartes was the son of a minor nobleman and belonged to a family that had produced a number of learned men. At the age of eight he was enrolled in the Jesuit school of La Flèche in Anjou, where he remained for eight years. Besides the usual classical studies, he received instruction in mathematics and in Scholastic philosophy. Roman Catholicism exerted a strong influence on Descartes throughout his life. Upon graduation from school, he studied law at the University of Poitiers, graduating in 1616. He never practiced law, however; in 1618 he entered the service of Prince Maurice of Nassau, leader of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, with the intention of following a military career. In succeeding years Descartes served in other armies, but his attention had already been attracted to the problems of mathematics and philosophy to which he was to devote the rest of his life. He made a pilgrimage to Italy from 1623 to 1624 and spent the years from 1624 to 1628 in France. While in France, Descartes devoted himself to the study of philosophy and also experimented in the science of optics. In 1628, having sold his properties in France, he moved to the Netherlands, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Descartes lived for varying periods in a number of different cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Deventer, Utrecht, and Leiden.

It was probably during the first years of his residence in the Netherlands that Descartes wrote his first major work, Essais philosophiques (Philosophical Essays), published in 1637. The work contained four parts: an essay on geometry, another on optics, a third on meteors, and Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), which described his philosophical speculations. This was followed by other philosophical works, among them Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641; revised 1642) and Principia Philosophiae (The Principles of Philosophy, 1644). The latter volume was dedicated to Princess Elizabeth Stuart of Bohemia, who lived in the Netherlands and with whom Descartes had formed a deep friendship. In 1649 Descartes was invited to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden in Stockholm to give the queen instruction in philosophy; in this year he also published the work called The Passions of the Soul. The next year, however, the rigors of the northern winter brought on the pneumonia that caused his death on February 11, 1650.

Descartes attempted to apply the rational inductive methods of science, and particularly of mathematics, to philosophy. His concern with mathematics and its power as an instrument of science profoundly influenced his philosophical system; he believed that all natural science must be capable of being unified under mathematics, and that the world must be of such a nature as to admit of mathematical treatment. Before his time, philosophy had been dominated by the method of Scholasticism, which was entirely based on comparing and contrasting the views of recognized authorities. Rejecting this method, Descartes stated, "In our search for the direct road to truth, we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstration of arithmetic and geometry." The criterion of certainty was expressed in the rule that he would accept only those beliefs that appeared to him "clearly and distinctly" to be true, meaning propositions which anyone could see to be true by the "natural light" of reason. To test which of his previous beliefs could meet these conditions, he subjected them to a series of skeptical hypotheses (His application of this procedure of "methodical doubt" is explained principally in the Discourse on Method and in the Meditations). For example, he asked himself whether physical objects around him really existed. He reasoned that although he felt certain that at a particular moment he was seeing and feeling various physical objects, he had on many occasions felt just as certain of such things when later it had turned out that he had been dreaming, and all the things around him had been illusions. He could even doubt that he himself had a body, since his body was just another physical object among others. His most powerful skeptical hypothesis, that there is an evil genius trying to deceive him, challenges not only the belief that the physical world exists, but also belief in simple statements of arithmetic, such as 2 + 3 = 5, and thus would seem to call into question the validity of reason itself. But not even an evil genius could deceive someone into believing falsely that he existed. "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am") is thus beyond skeptical doubt. Thus he has proved his existence as a res cogitans or thinking being, as he puts it a substance whose essential attribute is that of thought.

From this Archimedean point, "I think, therefore I am," Descartes attempts to regain the world called into doubt by his skeptical hypotheses. He turns to the content of his thoughts and realizes that he has, among other ideas, the idea of a Perfect Being or God, and reasons that there must be something outside himself corresponding to this idea, that God must exist in reality and not merely in his thoughts. He is led to this conclusion first from St. Anselm's ontological argument that God is a being than which no greater can be thought and therefore can be said to exist in the mind, and that to exist actually is more perfect than to exist only in the mind; therefore God must exist in reality as well as in the mind. Descartes then argues that an idea of a perfect thing cannot be brought into being by an imperfect agent, as he is as shown by his state of doubt, which is inferior to knowledge. Hence there must really be a Perfect Being who is the origin of this idea. Since he has established the existence of God, he reasons that a Perfect Being would not allow him to be deceived about the actual existence of external objects. However, his arguments to overcome skepticism are not without their problems. One of these is known as the Cartesian circle: no argument to show that God exists can be certain unless one is certain of one's own reasoning; but, according to Descartes, one cannot be certain of one's reasoning unless one is certain that God exists. Also, as Descartes admitted, we are sometimes deceived, so how is this to be reconciled with the existence of a Perfect Being who would not deceive us? Descartes' answer at the time was that deceptions are a result of our misuse of free will. Philosophers have been struggling with skepticism--especially skepticism about the existence of the physical world--ever since.

Descartes is known as the father of the mind-body problem. He claimed that human beings are composites of two kinds of substances, mind and body. A mind is a conscious or thinking being, that is, it understands, wills, senses, and imagines. A body is a being extended in length, width, and breadth. Minds are indivisible, whereas bodies are infinitely divisible. The "I" of the "I think, therefore I am" is the mind and can exist without being extended, so that it can in principle survive the death of the body. Despite having different natures, Descartes thought that mind and body causally interact. The human mind causes motions in the body by moving a small part of the brain. Motions in that same part of the brain produce sensations and emotions. Ultimately Descartes thought that the mind or soul and body are united in a peculiar way, but the peculiar nature of this union cannot be explained. In the Passions of the Soul he suggested that the mind and body interacted through the pineal gland. This problem of whether mental entities are different in nature from physical entities continues to be a primary concern of philosophers and psychologists.

Descartes as a natural scientist argued that bodies differ from how they appear through the senses. Colors, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, and cold are merely sensations existing in thought, and there is nothing in bodies that resembles them, just as there is nothing in bodies that resembles the sensation of pain. Instead the properties of bodies are those which are capable of being quantified, namely, extension and its modes, shape, size, and motion. He denied the existence of a vacuum, because what one would be inclined to call empty space meets his definition of body in virtue of being extended in three dimensions. All the phenomena in the created world external to humans, such as gravity, magnetism, and the cohesion of bodies, as well as the complex functioning of living organisms including human bodies, he believed could be explained solely by mechanistic physics, that is, by the motions and collisions of bodies. He even denied that consciousness must be attributed to animals in order to explain their behavior. Although his laws of impact, his vortex theory of gravity, and his denial of a vacuum were rejected as physics developed, he deserves credit for one of the first formulations of the law of inertia, which he justified by appeal to the immutability of God.

In the field of physiology, Descartes held that part of the blood was a subtle fluid, which he called animal spirits. The animal spirits, he believed, came into contact with thinking substances in the brain and flowed out along the channels of the nerves to animate the muscles and other parts of the body. Descartes's study of optics led him to the independent discovery of the fundamental law of reflection: that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. His essay on optics was the first published statement of this law. Descartes's treatment of light as a type of pressure in a solid medium paved the way for the undulatory theory of light.

The most notable contribution that Descartes made to mathematics was the systematization of analytic geometry. He was the first mathematician to attempt to classify curves according to the types of equations that produce them. He also made contributions to the theory of equations. Descartes was the first to use the last letters of the alphabet to designate unknown quantities and the first letters to designate known ones. He also invented the method of indices to express the powers of numbers. In addition, he formulated the rule, which is known as Descartes's rule of signs, for finding the number of positive and negative roots for any algebraic equation.

The influence of Descartes on the history of philosophy has probably been greater than that of any other philosopher with the exception of Aristotle. He influenced the rationalists who were his immediate followers, particularly Leibniz and Spinoza, who agreed with his general account of philosophy and science. The empiricists Locke and Hume, who rejected most of his conclusions, were nevertheless profoundly affected by his approach. Descartes changed the whole course of modern philosophical enquiry by placing at the center of philosophy the epistemological question "how do I know," replacing the earlier emphasis on what the world was like with how one could know what the world was like. His philosophy contained the seeds of idealism that began with Berkeley and continued with Schelling and Hegel through the 19th century.

Hume

Soon after completing his studies at Edinburgh, Scottish philosopher David Hume began writing his comprehensive statement of the views he believed would contribute to philosophy no less than Newton's had to science. But the public reception for the three books of his magisterial Treatise of Human Nature (1739) was less than cordial, and Hume abandoned his hopes of a philosophical career in order to support his family as a librarian, historian, diplomat, and political essayist, a course of action he described in the autobiographical My Own Life (1776). Hume's Essays Moral and Political (1741-1742) found some success, and the multi-volume History of England (1754-1762) finally secured the modest livelihood for which he had hoped. Although he spent most of his life trying to produce more effective statements of his philosophical views, he did not live to see the firm establishment of his reputation by the criticisms of Kant and much later appreciation of the logical positivists.

The central themes of Book I of the Treatise receive a somewhat more accessible treatment in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), a more popular summary of Hume's empiricism. According to Hume, little human knowledge can be derived from the deductively certain relations of ideas. Since the causal interactions of physical objects are known to us only as inherently uncertain matters of fact, Hume argued, our belief that they exhibit any necessary connection (however explicable) can never be rationally justified, but must be acknowledged to rest only upon our acquired habits. In similar fashion, Hume argued that we cannot justify our natural beliefs in the reality of the self or the existence of an external world. From all of this, he concluded that a severe (if mitigated) skepticism is the only defensible view of the world.

Hume recast the moral philosophy of the Treatise's Book III in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). In both texts Hume clearly maintained that human agency and moral obligation are best considered as functions of human passions rather than as the dictates of reason. In the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1780), Hume discussed the possibility of arriving at certain knowledge of god through the application of reason and considered defense of a fideistic alternative.

HUME'S BELIEFS Hume believed that all knowledge came from experience. He also believed that a person's experience's existed only in the person's mind. Hume believed that there was a world outside of human conscience, but he did not think this could be proved.

Hume grouped perceptions and experiences into one of two categories: impressions and ideas. Ideas are memories of sensations claimed Hume, but impressions are the cause of the sensation. In other words, an impression is part of a temporary feeling, but an idea is the permanent impact of this feeling. Hume believed that ideas were just dull imitations of impressons.

Hume also attacked the idea of casualty. This idea states that for all effects there is a cause. Hume said that even though the cause preceded the effect, there is no proof that the cause is responsible for the effect's occurence.

Mr. Hume was a firm believer that the human mind invented nothing. Instead, he claimed, the human mind takes simple ideas, and turns them into complex ideas. A simple example of this is the idea of an angel. Angels are human figures with wings. What Hume claimed that an angel is formed of two simple ideas, the human figure and wings.

A more complicated example of this is heaven. When we attempt to break down the concept of heaven into simple ideas, we are left with things such as pearly gates, angels, and golden palaces. But these are all complex ideas as well (pearls+gates, gold+palaces), so it could be said that heaven is a complex idea formed by other complex ideas. The complex ideas that form it, however, are all made up of simple ideas.

Hume, David, 1711-76, Scottish philosopher and historian. Hume carried the empiricism of John Locke and George Berkeley to the logical extreme of radical skepticism. He repudiated the possibility of certain knowledge, finding in the mind nothing but a series of sensations, and held that cause-and-effect in the natural world derives solely from the conjunction of two impressions. Hume's skepticism is also evident in his writings on religion, in which he rejected any rational or natural theology. Besides his chief work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he wrote Political Discourses (1752), The Natural History of Religion (1755), and a History of England (1754-62) that was, despite errors of fact, the standard work for many years.

Hume's skepticism emerges from virtually every topic on which he wrote, such as causality, personal identity, external objects, determinism, morality, and religion. However, his quintessential skeptical arguments appear in the final Part of Treatise Book I. There Hume not only denies the possibility of securing knowledge on issues held dear by traditional philosophers, but he argues further that reason is riveted with internal contractions. Section 12 of the Enquiry reiterates this theme, drawing on Zeno's paradoxes. Hume was acquainted with the skeptical writings of Sextus Empiricus and Bayle, and undoubtedly were of influence. He was also familiar with the above modern critiques of skepticism, which directed his unique spin on skepticism. Unlike Ramsey and Baxter, Hume argued that the philosophical truth of skepticism is an entirely different issue than the psychological ability to doubt or suspend judgment about a given proposition. Thus, the psychological issue can never constitute a refutation of the philosophical question. This makes Hume a uniquely consistent Pyrrhonist since one's psychological stance towards a proposition has no bearing on the philosophical consistency with which it is undermined.

In spite of Hume's skeptical arguments, there is a positive or constructive side to his writings, but where the one starts and the other stops is a matter of dispute. One problem is that Book I is mainly a collection of discussions on various epistemological topics such as space, time, causality, external objects and personal identity. Sometimes the topics are related, at other times they are not. This only makes it more difficult to see a pattern to his skepticism. After several unsuccessful attempts at finding a consistent interpretation, Passmore concluded pessimistically that, "to be a Humean, precisely, is to take no system as final, nothing as ultimate except the spirit of enquiry" (Hume's Intentions, 1952, p. 159). Contrary to Passmore, though, most commentators attempt some systematic account. Livingston argues that Hume's skeptical arguments are only a tool to procure a psychological compelling set of beliefs. For Livingston, Hume presents a number of epistemological accounts of external objects, but then skeptically rejects them all: "the Pyrrhonian arguments are a necessary stage in the natural history of philosophical reflection from vulgar thought through false philosophy to philosophy that is true." What emerges from Livingston's interpretation is a "true philosophy" which presupposes the original authority of common life (Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, 1985, pp. 3, 27- 28, 247). However, the question still remains whether Hume's "philosophy of common life" itself constitutes a skeptical set of propositions. Norton believes that it does. For Norton, Hume adopted a skeptical method of arguing, similar to the Academic skepticism of Carneades and Cicero as a response to a speculative crisis in his day. This skeptical methodology also made for a skeptical set of propositions (including cause and effect, external objects and miracles) insofar as these propositions must be viewed with a certain "modesty and diffidence" (David Hume, 1982, pp. 220, 294). Although one senses from Norton's account that Hume is not just another Bayle or modern Academic skeptic, he only briefly notes a few features of Hume's skeptical methodology which distinguish him from his skeptical mentors (Norton 1982, 290- 295).

Spinoza

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, into a family of Jewish emigrants fleeing persecution in Portugal. He was trained in Talmudic scholarship, but his views soon took unconventional directions which the Jewish community - fearing renewed persecution on charges of atheism - tried to discourage. Spinoza was offered 1000 florins to keep quiet about his views, but refused. At the age of 24, he was summoned before a rabbinical court, and solemnly excommunicated.

Spinoza refused all rewards and honours, and gave away to his sister his share of his father's inheritance - keeping only a bedstead for himself. He earned his living as a humble lens-grinder. He died, in February 1674, of consumption, probably aggravated by fine glass dust inhaled at his workbench.

His philosophy is summarized in the Ethics, a very abstract work, which openly expresses none of the love of nature that might be expected from someone who identified God with nature. And Spinoza's starting point is not nature or the cosmos, but a purely theoretical definition of God. The work then proceeds to prove its conclusions by a method modelled on geometry, through rigorous definitions, axioms, propositions and corollaries. No doubt in this way Spinoza hoped to build his philosophy on the solidest rock, but the method, as well as some of the arguments and definitions, are often unconvincing.

Spinoza believed that everything that exists is God. However, he did not hold the converse view that God is no more than the sum of what exists. God had infinite qualities, of which we can perceive only two, thought and extension. Hence God must also exist in dimensions far beyond those of the visible world.

Significantly, Spinoza titled his chief work The Ethics. He derived an ethic by deduction from fundamental principles, and so his ethics were closely linked to his view of "God or nature" as everything. The highest good, he asserted, was knowledge of God, which was capable of bringing freedom from tyranny by the passions, freedom from fear, resignation to destiny, and true blessedness.

At first Spinoza was reviled as an atheist - and certainly, his God is not the conventional Judo-Christian God. The philosophers of the enlightenment ridiculed his methods - not without some grounds. The romantics, attracted by his identification of God with Nature, rescued him from oblivion

Herder (1744-1803)

Johann Gottfried von Herder is a philosopher of the first importance. This claim depends largely on the intrinsic quality of his ideas (of which this article will try to give an impression). But another aspect of it is his intellectual influence. This has been immense both within philosophy and beyond (much greater than is usually realized). For example, Hegel's philosophy turns out to be an elaborate systematic development of Herderian ideas (especially concerning God, the mind, and history); so too does Schleiermacher's (concerning God, the mind, interpretation, translation, and art); Nietzsche is deeply influenced by Herder (concerning the mind, history, and values); so too is Dilthey (in his theory of the human sciences); even J.S. Mill has important debts to Herder (in political philosophy); and beyond philosophy, Goethe was transformed from being merely a clever but conventional poet into a great artist largely through the early impact on him of Herder's ideas.

Indeed, Herder can claim to have virtually established whole disciplines which we now take for granted. For example, it was mainly Herder (not, as is often claimed, Hamann) who established fundamental ideas about an intimate dependence of thought on language which underpin modern philosophy of language. It was Herder who, through the same ideas, his broad empirical approach to languages, his recognition of deep variations in language and thought across historical periods and cultures, and in other ways, inspired W. von Humboldt to found modern linguistics. It was Herder who developed modern hermeneutics, or interpretation-theory, in a form that would subsequently be taken over by Schleiermacher and then more systematically formulated by Schleiermacher's pupil Böckh. It was Herder who, in doing so, also established the methodological foundations of nineteenth-century German classical scholarship (which rested on the Schleiermacher-Böckh methodology), and hence of modern classical scholarship generally. It was arguably Herder who did more than anyone else to establish the general conception and the interpretive methodology of our modern discipline of anthropology. Finally, Herder also made vital contributions to the progress of modern biblical scholarship.

1. Life and Works

2. Philosophical Style

3. General Program in Philosophy

4. Philosophy of Language and Interpretation

5. Philosophy of Mind

6. Aesthetics

7. Philosophy of History

8. Political Philosophy

9. Philosophy of Religion

Bibliography

Other Internet Resources

Related Entries

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1. Life and Works

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) was born in Mohrungen in East Prussia. His father was a school teacher and he grew up in humble circumstances. In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he studied with Kant, who accorded him special privileges because of his unusual intellectual abilities. At this period he also began a lifelong friendship with the irrationalist philosopher Hamann. In 1764 he left Königsberg to take up a school-teaching position in Riga. There he wrote the programmatic essay How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People (1765); published his first major work, on the philosophy of language and literature, the Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767-8); and also an important work in aesthetics, the Critical Forests (1769). In 1769 he resigned his position and travelled -- first to France, and then to Strasbourg, where he met, and had a powerful impact on, the young Goethe. In 1771 Herder won a prize from the Berlin Academy for his best-known work in the philosophy of language, the Treatise on the Origin of Language (published 1772). From 1771-6 he served as court preacher to the ruling house in Bückeburg. The most important work from this period is his first major essay on the philosophy of history, This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774). In 1776, partly through Goethe's influence, he was appointed General Superintendant of the Lutheran clergy in Weimar, a post he kept for the rest of his life. During this period he published an important essay in the philosophy of mind, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778); a seminal work concerning the Old Testament, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782-3); his well-known longer work on the philosophy of history, the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784-91); an influential essay in the philosophy of religion, God. Some Conversations (1787); a work largely on political philosophy, written in response to the French Revolution, the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793-7); a series of Christian Writings (1794-8) concerned with the gospels of the New Testament; and two works opposing Kant's critical philosophy, the Metacritique (1799) (against the theoretical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason) and the Calligone (1800) (against the aesthetics of the Critique of Judgment). In addition to the works mentioned, Herder wrote many others during his career as well.

2. Philosophical Style

In certain ways Herder's philosophical texts are easier to read than others from the period. For example, he avoids technical jargon, his writing is lively and rich in examples rather than dry and abstract, and he has no large, complex system for the reader to keep track of. But his texts also have certain peculiarities which can impede a proper understanding and appreciation of his thought, and it is important to be alerted to these.

To begin with, Herder's writing often seems emotional and grammatically undisciplined in a way that might perhaps be expected in casual speech but not in philosophical texts. This is intentional. Indeed, Herder sometimes deliberately "roughed up" material in this direction between drafts. When writing in this way he is actually often using grammatical-rhetorical figures which can easily look like mere carelessness to an untutored eye but receive high literary sanction from classical sources and are employed artfully (e.g. anacoluthon). Moreover, he has serious philosophical reasons for writing in this way rather than in the manner of conventional academic prose, including: (1) This promises to make his writing more broadly accessible and interesting to people -- a decidedly non-trivial goal for him, since he believes it to be an essential part of philosophy's vocation to have a broad social impact. (2) One of his central theses in the philosophy of mind holds that thought is not and should not be separate from volition, or affect, that types of thinking which aspire to exclude affect are inherently distorting and inferior. Standard academic writing has this vice, whereas spontaneous speech, and writing which imitates it, do not. (3) Herder is opposed to any grammatical or lexical straightjacketing of language, any slavish obedience to grammar books and dictionaries. In Herder's view, such straightjacketing is inimical, not only to linguistic creativity and inventiveness, but also (much worse), because thought is essentially dependent on and confined in its scope by language, thereby to creativity and inventiveness in thought itself.

Another peculiarity of Herder's philosophy is its unsystematic nature. This is again deliberate. For Herder is largely hostile towards systematicity in philosophy (a fact reflected both in explicit remarks and in many of his titles: Fragments . . . , Ideas . . . , etc.). He is in particular hostile to the ambitious sort of systematicity aspired to in the tradition of Spinoza, Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: the ideal of a theory whose parts form and exhaust some sort of strict overall pattern of derivation. He has compelling reasons for this hostility: (1) He is very skeptical that such systematic designs can be made to work (as opposed to creating, through illicit means, an illusion that they do so). (2) He believes that such system-building leads to a premature closure of inquiry, and in particular to the disregarding or distorting of new empirical evidence. Scrutiny of such systems amply bears out these concerns. Herder's well-grounded hostility to this type of systematicity established an important countertradition in German philosophy (which subsequently included e.g. F. Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein).

On the other hand, unlike Hamann, Herder is in favor of "systematicity" in a more modest sense: the ideal of a theory which is self-consistent and maximally supported by argument. He by no means always achieves this ideal (so that interpreting him requires more selectivity and reconstruction than is the case with some philosophers). But his failures to do so are often more apparent than real: First, often when he may seem to be guilty of inconsistency he really is not. For he is often developing philosophical dialogues between two or more opposing viewpoints, in which cases it would clearly be a mistake to accuse him of inconsistency in any usual or pejorative sense; and (less obviously) in many other cases he is in effect still working in this dialogue-mode, only without bothering to distribute the positions among different interlocutors explicitly, and so is again really innocent of inconsistency (examples occur in How Philosophy and This Too). Moreover, he has serious motives for this method of (implicit) dialogue: (1) Sometimes his motive is simply that when dealing with religiously or politically delicate matters it permits him to state his views but without quite stating them as his own and therefore without inviting trouble. But there are also philosophically deeper motives: (2) He takes over from the precritical Kant an idea (inspired by ancient skepticism) that the best way for the philosopher to pursue the truth is by setting contrary views on a subject into opposition with one another in order to advance towards, and hopefully attain, the truth through their mutual testing and modification. (3) Also, he develops an original variant of that idea on the socio-historical plane: analogously, the way for humankind as a whole to attain the elusive goal of truth is through an ongoing contest between opposing positions, in the course of which the best ones will eventually win out (this idea anticipates, and inspired, a central thesis of J.S. Mill's On Liberty). This yields a further motive for the dialogue-method (even where it does not lead Herder himself to any definite conclusion), in effect warranting the rhetorical question, And what does it matter to the cause of humankind and its discovery of truth whether those various opposing positions are advanced by different people or by the same person? Second, Herder's appearance of neglecting to give arguments is often, rather, a principled rejection of arguments of certain sorts. For example, he has a general commitment to empiricism and against apriorism in philosophy which leads him to avoid familiar sorts of apriorist arguments in philosophy; and a commitment to non-cognitivism in ethics which leads him to refrain from familiar sorts of cognitivist arguments in ethics.

3. General Program in Philosophy

Hamann's influence on Herder's best thought has been greatly exaggerated. But Kant's was early, fundamental, and enduring. However, the Kant who influenced Herder in this way was the precritical Kant of the early and middle 1760's, not the critical Kant (against whom Herder later engaged in the -- distracting and rather ineffective -- public polemics mentioned above). Some of Kant's key positions in the 1760's, sharply contrasting with those which he would later adopt in the critical period, were: a (Pyrrhonist-influenced) skepticism about metaphysics; a form of empiricism; and a (Hume-influenced) non-cognitivism in ethics. Herder took over these positions in the 1760's and retained them throughout his career. It should by no means be assumed that this Herderian debt to the early Kant is a debt to a philosophically inferior Kant; a good case could be made for the very opposite.

Herder's 1765 essay How Philosophy is a key text for understanding both his debt to Kant and the broad orientation of his philosophy. The essay was written under strong influence from Kant, especially, it seems, Kant's 1766 essay Dreams of a Spirit Seer, which Kant sent Herder before its publication.

Herder's essay answers a prize question set by a society in Bern: "How can the truths of philosophy become more universal and useful for the benefit of the people?" This question is conceived in the spirit of the Popularphilosophie that was competing with school-philosophy at the time. Kant himself tended to identify with Popularphilosophie at this period, and Herder's selection of this question shows him doing so as well, though in his case the identification would last a lifetime. Philosophy should become relevant and useful for the people as a whole -- this is a basic ideal of Herder's philosophy.

Largely in the service of this ideal, Herder's essay argues for two sharp turns in philosophy, turns which would again remain fundamental throughout the rest of his career. The first involves a rejection of traditional metaphysics, and closely follows an argument of Kant's in Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Herder's case is roughly this: (1) Traditional metaphysics, by undertaking to transcend experience (or strictly, and a little more broadly, "healthy understanding," which includes, in addition to empirical knowledge, also ordinary morality, intuitive logic, and mathematics), succumbs to unresolvable contradictions between claims, and hence to the Pyrrhonian skeptical problem of an equal plausibility on both sides requiring a suspension of judgment. Moreover (Herder adds in the Fragments), given the truth of a broadly empiricist theory of concepts, much of the terminology of traditional metaphysics turns out to lack the basis in experience that is required in order even to be meaningful, and hence is meaningless (the illusion of meaningfulness arising through the role of language, which spins on, creating illusions of meaning, even after the empirical conditions of meaning have been left behind). (2) Traditional metaphysics is not only, for these reasons, useless; it is also harmful, because it distracts its participants from the matters which should be their focus: empirical nature and human society. (3) By contrast, empirical knowledge (or strictly, and a bit more broadly, "healthy understanding") is free of these problems. Philosophy should therefore be based on and continuous with this.

Herder's second sharp turn concerns ethics. Here he remains indebted to Kant, but also goes further beyond him. Herder's basic claims are these: (1) Morality is fundamentally more a matter of sentiments than of cognitions (Herder's sentimentalism is not crude, however; in subsequent works he stresses that cognition plays a large role in morality as well). (2) Cognitivist theories of morality -- of the sort espoused in this period by Rationalists like Wolff, but also by many other philosophers before and since (e.g. Plato and the critical Kant) -- are therefore based on a mistake, and so useless as means of moral enlightenment or improvement. (3) But (and here Herder's theory moves beyond Kant's), worse than that, they are actually harmful to morality, because they weaken the moral sentiments on which it really rests. In This Too and On the Cognition Herder suggests several reasons why: (a) Abstract theorizing weakens sentiments generally, and hence moral sentiments in particular. (b) The cognitivists' theories turn out to be so strikingly implausible that they bring morality itself into disrepute, people reacting to them roughly along the lines: If this is the best that even the experts can say in explanation and justification of morality, then morality must certainly be a sham, and I may as well ignore it and do as I please. (c) Such theories distract people from recognizing, and working to reinforce, the real foundations of morality: not an imaginary theoretical insight of some sort, but a set of causal mechanisms for inculcating the moral sentiments. (4) More positively, Herder accordingly turns instead to determining theoretically and promoting in practice just such a set of causal mechanisms. In How Philosophy he mainly stresses forms of education and an emotive type of preaching. But he elsewhere also identifies and promotes a much broader set of mechanisms, including: the influence of morally exemplary individuals; morally relevant laws; and literature (along with other art forms). Literature is a special focus of Herder's theory and practice here. He sees it as exerting moral influence in various ways -- e.g. not only through fairly direct moral instruction, but also through the literary perpetuation (or creation) of morally exemplary individuals (e.g. Jesus in the New Testament), and the exposure of readers to other people's inner lives and a consequent enhancement of their sympathies for them (a motive behind Herder's publication of Volkslieder, or popular songs, from peoples around the world). Herder's development of this theory and practice of moral pedagogy was lifelong and tireless.

4. Philosophy of Language and Interpretation

On the Origin is Herder's best known work in the philosophy of language, but it is in certain respects unrepresentative and inferior in comparison with other works such as the Fragments and should not monopolize attention. On the Origin is primarily concerned with the question whether the origin of language can be explained in purely natural, human terms or (as Süßmilch had recently argued) only in terms of a divine source. Herder argues for the former position and against the latter. His argument is quite persuasive, especially when supplemented on its positive side from the Fragments. But this argument is unlikely to constitute a modern philosopher's main reason for interest in Herder's ideas about language (deriving its zest, as it does, from a religious background that is no longer ours).

Of much greater modern relevance is Herder's theory of interpretation, including his account of the relation between thought and language. This theory is scattered through a large number of works. The following are its main features:

Herder's theory rests on, but also in turn supports, an epoch-making insight: (1) Such eminent Enlightenment philosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire had still believed that, as Hume put it, "mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange." What Herder discovered, or at least saw more clearly and fully than anyone before him, was that this was false, that peoples from different historical periods and cultures often vary tremendously in their concepts, beliefs, (perceptual and affective) sensations, and so forth. He also noted that similar, albeit usually less dramatic, variations occur even between individuals within a single culture and period. (These two positions are prominent in many works, including e.g. On the Change of Taste (1766) and On the Cognition.) Let us call this twofold principle the principle of radical difference.

(2) Given such radical difference, and the gulf that consequently often divides an interpreter's own thought from that of the person he wants to interpret, interpretation is often an extremely difficult task, requiring extraordinary efforts from the interpreter. (Herder does not draw the more extreme -- and misguided -- conclusion to which some recent philosophers have been tempted that it would be impossible.)

(3) In particular, the interpreter often faces, and needs to resist, a temptation falsely to assimilate the thought which he is interpreting to someone else's, especially his own. (This theme is prominent in This Too, for example.)

How is the interpreter to meet the challenge? Herder advances three theses concerning thought and language which underpin the rest of his theory of interpretation (and the first two of which in addition founded the philosophy of language as we know it today):

(4) Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in scope by, language -- i.e. one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically. (Herder, to his credit, normally refrains from a more extreme, but philosophically untenable, version of this thesis, favored by some of his successors, which identifies thought with language, or with inner language.) One consequence of this thesis for interpretation is that an interpreted subject's language is a reliable indicator of the scope of his thought.

(5) Meanings or concepts are not to be equated with the sorts of items, in principle autonomous of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them -- e.g. the referents involved, Platonic forms, or "ideas" of the sort championed by the British empiricists and others. Instead, they consist in usages of words. Consequently, interpretation will essentially involve pinning down word-usages. (Positions (4) and (5) are already embraced by Herder in the 1760's, e.g. in the Fragments.)

(6) Conceptualization is intimately bound up with (perceptual and affective) sensation. More specifically, Herder develops a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts according to which sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, though we are able to achieve non-empirical concepts by means of a sort of metaphorical extension from the empirical ones -- so that all of our concepts ultimately depend in one way or another on sensation. This position carries the important consequence for interpretation that any understanding of a concept must somehow capture its basis in sensation. (For this position, see e.g. On the Cognition.)

Herder also has two further basic principles in interpretation-theory:

(7) A principle of secularism in interpretation: the interpretation of texts must never rely on religious assumptions or means, even when the texts are sacred ones. (This principle is already prominent in works from the 1760's.)

(8) A principle of methodological empiricism in interpretation: interpretation must always be based on, and kept strictly faithful to, exact observations of linguistic (and other relevant) evidence. (This principle is again already prominent in the 1760's, e.g. in the Fragments and On Thomas Abbt's Writings (1768).)

Beyond this, Herder also advances a further set of interpretive principles which can easily sound much more "touchy-feely" at first hearing (the first of them rather literally so!), but which are in fact on the contrary quite "hard-nosed":

(9) Herder proposes (prominently in This Too) that the way to bridge radical difference when interpreting is through Einfühlung, "feeling one's way in." This proposal has often been thought (e.g. by Meinecke) to mean that the interpreter should perform some sort of psychological self-projection onto texts. But that is emphatically not Herder's idea -- for that would amount to exactly the sort of assimilation of the thought in a text to one's own which he is above all concerned to avoid. As can be seen from This Too, what he has in mind is instead an arduous process of historical-philological inquiry. What, though, more specifically, is the cash value of the metaphor of Einfühlung? It has at least five components: (a) Note, first, that the metaphor implies (once again) that there typically exists radical difference, a gulf, between an interpreter's mentality and that of the interpreted subject, making interpretation a difficult, laborious task (it implies that there is an "in" there which one must carefully and laboriously "feel one's way into"). (b) It also implies (This Too shows) that the "feeling one's way in" should include thorough research not only into a text's use of language but also into its historical, geographical, and social context. (c) It also implies a claim - based on Herder's quasi-empiricist theory of concepts -- that in order to interpret a subject's language one must achieve an imaginative reproduction of his (perceptual and affective) sensations. (d) It also implies that hostility in an interpreter towards the people he interprets will generally distort his interpretation, and must therefore be avoided (though Herder is equally opposed to excessive identification with them for the same reason). (e) Finally, it also implies that the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where this achieves something like the same immediacy and automaticness that it had for a text's original audience when they understood the text in light of such things (so that it acquires for him, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feeling than a cognition).

(10) In addition, Herder insists (e.g. in the Critical Forests) on a principle of holism in interpretation. This principle rests on several motives, including: (a) Pieces of text taken in isolation are typically ambiguous in various ways (in relation to background linguistic possibilities). In order to resolve such ambiguities, one needs the guidance provided by surrounding text. (b) That problem arises once a range of possible linguistic meanings, etc. is established for a piece of text. But in the case of a text separated from the interpreter by radical difference, knowledge of such a range itself presents a problem. How, for example, is he to pin down the range of possible meanings, i.e. possible usages, for a word? This requires collation of the word's actual uses and inference from these to the rules that govern them, i.e. to their usages, a collation which in turn requires looking to remoter contexts in which the same word occurs (other parts of the text, other works in the author's corpus, works by other contemporaries, etc.), or in short: holism. (c) Authors typically write a work as a whole, conveying ideas not only in its particular parts but also through the way in which these fit together to make up a whole (either in instantiation of a general genre or in a manner more specific to the particular work). Consequently, readings which fail to interpret the work as a whole will miss essential aspects of its meaning -- not only the ideas in question themselves but also meanings of the particular parts on which they shed important light.

(11) In On Thomas Abbt's Writings, On the Cognition, and elsewhere Herder makes one of his most important innovations: interpretation must supplement its focus on word-usage with attention to authorial psychology. Herder implies several reasons for this: (a) As already mentioned, Herder embraces a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts which implies that in order to understand an author's concepts an interpreter must recapture his relevant sensations. (b) As Quentin Skinner has recently stressed, understanding the linguistic meaning of an utterance or text is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for understanding it tout court -- one needs, in addition, to establish the author's illocutionary intentions. For example, a stranger tells me, "The ice is thin over there"; I understand his linguistic meaning perfectly; but is he simply informing me?, warning me?, threatening me?, joking? . . . (c) Skinner implies that one can determine linguistic meanings prior to establishing authorial intentions. That may sometimes be so (e.g. in the example just given). But is it generally? Herder implies not. And this seems right, because commonly the linguistic meaning of a formula is ambiguous (in terms of background linguistic possibilities), and in order to identify the relevant meaning one must turn, not only (as previously mentioned) to larger bodies of text, but also to hypotheses, largely derived therefrom, about the author's intentions (e.g. about the subject-matter he intends to treat). This is a further reason why interpreters must invoke psychology. (d) Herder also (as recently mentioned) stresses that an author often conveys ideas in his work, not explicitly in its verbal expressions, but rather via these and the way in which they are put together to form a textual whole (either in instantiation of a general genre or in a manner more specific to the particular text). It is necessary for the interpreter to capture these ideas both for their own sakes and because doing so is often essential for resolving ambiguities at the level of particular verbal expressions. (e) Herder also refers to the second limb of his doctrine of radical difference -- individual variations in mode of thought even within a single culture and period -- as a source of the need for psychological interpretation. Why does any special need arise here? Part of the answer seems to be that when one is dealing, for example, with a concept that is distinctive of a particular author rather than common to a whole culture, one typically faces a problem of relative paucity and lack of contextual variety in the actual uses of the word available as empirical evidence from which to infer the rule for use, or usage, constitutive of its meaning. Hence one needs extra help -- and the author's general psychology may provide this.

(12) In the same works Herder also indicates that interpretation, especially in its psychological aspect, requires the use of divination. This is another principle which can sound disturbingly "touchy-feely" at first hearing -- in particular, it can sound as though Herder means some sort of prophetic process that has a religious basis and is perhaps even infallible. However, what he really has in mind is (far more sensibly) a process of hypothesis, based on meager empirical evidence, but also going well beyond it, and therefore vulnerable to subsequent falsification, and abandonment or revision if falsified.

(13) Finally, a point concerning the general nature of interpretation and its subject-matter: After Herder, the question arose whether interpretation was a science or an art. Herder does not really address this question. But his inclination would clearly be to say that it is like rather than unlike natural science (pace a reading in the German secondary literature which makes him out to be a sort of proto-Gadamer). There are several reasons for this: (a) He assumes (as did virtually everyone at this period) that the meaning of an author's text is as much an objective matter as the subjects addressed by the natural scientist. (b) The difficulty of interpretation that results from radical difference, and the consequent need for a methodologically subtle and laborious approach to it in many cases, make for another point of similarity between interpretation and natural science. (c) The essential role of "divination" qua hypothesis in interpretation constitutes a further point of similarity between it and natural science. Moreover, (d) even the subject-matter of interpretation is not, in Herder's view, sharply different from that dealt with by natural science: the latter investigates physical processes in nature in order to determine the forces that underly them, but similarly interpretation investigates human verbal (and non-verbal) physical behavior in order to determine the forces that underly it (Herder explicitly identifying mental conditions, including conceptual understanding, as "forces").

Herder's theory owes many debts to predecessors. Hamann has commonly been credited with introducing the revolutionary doctrines (4) and (5). But that seems a mistake; Herder was already committed to them in the 1760's, Hamann only later. Herder's debts are rather to a group of authors influenced by Wolff including Abbt and Süßmilch (for (4)) and especially Ernesti (for (1), (2), (5), (7), (8), and (10)). However, Herder's borrowings incorporate important refinements, and his overall contribution is enormous.

Herder's theory was taken over almost in its entirety by Schleiermacher in his hermeneutics lectures. Schleiermacher's theory is also directly influenced by sources shared with Herder, especially Ernesti. But such fundamental and famous positions in it as Schleiermacher's supplementing of "linguistic" with "psychological" interpretation and identification of "divination" as the method especially of the latter are due entirely to Herder. Moreover, where Herder and Schleiermacher do occasionally disagree, Herder's position is almost always philosophically superior.

5. Philosophy of Mind

Herder in On the Cognition and elsewhere also develops an extremely interesting and influential position in the philosophy of mind. The following are some of its central features.

Herder's position is uncompromisingly naturalistic and anti-dualistic in intent. In On the Cognition he tries to erase the division between the mental and the physical in two specific ways: First, he advances a theory that minds consist in forces [Kräfte] which manifest themselves in people's bodily behavior -- just as physical nature contains forces which manifest themselves in the behavior of bodies. (Note that the general notion of mental "forces" can already be found before Herder in Rationalists such as Wolff and Süßmilch.) He is officially agnostic on the question of what force is, except for conceiving it as something apt to produce a type of bodily behavior, and as a real source thereof (not something reducible thereto). This, strictly speaking, frees the theory from some common characterizations and objections (e.g. vitalism). But it also leaves the theory with enough content to have great virtues over rival theories: (1) The theory ties mental states conceptually to corresponding types of bodily behavior -- which seems correct, and therefore marks a point of superiority over dualistic theories, and indeed over mind-brain identity theories as well. (2) On the other hand, it also avoids reducing mental states to bodily behavior -- which again seems correct, in view of such obvious facts as that we can be, and indeed often are, in mental states which happen to receive no behavioral manifestation, and hence marks a point of superiority over outright behaviorist theories.

Second, Herder also tries to explain the mind in terms of the phenomenon of irritation [Reiz], a phenomenon recently identified by Haller and exemplified by muscle fibers contracting in response to direct physical stimuli and relaxing upon their removal -- in other words, a phenomenon which, while basically physiological, also seems to exhibit a transition to mental characteristics. There is an ambiguity in Herder's position here: usually, he wants to resist physicalist reductionism, and so would resist saying that irritation is purely physiological and fully constitutes mental states. But in the 1775 draft of On the Cognition and even in parts of the published version this is his position. And from a modern standpoint, this is a further virtue of his account (though we would certainly today want to recast it in terms of different, and more complex, physiological processes than irritation). This line of thought might seem at odds with his first one (forces). But it need not be. For, given his official agnosticism about what forces are, it could, so to speak, fill in the "black box" of the hypothesized real forces, namely in physicalist terms. In other words, it turns out (not as a conceptual matter, but as a contingent one) that the real forces in question consist in physiological processes.

Herder's philosophy of mind also holds that the mind is a unity, that there is no real division between its faculties. This position contradicts theorists such as Sulzer and Kant. However, it is not in itself new with Herder (or Hamann), having already been central to Rationalism, especially Wolff. Where Herder (with Hamann) is more original is in rejecting the Rationalists' reduction of sensation and volition to cognition; establishing the unity thesis in an empirical rather than apriorist way; and adding a normative dimension to it -- this is not only how the mind is but also how it ought to be. This last feature can sound incoherent, since if the mind is this way by its very nature, what sense is there in prescribing to people that it should be so rather than otherwise? But Herder's idea is in fact the coherent one that, while the mind is indeed this way by its very nature, people sometimes behave as though one faculty could be abstracted from another, and try to effect that, and this then leads to various malfunctions, and should therefore be avoided.

Herder's whole position on the mind's unity rests on three more specific doctrines of intimate mutual involvements between mental faculties, and of malfunctions that arise from striving against these, doctrines which are in large part empirically motivated and hence lend the overall position a sort of empirical basis:

A first concerns the relation between thought and language: Not only does language of its very nature express thought (an uncontroversial point), but also (as noted earlier) for Herder thought is dependent on and bounded by language. Herder bases this further claim largely on empirical grounds (e.g. about how children's thought develops with language acquisition). The normative aspect of his position here is that attempts (in the manner of some metaphysics) to cut language free from the constraints of thought or (a more original point) vice versa lead to nonsense.

A second area of intimate mutual involvement concerns cognition and volition, or affects. The claim that volition is and should be based on cognition is not particularly controversial. But Herder also argues the converse, that all cognition is and should be based on volition, on affects (and not only on such relatively anemic ones as the impulse to know the truth, but also on less anemic ones). He is especially concerned to combat the idea that theoretical work is or should be detached from volition, from affects. In his view, it never really is even when it purports to be, and attempts to make it so merely impoverish and weaken it. His grounds for this whole position are again mainly empirical.

A third area of intimate mutual involvement concerns thought and sensation. Conceptualization and belief, on the one hand, and sensation, on the other, are intimately connected according to Herder. Thus he advances the quasi-empiricist theory of concepts mentioned earlier, which entails that all our concepts (and hence also all our beliefs) ultimately depend in one way or another on sensation. And conversely, he argues -- anticipating much recent work in philosophy -- that there is a dependence in the other direction as well, that the character of our sensations depends on our concepts and beliefs. Normatively, he sees attempts to violate this interdependence as inevitably leading to intellectual malfunction -- e.g., as already mentioned, metaphysicians' attempts to cut entirely free from the empirical origin of our concepts lead to meaninglessness. His grounds for this whole position are again largely empirical.

In a further seminal move Herder also argues that (linguistic) meaning is fundamentally social -- so that thought and other aspects of human mental life (as essentially articulated in terms of meanings), and therefore also the very self (as essentially dependent on thought and other aspects of human mental life, and defined in its specific identity by theirs), are so too. Herder's version of this position seems meant only as an empirically-based causal claim. It has since fathered attempts to generate more ambitious arguments for stronger versions of the claim that meaning -- and hence also thought and the very self -- is socially constituted (e.g. by Hegel, Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Burge). However, it may well be that these more ambitious arguments do not work, and that Herder's version is exactly what should be accepted.

Herder also, in tension though not contradiction with this, holds that (even within a single culture and period) human minds are as a rule deeply individual, deeply different from each other -- so that in addition to a generalizing psychology we also need a psychology oriented to individuality. This is an important idea which has strongly influenced subsequent thinkers (e.g. Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Proust, Sartre, and Manfred Frank). Herder advances it only as an empirical rule of thumb. By contrast, a prominent strand in Schleiermacher and Frank purports to make it an a priori universal truth. But Herder's position is again arguably the more plausible one.

Finally, like predecessors in the Rationalist tradition and Kant, Herder sharply rejects the Cartesian idea of the mind's self-transparency -- instead insisting that much of what occurs in the mind is unconscious, so that self-knowledge is often deeply problematic. This is another compelling position which has had a strong influence on subsequent thinkers.

This whole Herderian philosophy of mind owes much to predecessors, especially in the Rationalist tradition. But it is also in many ways original. The theory is important in its own right. And it also exercised enormous influence on successors (e.g. on Hegel in connection with anti-dualism, the role of physical behavior in mental conditions, faculty-unity, and the sociality of meaning, thought, and self; on Schleiermacher in connection with anti-dualism and faculty-unity; and on Nietzsche in connection with the interdependence of cognition and volition, or affects, the individuality of the mind and the need for an individualistic psychology, and the mind's lack of self-transparency).

6. Aesthetics

In the Critical Forests (1769, though the important fourth part was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century) Herder sets out to argue for the following aesthetic theory: whereas music is a mere succession of objects in time, and sculpture and painting are merely spatial, poetry has a sense, a soul, a force; whereas music, sculpture, and painting belong solely to the senses (to hearing, feeling, and vision, respectively), poetry not only depends on the senses but also relates to the imagination; whereas music, sculpture, and painting employ only natural signs, poetry uses voluntary and conventional signs. This theory was taken over (with minor modifications) by Schleiermacher in his aesthetics lectures, and it has sometimes been touted as Herder's main achievement in aesthetics. But it is a naive theory, and his real achievements in aesthetics are other than and contrary to it.

As noted earlier, Herder's philosophy of language is committed to the two doctrines that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language, and that meaning is word-usage. This invites certain questions: These doctrines plausibly break with an Enlightenment assumption that thought and meaning are in principle autonomous of whatever material, perceptible expressions they may happen to receive. Following Charles Taylor, we might call such a move one to "expressivism." But what form should expressivism take exactly? Is the dependence of thought and meaning on external symbols strictly one on language (in the usual sense of "language")? Or is it not rather a dependence on a broader range of symbolic media including, besides language, also such things as painting, sculpture, and music, so that a person might be able to entertain thoughts which he was not able to express in language but only in some other symbolic medium? Let us call the former position narrow expressivism and the latter broad expressivism.

Also, is Herder's own position narrow expressivism or broad expressivism? It might seem at first sight that his two doctrines themselves already answer this question in favor of narrow expressivism because of their reference to "language" and "words." However, matters are not quite so simple. For one thing, such terms easily lend themselves to broadened uses which might include media beyond language in the usual sense. For another, precisely such a broadening actually occurs in a philosopher closely connected with Herder: Hamann. In his Metacritique (1784), Hamann is just as much verbally committed to the two doctrines in question as Herder. But he embraces broad expressivism. And he does so quite consistently, because he understands the terms "language" and "word" as they occur in the doctrines in unusually broad senses -- for example, he explicitly includes as forms of the "language" on which he says thought depends not only language in the usual sense but also painting, drawing, and music.

Nonetheless, Herder's considered position is in fact the narrow expressivism that his two doctrines initially seem to suggest (so that his verbal sharing of these doctrines with Hamann masks an important difference of philosophical position between them).

Moreover, after much wrestling with the subject, Herder eventually developed a particularly compelling version of narrow expressivism. The key work in this connection is the Critical Forests. By the time of writing this work, Herder was already committed to the two doctrines mentioned, and, as this would suggest, from the start in the Critical Forests he is committed to narrow expressivism. However, his commitment to it is initially unsatisfactory and inconsistent. For one thing, it initially takes the extreme and implausible form of denying to the non-linguistic arts any capacity to express thoughts autonomously of language by denying that they can express thoughts at all. This is the force of the naive theory described earlier which the work sets out to develop. Adding inconsistency to this unsatisfactoriness, Herder is from the start in the work also committed to saying (more plausibly) that visual art does express thoughts -- e.g. he intervenes in a quarrel between Lessing and Winckelmann on the question of whether linguistic art (especially poetry) or visual art (especially sculpture) is expressively superior in ways which tend to support Winckelmann's case for visual art. This unsatisfactoriness and inconsistency result from the fact that Herder has not yet realized that it is perfectly possible to reconcile narrow expressivism with the attribution of thoughts to non-linguistic art, namely by insisting that the thoughts expressed by non-linguistic art must be derivative from and bounded by the artist's capacity for linguistic expression. However, by the time Herder writes the later parts of the Critical Forests, he has found this solution. Thus in the third part, focusing on a particularly instructive example, he notes that the pictorial representations on Greek coins are typically allegorical. And by the fourth part he is prepared to say something similar about much painting as well, writing, for example, of "the sense, the allegory, the story / history which is put into the whole of a painting." By 1778 he extends this account to sculpture as well. Thus in the Plastic of 1778 he abandons the merely sensualistic conception of sculpture that dominated the Critical Forests and instead argues that sculpture is essentially expressive of, and therefore needs to be interpreted by, a soul, but this no longer forces him into unfaithfulness to his principle that thought is dependent on, and bounded by, language, for he now conceives the thoughts expressed by sculpture to have a linguistic source: "The sculptor stands in the dark of night and gropes towards the forms of gods. The stories of the poets are before and in him." Subsequently, in the Theological Letters (1780-1) and the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, Herder extends the same solution to music as well.

Herder also in his considered position implies that "non-linguistic" art is dependent on thought and language in another way: In the fourth part of the Critical Forests he develops the point (mentioned earlier) that human perception is of its nature infused with concepts and beliefs, and consequently with language -- which of course implies that the same is true of the perception of "non-linguistic" artworks in particular. So "non-linguistic" art is really doubly dependent on thought and language: not only for the thoughts which it expresses but also for those which it presupposes in perception.

With Herder's achievement of this refined form of narrow expressivism and Hamann's articulation of broad expressivism, there were two plausible but competing theories available. Nineteenth-century theorists (e.g. Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey) would subsequently be deeply torn between them, and the dispute remains a live and important one today.

Because for Herder thought and language play important roles not only in linguistic but also in "non-linguistic" art, both for him present similar interpretive challenges, requiring similar interpretive solutions. One aspect of this which deserves special emphasis is genre.

Herder believes, plausibly, that a work of art is always written or made to exemplify a certain genre, and that it is vital for the interpreter to identify its genre in order to understand it. Herder's basic conception of genre is that it consists in an overall purpose together with certain rules of composition dictated thereby. For Herder, genres are in large measure socially pregiven, but they always play their role in a work via authorial intention (not autonomously thereof), and are not something the individual artist is inexorably locked into but something he can and often does modify.

Why does Herder believe that it is vital to define a work's genre-conception correctly in order to understand the work properly? He has two main reasons (both good ones): First, because an author intends his work to exemplify a certain genre, there will normally be aspects of his meaning in the work which are expressed, not explicitly in any particular part or parts of it, but rather through its intended exemplification of the genre. For instance, Lessing had argued that the function of Aesop's fables as a genre was to illustrate through a concrete example a universal moral principle, whereas Herder argues that it was rather to illustrate general rules of life, experience, or prudence -- so the full interpretation of any particular fable must include either a universal moral principle (if Lessing is right) or a general rule of life, etc. (if Herder is right). Or to cite a "non-linguistic" case, Herder argues that Egyptian sculpture (unlike Greek) had a function as a genre of expressing certain ideas about death and eternity -- so that the full interpretation of a piece of Egyptian sculpture must include this aspect of meaning deriving from the general genre. Second, correctly identifying the genre is also vitally important for correctly interpreting things which are expressed explicitly in parts of a work. Hence, for example, in the Critical Forests Herder argues that in order to achieve a proper understanding of "ridiculous" passages in Homer (such as the Thersites episode in Iliad, book 2) it is essential to understand them in light of the nature of the whole text and their contribution thereto.

Just as Herder insists on a scrupulous methodological empiricism in interpretation generally, so he insists on it in connection with defining genres in particular. He therefore sharply rejects apriorism here -- both the absolute apriorism of refusing in one's definition of a genre to be guided by the observation of examples at all, and the more seductive relative apriorism of allowing oneself to be guided by the observation of examples but excluding from these particular cases, or even whole classes of cases, to which the resulting genre-conception is to be applied in interpretation. The latter procedure is still disastrous, in Herder's view, because the superficial appearance of a similar genre shared by different historical periods or cultures, or even by different authors within one period and culture, or even by a single author in one work and the same author in another, usually masks vitally important differences. Herder identifies a misguided apriorism in the definition of genres in many areas of interpretation. For example, the essay Shakespeare (1773) finds it in the French critics' approach to tragedy, an approach which assumes the universal validity of Aristotelian genre-rules which were originally derived exclusively from ancient tragedies (sometimes even overlooking this empirical derivation), and consequently assumes that they provide an appropriate yardstick for interpreting Shakespearean tragedy, whose genre-conception is in fact quite different. And This Too and other pieces find it in Winckelmann's treatment of Egyptian sculpture: Winckelmann implicitly assumes the universal validity of a genre-conception for sculpture which he has derived from the Greeks, namely one dominated by the genre-purpose of a this-worldly portrayal of life and beauty, and he then applies this in the interpretation of Egyptian sculpture, where the genre-conception is in fact quite different, in particular involving a contrary genre-purpose of conveying ideas of death and eternity.

Moreover, Herder stresses that getting questions of genre right is vitally important not only for the correct interpretation of artworks, but also for their correct critical evaluation. The French critics not only make an interpretive mistake when they go to Shakespeare with a genre dogmatically in mind that was not his, but they also, on this basis, make an evaluative one: because they falsely assume that he somehow must be aspiring to realize the genre-purpose and -rules which Aristotle found in ancient tragedy, they fault him for failing to realize them, while at the same time they overlook the quite different genre-purpose and -rules to which he really aspires and his success in realizing these. Similarly, Winckelmann not only makes an interpretive mistake when he implicitly imputes to the Egyptians a Greek genre-purpose and -rules for sculpture that were not theirs, but he also, on this basis, makes an evaluative one: because he falsely assumes that the Egyptians somehow must be aspiring to realize the Greek genre-purpose and -rules, he faults them for failing to realize them, and at the same time he overlooks their success in realizing the very different genre-purpose and -rules which they really do aspire to realize.

Nothing has yet been said about beauty, which philosophers often think of as the central concern of the philosophy of art. Herder strikingly, and plausibly, argues that, on the contrary, beauty is not nearly as essential to art as it is often taken to be. He makes this point in the Calligone, for example, where he argues that art is much more essentially a matter of Bildung -- i.e., roughly, cultural formation or education (especially in moral respects).

A further claim which he makes about beauty (both in art and more generally) is that standards of beauty vary greatly from one historical period and culture to another. This is his usual position, from early works such as On the Change of Taste to late works such as Calligone (where he invokes it against Kant's Critique of Judgment). There is also an occasional counterstrand in which he argues for a deeper unity in standards of beauty across historical periods and cultures (e.g. in the Critical Forests). However, the former position is his considered one, and seems much the more plausible one.

Finally, in close connection with the point mentioned above that the fundamental role of the arts is one of Bildung, Herder in On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Ethics of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times (1778) and in Calligone argues more specifically that the fundamental role of the arts both has been historically and moreover should be one of moral character formation.

Herder has a fairly nuanced account of how the arts do and should perform this function. For example, On the Influence of the Beautiful Sciences on the Higher Sciences (1781) specifies three ways in which poetry and literature promote moral character formation: First, they do so "through light rules," in other words through conveying ethical principles in explicit or implicit ways. Second, and more important, they do so by presenting in an attractive light good moral examples for people to emulate: "still better, through good examples." Third, they also convey a broad range of practical experience relevant to the formation of moral character which would otherwise have to be acquired, if at all, by the more arduous route of first-hand experience. In Calligone Herder also notes the power that music has to affect moral character for good or ill depending on the principles with which it is associated, and the power of visual art to make moral ideals attractive by presenting them blended with physical beauty.

Herder's conception that it should be the primary function of art to form moral character also serves him as a criterion for evaluating artworks. Thus when he observes in On the Effect that in contrast to earlier poetry modern poetry has typically lost this function, he means this as a serious criticism of modern poetry. He even applies this criterion as a ground for criticizing certain works by his friends Goethe and Schiller which he considers amoral or immoral in content.

7. Philosophy of History

Herder's philosophy of history appears mainly in two works, This Too and the later Ideas. His fundamental achievement in this area lies in his development of the thesis mentioned earlier -- contradicting such Enlightenment philosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire -- that there exist radical mental differences between historical periods, that people's concepts, beliefs, sensations, etc. differ in important ways from one period to another. This thesis is already prominent in On the Change of Taste (1766). It had an enormous influence on successors such as Hegel and Nietzsche.

Herder makes the empirical exploration of the realm of mental diversity posited by this thesis the very core of the discipline of history. For, as has often been noted, he takes little interest in the so-called "great" political and military deeds and events of history, focusing instead on the "innerness" of history's participants. This choice is deliberate and self-conscious. Because of it, psychology and interpretation inevitably take center-stage in the discipline of history for Herder.

Herder has deep philosophical reasons for this choice, and hence for assigning psychology and interpretation a central role in history. To begin with, he has negative reasons directed against traditional political-military history. Why should history focus on the "great" political and military deeds and events of the past? There are several possible answers: (1) A first would be that they are fascinating or morally edifying. But Herder will not accept this. For one thing, he denies that mere fascination or curiosity is a sufficiently serious motive for doing history. For another, his antiauthoritarianism, antimilitarism, and borderless humanitarianism cause him to find the acts of political domination, war, and empire which make up the vast bulk of these "great" deeds and events not morally edifying but morally repugnant.

This leaves two other types of motivation which might be appealed to for doing the sort of history in question: (2) because examining the course of such deeds and events reveals some sort of overall meaning in history, or (3) because it leads to efficient causal insights which enable us to explain the past and perhaps also predict or control the future. Herder is again skeptical about these rationales, however. This skepticism is clearest in the Older Critical Forestlet (1767-8) where, in criticism of rationale (2), he consigns the task of "the whole ordering together of many occurrences into a plan" not to the historian but to the "creator, . . . painter, and artist," and in criticism of rationale (3), he goes as far as to assert (on the basis of a Hume- and Kant-influenced general skepticism about causal knowledge) that with the search for efficient causes in history "historical seeing stops and prophecy begins." His later writings depart from this early position in some obvious ways, but also in less obvious ways remain faithful to it. They by no means officially stay loyal to the view that history has no discernible meaning; famously, This Too insists that history does have an overall purpose, and that this fact (though not the nature of the purpose) is discernible from the cumulative way in which cultures have built upon one another, and the Ideas then tells a long story to the effect that history's purpose consists in its steady realization of "humanity" and "reason." However, Herder clearly still harbors grave doubts just below the surface. This is visible in This Too from the work's ironically self-deprecating title; Pyrrhonian-spirited motto; vacillations between several incompatible models of history's direction (progressive?, progressive and cyclical?, merely cyclical?, even regressive?); and morbid dwelling on, and unpersuasive attempt to rebut, the "skeptical" view of history as meaningless "Penelope-work." (A few years later Herder would write that history is "a textbook of the nullity of all human things.") It is also visible in the Ideas from the fact that Herder's official account of the purposiveness of history gets contradicted by passages which insist on the inappropriateness of teleological (as contrasted with efficient causal) explanations in history. Herder's official position certainly had a powerful influence on some successors (especially Hegel), but it is this quieter counterstrand of skepticism that represents his better philosophical judgment. Concerning efficient causal insights, Herder's later works again in a sense stay faithful to his skeptical position in the Older Critical Forestlet -- but they also modify it, and this time for the better philosophically speaking. The mature Herder does not, like the Herder of that work, rest his case on a general skepticism about the role or discernibility of efficient causation in history. On the contrary, he insists that history is governed by efficient causation and that we should try to discover as far as possible the specific ways in which it is so. But he remains highly skeptical about the extent to which such an undertaking can be successful, and hence about how far it can take us towards real explanations of the past, and towards predicting or controlling the future. His main reason for this skepticism is that major historical deeds and events are not the products of some one or few readily identifiable causal factors (as political and military historians tend to assume), but rather of chance confluences of huge numbers of different causal factors, many of which, moreover, are individually unknown and unknowable by the historian (e.g. because in themselves too trivial to have been recorded, or, in the case of psychological factors, because the historical agent failed to make them public, deliberately misrepresented them, or was himself unaware of them due to the hidden depths of his mind).

Complementing this negative case against the claims of traditional political-military history to be of overriding importance, Herder also has positive reasons for focusing instead on the "innerness" of human life in history. One reason is certainly just the sheer interest of this subject-matter -- though, as was mentioned, that would not be a sufficient reason in his eyes. Another reason is that his discovery of radical diversity in human mentality has shown there to be a much broader, less explored, and more intellectually challenging field for investigation here than previous generations of historians have realized. Two further reasons are moral in nature: (1) He believes, and plausibly so, that studying people's minds through their literature, visual art, etc. generally exposes one to them at their moral best (in sharp contrast to studying their political-military history), so that there are benefits of moral edification to be gleaned here. (2) He has cosmopolitan and egalitarian moral motives for studying people's minds through their literature, visual art, etc.: (in sharp contrast to studying unedifying and elite-focused political-military history) this promises to enhance our sympathies for peoples and for peoples at all social levels, including lower ones. Finally, doing "inner" history is also an important instrument for our non-moral self-improvement: (1) It serves to enhance our self-understanding. One reason for this is that it is by, and only by, contrasting one's own outlook with the outlooks of other peoples that one recognizes what is universal and invariant in it and what by contrast distinctive and variable. Another very important reason is that in order fully to understand one's own outlook one needs to identify its origins and how they developed into it (this is Herder's famous "genetic method," which subsequently became fundamental to the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault). (2) Herder believes that an accurate investigation of the (non-moral) ideals of past ages can serve to enrich our own ideals and happiness. This motive finds broad application in Herder. An example is his exploration of past literatures in the Fragments largely with a view to drawing from them lessons about how better to develop modern German literature.

Herder's decision to focus on the "innerness" of history's participants, and his consequent emphasis on psychology and interpretation as historical methods, strikingly anticipated and influenced Dilthey. So too did Herder's rationale for this, as described above, which is indeed arguably superior to Dilthey's, especially on its positive side.

Finally, Herder is also impressive for having recognized, and, though not solved, at least grappled with, a problem that flows from his picture of history (and intercultural comparisons) as an arena of deep variations in human mentality. This is the problem of skepticism. He tends to run together two problems here: (1) the problem of whether there is any meaning to the seemingly endless and bewildering series of changes from epoch to epoch (or culture to culture); (2) the problem that the multiplication of conflicting viewpoints on virtually all subjects that is found in history (or in intercultural comparisons) causes, or at least exacerbates, the ancient skeptic's difficulty of unresolvable disputes forcing one to suspend belief on virtually all subjects. Problem (1) has been discussed. Here it is problem (2) that concerns us. This is a problem that Troeltsch would make much of in the twentieth century. But Herder had already clearly seen it.

Herder is determined to avoid this sort of skepticism. He has two main strategies for doing so, but they are inconsistent with each other, and neither in the end works: His first is to try to defuse the problem at source by arguing that, on closer inspection, there is much more common ground between different periods and cultures than it allows. This strategy plays a central role in the Ideas, where in particular "humanity" is presented as a shared ethical value; and it is also present in the Critical Forests, where (as mentioned earlier) Herder argues that standards of beauty have an underlying unity. Herder's second strategy is rather to acknowledge the problem fully and to respond with relativism: especially in This Too he argues that -- at least where questions of moral, aesthetic, and prudential value are concerned -- the different positions taken by different periods and cultures are equally valid, namely for the periods and cultures to which they belong, and that there can be no question of any preferential ranking between them. The later Letters vacillates between these two strategies.

Neither of these strategies is satisfactory in the end. The first, that of asserting deep commonalities, is hopeless (notwithstanding its seemingly eternal appeal to empirically underinformed Anglophone philosophers). It flies in the face of the empirical evidence -- e.g. Herder in this mode sentimentally praises Homer for his "humanity," and thereby lays himself open to Nietzsche's just retort in Homer's Contest that what is striking about Homer and his culture is rather their cruelty. Moreover, it flies in the face of Herder's own better interpretive judgments about the empirical evidence -- e.g. his observation in On the Change of Taste that basic values have not only changed through history but in certain cases actually been inverted (an observation which strikingly anticipates a brilliant insight of Nietzsche's concerning an inversion of ethical values that occurred in antiquity).

Herder's alternative, relativist, strategy, is more interesting, but is not in the end satisfactory either (even concerning values, where its prospects seem best). There are several potential problems with it. One, which is of historical interest but probably not in the end fatal, is this: Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit and then Nietzsche in his treatment of Christian moral values saw the possibility that one might accept Herder's insight that there were basic differences in values but nonetheless avoid his relativism by subjecting others' values to an internal critique, a demonstration that they were internally inconsistent. For example, Nietzsche (whose version of this idea is the more plausible) traced back such Christian values as forgiveness to a contrary underlying motive of resentment [ressentiment]. However, in order to work, such a response would need to show that the inconsistency was essential to the values in question, not merely something contingent that could disappear leaving the values consistently held -- and this it probably cannot do. A more serious problem with the strategy is rather a twofold one, which Nietzsche again saw: First, we cannot in fact sustain such a relativist indifference vis-à-vis others' values. Do we, for example, really think that a moral rule requiring the forcible burning of dead men's wives is no better and no worse than one forbidding it? Second, nor does the phenomenon of fundamental value variations require us to adopt such an indifference. For, while it may indeed show there to be no universal values, it leaves us with a better alternative to indifference: continuing to hold our values and to judge others' values in light of them only now in a self-consciously non-universal way. (As Nietzsche puts it, "My judgment is my judgment." Or if we reject Nietzsche's extreme individualism, "Our judgment is our judgment," for some less-than-universal us.)

8. Political Philosophy

Herder is not usually thought of as a political philosopher. But he was one, and moreover one whose political ideals are more admirable, theoretical stances more defensible, and thematic focus of more enduring relevance than those of any other German philosopher of the period. His most developed treatment of political philosophy occurs late, in a work prompted by the French Revolution of 1789: the Letters (including the early draft of 1792, important for its frank statement of his views about domestic politics).

What are the main features of Herder's political philosophy? We should begin with his political ideals, first in domestic and then in international politics: In domestic politics, the mature Herder is a liberal, a republican, a democrat, and an egalitarian (this in circumstances where such positions were by no means commonplace, and were embraced at a personal cost). His liberalism is especially radical in advocating virtually unrestricted freedom of thought and expression (including freedom of worship). He has several reasons for this position: (1) He feels that such freedom belongs to people's moral dignity. (2) He believes that it is essential for individuals' self-realization. (3) As mentioned earlier, he believes that human beings' capacities for discerning the truth are limited and that it is through, and only through, an ongoing contest between opposing viewpoints that the cause of truth gets advanced. (J.S. Mill would later borrow these considerations -- partly via intermediaries such as von Humboldt -- to form the core of his case for freedom of thought and expression in On Liberty.) Herder is also committed to republicanism and democracy (advocating a much broader franchise than Kant, for example). He has several reasons for this position, ultimately deriving from an egalitarian concern for the interests of all members of society: (1) He thinks it intrinsically right that the mass of people should share in their government, rather than having it imposed upon them. (2) He believes that this will better serve their other interests as well, since government by also tends to be government for. (3) He in particular believes that it will diminish the warfare that is pervasive under the prevailing autocratic political régimes of Europe, where it benefits the few rulers who decide on it but costs the mass of people dearly. Finally, Herder's egalitarianism also extends further. He does not reject class differences, property, or inequalities of property outright. But he opposes all hierarchical oppression; argues that all people in society have capacities for self-realization, and must receive the opportunity to realize them; and insists that government must intervene to ensure that they do, e.g. by guaranteeing education and a minimum standard of living for the poor.

Concerning international politics, Herder often gets classified as a "nationalist" or (even worse) a "German nationalist." Some other philosophers from the period deserve this slur (e.g. Fichte). But where Herder is concerned it is deeply misleading and unjust. On the contrary, his fundamental position in international politics is a committed cosmopolitanism, an impartial concern for all human beings. This is a large part of the force of his ideal of "humanity." Hence, for example, in the Letters he approvingly quotes Fénelon's remark, "I love my family more than myself; more than my family my fatherland; more than my fatherland humankind." Moreover, unlike Kant's cosmopolitanism, Herder's is genuine. Kant's cosmopolitanism is vitiated by a set of empirically ignorant and morally inexcusable prejudices which he harbors -- in particular, racism, antisemitism, and misogyny. By contrast, Herder's is entirely free of these prejudices, which he indeed works tirelessly to combat.

Herder does also insist on respecting, preserving, and advancing national groupings. But this is unalarming, for the following reasons: (1) For Herder, this is emphatically something that must be done for all national groupings equally (not just or especially Germany!). (2) The "nation" in question is not racial but linguistic and cultural (Herder rejects the very concept of race). (3) Nor does it involve a centralized or militaristic state (Herder advocates the disappearance of such a state and its replacement by loosely federated local governments with minimal instruments of force). (4) In addition, Herder's insistence on respecting national groupings is accompanied by the strongest denunciations of military conflict, colonial exploitation, and all other forms of harm between nations; a demand that nations instead peacefully cooperate and compete in trade and intellectual endeavors for their mutual benefit; and a plea that they should indeed actively work to help each other.

Moreover, Herder has compelling reasons for his insistence on respecting national groupings: (1) The deep diversity of values between nations entails that homogenization is ultimately impracticable, only a fantasy. (2) Such diversity also entails that, to the extent that it is practicable, it cannot occur voluntarily but only through external coercion. (3) In practice, attempts to achieve it, e.g. by European colonialism, are moreover coercive from, and subserve, ulterior motives of domination and exploitation. (4) Real national variety is moreover positively valuable, both as affording individuals a vital sense of local belonging and in itself.

It might be objected that all this does not yet really amount to a political theory -- such as other philosophers have given, including some of Herder's contemporaries in Germany. In a sense that is true, but philosophically defensible; in another sense it is false. It is true in this sense: There is indeed no grand metaphysical theory underpinning Herder's position -- no Platonic theory of forms, no correlation of political institutions with "moments" in a Hegelian Logic, no "deduction" of political institutions from the nature of the self or the will à la Fichte and Hegel, etc. But that is deliberate, given Herder's skepticism about such metaphysics. And is it not indeed philosophically a good thing? Nor does Herder have any elaborate account purporting to justify the moral intuitions at work in his political position as a sort of theoretical insight (in the manner of Kant's theory of the "categorical imperative" or Rawls's theory of the "original position," for example). But that is again quite deliberate, given his non-cognitivism in ethics, and his rejection of such theories as both false and harmful. And is he not again right about this, and the absence of such an account therefore again a good thing? Nor is Herder sympathetic with such tired staples of political theory as the state of nature, the social contract, natural rights, the general will, and utopias for the future. But again, he has good specific reasons for skepticism about these things. This, then, is the sense in which the objection is correct; Herder does indeed lack a "political theory" of these sorts. But he lacks it on principle, and is arguably quite right to do so.

On the other hand, he does have a "political theory" of another, and arguably more valuable, sort. For one thing, consistently with his general empiricism, his position in political philosophy is deeply empirically informed. For instance, as can be seen from the Dissertation on the Reciprocal Influence of Government and the Sciences (1780), his thesis about the importance of freedom of thought and expression, and the competition between views which it makes possible, for producing intellectual progress is largely based on the historical example of ancient Greece and in particular Athens (as contrasted with societies which have lacked the freedom and competition in question). And in the 1792 draft of the Letters he even describes the French Revolution and its attempts to establish a modern democracy as a sort of "experiment" from which we can learn (e.g. whether democracy can be successfully extended to nations much larger than ancient Athens). For another thing, conformably with his general non-cognitivism about morals, he is acutely aware that his political position ultimately rests on moral sentiments -- his own and, for its success, other people's as well. For example, the 10th Collection of the Letters stresses the fundamental role of moral "dispositions" or "feelings" as required supports for his political position's realization. As was mentioned, this standpoint absolves him of the need to do certain sorts of theorizing. However, it also leads him to engage in theorizing of another sort, namely theorizing about how, and by what means, people's moral sentiments should be molded in order to realize the ideals of his political position. His discussion of moral "dispositions" in the 10th Collection is an example of such theorizing (concerning the how rather than the means; his theorizing about causal means has been sketched earlier in this article). These two sorts of theorizing are deeply developed in Herder. And they are arguably much more pointful than the sorts which are not.

In short, to the extent that Herder's political philosophy really is theoretically superficial, it is arguably, to borrow a phrase of Nietzsche's, "superficial -- out of profundity" (whereas more familiar forms of political philosophy are profound out of superficiality). And in another, more important, sense it is not theoretically superficial at all.

9. Philosophy of Religion

In Herder's day German philosophy was deeply committed to a game of trying to reconcile the insights of the Enlightenment, especially those of modern science, with religion, and indeed with Christianity. Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and many others played this game -- each proposing some new reconciliation or other. Herder was part of this game as well. This was not a good game for philosophers to be playing. But it was only in the nineteenth century that German philosophy found the courage to cut the Gordian knot and turn from apologetics for religion and Christianity to thoroughgoing criticism of them (prime examples being Marx and Nietzsche). This situation imposes limits on the interest of Herder's philosophy of religion, as on that of the other reconciling philosophers mentioned.

Also, while Herder's philosophy of religion was extremely enlightened and progressive in both his early and his late periods, there was a spell in the middle, the years 1771-6 in Bückeburg, during which he fell into the sort of religious irrationalism more characteristic of his friend Hamann. This happened as the result of what we would today classify as a mild nervous breakdown (documentable from his correspondence at the time), and should be discounted.

Despite these qualifications, Herder did make important contributions to the philosophy of religion -- i.e. important in terms of their influence, their intrinsic value, or both. One of these (important for its influence) is his neo-Spinozism, expounded in God. Some Conversations of 1787. In this work he develops a version of "Spinozism" which consciously modifies the original in important respects. He shares with Spinoza the basic thesis of monism, and like Spinoza equates the single, all-encompassing principle in question with God. But whereas Spinoza characterized it as substance, Herder prefers to characterize it as force, or primal force. Moreover, this modification involves further ones which Herder finds attractive, including: (1) Spinoza's theory had rejected conceptions of God as a mind, as a being who thinks or has purposes. Given Herder's general philosophy of mind and its identification of the mind with force, his identification of God with force imports a claim that God is in fact a mind -- hence in works such as On the Spirit of Christianity (1798) he describes God as a Geist, a mind or spirit. Accordingly, Herder claims that God does think, and even have purposes. (2) Herder believes that Spinoza's original theory contains a residue of objectionable dualism, inherited from Descartes, in its conception of the relation between God's two known attributes, thought and extension (and similarly, in its conception of the relation between finite minds and bodies). By contrast, the conception of God as a force (and of finite minds as likewise forces) overcomes this residual dualism. For forces are of their very nature expressed in extended bodies. From around the time of God. Some Conversations until well into the nineteenth century a wave of neo-Spinozism swept through German philosophy: Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and lesser figures such as Hölderlin, Novalis, and F. Schlegel. This wave was mainly the result of Herder's embrace of neo-Spinozism in that work, and took over his modifications of Spinoza's position.

However, Herder's most intrinsically valuable contribution to the philosophy of religion concerns the interpretation of the bible. In this connection, as previously mentioned, he champions a strict secularism. This was already his position in the 1760's. At that period he argued vigorously, in the spirit of Galileo, for disallowing revelation any jurisdiction over natural science -- though he did so not in an anti-religious spirit but in the hope and expectation that an autonomous natural science would confirm religion. And he made a parallel case for the autonomy of interpretation: Religious assumptions and means have no business interfering in the interpretation of texts either, even when the texts are sacred ones. Instead, biblical texts must be interpreted as the works of human beings, and by means of the same sorts of rigorous hermeneutical methods that are employed for interpreting other ancient texts -- any religious enlightenment coming as a result of such interpretation, not entering into the process itself. This whole position remained Herder's considered stance in his later period as well.

The general idea that the bible should be interpreted in the same way as other texts was by no means the commonplace in Herder's day that it has since become, but nor was it new with him. In adopting this principle he was self-consciously following the lead of several recent bible scholars -- in particular, Ernesti, Michaelis, and Semler. However, Herder's secularism is more consistent and radical than theirs.

This can be illustrated by a comparison with Ernesti (the most important of the scholars just mentioned, and the one most consistently admired by Herder). Ernesti's great work, Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti (1761), which Herder singles out for special praise, is a key statement of the sort of secularism in question. Initially, this work seems to advocate a secularism identical in spirit to Herder's, arguing that we must interpret biblical books in the same way as profane texts, and thereby learn whatever religious truth they contain. However, as the work develops, matters become much cloudier. In this connection, it is important to distinguish two questions which can be asked concerning divine inspiration and interpretation: (1) May readers of sacred texts rely on a divine inspiration of themselves (e.g. by the Holy Spirit) bringing them to a correct interpretation rather than on more usual interpretive means? (2) May they assume in interpretation that because the texts' authors are divinely inspired the texts must be completely true and therefore also (a fortiori) completely self-consistent? When Ernesti develops the details of his position it becomes clear that he has really only advanced as far towards secularism as consistently answering question (1) in the negative, not question (2). His failure to give a consistently negative answer to question (2) lands him in flat contradiction with his official commitment to interpreting sacred texts in exactly the same way as profane texts (for of course, as he indeed himself implies, in interpreting profane texts we may not assume that the texts are throughout true and therefore also self-consistent). It also seems intellectually indefensible in itself -- merely a rather transparent refusal to stop, so to speak, "cooking the books" in favor of the bible when interpreting it. By contrast, the young Herder advances in his secularism beyond Ernesti because he consistently answers both questions in the negative, and thereby, unlike Ernesti, achieves a position which is both self-consistent and otherwise intellectually defensible. Moreover, Herder's actual interpretations of the bible admirably conform to this theoretical position, not only refraining from any reliance on divine inspiration and instead employing normal interpretive techniques, but also frequently attributing false and even inconsistent positions to the bible (both to the Old and to the New Testaments).

Another noteworthy feature of Herder's secularism is his insistence that interpreters of the bible must resist the temptation to read the bible as allegory (except in those few cases -- e.g. the parables of the New Testament -- where there is clear textual evidence of a biblical author's intention to convey an allegorical meaning). Herder gives a perceptive general diagnosis of the temptation to allegorical interpretation: over the course of history people's beliefs and values change, leading to discrepancies between the claims made by their traditional texts and their own beliefs and values, but they expect and want to find their traditional texts correct, and so they try to effect a reconciliation with their own beliefs and values by means of allegorical readings.

Herder's theoretical commitment to strict secularism in biblical interpretation led him to interpretive discoveries concerning the bible which were in themselves of epoch-making importance. For example, concerning the Old Testament, his commitment to applying normal hermeneutical methods enabled him to distinguish and define the different genres of poetry in the Old Testament in a way that was superior to anything done before him. Also, that commitment, and in particular his consequent readiness to find falsehood and even inconsistency in the bible, allowed him to make such important interpretive observations as that the ancient Jews' conceptions about death, afterlife, mind, and body, had changed dramatically over time. (For these two achievements, see especially On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.) Again, that commitment, and in particular Herder's consequent rejection of unwarranted allegorical interpretations, allowed him to substitute for the prevailing interpretation of the Song of Solomon as religious allegory an interpretation of it as simple erotic love poetry which is today generally accepted as correct. Similarly concerning the New Testament, Herder's commitment to applying normal hermeneutical methods, including his consequent readiness to recognize falsehood and inconsistency, enabled him to treat the authors of the four gospels as individual human authors instead of as mere mouthpieces of the deity, to perceive inconsistencies between their accounts, to establish the relative dates of the gospels correctly for the first time (Mark first, Matthew and Luke in the middle, John last and late), and to give a broadly correct account of their genesis in oral sermon and their likely relations to each other -- achievements attained above all in two late works from 1796-97, On the Savior of Mankind and On God's Son, the World's Savior.

Herder's strict secularism in interpretation would later be replicated by Schleiermacher, who similarly embraces the principle that the interpretation of sacred texts must treat them as the works of human authors and by means of exactly the same interpretive methods as are applied to profane texts, and similarly follows through on this commitment, in particular finding not only falsehoods but also inconsistencies in the bible.

Herder's achievements in this area have something of the character of the early acts of an inexorable tragedy, however. As was mentioned, he by no means intended his championing of the cause of intellectual conscience in insisting on the autonomy of natural science and interpretation to undermine religion in general or Christianity in particular; on the contrary, his hope and expectation was that both sorts of autonomy would in the end support religion and Christianity. However, this hope has been sorely disappointed. Autonomous natural science has increasingly made religion generally and Christianity in particular look untenable. And Herder's policy of reading the bible as a collection of human texts, with all the foibles of human texts, has increasingly led to an undermining of the bible's claims to intellectual authority. Much of what Herder has ultimately achieved in this area would therefore be deeply unwelcome to him.

Bibliography

Primary Texts

There are two main German editions of Herder's works:

Johann Gottfried Herder Sämtliche Werke, B. Suphan, et al. (eds.), Berlin, 1887-.

Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, U. Gaier, et al. (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, 1985-.

The latter edition includes very helpful notes.

Translations

Adler, H., and Menze, E.A., On World History, Armonk, 1996.

(Contains short excerpts on history from a variety of works, prominently including the Ideas.)

Barnard, F.M., J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, Cambridge, 1969.

(Includes (partial) translations of Herder's 1769 Journal, On the Origin, This Too, the Dissertation on the Reciprocal Influence of Government and the Sciences, and the Ideas, plus a very good introduction.)

Burkhardt, F.H., God. Some Conversations, New York, 1940.

Churchill, T., Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, London, 1800.

(A translation of the Ideas.)

Forster, M.N., J.G. Herder: Philosophical Writings, Cambridge, 2001/2.

(Contains full translations of How Philosophy, On the Origin, On the Cognition, and This Too, as well as other pieces.)

Marsh, J., The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, Burlington, Vt., 1833.

Menze, E.A., Menges, K., and Palma, M., Johann Gottfried Herder: Selected Early Works, 1764-7, Pennsylvania, 1992.

(Contains some early essays and selections from the Fragments.)

Moran, J.H., and Gode, A., On the Origin of Language, Chicago, 1986.

(Contains a partial translation of On the Origin.)

Nisbet, H.B., German Aesthetics and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Cambridge, 1985.

(Contains two pieces of Herder's in aesthetics, including his important essay Shakespeare.)

Immanuel Kant

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), German philosopher, considered by many the most influential thinker of modern times.

Life

Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), April 22, 1724, Kant received his education at the Collegium Fredericianum and the University of Königsberg. At the college he studied chiefly the classics, and at the university he studied physics and mathematics. After his father died, he was compelled to halt his university career and earn his living as a private tutor. In 1755, aided by a friend, he resumed his studies and obtained his doctorate. Thereafter, for 15 years he taught at the university, lecturing first on science and mathematics, but gradually enlarging his field of concentration to cover almost all branches of philosophy. Although Kant's lectures and works written during this period established his reputation as an original philosopher, he did not receive a chair at the university until 1770, when he was made professor of logic and metaphysics. For the next 27 years he continued to teach and attracted large numbers of students to Königsberg. Kant's unorthodox religious teachings, which were based on rationalism rather than revelation, brought him into conflict with the government of Prussia, and in 1792 he was forbidden by Frederick William II, king of Prussia, to teach or write on religious subjects. Kant obeyed this order for five years until the death of the king and then felt released from his obligation. In 1798, the year following his retirement from the university, he published a summary of his religious views. He died February 12, 1804.

Kant's Philosophy

The keystone of Kant's philosophy, sometimes called critical philosophy, is contained in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in which he examined the bases of human knowledge and created an individual epistemology. Like earlier philosophers, Kant differentiated modes of thinking into analytic and synthetic propositions. An analytic proposition is one in which the predicate is contained in the subject, as in the statement “Black houses are houses.” The truth of this type of proposition is evident, because to state the reverse would be to make the proposition self-contradictory. Such propositions are called analytic because truth is discovered by the analysis of the concept itself. Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, are those that cannot be arrived at by pure analysis, as in the statement “The house is black.” All the common propositions that result from experience of the world are synthetic.

Propositions, according to Kant, can also be divided into two other types: empirical and a priori. Empirical propositions depend entirely on sense perception, but a priori propositions have a fundamental validity and are not based on such perception. The difference between these two types of proposition may be illustrated by the empirical “The house is black” and the a priori “Two plus two makes four.” Kant's thesis in the Critique is that it is possible to make synthetic a priori judgments. This philosophical position is usually known as transcendentalism. In describing how this type of judgment is possible Kant regarded the objects of the material world as fundamentally unknowable; from the point of view of reason, they serve merely as the raw material from which sensations are formed. Objects of themselves have no existence, and space and time exist only as part of the mind, as “intuitions” by which perceptions are measured and judged.

In addition to these intuitions, Kant stated that a number of a priori concepts, which he called categories, also exist. He divided the categories into four groups: those concerning quantity, which are unity, plurality, and totality; those concerning quality, which are reality, negation, and limitation; those concerning relation, which are substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, and reciprocity; and those concerning modality, which are possibility, existence, and necessity. The intuitions and the categories can be applied to make judgments about experiences and perceptions, but cannot, according to Kant, be applied to abstract ideas such as freedom and existence without leading to inconsistencies in the form of pairs of contradictory propositions, or “antinomies,” in which both members of each pair can be proved true.

In the Metaphysics of Ethics (1797) Kant described his ethical system, which is based on a belief that the reason is the final authority for morality. Actions of any sort, he believed, must be undertaken from a sense of duty dictated by reason, and no action performed for expediency or solely in obedience to law or custom can be regarded as moral. Kant described two types of commands given by reason: the hypothetical imperative, which dictates a given course of action to reach a specific end; and the categorical imperative, which dictates a course of action that must be followed because of its rightness and necessity. The categorical imperative is the basis of morality and was stated by Kant in these words: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law.”

Kant's ethical ideas are a logical outcome of his belief in the fundamental freedom of the individual as stated in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788). This freedom he did not regard as the lawless freedom of anarchy, but rather as the freedom of self-government, the freedom to obey consciously the laws of the universe as revealed by reason. He believed that the welfare of each individual should properly be regarded as an end in itself and that the world was progressing toward an ideal society in which reason would “bind every law giver to make his laws in such a way that they could have sprung from the united will of an entire people, and to regard every subject, in so far as he wishes to be a citizen, on the basis of whether he has conformed to that will.” In his treatise Perpetual Peace (1795) Kant advocated the establishment of a world federation of republican states.

Kant had a greater influence than any other philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy, particularly as developed by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built; the dialectical method, used by both Hegel and Karl Marx, was an outgrowth of the method of reasoning by “antinomies” that Kant used. The German philosopher Johann Fichte, Kant's pupil, rejected his teacher's division of the world into objective and subjective parts and developed an idealistic philosophy that also had great influence on 19th-century socialists. One of Kant's successors at the University of Königsberg, J.F. Herbart, incorporated some of Kant's ideas in his system of pedagogy.

Other Works

In addition to works on philosophy, Kant wrote a number of treatises on various scientific subjects, many in the field of physical geography. His most important scientific work was General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), in which he advanced the hypothesis of the formation of the universe from a spinning nebula, a hypothesis that later was developed independently by Pierre de Laplace. Among Kant's other writings are Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Philosophy (1786), Critique of Judgment (1790), and Religion Within the Boundaries of Pure Reason (1793).

Christian’s Point of View of Kant

Philosophy of Immanuel Kant

Kant's philosophy is generally designated as a system of transcendental criticism tending towards Agnosticism in theology, and favouring the view that Christianity is a non-dogmatic religion.

Immanuel Kant was born at Königsberg in East Prussia, 22 April, 1724; died there, 12 February, 1804. From his sixteenth to his twenty-first year, he studied at the university of his native city, having for his teacher Martin Knutzen, under whom he acquired a knowledge of the philosophy of Wolff and of Newton's physics. After the death of his father in 1746 he spent nine years as tutor in various families. In 1755 he returned to Königsberg, and there he spent the remainder of his life. From 1755 to 1770 he was Privatdozent (unsalaried professor) at the University of Königsberg. In 1770 he was appointed professor of philosophy, a position which he held until 1797.

It is usual to distinguish two periods of Kant's literary activity. The first, the pre-critical period, extends from 1747 to 1781, the date of the epoch-making "Kritik der reinen Vernunft"; the second, the critical period, extends from 1781 to 1794.

THE PRE-CRITICAL PERIOD

Kant's first book, which was published in 1747, was entitled "Gedanken von der wahren Schatzung der lebendigen Kräfte" (Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces). In 1775 he published his doctor's dissertation, "On Fire" (De Igne), and the work "Principiorum Primorum Cognitionis Metaphysicae Nova Dilucidatio" (A New Explanation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge), by which he qualified for the position of Privatdozent. Besides these, in which he expounded and defended the current philosophy of Wolff, he published other treatises in which he applied that philosophy to problems of mathematics and physics. In 1770 appeared the work "De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Formis et Principiis" (On the Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World), in which he shows for the first time a tendency to adopt an independent system of philosophy. The years from 1770 to 1780 were spent, as Kant himself tells us, in the preparation of the "Critique of Pure Reason".

THE CRITICAL PERIOD

The first work of Kant in which he appears as an exponent of transcendental criticism is the "Critique of Pure Reason" (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), which appeared in 1781. A second edition was published in 1787. In 1785 appeared the "Foundation for the Metaphysics of Ethics" (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten). Then came a succession of critical works, the most important of which are the "Critique of Practical Reason" (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft), the "Critique of Judgment" (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, 1790), and "Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason" (Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793). The best editions of Kant's complete works are Hartenstein's second edition (8 vols., Leipzig, 1867-69), Rosenkranz and Schubert's (12 vols., Leipzig, 1834-42), and the edition which is being published by the Academy of Sciences of Berlin (Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausg. von der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902-).

During the period of his academic career, extending from 1747 to 1781, Kant, as has been said, taught the philosophy then prevalent in Germany, which was Wolff's modified form of dogmatic rationalism. That is to say, he made psychological experience to be the basis of all metaphysical truth, rejected skepticism, and judged all knowledge by the test of reason. Towards the end of that period, however, he began to question the solidity of the psychological basis of metaphysics, and ended by losing all faith in the validity and value of metaphysical reasoning. The apparent contradictions which he found to exist in the physical sciences, and the conclusions which Hume had reached in his analysis of the principle of causation, "awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber" and brought home to him the necessity of reviewing or criticizing all human experience for the purpose of restoring the physical sciences to a degree of certitude which they rightly claim, and also for the purpose of placing on an unshakable foundation the metaphysical truths which Hume's skeptical phenomenalism had overthrown. The old rational dogmatism had, he now considered, laid too much emphasis on the a priori elements of knowledge; on the other hand, as he now for the first time realized, the empirical philosophy of Hume had gone too far when it reduced all truth to empirical or a posteriori elements. Kant, therefore, proposes to pass all knowledge in review in order to determine how much of it is to be assigned to the a priori, and how much to the a posteriori factors, if we may so designate them, of knowledge. As he himself says, his purpose is to "deduce" the a priori or transcendental, forms of thought. Hence, his philosophy is essentially a "criticism", because it is an examination of knowledge, and "transcendental", because its purpose in examining knowledge is to determine the a priori, or transcendental, forms. Kant himself was wont to say that the business of philosophy is to answer three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? He considered, however, that the answer to the second and third depends on the answer to the first; our duty and our destiny can be determined only after a thorough study of human knowledge.

It will be found most convenient to divide the study of Kant's critical philosophy into three portions, corresponding to the doctrines contained in his three "Critiques". We shall, therefore, take up successively (1) the doctrines of the "Critique of Pure Reason"; (2) the doctrines of the "Critique of Practical Reason"; (3) the doctrines of the "Critique of the Faculty of Judgment".

"Critique of Pure Reason"

In accordance with his purpose to examine all knowledge in order to find what is and what is not a priori, or transcendental, that is anterior to experience, or independent of experience, Kant proceeds in the "Critique of Pure Reason" to inquire into the a priori forms of (a) sensation, (b) judgment, and (c) reasoning.

A. Sensation

The first thing that Kant does in his study of knowledge is to distinguish between the material, or content, and the form, of sensation. The material of our sense-knowledge comes from experience. The form, however, is not derived through the senses, but is imposed on the material, or content, by the mind, in order to render the material, or content, universal and necessary. The form is, therefore, a priori; it is independent of experience. The most important forms of sense-knowledge, the conditions, in fact, of all sensation, are space and time. Not only, then, are space and time mental entities in the sense that they are elaborated by the mind out of the data of experience; they are strictly subjective, purely mental, and have no objective entity, except in so far as they are applied to the external world by the mind.

Because of what is to follow, it is important to ask at this point: Do the a priori forms of sensation, since they admittedly enhance the value of sense-knowledge by rendering it universal and necessary, extend the domain of sense-knowledge, and carry us outside the narrow confines of the material, or data, of the senses? Kant holds that they do not. They affect knowledge, so to speak, qualitatively, not quantitatively. Now, the data of sensation represent only the appearances (Erscheinungen) of things; therefore all sensation is confined to a knowledge of appearances. Sense-knowledge cannot penetrate to the noumenon, the reality of the thing (Ding-an-sich).

B. Judgment

(b) Taking up now the knowledge which we acquire by means of the understanding (Verstand), Kant finds that thought in the strict sense begins with judgment. As in the case of sense-knowledge, he distinguishes here the content and the form. The content of judgment, or in other words, that which the understanding joins together in the act of judgment, can be nothing but the sense-intuitions, which take place, as has been said, by the imposition of the forms of space and time on the data of sensation. Sometimes the sense-intuitions (subject and predicate) are joined together in a manner that evidently implies contingency and particularity. An example would be the judgment, "This table is square." With judgments of this kind the philosopher is not much concerned. He is interested rather in judgments such as "All the sides of a square are equal", in which the relation affirmed to exist between the subject and the predicate is necessary and universal. With regard to these, Kant's first remark is that their necessity and universality must be a priori. That nothing which is universal and necessary can come from experience is axiomatic with him. There must, then, be forms of judgment, as there are forms of sensation, which are imposed by the understanding, which do not come from experience at all, but are a priori. These forms of judgment are the categories. It is hardly necessary to call attention to the contrast between the Kantian categories and the Aristotelean. The difference is fundamental, a difference in nature, purpose, function, and effect. The important point for the student of Kant is to determine the function of the categories. They serve to confer universality and necessity on our judgments. They serve, moreover, to bring diverse sense-intuitions under some degree of unity. But they do not extend our knowledge. For while representations (or intuitions) without the categories would be blind, the categories without representative, or intuitional, content, would be empty. We are still within the narrow circle of knowledge covered by our sense-experience. Space and time do not widen that circle; neither do the categories. The knowledge, therefore, which we acquire by the understanding is confined to the appearances of things, and does not extend to the noumenal reality, the Ding-an-Sich.

It is necessary at this point to explain what Kant means by the "synthetic a priori" judgments. The Aristotelean philosophers distinguished two kinds of judgments, namely, synthetic judgments, which are the result of a "putting-together" (synthesis) of the facts, or data, of experience, and analytic judgments, which are the result of a "taking-apart" (analysis) of the subject and predicate, without immediate reference to experience. Thus, "This table is round" is a synthetic judgment; "All the radii of a circle are equal" is an analytic judgment. Now, according to the Aristoteleans, all synthetic judgments are a posteriori, because they are dependent on experience, and all analytic judgments are a priori, because the bond, or nexus, in them is perceived without appeal to experience. This classification does not satisfy Kant. He contends that analytic judgments of the kind referred to do not advance knowledge at all, since they always "remain within the concepts [subject and predicate] and make no advance beyond the data of the concepts". At the same time he contends that the synthetic judgments of the Aristoteleans have no scientific value, since, coming as they do from experience, they must be contingent and particular. Therefore he proposes to introduce a third class, namely, synthetic a priori judgments, which are synthetic because the content of them is supplied by a synthesis of the facts of experience, and a priori, because the form of universality and necessity is imposed on them by the understanding independently of experience. An example would be, according to Kant, "Every effect must have a cause." Our concepts of "effect" and "cause" are supplied by experience; but the universality and necessity of principle are derived from the a priori endowment of the mind. The Aristoteleans answer, and rightly, that the so-called synthetic a priori judgments are all analytic.

C. Reasoning

In the third place, Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is occupied with the reasoning faculty (Vernunft). Here "ideas" play a role similar to that played in sensation and judgment by space and time and the categories, respectively. Examining the reasoning faculty, Kant finds that it has three distinct operations, namely, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive reasoning. To these, he says, correspond the three "ideas", the idea of the soul as thinking subject (psychological idea), the idea of matter as the totality of phenomena (cosmological idea), and the idea of God as the supreme condition of all reality (theological idea). He first takes up the idea of the soul, and, examining the course of reasoning of the psychologist who teaches the substantiality, immateriality, and immortality of the human soul, he pronounces that line of philosophical thought to be fallacious, because it starts with the false supposition that we can have an intuitive knowledge of the soul as the substantial subject of conscious states. This, he claims, is an erroneous supposition, for, while we can and do know our conscious states, we cannot know the subject of them. Rational psychology, then, makes a wrong start; its way is full of contradictions; it does not conclusively establish the immortality of the soul. Next, Kant subjects the cosmological idea to a similar analysis. He finds that as soon as we begin to predicate anything concerning the ultimate nature of matter we fall into a whole series of contradictions, which he calls "antinomies". Thus, the propositions, "Matter has a beginning", "The world was created", are apparently no more true than their contradictories, "Matter is eternal", "The world is uncreated." To every thesis regarding the ultimate nature of the material universe an equally plausible antithesis may be opposed. The conclusion is that by pure reason alone we cannot attain a knowledge of the nature of the material universe. Finally, Kant takes up the theological idea, the idea of God, and criticizes the methods and arguments of rational theology. The speculative basis of our belief in the existence of God is unsound he says, because the proofs brought forward to support it are not conclusive. St. Anselm's ontological argument tries to establish an existential proposition without reference to experience; it confounds the order of things with the order of ideas. The cosmological argument carries the principle of causality beyond the world of sense-experience, where alone it is valid. And the physico-theological argument from design, while it may prove the existence of an intelligent designer, cannot establish the existence of a Supreme Being. Kant, of course, does not deny the existence of God, neither does he deny the immortality of the soul or the ultimate reality of matter. His aim is to show that the three ideas, or, in other words, speculative reasoning concerning the soul, the universe, and God, do not add to our knowledge. But, although the ideas do not extend our experience, they regulate it. The best way to think about our conscious states is to represent them as inhering in a substantial subject, about which, however, we can know nothing. The best way to think of the external world is to represent it as a multiplicity of appearances, the ground of which is an unknowable material something; and the best way to organize and systematize all our knowledge of reality is to represent everything as springing from one source, governed by one law, and tending towards one end, the law, the source, and the end being an unknown and (speculatively) unknowable God. It is very easy to see how this negative phase of Kant's philosophy affected the subsequent course of philosophic thought in Europe. The conclusions of the first "Critique" are the premises of contemporary Agnosticism. We can know nothing except the appearances of things; the senses reach only phenomena; judgment does not go any deeper than the senses, so far as the external world is concerned; science and philosophy fail utterly in the effort to reach a knowledge of substance (noumenon), or essence, and the attempts of metaphysics to teach us what the soul is, what matter is, what God is, have failed and are doomed to inevitable failure. These are the conclusions which Kant reaches in the "Critique of Pure Reason"; they are the assumptions of the Agnostic and of the Neo-Kantian opponent of Scholasticism.

"Critique of Practical Reason"

Kant, it has often been said, tore down in order to build up. What he took away in the first "Critique" he gave back in the second. In the "Critique of Pure Reason" he showed that the truths which have always been considered the most important in the whole range of human knowledge have no foundation in metaphysical, that is, purely speculative, reasoning. In the "Critique of Practical Reasoning" he aims at showing that these truths rest on a solid moral basis, and are thus placed above all speculative contention and the clamour of metaphysical dispute. He has overthrown the imposing edifice which Cartesian dogmatism had built on the foundation "I think"; he now sets about the task of rebuilding the temple of truth on the foundation "I ought." The moral law is supreme. In point of certainty, it is superior to any deliverance of the purely speculative consciousness; I am more certain that "I ought" than I am that "I am glad", "I am cold", etc. In point of insistence, it is superior to any consideration of interest, pleasure or happiness; I can forego what is for my interest, I can set other considerations above pleasure and happiness, but if my conscience tells me that "I ought" to do something, nothing can gainsay the voice of conscience, though, of course, I am free to obey or disobey. This, then, is the one unshakable foundation of all moral, spiritual, and higher intellectual truth. The first peculiarity of the moral law is that it is universal and necessary. When conscience declares that it is wrong to tell a lie, the voice is not merely intended for here and now, not for "just this once", but for all time and for all space; it is valid always and everywhere. This quality of universality and necessity shows at once that the moral law has no foundation in pleasure, happiness, the perfection of self, or a so-called moral sense. It is its own foundation. Its voice reaches conscience immediately, commands unconditionally, and need give no reason for its behests. It is not, so to speak, a constitutional monarch amenable to reason, judgment, or any other faculty. It exacts unconditional, and in a sense unreasoned obedience. Hence the "hollow voice" of the moral law is called by Kant "the categorical imperative". This celebrated phrase means merely that the moral law is a command (imperative), not a form of advice or invitation to act or not to act; and it is an unconditional (categorical) command, not a command in the hypothetical mood, such as "If you wish to be a clergyman you must study theology." One should not, however, overlook the peculiarly empty character of the categorical imperative. Only in its most universal "hollow" utterances does it possess those qualities which render it unique in human experience. But as soon as the contingent data, or contents of a specific moral precept, are presented to it, it imposes its universality and necessity on them and lifts them to its own level. The contents may have been good, but they could not have been absolutely good; for nothing is absolutely good except good will--the acceptance, that is, of the moral law.

We know the moral law not by inference, but by immediate intuition. This intuition is, as it were, the primum philosophicum. It takes the place of Descartes' primary intuition of his own thought. From it all the important truths of philosophy are deduced, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. The freedom of the will follows from the existence of the moral law, because the fact that "I ought" implies the fact that "I can." I know that I ought to do a certain thing, and from this I infer that I can. In the order of things, of course, freedom precedes obligation. In the order of knowledge, I infer freedom from the fact of obligation. Similarly, the immortality of the soul is implied in the moral law. The moral law demands complete fulfilment of itself in absolute human perfection. But the highest perfection that man can attain in this life is only partial or incomplete perfection, because, so long as the soul is united with the body, there is always in our nature a mixture of the corporeal with the spiritual; the striving towards holiness is accompanied by an inclination towards unholiness, and virtue implies a struggle. There must, therefore, be a life beyond the grave in which this "endless progress", as Kant calls it, will be continued. Finally, the moral law implies the existence of God. And that in two ways. The authoritative "voice" of the law implies a lawgiver. Moreover, the nature of the moral law implies that there be somewhere a good which is not only supreme, but complete, which embodies in its perfect holiness all the conditions which the moral law implies. This supreme good is God.

"Critique of the Faculty of Judgment"

Intermediate between the speculative reason, which is the faculty of knowledge, and practical reason, which is the faculty of voluntary action, is the faculty which Kant calls judgment, and which is the faculty of aesthetic appreciation. As the true is the object of knowledge, and as the good is the object of action, the beautiful and purposive is the object of judgment. By this peculiar use of the word judgment Kant places himself at once outside the ranks of the sensists, who refer all the constituents of beauty to sense-perceived qualities. He is an intellectualist in aesthetics, reducing the beautiful to elements of intellectuality. The beautiful, he teaches, is that which universally and necessarily gives disinterested pleasure, without the concept of definite design. It differs, consequently, from the agreeable and the useful. However, Kant is careful to remark that the enjoyment of the beautiful is not purely intellectual, as is the satisfaction which we experience in contemplating the perfect. The perfect appeals to the intellect alone, while the beautiful appeals also to the emotions and to the aesthetic faculty. Closely allied to the beautiful is the purposive. The same faculty, judgment, which enables us to perceive and enjoy the aesthetic aspect of nature and of art, enables us also to perceive that in the manifold variety of our experience there is evidence of purpose or design. Kant introduced in his "Critique" of the teleological judgment an important distinction between external and internal adaptation. External adaptation, he taught, exists between the organism and its environment, as, for instance, between the plant and the soil in which it grows. Internal adaptation exists among the structural parts of the organism, or between the organism and its function. The former, he believed, could be explained by merely mechanical causes, but the latter necessitates the introduction of the concept of final cause. Organisms act as though they were produced by a cause which had a purpose in view. We cannot clearly demonstrate that purpose. The teleological concept is, therefore, like the "ideas" (the soul, the world, God) not constitutive of our experience but regulative of it. The highest use of the aesthetic faculty is the realization of the beautiful and the purposive as symbols of moral good. What speculative reason fails to find in nature, namely, a beautiful, purposive order, is suggested by the aesthetic judgment and fully attained by religion, which rests on the practical reason.

Kant, as is well known, reduces religion to a system of conduct. He defines religion as "the acknowledgement that our duties are God's commandments". He describes the essence of religion as consisting in morality. Christianity is a religion and is true only in so far as it conforms to this definition. The ideal Church should be an "ethical republic"; it should discard all dogmatic definitions, accept "rational faith" as its guide in all intellectual matters, and establish the kingdom of God on earth by bringing about the reign of duty. Even the Christian law of charity must take second place to the supreme exigencies of duty. In fact, it has been remarked that Kant's idea of religion, in so far as it is at all Scriptural, is inspired more by the Old than by the New Testament. He maintains that those dogmas which Christianity holds sacred, such as the mystery of the Trinity, should be given an ethical interpretation, should, so to speak, be regarded as symbols of moral concepts and values. Thus "historical faith", he says, is the "vehicle of rational faith". For the person and character of Christ he professes the greatest admiration. Christ, he declares, was the exemplification of the highest moral perfection.

EVALUATION OF KANT

Critics and historians are not all agreed as to Kant's rank among philosophers. Some rate his contributions to philosophy so highly that they consider his doctrines to be the culmination of all that went before him. Others, on the contrary, consider that he made a false start when he assumed in his criticism of speculative reason that whatever is universal and necessary in our knowledge must come from the mind itself, and not from the world of reality outside us. These opponents of Kant consider, moreover, that while he possessed the synthetic talent which enabled him to build up a system of thought, he was lacking in the analytic quality by which the philosopher is able to observe what actually takes place in the mind. And in a thinker who reduced all philosophy to an examination of knowledge the lack of the ability to observe what actually takes place in the mind is a serious defect. But, whatever may be our estimate of Kant as a philosopher, we should not undervalue his importance. Within the limits of the philosophical sciences themselves, his thought was the starting-point for Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer; and, so far as contemporary philosophic thought in Germany is concerned, whatever of it is not Kantian takes for its distinguishing characteristic its opposition to some point of Kantian doctrine. In England the Agnostic School from Hamilton to Spencer drew its inspiration from the negative teaching of the "Critique of Pure Reason". In France the Positivism of Comte and the neo-Criticism of Renouvier had a similar origin. Kant's influence reached out beyond philosophy into various other departments of thought. In the history of the natural sciences his name is associated with that of Laplace, in the theory which accounts for the origin of the universe by a natural evolution from primitive cosmic nebula. In theology his non-dogmatic notion of religion influenced Ritschl, and his method of transforming dogmatic truth into moral inspiration finds an echo, to say the least, in the exegetical experiments of Renan and his followers.

Some philosophers and theologians have held that the objective data on which the Catholic religion is based are incapable of proof from speculative reason, but are demonstrable from practical reason, will, sentiment, or vital action. That this position is, however, dangerous, is proved by recent events. The Immanentist movement, the Vitalism of Blondel, the anti-Scholasticism of the "Annales de philosophie chretienne", and other recent tendencies towards a non-intellectual apologetic of the Faith, have their roots in Kantism, and the condemnation they have received from ecclesiastical authority shows plainly that they have no clear title to be considered a substitute for the intellectualistic apologetic which has for its ground the realism of the Scholastics.

Immanuel Kant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 - February 12, 1804) was a German philosopher, generally regarded as the last major philosopher of the early modern period and, on anyone's account, one of history's most influential thinkers.

Kant is most famous for his view—called transcendental idealism—that we bring innate forms and concepts to the raw experience of the world, which otherwise would be completely unknowable. Kant's philosophy of nature and human nature is one of the most important historical sources of the modern conceptual relativism that dominated the intellectual life of the 20th century—though it is likely that Kant would reject relativism in most of its more radical modern forms. Kant is also well-known and very influential for his moral philosophy. Kant also proposed the first modern theory of solar system formation, known as the Kant-Laplace hypothesis .

Life

Kant spent most of his life in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). He spent much of his youth as a solid but not spectacular student, living more off playing pool than his writings. He was of the rather curious conviction that a person did not have a firm direction in life until their thirty-ninth year; when his came and passed and he was just a minor metaphysician in a Prussian University a brief mid-life crisis ensued; perhaps it can be credited with some of his later direction.

Kant was a respected and competent university professor for most of his life, although nothing he did until his late fifties would have gained him much if any historical repute. He lived a very regulated life: the walk he took at three-thirty every afternoon was so punctual that local housewives would set their clocks by him. He never left Prussia, and rarely stepped outside his own home town. Despite the reputation he has earned though, he was considered a very sociable person: he would regularly have guests over for dinner, insisting that sociable company was good for his constitution.

Around 1770, when he was forty-six, Kant read the work of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume's was fiercely empirical, and scorned all metaphysics (as well as systematically debunking great quantities of it). His most famous thesis is that nothing in our experience can justify our assuming that there are "causal powers" inhering in things—that, for example, when one billiard ball strikes another the second one in any sense "must" move. Of course, things always have happened this way, and we tend through "custom and habit" to assume they will; but we have no rational grounds for doing so. Kant was profoundly bothered. He simultaneously found Hume's argument irrefutable and his conclusions unacceptable. For ten years he published nothing, and then in 1781 released the massive "Critique of Pure Reason," arguably the most significant single book in modern philosophy. In this he developed his notion of a transcendental argument to show that, in short, although we cannot know necessary truths about the world "as it is in itself," we are nonetheless constrained to perceiving and thinking about the world in certain ways: we can know with certainty a great number of things about "the world as it appears to us": for example, that every event will be causally connected with others, that appearances in space and time will obey the laws of geometry and arithmetic, and so forth.

Over the next twenty-odd years until his death in 1804 Kant's output was unceasing. His edifice of Critical Philosophy was completed with the Critique of Practical Reason, which dealt with morality (action) in the same way that the first Critique dealt with knowledge; and the Critique of Judgment, which dealt with the various uses of our mental powers that neither confer factual knowledge nor determine us to action: aesthetic judgment (of the beautiful and sublime) and teleological judgment (construing things as having "purposes"). As Kant understood them, aesthetic and teleological judgment connected our moral and empirical judgments to one another, unifying his system.

Two shorter works, the "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics" and the "Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals" treated the same matter as the first and second critiques respectively, in a more cursory form—assuming the answer and working backward, so to speak. They serve as excellent introductions to the critical system. The epistemological material of the first Critique was put into application in the "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science"; the ethical dictums of the second were put into practice in "Metaphysics of Morals."

Aside from this Kant wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, politics, and the application of philosophy to life. When he died he was working on a projected "fourth critique," having come to the conviction that his system was incomplete; this incomplete manuscript has been published as "Opus Postumum". Kant died in 1804.

Kant's philosophy in general

Though he adopted the idea of a critical philosophy, the primary purpose of which was to "critique" or come to grips with the limitations of our mental capacities, Kant was one of the greatest of system builders, pursuing the idea of the critique through studies of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.

One famous citation, "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me", sums up his efforts: he wanted to explain in one systematic theory, those two areas or realms. Isaac Newton had developed a theory of physics that Kant wanted to build his philosophy upon. This theory involved the assumption of natural forces that humans cannot sense, but are used to explain movement of physical bodies.

His interest in science also led him to propose in 1755 that the solar system was created out of a gas cloud in which objects condensed due to gravity. This hypothesis is widely regarded as the first modern theory of solar system formation and is the ancestor to current theories of stellar formation.

Kant's metaphysics and epistemology

Kant's most widely read and most influential book is Critique of Pure Reason [1] (1781), which proceeds from a remarkably simple thought experiment. He said, try to imagine something that exists in no time and has no extent in space. The human mind cannot produce such an idea—time and space are fundamental forms of perception that exist as innate structures of the mind. Nothing can be perceived except through these forms, and the limits of physics are the limits of the fundamental structure of the mind. On Kant's view, therefore, there are something like innate ideas—a priori knowledge of some things (space and time)—since the mind must possess these categories in order to be able to understand the buzzing mass of raw, uninterpreted sensory experience which presents itself to our consciousness. Secondly, it removes the actual world (which Kant called the noumenal world, or noumena) from the arena of human perception—since everything we perceive is filtered through the forms of space and time we can never really "know" the real world.

Kant had wanted to discuss metaphysical systems but discovered "the scandal of philosophy"—you cannot decide what the proper terms for a metaphysical system are until you have defined the field, and you cannot define the field until you have defined the limit of the field of physics first. 'Physics' in this sense means, roughly, the discussion of the perceptible world.

Kant's moral philosophy

Kant develops his moral philosophy in three works: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals [2] (1785), Critique of Practical Reason [3] (1788) and Metaphysics of Morals [4] (1798).

Under this heading Kant is probably best known for his theory about a single, general moral obligation that explains all other moral obligations we have: the Categorical Imperative.

A categorical imperative, generally speaking, is an unconditional obligation, or an obligation that we have regardless of our will or desires (contrast with hypothetical imperative).

Our moral duties can be derived from the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative can be formulated in three ways, which he believed to be roughly equivalent (although many commentators do not):

The first formulation (the Formula of Universal Law) says: "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law."

The second formulation (the Formula of Humanity) says: "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."

The third formulation (the Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the previous two. It says that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as legislating universal laws through our maxims. We may think of ourselves as such autonomous legislators only insofar as we follow our own laws.

Example of the first formulation: If I breathe air, and I can will it so that everyone breathes air, we can see that breathing air is a moral obligation.

Example of the second formulation: If I steal a book from you, I am treating you as a means (to get a book) only. If I ask to have your book, I am respecting your humanity (or ability of rational thought).

The theory that we have universal duties, which hold despite one's subjective (and thus, merely hypothetical) imperatives that seek to fulfill one's own inclinations or happiness instead of these duties, is known as deontological ethics.. Kant is often cited as the most important source of this strand of ethical theory (in particular, of the theory of conduct, also known as the theory of obligation).

Routledge Account of Kant

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant was the paradigmatic philosopher of the European Enlightenment. He eradicated the last traces of the medieval worldview from modern philosophy, joined the key ideas of earlier rationalism and empiricism into a powerful model of the subjective origins of the fundamental principles of both science and morality, and laid the ground for much in the philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Above all, Kant was the philosopher of human autonomy, the view that by the use of our own reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and live up to the basic principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance, above all without divine support or intervention.

Kant laid the foundations of his theory of knowledge in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781). He described the fundamental principle of morality in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in the conclusion of which he famously wrote:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence.

(5: 161–2; see List of works for method of citation)

Kant tried to show that both the laws of nature and the laws of morality are grounded in human reason itself. By these two forms of law, however, he is often thought to have defined two incommensurable realms, nature and freedom, the realm of what is and that of what ought to be, the former of which must be limited to leave adequate room for the latter. Kant certainly did devote much space and effort to distinguishing between nature and freedom. But as he also says, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), it is equally important ‘to throw a bridge from one territory to the other’. Ultimately, Kant held that both the laws of nature and the laws of free human conduct must be compatible because they are both products of human thought imposed by us on the data of our experience by the exercise of our own powers. This was clearly stated in his last book, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798):

Philosophy is not some sort of science of representations, concepts, and ideas, or a science of all sciences, or anything else of this sort; rather, it is a science of the human being, of its representing, thinking, and acting – it should present the human being in all of its components, as it is and ought to be, that is, in accordance with its natural determinations as well as its relationship of morality and freedom. Ancient philosophy adopted an entirely inappropriate standpoint towards the human being in the world, for it made it into a machine in it, which as such had to be entirely dependent on the world or on external things and circumstances; it thus made the human being into an all but merely passive part of the world. Now the critique of reason has appeared and determined the human being to a thoroughly active place in the world. The human being itself is the original creator of all its representations and concepts and ought to be the sole author of all its actions.

(7: 69–70)

Thus, Kant derived the fundamental principles of human thought and action from human sensibility, understanding, and reason, all as sources of our autonomy; he balanced the contributions of these principles against the ineliminable inputs of external sensation and internal inclination beyond our own control; and he strove both to demarcate these principles from each other and yet to integrate them into a single system with human autonomy as both its foundation and its ultimate value and goal. These were the tasks of Kant’s three great critiques. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the essential forms of space, time and conceptual thought arise in the nature of human sensibility and understanding and ground the indispensable principles of human experience. He then argued that reason, in the narrow sense manifest in logical inference, plays a key role in systematizing human experience, but that it is a mistake to think that reason offers metaphysical insight into the existence and nature of the human soul, an independent world, and God. In the Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork, however, he argued that reason as the source of the ideal of systematicity is the source of the fundamental law of morality and our consciousness of our own freedom, which is the source of all value, and that we can postulate the truth of the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, our own immortality and the existence of God, as practical presuppositions of our moral conduct but not as theoretical truths of metaphysics. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argued that the unanimity of taste and the systematic organization of both individual organisms and nature as a whole could be postulated, again not as metaphysical dogmas but rather as regulative ideals of our aesthetic and scientific pursuits; he then went on to argue that it is through these ideals that we can tie together the realms of nature and freedom, because aesthetic experience offers us a palpable image of our moral freedom, and a scientific conception of the world as a system of interrelated beings makes sense only as an image of the world as the sphere of our own moral efforts. In many of his last writings, from Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) to his final manuscripts, the Opus postumum , Kant refined and radicalized his view that our religious conceptions can be understood only as analogies for the nature of human reason itself.

The Enlightenment began by attempting to bring even God before the bench of human reason – at the turn of the eighteenth century, both Shaftesbury in Great Britain and Wolff in Germany rejected voluntarism, the theory that God makes eternal truths and moral laws by fiat, and argued instead that we ourselves must know what is right and wrong before we could even recognize supposedly divine commands as divine. Kant completed their argument, concluding that the human being ‘creates the elements of knowledge of the world himself, a priori, from which he, as, at the same time, an inhabitant of the world, constructs a world-vision in the idea’ ( Opus postumum , 21: 31).

Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 consolidated many of the gains he had made during the 1760s and introduced a fundamentally new theory about the metaphysics and epistemology of space and time which was to remain a constant in his subsequent thought, but also left open crucial questions about the source of our most fundamental concepts. Although Kant hoped to proceed quickly to his projects in the philosophy of science and in moral and political theory, it was to take him all of the next decade to answer these preliminary questions.

Taking up where Directions in Space left off, Kant begins the dissertation with the distinction between intuitions (singular and immediate representations of objects) and concepts (general and abstract representations of them) as distinct but equally important elements in the ‘two-fold genesis of the concept [of a world] out of the nature of the mind’. The intellect (Kant does not yet divide this into understanding and reason) provides abstract concepts, under which instances are subordinated; the ‘sensitive faculty of cognition’ provides ‘distinct intuition[s]’ which represent concepts ‘in the concrete’ and within which different parts may be coordinated (2: 387). Kant goes on to claim that ‘whatever in cognition is sensitive is dependent upon the special character of the subject’, that is, the knower, so that sensation, through intuitions, represents things ‘as they appear’ (phenomena), while the intellect, through concepts, represents things ‘as they are’ (noumena) (2: 392). Kant then presents the ‘principles of the form of the sensible world’: time and space are the forms of the intuition of all objects (time is the form for all representation of objects, inner or outer, while space is the form for the representation of all outer objects) which do not arise from but are presupposed by all particular perceptions; they are singular rather than general, that is, particular times or spaces are parts of a single whole rather than instances of a general kind; and they must each be ‘the subjective condition which is necessary, in virtue of the nature of the human mind, for the co-ordinating of all things in accordance with a fixed law’, or a ‘pure intuition’ rather than ‘something objective and real’ (2: 398–400, 402–4). Only thus can we explain our knowledge of both these general claims about space and time as well as particular claims about their structure, such as the theorems of geometry (2: 404 ). In other words, we can explain the certainty of knowledge about space and time only by supposing that it is knowledge of the structure of our own minds, and thus of how objects appear to us, rather than knowledge about how things are in themselves. This necessarily subjective origin and significance of certainty, which Kant was later to name ‘transcendental idealism’, is the foundation for the active role of the human mind in knowledge of the world.

Kant has little to say about the source of intellectual concepts, but continues to believe that they give us knowledge of how things are independently of the structure of our own minds. His main claim, still Leibnizian, is that in order to conceive of things as genuinely distinct substances, yet as collectively interacting in a single world, we must conceive of them as contingent beings all depending upon a single necessary being (2: 407–8). Kant then argues that metaphysical error arises when the principles of sensitive and intellectual cognition are confused, but more particularly when ‘the principles which are native to sensitive cognition transgress their limits, and affect what belongs to the intellect’ (2: 411 ) – the opposite of what he will argue later when he claims that metaphysical illusion arises from thinking that human reason can reach beyond the limits of the senses (see §8). Finally, Kant introduces as mere ’principles of convenience’ the principles of universal causation and of the conservation of substance as well as a more general ‘canon’ of rationality, that ‘principles are not to be multiplied beyond what is absolutely necessary’ ( 30, 2: 418 ). A better account of these principles will occupy much of Kant’s later work (see §7).

Early readers of Kant’s dissertation objected to the merely subjective significance of space and especially time, but Kant was never to surrender this theory. What came to bother him instead was his inadequate treatment of metaphysical concepts such as ‘possibility, existence, necessity, substance, cause, etc.’ (2: 395). In a famous letter of 21 February 1772 to Marcus Herz (10: 129–35 ), Kant claimed that the ‘whole secret’ of metaphysics is to explain how intellectual concepts which neither literally produce their objects (as God’s concepts might) nor are merely produced by them (as empirical concepts are) nevertheless necessarily apply to them. But Kant did not yet know how to answer this question.

His first progress on this issue is found in fragments from 1774–5 (Reflections 4674–84, 17: 643–73). Two key ideas are found here. First, Kant finally formulates the problem of metaphysics as that of ‘synthetic’ rather than ‘analytic’ propositions: how can we know the truth of propositions in which the predicates clearly go beyond anything contained in their subject-concepts but yet enjoy the same universality and necessity as propositions which are mere tautologies, whose predicates are contained in their subject concepts (17: 643–4, 653–5)? Second, Kant here first states that the answer to this question lies in recognizing that certain fundamental concepts, not just the intuitions of space and time, are ‘conditions of the concrete representation [of objects] in the subject’ (17: 644) or of the unity of ‘experience in general’ (17: 658 ). Kant’s idea is that in order to ground any determinate ordering of either subjective or objective states in temporal succession, we must use the concepts of substance, causation, and interaction, and that these must therefore be categories which originate in the understanding just as the pure forms of space and time originate in the sensibility.

The project of the Critique of Pure Reason

In spite of this progress in 1775, six more years passed before the Critique of Pure Reason finally appeared in 1781. In an umistakeable reference to Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (see Locke, J.), Kant began the work with the promise to submit reason to a critique in order to obtain a ‘decision about the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general and the determination of its sources, its scope and its boundaries’ (A xii). The ‘chief question’ would be ‘what and how much can understanding and reason know apart from all experience?’ (A xvii ). Answering this question would require discovering the fundamental principles that human understanding contributes to human experience and exposing the metaphysical illusions that arise when human reason tries to extend those principles beyond the limits of human experience.

But Kant’s project was even more ambitious than that, as he was to make clear in the revised edition of the Critique six years later. There, in addition to more explicitly describing his strategy for explaining the certainty of the first principles of human knowledge as one of supposing that ‘objects must conform to our knowledge’ rather than vice versa (B xvi), Kant described his whole project in broader terms: ‘I therefore had to offset knowledge in order to make room for belief’ (B xxx). Kant did not mean to return to the sceptical fideism of earlier thinkers such as Pierre Bayle , who simply substituted religious belief for theoretical ignorance. Instead, Kant argues first that the human mind supplies necessary principles of sensibility and understanding, or perception and conception; next, that if human reason tries to extend the fundamental concepts and principles of thought beyond the limits of perception for purposes of theoretical knowledge, it yields only illusion; but finally that there is another use of reason, a practical use in which it constructs universal laws and ideals of human conduct and postulates the fulfilment of the conditions necessary to make such conduct rational, including the freedom of the will, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. This use of reason does not challenge the limits of theoretical reason but is legitimate and necessary in its own right.

In the Introduction, Kant defines his first task as that of explaining the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. This notion is grounded in two distinctions. First, there is a logical distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions: in analytic propositions, the predicate-concept is implicitly or explicitly contained in the subject-concept (for example, ‘A bachelor is unmarried’ or ‘An unmarried male is male’), so the proposition conveys no new information and is true by identity alone; in synthetic propositions, the content of the predicate is clearly not contained in the subject-concept (for example, ‘Bachelors are unhappy’) (A 6–7/B 10–11), so the proposition conveys new information and cannot be true by identity alone. Second, there is an epistemological distinction between propositions which are a posteriori, or can be known to be true only on the basis of antecedent experience and observation, and those which are a priori, or known to be true independently of experience, or at least any particular experience (A 1–2/B 1–3). Kant maintains that anything which is known to be universally and necessarily true must be known a priori, because, following Hume, he assumes that experience only tells us how what has actually been observed is, not how everything must be (A 1–2/B 3–4 ). Combining these two distinctions yields four possible kinds of judgments. Two of these obviously obtain: analytic a priori judgments, in which we know a proposition to be true by analysis of its subject-concept and without observation; and synthetic a posteriori judgments, in which we know factual statements going beyond subject-concepts to be true through observation. Equally clearly, a third possibility is excluded: there are no analytic a posteriori judgments, for we need not go to experience to discover what we can know from analysis alone. What is controversial is whether there are synthetic a priori judgments, propositions that are universally and necessarily true, and thus must go beyond experience, but which cannot be reached by the mere analysis of concepts. Both rationalists and empiricists had denied such a possibility, but for Kant only it could ground an informative science of metaphysics at all.

Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori judgment raises various problems. Critics have long complained that Kant provides no unequivocal criterion for deciding when a predicate is contained in a subject, and twentieth-century philosophers such as W. Quine argued that there are no analytic truths because not even definitions can be held entirely immune from revision in the face of empirical facts. Lewis White Beck showed, however, that this did not affect Kant’s project, for Kant himself, in a polemic with the Wolffian Johann August Eberhard , argued that analysis always presupposes synthesis, and that the adoption of any definition itself has to be justified, either by construction or observation; so even conceding that all judgments are ultimately synthetic, Kant’s question remains whether any of these are synthetic a priori.

Another issue is just what synthetic a priori judgments Kant intended to justify. In the ’Prolegomena’ and the ’Introduction’ to the second edition of the Critique, Kant suggests that it is obvious that synthetic a priori judgments exist in what he calls ’pure mathematics’ and ’pure physics’, and that his project is to show that what explains these also explains other such propositions, in metaphysics. Elsewhere, however, Kant suggests that metaphysics must show that there are any synthetic a priori judgments, even in mathematics and physics. While much of the content of the Critique suggests that Kant’s considered view must be the latter, he is far from clear about this.

Space, time and transcendental idealism

The first part of the Critique, the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, has two objectives: to show that we have synthetic a priori knowledge of the spatial and temporal forms of outer and inner experience, grounded in our own pure intuitions of space and time; and to argue that transcendental idealism, the theory that spatiality and temporality are only forms in which objects appear to us and not properties of objects as they are in themselves, is the necessary condition for this a priori knowledge of space and time (see Space; Time ).

Much of the section refines arguments from the inaugural dissertation of 1770. First, in what the second edition labels the ‘Metaphysical Exposition’, Kant argues that space and time are both pure forms of intuition and pure intuitions. They are pure forms of intuition because they must precede and structure all experience of individual outer objects and inner states; Kant tries to prove this by arguing that our conceptions of space and time cannot be derived from experience of objects, because any such experience presupposes the individuation of objects in space and/or time, and that although we can represent space or time as devoid of objects, we cannot represent any objects without representing space and/or time ( A 23–4/B 38–9; A 30–1/B 46). They are pure intuitions because they represent single individuals rather than classes of things; Kant tries to prove this by arguing that particular spaces and times are always represented by introducing boundaries into a single, unlimited space or time, rather than the latter being composed out of the former as parts, and that space and time do not have an indefinite number of instances, like general concepts, but an infinite number of parts (A 24/B 39–40; A 31–2/B 47–8 ).

Next, in the ‘Transcendental Exposition’, Kant argues that we must have an a priori intuition of space because ‘geometry is a science which determines the properties of space synthetically and yet a priori’ (B 40). That is, the propositions of geometry describe objects in space, go beyond the mere concepts of any of the objects involved – thus geometric theorems cannot be proved without actually constructing the figures – and yet are known a priori. (Kant offers an analogous but less plausible argument about time, where the propositions he adduces seem analytic (B 48 ).) Both our a priori knowledge about space and time in general and our synthetic a priori knowledge of geometrical propositions in particular can be explained only by supposing that space and time are of subjective origin, and thus knowable independently of the experience of particular objects.

Finally, Kant holds that these results prove transcendental idealism, or that space and time represent properties of things as they appear to us but not properties or relations of things as they are in themselves, let alone real entities like Newtonian absolute space; thus his position of 1768 is now revised to mean that space is epistemologically but not ontologically absolute (A 26/B 42; A 32–3/B 49–50; A 39– 40/B 56–7 ). Kant’s argument is that ‘determinations’ which belong to things independently of us ‘cannot be intuited prior to the things to which they belong’, and so could not be intuited a priori, while space and time and their properties are intuited a priori. Since they therefore cannot be properties of things in themselves, there is no alternative but that space and time are merely the forms in which objects appear to us.

Much in Kant’s theory has been questioned by later philosophy of mathematics. Kant’s claim that geometrical theorems are synthetic because they can only be proven by construction has been rendered doubtful by more complete axiomatizations of mathematics than Kant knew, and his claim that such propositions describe objects in physical space yet are known a priori has been questioned on the basis of the distinction between purely formal systems and their physical realization.

Philosophical debate, however, has centred on Kant’s inference of transcendental idealism from his philosophy of mathematics. One issue is the very meaning of Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves. Gerold Prauss and Henry Allison have ascribed to Kant a distinction between two kinds of concepts of objects, one including reference to the necessary conditions for the perception of those objects and the other merely leaving them out, with no ontological consequences. Another view holds that Kant denies that things in themselves, and not merely their concepts, are spatial and temporal, and that spatial and temporal properties are, literally, properties only of our own representations of things. Kant makes statements that can support each of these interpretations; but proponents of the second view, including the present author, have argued that it is entailed by both Kant’s argument for and his use of his distinction, the latter especially in his theory of free will (see §8).

The debate about Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism, already begun in the nineteenth century, concerns whether Kant has omitted a ‘neglected alternative’ in assuming that space and time must be either properties of things as they are in themselves or of representations, but not both, namely that we might have a priori knowledge of space and time because we have an a priori subjective representation of them while they are also objective properties of things. Some argue that there is no neglected alternative, because although the concepts of appearances and things in themselves are necessarily different, Kant postulates only one set of objects. This author has argued that the ‘neglected alternative’ is a genuine possibility that Kant intends to exclude by arguing from his premise that propositions about space and time are necessarily true: if those propositions were true both of our own representations and of their ontologically distinct objects, they might be necessarily true of the former but only contingently true of the latter, and thus not necessarily true throughout their domain (A 47–8/B 65–6 ). In this case, however, Kant’s transcendental idealism depends upon a dubious claim about necessary truth.

Pure concepts of the understanding

The ‘Transcendental Analytic’ of the Critique breaks new ground, arguing that the most fundamental categories of thought as well as the forms of perception are themselves human products which are necessary conditions of the possibility of experience. Like the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, its first section, the ‘Analytic of Concepts’, is also divided into a ‘metaphysical’ and a ‘transcendental deduction’ (B 159 ).

In the metaphysical deduction Kant intends to provide a principle to identify the most fundamental concepts of thought, the categories of the understanding, and then to show that our knowledge of any object always involves these categories. The key to his argument is the claim that knowledge is always expressed in a judgment (A 68–9/B 93–4); he then argues that there are certain characteristic forms or ‘logical functions’ of judgment, and that in order for our judgments to be about objects, these logical functions of judgments must also provide the basic concepts for conceiving of objects. Thus Kant first produces a table of the logical functions of judgment, based on the premise that every judgment has a quantity, quality, relation and modality, and then produces a table of categories, under the same four headings, showing how objects of such judgments must be conceived. Thus, judgments may be universal, particular, or singular, and then their objects must be unities, pluralities, or totalities; judgments may be affirmative, negative, or infinite, and objects manifest either reality, negation, or limitation; judgments may relate a predicate to a subject (categorical judgment), or else relate one predicate-subject judgment to another as antecedent and consequent (hypothetical judgment) or as alternatives (disjunctive judgment), and objects may correspondingly manifest the relations of inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, or community or reciprocity; finally, judgments may be problematic, assertoric, or apodeictic, thus their objects either possible or impossible, existent or non-existent, or necessary or contingent (A 70/B 95; A 80/B 106 ).

Kant’s scheme is intuitively plausible, and he makes use of it throughout his works. But philosophers as diverse as Hegel and Quine have questioned its coherence and necessity. What is troubling for Kant’s own project, however, is that he does not show why we must use all the logical functions of judgment, hence why we must use all the categories. In particular, he does not show why we must make not only categorical but also hypothetical and disjunctive judgments. Without such a premise, Kant’s arguments for causation, against Hume, and for interaction, against Leibniz, are not advanced.

Kant’s aim and his strategy in the transcendental deduction remain debatable, despite his complete revision of this section in the second edition of the Critique. Some view the transcendental deduction as a ‘regressive argument’ aimed at empiricism, meant to show only that if we make judgments about objects then we must use a priori concepts. But if Kant already established this in the metaphysical deduction, the transcendental deduction becomes redundant. It seems more natural to see the latter as intended to fix the scope of our use of the categories by showing that we can have no experience which is immune from conceptualization under them, thus that the categories enjoy universal objective validity. Because these categories originate in the logical structure of our own thought, Kant holds, we must conceive of ourselves as the autonomous lawgivers for all of nature (A 127–8, B 164 ).

There are many differences between the two versions of the transcendental deduction, but both employ the fundamental idea that we cannot have some form of self-consciousness, or ‘transcendental apperception’, without also having consciousness of objects, which in turn requires the application of the categories; then, since Kant holds that we can have no experience at all without being able to be conscious that we have it, he can argue that we can have no experience to which we cannot apply the categories. The success of this strategy is unclear. The first-edition deduction begins with a debatable analysis of the necessary conditions for knowledge of an object, which slides from the conditional necessity that we must use rules if we are to have knowledge of objects to an absolute necessity that we must have knowledge of objects, and then introduces transcendental apperception as the ‘transcendental ground’ of the latter necessity ( A 106). In the second edition, Kant begins directly with the claim that self-consciousness of our experience is always possible, which has not met with much resistance, but then makes the inference to the necessity of knowledge of objects conceived of through the categories by equating transcendental apperception with a notion of ‘objective apperception’ that is equivalent to judgment about objects (B 139–40 ). This makes the connection between self- consciousness and the categorial judgment of objects true by definition, and undermines Kant’s claim to provide a synthetic rather than analytic proof of the objective validity of the categories.

In spite of these problems, the idea that self-consciousness depends upon knowledge of objects and thus on the use of the categories to conceive of objects has remained attractive; and some of the most interesting recent work on Kant has been reconstructions of the transcendental deduction, such as those by Peter Strawson, Jonathan Bennett and Dieter Henrich. Others have concluded that Kant only establishes a convincing connection between self-consciousness and categorial thought of objects once he shows that making judgments about objects, using the categories, is a necessary condition for making judgments about the temporal order of our experience. This is Kant’s project in the next section of the Critique .

The principles of judgment and the foundations of science

Kant proceeds from the categories to the foundations of natural science in several steps. First, he argues that the categories, which thus far have merely logical content, must be made ‘homogeneous’ with experience, or be recast in forms we can actually experience. Since time, as the form of both outer and inner sense, is the most general feature of our sensible experience, Kant argues that the categories must be made homogeneous with experience by being associated with certain determinate temporal relations or ‘schemata’ (A 138–9/B 177–8 ). For example, the pure category of ground and consequence, thus far understood only abstractly as the relation of the states of objects that makes them fit to be objects of hypothetical (‘if–then’) judgments, is associated with the schema of rule-governed temporal succession, something closer to what we can actually experience. Focused as he is on the universality of time, Kant seems to de-emphasize spatiality unduly in the ‘Schematism’: for example, it would seem more natural to say that the schema of causality is the rule-governed temporal succession of states of objects within an appropriate degree of spatial contiguity.

Next, in the ‘System of all Principles of Pure Understanding’, Kant argues for the necessity of certain fundamental principles of all natural laws. Following the division of the categories, this chapter is divided into four parts. In the first, the ‘Axioms of Intuition’, Kant argues that ‘All intuitions are extensive magnitudes’ (B 202), and thus that all objects of experience are subject to the mathematics of discrete quantities. In the second, the ‘Anticipations of Perception’, Kant proves that ‘In all appearances, the real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, that is, a degree’ (B 207), and is thus subject to the mathematics of continuous quantities; here he argues that because our sensations manifest varying degrees of intensity we must also conceive of the objects they represent as manifesting a reality that varies in degree. The first of these two ‘mathematical’ principles (A 162/B 201 ) does not add to results already established in the Transcendental Aesthetic, however, and the second depends upon an empirical assumption.

In the next section, the ‘Analogies of Experience’, dealing with the first of two kinds of ‘dynamical’ principles, Kant offers some of the most compelling and important arguments in the Critique. In the First Analogy, Kant argues that we can determine that there has been a change in the objects of our perception, not merely a change in our perceptions themselves, only by conceiving of what we perceive as successive states of enduring substances (see Substance). Because we can never perceive the origination or cessation of substances themselves, but only changes in their states, Kant argues, the sum-total of substances in nature is permanent (B 224). In the Second Analogy, Kant argues for a further condition for making judgments about change in objects: because even when we undergo a sequence of perceptions, there is nothing in their immediate sensory content to tell us that there is an objective change, let alone what particular sequence of change there is, we can only distinguish a ‘subjective sequence of apprehension from the objective sequence of appearances’ (A 193/B 238) by judging that a particular sequence of objective states of affairs, a fortiori the sequence of our perceptions of those states, has been determined in accordance with a rule that states of the second type can only follow states of the first type – precisely what we mean by a causal law. Finally, the Third Analogy argues that because we always perceive states of objects successively, we cannot immediately perceive states of two or more objects to be simultaneous, and can therefore only judge that two such states simultaneously exist in different regions of space if they are governed by laws of interaction dictating that neither state can exist without the other (A 213/B 260 ).

Kant’s arguments have been assailed on the basis of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But since they are epistemological arguments that our ability to make temporal judgments about the succession or simultaneity of states of affairs depends upon our judgments about substance, causation and interaction, it is not clear that they are open to objection from this quarter. If relativity tells us that the succession or simultaneity of states of affairs may depend upon the choice of inertial frame, then Kant’s theory is not refuted, but just predicts that in that case our own judgments about temporal sequence must also vary. If quantum mechanics tells us that causal laws are merely probabilistic, then Kant’s theory is again not refuted but just predicts that in that case our temporal judgments cannot be entirely determinate.

In the last section of the ‘Principles’, Kant assigns empirical criteria to the modal concepts of possibility, actuality and necessity. The main interest of this section lies in the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ which Kant inserted into it in the second edition. Here Kant argues that temporal judgments about one’s own states require reference to objects which endure in a way that mental representations themselves do not, and therefore that consciousness of oneself also implies consciousness of objects external to oneself (B 275–6; also B xxxix–xli). There has been controversy not only about the precise steps of the proof, but also about whether it is supposed to prove that we have knowledge of the existence of things ontologically distinct from our own representations, which seems to undercut Kant’s transcendental idealism. However, the argument of 1787 was actually just the first of many drafts Kant wrote (Reflections 6311–16, 18: 606–23 ), and these suggest that he did mean to prove that we know of the existence of objects ontologically distinct from ourselves and our states, although we cannot attribute to them as they are in themselves the very spatiality by means of which we represent this ontological distinctness.

Finally, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published between the two editions of the Critique (1786), Kant carried his a priori investigation of the laws of nature one step further by introducing not only the empirical notion of change itself but also the further empirical concept of matter as the movable in space (4: 480). With this one empirical addition, he claims, he can deduce the laws of phoronomy, the vectorial composition of motions in space; of dynamics, the attractive and repulsive forces by which space is actually filled; of mechanics, the communication of moving forces; and of phenomenology, which in Kant’s sense – derived from J.H. Lambert, and very different from its later senses in Hegel or Husserl – means the laws for distinguishing apparent from real motions. This work is not an essay in empirical physics but rather an exploration of the conceptual framework into which the empirical results of physics must be fitted.

Lambert (1728-1777)

born August 26, 1728 , Mülhausen, Alsace

died September 25, 1777 , Berlin, Prussia [Germany]

Swiss German mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher who provided the first rigorous proof that p (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) is irrational, meaning that it cannot be expressed as the quotient of two integers.

Lambert, the son of a tailor, was largely self-educated and early in his life began geometric and astronomical investigations by means of instruments he designed and built himself. He worked for a time as a bookkeeper, secretary, and editor. As a private tutor in 1748, he gained access to a good library, which he used for self-improvement until 1759, when he resigned his post to settle in Augsburg. In 1764 he went to Berlin, where he received the patronage of Frederick the Great. His memoir containing the proof that p is irrational was published in 1768. In 1774 at Berlin he became editor of Astronomisches Jahrbuch oder Ephemeriden, an astronomical almanac.

Lambert made the first systematic development of hyperbolic functions. He is also responsible for many innovations in the study of heat and light. The lambert , a measurement of light intensity, was named in his honour. Among his most important works are Photometria (1760; “The Measurement of Light”); Die Theorie der Parallellinien (1766; “The Theory of Parallel Lines”), which contains results later included in non-Euclidean geometry; and Pyrometrie (1779; “The Measurement of Heat”). The Neues Organon (1764; “New Organon”), his principal philosophical work, contains an analysis of a great variety of questions, among them formal logic, probability, and the principles of science. He also corresponded with Immanuel Kant , with whom he shares the honour of being among the first to recognize that spiral nebulae are disk-shaped galaxies like the Milky Way.

Fichte (1762-1814)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (picture) was born at Rammenau in Upper Lusatia in 1762. He studied theology at the University of Jena, where, some years later, he occupied the chair of philosophy. Dismissed from Jena as a result of a violent controversy, he lectured at Berlin, where he became identified with the Romantic Movement.

In 1807 and 1808 he delivered in Berlin his famous Addresses to the German Nation, which were aimed at Stirring up the patriotic spirit of his countrymen and enlightening them on the foundations for national prosperity. Fichte died of typhus in 1814.

His masterpiece is Foundation of General Science.

II. Doctrine - Transcendental Idealism

Kantian Criticism had broached the following question:

"What knowledge of nature are we able to obtain?"

As an answer Criticism had advanced the doctrine of the thinking ego, which organizes the data of experience according to subjective a priori forms. Kant's thinking ego does not create experience and nature; rather, it is a transcendental condition for obtaining a knowledge of experience and nature.

For Fichte, on the contrary, the ego is creative activity and the root of all reality. Nothing is presupposed to the ego. In the very act by which the ego affirms that it is thinking there are contained, implicitly, all the causes of the phenomena, and nature in its totality. Fichte thus abolishes Kant's dualism of subject and object, of form and matter, of thought and being.

For him the subject alone exists; this he calls Pure Ego. Object, matter and noumenon will depend upon the activity of the Pure Ego. Thus the object is not something extraneous to the thinking subject; it is a moment in its development. To know nature is equivalent to knowing the process by which nature is derived from Pure Ego.

Thus we are brought to complete Transcendental Idealism; and Fichte, aware of this fact, tries to demonstrate its superiority over philosophical dogmatism, represented, as Fichte says, by Kant's doctrine of the "thing in itself." Fichte points out that Kant, in deriving experience from the object (the thing in itself), ended in mechanical necessity and materialism. Instead, the new Idealism, regarding things as being produced by the conscious activity of the ego, derives them from the world of liberty.

Nor was that all, for Fichte advanced practical reasons demanding that being (the object) be reduced to the status of a construction (ideated effect) of the thinking subject. Fichte adjudged impossible the dualism of the theoretical and practical ego which Kant had established. The two Kantian egos from two spheres of activity, placed, as it were, in juxtaposition. Still, they have no real contact with one another.

Fichte rejects this dualism, and bases his teaching on Kant's doctrine of the primacy of practical reason. Such a primary does not permit this absolute cleavage between the theoretical and the practical, but rather implies a unification of the two, with the subordination of the theoretical to the practical in the relationship of means to end. In other words, the primary impulse of Pure Ego is an act of will, the purpose or end of which is the fulfillment of a duty or obligation.

The successive stages (moments) of development of Pure Ego -- in other words, its objectivation in nature, and its operation of knowledge -- are nothing more than means willed by Pure Ego itself to attain its end. Thus the spirit (Pure Ego) which thinks is one and the same with the spirit which is obliged. Pure Ego, by thinking, actualizes the means (nature) enabling this Pure Ego to fulfill its duty (teleological view of reality).

The basic element of the activity of Pure Ego is conflict -- a never-ceasing struggle between what any individual ego is and what it should be. Thus the fulfillment of one action begets a further obligation, and the fulfillment of this second in turn evokes another, and so on ad infinitum. Only in this struggle, according to Fichte, can we have an effective superiority of practical reason over all the stages (moments) of the ego.

The stages by which Pure Ego carries out its infinite activity are two: production and reflection. In the first stage, the Ego, by an unconscious impulsion towards its end, produces the object (nature). Such a production must be understood as the act of Pure Ego, by which it takes the form of a limited being; it is an act of auto-limitation. Limitation is the mainspring, as it were, which renders possible the infinite activity of Pure Ego. Without such limitation there would be no object, but only Pure Ego alone, with no possibility of action, either theoretical or practical.

Theoretical action consists in knowledge, and knowing implies that there is a determined (limited) object known. Similarly, practical action consists in the fulfillment of a duty which involves the exercise of effort to overcome or remove obstacles or limitations. Hence, Pure Ego, when it objectivates itself and becomes nature, also limits itself.

Whereupon there arises the second stage of activity, reflection, by which Pure Ego attains its individual consciousness. Fichte calls this the empirical ego. With the rise of consciousness, or the empirical ego, the spirit of man knows itself as a limited ego; it becomes aware of self (ego) and non-self (non-ego). Once the spirit has acquired this consciousness of ego and non-ego, there arise in it the various forms of knowledge, sensible, intellectual and rational.

Reflection is not terminated in the act of cognitive representation; cognition is not an end in itself but only a means to the realization of an end. We know in order to act. Thus, whatever serves as a limitation to our understanding becomes an obstacle for the will. Practical activity consists in an effort to remove this obstacle.

This effort sets in motion an infinite series of ever greater realizations, an unending activity which never finds satisfaction or surcease in any actually acquired state of being, but tends ever toward the attainment of what should be. Since this end is not attainable within the limited object, moral activity will never cease to produce new and greater forms of duty.

The deficiencies which occur in this ascending line of duties are due, according to Fichte, to the shortcomings of individual and national education. Thus men, both as individuals and as social groups, must be educated to know what they are obliged to be.

The defeats which the German people had suffered in the struggle against Napoleon were vividly present in the mind of Fichte; he attributed these calamities to the political division of Germany. As a means of overcoming Napoleon, he advocated the unification of all the German states -- a strong Germany, conscious of its primacy, a leader among nations, should be able to destroy the power of Napoleon. Doctrines of this kind, appealing to the national spirit and to the idea of the superiority of the German people over all others, explain why Fichte had such great influence on the future of his country.

Starting from Kant's idealistic position he tried to overcome the dualism involved in Kant's doctrine of a (thing in itself) by bringing this mysterious reality into consciousness. To do this he dropped the Kantian distinction between practical and theoretical reason, and conceived of the absolute mind, or ego, as moral reason. In his view all existence is psychical, and the human mind is only a manifestation of the absolute ego. Thus, the last trace of an unknowable transcendent reality is obliterated. The absolute ego has divided itself into a large number of relative egos, and through these it is moving progressively toward its own destiny. The core of reality lies in human personality, in the finite mind, but this is caught up in an endless process of development; Hence, to transcend his own consciousness and explain the progress of history, with reference to the past and future, the philosopher must look at existence from the point of view of the absolute ego. In this way Fichte developed his subjective realism, bringing this scheme of idealistic evolution every phase of human experience. Under his treatment, ethics, sociology, aesthetics, and religion become a part of the history of the Absolute.

Voltaire

Voltaire, assumed name of François Marie Arouet (1694-1778), French writer and philosopher, who was one of the leaders of the Enlightenment. Voltaire was born in Paris, November 21, 1694, the son of a notary. He was educated by the Jesuits at the College Louis-le-Grand.

Early Brilliance

Voltaire quickly chose literature as a career. He began moving in aristocratic circles and soon became known in Paris salons as a brilliant and sarcastic wit. A number of his writings, particularly a lampoon accusing the French regent Philippe II, duc d'Orléans of heinous crimes, resulted in his imprisonment in the Bastille. During his 11-month detention, Voltaire completed his first tragedy, Œdipe, which was based upon the Œdipus tyrannus of the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles, and commenced an epic poem on Henry IV of France. Œdipe was given its initial performance at the Théâtre-Français in 1718 and received with great enthusiasm. The work on Henry IV was printed anonymously in Geneva under the title of Poème de la ligue (Poem of the League, 1723). In his first philosophical poem, Le pour et le contre (For and Against), Voltaire gave eloquent expression to both his anti-Christian views and his rationalist, deist creed.

A quarrel with a member of an illustrious French family, the chevalier de Rohan, resulted in Voltaire's second incarceration in the Bastille, from which he was released within two weeks on his promise to quit France and proceed to England. Accordingly he spent about two years in London. Voltaire soon mastered the English language, and in order to prepare the British public for an enlarged edition of his Poème de la ligue, he wrote in English two remarkable essays, one on epic poetry and the other on the history of civil wars in France. For a few years the Catholic, autocratic French government prevented the publication of the enlarged edition of Poème de la ligue, which was retitled La Henriade (The Henriad). The government finally allowed the poem to be published in 1728. This work, an eloquent defense of religious toleration, achieved an almost unprecedented success, not only in Voltaire's native France but throughout all of the continent of Europe as well.

Popularity at Court

In 1728 Voltaire returned to France. During the next four years he resided in Paris and devoted most of his time to literary composition. The chief work of this period is the Lettres anglaises ou philosophiques (English or Philosophical Letters, 1734). A covert attack upon the political and ecclesiastical institutions of France, this work brought Voltaire into conflict with the authorities, and he was once more forced to quit Paris. He found refuge at the Château de Cirey in the independent duchy of Lorraine. There he formed an intimate relationship with the aristocratic and learned Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, who exerted a strong intellectual influence upon him.

Voltaire's sojourn at Cirey in companionship with the marquise du Châtelet was a period of intense literary activity. In addition to an imposing number of plays, he wrote the Élements de la philosophie de Newton (Elements of the Philosophy of Newton), and produced novels, tales, satires, and light verses.

Voltaire's stay at Cirey was not without interruptions. He often traveled to Paris and to Versailles, where, through the influence of the marquise de Pompadour, the famous mistress of Louis XV, he became a court favorite. He was first appointed historiographer of France, and then a gentleman of the king's bedchamber; finally, in 1746, he was elected to the French Academy. His Poème de Fontenoy (1745), describing a battle won by the French over the English during the War of the Austrian Succession, and his Précis du siècle de Louis XV (Epitome of the Age of Louis XV), in addition to his dramas La princesse de Navarre and Le triomphe de Trajan, were the outcome of Voltaire's connection with the court of Louis XV. Following the death of Madame du Châtelet in 1749, Voltaire finally accepted a long-standing invitation from Frederick II of Prussia to become a permanent resident at the Prussian court. He journeyed to Berlin in 1750 but did not remain there more than two years, because his acidulous wit clashed with the king's autocratic temper and led to frequent disputes. While at Berlin he completed his Siècle de Louis XIV, a historical study of the period of Louis XIV (1638-1715).

Attacks on Religion

For some years Voltaire led a migratory existence, but he finally settled in 1758 at Ferney, where he spent the remaining 20 years of his life. In the interval between his return from Berlin and his establishment at Ferney, he completed his most ambitious work, the Essai sur l'histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (Essay on General History and on the Customs and the Character of Nations, 1756). In this work, a study of human progress, Voltaire decries supernaturalism and denounces religion and the power of the clergy, although he makes evident his own belief in the existence of God.

After settling in Ferney, Voltaire wrote several philosophical poems, such as Le désastre de Lisbonne (The Lisbon Disaster, 1756); a number of satirical and philosophical novels, of which the most brilliant is Candide (1759); the tragedy Tancrède (1760); and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). Feeling secure in his sequestered retreat, he sent forth hundreds of short squibs and broadsides satirizing abuses that he desired to expose. Those who suffered persecution because of their beliefs found in Voltaire an eloquent and powerful defender. The flavor of Voltaire's activities could be summarized in the phrase he often used: écrasons l'infâme (“let us crush the infamous one”). With this phrase, he referred to any form of religion that persecutes nonadherents or that constitutes fanaticism. For Christianity he would substitute deism, a purely rational religion. Candide, in which Voltaire analyzes the problem of evil in the world, depicts the woes heaped upon the world in the name of religion. He died in Paris, May 30, 1778.

Criticism

Voltaire's contradictions of character are reflected in his writings as well as in the impressions of others. He seemed able to defend either side in any debate, and to some of his contemporaries he appeared distrustful, avaricious and sardonic; others considered him generous, enthusiastic, and sentimental. Essentially, he rejected everything irrational and incomprehensible and called upon his contemporaries to act against intolerance, tyranny, and superstition. His morality was founded on a belief in freedom of thought and respect for all individuals, and he maintained that literature should be useful and concerned with the problems of the day. These views made Voltaire a central figure in the 18th-century philosophical movement typified by the writers of the famous French Encyclopédie. Because he pleaded for a socially involved type of literature, Voltaire is considered a forerunner of such 20th-century writers as Jean Paul Sartre and other French existentialists. All of Voltaire's works contain memorable passages distinguished by elegance, perspicuity, and wit. His poetic and dramatic works, however, are marred often by too great a concentration on historical matter and philosophical propaganda. His other writings include the tragedies Brutus (1730), Zaïre (1732), Alzire (1736), Mahomet (1741), and Mérope (1743); the philosophical romance Zadig (1747); the philosophical poem Discours sur l'homme (Discourse on Man, 1738); and the historical study Charles XII (1730).

Rousseau (1712-1778)

Jean Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 - July 2, 1778) was a Swiss-French philosopher, writer, political theorist, and self-taught composer.

Born in Geneva, Switzerland , and died in Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris). His mother died at his birth and his father abandoned him as a child.

Rousseau contended that man is essentially good, a "noble savage" when in the state of nature (the state of all the "other animals", and the condition man was in before the creation of civilization and society), and that good people are made unhappy and corrupted by their experiences in society. He viewed society as "artificial" and "corrupt" and held that the furthering of society results in the continuing unhappiness of man. Rousseau's essay, "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" (1750), argued that the advancement of art and science had not been beneficial to mankind. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty. He concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of sincere friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear and suspicion.

Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which describes the relationship of man with society. Published in 1762 and largely unread when it first appeared, it became one of the most influential works of abstract political thought in the Western tradition. Contrary to his earlier work, Rousseau claimed that the state of nature is a brutish condition without law or morality, and that there are good men only as a result of society's presence. In the state of nature, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men. Because he can be more successful facing threats by joining with other men, he has the impetus to do so. He joins together with his fellow men to form the collective human presence known as society. The social contract is the "compact" agreed to among men that sets the conditions for membership in society.

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau had tried to explain the human invention of government as a kind of contract between the governed and the authorities that governed them. The only reason human beings were willing to give up individual freedom and be ruled by others was that they saw that their rights, happiness, and property would be better-protected under a formal government rather than an anarchic, every-person-for-themselves type of society. He argued, though, that this original contract was deeply flawed. The wealthiest and most powerful members of society "tricked" the general population, and so installed inequality as a permanent feature of human society. Rousseau argued in The Social Contract that this contract between rulers and the ruled should be rethought. Rather than have a government which largely protects the wealth and the rights of the powerful few, government should be fundamentally based on the rights and equality of everyone. If any form of government does not properly see to the rights, liberty, and equality of everyone, that government has broken the social contract that lies at the heart of political authority.

These ideas were essential for both the French and American revolutions; in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the French and American revolutions are the direct result of Rousseau's abstract theories on the social contract.

Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is considered a forebearer of modern socialism and communism (see Karl Marx). Rousseau also questioned the assumption that the will of the majority is always correct. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority (see democracy).

One of the primary principles of Rousseau's political philosophy is that politics and morality should not be separated. When a state fails to act in a moral fashion, it ceases to function in the proper manner and ceases to exert genuine authority over the individual. The second important principle is freedom, which the state is created to preserve.

Rousseau's ideas about education have profoundly influenced modern educational theory. He minimizes the importance of book-learning, and recommends that a child's emotions should be educated before his reason. He placed a special emphasis on learning by experience.

"Man is born free but everywhere is in chains."

"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honour, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness."

"Let us return to nature."

In his earlier writings Rousseau identified nature with the primitive state of savage man. Later, especially under the criticism of Voltaire, Rousseau took nature to mean the spontaneity of the process by which man builds his personality and his world. Nature thus signifies interiority, integrity, spiritual freedom, as opposed to that imprisonment and enslavement which society imposes in the name of civilization. Hence, to go back to nature means to restore to man the forces of this natural process, to place him outside every oppressing bond of society and the prejudices of civilization.

Rousseau is buried in The Panthéon, Paris.

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), English philosopher and political theorist (see Political Theory), one of the first modern Western thinkers to provide a secular justification for the political state. The philosophy of Hobbes marked a departure in English philosophy from the religious emphasis of Scholasticism. His ideas represented a reaction against the decentralizing ideas of the Reformation (1517-1648), which, Hobbes contended, brought anarchy (see Anarchism). Regarded as an important early influence on the philosophical doctrine of utilitarianism, Hobbes also contributed to modern psychology and laid the foundations of modern sociology by applying mechanistic principles (see Mechanism) in an attempt to explain human motivation and social organization.

Born in Malmesbury, Hobbes was educated at Magdalen Hall, University of Oxford. In 1608 he became the tutor of William Cavendish, later earl of Devonshire. In the following years Hobbes made several tours through France and Italy with his pupil and, later, with Cavendish's son. During his travels Hobbes met and discussed the physical sciences with several leading thinkers of the time, including Italian astronomer Galileo and French philosophers René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi. In 1637 Hobbes returned to England and published his Little Treatise, which outlined his new theory of motion. Interrupted by the constitutional struggle between King Charles I and Parliament, Hobbes set to work on defense of the royal prerogative. This work was privately circulated in 1640 under the title The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic and was published in 1650. Hobbes, fearing that Parliament might have him arrested because of his book, fled to Paris, where he remained in voluntary exile for 11 years.

In 1642 Hobbes finished De Cive, (On Citizenship; translated in 1651), a statement of his theory of government. From 1646 to 1648 he was mathematics tutor to the prince of Wales, later King Charles II, who was living in exile in Paris. Hobbes's best-known work, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), is a forceful exposition of his doctrine of sovereignty. The work was interpreted by the followers of the exiled prince as a justification of the Commonwealth and aroused the suspicions of the French authorities by its attack on the papacy. Again fearful of arrest, Hobbes returned to England.

In 1660, when the Commonwealth ended and his former pupil acceded to the throne, Hobbes again came into favor. In 1666, however, the House of Commons passed a bill including Leviathan among the books to be investigated on charges of atheistic tendencies (Hobbes argued for a distinction between knowledge and faith and suggested that one could not gain a knowledge of God—see Atheism; Agnosticism). The measure caused Hobbes to burn many of his papers and to delay publication of three of his works: Behemoth: The History of the Causes of Civil Wars of England; Dialogues Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England; and a metrical Historia Ecclesiastica. At the age of 84, Hobbes wrote an autobiography in Latin verse. Within the next three years he translated into English verse the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. He died at the age of 91. In 1995 three previously unattributed essays of Hobbes were published. These writings suggest the influence of Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli on Hobbes's ethics and politics.

Developing his politics and ethics from a naturalistic basis of self-interest (see Naturalism; Egoism), Hobbes held that since people are fearful and predatory they must submit to the absolute supremacy of the state, in both secular and religious matters, in order to live by reason and gain lasting preservation. Within psychology, he proposed that all human actions are caused by material phenomena (see Materialism), with people motivated by what he termed appetite (movement toward an object; similar to pleasure) or aversion (movement away from an object; similar to pain).

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche, Friedrich (Wilhelm) (1844-1900), German philosopher, poet, and classical philologist, who became one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of the 19th century.

Life and Works

Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, Prussia. His father, a Lutheran minister, died when Nietzsche was five, and Nietzsche was raised by his mother in a home that included his grandmother, two aunts, and a sister. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24. Ill health (he was plagued throughout his life by poor eyesight and migraine headaches) forced his retirement in 1879. Ten years later he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900. In addition to the influence of Greek culture, particularly the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche was influenced by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, by the theory of evolution, and by his friendship with the German composer Richard Wagner.

A prolific writer, he wrote several major works, among them The Birth of Tragedy (1872; trans. 1966), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85; trans. 1954), Beyond Good and Evil (1886; trans. 1966), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887; trans. 1966), The Antichrist (1888; trans. 1954), Ecce Homo (1889; trans. 1966), and The Will to Power (1901; trans. 1910).

One of Nietszche's fundamental contentions was that traditional values (represented primarily by Christianity) had lost their power in the lives of individuals. He expressed this in his proclamation “God is dead.” He was convinced that traditional values represented a “slave morality,” a morality created by weak and resentful individuals who encouraged such behavior as gentleness and kindness because the behavior served their interests. Nietzsche claimed that new values could be created to replace the traditional ones, and his discussion of the possibility led to his concept of the overman or superman.

According to Nietzsche, the masses, whom he termed the herd or mob, conform to tradition, whereas his ideal overman is secure, independent, and highly individualistic. The overman feels deeply, but his passions are rationally controlled. Concentrating on the real world, rather than on the rewards of the next world promised by religion, the overman affirms life, including the suffering and pain that accompany human existence. His overman is a creator of values, a creator of a “master morality” that reflects the strength and independence of one who is liberated from all values, except those that he deems valid.

Nietzsche maintained that all human behavior is motivated by the will to power. In its positive sense, the will to power is not simply power over others, but the power over oneself that is necessary for creativity. Such power is manifested in the overman's independence, creativity, and originality. Although Nietzsche explicitly denied that any overmen had yet arisen, he mentions several individuals who could serve as models. Among these models he lists Socrates, Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon.

The concept of the overman has often been interpreted as one that postulates a master-slave society and has been identified with totalitarian philosophies. Many scholars deny the connection and attribute it to misinterpretation of Nietzsche's work.

Influence

An acclaimed poet, Nietzsche exerted much influence on German literature, as well as on French literature and theology. His concepts have been discussed and elaborated upon by such individuals as the German philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, and the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, the German-American theologian Paul Tillich, and the French writers Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre. Nietzsche's proclamation “God is dead” was seized upon by the post-World War II radical theologians, the Americans Thomas J. J. Altizer and Paul Van Buren, in their attempt to make Christianity relevant to its believers in the 1960's and '70s

Leibniz

Young Russell

The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, b. July 1, 1646, d. Nov. 14, 1716, was a universal genius and a founder of modern science. Leibniz was born in Leipzig and educated at the universities of Leipzig, Jena, and Altdorf. Beginning in 1666, the year in which he was awarded a doctorate in law, he served Johann Philipp von Schönborn, archbishop elector of Mainz, in a variety of legal, political, and diplomatic capacities. In 1673, when the elector's reign ended, Leibniz went to Paris. He remained there for three years and also visited Amsterdam and London, devoting his time to the study of mathematics, science, and philosophy. In Amsterdam he met Benedict Spinoza and discussed with him some of his writings. From 1676 until his death, Leibniz served the Brunswick family in Hanover as librarian, judge, and minister. After 1686 he served primarily as historian, preparing a genealogy of the Hanovers based on the critical examination of primary source materials. In search of sources, he traveled to Austria and Italy from 1687 to 1690. In his later years, Leibniz attempted to build an institutional framework for the sciences in central Europe and Russia. At his urging, the Brandenburg Society (Berlin Academy of Science) was founded in 1700. He met several times with Peter the Great to recommend educational reforms in Russia and proposed what became the St. Petersburg Academy of Science.

Leibniz was a first-class mathematician and scientist. His contribution in mathematics was to discover, in 1675, the fundamental principles of infinitesimal calculus. This discovery was arrived at independently of the discoveries of the English scientist Sir Isaac Newton, whose system of calculus was invented in 1666. Leibniz's system was published in 1684, Newton's in 1687, and the method of notation devised by Leibniz was universally adopted. In 1672 he also invented a calculating machine capable of multiplying, dividing, and extracting square roots. Leibniz was also an excellent philosopher whose metaphysical system is peculiarly interesting in that it can be interpreted as a system of logical doctrines. His positions were drawn from science, logic, and metaphysics, and he believed that his "new principle, pre-established harmony," was proved in all these disciplines, as well as in religious and moral theory.

Leibniz was dissatisfied with the "new philosophy" since Descartes and with the concepts of absolute space, time and matter of Newtonian mechanics. He showed that Descartes' formulation of the laws of motion was scientifically unsound, and that his view of motion as miraculously imparted to essentially inert matter was metaphysically unsatisfactory. He described "atoms of matter" as contrary to reason, since the "smallest particle of matter," as atoms are described, is logically absurd. If it is extended, then it is further divisible; if not then it is not a particle of matter. The laws of motion he thought demanded that the elements involved should be bearers of energy. The only possible element must be a "simple substance, without parts." In his Monadology, this simple substance he called a "monad," a non-extended, indestructible and immaterial entity. Each monad represents an individual microcosm, mirroring the universe in varying degrees of perfection and developing independently of all other monads, with no causal connection between them. The only essential characteristic of a monad is that it is active, and therefore all monads are of the same kind. Though the observed world appears to be spatiotemporal, with bodies moving in it in causal relations which each other, and there appear various different entities of stones, plants, and humans, these appearances are systematically connected with real properties of the system of monads.

There is an infinite series of monads ranging from the completely active to the almost inert. Their proper activity is perception or "mirroring." Every monad perceives all other monads with some degree of clarity in that they are in pre-established harmony with each other. The less active monads present the appearance of materiality. Every "body" is a colony of monads with various degrees of activity, and the human being is therefore no longer a Cartesian miraclte of mind and body but part of the natural order of the universal mirroring. Each monad "unfolds" its states in accordance with its own principle and in harmony with other monads. Leibniz described the unfolding of the states as "appetition," applicable equally to purposive human activity and the movements of a sunflower to the sun.

In the Discourse on Metaphysics, which is an elaboration of a letter to his theologian friend Antoine Arnauld, Leibniz presents arguments for the doctrine of monads drawn from the nature of propositions. He states that in arguments for simple substances every proposition is of the subject-predicate form and that every true proposition has its predicate contained in its subject. Just as there is no interaction between monads, there are no relational propositions, and as a monad contains its states unfolded in it, so every true proposition contains its predicate in its subject. Arnauld was completely dissatisfied on metaphysical, religious, and moral grounds. If the state of every monad is contained in its concept, then human freedom is a myth and God is constrained. Leibniz's reply was that every actual state of affairs has hypothetical but not absolute necessity; free and spontaneous activity is allowed for in the pre-established harmony of all monads and their states. All monads choose the best and their capacity to discern the best varies with the degree of clearness with which they mirror the world. And as he famously says, God, with perfect knowledge and goodness, freely chose to create this, the best of all possible worlds.

Leibniz's works, particularly the Monadology, greatly influenced German philosophers of the 18th century, including Christian von Wolff and Immanuel Kant.

Hegel (-1841

G. W. F. Hegel was born in Stuttgart, Germany, the son of a government official. He studied theology at the University of Tubingen. After serving as a tutor at Bern and Frankfurt, he was a lecturer and then a professor at the University of Jena (1801-06), headmaster of a school in Nuremberg (1808-16), and professor at Heidelberg (1816-18) and Berlin (1818-31). He died in Berlin, during a cholera epidemic, on Nov. 14, 1831. He was an idealist philosopher who has influenced many areas of modern philosophy; his strongest influence was on Karl Marx, and he had a negative influence on Søren Kierkegaard, whose rebellion against his objective systematizing began the school of existentialism.

Hegel wrote books on philosophy, religion, and history. His most important works include the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the Science of Logic (1816), the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), the Philosophy of Right (1821), and the Philosophy of History (from lectures in 1822), all of which have been translated into English.

According to Hegel, reality is Absolute Mind, Reason, or Spirit, which manifests itself in history. Whether the Spirit is human spirit or an alias of God he doesn't make clear. This Mind is universal, the World Mind (Weltgeist), which cannot be identified with any particular person, indeed all rational activity of each person is merely a phase of the Absolute. The Mind is dialectical in that one concept, the thesis, is followed by its opposite, the antithesis, which conflict and produce a higher concept, the synthesis. Hegel claimed that "the real is rational and the rational real," which can be understood as an expression of the identity of reality and the rational process. Because reality is rational, it acts in accordance with the laws of reasoning. To understand the nature of thought is to understand the nature of reality. Nature itself can be studied rationally because it manifests the dialectical activity of Mind.

The Mind also manifests itself in human affairs. Art is the sensuous expression of creative Spirit and is a rational process, and the philosopher can study art for the representation of reality that it really is. The philosopher can study religion and see that it is the highest nonrational manifestation of the Mind. In Christianity, the highest evolution of religious expression, the incarnation symbolically reflects the truth that the infinite is manifest in the finite and not distinct from it. In philosophy, Reason is revealed as the rational process. Through the concepts of philosophy the philosopher may know Reason as it has been and as it is in itself. The history of philosophy thus reveals the development of Mind itself in its quest for its own unification and actualization. The greater the historical perspective accorded the philosopher, the greater and richer the vision of the system and of Reason's own self-comprehension in the system.

Absolute Mind also manifests itself in the individual, who develops from a subjectivistic state to an objective rational consciousness through developmental phases of family, society, and state. To Hegel human history is the progression from bondage to freedom. Freedom is achieved as the desires of the individual are integrated into the unified system of the state, in which the will of one is replaced by the will of all. This theory is shown in his division of history into three stages, the first of which is in the ancient orient where only the ruler was free, the second in Greece and Rome where some were free, and modern world where all are considered free. This view of history divided Hegel's followers into left- and right-wing camps, with leftists like Marx turning the dialectic of Spirit into the dialectic of economic conditions and rightists stressing the unity of the state and breathing new life into Protestantism.

Perhaps no other thinker since Kant has had a comparable influence on philosophy, art, religion, and literature.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

(Redirected from Hegel)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831), a philosopher born in Stuttgart, Germany, received his education at Tübingen seminary, and became fascinated by the works of Spinoza, Kant, and Rousseau, and by the French Revolution. Many consider Hegel's thought to represent the summit of 19th Century Germany's movement of philosophical idealism; it made a profound impact on the historical materialism of Karl Marx.

Hegel attended the seminary at Tübingen with the epic poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the objective idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three watched the unfolding of the French Revolution and collaborated in a critique of the idealist philosophies of Kant and his follower Fichte.

Hegel's first and most important major work is the Phenomenology of Spirit (or ". . . of Mind"). During his life he also published the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the Science of Logic and the [Elements of the] Philosophy of Right.

Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty, and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding the history of philosophy (and the world itself) often called a "dialectic": a progression in which each successive moment emerges as a working-out of the self-contradictions inherent in the preceding moment. For example, the French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real freedom into western societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also absolutely radical: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but on to its own result: the hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the (allegedly) benevolent organizing power of rational government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality.

In contemporary accounts of Hegelianism -- to undergraduate classes, for example -- Hegel's dialectic often appears broken up for convenience into three moments called "thesis" (in our example, the revolution), "antithesis" (the terror which followed), and "synthesis" (the constitutional state of free citizens). Hegel did not use this classification at all himself, though: it was developed earlier by Fichte in his (loosely analogous) account of the relation between the individual subject and the world. Serious Hegel scholarship does not generally recognize the validity of this classification, although it probably has some pedagogical value.

Hegel used this system to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but many contemporary critics point out that Hegel often seems to gloss over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold. Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that the Hegel's system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. Arthur Schopenhauer hated Hegel with a passion on account of his historicism, decrying his work as "pseudo-philosophy".

After Hegel's death, his followers divided into two major and opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the direct disciples of Hegel at the University of Berlin, advocated evangelical orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. The Left became known as the Young Hegelians and they interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics. Left Hegelians included Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, Max Stirner, and most famously, Karl Marx. The multiple schisms in this faction eventually led to Stirner's anarchistic variety of egoism and Marx's version of communism.

Stanford Encyclopedia on Hegel

Life, Work, and Influence

Born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Hegel spent the years 1788-1793 as a theology student in nearby Tübingen, forming friendships there with fellow students, the future great romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Friedrich W. J. von Schelling (1775-1854), who, like Hegel, would become one of the major figures of the German philosophical scene in the first half of the nineteenth century. These friendships clearly had a major influence on Hegel's philosophical development, and for a while the intellectual lives of the three were closely intertwined.

After graduation Hegel worked as a tutor for families in Bern and then Frankfurt, where he was reunited with Hölderlin. Until around 1800, Hegel devoted himself to developing his ideas on religious and social themes, and seemed to have envisaged a future for himself as a type of modernising and reforming educator, in the image of figures of the German Enlightenment such as Lessing and Schiller. Around the turn of the century, however, possibly under the influence of Hölderlin, his interests turned more to the issues in the “critical” philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) that had enthused Hölderlin, Schelling, and many others, and in 1801 he moved to the University of Jena to join Schelling. In the 1790s Jena had become a centre of both “Kantian” philosophy and the early romantic movement and by the time of Hegel's arrival Schelling had already become an established figure, taking the approach of J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), the most important of the new Kantian-styled philosophers, in novel directions. In late 1801, Hegel published his first philosophical work, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, and up until 1803 worked closely with Schelling, with whom he edited the Critical Journal of Philosophy. In his “Difference” essay Hegel had argued that Schelling's approach succeeded where Fichte's failed in the project of systematising and thereby completing Kant's transcendental idealism, and on the basis of this type of advocacy was dogged for many years by the reputation of being a “mere” follower of Schelling (who was five years his junior).

By late 1806 Hegel had completed his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (published 1807), which showed a divergence from his earlier, seemingly more Schellingian, approach. Schelling, who had left Jena in 1803, interpreted a barbed criticism in the Phenomenology's preface as aimed at him, and their friendship abruptly ended. The occupation of Jena by Napoleon's troops as Hegel was completing the manuscript closed the university and Hegel left the town. Now without a university appointment he worked for a short time, apparently very successfully, as an editor of a newspaper in Bamberg, and then from 1808-1815 as the headmaster and philosophy teacher at a “gymnasium” in Nuremberg. During his time at Nuremberg he married and started a family, and wrote and published his Science of Logic. In 1816 he managed to return to his university career by being appointed to a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Then in 1818, he was offered and took up the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, the most prestigious position in the German philosophical world. While in Heidelberg he published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a systematic work in which an abbreviated version of the earlier Science of Logic (the “Encyclopaedia Logic” or “Lesser Logic”) was followed by the application of its principles to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. In 1821 in Berlin Hegel published his major work in political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, based on lectures given at Heidelberg but ultimately grounded in the section of the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit dealing with “objective spirit.” During the following ten years up to his death in 1831 Hegel enjoyed celebrity at Berlin, and published subsequent versions of the Encyclopaedia. After his death versions of his lectures on philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were published.

After Hegel's death, Schelling, whose reputation had long since been eclipsed by that of Hegel, was invited to take up the chair at Berlin, reputedly because the government of the day had wanted to counter the influence that Hegelian philosophy had developed among a generation of students. Since the early period of his collaboration with Hegel, Schelling had become more religious in his philosophising and criticised the “rationalism” of Hegel's philosophy. During this time of Schelling's tenure at Berlin, important forms of later critical reaction to Hegelian philosophy developed. Hegel himself had been a supporter of progressive but non-revolutionary politics, but his followers divided into “left-” and “right-wing” factions; from out of the former circle, Karl Marx was to develop his own “scientific” approach to society and history which appropriated many Hegelian ideas into Marx's materialistic outlook. (Later, especially in reaction to orthodox Soviet versions of Marxism, many “Western Marxists” re-incorporated further Hegelian elements back into their forms of Marxist philosophy.) Many of Schelling's own criticisms of Hegel's rationalism found their way into subsequent “existentialist” thought, especially via the writings of Kierkegaard, who had attended Schelling's lectures. Furthermore, the interpretation Schelling offered of Hegel during these years itself helped to shape subsequent generations' understanding of Hegel, contributing to the orthodox or traditional understanding of Hegel as a “metaphysical” thinker in the pre-Kantian “dogmatic” sense.

In academic philosophy, Hegelian idealism underwent a revival in both Great Britain and the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Britain, where philosophers such as T. H Green and F. H. Bradley had developed metaphysical ideas which they related back to Hegel's thought, Hegel came to be one of the main targets of attack by the founders of the emerging “analytic” movement, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. For most of the twentieth century, interest in Hegel became limited to the context of his relation to other more popular philosophical movements like existentialism or Marxism, or to his social and political thought. In France, a version of Hegelianism came to influence a generation of thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, largely through the lectures of Alexandre Kojève, an important precursor to the later “post-modern” movement. A later generation of French philosophers coming to prominence in the late 1960s and after, however, tended to react against Hegel in ways analogous to those in which early analytic philosophers had reacted against the Hegel who had influenced their predecessors. In Germany, interest in Hegel was revived early in the century with the historical work of Wilhelm Dilthey, and important Hegelian elements were incorporated into the approach of thinkers of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno, and later, Jürgen Habermas, as well as the “hermeneutic” approach of H.-G. Gadamer. In Hungary, similar Hegelian themes were developed by Georg Lukács and later thinkers of the “Budapest School.” In the 1960s the German philosopher Klaus Hartmann developed what was termed a “non-metaphysical” interpretation of Hegel which, together with the work of Dieter Henrich and others, played an important role in the revival of interest in Hegel in academic philosophy in the second half of the century. Within English-speaking philosophy, the final quarter of the twentieth century saw something of a revival of serious interest in Hegel's philosophy, especially in North America, with important works appearing such as those by H. S. Harris, Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard.

2. Hegel's Philosophy

Hegel's own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given in the “Preface” to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right captures a characteristic tension in his philosophical approach and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits of human cognition. “Philosophy,” he says there, “is its own time raised to the level of thought.”

On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase “its own time” the suggestion of an historical or cultural conditionedness and variability which applies even to the highest form of human cognition, philosophy itself -- the contents of philosophical knowledge, we might suspect, will come from the historically changing contents of contemporary culture. On the other, there is the hint of such contents being “raised” to some higher level, presumably higher than other levels of cognitive functioning -- those based in everyday perceptual experience, for example, or those characteristic of other areas of culture such as art and religion. This higher level takes the form of “thought” -- a type of cognition commonly taken as capable of having “eternal” contents (think of Plato and Frege, for example).

This antithetical combination within human cognition of the temporally-conditioned and the eternal, a combination which reflects a broader conception of the human being as what Hegel describes elsewhere as a “finite-infinite,” has led to Hegel being regarded in different ways by different types of philosophical readers. For example, an historically-minded pragmatist like Richard Rorty, distrustful of all claims or aspirations to the “God's-eye view,” could praise Hegel as a philosopher who had introduced this historically reflective dimension into philosophy (and setting it on the characteristically “hermeneutic” path which has predominated in modern continental philosophy) but who had unfortunately still remained bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for ahistorical truths. Those adopting such an approach to Hegel tend to have in mind the (relatively) young author of the Phenomenology of Spirit and have tended to dismiss as “metaphysical” later and more systematic works like the Science of Logic. In contrast, the British Hegelian movement at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, tended to ignore the Phenomenology and the more historicist dimensions of his thought, and found in Hegel a systematic metaphysician whose Logic provided a systematic and definitive philosophical ontology of an idealist type. This latter traditional, “metaphysical” view of Hegel dominated Hegel reception for most of the twentieth century, but has over the last few decades been contested by many Hegel scholars who have offered an alternative, “post-Kantian” view of Hegel.

2.1 The traditional “metaphysical” view of Hegel's philosophy

Given the understanding of Hegel that predominated at the time of the birth of analytic philosophy together with the fact that early analytic philosophers were rebelling precisely against “Hegelianism” so understood, the “Hegel” encountered in discussions within analytic philosophy is often that of the late nineteenth-century interpretation. In this picture, Hegel is seen as offering a metaphysico-religious view of “Absolute Spirit” which draws on pantheistic ideas of the identity of the universe and God, together with theistic ideas concerning the necessary “self-consciousness” of God. The peculiarity of Hegel's view, on this account, lies in his idea that the mind of God becomes actual only via the minds of his creatures, who serve as its vehicle. It is as distributed bearers of this developing self-consciousness of God that those finitely-embodied inhabitants of the universe -- we humans -- can be such “finite-infinites.”

An important consequence of Hegel's metaphysics, so understood, concerns history and the idea of historical development or progress, and it is as an advocate of an idea concerning the logically-necessitated teleological course of history that Hegel is most often decried. To many critics Hegel not only was an advocate of a disastrous political conception of the state and the relation of its citizens to it, a conception prefiguring twentieth-century totalitarianism, but had tried to underpin such advocacy with dubious logico-metaphysical speculations. With his idea of the development of “spirit” in history, Hegel is seen as literalising a way of talking about different cultures in terms of their “spirits,” of constructing a developmental sequence of epochs typical of nineteenth-century ideas of linear historical progress, and then enveloping this story of human progress in terms of one about the developing self-conscious of the cosmos-God itself.

As the bottom line of such an account concerned the evolution of states of a mind (God's), such an account is clearly an idealist one, but not in the sense, say, of Berkeley. The pantheistic legacy inherited by Hegel meant that he had no problem in considering an objective outer world beyond any particular subjective mind. But this objective world itself had to be understood as conceptually informed, as it were -- it was objectified spirit. Thus in contrast to Berkeleian “subjective idealism” it became common to talk of Hegel as incorporating the “objective idealism” of views, especially common among German historians, in which social life and thought were understood in terms of the conceptual or “spiritual” structures that informed them. But in contrast to both forms of idealism, Hegel, according to this reading, postulated a form of absolute idealism by including both subjective life and the objective cultural practices on which subjective life depended within the dynamics of the development of the self-consciousness and self-actualisation of God, the “Absolute Spirit.”

It is hardly surprising, given the more secular character of much twentieth-century philosophy, that Hegel, so understood, would be generally regarded as of merely historical interest. Nevertheless, Hegel was still seen by many as an important precursor of other more characteristically modern strands of thought such as existentialism and Marxist materialism. Existentialists were thought of as taking the idea of the finitude and historical and cultural dependence of individual subjects from Hegel and leaving out all pretensions to the “absolute,” while Marxists were thought of as taking the historical dynamics of the Hegelian picture but understanding this in materialist rather than idealist categories. But while the traditional view of Hegel remained a commonplace throughout the twentieth century it has come to be increasingly questioned as an accurate account of Hegel's philosophy within Hegel scholarship itself. In the last quarter of the century, an increasing number of Hegel interpreters argued that such an understanding was seriously flawed, and while various quite different philosophical interpretations of Hegel have emerged which attempt to acquit him of implausible metaphysico-theological views, one common tendency has been to stress the continuity of his ideas with the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant.

2.2 The non-traditional or “post-Kantian” view of Hegel

Least controversially, it has been claimed that either particular works such as the Phenomenology of Spirit, or particular areas of Hegel's philosophy, especially his ethical and political philosophy, can be understood as standing independently of the type of unacceptable metaphysical system sketched above. Somewhat more controversially, it has also been argued that the traditional picture is simply wrong at a more general “metaphysical” level and that Hegel is in no way committed to the bizarre “spirit monism” that has been traditionally attributed to him. While these latter views often differ among themselves and continue to take exception to various aspects of Hegel's actual work, they commonly agree in regarding Hegel as being a “post-Kantian” philosopher who had accepted that aspect of Kant's critical philosophy which has been the most influential, his critique of traditional “dogmatic” metaphysics. Thus while the traditional view sees Hegel as exemplifying the very type of metaphysical speculation that Kant successfully criticised, the post-Kantian view of Hegel sees him as both accepting and extending Kant's critique, even of turning it against the residual “dogmatically metaphysical” aspects of Kant's own philosophy.

To see Hegel as a post-Kantian is to regard him as extending that “critical” turn that Kant saw as setting his philosophy on a scientific footing in a way analogous to the work of Copernicus in cosmology. With his Copernican analogy Kant had compared the way that the positions of the sun and earth were reversed in Copernicus' transformation of cosmology to the way that the positions of knowing subject and known object were reversed in his own transcendental idealism. Objectivity could no longer be thought as a matter of mental representations “corresponding” to an object “in itself” . Having posed the question of the ground of the relation of a representation to an object, Kant had answered that where a representation was not made possible by the process of sensory affection, it could be justified as objective only if through it it became possible to cognise something as an object.

No sooner had Kant's philosophy appeared then many objections were raised, among which were complaints about the apparently irreducible gap between the mind qua universal discursive intelligence and the mind as individual psychological reality. Kantian ideas were quickly integrated by Schelling with extant Spinozist ideas concerning mind and body as different aspects of an underlying substance to yield a type of philosophical biology. Others, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher joined Kantian ideas about the mind with philological ideas linking thought to the structures of historically variable languages. Other critics pointed to internal inconsistencies in Kant's picture in which the world in itself seemed to be thought of on the one hand as the cause of its appearance, and on the other, as beyond knowledge and its constituent categories such as “cause.” Among the ambitions of many of Kant's successors, including Hegel, was that of somehow “completing” Kant. In Hegel especially, many argue, one can see the ambition to bring together the universalist dimensions of Kant's transcendental program with the culturally particularist conceptions of his more historically and relativistically-minded contemporaries. This resulted in his controversial conception of “spirit,” as developed in his Phenomenology of Spirit. With this notion, it has been argued, Hegel was pursing the Kantian question of the conditions of rational human “mindedness” rather than being concerned with giving an account of the developing self-consciousness of God. But while Kant had limited such conditions to “formal” structures of the mind, Hegel extended them to include aspects of historically and socially determined forms of embodied existence.

3. Hegel's Works

3.1 Phenomenology of Spirit

The term “phenomenology” had been coined by the German scientist and mathematician (and Kant correspondent) J. H. Lambert (1728 -- 1777), and in a letter to Lambert, sent to accompany a copy of his “Inaugural Dissertation” (1770), Kant had proposed a “general phenomenology” as a necessary “propaedeutic” presupposed by the science of metaphysics. Such a phenomenology was meant to determine the “validity and limitations” of what he called the “principles of sensibility,” principles he had (he thought) shown in the accompanying work to be importantly different to those of conceptual thought. The term clearly suited Kant as he had distinguished the “phenomena” known through the faculty of sensibility from the “noumena” known conceptually. This envisioned “phenomenology” seems to coincide roughly with what he was to eventually entitle a “critique of pure reason,” although Kant's thought had gone through important changes by the time that he came to publish the work of that name (1781, second edition 1787). Perhaps because of this he never again used the term “phenomenology” for quite this purpose.

There is clearly some continuity between this Kantian notion and Hegel's project. In a sense Hegel's phenomenology is a study of “phenomena” (although this is not a realm he would contrast with that of “noumena” ) and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is likewise to be regarded as a type of “propaedeutic” to philosophy rather than an exercise in it -- a type of induction or education of the reader to the “standpoint” of purely conceptual thought of philosophy itself. As such, its structure has been compared to that of an “educational novel,” having an abstractly conceived protagonist -- the bearer of an evolving series of “shapes of consciousness” or the inhabitant of a series of successive phenomenal worlds -- whose progress and set-backs the reader follows and learns from. Or at least this is how the work sets out: in the later sections the earlier series of “shapes of consciousness” becomes replaced with what seem more like configurations of human social existence, and the work comes to look more like an account of interlinked forms of social existence and thought, the series of which maps onto the history of western European civilization from the Greeks to Hegel's own time. The fact that it ends in the attainment of “Absolute Knowing,” the standpoint from which real philosophy gets done, seems to support the traditionalist reading in which a “triumphalist” narrative of the growth of western civilization is combined with the theological interpretation of God's self-manifestation and self-comprehension. When Kant had broached the idea of a phenomenological propaedeutic to Lambert, he himself had still believed in the project of a purely conceptual metaphysics, but this was a project that in his later critical philosophy he came to disavow. Traditional readers of Hegel thus see the Phenomenology's telos as attesting to Hegel's “pre-Kantian” (that is, “pre-critical”) outlook and his embrace of the metaphysical project that Kant famously came to dismiss as illusory. Supporters of the non-metaphysical Hegel obviously interpret this work and its telos differently. For example, some have argued that what this history tracks is the development of a type of social existence which enables a unique form of rationality, in that in such a society all dogmatic bases of thought have been gradually replaced by a system in which all claims become open to rational self-correction, by becoming exposed to demands for conceptually-articulated justifications.

Something of Hegel's phenomenological method may be conveyed by the first few chapters, which are perhaps among the more conventionally philosophical parts. Chapters 1 to 3 effectively follow a developmental series of “shapes of consciousness” or conscious attitudes which seem to be based upon distinct criteria for epistemic certainty. Chapter 1, “Sense-certainty” considers an epistemological attitude involving an appeal to some immediately given perceptual contents -- the sort of role played by “sense data” in some early twentieth-century approaches to epistemology, for example. By following the protagonist's attempts to make these implicit criteria explicit we are meant to appreciate that any such contents, even the apparently most “immediate,” in fact contain implicit conceptually articulated presuppositions, and so, in Hegel's terminology, are “mediated.” One might compare Hegel's point here to that expressed by Kant in his well known claim that without concepts, those singular and immediate mental representations he calls “intuitions” are “blind.” In more recent terminology one might talk of the “concept-” or “theory-ladenness” of all experience, and the lessons of this chapter have been likened to that of Wilfrid Sellars's famous criticism of the “myth of the given.”

By the end of this chapter our protagonist consciousness (and by implication, we the audience to this drama) has learnt that the nature of consciousness cannot be as originally thought, rather its contents must have some implicit universal (conceptual) aspect to them. Consciousness thus now commences anew with its new implicit epistemic criterion -- the assumption that since the contents of consciousness are “universal” they must be publicly graspable by others as well. Hegel's name for this type of perceptual realism in which any individual's idiosyncratic private apprehension will always be in principle correctable by the experience of others is “perception” (Wahrnehmung -- in German this term having the connotations of taking (nehmen) to be true (wahr)). As with the case for “sense-certainty,” here again, by following the protagonist consciousness's efforts to make this implicit criterion explicit, we see how the criterion generates contradictions which eventually undermine it as a criterion for certainty. In fact, such collapse into a type of self-generated scepticism is typical of all the “shapes” we follow in the work, and there seems something inherently skeptical about such reflexive cognitive processes. But Hegel's point is equally that there has always been something positive that has been learned in such processes, and this learning is more than that which consists in the mere elimination of epistemological dead-ends. Rather, as in the way that the internal contradictions that emerged from sense-certainty had generated a new shape, perception, the collapse of any given attitude always involves the emergence of some new implicit criterion which will be the basis of a new emergent attitude. In the case of “perception,” the emergent new shape of consciousness Hegel calls “understanding” -- a shape which he identifies with scientific cognition rather than that of everyday “perception.”

The transition from Chapter 3 to 4, “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” also marks a more general transition from “consciousness” to “self-consciousness.” It is in the course of chapter 4 that we find what is perhaps the most well-known part of the Phenomenology, the account of the “struggle of recognition” in which Hegel examines the intersubjective conditions which he sees as necessary for any form of “consciousness“.

Like Kant, Hegel thinks that one's capacity to be “conscious” of some external object as something distinct from oneself requires the reflexivity of “self-consciousness,” that is, it requires one's awareness of oneself as a subject for whom something distinct, the object, is presented as known. Hegel goes beyond Kant, however, in making this requirement dependent on one's recognition (or acknowledgment -- Anerkennung) as a subject by other self-consciousnesses whom one recognises in turn. In short, one's self-consciousness is in no sense direct, as it was for Descartes, for example. It comes about only indirectly via one's recognising other conscious subjects' recognition of oneself! It is in this way that the Phenomenology can change course, the earlier tracking of “shapes of consciousness” being effectively replaced by the tracking of distinct patterns of “mutual recognition” between subjects.

It is thus that Hegel has effected the transition from a phenomenology of “subjective mind,” as it were, to one of “objective spirit,” thought of as culturally distinct patterns of social interaction analysed in terms of the patterns of reciprocal recognition they embody. (“Geist” can be translated as either “mind” or “spirit,” but the latter, allowing a more cultural sense, as in the phrase “spirit of the age” (“Zeitgeist” ), seems a more suitable rendering for the title.) But this is only worked out in the text gradually. We -- the reading, “phenomenological” we -- can see how particular shapes of self-consciousness, such as that of the other-worldly religious self-consciousness (“unhappy consciousness” ) with which chapter 4 ends, depend on certain institutionalised forms of mutual recognition. But we are seeing this from the “outside” as it were, we still have to learn how real in situ self-consciousnesses could learn this of themselves. So we have to see how the protagonist self-consciousness could achieve this insight. It is to this end that we further trace the learning path of self-consciousness through the processes of “reason” (in chapter 5) before “objective spirit” can become the explicit subject matter of chapter 6, (Spirit).

Hegel's discussion of spirit starts from what he calls “Sittlichkeit” (translated as “ethical order” or “ethical substance”), “Sittlichkeit” being a nominalisation from the adjectival (or adverbial) form “sittlich,” “customary,” from the stem “Sitte” -- “custom” or “convention.” Thus Hegel might be seen as adopting the viewpoint that since social life is ordered by customs we can approach the lives of those living in it in terms of the patterns of those customs or conventions themselves -- the conventional practices, as it were, constituting specific forms of life. It is not surprising then that his account of spirit here starts with a discussion of religious and civic law. Undoubtedly it is Hegel's tendency to nominalise such abstract concepts as “customary” in his attempt to capture the concrete nature of such as patterns of conventional life, together with the tendency to then personify them (as in talking about “spirit” becoming “self-conscious”) that lends plausibility to the traditionalist understanding of Hegel. But for non-traditionalists it is not obvious that Hegel is in any way committed to any metaphysical supra-individual conscious beings with such usages. To take an example, in the second section of the chapter “Spirit” Hegel discusses “culture” as the “world of self-alienated spirit.” The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (stories, dramas, and so forth) within which they can recognise their own patterns of life reflected. We might find intelligible the idea that such products “hold up a mirror to society” within which “the society can regard itself,” without thinking we are thereby committed to some supra-individual social “mind” achieving self-consciousness. Furthermore, such cultural products themselves provide conditions allowing individuals to adopt particular cognitive attitudes. Thus, for example, the capacity to adopt the type of objective viewpoint demanded by Kantian morality (discussed in the final section of Spirit) -- the capacity to see things, as it were, from a “universal” point of view -- is bound up with the attitude implicitly adopted in engaging with spirit's “alienations.”

We might think that if Kant had written the Phenomenology, he would have ended it at chapter 6 with the modern moral subject as the telos of the story. For Kant, the practical knowledge of morality, orienting one within the noumenal world, exceeds the scope of theoretical knowledge which had been limited to phenomena. Hegel, however, thought that philosophy had to unify theoretical and practical knowledge, and so the Phenomenology has further to go. Again, this is seen differently by traditionalists and revisionists. For traditionalists, Chapters 7, “Religion” and 8, “Absolute Knowing,” testify to Hegel's disregard for Kant's critical limitation of theoretical knowledge to empirical experience. Revisionists, on the other hand, tend to see Hegel as furthering the Kantian critique into the very coherence of a conception of an “in-itself” reality which is beyond the limits of our theoretical (but not practical) cognition. Rather than understand “absolute knowing” as the achievement of some ultimate “God's-eye view” of everything, the philosophical analogue to the connection with God sought in religion, revisionists see it as the accession to a mode of self-critical thought that has finally abandoned all non-questionable mythical “givens,” and which will only countenance reason-giving argument as justification. However we understand this, absolute knowing is the standpoint to which Hegel has hoped to bring the reader in this complex work. This is the “standpoint of science,” the standpoint from which philosophy proper commences, and it commences in Hegel's next book, the Science of Logic.

3.2 Science of Logic

Hegel's Science of Logic, the three constituent “books” of which appeared in 1812, 1813, and 1816 respectively, is a work that few contemporary logicians would recognise as a work of logic, but it is not meant as a treatise in formal (or “general” ) logic. Rather, its provenance is to be found in what Kant had called “transcendental logic,” and which is more akin to what now is termed “epistemic” logic. In this sense it stands as a successor to Kant's “transcendental deduction of the categories” in the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant attempted to “deduce” a list of those non-empirical concepts, the “categories,” which he believed to be presupposed by the empirical judgments of finite, discursive knowers like ourselves.

A glance at the table of contents of Science of Logic reveals the same triadic structuring noted in the Phenomenology. At the highest level of its branching structure there are three “books,” devoted to the doctrines of “being,” “essence,” and “concept” respectively. In turn, each book has three sections, each section containing three chapters, and so on. In general each of these nodes deals with some particular category or “thought determination,” sometimes the first subheading under a node having the same name as the node itself. To some extent, the treatment of the syllogism found in Book 3 (and following Aristotle's three-termed schematism of the syllogistic structure) might be seen as providing a retrospective justification for this structuring, Hegel's idea being that all rigorous thought about anything must grasp it in terms of the fundamental thought determinations of “singularity,” “particularity,” and “universality.” (This combination may, in fact, reflect the post-Kantians' re-interpretation of Kant's taxonomy of the basic components of cognition -- the division of mental representation into “singular” intuitions and “general” concepts. Fichte had understood that Kant equivocates over the relation of “sensation” to “intuition” : sometimes Kant treats sensations as parts of intuitive representations (their “matter” ) and sometimes as non-representational states of the subject somehow “corresponding to” such matter. Kant's two-termed account therefore gets rearticulated as a three-termed account. In the later nineteenth century, no less a logician than Charles Sanders Peirce came to a similar idea about the fundamentally trinary structure of the categories of thought.)

Reading into the first chapter of Book 1, “Being,” it is quickly seen that the Logic repeats the movements of the first chapters of the Phenomenology, now, however, at the level of “thought” rather than conscious experience. Thus “being” is the thought determination with which the work commences because it at first seems to be the most “immediate,” fundamental determination characterising any possible thought content at all. It apparently has no internal structure (in the way that “bachelor,” say, has a structure containing further concepts “male” and “unmarried"). Again parallel to the Phenomenology, it is the effort of thought to make such contents explicit that both undermines them and brings about a new contents. “Being” seems “immediate” but reflection reveals that it itself is, in fact, only meaningful in opposition to another concept, “nothing.” In fact, the attempt to think “being” as immediate, and so as not mediated by its opposing concept “nothing,” has so deprived it of any determinacy or meaning at all that it effectively becomes nothing. That is, on reflection it is grasped as having passed over into its “negation” . Thus, while “being” and “nothing” seem both absolutely distinct and opposed, from another point of view they appear the same as no criterion can be invoked which differentiates them. The only way out of this paradox is to posit a third category, “becoming,” which seems to save thinking from paralysis because it accommodates both concepts: “becoming” contains “being” and “nothing” since when something “becomes” it passes, as it were, between nothingness and being. That is, when something becomes it seems to posses aspects of both being and nothingness.

In general this is how the Logic proceeds: seeking its most basic and universal determination, thought posits a category to be reflected upon, finds then that this collapses due to a contradiction generated, but then seeks a further category with which to make retrospective sense of that contradiction. This new category is more complex as it has internal structure in the way that “becoming” contains “being” and “nothing” as moments. But in turn the new category will generate some further contradictory negation and again the demand will arise for a further concept which will reconcile these opposed concepts by incorporating them as moments.

In this way the categorical infrastructure to thought becomes unpacked with only the use of those resources available to thought itself, its capacity to make its contents determinate (i.e., clear and distinct) and its refusal to tolerate contradiction. As has been mentioned, Hegel's logic might best be considered as a “transcendental” not a “formal” logic. Rather than treating the pure “form” of thought that has been abstracted from any possible content, transcendental logic treats thought that already possesses a certain type of content that Kant had called (predictably) “transcendental content.” This was that non-empirical but nevertheless intuitive element of “content” that was implicit in our thought, given that it was the thought of a particular kind of thinker, whose cognition about the world was restricted to the capacity to apply general concepts to singular and immediate empirical “intuitions.” It would seem to be this difference to traditional formal logic that underlies the contrast between the conceptual structure generated here, and that of the traditional “Tree of Porphyry” that results from the Platonic “method of division.” In the traditional structure, a more general concept is divided into more specific ones by means of some differentiating characteristic, in the way, for example, that the more general concept “animal” can be differentiated into “vertebrates” and “invertebrates.” In such a structure, the direction of conceptual specificity, and conceptual containment are reversed: a concept at any level will “contain,” as sub-concepts, all members of the chain of more abstract concepts standing “above” it. Thus if the concept “animal” is divided into the contraries “vertebrate” and “invertebrate,” each will in turn “contain” the superordinating concept “animal” and thereby in turn contain every concept that is contained within (and stands above) “animal.” In contrast, in Hegel's conceptual structure, reflection on a concept produces its negation in a type of internal division, and then both concept and negation become contained as “moments” in the more specific concept that is posited to resolve the paradox of that internal negation.

If Hegel's is a transcendental logic, however, it is clearly different from that of Kant's. For Kant, transcendental logic was the logic governing the thought of finite thinkers like ourselves, whose cognition was constrained by the necessity of applying general discursive concepts to the singular contents given in sensory intuitions, and he kept open the possibility that there could be a kind of thinker not so constrained -- God, for example, whose thought could apply directly to the world in a type of “intellectual” intuition. Again, opinions divide as to how Hegel's approach to logic relates to that of Kant. Traditionalists see Hegel as treating the finite thought of individual human discursive intellects as a type of “distributed” vehicle for the classically conceived infinite and intuitive thought of God. Non-traditionalists, in contrast, see the post-Kantians as removing the last residual remnant of the mythical idea of transcendent godly thought from Kant's approach. On their account, the very opposition that Kant has between finite human thought and infinite godly thought is suspect, and the removal of this mythical obstacle allows an expanded role for “transcendental content.” Regardless of how we interpret this however, it is important to grasp that for Hegel logic is not simply a science of the form of our thoughts but is also a science of actual “content” as well, and as such is a type of ontology. Thus it is not just about the concepts “being,” “nothing,” “becoming” and so on, but about being, nothing, becoming and so on, themselves. This in turn is linked to Hegel's radically non-representationalist (and in some sense “direct realist” ) understanding of thought. The world is not “represented” in thought by a type of “proxy” standing for it, but rather is presented, exhibited, or made manifest in it. (In recent analytic philosophy, John McDowell has presented an account of thought with this type of character, and has explicitly drawn a parallel to the approach of Hegel.)

The thought determinations of Book 1 lead eventually into those of Book 2, “The Doctrine of Essence.” Naturally the structures implicit in “essence” thinking are more developed than those of “being” thinking. Crucially, the contrasting pair “essence” and “appearance” allow the thought of some underlying reality which manifests itself through a different overlying appearance, a relation not able to be captured in the simpler “being” structures. Given the ontological dimension of Hegel's logic, its various stages are meant to coincide roughly with actual ontologies encountered in a history of metaphysics. Thus the metaphysics of Parmenides and Heraclitus, for example, line up with the thought determinations “being” and “becoming” at the beginning of Being-logic while Essence-logic culminates in concepts bound up with modern forms of substance metaphysics as found in Spinoza and Leibniz.

Book 3, “The Doctrine of Concept” effects a shift from the “Objective Logic” of Books 1 and 2, to “Subjective Logic,” and metaphysically coincides with a shift to the modern subject-based ontology of Kant. Just as Kantian philosophy is founded on a conception of objectivity secured by conceptual coherence, Concept-logic commences with the concept of “concept” itself! While in the two books of objective logic, the movement had been between particular concepts, “being,” “nothing,” “becoming” etc., in the subjective logic, the conceptual relations are grasped at a meta-level, such that the concept “concept” treated in Chapter 1 of section 1 (“Subjectivity” ) passes over into that of “judgment” in Chapter 2, as judgments are the larger wholes within which concepts themselves get related to each other. When the anti-foundationalism and holism of the Phenomenology is recalled, it will come as no surprise that the concept of judgment passes over into that of “syllogism”: for Hegel just as a concept gains its determinacy in the context of the judgments within which it is applied, so too do judgements gain their determinacy within larger patterns of inference. When Hegel declares the syllogism to be “the truth” of the judgment, he might be thought, as has been suggested by Robert Brandom, to be advocating a view somewhat akin to contemporary “inferentialist” approaches to semantics. On these approaches, an utterance gains its semantic content not from any combination of its already meaningful sub-sentential components, but from the particular inferential “commitments and entitlements” acquired when it is offered to others in practices presupposing the asking for and giving of reasons. Thought of in terms of the framework of Kant's “transcendental logic,” Hegel's position would be akin to allowing inferences -- “syllogisms” -- a role in the determination of “transcendental content,” a role which inference definitely does not have in Kant.

We might see then how the different ways of approaching Hegel's logic will be reflected in the interpretation given to the puzzling claim in Book 3 concerning the syllogism becoming “concrete” and “pregnant with” a content that has necessary existence. In contrast with Kant, Hegel seems to go beyond a “transcendental deduction” of the formal conditions of experience and thought and to a deduction of their material conditions. Traditionalists will see here something akin to the “ontological argument” of medieval theology in which the existence of something seems to have been necessitated by its concept -- an argument undermined by Kant's criticism of the treatment of existence as a predicate. In Hegel's version, it would be said, the objective existence that God achieves in the world has been necessitated by his essential self-consciousness. The revisionist reading, in contrast, would have to interpret this aspect of Hegel's logic differently.

As already noted, for Hegel, the logic of inference has a “transcendental content” in a way analogous to that possessed by the logic of judgment in Kant's transcendental logic. It is this which is behind the idea that the treatment of the formal syllogisms of inference will lead to a consideration of those syllogisms as “pregnant with content.” But for logic to be truly ontological a further step “beyond” Kant is necessary. For the post-Kantians, Kant had been mistaken in restricting the conditions of experience and thought to a “subjective” status. Kant's idea of our knowledge as restricted to the world as it is for us requires us to have a concept of the noumenal as that which cannot be known, the concept “noumenon” playing the purely negative role of giving a determinate sense to “phenomenon” by specifying its limits. That is, for Kant we need to be able to think of our experience and knowledge as finite and conditioned, and this is achieved in terms of a concept of a realm we cannot know. But, the post-Kantian objection goes, if the concept “noumenon” is to provide some sort of boundary to that of “phenomenon,” then it cannot be the empty concept that Kant supposed. Only a concept with a content can determine the limits of the content of some another concept (as when our empirical concept of “river,” for example, is made determinate by opposing empirical concepts like “stream” or “creek”). The positing of a noumenal realm must be the positing of a realm about which we can have some understanding.

This need felt by the post-Kantians for having a contentful concept of the “noumenal” or the “in itself” can also be seen from the inverse perspective. For Kant, sensation testifies to the existence of an objective noumenal world beyond us, but this world cannot be known as such; we can only know that world as it appears to us from within the constraints of the subjective conditions of our experience and thought. But for Hegel this is to attribute to a wholly inadequate form of knowledge -- sensation or feeling -- a power that is being denied to a much better form of knowledge -- that articulated by concepts. To think that our inarticulate sensations or feelings give us a truer account of reality than that of which we are capable via the scientific exercise of conceptualised thought indicates a type of irrationalist potential within Kantian thought, a potential that Hegel thought was being realised by the approach of his romantic contemporaries. The rational kernel of Kant's approach, then, had to be carried beyond the limits of a method in which the conditions of thought and experience were regarded as merely subjective. Rather than restrict its scope to “formal” conditions of experience and thought, it had to be understood as capable of revealing the objective or material conditions. Transcendental logic must thereby become ontological. It may be significant here that, as some recent studies of Kant's own later work (the Opus Postumum) suggest, Kant himself seems to have revised his own approach such that something like a deduction of the material conditions of thought was now considered as the proper province of transcendental philosophy.

3.3 Philosophy of Right

Like the Science of Logic, the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences is itself divided into three parts: a Logic; a Philosophy of Nature; and a Philosophy of Spirit. The same triadic pattern in the Philosophy of Spirit results in the philosophies of subjective spirit, objective spirit, and absolute spirit. The first of these constitutes Hegel's philosophy of mind, the last, his philosophy of art, religion, and philosophy itself. The philosophy of objective spirit concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which “spirit” is objectified. The book entitled Elements of the Philosophy of Right which Hegel published as a textbook for his lectures at Berlin essentially corresponds to a more developed version of the section on “Objective Spirit” in the Philosophy of Spirit.

The Philosophy of Right (as it is more commonly called) can, and has been, read as a political philosophy which stands independently of the system, but it is clear that Hegel intended it to be read against the background of the developing conceptual determinations of the Logic. The text proper starts from the conception of a singular willing subject (grasped from its own first-person point of view) as the bearer of “abstract right.” While this conception of the individual willing subject with some kind of fundamental right is in fact the starting point of many modern political philosophies (such as that of Locke, for example) the fact that Hegel commences here does not testify to any ontological assumption that the consciously willing and right-bearing individual is the basic atom from which all society can be understood as constructed -- an idea at the heart of standard “social contract” theories. Rather, this is merely the most “immediate” starting point of Hegel's presentation and corresponds to analogous starting places of the Logic. Just as the categories of the Logic develop in a way meant to demonstrate that what had at the start been conceived as simple is in fact only made determinate in virtue of its being part of some larger structure or process, here too it is meant to be shown that any simple willing and right-bearing subject only gains its determinacy in virtue of a place it finds for itself in a larger social, and ultimately historical, structure or process. Thus even a contractual exchange (the minimal social interaction for contract theorists) is not to be thought simply as an occurrence consequent upon the existence of two beings with natural wants and some natural calculative rationality; rather, the system of interaction within which individual exchanges take place (the economy) will be treated holistically as a culturally-shaped form of social life within which the actual wants of individuals as well as their reasoning powers are given determinate forms.

Here too it becomes apparent in Hegel's treatment of property and the exchange contract that the notion of recognition plays a crucial role in his general conception of the relation of individuals to each other and to society as a whole. A contractual exchange of commodities between two individuals itself involves an implicit act of recognition in as much as each, in giving something to the other in exchange for what they want, are thereby recognizing them as a proprietor of that thing, or, more properly, of the inalienable value attaching to it. By contrast, such proprietorship would be denied rather than recognised in fraud or theft -- forms of “wrong” (Unrecht) in which right is negated rather than acknowledged or posited. Thus what differentiates property from mere possession is that it is grounded in a relation of reciprocal recognition between two willing subjects. Moreover, it is in the exchange relation that we can see what it means for Hegel for individual subjects to share a “common will” -- an idea which will have important implications with respect to the difference of Hegel's conception of the state from that of Rousseau. Such an interactive constitution of the common will means that for Hegel such an identity of will is achieved because of not in spite of a co-existing difference between the particular wills of the subjects involved: while contracting individuals both “will” the same exchange, at a more concrete level, they do with different ends in mind. Each wants something different from the exchange.

Hegel passes from the abstract individualism of “Abstract Right” to the social determinacies of “Sittlichkeit” or “Ethical Life” via considerations first of “wrong” (the negation of right) and its punishment (the negation of wrong, and hence the “negation of the negation” of the original right), and then of “morality,” conceived more or less as an internalisation of the external legal relations. Consideration of Hegel's version of the retributivist approach to punishment affords a good example of his use of the logic of “negation.” In punishing the criminal the state makes it clear to its members that it is the acknowledgment of right per se that is essential to developed social life: the significance of “acknowledging another's right” in the contractual exchange cannot be, as it at first might have appeared to the participants, simply that of being a way of each getting what he or she wants from the other. Hegel's treatment of punishment also brings out the continuity of his way of conceiving of the structure and dynamics of the social world with that of Kant, as Kant too, in his Metaphysics of Morals had employed the idea of the state's punitive action as a negating of the original criminal act. Kant's idea, conceived on the model of the physical principle of action and reaction, was structured by the category of “community” or reciprocal interaction, and was conceived as involving what he called “real opposition.” Such an idea of opposed dynamic forces seems to form something of a model for Hegel's idea of contradiction and the starting point for his conception of reciprocal recognition. Nevertheless, clearly Hegel articulates the structures of recognition in more complex ways than those derivable from Kant's category of community.

First of all, in Hegel's analysis of Sittlichkeit the type of sociality found in the market-based “civil society” is to be understood as dependent upon and in contrastive opposition with the more immediate form found in the institution of the family -- a form of sociality mediated by a quasi-natural inter-subjective recognition rooted in sentiment and feeling: love. In the family the particularity of each individual tends to be absorbed into the social unit, giving this manifestation of Sittlichkeit a one-sidedness that is the inverse of that found in market relations in which participants grasp themselves in the first instance as separate individuals who then enter into relationships that are external to them.

These two opposite but interlocking principles of social existence provide the basic structures in terms of which the component parts of the modern state are articulated and understood. As both contribute particular characteristics to the subjects involved in them, part of the problem for the rational state will be to ensure that each of these two principles mediate the other, each thereby mitigating the one-sidedness of the other. Thus, individuals who encounter each other in the “external” relations of the market place and who have their subjectivity shaped by such relations also belong to families where they are subject to opposed influences. Moreover, even within the ensemble of production and exchange mechanisms of civil society individuals will belong to particular “estates” (the agricultural estate, that of trade and industry, and the “universal estate” of civil servants), whose internal forms of sociality will show family-like features.

Although the actual details of Hegel's “mapping” of the categorical structures of the Logic onto the Philosophy of Right are far from clear, the general motivation is apparent. As has been mentioned above, Hegel's logical categories can be read as an attempt to provide a schematic account of the material (rather than formal) conditions required for developed self-consciousness. Thus we might regard the various “syllogisms” of Hegel's Subjective Logic as attempts to chart the skeletal structures of those different types of recognitive inter-subjectivity necessary to sustain various aspects of rational cognitive and conative functioning (“self-consciousness”). From this perspective, we might see his “logical” schematisation of the modern “rational” state as a way of displaying just those sorts of institutions that a state must provide if it is to answer Rousseau's question of the form of association needed for the formation and expression of the “general will.”

Concretely, for Hegel it is representation of the estates within the legislative bodies that is to achieve this. As the estates of civil society group their members according to their common interests, and as the deputies elected from the estates to the legislative bodies give voice to those interests within the deliberative processes of legislation, we might see how the outcome of this process might be considered to give expression to the general interest. But Hegel's “republicanism” is here cut short by his invocation of the familial principle: such representative bodies can only provide the content of the legislation to a constitutional monarch who must add to it the form of the royal decree -- an individual “I will ….” To declare that for Hegel the monarch plays only a “symbolic” role here is to miss the fundamentally idealist complexion of his political philosophy. The expression of the general will in legislation cannot be thought of as an outcome of some quasi-mechanical process: it must be “willed.” If legislation is to express the general will, citizens must recognize it as expressing their wills; and this means, recognising it as willed. The monarch's explicit “I will” is thus needed to close this recognitive circle, lest legislation look like a mechanical compromise resulting from a clash of interests, and so as actively willed by nobody. Thus while Hegel is critical of standard “social contract” theories, his own conception of the state is still clearly a complicated transformation of those of Rousseau and Kant.

Perhaps one of the most influential parts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right concerns his analysis of the contradictions of the unfettered capitalist economy. On the one hand, Hegel agreed with Adam Smith that the interlinking of productive activities allowed by the modern market meant that “subjective selfishness” turned into a ”contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else.” But this did not mean that he accepted Smith's idea that this “general plenty” produced thereby diffused (or “trickled down” ) though the rest of society. From within the type of consciousness generated within civil society, in which individuals are grasped as “bearers of rights” abstracted from the particular concrete relationships to which they belong, Smithean optimism may seem justified. But this simply attests to the one-sidedness of this type of abstract thought, and the need for it to be mediated by the type of consciousness based in the family in which individuals are grasped in terms of the way they belong to the social body. In fact, the unfettered operations of the market produces a class caught in a spiral of poverty. Starting from this analysis, Marx later used it as evidence of the need to abolish the individual proprietorial rights at the heart of Hegel's “civil society” and socialise the means of production. Hegel, however, did not draw this conclusion. His conception of the exchange contract as a form of recognition that played an essential role within the state's capacity to provide the conditions for the existence of rational and free-willing subjects would certainly prevent such a move. Rather, the economy was to be contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state, and its social effects offset by welfarist state intervention.

Bibliography

Collected Works:

Gesammelte Werke, Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed., (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968-).

Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl Markus, ed., (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971).

English Translations of Key Texts:

Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948).

The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977).

Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).

The Encyclopedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991).

Philosophy of Nature (Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences), trans. Michael John Perry, 3 vols, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970).

Hegel's Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Political Writings, ed. Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet, trans. H. B Nisbet, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Mill (1806 - 1873)

John Stuart Mill, British philosopher-economist, the son of James Mill, had a great impact on 19th-century British thought, not only in philosophy and economics but also in the areas of political science, logic, and ethics. Mill was early introduced to the Benthamites, who actively pursued various social and political reforms along the utilitarian lines laid down by Jeremy Bentham. James Mill personally undertook the education of his precocious son, beginning with Greek at age three, with the aim of preparing him intellectually for eventual leadership of the group. At the age of 17 he had completed advanced and thorough courses of study in Greek literature and philosophy, chemistry, botany, psychology, and law. In 1822 he began to work as a clerk for his father in the examiner's office of the India House, and six years later he was promoted to the post of assistant examiner. Until 1856 he had charge of the company's relations with the princely states of India. In the latter year, Mill became chief of the examiner's office, a position he held until the dissolution of the company in 1858, when he retired. Mill lived in Saint Véran, near Avignon in France, until 1865, when he entered Parliament as a member from Westminster. Failing to secure reelection in the general election of 1868, he returned to France, where he studied and wrote until his death at Avignon on May 8, 1873.

In his early twenties Mill experienced a "mental crisis," in which he was overcome by intense depression and plagued by doubts concerning the causes to which he had previously been devoted, including the Benthamite philosophy of which he had become a leading spokesman. He believed that his education had been unduly narrow, and also feared that his ability to experience emotional excitement was inadequate. Although this period passed, it left a permanent imprint on Mill. Although he remained a Benthamite, he revised his earlier beliefs in important respects.

In 1830, Mill was introduced to Harriet Taylor, a woman who was married and the mother of several children. They developed a deep, unconventional, and probably platonic friendship that resulted in marriage 21 years later, following the death of her husband. Mill attributed to his wife, who died in 1858, a decisive influence on all his later work.

Mill stands as a bridge between the 18th-century concern for liberty, reason, and science and the 19th-century trend toward empiricism and collectivism. Mill's earliest important philosophical work, the System of Logic (1843), contains a valuable discussion of the epistemological principles underlying empiricism. Five years later came the Principles of Political Economy (1848). Mill is mainly remembered today, however, for his contributions to ethical and social theory.

Mill enthusiastically accepted the ethical system of Bentham, admiring Bentham rejection of intuitive modes of reasoning in morals for scientific methods. He also believed with Bentham that all our conduct is determined, and that all our deliberate acts are motivated by the belief that a certain line of conduct will lead to our own greatest good. Our decisions rest upon our characters and beliefs. He did, however, hold that we can to a degree correct our beliefs and improve our characters if we want to do so, which he thought was really inspiriting in the (incorrect, he believed) doctrine of free will. The fundamental principles of his ethics are that 1) pleasure alone is good or desirable in itself, and 2) actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of all concerned, wrong as they tend to promote unhappiness. He tries to connect pleasure or happiness with being the object of a desire and being good in itself. Mill makes many distinctions and conveys his own preferences regarding what is desirable and good; some desires are primitive, others the result of experience and self-discipline. He points to the qualitative differences between kinds of pleasure and says that we ought to give preference to the higher pleasures, which include the social and generous pleasures and those of the cultivated feelings and intellect. Regarding actions he states that some will bring happiness in the long run and others will not, and we ought to choose the action which looks most likely to produce the most happiness for all concerned in the action. One should be guided by the general rules which have been formulated as a result of the long experience of men in society. These rules can be tested by the philosopher, and rules are only valid if they pass the utilitarian test.

His political views come through in On Liberty (1859), in which he argues that freedom is being endangered by the power of public opinion. Society has a right to make laws for that part of one's conduct which may damage the interests of others, but in the private sphere the question of whether to regulate is an improper one. He argues that censorship could not be expedient in any civilized society. He believed in and later worked toward a government based on the working classes, whom he believed could be educated in time, and constitutional safeguards for the rights of women and minorities.

In his essays on natural theology Mill defends the possibility of a mind existing without a body, hence the possibility of immortality. He also examines the question whether the world we know it is the work of a divine intelligence. The argument from design carries some weight for him. At this point Mill switches the question from the region of belief to the region of simple hope. Without actual belief, a man may contemplate the notion of divine perfection. This has a practical value. These reflections are found in his letters and connect with his early serious Wordsworthian concern for the cultivation of the best that is to be found in human feeling and imagination. His Essays on Religion, which appeared after his death, surprised his more downright agnostic and atheistic friends.

Mill, John Stuart (1806 - 1873)

son of James Mill.

He was the greatest British philosopher of the nineteenth century, bringing Britain's traditions of empiricism and liberalism to their Victorian apogee.

The System of Logic, a product of his thirties, published in 1843, made his reputation as a philosopher. The Principles of Political Economy, of 1848, was a synthesis of classical economics which defined liberal orthodoxy for at least a quarter of a century. His two best-known works of moral philosophy, On Liberty and Utilitarianism, appeared later - in 1859 and 1861. In the 1860s he was briefly a Member of Parliament, and throughout his life was involved in many radical causes. Among them was his enduring support for women's rights - see The Subjection of Women of 1869.

The leading element in Mill's thought is his lifelong effort to weave together the insights of enlightenment and romanticism. He subscribed unwaveringly to what he called the 'school of experience and association'. He denied that there is knowledge independent of experience and held that attitudes and beliefs are the products of psychological laws of association. His view of human beings is naturalistic and his ethics is utilitarian. But he redesigned the liberal edifice built on these foundations to the romantic patterns of the nineteenth century. For these he was himself one of the great spokesmen. He learned much of the historical sociology which was so important to his liberalism from Frenchmen; but it was to German romanticism, via his Coleridgean friends, that he owes his deepest ethical theme - that of human nature as the seat of individuality and autonomy, capable of being brought to fruition through the culture of the whole man.

The controversy over Mill's achievement has always centred on whether the synthesis he sought, of enlightenment and romantic-idealist themes, is a possible one. Kant had argued that the naturalism of the Enlightenment subverted reason, and idealist philosophers of the nineteenth century followed him in that. Kant and Mill do in fact agree on a vital aspect of this question. They agree that if the mind is only a part of nature, no knowledge of the natural world can be a priori. Either all knowledge is a posteriori, grounded in experience, or there is no knowledge. Any grounds for asserting a proposition that has real content must be empirical grounds. However, much more important is the difference between them: whereas Kant thought knowledge could not be grounded on such a basis, and thus rejected naturalism, Mill thought it could. This radically empiricist doctrine is the thesis of the System of Logic.

There Mill draws a distinction between 'verbal' and 'real' propositions, and between 'merely apparent' and 'real' inferences. The distinction corresponds, as Mill himself notes, to that which Kant makes between analytic and synthetic judgements. But Mill applies it with greater strictness than anyone had done before, insisting with greater resolution that merely apparent inferences have no genuine cognitive content. He points out that pure mathematics, and logic itself, contain real propositions and inferences with genuine cognitive content. This clear assertion is central to the System of Logic, and the basis of its continuing importance in the empiricist tradition. For if Mill is also right in holding that naturalism entails that no real proposition is a priori, he has shown the implications of naturalism to be radical indeed. Not only mathematics but logic itself will be empirical.

His strategy is a pincer movement. One pincer is an indirect argument. If logic did not contain real inferences, all deductive reasoning would be a petitio principii, a begging of the question - it could produce no new knowledge. Yet clearly it does produce new knowledge. So logic must contain real inferences. The other pincer is a direct semantic analysis of basic logical laws. It shows them to be real and not merely verbal. The same strategy is applied to mathematics. If it was merely verbal, mathematical reasoning would be a petitio principii. But a detailed semantic analysis shows that it does contain real propositions.

Why do we think these real propositions in logic and mathematics to be a priori? Because we find their negations inconceivable, or derive them, by principles whose unsoundness we find inconceivable, from premisses whose negation we find inconceivable. Mill thought he could explain these facts about unthinkability, or imaginative unrepresentability, in associationist terms. His explanations are none too convincing, but his philosophical point still stands: the step from our inability to represent to ourselves the negation of a proposition to acceptance of its truth calls for justification. Moreover, the justification itself must be a priori if it is to show that the proposition is known a priori. (Thus Mill is prepared, for example, to concede the reliability of geometrical intuition: but he stresses that its reliability is an empirical fact, itself known inductively.)

All reasoning is empirical. What then is the basis of reasoning? Epistemologically, historically, and psychologically, Mill holds, it is enumerative induction, simple generalization from experience. We spontaneously agree in reasoning that way, and in holding that way of reasoning to be sound. The proposition 'Enumerative induction is a valid mode of reasoning' is not a verbal proposition. But nor is it grounded in an a priori intuition. All that Mill will say for it is that people in general, and the reader in particular, in fact agree on reflection in accepting it. It is on that basis alone that he rests its claim.

He does not take seriously Hume's sceptical problem of induction; his concern in the System of Logic is rather to find ways of improving the reliability of inductive reasoning:

if induction by simple enumeration were an invalid process, no process grounded on it would be valid; just as no reliance could be placed on telescopes, if we could not trust our eyes. But though a valid process, it is a fallible one, and fallible in very different degrees: if therefore we can substitute for the more fallible forms of the process, an operation grounded on the same process in a less fallible form, we shall have effected a very material improvement. And this is what scientific induction does.

So Mill's question is not a sceptical but an internal one - why is it that some inductions are more trustworthy than others? He answers by means of a natural history of induction, which traces how enumerative induction is internally vindicated by its actual success in establishing regularities, and how it eventually gives rise to more searching methods of investigation.

The origins are 'spontaneous' and 'unscientific' inductions about particular unconnected natural phenomena. They accumulate, interweave, and are not disconfirmed by further experience. As they accumulate and interweave, they justify the second-order inductive conclusion that all phenomena are subject to uniformity, and, more specifically, that all have discoverable sufficient conditions. In this less vague form, the principle of general uniformity becomes, given Mill's analysis of causation, the law of universal causation. This conclusion in turn provides (Mill believes) the grounding assumption for a new style of reasoning about nature-eliminative induction.

Here the assumption that a type of phenomenon has uniform causes, together with a (revisable) assumption about what its possible causes are, initiates a comparative inquiry in which the actual cause is identified by elimination. Mill formulates the logic of this eliminative reasoning in his 'methods of empirical inquiry'. The improved scientific induction which results spills back on to the principle of universal causation on which it rests, and raises its certainty to a new level. That in turn raises our confidence in the totality of particular enumerative inductions from which the principle is derived. This analysis of the 'inductive process' is one of Mill's most elegant achievements.

Mill and Hume then are both naturalistic radicals, but in quite different ways - Hume by virtue of his scepticism, Mill by virtue of his empiricist analysis of deduction. The only cognitive dispositions which Mill recognizes as primitively legitimate are the disposition to rely on memory and the habit of enumerative induction. The whole of science, he thinks, is built from the materials of experience and memory by disciplined employment of this habit.

This is Mill's inductivism - the view that enumerative induction is the only ultimate method of inference which puts us in possession of new truths. Is he right in thinking it to be so? In his own time the question produced an important, if confused, controversy between him and William Whewell. Whewell argued that fundamental to scientific inquiry was the hypothetical method, in which one argues to the truth of a hypothesis from the fact that it would explain observed phenomena. Mill, on the other hand, could not accept that the mere fact that a hypothesis accounted for the data in itself provided a reason for thinking it true. The point he appealed to is a powerful one: it is always possible that a body of data may be explained equally well by more than one hypothesis.

What he does not see, and this is one of the points of weakness in his philosophy, is how much must be torn from the fabric of our belief if inductivism is applied strictly. Thus, for example, while his case for empiricism about logic and mathematics is very strong, it is his methodology of science which then forces him to hold that we know basic logical and mathematical principles only by an enumerative induction. That is desperately implausible; accepting the hypothetical method would be one, though only one, possible remedy.

Inductivism also plays a key role in Mill's metaphysics. He sets this out in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) - a detailed criticism of the Scottish philosopher who had attempted to bring together the views of Reid and Kant. Here Mill endorses a doctrine which was then accepted, as he says, on all sides (though it would now be treated with greater mistrust). The doctrine is that our knowledge and conception of objects external to consciousness consists entirely in the conscious states they excite in us, or that we can imagine them exciting in us.

This leaves open the question whether objects exist independently of consciousness. It may be held that there are such objects, although we can only know them by hypothesis from their effects on us. Mill rejects this view - as, given his inductivism, he must. Instead he argues that external objects amount to nothing more than 'permanent possibilities of sensation'. The possibilities are 'permanent' in the sense that they obtain whether or not realized; they would occur if an antecedent condition obtained. (As well as 'permanent' Mill uses other terms, such as 'certified' or 'guaranteed'.)

Our knowledge of mind, like our knowledge of matter, Mill thinks to be 'entirely relative'. But he baulks at resolving it into a series of feelings and possibilities of feeling. For 'the thread of consciousness' contains memories and expectations as well as sensations. To remember or expect a feeling is not simply to believe that it has existed or will exist; it is to believe that I have experienced or will experience that feeling. Thus if the mind is to be a series of feelings, we would, he thinks, be forced to conclude that it is a series that can be aware of itself as a series. This drives him to recognize in mind, or self, a reality greater than the existence as a permanent possibility which is the only reality he concedes to matter. He fails to note that the doctrine that mind resolves into a series of feelings need not literally identify selves with series: it paraphrases talk of selves in terms of talk of series.

Discounting this uncertainty about what to say of the self, all that ultimately exists in Mill's view is experience in a temporal order. But he claims this to be consistent with common-sense realism, and he continues to see minds as proper parts of a natural order. The difficulties of this begin to emerge when we ask whether the experiences referred to in Mill's metaphysics are the very same as those referred to by common sense - and explained by physical antecedents. The same difficulties emerge for later phenomenalists, but Mill never addresses them.

To the succeeding generation of philosophers, who took Kant's philosophy seriously, Mill's naturalism seemed thoroughly incoherent. He fails to see the need for a synthetic a priori to render any knowledge possible, even though he gives an account of real propositions and inferences which agrees in essentials with Kant. On top of that, in accepting phenomenalism he accepts a doctrine which must lead to a transcendental view of consciousness, yet he remains determinedly naturalistic in his view of the mind. Perhaps present-day naturalism is finding ways of avoiding this second impasse, by being more rigorously naturalistic about experience than Mill was. But it has yet to cope clearly with the first.

In ethics and politics Mill's premisses remain those of enlightenment humanism. Value resides in the well-being achieved within individual lives; the interests of all make an equal claim on the consideration of all. Happiness is most effectively attained when society leaves people free to pursue their own ends subject to rules established for the general good. A science of man will ground rational policies for social improvement.

His reason for thinking that happiness is the only ultimate human end is just like his reason for thinking enumerative induction is the only ultimate principle of reasoning. He appeals to reflective agreement, in this case of desires rather than reasoning dispositions: 'the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so.'

But do we not, in theory and in practice, desire things under ends other than the end of happiness, for example under the idea of duty? Mill's response to this question has strength and subtlety. He acknowledges that we can will against inclination: 'instead of willing the thing because we desire it, we often desire it only because we will it'. There are, he agrees, conscientious actions, flowing not from any unmotivated desire but solely from acceptance of duty. But his point is that when we unmotivatedly desire a thing we desire it under the idea of it as pleasant. He further distinguishes between desiring a thing as 'part' of our happiness and desiring it as a means to our happiness. Virtuous ends can be a part of happiness: consider, for example, the difference between a spontaneously generous man and a conscientious giver. The first wants to give because he takes pleasure in giving. The second gives from a 'confirmed will to do right'. The benefit of another is for the first, but not the second, a 'part' of his own happiness.

The virtues can become a part of our happiness, and for Mill they ideally should be so. That ideal state is not an unrealistic one, for the virtues have a natural basis and a moral education can build on it by association. More generally, people can come to a deeper understanding of happiness through education and experience. Mill holds that some forms of happiness are inherently preferred as finer by those able to experience them fully - but these valuations are still in his view made from within the perspective of happiness, not from outside it.

So Mill deepened the Benthamite understanding of happiness; however, he never adequately examined the principle of utility itself. It was a philosopher of the generation after Mill's, Henry Sidgwick, who probed its groundings most deeply. But when we turn to Mill's conception of the relationship between the utility principle and the texture of norms by which day-to-day social life proceeds, we find him at his most impressive. His ability to combine abstract moral theory with the human understanding of a great political and social thinker here comes into its own. Benthamite radicalism lacks historical and sociological sense. The philosophes of the eighteenth century, 'attempting to new-model society without the binding forces which hold society together, met with such success as might have been expected'.

The utilitarian, he says, need not and cannot require that 'the test of conduct should also be the exclusive motive of it'. This historical and concrete aspect of Mill's utilitarianism is the key to his view of the institutions of justice and liberty; though his analysis of rights follows Bentham. A person has a right to a thing, he holds, if there is an obligation on society to protect him in his possession of that thing. But the obligation itself must be grounded in general utility.

The rights of justice reflect a class of exceptionally stringent obligations on society. They are obligations to provide to each person 'the essentials of human well-being'. The claim of justice is the 'claim we have on our fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence'. Because justice-rights protect those utilities which touch that groundwork they take priority over the direct pursuit of general utility as well as over the private pursuit of personal ends.

With liberty we find again that Mill's liberalism is grounded on a utilitarian base. He appeals to 'utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being'. In that respect, his liberalism stands opposed to the classical natural-rights liberalism of Locke. The famous principle which Mill enunciates in his On Liberty is intended to safeguard the individual's freedom to pursue his goals in his private domain: 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.'

Mill magnificently defends this principle of liberty on two grounds: it enables individuals to realize their individual potential in their own way, and, by liberating talents, creativity, and dynamism, it sets up the essential pre-condition for moral and intellectual progress. Yet the limitations of his Benthamite inheritance, despite the major enlargements he made to it, residually constrain him. His defence of the principle would have been still stronger if he had weakened (or liberalized) its foundation - by acknowledging the irreducible plurality of human ends and substituting for aggregate utility the generic concept of general good.

J.M.S.

Bibliography Fred R. Berger, Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London, 1984).

Wendy Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1991).

Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill (London, 1974).

Geoffrey Scarre, Logic and Reality in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Dordrecht, 1989).

John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London, 1989).

C. L. Ten, Mill on Liberty (Oxford, 1980).

Locke

John Locke, born on Aug. 29, 1632, in Somerset, England, was an English philosopher and political theorist. Locke was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he followed the traditional classical curriculum and then turned to the study of medicine and science, receiving a medical degree, but his interest in philosophy was reawakened by the study of Descartes. He then joined the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the earl of Shaftesbury, as a personal physician at first, becoming a close friend and advisor. Shaftesbury secured for Locke a series of minor government appointments. In 1669, in one of his official capacities, Locke wrote a constitution for the proprietors of the Carolina Colony in North America, but it was never put into effect. In 1671 Locke began to write his greatest work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which took nearly twenty years to complete since he was deeply engaged in Shaftesbury's political affairs. In 1675, after the liberal Shaftesbury had fallen from favor, Locke went to France. In 1679 he returned to England, but in view of his opposition to the Roman Catholicism favored by the English monarchy at that time, he soon found it expedient to return to the Continent. From 1683 to 1688 he lived in Holland, and following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the restoration of Protestantism to favor, Locke returned once more to England. The new king, William III, appointed Locke to the Board of Trade in 1696, a position from which he resigned because of ill health in 1700. He died in Oates on October 28, 1704.

Locke's Essay is one of the classical documents of British empirical philosophy. His official concern is with epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Locke sees the universe as made up of material bodies, which in turn are made of "insensible particles," which interact mechanically. There are also immaterial substances associated with human bodies. These bodies have sense organs, which when stimulated produce "ideas of sensation." These ideas are operated on by our minds to produce "ideas of reflection." These two types of ideas are the material of our thoughts, perception, and consciousness, which are all derived from experience; we can have no knowledge beyond our ideas. In perception, according to this view, we are not directly aware of physical objects; we are directly aware of the ideas that objects "cause" in us and that "represent" the objects in our consciousness. Our ideas of primary qualities of objects, or the mathematically determinable qualities of an object, such as shape, motion, weight, and number, actually exist in the world. Secondary qualities, those which arise from the senses, do not exist in objects as they exist in ideas. According to Locke, secondary qualities, such as taste, "are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce ideas in use by their primary qualities." When an object is perceived, a person's ideas of its shape and weight represent qualities to be found in the object itself. Color and taste, however, are not copies of anything in the object. Genuine knowledge cannot be found in natural science since the essence of physical objects that science studies cannot be known.

Locke is better known for his political thought. The first of the Two Treatises of Government is a refutation of the political views of Sir Robert Filmer. Filmer had argued that the authority of a king is equivalent to a father's authority over his children, derived from God's grant of authority to Adam. Locke argued that the father only has authority until the child becomes an adult, and that the king's subjects are not analogous to children. He also thought it was impossible to trace the descent of authority from Adam to the current King Charles II.

In the second treatise Locke set forth the view that societies emerge from a state of nature as a result of a contract made among individuals to submit themselves to a ruler or rulers. Against Hobbes, Locke argues that the ruler's rights as well as those of everyone are restrained by the laws of nature; the right to life, liberty, and property. The ruler's powers are given to him as a trust for the good of the citizens, and if the trust is broken his powers can be taken away. He believed that a monarchy with an assembly to hold the monarch to his trust was an ideal political arrangement. Unlike Hobbes he believed that principles of conduct were rational and humans could be trusted to follow those principles.

Locke's influence in modern philosophy has been profound and, with his application of empirical analysis to ethics, politics, and religion, he remains one of the most important and controversial philosophers of all time. Among his other works are Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).

Husserl (1859-1938)

Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher and founder of phenomenology. Husserl was born in Prossnitz, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), on April 8, 1859. He studied science, philosophy, and mathematics at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna and wrote his doctoral thesis on the calculus of variations. The main influence on Husserl's thought was the intentional psychology of Franz Brentano, under whom he studied in Vienna. He became interested in the psychological basis of mathematics and, shortly after becoming a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Halle, wrote his first book, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891). At that time he maintained that the truths of mathematics have validity regardless of the way people come to discover and believe in them.

Husserl then argued against his early position, which he called psychologism, in Logical Investigations (1900-01; trans. 1970). In this book he contended that the philosopher's task is to contemplate the essences of things, and that the essence of an object can be arrived at by systematically varying that object in the imagination. Husserl noted that consciousness is always directed toward something. He called this directedness intentionality and argued that consciousness contains ideal, unchanging structures called meanings, which determine what object the mind is directed toward at any given time.

During his tenure (1901-16) at the University of Göttingen, Husserl attracted many students, who began to form a distinct phenomenological school, and he wrote his most influential work, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913; trans. 1931). In this book Husserl introduced the term phenomenological reduction for his method of reflection on the meanings the mind employs when it contemplates an object. Because this method concentrates on meanings that are in the mind, whether or not the object present to consciousness actually exists, Husserl said the method involves "bracketing existence," that is, setting aside the question of the real existence of the contemplated object. He proceeded to give detailed analyses of the mental structures involved in perceiving particular types of objects, describing in detail, for instance, his perception of the apple tree in his garden. Thus, although phenomenology does not assume the existence of anything, it is nonetheless a descriptive discipline; according to Husserl, phenomenology is devoted, not to inventing theories, but rather to describing the "things themselves," which is not unlike the philosophy of Kant, an affinity of which Husserl himself was fully conscious.

After 1916 Husserl taught at the University of Freiburg. Phenomenology had been criticized as an essentially solipsistic method, confining the philosopher to the contemplation of private meanings, so in Cartesian Meditations (1931; trans. 1960), Husserl attempted to show how the individual consciousness can be directed toward other minds, society, and history. Husserl died in Freiburg on April 26, 1938.

Husserl's description of the consciousness of time presented in The Phenomenology of Inner Time-Consciousness (1928; Eng. trans., 1964), the revisions of his logical theory in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929; Eng. trans., 1969), and his later emphasis on the basic nature of humans' lived relationship with the world (Lebenswelt) in Experience and Judgment (1939; Eng. trans., 1973) have influenced philosophers in many different fields, the greatest perhaps on a younger colleague at Freiburg, Martin Heidegger. Husserl's relatively cognitive phenomenological method was transformed by Heidegger into an existentialism that dealt with the emotional and ethical significances of life as well as its perceptual, intellectual, and logical structures. Phenomenology remains one of the most vigorous tendencies in contemporary philosophy, and its impact has also been felt in theology, linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences.

Husserl

"Everything which is and has reality for me, that is, for man, exists only in my own consciousness."

Phenomenology

There is a thin, blurred line separating phenomenology and existentialism. Edmund Husserl was the leading thinker in the Phenomenological Movement, influencing most future existentialists either directly or indirectly. Husserl's phenomenology was a descriptive analysis of subjective processes. He described it as the intuitive study of essences.

According to Husserl, the goal of philosophy was to describe the data of consciousness without bias or prejudice, ignoring all metaphysical and scientific theories in order to accurately describe and analyze the data gathered by human senses and the mind. The students of Husserl summarized phenomenology as the study of "the things themselves."

The pursuit of essences was to be accomplished in phenomenology via three techniques: phenomenological reduction, eidetic reduction, and cognition analysis.

Phenomenological reduction, according to Husserl's teachings, is the exclusion from consideration of everything which is transcendent and anything else derived via scientific or logical inference. A phenomenologist would consider only what was immediately presented to consciousness. This is familiar to students of Jean-Paul Sartre, who suggested what you know of a person or item is all that you can evaluate. An object, even a person, is only what one sees and experiences of that object. The rest, Husserl suggested, was "bracketed out" from judgment. Husserl referred to this suspension of judgment as epoch.

As an example, via this theory, a color seen by one individual is known only to and by that one person. Measuring it scientifically, comparing to other colors, et cetera, do not truly change that what the individual sees is the only thing consciousness comprehends. The color experienced is the "pure phenomena", the scientific data are held in suspension, or epoch. Only the phenomenological knowledge is certain, and then only to the individual.

Eidetic reduction is the abstraction of essences. The essence abstracted via eidetic reduction is the intelligible structure of the phenomena found in consciousness. The goal is to find the basic components of a phenomena. For example, a chair might include the color, the materials used, and the shapes present in the structure. We apply basic, Platonic forms to all phenomena, according to Husserl. These basics allow us to communicate and describe a phenomena with some accuracy, though this lessens the original phenomena in some manner.

Returning to the example of color, one knows there are component colors. If one thinks to much about the mixture of colors, the color viewed is devalued. Green is green, according to Husserl, not a mixture of blue and yellow subtractives. The scientific knowledge of color is the universal form: there are agreed upon mathematical representations of color. Still, color is a personal and subjective phenomena, further complicated by differences in human senses, such as color blindness.

Cognition analysis is the detailed comparison between the phenomena as presented in consciousness and the universal form of the phenomena. We, as humans, struggle to align our experience of color with our scientific knowledge of color. Phenomenology attempts to reconcile what humans experience with what humans suppose know via theory. There is a distinction between the phenomenon as experienced and the cognition; Husserl compared appearance to that which appears.

Russell 1872 -1970

Russell

Orphaned at the age of four, Bertrand Russell studied both mathematics and philosophy (with McTaggart) at Cambridge University, where he later taught. As the grandson of a British prime minister, Russell devoted much of his public effort to matters of general social concern. He was jailed for writing a pacifist pamphlet during the First World War and attacked Bolshevism and Stalin in 1920, after visiting the Soviet Union. Russell supported the battle against Fascism during World War II but continued to protest Western colonialization and publicly deplored the development of weapons of mass destruction, as is evident in "The Bomb and Civilization" (1945), New Hopes for a Changing World (1951), and his untitled last essay. Throughout his life, Russell was an outspoken critic of organized religion as both unfounded and deceptive; he detailed its harmful social consequences in "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) and defended an agnostic alternative in "A Free Man's Worship" (1903). His Marriage and Morals (1929), an attack upon the repressive character of conventional sexual morality, was a central focus in the legal action that prevented him from accepting a teaching post at the City College of New York in 1940. Russell's Autobiography (1967-69) is an excellent source of information, analysis, and self-congratulation regarding his interesting life. Its pages include his eloquent statements of "What I Have Lived For" and "A Liberal Decalogue." Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950.

Through an early appreciation of the philosophical work of Leibniz, published in A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), Russell came to regard logical analysis as the crucial method for philosophy. In Principia Mathematica (1910-13), written jointly with Alfred North Whitehead, he showed that all of arithmetic could be deduced from a restricted set of logical axioms, a thesis presented and defended in less technical terms in Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919). Applying simlarly analytical methods to philosophical problems, Russell believed, could resolve disputes and provide an adequate account of human experience. Indeed, his A History of Western Philosophy (1946) tried to demonstrate that the philosophical tradition, properly understood, had moved slowly but steadily toward just such a culmination.

The attempt to account clearly for every constituent of ordinary assertions soon proved problematic, however. Russell proposed a ramified theory of types in order to avoid the self-referential paradoxes that might otherwise emerge from such abstract notions as "the barber who shaves all but only those who do not shave themselves" or "the class of all classes that are not members of themselves." In the theory of descriptions put forward in On Denoting (1905), Russell argued that proper analysis of denoting phrases enables us to represent all thought symbolically while avoiding philosophical difficulties about non-existent objects. As his essay on "Vagueness" (1923) shows, Russell long persisted in the belief that adequate explanations could provide a sound basis for human speech and thought.

In similar fashion, the analysis of statements attributing a common predicate to different subjects in "On the Relations of Universals and Particulars" (1911) convinced Russell that both particulars and universals must really exist. He developed this realistic view further in The Problems of Philosophy (1912). Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) continues this project by showing how Russell's philosophy of logical atomism can construct a world of public physical objects using private individual experiences as the atomic facts from which one could develop a complete description of the world. Although Russell's philosophical positions were soon eclipsed by those of Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, his model of the possibilities for analytic thought remains influential.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (May 18, 1872 - February 2, 1970), the third Earl Russell, was one of the most influential mathematicians, philosophers and logicians working (mostly) in the 20th century, an important political liberal, activist and a popularizer of philosophy. Millions looked up to Russell as a sort of prophet of the creative and rational life; at the same time, his stance on many topics was extremely controversial. He was born in 1872, at the height of Britain's economic and political ascendancy, and died, of influenza, in 1970 when Britain's empire had all but vanished and her power had been drained in two victorious but debilitating world wars. At his death, however, his voice still carried moral authority, for he was one of the world's most influential critics of nuclear weapons and the American war in Vietnam.

In 1950, Russell was made Nobel Laureate in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".

Russell's philosophical and logical work

Logic

In mathematical logic, Russell established Russell's paradox, which exposed an inconsistency in naive set theory and led directly to the creation of modern axiomatic set theory. It also crippled Gottlob Frege's project of reducing mathematics to logic. Nonetheless, Russell defended logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic) and attempted this project himself, along with Alfred North Whitehead, in the Principia Mathematica, a clean axiomatic system on which all of mathematics can be built, but which was never fully completed. Although it did not fall prey to the paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by Kurt Gödel that--for exactly that reason--neither Principia Mathematica nor any other consistent logical system could prove all mathematical truths, and hence Russell's project was necessarily incomplete.

Philosophy of Language

Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to philosophy of language is his theory of descriptions. It is normally illustrated using the phrase "the present King of France," as in "The present king of France is bald." What object is this sentence about, given that there is not, at present, a king of France? Alexius Meinong had suggested that we must posit a realm of "nonexistent entities" that we can suppose we are referring to when we use expressions like this; but this would be a strange theory, to say the least. Frege seemed to think we could dismiss as nonsense any sentences whose words apparently referred to objects that didn't exist. Among other things, the problem with this solution is that some such sentences, such as "If the present king of France is bald, then the present king of France has no hair on his head," not only do not seem nonsensical but appear to be obviously true. Roughly the same problem would arise if there were two king of France at present: which if them does "the king of France" denote?

The problem is general to what are called "definite descriptions." Normally this includes all terms beginning with "the", and sometimes includes names, like "Walter Scott." (This point is quite contentious: Russell sometimes thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called names at all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much subsequent work has treated them as altogether different things.) What is the "logical form" of definite descriptions: how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them in order to show how the truth of the whole depends on the truths of the parts? Definite descriptions appear to be like names that by their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more or less. What, then, are we to say about the sentence as a whole if one of its parts apparently isn't working right?

Russell's solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term alone but the entire sentence that contained a definite description. "The present king of France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each definite description in fact contains a claim of existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the obvious content of the sentence they appear in. The sentence as a whole then says three things about some object: the definite description contains two of them, and the rest of the sentence contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be false, not meaningless.

One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to P. F. Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does.

Epistemology

Russell's epistemology went through many phases, most of which have since fallen by the wayside in philosophy. Nonetheless, his influence lingers on in the distinction between two ways in which we can be familiar with objects: "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description." Russell thought that we could only be acquainted with our own "sense data," momentary perceptions of colours, sounds, and the like, and that everything else, including the physical objects that these were sense data of, could only be reasoned to--known by description--and not known directly. But the distinction has gained much wider application.

Influence on Philosophy

Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Alongside G. E. Moore he was largely responsible for the "revolt against Idealism" in British philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century (which was echoed, thirty years later in Vienna, by the logical positivists' "revolt against metaphysics"). Russell and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless and incoherent philosophy, and to seek clarity and precision in argument. Russell's logical work with Whitehead continued this project. Ludwig Wittgenstein was his student between 1911 and 1914, and he was responsible for having Wittgenstein's Tractatus published and for securing the latter a position at Cambridge and several fellowships. However, he came to disagree with Wittgenstein's later approach to philosophy, while Wittgenstein came to think of Russell as "superficial and glib." Russell's influence also lies heavily on the work of W. V. Quine, Karl Popper, and a number of others.

Russell's activism

Bertrand Russell was an outspoken pacifist. He opposed England's participation in World War I and as a result was first fined, then lost his professorship at Trinity College of Cambridge University and later imprisoned for six months. In the years leading to World War II, he supported the policy of appeasement, but later acknowledged that Hitler had to be defeated.

Russell called his stance "Relative Pacifisim" -- he held that war was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances (such as when when Hitler threatened to take over Europe) it might be a lesser of multiple evils.

On November 20, 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by a peace-loving foundation, Russell shocked most of his listeners by advocating a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Russell argued that war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, so it would be a humanitarian gesture, to get it over with quickly. Currently, Russell argued, humanity could survive such a war, whereas a full nuclear war after both sides had manufactured large stockpiles of more destructive weapons was likely to result in the extinction of the human race. Russell later relented from this stance, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear powers.

Starting in the 1950s, Russell became a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons, released a manifesto together with Albert Einstein and organized several conferences. In 1961, he was imprisoned for a week in connection with his nuclear disarmament protests. He opposed the Vietnam War and along with Jean-Paul Sartre organized a tribunal intended to expose American war crimes.

Russell wrote against Victorian notions of morality. His early writings expressed his opinion that sex between a man and woman who are not married to each other is not necessarily immoral if they truly love one another. This might not seem extreme by today's standards, but it was enough to raise vigorous protests and denunciations against him during his first visit to the United States. (Russell's private life was rather more hedonistic than his published writings revealed, but that was not yet well known at the time.)

He was an early critic of the official story in the John F. Kennedy assassination; his "16 Questions on the Assassination" from 1964 is still considered a good summary of the apparent inconsistancies in that case.

In matters of religion, Russell classified himself as a philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist. He wrote that his attitude towards the Christian God was the same as his attitude towards the Greek gods: strongly convinced that they don't exist, but not able to rigorously prove it. His position is explained in the essays Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? and Why I am not a Christian.

Politically he envisioned a kind of benevolent democratic socialism. He was extremely critical of the totalitarianism exhibited by Stalin's regime.

Russell's life

Bertrand Russell was from an aristocratic English family. His mother died when he was 2, his father died when he was 4. He was raised by his grandparents, the former prime minister Lord John Russell and his wife Frances. His godfather was Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill.

Russell first met the American Quaker, Alys Pearsall Smith, when he was seventeen years old. Russell fell in love with the puritanical, high-minded Alys, and married her in December 1894. Their marriage was ended by separation in 1911. Russell had never been faithful; he had passionate affairs with, among others, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Constance Malleson.

Russell studied philosophy and logic at Cambridge University, starting in 1890. He joined the faculty of Trinity College in 1908. In 1920, Russell travelled to Russia and subsequently lectured in Peking on philosophy for one year.

In 1921, after Russell had lost his professorship, he divorced Alys and married Dora Russell. Their children were John Russell and Katharine Russell. Russell supported himself during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics and education to the layman. Together with Dora, he founded the experimental Beacon Hill school in 1927.

Upon the death of his elder brother in 1931, Russell became 3rd Earl Russell. It is, however, quite rare for him to be referred to by this title.

After Russell's marriage to Dora broke up, in 1936 he took as his third wife an attractive Oxford undergraduate, Patricia ("Peter") Spence. She had been his children's governess in the summer of 1930.

In the spring of 1939, Russell moved to Santa Barbara to lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York shortly thereafter, but after public outcries, the appointment was annulled by the courts: his radical opinions made him "morally unfit" to teach at the college. He returned to Britain in 1944 and rejoined the faculty of Trinity College.

In 1952, Russell divorced Peter and married his fourth wife, Edith (Finch). They had known each other since 1925. Edith had lectured in English at Bryn Mawr College, near Philadelphia.

Bertrand Russell wrote his three volume autobiography in the late 1960s and died in 1970 in Wales. His ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains.

Quotes

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."

"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion." ("An outline of Intellectual Rubbish")

External Links

Online writings

In Praise of Idleness (1932), http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918), http://www.zpub.com/notes/rfree10.html

Ideas that Have harmed Mankind, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/2528/br_ideaharm.htm

Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?, http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell8.htm

Why I am not a Christian, http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell0.htm

16 Questions on the Assassination (of President Kennedy), http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/the_critics/russell/Sixteen_questions_Russell.html

Political Ideals, http://www.abacci.com/books/book.asp?bookID=1802

The Analysis Of Mind, http://www.abacci.com/books/book.asp?bookID=2445

Proposed Roads to Freedom, http://www.abacci.com/books/book.asp?bookID=2446

About Russell

The Bertrand Russell Society, http://users.drew.edu/jlenz/~brs.html

The Bertrand Russell Gallery, http://desktop12.cis.mcmaster.ca/~bertrand/

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Russell, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/

The Bertrand Russell Archives, http://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell1.htm

Russell's family, http://desktop12.cis.mcmaster.ca/~bertrand/family.html

Bertrand Russell Resources listing on eJournal website, http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/russell.htm

Berkeley (1685-1753)

Irish clergyman George Berkeley completed his most significant philosophical work before turning thirty, during his years as a student, fellow, and teacher at Trinity College, Dublin. Using material from his collegiate notebooks on philosophy, he developed a series of texts devoted to various aspects of a single central thesis: that matter does not exist. In An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), for example, he argued that the phenomena of visual sensation can all be explained without presupposing the reality of external material substances; the objects we see are merely ideas in our minds and that of god. Berkeley spent most of his mature years in London, travelling briefly to Rhode Island in the vain hope of securing financial support for a college to be established in Bermuda. He was appointed Anglican bishop of Cloyne in 1734. His later writings, which rarely receive philosophical attention, include: criticisms of Newton's calculus and theory of space in De Motu (1721) and The Analyst (1734); a defence of traditional Christian doctrine in the Alciphron (1734); and, in the interminable Siris (1744), a lengthy disquisition on the presumed benefits to health of "tar-water."

It is the earlier immaterialist philosophy, in which he employed strictly empiricist principles in defence of the view that only minds or spirits exist, for which Berkeley is now remembered. He opened A Treatise concerning the Principles of Knowledge (1710) rather technically, with an extended attack on Locke's theory of abstract ideas. The book continues with arguments designed to show that sensible qualities—both secondary and primary—can exist only when perceived, as ideas in our minds. Since physical objects are, on Berkeley's view, nothing more than collections of such qualities, these sensible objects, too, are merely ideas. In what he believed to be his most devastating point, Berkeley argued that it is literally inconceivable that anything like a material substance could exist independently of the spirits or active thinking substances that perceive it. Through the remainder of the Principles, Berkeley tried to distinguish his position from that of Malebranche, defended its application to the achievements of modern science, and extolled its beneficial consequences for traditional religion.

The same central doctrine, supported by a very similar train of thought, is expressed in different form in Three Dialogoues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). Here Berkeley spoke through Philonous ("Mind-lover"), who tries to convince his reluctant friend Hylas ("Woody") that it is only by rejecting the artificial philosophical concept of material substance that skepticism can be finally defeated and the truths of common-sense secured.

Auguste Comte 1798-1857

Summary

The French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) developed a secular religion known as positivism, which emphasized reason and logic. He later systematized it as the Religion of Humanity, complete with priests and a calendar of saints.

Comte divided the progress of mankind into three historical stages:

Theological: relies on supernatural agencies to explain what man can't explain otherwise.

Metaphysical: man attributes effects to abstract but poorly understood causes.

"Positive": because man now understands the scientific laws which control the world.

Comte also founded the social sciences, and it is important to remember in our more cynical times the ideals to which they aspired. Comte and other early social scientists assumed that human behavior must obey laws just as strict as Newton's laws of motion, and that if we could discover them, we could eliminate moral evils -- in exactly the same way that medical scientists were then discovering how diseases worked and were eliminating much of the physical suffering which had always been an inevitable part of the human condition. In his earlier, less systematic works he influenced such figures as J.S. Mill, T.H. Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and George Eliot; all gradually fell away as his philosophy became more rigidly systematic.

Major works:

The "Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société" (1822 -- the "fundamental opuscule").

The Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842); English translation & condensation The Positive Philosophy of August Comte, by Harriet Martineau (1853).

The complete Système de politique positive, ou Traité de Sociologie instituant la Religion de l'Humanité (1851-1854); English translation, The System of Positive Polity, by J.H. Bridges, Frederick Harrison, et. al., 1875-77.

The Synthèse subjective, ou Système universel des conceptions propres à l'état normal de l'Humanité, of which he completed only the the first volume before his death in 1857.

Also crucially important to his influence in Victorian England was John Stuart Mill's Auguste Comte and Positivism (1866).

Summary of Comte’s Writings

ON studying the development of human intelligence, it is found that it passes through three stages: (1) The theological, (2) the metaphysical, (3) the scientific or positive. In the theological stage it seeks to account for the world by super-natural beings. In the metaphysical stage it seeks an explanation in abstract forces. In the scientific, or positive, stage it applies itself to the study of the relation of phenomena to each other.

Different sciences have passed through these stages at different rates. Astronomy reached the positive stage first, then terrestrial physics, then chemistry, then physiology, while sociology has not even yet reached it. To put social phenomena upon a positive basis is the main object of this work; its secondary object is to show that all branches of knowledge spring from the same trunk. An integration of the sciences on a positive basis should lead to the discovery of the laws which rule the intellect in the investigation of facts, should regenerate science and reorganize society. At present the theological, the metaphysical and the positive conflict, and cause intellectual confusion.

The first step to be taken in forming a positive philosophy is to classify the sciences. The first great division we notice in natural phenomena is the division into inorganic and organic phenomena. Under the inorganic we may include the sciences astronomy, physics, chemistry; and under the organic we include the sciences physiology and sociology. These five sciences, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology and sociology, we may consider the five fundamental sciences.

This classification follows the order of the development of the sciences, and indicates their social relation and relative perfection. In order to reach effective knowledge, the sciences must be studied in the order named; sociology cannot be understood without knowledge of the anterior sciences.

Behind and before all these sciences, however, lies the great science of mathematics--the most powerful instrument the mind can employ in the investigation of natural law--and the science of mathematics must be divided into abstract mathematics or the calculus, and concrete mathematics embracing general geometry and rational mechanics. We have thus really six great sciences.

MATHEMATICS. Mathematics may be defined briefly as the indirect measurement of magnitudes and the determination of magnitudes by each other. It is the business of concrete mathematics to discover the equations of phenomena; it is the business of abstract mathematics to educe results from the equations Thus concrete mathematics discovers by actual experiment the acceleration which takes place per second in a falling body, and abstract mathematics educes results from the equations so discovered, and obtains unknown quantities from known.

ASTRONOMY. Astronomy may be defined as the science by which we discover the laws of the geometrical and mechanical phenomena presented by heavenly bodies. To discover these laws we can use only our sense of sight and our reasoning power, and reasoning bears a greater proportion to observation here than in any other science. Sight alone would never teach us the figure of the earth or the path of a planet, and only by the measurement of angles and computation of times can we discover astronomical laws. The observation of these invariable laws frees man from servitude to the theological and metaphysical conceptions of the universe.

PHYSICS. Physics may be defined briefly as the study of the laws which regulate the general properties of bodies regarded en masse, their molecules remaining unaltered and usually in a state of aggregation. In the observations of physics all the senses are employed, and mathematical analysis and experiment assist observation. In the phenomena of astronomy human intervention was impossible; in the phenomena of physics man begins to modify natural phenomena.

Physics includes the subdivisions statics, dynamics, thermology, acoustics, optics and electrology. Physics is still handicapped by metaphysical conceptions of the primary causes of phenomena.

CHEMISTRY. Chemistry may be briefly defined as the study of the laws of the phenomena of composition and decomposition, which result from the molecular and specific mutual action of different substances, natural or artificial. In the observations of chemistry the senses are still more employed, and experiment is of still more utility. Even in chemistry metaphysical conceptions linger.

PHYSIOLOGY. Physiology may be defined as the study of the laws of organic dynamics in relation to structure and environment. Placed in a given environment, a definite organism must always act in a definite way, and physiology investigates the reciprocal relations between organism, environment and function.

In physiology observation and experiment are of the greatest value, and apparatus of all kinds is used to assist both observation and experiment. Physiology is most closely connected with chemistry, since all the phenomena of life are associated with compositions and decompositions of a chemical character.

[SOCIAL PHYSICS]

To place social physics on a scientific basis is a task of great difficulty, since social theories are still perverted by theological and metaphysical doctrines. All I can hope to do is to point out general principles which may serve to correct the intellectual anarchy which is the cause of the moral and political anarchy of the present day. I propose to state first how the institution of a science of social physics bears upon the principal needs and grievances of society, so that men worthy of the name of statesmen may realize that such labours are of real utility.

So far, positive philosophy has worked timidly and tentatively, and has not been bold and broad and general enough to cope with intellectual anarchy in social questions; but it is necessary now that it play a more dominant part in life, and lead society out of the turmoil in which it has tossed for three centuries.

At present, society is distracted by two conflicting influences, which may be called the theological polity and the metaphysical polity.

The theological polity at one time exercised a beneficent influence on society; but for three centuries past its influence has been essentially retrograde, and has gradually, but radically, decayed. The causes of its decline are various; but the chief present-day antagonist to the theological polity is the scientific spirit, and this spirit can now never be repressed.

The metaphysical polity is progressive, but progressive mainly in a negative way. So far, it has made for progress; but it has made for progress chiefly by removing impediments to progress, by destroying the theological conceptions which retarded the development of human intelligence and human society. Though dangerous and revolutionary, it has been necessary; for much required to be demolished to permit permanent reconstruction.

The metaphysical polity was required to combat the theological; but now it has served its destructive purpose, and tends to become obstructive, for, having destroyed the old, it will not permit the new. Its chief dogma has always been liberty of conscience with the liberty of press and speech which that implies; but liberty of conscience really means little more than absence of intellectual regulation; and even as liberty of conscience is out of the question in astronomy and chemistry, so it is out of the question in social physics.

Excerpts from General View of Positivism (1830-42).

Our doctrine, therefore, is one which renders hypocrisy and oppression alike impossible. And it now stands forward as the result of all the efforts of the past, for the regeneration of order, which, whether considered individually or socially, is so deeply compromised by the anarchy of the present time. It establishes a fundamental principle by which true philosophy and sound polity are brought into correlation; a principle which can be felt as well as proved, and which is at once the keystone of a system and a basis of government. I shall show, moreover, in the fifth chapter, that the doctrine is as rich in aesthetic beauty as in philosophical power and in social influence.

It is not too much, then, to say that Positivism, notwithstanding its speculative origin, offers as much to natures of deep sympathy as to men of highly cultivated intellects, or of energetic character.

The first condition of unity is a subjective principle; and this principle in the Positive system is the subordination of the intellect to the heart.

The true Positive spirit consists in substituting the study of the invariable Laws of phenomena for that of their so-called Causes, whether proximate or primary- in a word, in studying the How instead of the Why

Excerpts from Positive Philosophy

All phenomena as subjected to invariable natural Laws. Our business is—seeing how vain is any research into what are called Causes, whether first or final,—to pursue an accurate discovery of these Laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number. By speculating upon causes, we could solve no difficulty about origin and purpose. Our real business is to analyse accurately the circumstances of phenomena, and to connect them by the natural relations of succession and resemblance

Then it was that the spirit of the Positive philosophy rose up in opposition to that of the superstitious and scholastic systems which had hitherto obscured the true character of all science. Since that date, the progress of the Positive philosophy, and the decline of the other two, have been so marked that no rational mind now doubts that the revolution is destined to go on to its completion,—every branch of knowledge being, sooner or later, brought within the operation of Positive philosophy.

Social phenomena demand a distinct classification, both on account of their importance and of their difficulty. They arc the most individual, the most complicated, the most dependent on all others; and therefore they must be the latest,—even if they had no special obstacle to encounter. This branch of science has not hitherto entered into the domain of Positive philosophy. Theological and metaphysical methods, exploded in other departments, arc as yet exclusively applied, both in the way of inquiry and discussion, in all treatment of Social subjects, though the best minds are heartily weary of eternal disputes about divine right and the sovereignty of the people. This is the great, while it is evidently the only gap which has to be filled, to constitute, solid and entire, the Positive Philosophy. Now that the human mind has grasped celestial and terrestrial physics,— mechanical and chemical; organic physics, both vegetable and animal,—there romaine one science, to fill up the series of sciences of observation,—Social physics. This is what men have now most need of: and this it is the principal aim of the present work to establish.

The purpose of this work is not to give an account of the Natural Sciences. Besides that it would be endless. and that it would require a scientific preparation such as no one man possesses, it would be apart from our object, which is to go through a course of not Positive Science, but Positive Philosophy. We have only to consider each fundamental science in its relation to the whole positive system, and to the spirit which characterizes it; that is, with regard to its methods and its chief results.

The two aims, though distinct, are inseparable; for, on the one hand, there can be no positive philosophy without a basis of social science, without which it could not be all-comprehensive; and, on the other hand, we could not pursue Social science without having been prepared by the study of phenomena less complicated than those of society, and furnished with a knowledge of laws and anterior facts which have a bearing upon social science. Though the fundamental sciences are not all equally interesting to ordinary minds, there is no one of them that can be neglected in an inquiry like the present; and, in the eye of philosophy, all are of equal value to human welfare. Even those which appear the least interesting have their own value, either on account of the perfection of their methods,. or as being the necessary basis of all the others.

Advantageous of Positive Philosophy

1. Affords the only rational means of exhibiting the logical laws of the human mind. After two thousand years of psychological pursuit, no one proposition is established to the satisfaction of its followers. They are divided, to this day, into a multitude of schools, still disputing about the very elements of their doctrine. This interior observation gives birth to almost as many theories as there are observers. This, then, is the first great result of the Positive Philosophy— the manifestation by experiment of the laws which rule the Intellect in the investigation of truth; and, as a consequence, the knowledge of the general rules suitable for that object.

2. The second effect of the Positive Philosophy, an effect not less important and far more urgently wanted, will be to regenerate Education. The student should obtain general positive conceptions of all the classes of natural phenomena. It is such an aggregate of conceptions, whether on a great or on a small scale, which must henceforth be the permanent basis of all human combinations. It will constitute the mind of future generations. In order to this regeneration of our intellectual system, it is necessary that the sciences, considered as branches from one trunk, should yield us, as a whole, their chief methods and their most important results.

3. The same special study of scientific generalities must also aid the progress of the respective positive sciences: and this constitutes our third head of advances. The divisions which we establish between the sciences are, though not arbitrary, essentially artificial. The subject of our researches is one: we divide it for our convenience, in order to deal the more easily with its difficulties. But it sometimes happens-and especially with the most important doctrines of each science—that we need what we can not obtain under the present isolation of the sciences—a combination of several special points of view; and for want of this, very important problems wait for their solution much longer than they otherwise need do. The Unity of Science -- the elucidation of the respective sciences by their combination.

4. The Positive Philosophy offers the only solid basis for that Social Reorganization which must succeed the critical condition in which the most civilized nations are now living. It can not be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this work that Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos; in other words, that all social mechanism rests upon Opinions. Till a certain number of general ideas can be acknowledged as a rallying-point of social doctrine, the nations will remain in a revolutionary state, whatever palliatives may be devised; and their institutions can be only provisional But whenever the necessary agreement on first principles can be obtained, appropriate institutions will issue from them, without shock or resistance; for the causes of disorder will have been arrested by the mere fact of the agreement. It is in this direction that those must look who desire a natural and regular, a normal state of society. We have only to complete the Positive Philosophy by bringing Social phenomena within its comprehension, and afterward consolidating the whole into one body of homogeneous doctrine.

Caveat

Our intellectual resources are too narrow, and the universe is too complex, to leave any hope that it will ever be within our power to carry scientific perfection to its last degree of simplicity. The only necessary unity is that of Method, which is already in great part established. As for the doctrine, it need not be one; it is enough that it be homogeneous. It is, then, under the double aspect of unity of method and homogeneousness of doctrine that we shall consider the different classes of positive theories in this work. While pursuing the philosophical aim of all science, the lessening of the number of general laws requisite for the explanation of natural phenomena, we shall regard as presumptuous every attempt, in all future time, to reduce them rigorously to one.

What is Positivism?

1. Natural Laws

There can be no doubt that Man's study of nature must furnish the only basis of his action upon nature; for it is only by knowing the laws of phenomena, and thus being able to foresee them, that we can, in active life, set them to modify one another for our advantage. Our direct natural power over everything about us is extremely weak, and altogether disproportioned to our needs. Whenever we effect anything great, it is through a knowledge of natural laws, by which we can set one agent to work upon another, even very weak modifying elements producing a change in the results of a large aggregate of causes. The relation of science to art may be summed up in a brief expression: [40]

From Science comes Prevision: from Prevision comes Action. The sciences have a higher destination still; and not only higher, but more direct—that of satisfying the craving of our understanding to know the laws of phenomena.

This need of disposing facts in a comprehensible order (which is the proper object of all scientific theories) is so inherent in our organization, that if we could not satisfy it by positive conceptions,, we must inevitably return to those theological and metaphysical explanations which had their origin in this very fact of human nature. It is this original tendency which acts as a preservative, in the minds of men of science,, against the narrowness and incompleteness which the practical habits of our age are apt to produce. It is through this that we arc able to maintain just and noble ideas of the importance anti destination of the sciences; and if it wore not thus, the human understanding would soon, as Condorcet has observed, come to a stand, even as to the practical applications for the sake of which higher things had been sacrificed; for, if tile arts flow from science, the neglect of science must destroy the consequent arts. Some of the most important arts arc derived from speculations pursued during long ages with a purely scientific intention. For instance, the ancient Greek geometers delighted themselves with beautiful speculations on Conic Sections; those speculations wrought, after a long series of generations, the renovation of astronomy; and out of this has the art of navigation attained a perfection which it never could have reached otherwise than through the speculative labors of Archimedes and Apollonius: so that, to use Condorcet's illustration, "the sailor who is preserved from shipwreck by the exact observation of the longitude, owes his life to a theory conceived two thousand years before by men of genius who had in view simply geometrical speculations." Meantime, an intermediate class is rising up, whose particular destination is to organize the relation of theory and practice; such as the engineers, who do not labor in the advancement of science, but who [41] study it in its existing state,, to apply it to practical purposes. Such classes are furnishing us with the elements of a future body of doctrine on the theories of the different arts. The time will come when out of such results, a department of Positive philosophy may arise; but it will be in a distant future. If we remember that several sciences are implicated in every important art,—that, for instance, a true theory of Agriculture requires a combination of physiological, chemical, mechanical, and even astronomical and mathematical science,—it will be evident that true theories of the arts must wait for a large and equable development of these constituent sciences.

First, that science being composed of speculative knowledge and of practical knowledge, we have to deal only with the first; and

Second, that theoretical knowledge, or science properly so called, being divided into general and particular, or abstract and concrete science, we have again to deal only with the first.

Being thus in possession of our proper subject, duly prescribed, we may proceed to the ascertainment of the true order of the fundamental sciences.

The Hierarchy

Morale/Ethics

Sociologie/Sociology

Biologie/Biology

Chimie/Chemistry

Physique/Physics

Astronomie/Astronomy

Mathématiques/Mathematics

Principle of the Hierarchy--The Three Stages

· Theoretically considered, the hierarchy, when followed bottom-up, proceeds from the simple to the complex, and from the general to the particular.

· Pragmatically envisioned, it reflects the increasing modificability of phenomena through human intervention.

· Taken historically, it presents the order in which the different sciences, one after the other, were founded--each in succession passing through a three-staged evolution:

from the theological,

through the metaphysical,

to the positive state.

Effect of Classification on Methods

As the phenomena which are homogeneous have been classed under one science, while those which belong to other sciences are heterogeneous, it follows that the Positive Method must be constantly modified in a uniform manner in the range of the same fundamental science, and will undergo modifications, different and more and more compound, in passing from one science to another. Thus, under the scale laid down, we shall meet with it in all its varieties; which could not happen if we were to adopt a scale which should not fulfill the conditions we have admitted. This is an all important consideration; for if, as we have already seen, we can not understand the positive method in the abstract, but only by its application, it is clear that we can have no adequate conception of it but by studying it in its varieties of application. No one science, however well chosen, could exhibit it. Though the Method is always the same, its procedure is varied. For instance, it should be Observation with regard to one kind of phenomena, and Experiment with regard to another; and different kinds of experiment, according to the case.

The Objective and Subjective Methods

According to Comte's terminology:

The objective method is the one used when following the hierarchy bottom-up, i.e., when concentrating upon the necessary subordination of higher sciences to lower ones.

And the subjective method is the one used when following the hierarchy top-down, as we come to see that the complex phenomena studied by the higher sciences necessarily include the simpler phenomena of the lower ones.

Thus higher sciences, after having received their primary materials (scientific results and methods) objectively from the lower ones, are apt, once they have come to maturity, to subjectively regenerate the latter through their own more synthetic--and closer to human needs--point of view.

In that sense, Comte asserts that the only possible synthesis of all the sciences cannot be an objective (i.e. a reductionnist) synthesis, but has to be a subjective (i.e. a holistic) one.

Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832.

British gentleman, political activist, legal scholar, social philosopher, linguist, Jeremy Bentham is best known as the founder of British "utilitarianism" or "philosophical radicalism".

Born into a wealthy Tory family, Jeremy Bentham was educated at Westminster school and Queen's College, Oxford. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1769. His independent wealth permitted him to set himself up as a writer in London. According to his contemporary William Hazlitt, "Bentham has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster...like an anchorite in a cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine."

In 1768 that Bentham came across a political tract by Joseph Priestley in which the the phrase "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" was invoked. Intrigued, Bentham followed this up by reading Hume, Helvetius and Beccaria and slowly began forming his utilitarian ideas.

Bentham's first book (1776) was an attack on Blackstone's immensely popular Commentaries on the Laws of England. For Bentham, Blackstone's obsession with the "rule of law" made a fetish out of ancient laws that were long outdated and prevented the passing of new legislation more appropriate for changing circumstances. Bentham claimed that all laws, ancient and modern, should be evaluated according to the single ethical principle of "utility". A law is good or bad depending upon whether or not it increased general happiness of the population.

From 1785 to 1788, Bentham traveled to Russia to visit his brother. Upon his return, he published his most famous work, Introduction to the Principles of Morals (1789), which has been widely regarded as the founding document of British utilitarianism. In 1791-94, Bentham actively campaigned for his "model prison" -- the "Panopticon". Bentham's first disciple, Étienne Dumont, published French translations of several of Bentham's works, giving him a good deal of popularity abroad. Despite his adamant opposition to the "natural law" language and principles of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, Bentham welcomed both the American and French Revolutions. He was made an honorary citizen of the French Republic in 1792.

expounding tract after tract on utilitarian philosophy, legal theory and social reform. He struck up important friendships with the politicians Earl of Shelburne and William Pitt and the economist David Ricardo.

His first book (1776)

Bentham introduced the distinction between individual "hedonic calculation" (maximizing individual utility) as a basis of a positive theory of behavior, and social calculation (maximizing aggregate utility) as a normative theory of social organization.

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne." (Bentham, 1780).

Bentham argued that virtually all humans seek to maximize their "happiness", defined as the surplus of pleasures over pains. He also posited that all human actions arise from the hedonic calculus. Altruism, asceticism, love, duty, a desire for freedom, obedience to the law, faith, etc. are reducible to individual pleasure and pain calculations. By applying his utility hypothesis so widely, Bentham made it empirically unverifiable. No piece of evidence could conceivably be brought up to disprove it.

Bentham also correlated happiness with the means to happiness. The wealthier a person is, the greater the happiness he can attain. However, he recognized the principle of diminishing marginal utility, i.e. that the greater the amount of utility a person already has, the smaller will be the utility gain of any extra increment of wealth.

The critical question Bentham puzzled over was whether the unhindered pursuit of individual happiness could be reconciled with morality. The only ethical principle he accepted was that increasing general happiness is "good", while decreasing it is "bad". From the outset, then, Bentham dismissed all "ipsedixitisms", i.e. moral judgments based on criteria such as "sympathy" or "intentions". Similarly, all abstract notions of social ethics like "natural rights", "social justice", etc. were hogwash. For Bentham, only consequences mattered. Actions are to be judged strictly on the basis of how their outcomes affect general utility.

But what is general utility of a society? Bentham argued it was no more and no less than the sum total of individual utilities of all members of a society. Whom we include in our definition of "society" depends on our sphere of consideration. It may be a nation, it may be all of humanity. It may be confined to living adult voters, or it may embrace all people and generations yet unborn.

What is utility?

He emphasized the need for equal weights in this summation: no person's utility counted more than another's (it somehow slipped Bentham's notice that this presumption implicitly introduces elements of some "natural law" doctrines, but so be it).

of "equal capacity for pleasure" was a natural law notion slipped through.

Insisting that individuals are the best judges of their own happiness, Bentham had an automatic tendency to default to non-interference by government. However, he recognized that individual actions of one individual often implicated the happiness of others and that individuals may not have the incentive or ability to coordinate concerted actions that improve aggregate utility.

As such, Bentham laid some responsibilities in the hands of the State. The first obligation is to not let people suffer needlessly. This means guaranteeing a minimal subsistence level of income to ensure survival for all citizens and the provision of security of individuals (as well as their property) against the violence of other citizens or foreign nations.

The second obligation is to encourage abundance, both of wealth and of population. This was a tricky issue. If wealth is constant, then a greater population will reduce wealth per capita. However, Bentham believed that a plentiful population is necessary for defense. At any rate, as argued by Paley (1785), by the principle of diminishing marginal utility and direct summation of utility, a large but poor population might have a higher "aggregate utility" than a small and rich population.

The third obligation was equality of means. By the principle of diminishing marginal utility, an extra £1 contributes less utility to a rich man than it does to a poor one. Consequently, reallocation of income to complete equality is desirable as the utility loss of the rich is more than compensated by the utility gain of the poor. However, he recognized that radical redistribution can also thwart incentives and productivity, and thus decrease general abundance. Bentham argued that some amount of redistributive taxation is warranted, but it must be carefully balanced against these other considerations. He thought that progressive inheritance taxes, as they have few adverse effects on incentives, were the best solution.

Mill (1850) implicitly defined the ideal population as that which maximized average happiness per head (a definition later attributed to Cannan). Sidgwick (1894) defined maximum happiness = average happiness x population, a solution greatly applauded by Edgeworth (1877, 1881).

as enshrined in Blackstone's Commentaries and political documents such as the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

dismissed all "ipsedixitisms", i.e. moral judgments based on criteria such as "sympathy" or "intentions". For Bentham, only consequences mattered. Actions are to be judged strictly on the basis of how their outcomes affect general utility.

Social utility was a bit more complicated. He invoked Helvetius's phrase, "greatest happiness for the greatest number" as his general ethical principle. Bentham dismissed all notions of "natural rights" or "social contracts" as enshrined in Blackstone's Commentaries and political documents such as the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man. He also dismissed all "ipsedixitisms", i.e. moral judgments based on criteria such as "sympathy" or "intentions". For Bentham, only consequences mattered. Actions are to be judged strictly on the basis of how their outcomes affect general utility.

If the objective is to maximize light in a room, it might be better to use one strong lamp rather than five weak candles.

Thus,

The responsibilities of the State are laid out in several different places. The first obligation is to not let people suffer needlessly. This means guaranteeing a minimal subsistence level of income to ensure survival for all citizens and the provision of security of individuals (as well as their property) against the violence of other citizens or foreign nations. The second obligation is to encourage abundance, both of wealth and of population. This was a tricky issue. If wealth is constant, then a greater population will reduce wealth per capita. However, Bentham believed that a plentiful population is necessary for defense. At any rate, by the principle of diminishing marginal utility and direct summation of utility, a large but poor population might have a higher "aggregate utility" than a small and rich population.

Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals (1780) was the founding document of British utilitarianism. It was here that he first articulated its basic foundations:

Thus, Bentham introduced the distinction between individual "hedonic calculation" (maximizing individual utility) and social "hedonic calc

Marx ridiculed him as a "purely English phenomenon", "a genius by way of bourgeois stupidity"

As William Hazlitt recalled, "Bentham has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster...like an anchorite in a cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine." Bentham was a rather eccentric man with a peculiar taste for odd words (e.g. he referred to his after-dinner strolls as "post-prandial vibrations"). Karl Marx regarded him as a "purely English phenomenon" and "a genius by way of bourgeois stupidity." (Marx, 1867: p.758n.).

as "a genius by way of bourgeois stupidity." (Marx, 1867).

Bentham's defense of usury (1787) is a direct attack on Adam Smith's recommendation of legal limits on the rate of interest.

Bentham was a great friend of James Mill and was the mentor of the latter's son, John Stuart Mill. His essentially singular criteria for judging policy proposals - maximum felicitas - "greatest happiness for the greatest number", is best captured in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals (1780), and has been the bedrock for English Utilitarian philosophy. Naturally, Bentham was the father of the "utility function" so ubiquitous in modern economics (and he was aware of diminishing marginal utility). However, for his policy propositions to be useful, Bentham assumed that utility was effectively comparable across people, a proposition which most modern economists reject.

A constant political activist, he made substantial contributions to education -- including his bizarre 1817 "sense-data" theory of language. Bentham also founded the University College London, specifically designed to be accessible to Non-Conformist, Catholic and Jewish students.

Bentham was the quintessential English eccentric. He was particularly fond of inventing new words with tangled Greek and Latin roots rather than just using their humble English equivalents. Some of his lexical constructions have caught on, e.g. "international", "maximize" and "codification". Others, like "post-prandial vibrations" (after-dinner walks) remained confined to Mr. Jeremy's circle.

Bentham's most bizarre coup came after his death in 1832. As stipulated in his will, Bentham's embalmed body was dressed and placed on display in a glass cabinet in the hallways of UCL. His body is still there today and, apparently, it is still wheeled in to preside over the annual meeting of university administrators. He also left his estate as an endowment to UCL and tens of thousands of pages of unpublished papers and tracts for successive generations to dig through (which they are still doing).

Sir William Hamilton 1788-1856

Scottish metaphysician, was born in Glasgow on the 8th of March 1788. His father, Dr William Hamilton, had in 1781, on the strong recommendation of the celebrated William Hunter, been appointed to succeed his father, Dr Thomas Hamilton, as professor of anatomy in the university of Glasgow; and when he died in 1790, in. his thirty-second year, he had already gained a great reputation. ~William Hamilton and a younger brother (afterwards Captain Thomas Hamilton, q.v.) were thus brought up under the sole care of their mother. William received his early education in Scotland, except during two years which he spent in a private school near London, and went in 1807, as a Snell exhibitioner, to Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained a firstclass in lit ens humaniori bus and took the degree of B.A. in 1811, M.A. in 1814. He had been intended for the medical profession, but soon after leaving Oxford he gave up this idea, and in 1813 became a member of the Scottish bar. His life, however, was mainly that of a student; and the following years, marked by little of outward incident, were filled by researches of all kinds, through which he daily added to his stores of learning, while at the same time he was gradually forming his philosophic system. Investigation enabled him to make good his claim to represent the ancient family of Hamilton of Preston, and in 1816 he took up the baronetcy, which had been in abeyance since the death of Sir Robert Hamilton of Preston (1650—1701), well known in his day as a Covenanting leader.

Two visits to Germany in 1817 and 1820 led to his taking up the study of German and later on that of contemporary German philosophy, which was then almost entirely neglected in the British universities. In 1820 he was a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh, which had fallen vacant on the death of Thomas Brown, colleague of Dugald Stewart, and the latter’s consequent resignation, but was defeated on political grounds by John Wilst (1785—1854), the “Christopher North” of Blackwood’s Magazine. Soon afterwards (1821) he was appointed professor of civil history, and as such delivered several courses of lectures on the history of modern Europe and the history of literature. The salary was £100 a year, derived from a local beer tax, and was discontinued after a time. No pupils were compelled to attend, the class dwindled, and Hamilton gave it up when the salary ceased. In January 1827 he suffered a severe, loss in the death of his mother, to whom he had been a devoted son. In March 1828 he married his cousin Janet Marshall.

In 1829 his career of authorship began with the appearance of the well-known essay on the “Philosophy of the Unconditioned” (a critique of Comte’s Cours de philosophie)—the first of a series of articles contributed by him to the Edinburgh Review. He was elected in 1836 to the Edinburgh chair of logic and metaphysics, and from this time dates the influence which, during the next twenty years, he exerted over the thought of the younger

generation in Scotland. Much about the same time he began the preparation of an annotated edition of Reid’s works, intending to annex to it a number of dissertations. Before, however, this design had been carried out, he was struck (1844) with paralysis of the right side, which seriously crippled his bodily powers, though it left his mind wholly unimpaired. The edition of Reid appeared in 1846, but with only seven of the intended dissertations—the last, too, unfinished. It was his distinct purpose to complete the work, but this purpose remained at his death unfulfilled, and all that could be done afterwards was to print such materials for the remainder, or such notes on the subjects to be discussed, as were found among his MSS. Considerably before this time he had formed his theory of logic, the leading principles of which were indicated in the prospectus of an essay on a new analytic of logical forms prefixed to his edition of Reid. But the elaboration of the scheme in its details and applications continued during the next few years to occupy much of his leisure. Out of this arose a sharp controversy with Augustus de Morgan. The essay did not appear, but the results of the labour gone through are contained in the appendices to his Lectures on Logic. Another occupation of these years was the preparation of extensive materials for a publication which he designed on the personal history, influence and opinions of Luther. Here he advanced so far as to have planned and partly carried out the arrangement of the work; but it did not go further, and still remains in MS. In 1852—1853 appeared the first and second editions of his Discussions in Philosophy, Literature and Education, a reprint, with large additions, of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Soon after, his general health began to fail. Still, however, aided now as ever by his devoted wife, he persevered in literary labour; and during 1854— 1855 he brought out nine volumes of a new edition of Stewart’s works. The only remaining volume was to have contained a memoir of Stewart, but this he did not live to write. He taught his class for the last time in the winter of 1855—1856. Shortly after the close of the session he was taken ill, and on the 6th of May 5856 he died in Edinburgh.

Hamilton’s positive contribution to the progress of thought is comparatively slight, and his writings, even where reinforced by the copious lecture notes taken by his pupils, cannot be said to present a comprehensive philosophic system. None the less he did considerable service by stimulating a spirit of criticism in his pupils, by insisting on the great importance of psychology as opposed to the older metaphysical method, and not least by his recognition of the importance of German philosophy, especially that of Kant. By far his most important work was his “Philosophy of the Unconditioned,” the development of the principle that for the human finite mind there can be no knowledge of the Infinite. The basis of his whole argument is the thesis, “To think is to condition.” Deeply impressed with Kant’s antithesis between subject and object, the knowing and the known, Hamilton laid clown the principle that every object is known only in virtue of its relations to other objects. From this it follows limitless time, space, power and so forth are humanly speaking inconceivable. The fact, however, that all thought seems to demand the idea of the infinite or absolute provides a sphere for faith, which is thus the specific faculty of theology. It is a weakness characteristic of the human mind that it cannot conceive any phenomenon without a beginning: hence the conception of the causal relation, according to which every phenomenon has its cause in preceding phenomena, and its effect in subsequent phenomena. The causal concept is, therefore, only one of the ordinary necessary forms of the cognitive consciousness limited, as we have seen, by being confined to that which is relative or conditioned. As regards the problem of the nature of objectivity, Hamilton simply accepts the evidence of consciousness as to the separate existence of the object: “the root of our nature cannot be a lie.” In virtue of this assumption Hamilton’s philosophy becomes a” natural realism.” In fact his whole position is a strange compound of Kant and Reid. Its chief practical corollary is the denial of philosophy as a method of attaining absolute knowledge and its relegation to the academic sphere of mental training. The transition from philosophy to theology, i.e. to the sphere of faith, is presented by Hamilton under the analogous relation between the mind and the body. As the mind is to the body, so is the unconditioned Absolute or God to the world of the conditioned. Consciousness, itself a conditioned phenomenon, must derive from or depend on some different thing prior to or behind material phenomena. Curiously enough, however, Hamilton does not explain how it comes about’ that God, who in the terms of the analogy bears to the conditioned mind the relation which the conditioned mind bears to its objects, can Himself be unconditioned. He can be regarded only as related to consciousness, and in so far is, therefore, not absolute or unconditioned. Thus the very principles of 1-lamilton’s philosophy are apparently violated in his theological argument.

Hamilton regarded logic as a purely formal science; it seemed to him an unscientific mixing together of heterogeneous elements to treat as parts of the same science the formal and the material conditions of knowledge. He was quite ready to allow that on this view logic cannot be used as a means of discovering or guaranteeing facts, even the most general, and expressly asserted that it has to do, not with the objective validity, but only with the mutual relations, of judgments. He further held that induction and deduction are correlative processes of formal logic, each resting on the necessities of thought and deriving thence its several laws. The only logical laws which he recognized were the three axioms of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle, which he regarded as severally phases of one general condition of the possibility of existence and, therefore, of thought. The law of reason and consequent he considered not as different, but merely as expressing metaphysically what these express logically. He added as a postulate—which in his theory was of importance—” that logic be allowed to state explicitly what is thought implicitly.” in logic, Hamilton is known chiefly as the inventor of the doctrine of the “quantification of the predicate,” i.e. that the judgment “All A is B “ should really mean “All A is all B,” whereas the ordinary universal proposition should be stated “All A is some B.” This view, which was supported by Stanley Jevons, is fundamentally at fault since it implies that the predicate is thought of in its extension; in point of fact when a judgment is made, e.g. about men, that they are mortal (“ All men are mortal “), the intention is to attribute a quality (i.e. the predicate is used in connotation). In other words, we are not considering the question “what kind are men among the various things which must die?” (as is implied in the form “all men are some mortals “) but “ what is the fact about men?” We are not stating a mere identity (see further, e.g., H. W. B. Joseph, Introduction to Logic, 1906, pp. 198 foll.).

The philosopher to whom above all others Hamilton professed allegiance was Aristotle. His works were the object of his profound and constant study, and supplied in fact the mould in which his whole philosophy was cast. With the commentators on the Aristotelian writings, ancient, medieval and modern, he was also familiar; and the scholastic philosophy he studied with care and appreciation at a time when it had hardly yet begun to attract attention in his country. His wide reading enabled him to trace many a doctrine to the writings of forgotten thinkers; and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to draw forth such from their obscurity, and to give due acknowledgment, even if it chanced to be of the prior possession of a view or argument that he had thought out for himself. Of modern German philosophy he was a diligent, if not always a sympathetic, student. How profoundly his thinking was modified by that of Kant is evident from the tenor of his speculations; nor was this less the case because, on fundamental points, he came to widely different conclusions.

Any account of Hamilton would be incomplete which regarded him only as a philosopher, for his knowledge and his interests embraced all subjects related to that of the human mind. Physical and mathematical science had, indeed, no attraction for him; but his study of anatomy and physiology was minute and experimental. In literature alike ancient and modern he was widely and deeply read; and, from his unusual powers of memory, the stores which he had acquired were always at command. If there was one period with the literature of which he was more particularly familiar, it was the 16th and 17th centuries. Here in every department he was at home. He had gathered a vast amount of its theological lore, had a critical knowledge especially of its Latin poetry, and was minutely acquainted with the history of the actors in its varied scenes, not only as narrated in professed records, but as revealed in the letters, table-talk, and casual effusons of themselves or their contemporaries (cf. his article on the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, and his pamphlet on the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843). Among his literary projects were editions of the works of George Buchanan and Julius Caesar Scaliger. His general scholarship found expression in his library, which, though mainly, was far from being exclusively, a philosophical collection. It now forms a distinct portion of the library of the university of Glasgow.

His chief practical interest was in education—an interest which he manifested alike as a teacher and as a writer, and which had led him long before he was either to a study of the subject both theoretical and historical. He thence adopted views as to the ends and methods ‘of education that, when afterwards carried out or advocated by him, met with general recognition; but he also expressed in one of his articles an unfavourable view of the study of mathematics as a mental gymnastic, which excited much opposition, but which he never saw reason to alter. As a teacher, he was zealous and successful, and his writings on university organization and reform had, at the time of their appearance, a decisive practical effect, and contain much that is of permanent value.

His posthumous works are his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, 4 vols., edited by H. L. Mansel, Oxford, and John Veitch (Metaphysics,

I~5S; LogIc, thbO); and Additional Notes to Reid’s Works, from Sir

W. Hamilton’s MSS., under the editorship of H. L. Mansel, D.D.

(1862). A MemoIr of Sir W. Hamilton, by \Teitch, appeared in

1869.

Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)

British philosopher and sociologist, Herbert Spencer was a major figure in the intellectual life of the Victorian era. He was one of the principal proponents of evolutionary theory in the mid nineteenth century, and his reputation at the time rivaled that of Charles Darwin. Spencer was initially best known for developing and applying evolutionary theory to philosophy, psychology and the study of society -- what he called his "synthetic philosophy" (see his A System of Synthetic Philosophy, 1862-93). Today, however, he is usually remembered in philosophical circles for his political thought, primarily for his defense of natural rights and for criticisms of utilitarian positivism, and his views have been invoked by 'libertarian' thinkers such as Robert Nozick.

Spencer was born in Derby, England on 27 April 1820, the eldest of nine children, but the only one to survive infancy. He was the product of an undisciplined, largely informal education. His father, George, was a school teacher, but an unconventional man, and Spencer's family were Methodist 'Dissenters,' with Quaker sympathies. From an early age, Herbert was strongly influenced by the individualism and the anti-establishment and anti-clerical views of his father, and the Benthamite radical views of his uncle Thomas. Indeed, Spencer's early years showed a good deal of resistance to authority and independence.

A person of eclectic interests, Spencer eventually trained as a civil engineer for railways but, in his early 20s, turned to journalism and political writing. He was initially an advocate of many of the causes of philosophic radicalism and some of his ideas (e.g., the definition of 'good' and 'bad' in terms of their pleasurable or painful consequences, and his adoption of a version of the 'greatest happiness principle') show similarities to utilitarianism.

From 1848 to 1853, Spencer worked as a writer and subeditor for The Economist financial weekly and, as a result, came into contact with a number of political controversialists such as George Henry Lewes, Thomas Carlyle, Lewes' future lover George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans [1819-1880])--with whom Spencer had himself had a lengthy (though purely intellectual) association--and T.H. Huxley (1825-1895). Despite the diversity of opinions to which he was exposed, Spencer's unquestioning confidence in his own views was coupled with a stubbornness and a refusal to read authors with whom he disagreed.

In his early writings, Spencer defended a number of radical causes-- particularly on land nationalization, the extent to which economics should reflect a policy of laissez-faire, and the place and role of women in society--though he came to abandon most of these causes later in his life.

In 1851 Spencer's first book, Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness appeared. ('Social statics'--the term was borrowed from Auguste Comte--deals with the conditions of social order, and was preliminary to a study of human progress and evolution--i.e., 'social dynamics.') In this work, Spencer presents an account of the development of human freedom and a defense of individual liberties, based on a (Lamarckian-style) evolutionary theory.

Upon the death of his uncle Thomas, in 1853, Spencer received a small inheritance which allowed him to devote himself to writing without depending on regular employment.

In 1855, Spencer published his second book, The Principles of Psychology. As in Social Statics, Spencer saw Bentham and Mill as major targets, though in the present work he focussed on criticisms of the latter's associationism. (Spencer later revised this work, and Mill came to respect some of Spencer's arguments.) The Principles of Psychology was much less successful than Social Statics, however, and about this time Spencer began to experience serious (predominantly mental) health problems that affected him for the rest of his life. This led him to seek privacy, and he increasingly avoided appearing in public. Although he found that, because of his ill health, he could write for only a few hours each day, he embarked upon a lengthy project--the nine-volume A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1862- 93)--which provided a systematic account of his views in biology, sociology, ethics and politics. This 'synthetic philosophy' brought together a wide range of data from the various natural and social sciences and organized it according to the basic principles of his evolutionary theory.

Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy was initially available only through private subscription, but he was also a contributor to the leading intellectual magazines and newspapers of his day. His fame grew with his publications, and he counted among his admirers both radical thinkers and prominent scientists, including John Stuart Mill and the physicist, John Tyndall. In the 1860s and 1870s, for example, the influence of Spencer's evolutionary theory was on a par with that of Charles Darwin.

In 1883 Spencer was elected a corresponding member of philosophical section of the French academy of moral and political sciences. His work was also particularly influential in the United States, where his book, The Study of Sociology, was at the center of a controversy (1879-80) at Yale University between a professor, William Graham Sumner, and the University's president, Noah Porter. Spencer's influence extended into the upper echelons of American society and it has been claimed that, in 1896, "three justices of the Supreme Court were avowed 'Spencerians'." His reputation was at its peak in the 1870s and early 1880s, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. Spencer, however, declined most of the honors he was given.

Spencer's health significantly deteriorated in the last two decades of his life, and he died in relative seclusion, following a long illness, on December 8, 1903.

Within his lifetime, some one million copies of his books had been sold, his work had been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, and his ideas were popular in a number of other countries such as Poland (e.g., through the work of the positivist, Wladyslaw Kozlowski). Nevertheless, by the end of his life, his political views were no longer as popular as they had once been, and the dominant currents in liberalism allowed for a more interventionist state.

Method

Spencer's method is, broadly speaking, scientific and empirical, and it was influenced significantly by the positivism of Auguste Comte. Because of the empirical character of scientific knowledge and because of his conviction that that which is known--biological life--is in a process of evolution, Spencer held that knowledge is subject to change. Thus, Spencer writes, "In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances." As scientific knowledge was primarily empirical, however, that which was not 'perceivable' and could not be empirically tested could not be known. (This emphasis on the knowable as perceivable led critics to charge that Spencer fails to distinguish perceiving and conceiving.) Nevertheless, Spencer was not a skeptic.

Spencer's method was also synthetic. The purpose of each science or field of investigation was to accumulate data and to derive from these phenomena the basic principles or laws or 'forces' which gave rise to them. To the extent that such principles conformed to the results of inquiries or experiments in the other sciences, one could have explanations that were of a high degree of certainty. Thus, Spencer was at pains to show how the evidence and conclusions of each of the sciences is relevant to, and materially affected by, the conclusions of the others.

Human Nature

In the first volume of A System of Synthetic Philosophy, entitled First Principles (1862), Spencer argued that all phenomena could be explained in terms of a lengthy process of evolution in things. This 'principle of continuity' was that homogeneous organisms are unstable, that organisms develop from simple to more complex and heterogeneous forms, and that such evolution constituted a norm of progress. This account of evolution provided a complete and 'predetermined' structure for the kind of variation noted by Darwin--and Darwin's respect for Spencer was significant.

But while Spencer held that progress was a necessity, it was 'necessary' only overall, and there is no teleological element in his account of this process. In fact, it was Spencer, and not Darwin, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," though Darwin came to employ the expression in later editions of the Origin of Species. (That this view was both ambiguous --for it was not clear whether one had in mind the 'fittest' individual or species--and far from universal was something that both figures, however, failed to address.)

Spencer's understanding of evolution included the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and emphasized the direct influence of external agencies on the organism's development. He denied (as Darwin had argued) that evolution was based on the characteristics and development of the organism itself and on a simple principle of natural selection.

Spencer held that he had evidence for this evolutionary account from the study of biology (see Principles of Biology, 2 vols. [1864-7]). He argued that there is a gradual specialization in things--beginning with biological organisms--towards self-sufficiency and individuation. Because human nature can be said to improve and change, then, scientific--including moral and political-- views that rested on the assumption of a stable human nature (such as that presupposed by many utilitarians) had to be rejected. 'Human nature' was simply "the aggregate of men's instincts and sentiments" which, over time, would become adapted to social existence. Spencer still recognized the importance of understanding individuals in terms of the 'whole' of which they were 'parts,' but these parts were mutually dependent, not subordinate to the organism as a whole. They had an identity and value on which the whole depended--unlike, Spencer thought, that portrayed by Hobbes.

For Spencer, then, human life was not only on a continuum with, but was also the culmination of, a lengthy process of evolution. Even though he allowed that there was a parallel development of mind and body, without reducing the former to the latter, he was opposed to dualism and his account of mind and of the functioning of the central nervous system and the brain was mechanistic.

Although what characterized the development of organisms was the 'tendency to individuation' (Social Statics [1851], p. 436), this was coupled with a natural inclination in beings to pursue whatever would preserve their lives. When one examines human beings, this natural inclination was reflected in the characteristic of rational self-interest. Indeed, this tendency to pursue one's individual interests is such that, in primitive societies, at least, Spencer believed that a prime motivating factor in human beings coming together was the threat of violence and war.

Paradoxically, perhaps, Spencer held an 'organic' view of society. Starting with the characteristics of individual entities, one could deduce, using laws of nature, what would promote or provide life and human happiness. He believed that social life was an extension of the life of a natural body, and that social 'organisms' reflected the same (Lamarckian) evolutionary principles or laws as biological entities did. The existence of such 'laws,' then, provides a basis for moral science and for determining how individuals ought to act and what would constitute human happiness.

Religion

As a result of his view that knowledge about phenomena required empirical demonstration, Spencer held that we cannot know the nature of reality in itself and that there was, therefore, something that was fundamentally "unknowable." (This included the complete knowledge of the nature of space, time, force, motion, and substance.)

Since, Spencer claimed, we cannot know anything non-empirical, we cannot know whether there is a God or what its character might be. Though Spencer was a severe critic of religion and religious doctrine and practice--these being the appropriate objects of empirical investigation and assessment--his general position on religion was agnostic. Theism, he argued, cannot be adopted because there is no means to acquire knowledge of the divine, and there would be no way of testing it. But while we cannot know whether religious beliefs are true, neither can we know that (fundamental) religious beliefs are false.

Moral Philosophy

Spencer saw human life on a continuum with, but also as the culmination of, a lengthy process of evolution, and he held that human society reflects the same evolutionary principles as biological organisms do in their development. Society--and social institutions such as the economy--can, he believed, function without external control, just as the digestive system or a lower organism does (though, in arguing this, Spencer failed to see the fundamental differences between 'higher' and 'lower' levels of social organization). For Spencer, all natural and social development reflected 'the universality of law'. Beginning with the 'laws of life', the conditions of social existence, and the recognition of life as a fundamental value, moral science can deduce what kinds of laws promote life and produce happiness. Spencer's ethics and political philosophy, then, depends on a theory of 'natural law,' and it is because of this that, he maintained, evolutionary theory could provide a basis for a comprehensive political and even philosophical theory.

Given the variations in temperament and character among individuals, Spencer recognized that there were differences in what happiness specifically consists in (Social Statics [1851], p. 5). In general, however, 'happiness' is the surplus of pleasure over pain, and 'the good' is what contributes to the life and development of the organism, or--what is much the same--what provides this surplus of pleasure over pain. Happiness, therefore, reflects the complete adaptation of an individual organism to its environment--or, in other words, 'happiness' is that which an individual human being naturally seeks.

For human beings to flourish and develop, Spencer held that there must be as few artificial restrictions as possible, and it is primarily freedom that he, contra Bentham, saw as promoting human happiness. While progress was an inevitable characteristic of evolution, it was something to be achieved only through the free exercise of human faculties (see Social Statics).

Society, however, is (by definition, for Spencer) an aggregate of individuals, and change in society could take place only once the individual members of that society had changed and developed (The Study of Sociology, pp. 366-367). Individuals are, therefore, 'primary,' individual development was 'egoistic,' and associations with others largely instrumental and contractual.

Still, Spencer thought that human beings exhibited a natural sympathy and concern for one another; there is a common character and there are common interests among human beings that they eventually come to recognize as necessary not only for general, but for individual development. (This reflects, to an extent, Spencer's organicism.) Nevertheless, Spencer held that 'altruism' and compassion beyond the family unit were sentiments that came to exist only recently in human beings.

Spencer maintained that there was a natural mechanism--an 'innate moral sense'--in human beings by which they come to arrive at certain moral intuitions and from which laws of conduct might be deduced (The Principles of Ethics, I [1892], p. 26). Thus one might say that Spencer held a kind of 'moral sense theory' (Social Statics, pp. 23, 19). (Later in his life, Spencer described these 'principles' of moral sense and of sympathy as the 'accumulated effects of instinctual or inherited experiences.') Such a mechanism of moral feeling was, Spencer believed, a manifestation of his general idea of the 'persistence of force.' As this persistence of force was a principle of nature, and could not be created artificially, Spencer held that no state or government could promote moral feeling any more than it could promote the existence of physical force. But while Spencer insisted that freedom was the power to do what one desired, he also held that what one desired and willed was wholly determined by "an infinitude of previous experiences" (The Principles of Psychology, pp. 500-502.) Spencer saw this analysis of ethics as culminating in an 'Absolute Ethics,' the standard for which was the production of pure pleasure--and he held that the application of this standard would produce, so far as possible, the greatest amount of pleasure over pain in the long run.

Spencer's views here were rejected by Mill and Hartley. Their principal objection was that Spencer's account of natural 'desires' was inadequate because it failed to provide any reason why one ought to have the feelings or preferences one did.

There is, however, more to Spencer's ethics than this. As individuals become increasingly aware of their individuality, they also become aware of the individuality of others and, thereby, of the law of equal freedom. This 'first principle' is that 'Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man' (Social Statics, p. 103). One's 'moral sense,' then, led to the recognition of the existence of individual rights, and one can identify strains of a rights-based ethic in Spencer's writings.

Spencer's views clearly reflect a fundamentally 'egoist' ethic, but he held that rational egoists would, in the pursuit of their own self interest, not conflict with one another. Still, to care for someone who has no direct relation to oneself--such as supporting the un- and under employed--is, therefore, not only not in one's self interest, but encourages laziness and works against evolution. In this sense, at least, social inequity was explained, if not justified, by evolutionary principles.

Political Philosophy

Despite his egoism and individualism, Spencer held that life in community was important. Because the relation of parts to one another was one of mutual dependency, and because of the priority of the individual 'part' to the collective, society could not do or be anything other than the sum of its units. This view is evident, not only in his first significant major contribution to political philosophy, Social Statics, but in his later essays--some of which appear in later editions of The Man versus the State.

As noted earlier, Spencer held an 'organic' view of society, Nevertheless, as also noted above, he argued that the natural growth of an organism required 'liberty'--which enabled him (philosophically) to justify individualism and to defend the existence of individual human rights. Because of his commitment to the 'law of equal freedom' and his view that law and the state would of necessity interfere with it, he insisted on an extensive policy of laissez faire. For Spencer, 'liberty' "is to be measured, not by the nature of the government machinery he lives under [...] but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him" (The Man versus the State [1940], p. 19); the genuine liberal seeks to repeal those laws that coerce and restrict individuals from doing as they see fit. Spencer followed earlier liberalism, then, in maintaining that law is a restriction of liberty and that the restriction of liberty, in itself, is evil and justified only where it is necessary to the preservation of liberty. The only function of government was to be the policing and protection of individual rights. Spencer maintained that education, religion, the economy, and care for the sick or indigent were not to be undertaken by the state.

Law and public authority have as their general purpose, therefore, the administration of justice (equated with freedom and the protection of rights). These issues became the focus of Spencer's later work in political philosophy and, particularly, in The Man versus the State. Here, Spencer contrasts early, classical liberalism with the liberalism of the 19th century, arguing that it was the latter, and not the former, that was a "new Toryism"--the enemy of individual progress and liberty. It is here as well that Spencer develops an argument for the claim that individuals have rights, based on a 'law of life'. (Interestingly, Spencer acknowledges that rights are not inherently moral, but become so only by one's recognition that for them to be binding on others the rights of others must be binding on oneself--this is, in other words, a consequence of the 'law of equal freedom.') He concluded that everyone had basic rights to liberty 'in virtue of their constitutions' as human beings (Social Statics, p. 77), and that such rights were essential to social progress. (These rights included rights to life, liberty, property, free speech, equal rights of women, universal suffrage, and the right 'to ignore the state'--though Spencer reversed himself on some of these rights in his later writings.) Thus, the industrious--those of character, but with no commitment to existing structures except those which promoted such industry (and, therefore, not religion or patriotic institutions)--would thrive. Nevertheless, all industrious individuals, Spencer believed, would end up being in fundamental agreement.

Not surprisingly, then, Spencer maintained that the arguments of the early utilitarians on the justification of law and authority and on the origin of rights were fallacious. He also rejected utilitarianism and its model of distributive justice because he held that it rested on an egalitarianism that ignored desert and, more fundamentally, biological need and efficiency. Spencer further maintained that the utilitarian account of the law and the state was also inconsistent---that it tacitly assumed the existence of claims or rights that have both moral and legal weight independently of the positive law. And, finally, Spencer argues as well against parliamentary, representative government, seeing it as exhibiting a virtual "divine right"---i.e., claiming that "the majority in an assembly has power that has no bounds." Spencer maintained that government action requires not only individual consent, but that the model for political association should be that of a "joint stock company", where the 'directors' can never act for a certain good except on the explicit wishes of its 'shareholders'. When parliaments attempt to do more than protect the rights of their citizens by, for example, 'imposing' a conception of the good--be it only on a minority--Spencer suggested that they are no different from tyrannies.

Spencer has been frequently accused of inconsistency; one finds variations in his conclusions concerning land nationalization and reform, the rights of children and the extension of suffrage to women, and the role of government. Moreover, in recent studies of Spencer's theory of social justice, there is some debate whether justice is based primarily on desert or on entitlement, whether the 'law of equal freedom' is a moral imperative or a descriptive natural law, and whether the law of equal freedom is grounded on rights, utility, or, ultimately, on 'moral sense'. Nevertheless, Spencer's work has frequently been seen as a model for later 'libertarian' thinkers, such as Robert Nozick, and he continues to be read--and is often invoked--by 'libertarians' on issues concerning the function of government and the fundamental character of individual rights.

Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (b.1861 - d.1947), British mathematician, logician and philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. In collaboration with Bertrand Russell, he authored the landmark three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913) and contributed significantly to twentieth-century logic and metaphysics.

Although there are important continuities throughout his career, Whitehead's intellectual life is often divided into three main periods. The first corresponds roughly with his time at Cambridge, from 1884 to 1910. It was during these years that he worked primarily on issues in mathematics and logic. It was also during this time that he collaborated with Russell. The second main period, covering the years from 1910 to 1924, corresponds with his time at London. During these years Whitehead concentrated mainly, but not exclusively, on issues in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of education. The third main period corresponds roughly with his time at Harvard, from 1924 onward. It was during this time that he worked on more general issues in philosophy, including the development of a comprehensive metaphysical system which has come to be known as process philosophy.

Whitehead's Chronology

Whitehead's Philosophical Influence

Whitehead's Writings

Bibliography

Other Internet Resources

Related Entries

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Whitehead's Chronology

A short chronology of the major events in Whitehead's life is as follows:

(1861) Born February 15 in Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, Kent, England.

(1880) Enters Trinity College, Cambridge, with a scholarship in mathematics.

(1884) Elected a Fellow in Mathematics at Trinity.

(1891) Marries Evelyn Wade.

(1903) Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as a result his work on universal algebra.

(1910) Moves to University College London.

(1914) Appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

(1924) Appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.

(1931) Elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

(1937) Retires from Harvard.

(1945) Awarded Order of Merit.

(1947) Dies December 30 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

For a chronology of Whitehead's major publications, readers are encouraged to consult Whitehead's Writings below.

Whitehead's Philosophical Influence

Whitehead's philosophical influence can be felt in all three of the main areas in which he worked (i.e., logic and the foundations of mathematics, the philosophy of science, and metaphysics) as well as in other areas such as ethics, education and religion.

Whitehead began his academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge, where, starting in 1885, he taught for twenty-five years. In 1890 Bertrand Russell arrived as a student at Trinity and, during the 1890s, the two men came into regular contact with one another. According to Russell, "Whitehead was extraordinarily perfect as a teacher"[1] and Whitehead soon became something of a mentor to the younger man.

By the early 1900s, both men had completed books on the foundations of mathematics. Whitehead's 1898 A Treatise on Universal Algebra had resulted in his election to the Royal Society. Russell's 1903 The Principles of Mathematics was equally significant, marking a decisive break from Russell's earlier neo-Kantian work, including his 1897 An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. Since the research for a proposed second volume of Russell's Principles overlapped considerably with Whitehead's own research for the planned second volume of his Universal Algebra, the two men began collaboration on what was eventually to become Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913). According to Whitehead, they initially expected the research to take about a year to complete. In the end, they worked together on the project for a full decade.

Logicism, the theory that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic, consists of two main theses. The first is that all mathematical truths can be translated into logical truths or, in other words, that the vocabulary of mathematics constitutes a proper subset of the vocabulary of logic. The second is that all mathematical proofs can be recast as logical proofs or, in other words, that the theorems of mathematics constitute a proper subset of the theorems of logic.

Like Gottlob Frege, Whitehead and Russell took the view that numbers could be identified with sets of sets, and that number-theoretic operations could be explained in terms of set theoretic operations such as intersection, union, and difference. Although Whitehead and Russell were able to provide many detailed derivations of major theorems in set theory, finite and transfinite arithmetic, and elementary measure theory, the issue of whether set theory itself can be said to have been successfully reduced to logic remained controversial.

Following the completion of Principia, Whitehead and Russell began to go their separate ways. Perhaps inevitably, Russell's anti-war activities during World War I, in which Whitehead lost his youngest son, also led to something of a split between the two men. Nevertheless, they remained on relatively good terms for the rest of their lives.

At the University of London, Whitehead turned his attention to issues in the philosophy of science. Of particular note was his rejection of the idea that each object has a simple spatial or temporal location. Instead, Whitehead advocated the view that all objects should be understood as fields having both temporal and spatial extensions. For example, just as we cannot perceive a Euclidean point that has position but no magnitude, or a line that has length but no breadth, it is impossible, says Whitehead, to conceive of a simple spatial or temporal location. To think that we can do so involves what he called "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness," the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.[2]

As Whitehead explains, it is his view "that among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. … [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme."[3]

Whitehead's basic idea was that we obtain the abstract idea of a spatial point by considering the limit of a real-life series of volumes extending over each other, for example, a nested series of Russian dolls or a nested series of pots and pans. However, it would be a mistake to think of a spatial point as being anything more than an abstraction; instead, real positions involve the entire series of extended volumes. As Whitehead himself puts it, "In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world."[4]

Further, according to Whitehead, every real-life object may be understood as a similarly constructed series of events and processes. It is this latter idea that Whitehead later systematically elaborates in his imposing Process and Reality (1929), going so far as to suggest that process, rather than substance, should be taken as the fundamental metaphysical constituent of the world. Underlying this work was also the basic idea that, if philosophy is to be successful, it must explain the connection between objective, scientific and logical descriptions of the world and the more everyday world of subjective experience.

While at London, Whitehead also became involved in many practical aspects of tertiary education, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Science and holding several other senior administrative posts. Many of the essays in his The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929) date from this time. It was also during his time in London that Whitehead published several less well known books, including An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922).

Upon being offered an appointment at Harvard, Whitehead moved to the United States in 1924. Given his prior training in mathematics and in the physical sciences, it was sometimes joked that the first philosophy lectures he ever attended were those that he himself delivered at Harvard in his new role as Professor of Philosophy. A year later he also delivered Harvard's prestigious Lowell Lectures which formed the basis for his first primarily metaphysical book, Science and the Modern World (1925). In it, he introduces several themes that later found fuller expression in Process and Reality. The same is true of the 1927/28 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh on which Process and Reality eventually came to be based.

In Process and Reality, rather than assuming substance as the basic metaphysical category, Whitehead introduces a new metaphysically primitive notion which he calls an actual occasion. On Whitehead's view, an actual occasion is not an enduring substance, but a process of becoming. As Donald Sherburne points out, "It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is 'all window.' It is as though one were to take Aristotle's system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its preeminence by the category of relation …."[5] As Whitehead himself explains, his "philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy … For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world."[6]

Significantly, this view runs counter to more traditional views associated with material substance: "There persists," says Whitehead, "[a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived."[7]

The assumption of scientific materialism is effective in many contexts, says Whitehead, only because it directs our attention to a certain class of problems that lend themselves to analysis within this framework. However, scientific materialism is less successful when addressing issues of teleology and when trying to develop a comprehensive, intergrated picture of the universe as a whole. According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic rather than materialistic is therefore essential, and this change in viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand modern physics as from attempts to understand human psychology and teleology. Says Whitehead, "Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events."[8]

The end result is that Whitehead concludes that "nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process."[9]

Whitehead's ultimate attempt to develop a metaphysical unification of space, time, matter, events and teleology has proved to be controversial. In part, this may be because of the connections Whitehead saw between his metaphysics and traditional theism. According to Whitehead, religion is concerned with permanence amid change, and can be found in the ordering we find within nature, something he sometimes called the "primordial nature of God." Thus although not especially influential among contemporary Anglo-American secular philosophers, his metaphysical ideas have had significant influence among many theologians and philosophers of religion.

Analytic and Existential Philosophy

Major events in history up through the mid-20th century can easily be attributed to the legacy of the first Great War:

a world-wide economic crisis and the Great Depression facilitated the rise of fascism throughout Europe

which led to the rise of Nazi Germany and the great cataclysm of World War II

which was followed by the nuclear age and the beginnings of the Cold War.

Developments in western philosophy during this period can be loosely divided into two schools of thought: analytic philosophy, and existentialism.

Analytic philosophy can be further divided into three distinct, yet loosely associated, schools: logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and logical empiricism.

The association between these three analytic schools was based, more or less, on shared ideas, the individuals and groups involved, and one individual in particular: Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by most to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

The emergence of existentialism as a powerful philosophical movement was due in part to the traumatic effects of World War II.

Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Austrian-British philosopher, considered the most influential thinker of the 20th century, and celebrated for his contributions to the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy.

Born in Vienna, he went to England to study engineering and pure mathematics; this led him to study under Bertrand Russell, and from there his attention turned to philosophy.

By 1918 Wittgenstein had completed his first major work, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921), a work he then believed provided the "final solution" to philosophical problems. Shortly after this, Wittgenstein took a long hiatus from academic life.

He resumed his work in philosophy in 1929 and, at this point, began to reject certain conclusions of the Tractatus. He eventually developed a new position which was later reflected in his second great work, Philosophical Investigations (pub. posthumously 1953).

Wittgenstein’s philosophical life may be divided into two distinct phases:

his ‘early’ period, represented by the Tractatus, where he argued that "philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts"

his ‘later’ period, represented by the Philosophical Investigations, where he maintained that "philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language"

Throughout most of his life, however, Wittgenstein consistently viewed philosophy as linguistic analysis with its focus on language and "language games."

Major themes put forth in the Tractatus may be summarized as follows:

Language is composed of complex propositions that can be analyzed into less complex propositions until one arrives at simple or elementary propositions.

Correspondingly, the world is composed of complex facts that can be analyzed into less complex facts until one arrives at simple "atomic facts."

The world is the totality of these facts.

He claimed that the nature of language required elementary propositions, and his theory of meaning required that there be atomic facts pictured by the elementary propositions.

According to Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning, it is the nature of elementary propositions to logically picture atomic facts, or "states of affairs."

On this analysis, only propositions that picture facts—the propositions of science—are considered cognitively meaningful.

Metaphysical, ethical, and theological statements, on the other hand are not meaningful assertions.

These themes echoed Bertrand Russell’s theory of logical atomism [see below] and greatly influenced the logical positivists and other followers of linguistic analysis during this period.

The later Wittgenstein came to believe, however, that the narrow view of language reflected in the Tractatus was mistaken. His response to this realization were the new principles outlined in Philosophical Investigations.

Themes put forth in the Investigations may be summarized as follows:

Words are like tools, and just as tools serve different functions, so linguistic expressions serve many functions. Although some propositions are used to picture facts, many others do not.

Recognition of this linguistic flexibility led Wittgenstein to the conclusion that people play different "language games." The scientist, for example, is involved in a different language game than the theologian.

The meaning of a proposition must be understood in terms of its context, that is, in terms of the rules of the game of which that proposition is a part.

The key to the resolution of philosophical puzzles, according to Wittgenstein, is the therapeutic process of examining and describing language in use.

Logical Positivism

Influenced by Russell, Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, and others, a group of philosophers and mathematicians in Vienna in the 1920s initiated a movement known as logical positivism.

This "Vienna Circle" initiated one of the most important chapters in the history of analytic and linguistic philosophy.

According to the positivists, the task of philosophy is the clarification of meaning, not the discovery of new facts or the construction of traditional metaphysics.

Logical positivism was a philosophical movement which used a strict principle of verifiability to reject as meaningless the non-empirical statements of metaphysics, theology, and ethics.

The logical positivists regarded as meaningful only statements reporting empirical observations, taken together with the tautologies of logic and mathematics.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus proved to be of decisive influence in the rejection of metaphysical doctrines for their meaninglessness, and the acceptance of empiricism, based on scientific verification, as a matter of logical necessity.

According to the verifiability theory of meaning, only scientific statements are legitimate factual claims; and metaphysical, religious, and ethical sentences are factually empty.

A.J. Ayer

(1910-89)

British philosopher, influenced the development of contemporary analytic philosophy.

His most important work, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), was an influential expression of contemporary logical positivism.

Other works of Ayer include:

The Problem of Knowledge (1956)

The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973)

Although his views were later modified, he maintained early on that all meaningful statements are either logical or empirical.

According to his principle of verification, a statement is considered empirical only if some sensory observation is relevant to determining its truth or falseness. Sentences that are neither logical nor empirical—including traditional religious, metaphysical, and ethical sentences—are judged nonsensical.

Linguistic Analysis

Linguistic analysis was that form of analytic philosophy inspired by the work of Moore and Russell, and developed explicitly by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus.

Although no specific doctrines or tenets were accepted by the movement as a whole, analytic and linguistic philosophers agreed that the proper activity of philosophy was to clarify language so as to resolve philosophical problems which were immersed in linguistic confusion.

A considerable diversity of views existed among analytic and linguistic philosophers regarding the nature of linguistic analysis:

Some were concerned with clarifying the meaning of specific words or phrases as an essential step in making philosophical assertions clear and unambiguous.

Others were concerned with determining the general conditions that must be met for any linguistic utterance to be meaningful; their intent was to establish criteria that would distinguish between meaningful and nonsensical sentences.

Some focused on the analysis of ordinary, or natural, language.

Still others were interested in creating formal, symbolic languages which were mathematical in nature.

In their opposition to idealism and in their commitment to the careful attention to language, Moore and Russell set the mood and style for all subsequent analytic and linguistic philosophy.

G. E. Moore rejected Hegelian idealism and held that philosophy was primarily analysis.

Moore’s analytical tenets may be summarized as follows:

Philosophical tasks involve the clarification of puzzling propositions by indicating less complicated propositions to which the originals are held to be logically equivalent.

Only when this task is completed can the truth or falsity of problematic philosophical assertions be adequately determined.

Bertrand Russell was concerned with developing an ideal logical language that would accurately reflect the nature of the world.

Russell’s logical atomism was a metaphysical view based on the logical analysis of language, and the insistence that meaningful propositions must correspond to facts.

According to Russell, complex propositions can be resolved into their simplest components, which he called atomic propositions. These propositions refer to "atomic facts" and are the ultimate constituents of the universe.

His interest in the structure of language also led him to distinguish between the grammatical form of a proposition and its logical form.

Wittgenstein was another central figure in the analytic and linguistic movement. In his first major work, Tractatus, he presented a theory of language which argued that "all philosophy is a critique of language" and that "philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts."

The results of Wittgenstein’s analysis resembled Russell’s logical atomism. The world, he argued, is ultimately composed of simple facts, and the purpose of language is to ‘picture’ these facts.

To be meaningful, statements about the world must be reducible to linguistic utterances that have a structure similar to the simple facts pictured; and only propositions that picture facts—the propositions of science—are considered factually meaningful.

Metaphysical, theological, and ethical sentences were judged to be factually meaningless.

Logical Empiricism

In time, Ayer’s principle of verification came under attack as being too narrow, and yielded to the broader understanding of the nature of language represented in Wittgenstein’s concept of "language games."

In his argument regarding the variety and flexibility of language—that the scientist, the poet, and the theologian are involved in different language games—it became clear that propositions do much more than simply picture facts.

The later Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of a proposition must be understood in its context, that is, in terms of the rules of the language game of which that proposition is a part.

Philosophy, he concluded, is an attempt to resolve problems that arise as the result of linguistic confusion; and the key to the resolution of such problems is ordinary language analysis and the proper use of language.

Later positivists rejected scientific verification maintaining that the verification principle itself is philosophically unverifiable. This later group preferred to call themselves logical empiricists.

The tenets of logical empiricism may be summarized as follows:

it combined the positivism of Hume and Comte with the Cartesian and Kantian concern for logical rigor and precision

it rejected metaphysics as a meaningless game of words

it insisted on the definition of all concepts in terms of observable facts

it assigned to philosophy the task of clarifying the concepts and the logical syntax of science

Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), British philosopher, played a significant role in the development of contemporary analytic and linguistic philosophy.

According to Ryle, the task of philosophy is to restate "systematically misleading expressions" into forms that are logically more accurate.

He was particularly concerned with statements which misleadingly suggest the existence of nonexistent objects.

In The Concept of Mind (1949), he attacked the so-called "mentalistic language" which suggests that the mind is an entity in the same way as the body.

John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960), British philosopher, was another prominent figure in analytic and linguistic philosophy.

He also viewed the fundamental philosophical task to be that of analyzing and clarifying ordinary language; and he came to believe that all language is "performative" and made up of "speech acts."

According to Austin’s speech-act theory, many utterances do not merely describe reality, they also have an effect on reality, insofar as they too are the performance of some act.

His posthumously published works include:

Sense and Sensibilia (1962)

How to Do Things with Words (1962).

Peter Frederick Strawson (1919- ), British philosopher, is associated with the movement known as ‘ordinary language’ philosophy.

Strawson's first book, Introduction to Logical Theory (1952), contains his analysis of the relationship between formal logic and the logical features of ordinary language.

According to Strawson, the complexity of ordinary language is inadequately represented by formal logic, and that in analyzing ordinary language a variety of tools must be used.

In his work Individuals (1959), Strawson engaged in what he called descriptive metaphysics, an effort to describe how people think about the world.

W.V. Quine (1908- ), American philosopher, known for his work in mathematical logic and his contributions to a pragmatic theory of knowledge.

Quine is known for his criticism of the traditional distinction between so-called "synthetic statements" (empirical, or factual, propositions) and "analytic statements" (necessarily true propositions).

For Quine, the justification for speaking one way rather than another, just as the justification for adopting one conceptual system rather than another, is a thoroughly pragmatic one.

Quine also discussed the relationship between language and ontology.

His published works include:

Mathematical Logic (1940)

Word and Object (1960)

The commitment to language analysis as a way of pursuing philosophy continues as a significant dimension in contemporary philosophy.

A division also continues to exist between those who prefer to work with the precision and rigor of symbolic logical systems, and those who prefer to analyze ordinary language.

Although few contemporary philosophers maintain that all philosophical problems are linguistic, the view continues to be widely held that attention to the logical structure of language and to how language is used in everyday discourse can often aid in resolving philosophical problems.

Existential Philosophy

Because of the diversity of positions associated with existentialism, the term is impossible to define precisely; however, certain themes common to virtually all existentialist writers can be identified.

The term itself suggests one major theme: the stress on concrete individual existence, that is, on subjectivity, individual freedom, and choice:

Moral Individualism—that the highest good for the individual is to find his or her own unique vocation; that one must choose one's own way without the aid of universal, objective standards; that no objective, rational basis can be found for moral decisions.

Subjectivity—that personal experience and acting on one's own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth; that the perspective of the individual should be emphasized; that one should be suspicious of systematic reasoning; that the most important questions in life are not accessible to reason or science.

Choice and Commitment—that humanity's primary distinction is the freedom to choose; that choice is central to human existence, and is inescapable; that freedom of choice entails commitment and responsibility; that individuals must accept the risk and responsibility of their choices.

Dread and Anxiety—that fear and general feelings of apprehension, or dread, are part of the human experience; that anxiety (German Angst) results from the individual's confrontation with the impossibility of finding ultimate justification for the choices one makes; that one should recognize and acknowledge these feelings of dread and anxiety.

As a distinct philosophical and literary movement, 20th century existentialism had its roots in the 19th century romantic revolt against reason and science in favor of passionate involvement in life.

Kierkegaard

Generally regarded as the founder of modern existentialism, reacted against the systematic absolute idealism of Hegel and rejected his rational understanding of humanity and history.

Kierkegaard stressed, instead, the ambiguity and absurdity of the human situation.

He believed it was the individual's responsibility to live a totally committed life, a ‘personally valid’ way of life; that this commitment could only be understood by the individual who made it; and that the individual must always be prepared to defy the norms of society for the sake of this commitment.

Nietzsche influenced 20th century existentialism through his criticism of traditional metaphysical and moral assumptions; through his espousal of tragic pessimism; and through his notion of the life-affirming individual will that opposes itself to moral conformity.

Nietzsche proclaimed the "death of God" and went on to reject the entire Judeo-Christian moral tradition in favor of a heroic pagan ideal.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, advocated a radically individualistic Christian faith.

Heidegger and Sartre

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), German philosopher, developed the 20th century notion of existential phenomenology.

Heidegger's original treatment of such themes as human finitude, death, nothingness, and authenticity led to his association with existentialism.

He began his career as an assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and was also influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

Although influenced by Husserl, Heidegger rejected his attempt to put philosophy on a conclusive rationalistic basis.

He argued, instead, that humanity finds itself in an incomprehensible, indifferent world, and that human beings can never hope to understand why they are here.

He believed that each individual must choose a goal and follow it with passionate conviction, aware of the certainty of death and the ultimate meaninglessness of one's life.

In his most important and influential work, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger formulated what he considered the essential philosophical questions: What is it, "to be," and what kind of "being" do human beings have?

Heidegger’s theory of ‘being and time’ may be summarized as follows:

Individuals are thrown into a world that they have not made, but which consists of potentially useful things, including cultural as well as natural objects.

Because these objects come to humanity from the past, and are used in the present for the sake of future goals, Heidegger posited a fundamental relation between the mode of being of objects and humanity, and of the structure of time.

The individual, he claimed, is always in danger of being submerged in the world of objects and everyday routine, and the conventional, shallow behavior of the crowd.

Ultimately, a feeling of dread (Angst) brings the individual to a confrontation with death and the ultimate meaninglessness of life.

But only in this confrontation can an authentic sense of "Being" and of freedom be attained.

After 1930, Heidegger expanded his thoughts on Being, including new ideas which were later expressed in such works as An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953):

He felt that modern technological society had fostered a purely manipulative attitude, which had deprived Being, and human life, of meaning—a condition he called nihilism.

Humanity had forgotten its true vocation, and needed to recover the deeper understanding of Being to be receptive to new understandings of human existence.

Although his work had a crucial influence on the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, Heidegger eventually repudiated the existentialist interpretations of his work.

Because of his early public support of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Heidegger's professional activities were restricted after World War II and controversy followed him until his retirement in 1959.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), philosopher, dramatist, novelist, and political journalist, and the leading exponent of French existentialism.

Sartre gave the term existentialism general currency by using it for his own philosophy and by becoming the leading figure of a distinct movement in France that became internationally influential after World War II.

His philosophic work combined the phenomenology of Husserl, the metaphysics of Hegel and Heidegger, and the social theory of Marx into a single view.

Sartre's philosophy was explicitly atheistic and pessimistic; he declared that human beings require a rational basis for their lives but are unable to achieve one, and thus human life, he concluded, is a "futile passion."

Sartre nevertheless insisted that his existentialism is a form of humanism, and he strongly emphasized human freedom, choice, and responsibility.

In his early philosophic work, Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre conceived humans as beings who create their own world by rebelling against authority and by accepting personal responsibility for their actions, unaided by society, traditional morality, or religious faith.

His theory of existential psychoanalysis asserted the inescapable responsibility of all individuals for their own decisions and made the recognition of one's absolute freedom of choice the necessary condition for authentic human existence.

His plays and novels also expressed the belief that freedom and acceptance of personal responsibility are the main values in life, and that individuals must rely on their creative powers rather than on social or religious authority.

In his later philosophic work, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre's emphasis shifted from existentialist freedom and subjectivity to Marxist social determinism; here he tried to reconcile existentialist concepts with a Marxist analysis of society and history.

Sartre argued that the influence of modern society over the individual is so great as to produce serialization, by which he meant loss of self. Individual power and freedom, he claimed, can only be regained through group revolutionary action.

Sartre's philosophical views, which he related to life, literature, psychology, and political action, stimulated so much popular interest that existentialism became a worldwide movement.

Existentialism in Theology

Kierkegaard’s ‘religious existentialism’ foreshadowed its profound influence on 20th century theology. This is particularly evident in the works of Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber.

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), German philosopher, influenced modern theology and psychiatry as well as philosophy.

Although he rejected explicit religious doctrines, Jaspers influenced contemporary theology through his preoccupation with transcendence and the limits of human experience.

In his first major work, General Psychopathology (1913), Jaspers criticized the scientific pretensions of psychotherapy as misleading and deterministic.

In Philosophy (3 vols.1932), Jaspers gave his view of the history of philosophy and introduced his major themes.

He viewed philosophy as an effort to explore and describe the margins and limits of experience, and he used the term "the encompassing" to refer to the ultimate limits of being.

Jaspers also wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern science and modern economic and political institutions.

Another important work was Philosophy and Existence (1938). For Jaspers, the term "existence" designates the indefinable experience of freedom and possibility; an experience which constitutes the authentic being of individuals who become aware of "the encompassing" by confronting suffering, conflict, guilt, chance, and death.

"Transcendence" is the term Jaspers used to identify God in the intense emotional experience of human beings.

Martin Buber (1878-1965), Austrian-born Jewish religious philosopher, and Zionist author and scholar, developed what he called a philosophy of dialogue.

Buber combined Jewish mysticism with strains of existential thought, and interpreted human experience as a dialogue between the individual and God.

His most widely known work, I and Thou (1922), is a concise poetic expression of his philosophy of dialogue, a religious existentialism centered on his distinction between two types of relationships:

direct, mutual relationship—the "I-Thou" relationship, or dialogue, in which each person confirms the other as of unique value

indirect, utilitarian relationship—the "I-It" relationship, or monologue, in which each person knows and uses others but does not really see or value them for themselves

Applying this distinction between "dialogue" and "monologue" to religion, Buber insisted that religion means talking to God, not about God. The essence of biblical Judaism, in Buber's view, is not monotheism but the dialogue between man and God.

Apart from Buber's philosophy of dialogue, he is best known for his re-creation and interpretation of Hasidism, the popular mystical movement that swept East European Jewry in the 18th and 19th centuries. Buber transformed Hasidism into one of the most recognized mystical movements of the world.

Foucault

Michel Foucault's

Interpretive Analytics

The provocative and influential French thinker, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), challenged the fundamental Western liberal assumptions, originating in the Enlightenment, that history is the objective story of society in progress and that mankind can be defined in terms of an unchanging human nature. Since science has been the guarantor of progress in liberalism, Foucault's work strikes hard at science. Nonetheless, his radically revisionist historiography initially stimulated primarily literary critics and cultural historians, and had only marginal impact on the mainstream practice of the history of science. In the mid 1980s Peter J. Bowler's Evolution: The History of an Idea (1983, rev. ed., 1989) opened professional history of science to Foucault's influence. Bowler presented Foucault's thesis from The Order of Things as a credible interpretation of the pre-Darwinian history of evolutionary ideas. As the most widely used teaching text on the history of evolution, Bowler's work forced historians of biology to deal with Foucault.

In this brief article, I review eight aspects of Foucault's work: (1) his general thesis about the history of the West; (2) his interpretation of the history of science; (3) his thesis about power, (4) his vision of society; (5) his methodology; (6) my interpretation of Foucault's vision of society, (7) the relation of his work to Martin Heidegger's philosophical project, and (8) a summary characterization of Foucault's theory. Also, I provide references.

(1) The history of the West. Running through all of Foucault's books is a large background thesis about the history of the West. Foucault believed that the modality of Being of Western mankind did not remain constant, but changed fundamentally. The most important change came toward the end of the eighteenth century. Western man's phenomenological horizon ruptured, opening a space in which he constituted his self as a subject of study in a profoundly new way. The novelty of this self-reconstitution had to do with the unprecedented totalization of Western man's world.

Foucault's thesis has to be stated in special philosophical language, because more obvious terminology reflects points of view Foucault rejected. For instance, we might gloss Foucault's thesis as claiming that human nature changed over history and because of history. Foucault rejected talk of human nature, however, because he did not think man had a "human nature." He rejected the possibility of a philosophical anthropology on which talk of human nature is necessarily based. Foucault also did not derive his thesis from cultural anthropology. As a modern science, cultural anthropology is itself a product of the Western modality of Being as reconstituted in the late eighteenth century. To understand Foucault's philosophical language, we must learn more about his thesis and its sources.

Foucault's large background thesis has been obscured for many readers by the provocative and counter-intuitive claims he made in subsidiary theses. At one time or another, he argued, that all social relations are produced by "power"; that classes in power create themselves, and mask their self constitution, by negatively constituting other classes as Other; that science is not an objective study of nature; that the social progress claimed by Western liberalism, such as the advance of individual freedom, has really involved new forms of maintenance of old power relations; that definition of sexuality in terms of two essential genders is distinctly modern and was created as part of social power relations. In employing these theses, Foucault turned upside down treasured, conventional notions of modern bourgeois society. For instance, he argued that the study of "insane mentality" reveals the essence of rationality and that normal sexual behavior is a cloaked version of the "abnormal." In other words, Foucault collapsed distinctions between normality and abnormality, and between centricity and marginality. Return to Contents Paragraph

(2) The history of science. Foucault's scholarly project focused on the history of the modern human sciences. His thesis about the pre-Darwinian history of evolution theory (The Order of Things, 1970), particularly engaged mainstream historians of science. He argued that Cuvier, conventionally considered the arch-opponent of transmutation (as evolutionary theory before Darwin was called), was actually the great innovator. Cuvier's revision of the underlying logic of biological taxonomy and theory of comparative anatomy created an intellectual opening in which Darwinian evolutionary theory could be created. Foucault relegated Lamarck, whom historians considered the most important precursor of Darwin, to a prior era of closed taxonomy out of which true evolutionary theory could not emerge.

Foucault's argument looked at an underlying, "preconceptual" level of cultural mentality (Archaeology, 60-63), lying beyond the reach of conscious theorizing by scientists. He called this hypothetical construct by different names in different books - "episteme", "discursive formation," "conditions of emergence of discourse," for example. The different names all pointed to a similar idea: that a society in an historical epoch shared an unconscious cultural formation which set up the rules of reasoning of science and the codes of cultural thought. The existence of this formation was not a choice or a fundamental project of the society (Archaeology, 69-70). The logic, the taxonomy, and the theoretical possibility of kinds of scientific theorizing emerged out of this formation. Science could not independently test its own deep assumptions, that is, the assumptions that made science "science" to begin with. Scientists thinking scientific thoughts had a modality of Being in the world just as much a product of historicity as ordinary persons, artists, and politicians.

Furthermore, all scientific investigation and social discussion ("discourses") about human nature, cultural activity, and social history, emerged from societal agents engaged in processes of social control, that is, of power. Power brought "objective" scientific knowledge into being. "Objectivity" was relative to power. Stabilization of social distribution of power set up long historical epochs when the socially constructed features of knowledge remained frozen in "discursive formations." Ideas became reified. The social relations of power were masked by canons of legitimacy internalized by persons who accepted - whether they knew it or not - the distribution of power in society. Science was certainly "about truth," but science was also about power. "Power" produced and controlled the epistemology, theoretic structure, and taxonomy of formal knowledge. Power produced and controlled the cultural codes by which groups acted out their roles. Power produced and controlled the voluble social discourses between diverse ethnic groups and classes of modern society. Foucault's radical project amounted to the complete historicizing of scientific knowledge and of human cultures. Return to Contents Paragraph

(3) Power.Commentators cannot agree on Foucault's accomplishment, in part because Foucault spoke elusively about the key concept of his work - his concept of "power." Also, he rejected the easy interpretations of what he meant by "power." In this section, I review briefly what Foucault says power is not. I then suggest approaching Foucault's concept of power indirectly, by examining his vision of society. If we can figure out his vision of society, we might be able to identify the kind of power that existed in such a society and that produced the "problématiques", whose genealogy Foucault traced.

Foucault said that by "power" he did not refer to the coercion based on police power with which a ruling class suppresses other classes. The employment of court injunctions and militias to break up strikes, often employed by American capitalists at the end of the nineteenth century, the use of legislation to strip one group of the benefits of citizenship, as the Nazi government did to German Jews, the use of the military to destroy rebellion as many European nations did to local opposition to their colonial rule - these are all striking examples of the sordid, point to point, employment of power; but they are not what Foucault meant by "power." Foucault said that he did not mean by power what is now fashionably called "cultural hegemony" - the use of the law and the legitimating authority of public institutions, such as schools, to inculcate in suppressed groups the false belief that they were not suppressed or that their suppression was in their own interest. Foucault did not mean by "power" the cultural capability of ruling classes or castes to impose cultural norms on subject people, for instance, to convince working classes that repression of libido was morally desirable or that certain proscribed behaviors, such as homosexuality, were "abnormal." Foucault did not deny many such examples of blatant exercise of power, but he rejected them as not fundamental, because the amount of power they expressed was insufficient to shape or transform society in the ways he perceived "power" as doing. Power had to be positive as well as negative. Power had to create new forms of behavior, new modes of self understanding, and new codes of meaning, as well as restrain behaviors opposed to a ruling class.

Scholars have suggested several interpretations of the generalized, positive social power by which Foucault believed social dominance was maintained. One scholar suggested that "power" was analogous to "social consensus," a familiar sociological concept in mainstream structural-functionalism in the United States. Foucault rejected this analogy, since it appeared to reduce "power" to a technique of psychological investment. Other scholars suggested that "power" was analogous to Rousseau's "general will" of the people, in which democratic societies grounded their sovereignty. Foucault rejected this suggestion as tying the concept of power - through the concept of sovereignty - to particular political positions. Marxist scholars suggest that Foucault's concept of power is analogous to Marx's concept of "over-determination." This Marxist concept means that everything in society determines everything else, as society developed according to economic laws. Marxists use the over-determination concept to refute the crude mis-interpretation of Marxist social theory, which says, erroneously, that economic institutions "determine" cultural forms, as if cultural forms had no influence on their own. Foucault allowed that this concept of over-determination was close to how power manifested itself in society, but he rejected the notion of any fundamental economic laws.

In interviews with scholars, eager to make concrete sense of Foucault's theory of power, Foucault did provide several positive hints as to what he meant. He said that power is like war, and power is like language. By these hints, he appeared to mean that "power" is a generalized social situation of conflict held together or motivated by distinctive rules. I believe that these hints provide unintended insight into the psychological origin of Foucault's concept of power, as well as to its scholarly meaning in his theory. I wish to approach these hints indirectly by looking at Foucault's vision of society. Return to Contents Paragraph

(4) Vision of society. Foucault's work concerns Western culture in four major periods - Hellenic Greece and pre-Christian Classical Rome (two periods that he lumps together as "antiquity"), Seventeenth and eighteenth century France (which he calls the "classical period"), and nineteenth century France (the "modern" period). He is interested in the shift from Ancient to Classical cultures, from the Renaissance to Modern times, and from the pre-French Revolution ancien régime to the post-French Revolution Modern epoch. The French revolution was crucial for Foucault, because it introduced the political mentality of totalization that laid the basis for the reformation of the scientific episteme and the reconceptualization of major scientific and medical phenomena (Birth of the Clinic, 28-31, 38). Foucault also suggested (Order of Things, 385) that the modern era in the study of man was (in the post ww2 era) coming to an end. This thesis that our present era is "post modern" has since become familiar. Except for his last work in which he addressed Greek and Roman cultures of sexuality, Foucault looked at Western history through French history with little detailed attention to English, German, or Italian history. (This focus on French history is distinct from Foucault's indebtedness to non-French historians and philosophers. Indeed, his largest debt for his historical thesis - the emergence of a new historical mode of Being at the beginning of the modern epoch-is to the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger.)

In discussing all of these different periods and culture, Foucault wove his analyses around three social constructs, as if he believed these societies shared some unity: class (or caste), command economics, and the state. He also referenced (though not frequently) the idea that these social constructs reflected the fundamental need of societies to marshal economic resources to keep themselves going. This reference probably grew out of the influence of Marxism on his early writings. Foucault was not a Marxist, however, because he clearly did not think that economic laws drove history. Rather, he thought that power arranged itself socially most efficiently and effectively through classes or castes, using command economics, and by aligned classes with the powers of the state. Marxists believed the free market had the greatest role in driving social change in modern capitalism; Foucault did not.

Using the three concepts of class, command, and state, Foucault characterized different Western societies in similar terms. These features were present all periods, but they became stronger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All societies have classes (i.e., classes pre-exist the industrial revolution). All societies were hierarchically organized. All states were administrative. All had administrative collective institutions (army, hospitals, etc.) that executed the will of the state. Social behaviors were produced (or generated or proliferated) in institutional settings in which behavior was regulated (by "systems of power"), and in which persons were brought to see themselves as "subjects" of the regulation. The major problem of government was sovereignty and the organization of sovereignty vis a vis the subjects of sovereignty. Foucault saw the "state" as co-extensive with "society."

Foucault discussed even the Ancient Greek city-state and the Classical Roman state as if city, state, and society were largely one and the same. (Sexuality, II: 121) Ancient Greece did not have a market society, but a command economy; "markets" and "marketplaces" were civic institutions. The model for Greek command economy and command society was the patriarchal household. Social relations were conceptualized by the Ancient Greeks themselves and by Foucault in terms of dominance and subordination. In Ancient Greece, politics was fiat (Sexuality, II:167)

Despite the appearance of some apparently familiar language and concepts in Foucault's social description, Foucault denied that Western societies were ever what most Western social thinkers have thought they were. Here is a brief recitation. (i) Foucault's vision of society was not Lockean. Foucault never described society, even when discussing nineteenth century Western liberalism, in terms of voluntarism and the free negotiation of social relations between individuals. He did not use Hobbes' or Locke's concepts of contract. (ii) Foucault never characterized Western society after the Renaissance as Weberian. He did not discuss a bureaucratic, collective society with an inherent tendency toward bureaucratic rationalization. (iii) Foucault did not describe modern society in Spencerian terms of free markets of capital and labor. He did not see markets as ruled by the laws of the market. He did not use John Stuart Mill's language of individualism. (iv) Foucault did not describe social change in William Graham Sumner's familiar evolutionary language of cultural folkways, of slowly evolving cooperative institutions functionally adapting to a Lyellian natural environment and a Malthusian social environment. He did not see society organically unified in analogy to the biological organism. (v) Foucault did not think that society built itself up from individual role-playing and elementary social institutions on the basis of a consensus of values as did Talcott Parsons, the great American theorist of structural functionalism of the 1950s. (vi) Foucault did not utilize Marxist theory of conflict or contradiction between opposed social-economic classes. Though Foucault acknowledged the social presence of collective institutions, of liberal economic and social forms, of individuals, and of values that bind and interests that divide, of social conflict and contradiction, he rejected all of the major Western traditions of social and economic interpretation of the West of the past three hundred years. Since one or other of these traditions provides the vocabulary that scholars use today to discuss the history of the West, no one has been able to discuss Foucault's theory except in indirect terms.

Foucault believed that seeing Western society as the product of "power" made it impossible to see the West in terms of freedom. Since all Western social theory has been based on assumptions of the real meaningfulness of freedom, Foucault could not use them. Foucault's story of the West is not the story of freedom. Return to Contents Paragraph

(5) Methodology. Foucault was not a social theorist. He felt no compulsion to create a social theory that would "explain" or "interpret" the history of the West in terms of "power." He was not a historian of ideas. He presented himself as an "archaeologist," who must be content with describing the invisible cultural formations that, he believed, produced the visible social and literary evidence he examined. He sought the conditions of possibility of discourse, the rules which governed the putting together of statements, and the ruptures in formations where novelty could appear. "Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules." (Archaeology, 138) Return to Contents Paragraph

(6) An interpretation of Foucault's vision of society. We can at most glimpse Foucault's vision of European society. Foucault's early works point to what was probably Foucault's conscious model of power: the ancien régime of the centralized administrative monarchical French state of the 17th and 18th century.

Despite Foucault's immersion in French history of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, however, he had no personal experience of it that might have fostered the intense motivation of rejection of all conventional interpretive models. There was, however, a different "monarchical administrative state" based on power that he did personally experience, though he did not mention it in his scholarly writings. This was Nazi occupied Vichy France of the second world war. Born in 1926, Foucault was thirteen years old when France fell to Hitler's armies. He grew up during his formative adolescent years, experiencing his intellectual, sexual, and political coming of age, in the occupied provincial town of Poitiers. His family's Catholic faith, observance of Catholic ritual, and years of schooling in Catholic schools reinforced the atmosphere of coercive administrative regulation that generated Foucault's personality and self-understanding.

The few known details of Foucault's life in these years testify to the social mystery of coercive power diffused so completely through society that brutal display of police power by the Nazi occupiers was seldom necessary to compel collaborationist thought and behavior. Foucault remembered himself as a passive observer, witnessing at some emotional distance the appearance and disappearance, flight and arrest, of teachers, town's people, and relatives in the ruptures and eruptions in the horizon of Nazi authority.

Understanding the psychological origins of theoretical insight does not in any way invalidate (or validate) the insight. It only helps us to understand the nature of the insight. With Foucault's youthful experience of the Nazi collaborationist state, diffused by coercion, in mind, we can now see what Foucault's theory of "power" means. Foucault would no doubt object to my psychological reading of his theory; nonetheless, I believe that his theory of power represents a projection of a "hostage" psychology. Several decades of study by experts of terrorists and hostages have convinced them of the reality of a psychological transformation the hostage undergoes during captivity. Studies of the psychology of abused women who remain within abusive marriages have reinforced this portrait. The hostage is taken against her will. Prolonged dependency for survival of the hostage on the will of the terrorists leads to a psychological switch, in which the hostage comes to identify with the captor and with the captor's perspective. Long term hostages, like abused women, will often try to explain sympathetically their captors' point of view. In other words, involuntary captivity in conditions of absolute power over life and death often lead to a collaborationist mentality and the concomitant masking of the relationship of power and dependence from the victim's own perception. Absolute power determines everything about the captivity, but the power is invisible; it is everywhere and nowhere. Return to Contents Paragraph

(7) Foucault and Heidegger's existentialism. Much of the difficulty with Foucault's thesis is that it is disguised philosophy. This is clear by examining the relationship between Foucault's background thesis about the history of the West and Martin Heidegger's theory of Being. One of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Heidegger elaborated a philosophy of "phenomenological existentialism." Heidegger tried to account for (descriptively, without explaining) the structure of human consciousness - that is, the organization of our conscious experience into, for instance, subject and object ("I" and "you", "I" and "it"), attention, expectation, memory, the sense of the past, and the sense of the future. Human beings live "in history," something (presumably) no other organism does. Heidegger did not think that these structures pre-existed experience, but came into existence as experience was generated.

Without going into a detailed explication of a very complicated philosophy, we may jump to Heidegger's main conclusion. Heidegger believed that one of the major characteristics of twentieth century man's consciousness is its experience of the world as technology. Modern man experiences himself, his domestic world, and his larger social world as utilities for his needs and purposes. Moreover, this "technologization" of man's experience is total. Everything about our experience is technological, including our experience of other persons.

Heidegger had a quasi-historical thesis concerning his theory of consciousness. He believed that technological consciousness is not an essential part of being human, but a change from an earlier way of being. Once man experienced the world so that metaphysics was real; now man no longer does. Critics of Heidegger eventually came to see Heidegger's thesis as a complicated anti-modernism. Heidegger was saying, in effect, that modern man has lost a sense of the sacred - a religious way of being in the world. Technology is a "total" world for modern man, because modern man has relinquished his dependence upon an ultimate "other," that is, upon God. Without dependency upon God, man is completely inside technology, with no glimpse of any thing or being which he cannot use technologically, such as God. (In Augustinian theology and German Lutheran theology, the two traditions of religious thought present in Heidegger, man has no capability to influence God's grace; hence man cannot technologize his relation to God.) Heidegger presented his theory as a philosopher, not a historian, and did not seek "historical" evidence for it (which is why I have labeled his theory as "quasi-historical"). Heidegger even claimed, in Being and Time (1927), that historical evidence was irrelevant to it. Nonetheless, his theory clearly implied that historians should find in man's literary and cultural production some evidence of a changed consciousness, a changed way of being in the world. This is what Foucault looked for.

Foucault's work can be consistently interpreted as providing the historical evidence of Heidegger's thesis of a change in man's Being. Foucault also provided a date for the change: the era of the French Revolution. During that time, Western man's "world" transformed totally, so that man became the object of technological manipulation and "objective" scientific study; i.e., Western man became technologized, treating himself, as well as other persons, as objects, just as Heidegger described. Return to Contents Paragraph

(8) Summary.We are now, finally, in a position to characterize Foucault's theory. Foucault's theory is political. Politics concerns the ultimate operation of power in the distribution of social resources. Foucault's concerns were ultimately "political" by this definition. Even more, Foucault's "explanation" of the nature of Western history was also "political." Foucault saw Western man's Being as a product of political epochs of history. Economic and social institutions and cultural forms, including technology, were simply characteristic constructions of particular political worlds, just as in Heidegger's phenomenological theory the "I" and "you" and "it" of experience are constructions of the technological mode of Being of "modernity." Return to Contents Paragraph

Francis Bacon

(1561-1626)

Sir Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam and the Viscount St. Albans) was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. Early in his career he claimed “all knowledge as his province” and afterwards dedicated himself to a wholesale revaluation and re-structuring of traditional learning. To take the place of the established tradition (a miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and natural magic), he proposed an entirely new system based on empirical and inductive principles and the active development of new arts and inventions, a system whose ultimate goal would be the production of practical knowledge for “the use and benefit of men” and the relief of the human condition.

At the same time that he was founding and promoting this new project for the advancement of learning, Bacon was also moving up the ladder of state service. His career aspirations had been largely disappointed under Elizabeth I, but with the ascension of James his political fortunes rose. Knighted in 1603, he was then steadily promoted to a series of offices, including Solicitor General (1607), Attorney General (1613), and eventually Lord Chancellor (1618). While serving as Chancellor, he was indicted on charges of bribery and forced to leave public office. He then retired to his estate where he devoted himself full time to his continuing literary, scientific, and philosophic work. He died in 1626, leaving behind a cultural legacy that, for better or worse, includes most of the foundation for the triumph of technology and for the modern world as we currently know it.

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Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to that part of this article)

Life and Political Career

Thought and Writings

Literary Works

The New Atlantis

Scientific and Philosophical Works

The Great Instauration

The Advancement of Learning

The “Distempers” of Learning

The Idea of Progress

The Reclassification of Knowledge

The New Organon

The Idols

Induction

Reputation and Cultural Legacy

Bibliography

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Life and Political Career

Sir Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam, the Viscount St. Albans, and Lord Chancellor of England) was born in London in 1561 to a prominent and well-connected family. His parents were Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Seal, and Lady Anne Cooke, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, a knight and one-time tutor to the royal family. Lady Anne was a learned woman in her own right, having acquired Greek and Latin as well as Italian and French. She was a sister-in-law both to Sir Thomas Hoby, the esteemed English translator of Castiglione, and to Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley), Lord Treasurer, chief counselor to Elizabeth I, and from 1572-1598 the most powerful man in England.

Bacon was educated at home at the family estate at Gorhambury in Herfordshire. In 1573, at the age of just twelve, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where the stodgy Scholastic curriculum triggered his lifelong opposition to Aristotelianism (though not to the works of Aristotle himself).

In 1576 Bacon began reading law at Gray’s Inn. Yet only a year later he interrupted his studies in order to take a position in the diplomatic service in France as an assistant to the ambassador. In 1579, while he was still in France, his father died, leaving him (as the second son of a second marriage and the youngest of six heirs) virtually without support. With no position, no land, no income, and no immediate prospects, he returned to England and resumed the study of law.

Bacon completed his law degree in 1582, and in 1588 he was named lecturer in legal studies at Gray’s Inn. In the meantime, he was elected to Parliament in 1584 as a member for Melcombe in Dorsetshire. He would remain in Parliament as a representative for various constituencies for the next 36 years.

In 1593 his blunt criticism of a new tax levy resulted in an unfortunate setback to his career expectations, the Queen taking personal offense at his opposition. Any hopes he had of becoming Attorney General or Solicitor General during her reign were dashed, though Elizabeth eventually relented to the extent of appointing Bacon her Extraordinary Counsel in 1596.

It was around this time that Bacon entered the service of Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, a dashing courtier, soldier, plotter of intrigue, and sometime favorite of the Queen. No doubt Bacon viewed Essex as a rising star and a figure who could provide a much-needed boost to his own sagging career. Unfortunately, it was not long before Essex’s own fortunes plummeted following a series of military and political blunders culminating in a disastrous coup attempt. When the coup plot failed, Devereux was arrested, tried, and eventually executed, with Bacon, in his capacity as Queen’s Counsel, playing a vital role in the prosecution of the case.

In 1603, James I succeeded Elizabeth, and Bacon’s prospects for advancement dramatically improved. After being knighted by the king, he swiftly ascended the ladder of state and from 1604-1618 filled a succession of high-profile advisory positions:

1604 – Appointed King’s Counsel.

1607 – Named Solicitor General.

1608 – Appointed Clerk of the Star Chamber.

1613 – Appointed Attorney General.

1616 – Made a member of the Privy Council.

1617 – Appointed Lord Keeper of the Royal Seal (his father’s former office).

1618 – Made Lord Chancellor.

As Lord Chancellor, Bacon wielded a degree of power and influence that he could only have imagined as a young lawyer seeking preferment. Yet it was at this point, while he stood at the very pinnacle of success, that he suffered his great Fall. In 1621 he was arrested and charged with bribery. After pleading guilty, he was heavily fined and sentenced to a prison term in the Tower of London. Although the fine was later waived and Bacon spent only four days in the Tower, he was never allowed to sit in Parliament or hold political office again.

The entire episode was a terrible disgrace for Bacon personally and a stigma that would cling to and injure his reputation for years to come. As various chroniclers of the case have pointed out, the accepting of gifts from suppliants in a law suit was a common practice in Bacon’s day, and it is also true that Bacon ended up judging against the two petitioners who had offered the fateful bribes. Yet the damage was done, and Bacon to his credit accepted the judgment against him without excuse. According to his own Essayes, or Counsels, he should have known and done better. (In this respect it is worth noting that during his forced retirement, Bacon revised and republished the Essayes, injecting an even greater degree of shrewdness into a collection already notable for its worldliness and keen political sense.) Macaulay in a lengthy essay declared Bacon a great intellect but (borrowing a phrase from Bacon’s own letters) a “most dishonest man,” and more than one writer has characterized him as cold, calculating, and arrogant. Yet whatever his flaws, even his enemies conceded that during his trial he accepted his punishment nobly, and moved on.

Bacon spent his remaining years working with renewed determination on his lifelong project: the reform of learning and the establishment of an intellectual community dedicated to the discovery of scientific knowledge for the “use and benefit of men.” The former Lord Chancellor died on 9 April, 1626, supposedly of a cold or pneumonia contracted while testing his theory of the preservative and insulating properties of snow.

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Thought and Writings

In a way Bacon’s descent from political power was a fortunate fall, for it represented a liberation from the bondage of public life resulting in a remarkable final burst of literary and scientific activity. As Renaissance scholar and Bacon expert Brian Vickers has reminded us, Bacon’s earlier works, impressive as they are, were essentially products of his “spare time.” It was only during his last five years that he was able to concentrate exclusively on writing and produce, in addition to a handful of minor pieces:

Two substantial volumes of history and biography, The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh and The History of the Reign of King Henry the Eighth.

De Augmentis Scientiarum (an expanded Latin version of his earlier Advancement of Learning).

The final 1625 edition of his Essayes, or Counsels.

The remarkable Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History in Ten Centuries (a curious hodge-podge of scientific experiments, personal observations, speculations, ancient teachings, and analytical discussions on topics ranging from the causes of hiccups to explanations for the shortage of rain in Egypt). Artificially divided into ten “centuries” (i.e., ten chapters, each consisting of one hundred items), the work was apparently intended to be included in Part Three of the Magna Instauratio.

His utopian science-fiction novel The New Atlantis, which was published in unfinished form a year after his death.

Various parts of his unfinished magnum opus Magna Instauratio (or Great Instauration), including a “Natural History of Winds” and a “Natural History of Life and Death.”

These late productions represented the capstone of a writing career that spanned more than four decades and encompassed virtually an entire curriculum of literary, scientific, and philosophical studies.

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Literary Works

Despite the fanatical claims (and very un-Baconian credulity) of a few admirers, it is a virtual certainty that Bacon did not write the works traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. Even so, the Lord Chancellor’s high place in the history of English literature as well as his influential role in the development of English prose style remain well-established and secure. Indeed even if Bacon had produced nothing else but his masterful Essayes (first published in 1597 and then revised and expanded in 1612 and 1625), he would still rate among the top echelon of 17th-century English authors. And so when we take into account his other writings, e.g., his histories, letters, and especially his major philosophical and scientific works, we must surely place him in the first rank of English literature’s great men of letters and among its finest masters (alongside names like Johnson, Mill, Carlyle, and Ruskin) of non-fiction prose.

Bacon’s style, though elegant, is by no means as simple as it seems or as it is often described. In fact it is actually a fairly complex affair that achieves its air of ease and clarity more through its balanced cadences, natural metaphors, and carefully arranged symmetries than through the use of plain words, commonplace ideas, and straightforward syntax. (In this connection it is noteworthy that in the revised versions of the essays Bacon seems to have deliberately disrupted many of his earlier balanced effects to produce a style that is actually more jagged and, in effect, more challenging to the casual reader.)

Furthermore, just as Bacon’s personal style and living habits were prone to extravagance and never particularly austere, so in his writing he was never quite able to resist the occasional grand word, magniloquent phrase, or orotund effect. (As Dr. Johnson observed, “A dictionary of the English language might be compiled from Bacon’s works alone.”) Bishop Sprat in his 1667 History of the Royal Society honored Bacon and praised the society membership for supposedly eschewing fine words and fancy metaphors and adhering instead to a natural lucidity and “mathematical plainness.” To write in such a way, Sprat suggested, was to follow true, scientific, Baconian principles. And while Bacon himself often expressed similar sentiments (praising blunt expression while condemning the seductions of figurative language), a reader would be hard pressed to find many examples of such spare technique in Bacon’s own writings. Of Bacon’s contemporary readers, at least one took exception to the view that his writing represented a perfect model of plain language and transparent meaning. After perusing the New Organon, King James (to whom Bacon had proudly dedicated the volume) reportedly pronounced the work “like the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.”

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The New Atlantis

As a work of narrative fiction, Bacon’s novel New Atlantis may be classified as a literary rather than a scientific (or philosophical) work, though it effectively belongs to both categories. According to Bacon’s amanuensis and first biographer William Rawley, the novel represents the first part (showing the design of a great college or institute devoted to the interpretation of nature) of what was to have been a longer and more detailed project (depicting the entire legal structure and political organization of an ideal commonwealth). The work thus stands in the great tradition of the utopian-philosophic novel that stretches from Plato and More to Huxley and Skinner.

The thin plot or fable is little more than a fictional shell to contain the real meat of Bacon’s story: the elaborate description of Salomon’s House (also known as the College of the Six Days Works), a centrally organized research facility where specially trained teams of investigators collect data, conduct experiments, and (most importantly from Bacon’s point of view) apply the knowledge they gain to produce “things of use and practice for man’s life.” These new arts and inventions they eventually share with the outside world.

In terms of its sci-fi adventure elements, the New Atlantis is about as exciting as a government or university re-organization plan. But in terms of its historical impact, the novel has proven to be nothing less than revolutionary, having served not only as an effective inspiration and model for the British Royal Society, but also as an early blueprint and prophecy of the modern research center and international scientific community.

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Scientific and Philosophical Works

It is never easy to summarize the thought of a prolific and wide-ranging philosopher. Yet Bacon somewhat simplifies the task by his own helpful habits of systematic classification and catchy pneumonic labeling. (Thus, for example, there are three “distempers” – or diseases – of learning,” eleven errors or “peccant humours,” four “Idols,” three primary mental faculties and categories of knowledge, etc.) In effect, by following Bacon’s own methods it is possible to produce a convenient outline or overview of his main scientific and philosophical ideas.

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The Great Instauration

As early as 1592, in a famous letter to his uncle, Lord Burghley, Bacon declared “all knowledge” to be his province and vowed his personal commitment to a plan for the full-scale rehabilitation and reorganization of learning. In effect, he dedicated himself to a long-term project of intellectual reform, and the balance of his career can be viewed as a continuing effort to make good on that pledge. In 1620, while he was still at the peak of his political success, he published the preliminary description and plan for an enormous work that would fully answer to his earlier declared ambitions. The work, dedicated to James, was to be called Magna Instauratio (i.e., the “grand edifice” or Great Instauration), and it would represent a kind of summa or culmination of all Bacon’s thought on subjects ranging from logic and epistemology to practical science (or what in Bacon’s day was called “natural philosophy,” the word science being then but a general synonym for “wisdom” or “learning”).

Like several of Bacon’s projects, the Instauratio in its contemplated form was never finished. Of the intended six parts, only the first two were completed, while the other portions were only partly finished or barely begun. Consequently, the work as we have it is less like the vast but well-sculpted monument that Bacon envisioned than a kind of philosophical miscellany or grab-bag. Part I of the project, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (“Nine Books of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning”), was published in 1623. It is basically an enlarged version of the earlier Proficience and Advancement of Learning, which Bacon had presented to James in 1605. Part II, the Novum Organum (or “New Organon”) provides the author’s detailed explanation and demonstration of the correct procedure for interpreting nature. It first appeared in 1620. Together these two works present the essential elements of Bacon’s philosophy, including most of the major ideas and principles that we have come to associate with the terms “Baconian” and “Baconianism.”

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The Advancement of Learning

Relatively early in his career Bacon judged that, owing mainly to an undue reverence for the past (as well as to an excessive absorption in cultural vanities and frivolities), the intellectual life of Europe had reached a kind of impasse or standstill. Yet he believed there was a way beyond this stagnation if persons of learning, armed with new methods and insights, would simply open their eyes and minds to the world around them. This at any rate was the basic argument of his seminal 1605 treatise The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, arguably the first important philosophical work to be published in English.

It is in this work that Bacon sketched out the main themes and ideas that he continued to refine and develop throughout his career, beginning with the notion that there are clear obstacles to or diseases of learning that must be avoided or purged before further progress is possible.

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The “Distempers” of Learning

“There be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced.” Thus Bacon, in the first book of the Advancement. He goes on to refer to these vanities as the three “distempers” of learning and identifies them (in his characteristically memorable fashion) as “fantastical learning,” “contentious learning,” and “delicate learning” (alternatively identified as “vain imaginations,” “vain altercations,” and “vain affectations”).

By fantastical learning (“vain imaginations”) Bacon had in mind what we would today call pseudo-science: i.e., a collection of ideas that lack any real or substantial foundation, that are professed mainly by occultists and charlatans, that are carefully shielded from outside criticism, and that are offered largely to an audience of credulous true believers. In Bacon’s day such “imaginative science” was familiar in the form of astrology, natural magic, and alchemy.

By contentious learning (“vain altercations”) Bacon was referring mainly to Aristotelian philosophy and theology and especially to the Scholastic tradition of logical hair-splitting and metaphysical quibbling. But the phrase applies to any intellectual endeavor in which the principal aim is not new knowledge or deeper understanding but endless debate cherished for its own sake.

Delicate learning (“vain affectations”) was Bacon’s label for the new humanism insofar as (in his view) it seemed concerned not with the actual recovery of ancient texts or the retrieval of past knowledge but merely with the revival of Ciceronian rhetorical embellishments and the reproduction of classical prose style. Such preoccupation with “words more than matter,” with “choiceness of phrase” and the “sweet falling of clauses” – in short, with style over substance – seemed to Bacon (a careful stylist in his own right) the most seductive and decadent literary vice of his age.

Here we may note that from Bacon’s point of view the “distempers” of learning share two main faults:

Prodigal ingenuity – i.e., each distemper represents a lavish and regrettable waste of talent, as inventive minds that might be employed in more productive pursuits exhaust their energy on trivial or puerile enterprises instead.

Sterile results – i.e., instead of contributing to the discovery of new knowledge (and thus to a practical “advancement of learning” and eventually to a better life for all), the distempers of learning are essentially exercises in personal vainglory that aim at little more than idle theorizing or the preservation of older forms of knowledge.

In short, in Bacon’s view the distempers impede genuine intellectual progress by beguiling talented thinkers into fruitless, illusory, or purely self-serving ventures. What is needed – and this is a theme reiterated in all his later writings on learning and human progress – is a program to re-channel that same creative energy into socially useful new discoveries.

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The Idea of Progress

Though it is hard to pinpoint the birth of an idea, for all intents and purposes the modern idea of technological “progress” (in the sense of a steady, cumulative, historical advance in applied scientific knowledge) began with Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning and became fully articulated in his later works.

Knowledge is power, and when embodied in the form of new technical inventions and mechanical discoveries it is the force that drives history – this was Bacon’s key insight. In many respects this idea was his single greatest invention, and it is all the more remarkable for its having been conceived and promoted at a time when most English and European intellectuals were either reverencing the literary and philosophical achievements of the past or deploring the numerous signs of modern degradation and decline. Indeed, while Bacon was preaching progress and declaring a brave new dawn of scientific advance, many of his colleagues were persuaded that the world was at best creaking along towards a state of senile immobility and eventual darkness. “Our age is iron, and rusty too,” wrote John Donne, contemplating the signs of universal decay in a poem published six years after Bacon’s Advancement.

That history might in fact be progressive, i.e., an onward and upward ascent – and not, as Aristotle had taught, merely cyclical or, as cultural pessimists from Hesiod to Spengler have supposed, a descending or retrograde movement, became for Bacon an article of secular faith which he propounded with evangelical force and a sense of mission. In the Advancement, the idea is offered tentatively, as a kind of hopeful hypothesis. But in later works such as the New Organon, it becomes almost a promised destiny: Enlightenment and a better world, Bacon insists, lie within our power; they require only the cooperation of learned citizens and the active development of the arts and sciences.

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The Reclassification of Knowledge

In Book II of De Dignitate (his expanded version of the Advancement) Bacon outlines his scheme for a new division of human knowledge into three primary categories: History, Poesy, and Philosophy (which he associates respectively with the three fundamental “faculties” of mind – memory, imagination, and reason). Although the exact motive behind this reclassification remains unclear, one of its main consequences seems unmistakable: it effectively promotes philosophy – and especially Baconian science – above the other two branches of knowledge, in essence defining history as the mere accumulation of brute facts, while reducing art and imaginative literature to the even more marginal status of “feigned history.”

Evidently Bacon believed that in order for a genuine advancement of learning to occur, the prestige of philosophy (and particularly natural philosophy) had to be elevated, while that of history and literature (in a word, humanism) needed to be reduced. Bacon’s scheme effectively accomplishes this by making history (the domain of fact, i.e., of everything that has happened) a virtual sub-species of philosophy (the domain of realistic possibility, i.e., of everything that can theoretically or actually occur). Meanwhile, poesy (the domain of everything that is imaginable or conceivable) is set off to the side as a mere illustrative vehicle. In essence, it becomes simply a means of recreating actual scenes or events from the past (as in history plays or heroic poetry) or of allegorizing or dramatizing new ideas or future possibilities (as in Bacon’s own interesting example of “parabolic poesy,” the New Atlantis.)

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The New Organon

To the second part of his Great Instauration Bacon gave the title New Organon (or “True Directions concerning the Interpretation of Nature”). The Greek word organon means “instrument” or “tool,” and Bacon clearly felt he was supplying a new instrument for guiding and correcting the mind in its quest for a true understanding of nature. The title also glances at Aristotle’s Organon (a collection that includes his Categories and his Prior and Posterior Analytics) and thus suggests a “new instrument” destined to transcend or replace the older, no longer serviceable one. (This notion of surpassing ancient authority is aptly illustrated on the frontispiece of the 1620 volume containing the New Organon by a ship boldly sailing beyond the mythical pillars of Hercules, which supposedly marked the end of the known world.)

The New Organon is presented not in the form of a treatise or methodical demonstration but as a series of aphorisms, a technique that Bacon came to favor as less legislative and dogmatic and more in the true spirit of scientific experiment and critical inquiry. Combined with his gift for illustrative metaphor and symbol, the aphoristic style makes the New Organon in many places the most readable and literary of all Bacon’s scientific and philosophical works.

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The Idols

In Book I of the New Organon (Aphorisms 39-68), Bacon introduces his famous doctrine of the “idols.” These are characteristic errors, natural tendencies, or defects that beset the mind and prevent it from achieving a full and accurate understanding of nature. Bacon points out that recognizing and counteracting the idols is as important to the study of nature as the recognition and refutation of bad arguments is to logic. Incidentally, he uses the word “idol” – from the Greek eidolon (“image” or “phantom”) – not in the sense of a false god or heathen deity but rather in the sense employed in Epicurean physics. Thus a Baconian idol is a potential deception or source of misunderstanding, especially one that clouds or confuses our knowledge of external reality.

Bacon identifies four different classes of idol. Each arises from a different source, and each presents its own special hazards and difficulties.

1. The Idols of the Tribe. These are the natural weaknesses and tendencies common to human nature. Because they are innate, they cannot be completely eliminated, but only recognized and compensated for. Some of Bacon’s examples are:

Our senses – which are inherently dull and easily deceivable. (Which is why Bacon prescribes instruments and strict investigative methods to correct them.)

Our tendency to discern (or even impose) more order in phenomena than is actually there. As Bacon points out, we are apt to find similitude where there is actually singularity, regularity where there is actually randomness, etc.

Our tendency towards “wishful thinking.” According to Bacon, we have a natural inclination to accept, believe, and even prove what we would prefer to be true.

Our tendency to rush to conclusions and make premature judgments (instead of gradually and painstakingly accumulating evidence).

2. The Idols of the Cave. Unlike the idols of the tribe, which are common to all human beings, those of the cave vary from individual to individual. They arise, that is to say, not from nature but from culture and thus reflect the peculiar distortions, prejudices, and beliefs that we are all subject to owing to our different family backgrounds, childhood experiences, education, training, gender, religion, social class, etc. Examples include:

Special allegiance to a particular discipline or theory.

High esteem for a few select authorities.

A “cookie-cutter” mentality – that is, a tendency to reduce or confine phenomena within the terms of our own narrow training or discipline.

3. The Idols of the Market Place. These are hindrances to clear thinking that arise, Bacon says, from the “intercourse and association of men with each other.” The main culprit here is language, though not just common speech, but also (and perhaps particularly) the special discourses, vocabularies, and jargons of various academic communities and disciplines. He points out that “the idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds”: “they are either names of things that do not exist” (e.g., the crystalline spheres of Aristotelian cosmology) or faulty, vague, or misleading names for things that do exist (according to Bacon, abstract qualities and value terms – e.g., “moist,” “useful,” etc. – can be a particular source of confusion).

4. The Idols of the Theatre. Like the idols of the cave, those of the theatre are culturally acquired rather than innate. And although the metaphor of a theatre suggests an artificial imitation of truth, as in drama or fiction, Bacon makes it clear that these idols derive mainly from grand schemes or systems of philosophy – and especially from three particular types of philosophy:

Sophistical Philosophy – that is, philosophical systems based only on a few casually observed instances (or on no experimental evidence at all) and thus constructed mainly out of abstract argument and speculation. Bacon cites Scholasticism as a conspicuous example.

Empirical Philosophy – that is, a philosophical system ultimately based on a single key insight (or on a very narrow base of research), which is then erected into a model or paradigm to explain phenomena of all kinds. Bacon cites the example of William Gilbert, whose experiments with the lodestone persuaded him that magnetism operated as the hidden force behind virtually all earthly phenomena.

Superstitious Philosophy – this is Bacon’s phrase for any system of thought that mixes theology and philosophy. He cites Pythagoras and Plato as guilty of this practice, but also points his finger at pious contemporary efforts, similar to those of Creationists today, to found systems of natural philosophy on Genesis or the book of Job.

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Induction

At the beginning of the Magna Instauratio and in Book II of the New Organon, Bacon introduces his system of “true and perfect Induction,” which he proposes as the essential foundation of scientific method and a necessary tool for the proper interpretation of nature. (This system was to have been more fully explained and demonstrated in Part IV of the Instauratio in a section titled “The Ladder of the Intellect,” but unfortunately the work never got beyond an introduction.)

According to Bacon, his system differs not only from the deductive logic and mania for syllogisms of the Schoolmen, but also from the classic induction of Aristotle and other logicians. As Bacon explains it, classic induction proceeds “at once from . . . sense and particulars up to the most general propositions” and then works backward (via deduction) to arrive at intermediate propositions. Thus, for example, from a few observations one might conclude (via induction) that “all new cars are shiny.” One would then be entitled to proceed backward from this general axiom to deduce such middle-level axioms as “all new Lexuses are shiny,” “all new Jeeps are shiny,” etc. – axioms that presumably would not need to be verified empirically since their truth would be logically guaranteed as long as the original generalization (“all new cars are shiny”) is true.

As Bacon rightly points out, one problem with this procedure is that if the general axioms prove false, all the intermediate axioms may be false as well. All it takes is one contradictory instance (in this case one new car with a dull finish) and “the whole edifice tumbles.” For this reason Bacon prescribes a different path. His method is to proceed “regularly and gradually from one axiom to another, so that the most general are not reached till the last.” In other words, each axiom – i.e., each step up “the ladder of intellect” – is thoroughly tested by observation and experimentation before the next step is taken. In effect, each confirmed axiom becomes a foothold to a higher truth, with the most general axioms representing the last stage of the process.

Thus, in the example described, the Baconian investigator would be obliged to examine a full inventory of new Chevrolets, Lexuses, Jeeps, etc., before reaching any conclusions about new cars in general. And while Bacon admits that such a method can be laborious, he argues that it eventually produces a stable edifice of knowledge instead of a rickety structure that collapses with the appearance of a single disconfirming instance. (Indeed, according to Bacon, when one follows his inductive procedure, a negative instance actually becomes something to be welcomed rather than feared. For instead of threatening an entire assembly, the discovery of a false generalization actually saves the investigator the trouble of having to proceed further in a particular direction or line of inquiry. Meanwhile the structure of truth that he has already built remains intact.)

Is Bacon’s system, then, a sound and reliable procedure, a strong ladder leading from carefully observed particulars to true and “inevitable” conclusions? Although he himself firmly believed in the utility and overall superiority of his method, many of his commentators and critics have had doubts. For one thing, it is not clear that the Baconian procedure, taken by itself, leads conclusively to any general propositions, much less to scientific principles or theoretical statements that we can accept as universally true. For at what point is the Baconian investigator willing to make the leap from observed particulars to abstract generalizations? After a dozen instances? A thousand? The fact is, Bacon’s method provides nothing to guide the investigator in this determination other than sheer instinct or professional judgment, and thus the tendency is for the investigation of particulars – the steady observation and collection of data – to go on continuously, and in effect endlessly.

One can thus easily imagine a scenario in which the piling up of instances becomes not just the initial stage in a process, but the very essence of the process itself; in effect, a zealous foraging after facts (in the New Organon Bacon famously compares the ideal Baconian researcher to a busy bee) becomes not only a means to knowledge, but an activity vigorously pursued for its own sake. Every scientist and academic person knows how tempting it is to put off the hard work of imaginative thinking in order to continue doing some form of rote research. Every investigator knows how easy it is to become wrapped up in data – with the unhappy result that one’s intended ascent up the Baconian ladder gets stuck in mundane matters of fact and never quite gets off the ground.

It was no doubt considerations like these that prompted the English physician (and neo-Aristotelian) William Harvey, of circulation-of-the-blood fame, to quip that Bacon wrote of natural philosophy “like a Lord Chancellor” – indeed like a politician or legislator rather than a practitioner. The assessment is just to the extent that Bacon in the New Organon does indeed prescribe a new and extremely rigid procedure for the investigation of nature rather than describe the more or less instinctive and improvisational – and by no means exclusively empirical – method that Kepler, Galileo, Harvey himself, and other working scientists were actually employing. In fact, other than Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who, overseeing a team of assistants, faithfully observed and then painstakingly recorded entire volumes of astronomical data in tidy, systematically arranged tables, it is doubtful that there is another major figure in the history of science who can be legitimately termed an authentic, true-blooded Baconian. (Darwin, it is true, claimed that The Origin of Species was based on “Baconian principles.” However, it is one thing to collect instances in order to compare species and show a relationship among them; it is quite another to theorize a mechanism, namely evolution by mutation and natural selection, that elegantly and powerfully explains their entire history and variety.)

Science, that is to say, does not, and has probably never advanced according to the strict, gradual, ever-plodding method of Baconian observation and induction. It proceeds instead by unpredictable – and often intuitive and even (though Bacon would cringe at the word) imaginative – leaps and bounds. Kepler used Tycho’s scrupulously gathered data to support his own heart-felt and even occult belief that the movements of celestial bodies are regular and symmetrical, composing a true harmony of the spheres. Galileo tossed unequal weights from the Leaning Tower as a mere public demonstration of the fact (contrary to Aristotle) that they would fall at the same rate. He had long before satisfied himself that this would happen via the very un-Bacon-like method of mathematical reasoning and deductive thought-experiment. Harvey, by a similar process of quantitative analysis and deductive logic, knew that the blood must circulate, and it was only to provide proof of this fact that he set himself the secondary task of amassing empirical evidence and establishing the actual method by which it did so.

One could enumerate – in true Baconian fashion – a host of further instances. But the point is already made: advances in scientific knowledge have not been achieved for the most part via Baconian induction (which amounts to a kind of systematic and exhaustive survey of nature supposedly leading to ultimate insights) but rather by shrewd hints and guesses – in a word by hypotheses – that are then either corroborated or (in Karl Popper’s important term) falsified by subsequent research.

In summary, then, it can be said that Bacon underestimated the role of imagination and hypothesis (and overestimated the value of minute observation and bee-like data collection) in the production of new scientific knowledge. And in this respect it is true that he wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor, regally proclaiming the benefits of his own new and supposedly foolproof technique instead of recognizing and adapting procedures that had already been tested and approved. On the other hand, it must be added that Bacon did not present himself (or his method) as the final authority on the investigation of nature or, for that matter, on any other topic or issue relating to the advance of knowledge. By his own admission, he was but the Buccinator, or “trumpeter,” of such a revolutionary advance – not the founder or builder of a vast new system, but only the herald or announcing messenger of a new world to come.

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Reputation and Cultural Legacy

If anyone deserves the title “universal genius” or “Renaissance man” (accolades traditionally reserved for those who make significant, original contributions to more than one professional discipline or area of learning), Bacon clearly merits the designation. Like Leonardo and Goethe, he produced important work in both the arts and sciences. Like Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, he combined wide and ample intellectual and literary interests (from practical rhetoric and the study of nature to moral philosophy and educational reform) with a substantial political career. Like his near contemporary Machiavelli, he excelled in a variety of literary genres – from learned treatises to light entertainments – though, also like the great Florentine writer, he thought of himself mainly as a political statesman and practical visionary: a man whose primary goal was less to obtain literary laurels for himself than to mold the agendas and guide the policy decisions of powerful nobles and heads of state.

In our own era Bacon would be acclaimed as a “public intellectual,” though his personal record of service and authorship would certainly dwarf the achievements of most academic and political leaders today. Like nearly all public figures, he was controversial. His chaplain and first biographer William Rawley declared him “the glory of his age and nation” and portrayed him as an angel of enlightenment and social vision. His admirers in the Royal Society (an organization that traced its own inspiration and lineage to the Lord Chancellor’s writings) viewed him as nothing less than the daring originator of a new intellectual era. The poet Abraham Cowley called him a “Moses” and portrayed him as an exalted leader who virtually all by himself had set learning on a bold, firm, and entirely new path:

Bacon at last, a mighty Man, arose

Whom a wise King and Nature chose

Lord Chancellour of both their Lawes. . . .

The barren Wilderness he past,

Did on the very Border stand

Of the great promis’d Land,

And from the Mountains Top of his Exalted Wit,

Saw it himself and shew’d us it. . . .

Similarly adulatory if more prosaic assessments were offered by learned contemporaries or near contemporaries from Descartes and Gassendi to Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle. Leibniz was particularly generous and observed that, compared to Bacon’s philosophical range and lofty vision, even a great genius like Descartes “creeps on the ground.” On the other hand, Spinoza, another close contemporary, dismissed Bacon’s work (especially his inductive theories) completely and in effect denied that the supposedly grand philosophical revolution decreed by Bacon, and welcomed by his partisans, had ever occurred.

The response of the later Enlightenment was similarly divided, with a majority of thinkers lavishly praising Bacon while a dissenting minority castigated or even ridiculed him. The French encyclopedists Jean d’Alembert and Denis Diderot sounded the keynote of this 18th-century re-assessment, essentially hailing Bacon as a founding father of the modern era and emblazoning his name on the front page of the Encyclopedia. In a similar gesture, Kant dedicated his Critique of Pure Reason to Bacon and likewise saluted him as an early architect of modernity. Hegel, on the other hand, took a dimmer view. In his “Lectures on the History of Philosophy” he congratulated Bacon on his worldly sophistication and shrewdness of mind, but ultimately judged him to be a person of depraved character and a mere “coiner of mottoes.” In his view, the Lord Chancellor was a decidedly low-minded (read typically English and utilitarian) philosopher whose instruction was fit mainly for “civil servants and shopkeepers.”

Probably the fullest and most perceptive Enlightenment account of Bacon’s achievement and place in history was Voltaire’s laudatory essay in his Letters on the English. After referring to Bacon as the father of experimental philosophy, he went on to assess his literary merits, judging him to be an elegant, instructive, and witty writer, though too much given to “fustian.”

Bacon’s reputation and legacy remain controversial even today. While no historian of science or philosophy doubts his immense importance both as a proselytizer on behalf of the empirical method and as an advocate of sweeping intellectual reform, opinion varies widely as to the actual social value and moral significance of the ideas that he represented and effectively bequeathed to us. The issue basically comes down to one’s estimate of or sympathy for the entire Enlightenment/Utilitarian project. Those who for the most part share Bacon’s view that nature exists mainly for human use and benefit, and who furthermore endorse his opinion that scientific inquiry should aim first and foremost at the amelioration of the human condition and the “relief of man’s estate,” generally applaud him as a great social visionary. On the other hand, those who view nature as an entity in its own right, a higher-order estate of which the human community is only a part, tend to perceive him as a kind of arch-villain – the evil originator of the idea of science as the instrument of global imperialism and technological conquest.

On the one side, then, we have figures like the anthropologist and science writer Loren Eiseley, who portrays Bacon (whom he calls “the man who saw through time”) as a kind of Promethean culture hero. He praises Bacon as the great inventor of the idea of science as both a communal enterprise and a practical discipline in the service of humanity. On the other side, we have writers, from Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Lewis Mumford to, more recently, Jeremy Rifkin and eco-feminist Carolyn Merchant, who have represented him as one of the main culprits behind what they perceive as western science’s continuing legacy of alienation, exploitation, and ecological oppression.

Clearly somewhere in between this ardent Baconolotry on the one hand and strident demonization of Bacon on the other lies the real Lord Chancellor: a Colossus with feet of clay. He was by no means a great system-builder (indeed his Magna Instauratio turned out to be less of a “grand edifice” than a magnificent heap) but rather, as he more modestly portrayed himself, a great spokesman for the reform of learning and a champion of modern science. In the end we can say that he was one of the giant figures of intellectual history – and as brilliant, and flawed, a philosopher as he was a statesman.

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Bibliography

Note: The standard edition of Bacon’s Works and Letters and Life is still that of James Spedding, et. al., (14 volumes, London, 1857- 1874), also available in a facsimile reprint (Stuttgart, 1989).

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944.

Anderson, F. H. Francis Bacon: His Career and His Thought. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1962.

Bury, J.B. The Idea of Progress. London: MacMillan, 1920.

Eiseley, Loren. The Man Who Saw Through Time. New York: Scribners, 1973.

Fish, Stanley E. “The Experience of Bacon’s Essays.” In Self-Consuming Artifacts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-modern Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980.

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. 1934.

Lampert, Laurence. Nietzsche and Modern Times : A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.

Rifkin, Jeremy. Biosphere Politics. New York: Crown, 1991.

Rossi, Paolo. Francis Bacon: from Magic to Science. Trans. Sacha Rabinovitch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Vickers, Brian. Francis Bacon. Harlow, UK: Longman Group, 1978.

Vickers, Brian, Ed. Francis Bacon. New York : Oxford University Press, 1996.

Whitney, Charles. Francis Bacon and Modernity. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1986.

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Author Information:

David Simpson

Email: dsimpson@condor.depaul.edu

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to that part of this article)

Early Life

Later Life and Writings

The State of Nature

Laws of Nature

Other Laws of Nature

Governments

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Early Life

Thomas Hobbes was born at Westport, adjoining Malmesbury in Wiltshire, on April 5, 1588. His father, the vicar of the parish (so John Aubery tells us), "was one of the ignorant Sir Johns of Queen Elizabeth's time, could only read the prayers of the church and the homilies, and valued not learning, as not knowing the sweetness of it" (Letters written by eminent persons. . .and Lives of eminent men, 1813). Hobbes led a sheltered and leisured life. His education was provided for by an uncle, a solid tradesman and alderman of Malmesbury. He was already a good Latin and Greek scholar when, not yet fifteen, he was sent to Magdalen Hall, Oxford. On leaving Oxford, in 1608, he became companion to the eldest son of Lord Cavendish of Hardwicke (afterwards created Earl of Devonshire), and his connection with the Cavendish family lasted (although not without interruptions) till his death.

Three times in his life, Hobbes traveled on the continent with a pupil. His first journey was begun in 1610, and in it he visited France, Germany, and Italy, learning the French and Italian languages, and gaining experience, but not yet conscious of his life's work. On his return (the date is uncertain), he settled down with his young lord at Hardwick an din London. His secretarial duties were light, and he set himself to become a scholar. To this period, belongs his acquaintance with Bacon, Herbert of Cherbury, Ben Johnson, and other leading men of the time.

Hobbes's pupil and friend died in 1628, two years after the death of the first earl; his son and successor was a boy of eleven; his widow did not need the services of a secretary; and, for a time, there was no place in the household for Hobbes. In 1629, he left for the continent again with a new pupil, returning from this second journey in 1631 to take charge of the young earl's education. "He was forty years old before he looked on geometry, which happened accidentally; being in a gentleman's library in. . . Euclid's Elements lay open. About this time also, or soon afterwards, his philosophical views began to take shape. Among his manuscripts there is a Short Tract on First Principles (Elements Of Law, ed. Toonies, 1889, pp. 193-210), which has been conjectured to belong to the year 1630. It shows the author so much impressed by his reading of Euclid as to adopt the geometrical form (soon afterwards used by Descartes) for the expression of his argument.

When Hobbes made his third visit to the continent, which lasted from 1634 to 1637 and on which he was accompanied by the young Earl of Devonshire, he is found taking his place among philosophers. At Paris, he was an intimate of Mersenne, who was the center of a scientific circle that included Descartes and Gassendi; and at Florence he held discourse with Galileo. After his return to England he wrote, with a view to publication, a sketch of his new theory, to which he gave the title Elements of Law natural and politic. The treatise was never published by Hobbes, nor did it appear as a connected whole until 1889, although in 1650, probably with his consent, its first thirteen chapters were issued with the title Human Nature, and the remainder of the volume as a separate work De Corpore Politico. In November 1640, when the Long Parliament began to show signs of activity threatening civil war, Hobbes was "the first of all that fled" to France; he thus describes himself as a "man of feminine courage". He remained in France for the next 11 years. By his influence, Hobbes was appointed to teach mathematics to Charles, Prince of Wales, who arrived in Paris in 1646. Of greater interest is another literary correspondence which followed close upon his arrival in Paris. Mersenne was then collecting the opinions of scholars on the forthcoming treatise by Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, and in January 1641, Hobbes's objections were ready and forwarded to his great contemporary in Holland. These, with the replies of Descartes, afterwards appeared as the third set of Objectiones when the treatise was published. Further communications followed on the Dioptrique which had appeared along with the famous Discours de la methode in 1637. Descartes did not discover the identity of his two critics; but he did not approve of either. To Descartes, mend was the primal certainty and independent of material reality. Hobbes, on the other hand, had already fixed on motion as the fundamental fact, and his originality consisted in his attempt to use it for the explanation not of nature only, but also of mind and society. Two or three years after his correspondence with Descartes, Hobbes contributed a summary of his views on physics and a Tractatus Opticus to works published by Mersenne.

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Later Life and Writings

At least by the beginning of his residence in Paris in 1640, Hobbes had matured the plan for his own philosophical work. It was to consist of three treatises, dealing respectively with matter or body, with human nature, and with society. It was his intention, he says, to have dealt with these subjects in this order, but his country "was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion, and the obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an approaching war," and this cause, as he said, "ripened and plucked from me this third part" of the system--the book De Cive, published at Paris in 1642. When stable government seemed to have been re-established by the Commonwealth, he had it published in London, in an English version from his own hand, as Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society. The same year, 1651, saw the publication, also in London, of his greatest work, Leviathan, and his own return to England, which now promised a sager shelter to the philosopher than France, where he feared the clergy and was no longer in favor with the remnant of the exiled English court.

The last twenty-eight years of Hobbes's long life were spent in England; and there he soon returned to the house of his old pupil the Earl of Devonshire, who had preceded him in submitting to the Commonwealth and like him welcomed the king on his return. For a year or two after his home-coming, Hobbes resided in London, busied with the completion of his philosophical system, the long-delayed first part of which, De Corpore, appeared in 1655, and the second part, De Homine, in 1656. The latter work contains little or nothing of importance that Hobbes had not said already; but the former deals with the logical, mathematical, and physical principles which were to serve as foundation for the imposing structure he had built. In 1654, the tract Of Liberty and Necessity, which he had written eight years before in reply to the bishop Bramhall's arguments, was published by some person unnamed into whose hands it had fallen. Not suspecting Hobbes's innocence in the matter of the publication, Bramhall replied with some heat on the personal question and much fullness on the matter in hand in the following year; and this led to Hobbes's elaborate defense is The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, published in 1656.

A bill aimed at blasphemous literature passed the Commons in January 1667, and Leviathan was one of two books mentioned in it. The bill never passed both houses; but Hobbes was seriously frightened. He is said to have become more regular at church and communion. He also studied the law of heresy, and wrote a short treatise on the subject, proving that there was no court by which he could be judged. But he was not permitted to excite the public conscience by further publications on matters of religion. A Latin translation of Leviathan (containing a new appendix bringing its theology into line with the Nicene creed) was issued at Amsterdam in 1668. Other works, however, dating from the same year, were kept back--the tract on Heresy, the answer to Bramhall's attack on Leviathan, and Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England. About the same time was written his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. His Historia Ecclesiastica, in elegiac verse, dates from about his eightieth year. When he was eighty-four, he wrote his autobiography in Latin verse. In 1673, he published a translation in rhymed quatrains of four books of the Odyssey; and he had completed both Iliad and Odyssey when, in 1675, he left London for the last time. Thereafter he lived with the Cavendish family at one of their seats in Derbyshire. He died at Hardwick on December 4, 1679.

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The State of Nature

In his brief introduction to the Leviathan, Hobbes describes the state as an organism analogous to a large person. He shows how each part of the state parallels the function of the parts of the human body. He notes that the first part of his project is to describe human nature, insofar as humans are the creators of the state. To this end, he advises that we look into ourselves to see the nature of humanity in general. Hobbes argues that, in the absence of social condition, every action we perform, no matter how charitable or benevolent, is done for reasons which are ultimately self-serving. For example, when I donate to charity, I am actually taking delight in demonstrating my powers. In its most extreme form, this view of human nature has since been termed psychological egoism. Hobbes believes that any account of human action, including morality, must be consistent with the fact that we are all self-serving. In this chapter. Hobbes speculates how selfish people would behave in a state of nature, prior to the formation of any government He begins noting that humans are essentially equal, both mentally and physically, insofar as even the weakest person has the strength to kill the strongest. Given our equal standing, Hobbes continues noting how we are situations in nature make us naturally prone to quarrel. There are three natural causes of quarrel among people: competition for limited supplies of material possessions, distrust of one another, and glory insofar as people remain hostile to preserve their powerful reputation. Given the natural causes of quarrel, Hobbes concludes that the natural condition of humans is a state of perpetual war of all against all, where no morality exists, and everyone lives in constant fear:

In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of people, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes continues offering proofs that the state of nature would be as brutal as he describes. We see signs of this in the mistrust we show of others in our daily lives. In countries which have yet to be civilized people treat are barbaric to each other. Finally, in the absence of international law, strong countries prey on the weakness of weak countries. Humans have three motivations for ending this state of war: the fear of death, the desire to have an adequate living, and the hope to attain this through one's labor. Nevertheless, until the state of war ends, each person has a right to everything, including another person's life.

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Laws of Nature

In articulating the peace-securing process, Hobbes draws on the language of the natural law tradition of morality, which was then championed by Dutch politician Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). According to Grotius, all particular moral principles derive from immutable principles of reason. Since these moral mandates are fixed in nature, they are thus called "laws of nature." By using the jargon of natural law theory, Hobbes is suggesting that, from human self-interest and social agreement alone, one can derive the same kinds of laws which Grotius believes are immutably fixed in nature. Throughout his discussion of morality, Hobbes continually re-defines traditional moral terms (such as right, liberty, contract, and justice) in ways which reflects his account of self-interest and social agreement. For Grotius and other natural law theorists, a law of nature is an unchangeable truth which establishes proper conduct. Hobbes defines a law of nature as follows:

A Law of Nature (lex naturalis) is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a person is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or takes away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that by which he thinks it may be best preserved.

Hobbes continues by listing specific laws of nature all of which aim at preserving a person's life. Hobbes's first three Laws of Nature are the most important since they establish the overall framework for putting an end to the state of nature. Given our desire to get out of the state of nature, and thereby preserve our lives, Hobbes concludes that we should seek peace. This becomes his first law of nature:

"That every person ought to endeavor peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war; the first branch of which rule contains the first and fundamental Law of Nature, which is, To seek peace and follow it; the second, the sum of the right of nature, which is, By all means we can, to defend ourselves.

The reasonableness of seeking peace, indicated by the first law, immediately suggests a second law of nature, which is that we mutually divest ourselves of certain rights (such as the right to take another person's life) so to achieve peace:

That a person be willing, when others are so too (as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary), to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other people, as he would allow other people against himself.

The mutual transferring of these rights is called a contract and is the basis of the notion of moral obligation and duty. For example, I agree to give up my right to steal from you, if you give up your right to steal from me. We have then transferred these rights to each other and thereby become obligated to not steal from each other. From selfish reasons alone, we are both motivated to mutually transfer these and other rights, since this will end the dreaded state of war between us. Hobbes continues by discussing the validity of certain contracts. For example, contracts made in the state of nature are not generally binding, for, if I fear that you will violate your part of the bargain, then no true agreement can be reached. No contracts can be made with animals since animals cannot understand an agreement. Most significantly, I cannot contract to give up my right to self-defense since self-defense (or self-preservation) is my sole motive for entering into any contract.

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Other Laws of Nature

Hobbes derives his laws of nature deductively, modeled after the type reasoning used in geometry. That is, from a set of general principles, more specific principles are logically derived. Hobbes's general principles are (1) that people pursue only their own self-interest, (2) the equality of people, (3) the causes of quarrel, (4) the natural condition of war, and (5) the motivations for peace. From these he derives the above two laws, along with at least 13 others. Simply making contracts will not in and of itself secure peace. We also need to keep the contracts we make, and this is Hobbes's third law of nature. Hobbes notes a fundamental problem underlying all contracts: as selfish people, each of us will have an incentive to violate a contract when it serves our best interests. For example, it is in the mutual best interests of Jones and myself to agree to not steal from each other. However, it is also in my best interests to break this contract and steal from Jones if I can get away with it. And, what complicates matters more, Jones is also aware of this fact. Thus, it seems that no contract can ever get off the ground. This is accomplished by giving unlimited power to a political sovereign who will punish us if we violate our contracts. Again, it is for purely selfish reasons (i.e. ending the state of nature) that I agree to set up a policing power which will punish me.

As noted, Hobbes's first three Laws of Nature establish the overall framework for putting an end to the state of nature. The remaining laws give content to the earlier ones by describing more precisely the kinds of contracts which will preserve peace. For example, the fourth law is to show Gratitude toward those who comply with contracts. Otherwise people will regret that they complied when someone is ungrateful. Similarly, the fifth law is that we should be accommodating to the interests of society. For, if we quarrel over every minor issue, then this will interrupt the peace process. Briefly, here are the remaining laws: (6) cautious pardoning of those who commit past offenses; (7) the purpose of punishment is to correct the offender, not "an eye for an eye" retribution; (8) avoid direct or indirect signs of hatred or contempt of another; (9) avoid pride; (10) retain only those rights which you would acknowledge in others; (11) be equitable (impartial); (12) share in common that which cannot be divided, such as rivers; (13) items which cannot be divided or enjoyed in common should be assigned by lot; (14) mediators of peace should have safe conduct; (15) Resolve disputes through an arbitrator. Hobbes explains that there are other possible laws which are less important, such as those against drunkenness, which tends to the destruction of particular people. At the close of Chapter 15 Hobbes states that morality consists entirely of these Laws of Nature which are arrived at though social contract. Contrary to Aristotle's account of virtue ethics, Hobbes adds that moral virtues are relevant to ethical theory only insofar as they promote peace. Outside of this function, virtues have no moral significance.

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Governments

Hobbes continues in Chapter 17 that to ensure contracts (and peace) power must be given to one person, or one assembly. We do this by saying, implicitly or explicitly, "I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this person, or to this assembly of people, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner." His definition of a commonwealth, then, is this: "One person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants on with another, have mad themselves every on the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defense" This person is called a "sovereign." He continues that there are two ways of establishing a commonwealth: through acquisition (force), or through institution (agreement). In Chapter 18 Hobbes lists the rights of rights of sovereigns. They are, (1) Subjects owe him sole loyalty; (2) Subjects cannot be freed from their obligation; (3) Dissenters must consent with the majority in declaring a sovereign; (4) Sovereign cannot be unjust or injure any subject; (5) The sovereign cannot be put to death; (6) The right to censor doctrines repugnant to peace; (7) Legislative power of prescribing rules; (8) Judicial power of deciding all controversies; (9) Make war and peace with other nations; (10) Choose counselors; (11) Power of reward and punishment; (12) Power of all civil appointments, including the militia. In Chapter 19 he discusses the kinds of governments that can be instituted. The three main forms are monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. He argues that monarchy is best for several reasons. Monarch's interests are the same as the people's. He will receive better counsel since he can select experts and get advice in private. His policies will be more consistent. Finally, there is less chance of a civil war since the monarch cannot disagree with himself.

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IEP

Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle was born into a Protestant family. His father was Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, who had left England in 1588 at the age of 22 and gone to Ireland. Appointed clerk of the council of Munster by Elizabeth I in 1600, he bought Sir Walter Raleigh's estates in the counties of Cork, Waterford, and Tipperary two years later. Robert's mother, Catherine Fenton, was Richard Boyle's second wife, his first having died within a year of the birth of their first child. Robert was the seventh son (and fourteenth child) of his parents fifteen children (twelve of the fifteen survived childhood). Richard Boyle was in his 60s and Catherine Boyle in her 40s when Robert was born. Of his father Robert would later write [12]:-

He, by God's blessing on his prosperous industry, from very inconsiderable beginnings, built so plentiful and so eminent a fortune, that his prosperity has found many admirers, but few parallels.

Indeed, Robert was fortunate to have the richest man in Great Britain for a father although, one would have to say, the Earl of Cork had acquired his fortune by somewhat dubious means. He was imprisoned in England on charges of embezzlement at one stage and later was fined heavily for possessing defective titles to some of his estates.

The Earl of Cork and his wife believed that the best upbringing for young children, up to the time they began their education, could be provided away from their parents. Robert was sent away to be brought up in the country while his father continued to aim for higher and higher political success. The Earl of Cork lived for four years in his town house in Dublin. He was appointed a lord high justice in 1629 and lord high treasurer in 1631. However, during this time in Dublin Robert's mother died and some time after this Robert returned from his stay with his country nurse to rejoin his family.

Robert was sent, together with one of his brothers, to study at Eton College in England in 1635. At this time the school was becoming fashionable as a place where important people sent their sons. The headmaster was John Harrison and the two young Boyle brothers lived in the headmaster's house [10]:-

Besides the strictly classical course of study then in vogue, the boys had private tutors in French, dancing, and music, for whom they paid extra fees.

Boyle paid tribute to Harrison in [12] where he writes that Harrison gave him a:-

... strong passion to acquire knowledge ...

At this stage of his time at Eton, Boyle's education was clearly going well. He was popular with both his headmaster and his fellow pupils. However, perhaps he had been given too much special attention by Harrison for, when Harrison retired, Boyle seemed unable to fit in with the educational discipline the new headmaster brought to the school. Realising that neither of his sons were progressing well at school under the new headmaster, the Earl of Cork took his sons away from the Eton in November 1638. After this Boyle was tutored privately by one of his father's chaplains.

At the age of 12 Boyle was sent by his father, with one of his brothers, on a European tour. From Dieppe they travelled to Paris, then on to Lyon before reaching Geneva. In Geneva Boyle studied with a private tutor French, Latin, rhetoric and religion. He also spent time in the afternoons playing tennis and fencing. Perhaps most importantly of all he began to study mathematics and soon [12]:-

... he grew very well acquainted with the most useful part of arithmetic, geometry, with its subordinates, the doctrine of the sphere, that of the globe, and fortification.

In 1641 Boyle learnt Italian in preparation for visiting there. In September of that year Boyle and his tutor were in Venice, then by the beginning of 1642 they were in Florence. Galileo died in his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, while Boyle was living in the city. He was much influenced by this event and he carefully studied Galileo's works. If any one event shaped Boyle's life and directed him towards science, then it was this. Of course his Protestant background, with an ingrained fear of Jesuits, contributed to his sympathy for Galileo and his treatment by the Roman Catholic Church. Boyle became a strong supporter of Galileo's philosophy and believed strongly from this time in the new approach to studying the world through mathematics and mechanics.

By May 1642 Boyle and his tutor were in Marseilles waiting for money from Boyle's father so that he could complete the journey home. This did not arrive, merely a letter from his father explaining that a rebellion in Munster was fully occupying his time and money. He did send 250 to pay for Boyle's return, but the money never reached him. Boyle returned to Geneva where he seems to have lived mainly on his tutor's earnings, while his father continued to fight the Irish at Lismore Castle. King Charles I negotiated a cease-fire with the Catholic rebels fighting the Earl of Cork so that he might bring his troops back to England to help him in the civil war which had broken out. The Earl of Cork never got over Charles treating the Irish as equals and he died shortly after in September 1643. Robert Boyle was still living in Geneva when his father died. In the summer of 1644 he sold some jewellery and used the money that he was paid to finance his return trip to England.

Back in England, Boyle lived for a while with his sister Katherine. She was thirteen years older than him and was a lady of some importance, married to Viscount Ranelagh. England was in a chaotic state, the civil war which had began in 1642 was being fought between King Charles and the parliament. Charles had moved to Oxford while the parliament had formed a treaty with the Scots. In return for Scots military support they were promised the establishment of a Presbyterian church. Several battles in 1644 left both King and parliament somewhat in disarray. Boyle had property in England, the manor of Stalbridge, left to him by his father but the situation in the country made things difficult. He wrote in a letter (see for example [3]):-

[I] got safe into England towards the middle of the year 1644, where we found things in such a confusion, that although the manor of Stalbridge were by my father's decease descended unto me, yet it was near four months before I could get thither.

In fact although Boyle inspected his new home after four months, it was much longer before he was able to move in. This happened in March 1646 after he had spent more time with his sister and made a return trip to France to repay his debts to his tutor who continued to live there. Although Boyle did not intend to spend long at Stalbridge, he remained there for around six years. He probably studied harder than he admits in a letter sent to his old tutor in France in October 1646 (see for example [3]):-

As for my studies, I have had the opportunity to prosecute them but by fits and snatches, as my leisure and my occasions would give me leave. Divers little essays, both in verse and prose, I have taken pains to scribble upon several subjects. ... The other humane studies I apply myself to, are natural philosophy, the mechanics and husbandry, according to the principles of our new philosophical college ...

This "new philosophical college" is also called by Boyle the "Invisible College" later in the letter. It is the society which would soon became the "Royal Society of London" and it provided Boyle's only contact with the world of science while he lived a somewhat lonely life at Stalbridge. He would look forward to his visits to London where members of the College [3]:-

.. do now and then honour me with their company.

It was discussions in the Invisible College which led to Boyle reading Oughtred's Clavis Mathematica as well as the works of Mersenne and Gassendi. Boyle had from the time of his visit to Italy favoured the ideas of Copernicus and he now held these views deeply, together with a deep belief in the atomic theory of matter. In the Invisible College these views were considered to be those of the new natural philosophy.

This period was a difficult one for Boyle for he tried hard not to be forced to take sides in the civil war. His loyalties were somewhat divided, his father having been a staunch Royalist, his sister Katherine a staunch Parliamentarian. Basically he had little sympathy with either side, but the final outcome of the civil war turned out to his advantage. Charles I was defeated and executed but, in 1650, Charles II landed in Scotland and tried to regain power. Cromwell, leading the parliamentary forces, defeated the Scots in 1650, again in 1651, and the Irish were also defeated by Cromwell in 1652. Boyle went to Ireland in 1652 to look after his estates there. He ended up a very rich man when Cromwell apportioned Irish lands to the English colonists. From that time on he was able to devote himself entirely to science without the need to earn money. It should be noted, however, that Boyle was a very generous man with his money, and many around him benefited from this generosity.

Boyle met John Wilkins, the leader of the Invisible College, in London when he visited there in 1653. At this time Wilkins had just been appointed as Warden of Wadham College in Oxford and he was planning to run the Invisible College from there. He strongly encouraged Boyle to join them in Oxford and invited him to live in the College. Boyle decided to go to Oxford but preferred not to accept Wilkins' offer of accommodation, choosing instead to arrange his own rooms where he could carry out his scientific experiments. At Oxford he joined a group of forward looking scientists, including John Wilkins, John Wallis who was the Savilian Professor of Geometry, Seth Ward who was the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and Christopher Wren who would succeed Ward as Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 1661. From 1654 Boyle lived in Oxford, although he never held any university post.

He made important contributions to physics and chemistry and is best known for Boyle's law (sometimes called Mariotte's Law) describing an ideal gas. Boyle's law appears in an appendix written in 1662 to his work New Experiments Physio-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects (1660). The 1660 text was the result of three years of experimenting with an air pump with the help of Hooke who he employed as his assistant. The apparatus had been designed by Hooke and using it Boyle had discovered a whole series of important facts. He had shown, among other things, that sound did not travel in a vacuum, he had proved that flame required air as did life, and he investigated the elastic properties of air.

The 1662 appendix did not only contain Boyle's law which relates volume and pressure in a gas, but it also contained a defence of Boyle's work on the vacuum which appeared in the main text. Many scientists, particularly Hobbes, had argued that a vacuum could not exist and claimed that Boyle's results obtained with the vacuum pump must be the result of some as yet undiscovered force. Another book by Boyle in 1666 was called Hydrostatic paradoxes. It is [1]:-

... both a penetrating critique of Pascal's work on hydrostatics, full of acute observations upon Pascal's experimental method, and a presentation of a series of important and ingenious experiments on fluid pressure.

In The Sceptical Chemist (1661) Boyle argued against Aristotle's view of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. He argued that matter was composed of corpuscles which themselves were differently built up of different configurations of primary particles. Although many ideas in this work were taken over from Descartes, in one respect he fundamentally disagreed with him. Boyle's ideas that the primary particles move freely in fluids, less freely in solids, followed Descartes. However, Descartes did not believe in a vacuum, rather he believed in an all pervading ether. Boyle had conducted many experiments which led him to believe in a vacuum and, having found no experimental evidence of the ether, to reject that idea. He did follow Descartes in his overall belief that the world was basically a complex system governed by a small number of simple mathematical laws.

In considering optics, in particular colour, Boyle was not so successful. He published Experiments and considerations touching colours in 1664 but was quite prepared to acknowledge that Hooke's work of 1665 was superior and he completely acknowledged that Newton's ideas, published in 1672, should replace his own.

Boyle was a founding fellow of the Royal Society. He published his results on the physical properties of air through this Society. His work in chemistry was aimed at establishing it as a mathematical science based on a mechanistic theory of matter. It is for this reason that we have decided to include Boyle into this archive of mathematicians for, although he did not develop any mathematical ideas himself, he was one of the first to argue that all science should be developed as an application of mathematics. Although others before him had applied mathematics to physics, Boyle was one of the first to extend the application of mathematics to chemistry which he tried to develop as a science whose complex appearance was merely the result on simple mathematical laws applied to simple fundamental particles.

In 1668 Boyle left Oxford and went to live with his sister Lady Ranelagh in London. There he became a neighbour of Barrow but seemed to have more common scientific interests with another neighbour Thomas Sydenham, a physician. In 1669 his sister's husband died. Some however, were keen to find Boyle a wife. Wallis found someone whom he considered particularly suitable to be Boyle's wife and wrote to him saying:-

If I might be the happy instrument in making two so excellent persons happy in each other ... I do not know in what else I could more approve myself.

Boyle seemed to have successfully avoided such attempts to marry him off. In June 1670 he had a stroke which left him paralysed but slowly he recovered his health. He continued to work and to entertain at his London home. Visitors were so frequent that he had to restrict visits so that he had time to continue with his scientific researches, which he did with the help of many excellent assistants.

In 1680 he declined the offer that he serve as President of the Royal Society. He explained his reasons were religious in that he could not swear to necessary oaths. The religious side of Boyle is one which we have not mentioned in this biography, yet it was an important force in his life. Perhaps the reason it has not been necessary to mention his strong Christian faith earlier is that to Boyle there was no conflict with religion and a mechanistic world [1]:-

... for him a God who could create a mechanical universe - who could create matter in motion, obeying certain laws out of which the universe as we know it could come into being in an orderly fashion - was far more to be admired and worshipped than a God who created a universe without scientific law.

Dilthey (1833-1911)

born Nov. 19, 1833 , Biebrich, near Wiesbaden, Nassau

died Oct. 1, 1911 , Seis am Schlern, near Bozen, South Tirol, Austria-Hungary

Dilthey, detail of an oil painting by R. Lepsius, c. 1904; in a private collection

Archiv fur Kunst und Geschichte, West Berlin

German philosopher who made important contributions to a methodology of the humanities and other human sciences. He objected to the pervasive influence of the natural sciences and developed a philosophy of life that perceived man in his historical contingency and changeability. Dilthey established a comprehensive treatment of history from the cultural viewpoint that has been of great consequence, particularly to the study of literature.

Dilthey was the son of a Reformed Church theologian. After he finished grammar school in Wiesbaden, he began to study theology, first at Heidelberg, then at Berlin, where he soon transferred to philosophy. After completing exams in theology and philosophy, he taught for some time at secondary schools in Berlin but soon abandoned this to dedicate himself fully to scholarly endeavours.

During these years he was bursting with energy, and his investigations led him into diverse directions. In addition to extensive studies on the history of early Christianity and on the history of philosophy and literature, he had a strong interest in music, and he was eager to absorb everything that was being discovered in the unfolding empirical sciences of man: sociology and ethnology, psychology and physiology. Hundreds of reviews and essays testify to an almost inexhaustible productivity.

In 1864 he took his doctorate at Berlin and obtained the right to lecture. He was appointed to a chair at the University of Basel in 1866; appointments to Kiel, in 1868, and Breslau, in 1871, followed. In 1882 he succeeded R.H. Lotze at the University of Berlin, where he spent the remainder of his life.

During these years Dilthey led the quiet life of a scholar, devoid of great external excitement and in total dedication to his work. He searched for the philosophical foundation of what he first and rather vaguely summarized as the “sciences of man, of society, and the state,” which he later called Geisteswissenschaften (“human sciences”)—a term that eventually gained general recognition to collectively denote the fields of history, philosophy, religion, psychology, art, literature, law, politics, and economics. In 1883, as a result of these studies, the first volume of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (“Introduction to Human Sciences”) appeared. The second volume, on which he worked continually, never did appear. This introductory work yielded a series of important essays; one of these—his “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (1894; “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology”)—instigated the formation of a cognitive (Verstehen), or structural, psychology. During the last years of his life, Dilthey resumed this work on a new level in his treatise Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910; “The Structure of the Historical World in the Human Sciences”), which was also left unfinished.

Opposed to the trend in the historical and social sciences to approximate the methodological ideal of the natural sciences, Dilthey tried to establish the humanities as interpretative sciences in their own right. In the course of this work he broke new philosophical ground by his study of the relations between personal experience, its realization in creative expression, and the reflective understanding of this experience; the interdependence of self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons; and, finally, the logical development from these to the understanding of social groups and historical processes. The subject matter of the historical and social sciences is the human mind, not as it is enjoyed in immediate experience nor as it is analyzed in psychological theory, but as it manifests or “objectifies” itself in languages and literatures, actions, and institutions. Dilthey emphasized that the essence of human beings cannot be grasped by introspection but only from a knowledge of all of history; this understanding, however, can never be final because history itself never is: “The prototype ‘man' disintegrates during the process of history.” For this reason, his philosophical works were closely connected to his historical studies. From these works later arose the encompassing scheme of his Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (“Studies Concerning the History of the German Mind”); the notes for this work make up a complete coherent manuscript, but only parts have been published.

Dilthey held that historical consciousness—i.e., the consciousness of the historical relativity of all ideas, attitudes, and institutions—is the most characteristic and challenging fact in the intellectual life of the modern world. It shakes all belief in absolute principles, but it thereby sets people free to understand and appreciate all the diverse possibilities of human experience. Dilthey did not have the ability for definitive formulation; he was suspicious of rationally constructed systems and preferred to leave questions unsettled, realizing that they involved complexity. For a long time, therefore, he was regarded primarily as a sensitive cultural historian who lacked the power of systematic thought. Only posthumously, through the editorial and interpretative work of his disciples, did the significance of the methodology of his historical philosophy of life emerge.