The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 3 pptx

On Using the Book
In one way there is little need for an entry in this book to contain cross-
references to other entries. This is so since the reader can safely assume that
almost every philosophical term which is used for an idea or doctrine or what-
ever also has an entry to itself. The same is true of almost every philosopher
who is mentioned. That is not all. Entries can be counted on for very many
subjects which fall under such common terms as ‘beauty’, ‘causation’, ‘democ-
racy’, ‘guilt’, ‘knowledge’, ‘mind’, and ‘time’—all such subjects which get
philosophical attention.
Still, it seems a good idea to provide occasional reminders of the general pos-
sibility of having more lights shed on something by turning elsewhere. And
there is often a good reason for prompting or directing a reader to look else-
where, a reason of which a reader may be unaware.
So occasionally a term in an entry is preceded by an asterisk, indicating that it
is the heading or the first word of the heading of another entry. For the same
reason an asterisked term or terms may appear on a line at the end of an entry.
In some cases the latter references are to related or opposed ideas or the like. In
order not to have the book littered with asterisks, they have very rarely been
put on the names of philosophers. But it is always a good idea to turn to the
entries on the mentioned philosophers.
The cross-references are more intended for the browsing reader than the
reader at work. For the reader at work, there is an Index and List of Entries at
the back of the book. The Index and List of Entries usually gives references to
more related entries than are given by cross-references in and at the end of an
entry. It is also possible to look up all the entries on, say, aesthetics or American
philosophy or applied ethics.
The book is alphabetized by the whole headings of entries, as distinct from
the first word of a heading. Hence, for example, abandonment comes before
a priori and a posteriori. It is wise to look elsewhere if something seems to be
missing.
At the end of the book there is also a useful appendix on Logical Symbols as

well as the appendices A Chronological Table of Philosophy and Maps of Philosophy.
abandonment. A rhetorical term used by existentialist
philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre to describe the
absence of any sources of ethical authority external to one-
self. It suggests that one might have expected to find such
an authority, either in religion or from an understanding
of the natural world, and that the discovery that there is
none leads one to feel ‘abandoned’. For existentialists such
as Sartre, however, this sense of abandonment is only a
prelude to the recognition that ethical values can be
grounded from within a reflective understanding of the
conditions under which individuals can attain *authenti-
city in their lives. Thus the conception of abandonment is
essentially an existentialist dramatization of Kant’s rejec-
tion of heteronomous conceptions of value in favour of
the *autonomy of the good will. t.r.b.
*existentialism; despair.
J P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. P. Mairet (London,
1948).
abduction. Abductive reasoning accepts a conclusion on
the grounds that it explains the available evidence. The
term was introduced by Charles Peirce to describe an
inference pattern sometimes called ‘hypothesis’ or ‘*infer-
ence to the best explanation’. He used the example of
arriving at a Turkish seaport and observing a man on
horseback surrounded by horsemen holding a canopy
over his head. He inferred that this was the governor of
the province since he could think of no other figure who
would be so greatly honoured. In his later work, Peirce
used the word more widely: the logic of abduction exam-

ines all of the norms which guide us in formulating new
hypotheses and deciding which of them to take seriously.
It addresses a wide range of issues concerning the ‘logic of
discovery’ and the economics of research. c.j.h.
*induction.
C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vii (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 89–164.
Abelard, Peter (1079–1142). Most widely known for his
love affair with Héloïse, about which we learn a good deal
from his letters to her as well as from his Historia Calamita-
tum. He was also one of the great controversialists of his
era. After studying under Roscelin (c.1095) and William of
Champeaux (c.1100), he established himself as a master in
his own right, and one to whom students flocked through-
out his career. In the dispute about the nature of *univer-
sals he was in the nominalist camp, holding that universals
are utterances (voces) or mental terms, not things in the
real world. The universality of a universal derives from
the fact that it is predicable of many things. Nevertheless,
unless a number of things are in the same state, the one
universal term cannot be predicated of them. Hence
although universals are not themselves real things, it is a
common feature of real things that justifies the predica-
tion of a universal of them.
In his Dialectica Abelard takes up, among numerous
other topics, the question, widely discussed in the Middle
Ages, of the relation between human freedom and divine
providence. If God, who is omniscient, knows that we are
going to perform a given act, is it not necessary that we
perform it, and in that case how can the act be free?
Abelard’s answer is that we do indeed act freely and that it

is not merely our acts but our free acts that come under
divine providence. God’s foreknowing them carries no
implication that we are not free to avoid performing
them. a.bro.
*Heloïse complex; properties; qualities.
Abelard, Dialectica, ed. L. M. de Rijk (Assen, 1970).
J. Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 2002).
ableism. Prejudice against people with disabilities, which
can take many forms. It can take the form of a prejudice
against using sign language with those who are deaf even
when only a small percentage of them can master the
alternatives of lipreading and speaking. It also shows itself
as a prejudice against the use of Braille with the blind or
visually impaired even when this makes them less efficient
readers than they might be. In general, it is a prejudice
against performing activities in ways that are better for
disabled people. j.p.s.
*disability and morality.
Anita Silvers, ‘People with Disabilities’, in Hugh LaFollette (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2003).
abortion. Human beings develop gradually inside
women’s bodies. The death of a newly fertilized human
egg does not seem the same as the death of a person. Yet
A
there is no obvious line that divides the gradually develop-
ing foetus from the adult. Hence abortion poses a difficult
ethical issue.
Those who defend women’s rights to abortion often
refer to themselves as ‘pro-choice’ rather than as ‘pro-
abortion’. In this way they seek to bypass the issue of the

moral status of the foetus, and instead make the right to
abortion a question of individual liberty. But it cannot sim-
ply be assumed that a woman’s right to have an abortion is
a question of individual liberty, for it must first be estab-
lished that the aborted foetus is not a being worthy of pro-
tection. If the foetus is worthy of protection, then laws
against abortion do not create ‘victimless crimes’ as laws
against homosexual relations between consenting adults
do. So the question of the moral status of the foetus cannot
be avoided.
The central argument against abortion may be put like
this:
It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
A human foetus is an innocent human being.
Therefore it is wrong to kill a human foetus.
Defenders of abortion usually deny the second premiss of
this argument. The dispute about abortion then becomes
a dispute about whether a foetus is a human being, or, in
other words, when a human life begins. Opponents of
abortion challenge others to point to any stage in the grad-
ual process of human development that marks a morally
significant dividing-line. Unless there is such a line, they
say, we must either upgrade the status of the earliest
embryo to that of the child, or downgrade the status of the
child to that of the foetus; and no one advocates the latter
course.
The most commonly suggested dividing-lines between
the fertilized egg and the child are birth and viability. Both
are open to objection. A prematurely born infant may well
be less developed in these respects than a foetus nearing

the end of its normal term, and it seems peculiar to hold
that we may not kill the premature infant, but may kill the
more developed foetus. The point of viability varies
according to the state of medical technology, and, again,
it is odd to hold that a foetus has a right to life if the
pregnant woman lives in London, but not if she lives in
New Guinea.
Those who wish to deny the foetus a right to life may be
on stronger ground if they challenge the first, rather than
the second, premiss of the argument set out above. To
describe a being as ‘human’ is to use a term that straddles
two distinct notions: membership of the species Homo
sapiens, and being a person, in the sense of a rational or
self-conscious being. If ‘human’ is taken as equivalent to
‘person’, the second premiss of the argument, which
asserts that the foetus is a human being, is clearly false; for
one cannot plausibly argue that a foetus is either rational
or self-conscious. If, on the other hand, ‘human’ is taken to
mean no more than ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’,
then it needs to be shown why mere membership of a
given biological species should be a sufficient basis for a
right to life. Rather, the defender of abortion may wish to
argue, we should look at the foetus for what it is—the
actual characteristics it possesses—and value its life
accordingly. p.s.
*applied ethics; double effect.
D. Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge, 2002).
Rosalind Hursthouse, Beginning Lives (Oxford, 1987).
Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, in Peter Singer
(ed.), Applied Ethics (Oxford, 1986).

Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford, 1983).
Absolute, the. That which has an unconditioned exist-
ence, not conditioned by, relative to, or dependent upon
anything else. Usually deemed to be the whole of things,
conceived as unitary, as spiritual, as self-knowing (at least
in part via the human mind), and as rationally intelligible,
as finite things, considered individually, are not. The
expression was introduced into philosophy by Schelling
and Hegel. In the English speaking world it became the
key concept of such absolute idealists as Josiah Royce and
F. H. Bradley. t.l.s.s.
*idealism, philosophical.
J. N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute (London, 1970).
T. L. S. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh,
1983).
absolutism, moral. The view that certain kinds of actions
are always wrong or are always obligatory, whatever the
consequences. Typical candidates for such absolute prin-
ciples would be that it is always wrong deliberately to kill
an innocent human being, or that one ought always to tell
the truth or to keep one’s promises. Absolutism is to be
contrasted with *consequentialism, the view that the
rightness or wrongness of actions is determined solely by
the extent to which they lead to good or bad conse-
quences. A consequentialist could maintain, for example,
that *killing is normally wrong because it creates a great
deal of grief and suffering and deprives the person who is
killed of the future happiness which he/she would have
experienced, but that since, in some cases, a refusal to kill
may lead to even more suffering and loss of happiness, it

may sometimes be right even to kill the innocent.
Moral absolutism is linked to, but not synonymous
with, a *deontological position in ethics. The latter is the
view that certain kinds of actions are intrinsically right or
wrong—right or wrong simply because they are that kind
of action—independently of the consequences to which
they may lead. Killing the innocent, for instance, may be
thought to be wrong just because it is the killing of the inno-
cent, quite apart from the suffering and loss of happiness to
which it will normally lead. A deontological position obvi-
ously contrasts with a consequentialist one, and may
appear to be the same as absolutism, but in fact the two are
distinct. One may hold that killing the innocent is intrinsic-
ally wrong, but also accept that in certain extreme cir-
cumstances the intrinsic wrongness of killing the innocent
may itself be overriden by the appalling consequences
2 abortion
which will occur if one refuses to kill. Absolutism builds
on a deontological position but adds a stronger claim—
not only is the action intrinsically wrong, but its wrong-
ness can never be overridden by any consideration of
consequences.
The absolutist position corresponds to common trad-
itional views of morality, particularly of a religious kind—
what might be called the ‘Ten Commandments’ idea of
morality. Nevertheless, when detached from appeals to
religious authority absolutism may appear to be vulner-
able to rational criticism. Is it not perverse to maintain that
a certain kind of action is simply ruled out, even when the
refusal to perform it will lead to even worse conse-

quences? Why insist on never killing the innocent, for
instance, if in certain circumstances a refusal to do so will
mean that more innocent people will die? To be plausible,
absolutism needs to be supplemented with some further
distinction between different ways in which conse-
quences may come about, such as the distinction between
*acts and omissions, or the doctrine of *double effect. The
absolutist who refuses to condone the killing of the inno-
cent, even though more innocent people will die as a
result of not doing so, can then say that though the loss of
innocent lives is a terrible thing; nevertheless, letting inno-
cent people die, or bringing about innocent deaths as an
unintended side-effect, is not ruled out by an absolute pro-
hibition in the same way as is the intentional killing of the
innocent. Whether this is a sufficient defence of abso-
lutism remains a matter for debate. r.j.n.
*ideals, moral; lying.
G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘War and Murder’, in Collected Philosophical
Papers, iii (Oxford, 1981).
Jonathan Bennett, ‘Whatever the Consequences’, in Analysis
(1966).
Thomas Nagel, ‘War and Massacre’, in Mortal Questions (Cam-
bridge, 1979).
abstract entities. The dichotomy between the abstract
and the concrete is supposed to effect a mutually exclusive
and jointly exhaustive ontological classification. The
dichotomy is, however, too naïve to be of theoretical use.
There are many different ways, themselves vague, to
mark the distinction: abstract entities are not perceptible,
cannot be pointed to, have no causes or effects, have no

spatio-temporal location, are necessarily existent. Nor is
there agreement about whether there are any abstract
entities, and, if so, which sorts of entity are abstract.
Abstract entities, conceived as having no causal powers,
are thought problematic for epistemological reasons:
how can we refer to or know anything about entities
with which we have no causal commerce? Hence the
existence of nominalists, who try to do without abstract
entities. a.d.o.
*universals; nominalism; proposition.
B. Hale, Abstract Objects (Oxford, 1987).
abstract ideas: see ideas.
abstraction. A putative psychological process for the
acquisition of a *concept x either by attending to the fea-
tures common to all and only xs or by disregarding just the
spatio-temporal locations of xs. The existence of abstrac-
tion is endorsed by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (esp. ii. xi. 9 and 10 and iii. iii. 6ff.) but
rejected by Berkeley in The Principles of Human Knowledge
(esp. paras. 6ff. and paras. 98, 119, and 125). For Locke the
capacity to abstract distinguishes human beings from ani-
mals. It enables them to think in abstract ideas and hence
use language. Berkeley argues that the concept of an
abstract *idea is incoherent because it entails both the
inclusion and the exclusion of one and the same property.
This in turn is because any such putative idea would have
to be general enough to subsume all xs yet precise enough
to subsume only xs. For example, the abstract idea of tri-
angle ‘is neither oblique nor rectangular, equilateral nor
scalenon, but all and none of these at once’ (The Principles

of Human Knowledge, Introduction, para. 13). s.p.
George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge (1710).
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).
Stephen Priest, The British Empiricists (London, 1990).
abstract particulars: see properties, individual.
absurd, the. A term used by existentialists to describe that
which one might have thought to be amenable to reason
but which turns out to be beyond the limits of rationality.
For example, in Sartre’s philosophy the ‘original choice’ of
one’s fundamental project is said to be ‘absurd’, since,
although choices are normally made for reasons, this
choice lies beyond reason because all reasons for choice
are supposed to be grounded in one’s fundamental pro-
ject. Arguably, this case in fact shows that Sartre is mis-
taken in supposing that reasons for choice are themselves
grounded in a choice; and one can argue that other cases
which are supposed to involve experience of the ‘absurd’
are in fact a *reductio ad absurdum of the assumptions
which produce this conclusion. The ‘absurd’ does not in
fact play an essential role within existentialist philosophy;
but it is an important aspect of the broader cultural con-
text of existentialism, for example in the ‘theatre of the
absurd’, as exemplified by the plays of Samuel Beckett.
t.r.b.
*abandonment; existentialism.
A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London, 1955).
J P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes (London, 1958),
479.
academic freedom. An integral aspect of open societies,

academic freedom is the right of teachers in universities
and other sectors of education to teach and research as
their subject and conscience demands. This right, though,
may not be unproblematically applicable, even in free
societies. Should academic freedom be extended to those
perceived by others as using it to interfere with the rights
academic freedom 3
of others, or to pursue morally objectionable research?
Like other *freedoms, in practice academic freedom is
constrained by often tacit conventions regarding its limits.
One should never underestimate the ingenuity of aca-
demics themselves in justifying denials of academic
freedom to their colleagues. a.o’h.
*persecution of philosophers; teaching and indoctrinat-
ing.
C. Russell, Academic Freedom (London, 1993).
Academy, the. The educational institution founded by
Plato, probably around 387 bc, so-called because of its
location at a site sacred to the hero Academus. It is fanciful
to call the Academy a ‘university’ or ‘college’. The best
idea we have of the subjects studied there comes from
Plato’s dialogues themselves and Aristotle’s testimony.
When Plato died, the leadership of the Academy passed to
his nephew Speusippus. About 275 the so-called Middle
Academy came to be dominated by *Sceptics under the
leadership of Arcesilaus. This dominance continued
through the middle of the second century when
Carneades founded the New Academy. In 87/6 Antiochus
of Ascalon broke away from the sceptical tradition of Pla-
tonic interpretation to try to recover what he regarded as

a more authentic form of Platonism. Since the physical
structures of the original Academy had been destroyed
with the fall of Athens in 88, Antiochus’ Academic leader-
ship was more notional than real. Though the Academy
was revived in the later fourth century ad, it was
destroyed finally by Justinian in 529. l.p.g.
*philosophy, history of centres and departments of.
J. Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy 347–274 BC
(Oxford, 2003).
—— The Middle Platonists 80 BC to AD 220 (Ithaca, NY, 1977).
access, privileged: see privileged access.
accident. The term ‘accident’ in philosophy has two main
uses, both stemming from Aristotle. In the first an acci-
dent is a quality which is not essential to the kind of thing
(or in later philosophers, to the individual) in question.
‘Being musical’ is accidental to Socrates, ‘being rational’
and ‘being an animal’ are not. Which *qualities, if any, are
essential or non-accidental is a controversial matter in
contemporary philosophy. In the second main use, the
term ‘accident’ is a way of allowing chance and causality
to coexist: digging for truffles I turn up some treasure. The
digging was not an accident, and since the treasure was
there all along, my finding it if I dug there was determined;
none the less, my finding of it was accidental, since my dig-
ging was a digging for truffles, not for treasure. Typically,
events which are accidental under one description are
determined under another. In non-philosophical contexts
the term often connotes harmful accidents. j.j.m.
*properties, general.
J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford,

1961).
Irving Copi, ‘Essence and Accident’, in Stephen P. Schwartz (ed.),
Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Ithaca, NY, 1977).
Achilles paradox. A paradox of motion, due to Zeno of
Elea. In a race, Achilles can never catch the tortoise, if the
tortoise is given a head start. For while Achilles closes the
initial gap between them, the tortoise will have created a
new gap, and while Achilles is closing that one, the tor-
toise will have created another. However fast Achilles
runs, all that the tortoise has to do, in order not to be
beaten, is make some progress in the time it takes Achilles
to close the previous gap. Standard responses include
claiming that the argument misconceives the implicit
ideas of infinite series and their limits; alternatively, that
space is not adequately described in purely mathematical
terms. Zeno’s own response is not documented. One
hypothesis is that he took the conclusion at face value, as
part of a general scepticism concerning matter, space, and
motion. r.m.s.
*infinity.
Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch. 1.
acquaintance and description. A distinction between
two kinds of knowledge, crucial to Russell’s philosophy,
and analogous to that between connaître and savoir. We
are not acquainted with Sir Walter Scott, so we know him
only by description, for example as the author of Waverley.
By contrast, we can know one of our experiences ‘by
acquaintance’, that is, without the intermediary of any
definite description. More generally, to know a thing by
description is to know that there is something uniquely

thus and so; to know a thing by acquaintance is for it to
come before the mind without the intermediary of any
description. Knowledge by description involves know-
ledge of truths, whereas knowledge by acquaintance does
not: it is knowledge of things.
For Russell, acquaintance is basic on two counts: all
understanding rests upon acquaintance (with what the
word or concept stands for); and all knowledge of truths
depends upon acquaintance with those things which the
truths concern. r.m.s.
*descriptions, theory of.
B. Russell, ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by
Description’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vi (Lon-
don, 1992); first pub. in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
(1911).
—— The Problems of Philosophy (London, 1912), ch. 5.
action. An action is sometimes defined as someone’s
doing something intentionally. The phenomenon of
human action owes its importance both to questions
about *agents’ metaphysical status, and to ethical and
legal questions about human *freedom and *responsibil-
ity. Recently many philosophers have thought that an
account of action (the phenomenon) should proceed via
an account of actions (events). When an action is defined
as someone’s doing something intentionally, actions are
4 academic freedom
taken to be a species of event, and events are taken to be
particulars which can be described in different ways. On
this account, Jane’s moving of her fingers against the key-
board, where it results in sounds of piano playing, is Jane’s

playing of the piano. Thus Jane does two things—move
her fingers and play the piano—although there is only one
action here. Typically someone who does something does
several ‘linked’ things, each one being done by or in doing
some other. (*Basic action.) According to the definition,
for there to be an action a person only has to have done
intentionally one (at least) of the things she did. So Jane’s
waking up the neighbours could be an action, even
though she didn’t intentionally wake them: it would be, if
it were also her playing of the piano, and she did play the
piano intentionally.
When this definition is combined with the thought that
it is by moving her body that a person does anything, the
claim that actions are bodily movements is made: every
action is an event of a person’s moving (the whole or a part
of) her body.
The definition is not uncontroversial. Some philoso-
phers (such as Goldman) deny that a person’s doing one
thing can be the same as her doing another; they believe
that events should be ‘finely individuated’, not ‘coarsely’,
so that only some actions, not all of them, are bodily
movements. Other philosophers deny that actions are
events at all: either they think that there are no such things
as particular events, or they allow that there are events but
say that actions are not among them.
Even a proponent of the definition will acknowledge
that it does not cover all of the ground where attributions
of responsible agency can be made. (1) A person may be
said to have done something when she keeps perfectly
still—when, apparently, no event occurs. In such cases, it

seems intuitively right that to say there is an instance of
action only if the person intentionally kept still. Thus it may
still be thought that ‘doing something intentionally’
marks out action: the original definition can be seen to be
basically right, but it has to be conceded that there is not
always an event when there is an instance of action, and
that no fully general link can be made between action and
bodily movement. (2) A person may be answerable for
doing something that she didn’t intentionally do: for
instance, when she starts a fire by idly throwing away her
lighted cigarette. To cover cases like this, more resources
than the word ‘intentionally’ are needed. But further elu-
cidation of ‘intentionally’ may uncover a range of con-
cepts which can in turn illuminate a broad conception of
responsible agency.
A person’s doing of something intentionally, it may be
argued, always results from that person’s believing some-
thing and her desiring something, which jointly constitute
her having a reason to do the thing. The definition of
actions, then, may be part of a view according to which a
certain sort of causal history distinguishes actions from
other events. Such a view fell from philosophical favour in
the 1950s and 1960s, but has by now been largely restored
to credibility. The view has many variants. In a traditional
empiricist version, each action is caused by a *volition. In
some quarters, the traditional version has been sup-
planted by the thesis that each action is itself an event of
someone’s *trying to do something: the suggestion is that
a person’s having a reason to do something leads her to
attempt to do it, and then, when her attempt actually has

the effects she wants, as usually it does, it is her doing the
thing intentionally.
Giving someone’s reasons is a matter of saying why she
did what she did, so that the idea of a distinctive kind of
explanation—action explanation—enters the picture
when an action is seen to result from someone’s having a
reason. (*Reasons and causes.) Also introduced is the idea
of a distinctive kind of thinking from which action issues—
*practical reason, or deliberation, an account of which
requires understanding of (at least) *belief, desire, valuing,
*intention, and choice. j.horn.
*choosing and deciding; mental causation.
D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980).
A. I. Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Princeton, NJ, 1970).
J. Hornsby, Actions (London, 1980).
A. Mele (ed.), The Philosophy of Action (Oxford, 1997).
action, basic: see basic action.
action at a distance. That one event could have direct
causal influence on another spatially separated from it
without causation being propagated continuously from
point to point has often been met with scepticism. In the
nineteenth century field theories ‘filled in’ the causation
between particles with spatially continuous fields. But
field theories have their own problems, especially with the
interaction of the source particle of the field with its own
generated field. These have led to contemporary action at
a distance theories of interaction. In order to conform to
the observed facts and to relativity, these must posit a time
delay between cause and spatially distant effect. In order
to account for the behaviour of the source, both retarded

and advanced effects must be posited. While the denial of
action at a distance is built into quantum field theory and
into many accounts of causation (Hume, Reichenbach,
Salmon), the famous space-like correlations of *quantum
mechanics are a difficulty for those who deny action at a
distance. l.s.
*causality.
P. Davies, The Physics of Time Asymmetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1974),
sect. 5.8.
J. Earman, A Primer of Determinism (Dordrecht, 1986), ch. 4,
sects. 7, 8.
active and passive intellects. Two powers relating to
conceptual thought associated with Aristotelian philoso-
phy. In De anima Aristotle distinguishes between the
*mind as a capacity for conceptual thinking (the passive
intellect), and another power (the active intellect) which
forms concepts and activates the latent capacity for
thought. The interpretation of these notions has been a
active and passive intellects 5
matter of controversy since antiquity and remains unre-
solved today. Some medieval Arabic commentators
regarded the active intellect as a single immaterial princi-
ple to which all thinkers are related; other medievals held
this to be so in respect of both intellects. Aquinas argued
instead that the two intellects are simply powers of the
mind of each thinker. Conceived in this way the distinc-
tion corresponds to that recurrent in cognitive psychology
between concept-forming and concept-employing capaci-
ties. It also bears upon the debate between nativism and
abstractionism in relation to the source of *ideas. j.hal.

*acts, mental.
Z. Kuksewicz, ‘The Potential and the Agent Intellect’, in N. Kret-
zmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History
of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982).
acts and omissions. The moral distinction between acts
and omissions amounts to the claim that there is a morally
significant difference between a particular action and a
corresponding failure to act, even though they have the
same outcomes. Thus, it is said that there is a moral differ-
ence between, for example, lying and not telling the truth,
hindering and failing to help, and between *killing and
letting die, even though, in each case, the consequences of
the action and the omission may be the same.
There is undoubtedly some obscurity about the distinc-
tion. Understanding it is complicated by the somewhat
untidy concept of an omission. Roughly speaking, an
omission of mine may be said to occur when I fail to do
something which I might reasonably have been expected
to do. Such an omission may or may not be a matter of
moral censure, depending on what duties I have and what
expectations they give rise to.
However, since the fact that something is an omission
settles no moral questions, it is mistaken to interpret the
acts–omissions distinction as straightforwardly differenti-
ating between what we are obliged not to do and what we
are allowed to do. Hence it is not the claim that killing, for
instance, is morally forbidden while letting die is morally
permissible. Nor does it seem helpful to see the distinction
as hanging on a difference in intention, for, clearly, both a
case of killing and a case of letting die would have to be

intentional, as opposed to accidental, to raise serious
moral questions. The point of the distinction seems rather
to be to assert that there are prima-facie differences
in gravity in the moral logic of the two areas, i.e. that cases
of positive commission require reasons that are morally
weightier than, and perhaps different in kind from, those
that would justify an omission. Thus not killing and not
lying, for example, are held to be morally more basic than
saving lives and telling the truth, even though the latter
are also a matter of moral duty.
As a cornerstone of *deontological ethics, the acts–
omissions distinction is vulnerable to the usual criticisms
by *consequentialism and its proponents. But some of
these criticisms are misguided: utilitarian dismissals of the
distinction are often based on the idea that it amounts to,
for instance, a denial of the duty to save life. Yet one does
not have to refute the distinction to establish the moral
duty to save lives. If we can be held just as responsible for
the things we fail to do as for the things we do, we need not
deny what the distinction asserts—that there is a differ-
ence between the moral ground we should be able to take
for granted and the moral ground we have to struggle con-
tinuously to gain. p.w.
*absolutism, moral.
E. D’Arcy, Human Acts (Oxford, 1963).
acts, linguistic: see linguistic acts.
acts, mental. (1) Mental actions; or, less commonly,
(2) *mental events in general. Mental events that are not
mental actions include suddenly remembering where one
left one’s keys and noticing that it is raining. Paradigmatic

mental actions include adding numbers in one’s head,
deliberating, and (one some views) choosing and trying.
The precise difference between mental events that are
actions and those that are not is a vexed question (some-
times examined under the rubric ‘activity versus passiv-
ity’). Whether there is a single concept of action that
includes both mental actions and actions essentially
involving peripheral bodily movement is controversial.
The promising idea that actions are analysable as events
with ‘the right sort’ of psychological–causal history
may provide the key to both questions, provided that the
right sort of history does not itself essentially include
actions. a.r.m.
*active and passive intellects; mental states;
volitions.
B. O’Shaughnessy, The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory (Cambridge,
1980).
Adams, Marilyn McCord (1943–).American philoso-
pher (at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford) who has writ-
ten particularly on medieval philosophy and in
philosophy of religion. She is the author, inter alia, of
numerous papers on various topics, and of a monumental
two-volume study of William of Ockham (1987). She
has written on the problems of *evil. For example, in ‘Hor-
rendous Evils and the Goodness of God’, considering
‘evils the participation in (the doing or suffering of )
which gives one reason prima facie to doubt whether
one’s life could . . . be a great good to one on the whole’,
she argues that ‘the how of God’s victory’ can be rendered
intelligible for Christians ‘by integrating participation in

horrendous evils into a person’s relationship with God’.
Her work often offers solutions for believers using terms
internal to Christian tradition. Arguably, it also clarifies
religious views for non-believers. Spouse of R. Adams.
e.t.s.
*Anselm.
Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of
God’, in Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams
(eds.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 1990).
6 active and passive intellects
Adams, Robert M. (1937– ). American philosopher (at
Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford) who has done work
in philosophy of religion, ethics, metaphysics, and the his-
tory of philosophy. His book The Virtue of Faith incorpor-
ates diverse aspects of his views in philosophy of religion,
with references. Another example of his writing is the
paper ‘Involuntary Sins’ (Philosophical Review (1985)),
in which Adams argues that persons may be responsible
for emotions and attitudes such as anger even if these are
not voluntary (subject to direct or indirect control by the
will). This paper draws on concepts with a religious his-
tory, but has also challenged philosophers who have non-
religious interests in the ethics of emotion and in action
theory. Adams has, in addition, done influential work on
a modified *divine command theory of ethics, and on
the problem of *evil, among other topics. Spouse of
M. Adams. e.t.s.
*Sin.
Robert M. Adams, The Virtue of Faith (Oxford, 1987).
——Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (New York, 1994).

——Finite and Infinite Goods (New York, 1999).
ad hominem
argument. For Aristotle, a *fallacy in which
‘persons direct their solutions against the man, not against
his arguments’ (Sophistical Refutations, 178
b
17). Locke sees
it as a ‘way to press a man with consequences drawn from
his own principles or concessions’ (Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, iv. xvii. 21). Locke’s ad hominem,
though he does not describe it as a fallacy, is not a proof
‘drawn from any of the foundations of knowledge or
probability’. j.woo.
*risus sophisticus.
John Woods and Douglas Walton, Fallacies: Selected Papers,
1972–1982 (Dordrecht, 1989), chs. 5 and 7.
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69). German
philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist, who was the
most brilliant and versatile member of the *Frankfurt
School. He studied philosophy, music, and sociology at
Frankfurt and music in Vienna under Alban Berg. In 1934
he was forced to emigrate, first to Oxford, then in 1938 to
New York.
His thought was permanently marked by the rise of fas-
cism, and by the failure of *Marxism both in the West and
in the Soviet Union. Political defeat accounts for the sur-
vival of philosophy, against Marx’s expectations: ‘Philoso-
phy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the
moment to realize it was missed.’ He and Horkheimer
diagnose the ills of modernity in Dialectic of the Enlight-

enment (1947; tr. New York, 1972).
Another factor shaping Adorno’s thought is *existen-
tialism, which was in part a ‘movement of rebellion
against the dehumanization of man in industrial society’
(Tillich) and a response to the failure of Marx’s and Hegel’s
solutions to it. Despite his criticisms of the existentialists,
Adorno shared many of their concerns: Kierkegaard’s
reinstatement of subjectivity against Hegel’s supposedly
panlogistic and historicist system, Heidegger’s antipathy
to technology, and so on. (Adorno’s 1933 habilitation the-
sis on Kierkegaard appeared as Kierkegaard: Construction of
the Aesthetic in 1965.) He criticizes them from a (consider-
ably modified) Hegelian–Marxist viewpoint, arguing that
they, like more traditional philosophies, misrepresent
social and political relations and thereby provide an ideo-
logical justification for domination. Even to ignore socio-
political relations is to justify them, by suggesting, for
example, that the individual is more autonomous than he
is: ‘If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes
the concept, it is from the outset of the nature of the
musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown
the screams of its victims.’ But he also subjects them to
‘immanent’ philosophical criticism, applying ‘Hegel’s
dictum that in dialectics an opponent’s strength is absorbed
and turned against him.’
In Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (1956; but written
in Oxford, 1934–7; tr. Oxford, 1982) he applied these
methods to Husserl’s half-hearted idealism, arguing that
‘one cannot both derive advantage from this solipsistic
approach and transcend its limit’ and that ‘phenomeno-

logically speaking,[the fact that it is done] “with the eyes”
belongs to the sense of seeing and is not only [the result of ]
causal reflection and theoretical explanation’. Adorno
invokes Hegel’s belief that everything is mediated against
Husserl’s attempt to find an indubitable beginning or
foundation for philosophy: ‘The insistence on the medi-
atedness of everything immediate is the model of dialectical
thinking as such, and also of materialistic thinking, insofar
as it ascertains the social preformation of contingent, indi-
vidual experience.’
In The Jargon of Authenticity (1965; tr. London, 1973),
besides censuring what he saw as Heidegger’s obfuscating
and ideological jargon, Adorno criticized him both on a
philosophical level (‘In view of our potential, and grow-
ing, control over organic processes, we cannot dismiss
a fortiori the thought of the elimination of death. This may
be very unlikely; but we can entertain a thought, which,
according to existential ontology, should be unthinkable’)
and on a political level: ‘Heidegger’s dignity is again the
shadow of such a borrowed ideology; the subject who
based his dignity on the (albeit questionable) Pythagorean
claim that he is a good citizen of a good state, gives way to
the respect due to him merely because he, like everyone
else, must die. In this respect Heidegger is a reluctant
democrat.’
Negative Dialectics (1966; tr. New York, 1973) gives a
general account of Adorno’s thought. Like Socrates and
the early Plato, he wields a negative dialectic and does not,
like Hegel and the later Plato, derive a positive result, let
alone an all-encompassing system or a philosophy of

‘identity’, from his critique of other philosophers and of
social institutions. His aim is to dissolve conceptual forms
before they harden into lenses which distort our vision of,
and impair our practical engagements with, reality. Real-
ity is not transparent to us; there is a ‘totally other’, a ‘non-
identical’, that eludes our concepts.
Adorno, Theodor 7
When concepts fail us, *art comes to our aid. Aesthetic
illusion sustains the hope for an ideology-free utopia that
neither theory nor political activity can secure: ‘In illusion
there is a promise of freedom from illusion.’ Art, especially
music, is relatively autonomous of repressive social struc-
tures and thus represents a demand for freedom and a cri-
tique of society. This is to be discerned in the formal
properties of particular works. Art is ‘concentrated social
substance’. Even music commercially mass-produced by
the ‘culture industry’ has a social meaning: the repressive
irrationality of capitalism. m.j.i.
M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London, 1973).
G. Rose, The Melancholy Science (London, 1979).
L. Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of
Illusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
aesthetic attitude. The aesthetic attitude is supposedly a
particular way of experiencing or attending to objects. It is
said to be an attitude independent of any motivations to
do with utility, economic value, moral judgement, or
peculiarly personal emotion, and concerned with experi-
encing the object ‘for its own sake’. At the limit, the
observer’s state would be one of pure detachment,
marked by an absence of all desires directed to the object.

It could be conceived of as an episode of exceptional ele-
vation wholly beyond our ordinary understanding of
empirical reality (as in Schopenhauer), or simply as a state
of heightened receptiveness in which our perception of
the object is more disengaged than usual from other
desires and motivations which we have. The term ‘disin-
terested’ is often applied to such an attitude.
Commonly, proponents of the aesthetic attitude think
that it can be directed as much to nature as to works of art,
and, for some thinkers, it is important that we may adopt
an aesthetic attitude towards any object without restric-
tion. However, it is questionable whether we can always
abandon our instrumental, moral, or emotional attitudes.
For a range of different cases to test this question, think of
buildings which we live in, war atrocities which we see on
film, and the naked human body. The two questions are
whether we can, and whether we ever should, adopt a
purely aesthetic attitude to these things. In the case of art,
an aesthetic attitude theory can support the idea that cer-
tain kinds of response are privileged, others discountable
on the grounds of failing to take the ‘correct’ attitude
towards the object concerned. This assumes that the point
of *art is wholly aesthetic. The notion of an aesthetic atti-
tude deserves to be treated with some scepticism, as it has
been in recent philosophy. c.j.
*aesthetic concepts; aesthetic judgement.
G. Dickie, ‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude’, American Philo-
sophical Quarterly (1964); repr. in J. Hospers (ed.), Introductory
Readings in Aesthetics (New York, 1969).
A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, i, tr.

E. F. J. Payne (New York, 1964), Third Book.
aesthetic concepts. Term introduced into aesthetic the-
ory in Frank Sibley’s landmark 1959 essay of that name.
According to Sibley, aesthetic concepts, such as balanced,
delicate, anguished, differ from non-aesthetic ones, such as
orange, rough, square, in being strongly non-condition-
governed, that is, not applicable according to a rule going
from non-aesthetic concepts to aesthetic concepts. Aes-
thetic concepts, Sibley insisted, were strongly perceptual
ones—their presence must be experienced, not inferred—
but unlike non-aesthetic perceptual concepts, they
require taste, not merely functioning senses, for their dis-
cernment, and they are of a higher order than and depen-
dent on non-aesthetic perceptual concepts. Sibley’s claim
is plainly related to the Kantian notion that the judgement
of beauty is not subject to rule.
It is important to see that Sibley’s claim is, in terms sug-
gested by Monroe Beardsley, a denial of application con-
ditions for aesthetic concepts, not a denial of occurrence
conditions for them. And one piece of evidence for the cor-
rectness of Sibley’s claim concerning the non-condition-
governedness of the aesthetic is how finely dependent on
the non-aesthetic complexion of an object the application
of an aesthetic term appears to be, very small differences
in non-aesthetic complexion being able to induce large dif-
ferences in the aesthetic terms that apply. Nevertheless,
Sibley’s thesis came under attack early on from philoso-
phers such as Ted Cohen, who maintained that the aes-
thetic/non-aesthetic distinction was untenable, and Peter
Kivy, who held that aesthetic terms were in fact condition-

governed after all.
In more recent discussion, talk of aesthetic concepts has
usually been replaced by talk of aesthetic properties, and
Sibley’s claim of dependence has been transmuted into
talk of the supervenience of aesthetic properties on non-
aesthetic properties, including those relating to an object’s
appreciative context. Current debate about aesthetic con-
cepts turns on the issue of how to delineate clearly the
class of such concepts, the issue of whether such concepts
essentially involve a normative or evaluative component,
and the issue of the defensibility of realism with respect to
such concepts. j.lev.
*aesthetic attitude.
E. Brady and J. Levinson (eds.), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After
Sibley (Oxford, 2001).
J. Levinson, ‘Aesthetic Supervenience’, in Music, Art, and Meta-
physics (Ithaca, NY, 1990).
Frank Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers, ed. J. Benson,
B. Redfern, and J. R. Cox (Oxford, 2001).
aesthetic distance. In one version of *‘aesthetic attitude’
theory, aesthetic responses are alleged to occur when
people ‘distance’ themselves from an object they perceive,
suspending their desires and other feelings, and leaving
the mere experience of contemplating it. ‘Distancing’ is
also thought of as a feature in understanding artistic repre-
sentations. Someone whose own emotions became
engaged in an experience of full-blown pity or contempt
for a fictional character would be ‘under-distanced.’ c.j.
E. Bullough, ‘Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic
Principle’, in Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays (London, 1957).

8 Adorno, Theodor
aesthetic imagination: see imagination, aesthetic.
aestheticism. A term sometimes used pejoratively for a
view about the value of *art. More often presupposed
than argued for, it is the idea that works of art have value
to the extent that they can be appreciated for their aes-
thetic merits, and that such appreciation requires no justi-
fication by reference to anything outside itself.
Aestheticism presupposes both that there is distinctively
aesthetic value, and that such value is not derivative from
any other kind. An alternative to aestheticism would be
instrumentalism, the view that art is valuable, if at all,
because it is a means to some end, such as moral improve-
ment, knowledge (say, of human psychology or history),
or a more cohesive society. For aestheticism, by contrast,
art belongs securely in the realm of the aesthetic, and that
realm has a wholly autonomous value. c.j.
W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, in W. E.
Buckler (ed.), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (New York, 1986).
L. Tolstoy, What is Art?, tr. A Maude (Indianapolis, 1960).
aesthetic judgement. An aesthetic judgement attributes a
form of aesthetic value to a thing, of whatever kind. (For
most philosophers, not all aesthetic judgements are about
art, and not all judgements about art are aesthetic judge-
ments.) Kant’s influential theory provides a starting point
for analysing such judgements. For Kant, aesthetic judge-
ments are distinguished both from the expression of sub-
jective likes and dislikes, and from judgements that ascribe
an objective property to the thing that is judged. Like sub-
jective preferences, they must be made on the basis of an

experience of *pleasure; but like property-ascribing judge-
ments, they make a claim with which other subjects are
expected to agree. Other views would assimilate aesthetic
judgements more closely to truth claims about a thing’s
properties, or place more emphasis on subjective response,
and less on the notion of agreement or correctness. c.j.
*aesthetic attitude.
I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1969).
aesthetics, history of. Aesthetics, conceived as a distinct
discipline or sub-discipline dealing with philosophical
questions concerning *art and aesthetic value, is a modern
invention, originating in the eighteenth century. Ancient
and medieval writers gave consideration to *beauty, artis-
tic representation, the *sublime, and the value of the arts,
and among these discussions those of Plato (especially in
the Republic) and Aristotle (in the Poetics) have been vastly
influential and are still studied by aestheticians today.
Later writings by, for example, Plotinus, Augustine, and
Aquinas are of historical importance for the philosophy of
art. However, this sketch will concentrate on major lines
of thought concerning art and the aesthetic on the part of
philosophers in the modern period, from roughly 1700
onwards.
Philosophical aesthetics owes much to German
philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
including its name (Alexander Baumgarten coined the
term in 1735, taking it from the Greek aisthesis, meaning
sensation or perception), but also, thanks to Kant, Hegel,
and their contemporaries, its first definitive book, its
arrival as a systematic discipline, and its period of greatest

intellectual fervour. However, the earliest recognizable
practitioners of aesthetics were philosophers in the British
empiricist tradition. The most important work here is that
of David Hume; other figures are Joseph Addison, Francis
Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, Alexander Gerard, Lord
Kames, and Archibald Alison. These thinkers were
broadly in the wake of Locke’s empiricism, but worked on
problems of *taste, beauty, and critical judgement in a
way that Locke had not. Locke’s contemporary Shaftes-
bury addressed such issues prominently, and has some-
times been considered the founder of aesthetics, though
he never achieves the separation from ethical questions
which allows the aesthetic to emerge as an area of investi-
gation in its own right. The work often credited with
developing the first independent notion of aesthetic
response is Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). Hutcheson attempts to
explain the source of our pleasure in beauty, and assigns it
to an ‘internal sense’ in addition to the five familiar senses.
We are caused by some objects to have ideas of beauty,
but their occurring in us is neither determined by know-
ledge we have of the object, nor attended by any desire or
interest towards it. This effectively sets the stage for many
later theories of aesthetic response.
A concise early discussion of the problem of *aesthetic
judgements is Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’
(1757), regarded today as the most important contribution
to aesthetics before Kant. Hume starts from an apparent
contradiction. Judgements of taste, which in this context
are critical judgements about the arts, are founded upon

sentiments of beauty, but sentiments make no reference
to states of affairs in the world and are merely subjective,
so judgements of taste, which are frequently found to be
in conflict with one another, might all seem equally
‘right’. Yet there are some judgements which we would
regard as clearly wrong, absurd or ridiculous (such as the
assertion of ‘an equality of genius between Ogilby and
Milton’). How to explain the rightness or greater authori-
tativeness of some critical judgements, while acknow-
ledging them to be based upon subjective responses?
Hume proposes that there must be some standard of taste
to settle aesthetic disputes. He mentions the idea of gen-
eral principles of taste, though what they are and how they
are applied is less clear. He adduces the fact that certain
works of classical literature are universally regarded as
paradigms. Finally he suggests that some human beings
can be found who are ‘true judges’ and whose responses
are more authoritative than those of others. These true
judges would be characterized by ‘strong sense, united to
delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by
comparison, and cleared of all prejudice’. Though it
remains difficult to see how such judges are to be identi-
fied and why we should assume that their judgements will
aesthetics, history of 9