The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 5 ppsx

absence of passion is just evil when it chooses the worse
course.
This view of the will can be de-moralized by attaching it
to long-term objectives generally, or to reflective choice.
Yet there are many problems in the whole project of
postulating such a rational faculty, which is an unstable
structure built too rapidly on some familiar idioms and
supposed requirements of experience. j.c.b.g.
*reason as the slave of the passions.
William Charlton, Weakness of Will (Oxford, 1988).
Donald Davidson, Problems of Rationality (Oxford, 2004).
Justin Gosling, Weakness of the Will (London, 1990).
R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963).
A. Mele, Autonomy, Self-Control and Weakness of Will (New York,
2002).
B. O’Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge, 1980).
S. Stroud and C. Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of Will and Practical
Irrationality (Oxford, 2003).
Albert the Great (c.1206–80). Born in the German town of
Lauingen, he studied briefly at Padua, becoming a
Dominican in 1223. He was a regent master at Paris
(1242–8), during which time Aquinas was one of his stu-
dents, and in 1248 the two men became colleagues at
Cologne. He was known as doctor universalis because of
his encyclopedic knowledge displayed in his voluminous
writings. He wrote extensively on scientific matters, and
also on theology and philosophy, where he was heavily
influenced by the works of Aristotle then reaching the
Christian West accompanied by the commentaries of
Muslim philosophers, in particular al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ and Avi-
cenna. He was one of the earliest to realize that it was vital

to work out a means of squaring Aristotelian philosophy
with Christianity, for Aristotle had highly persuasive argu-
ments for his doctrines, and those who would be per-
suaded by the arguments had to be shown that they could
assent to the doctrines without in so doing implying the
falsity of the faith. More than anyone it was Aquinas who
carried out the task that Albert had recognized to be so
necessary. a.bro.
*Aristotelianism.
J. Weisheipl (ed.), Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative
Essays (Toronto, 1980).
Albo, Joseph (c.1360–1444?). Jewish philosopher of
Castile, author of Sefer ha-Ikkarim (The Book of Principles,
1425). A student of Crescas, well versed in mathematics,
medicine, Islamic, Christian, and Jewish philosophy, and
biblical and rabbinical learning, Albo spoke in the Tortosa
Disputation of 1413–14. Against a backdrop of anti-Jewish
polemic, he sought to forge a philosophically defensible
Jewish creed centred on God, revelation, and requital,
de-emphasizing the Messianic idea, the sorest point of
Christian–Jewish polemics. From Aquinas Albo adopted
the idea of natural law, arguing, with Maimonides, that
the superiority of divine legislation lay in its (credal)
provision for spiritual felicity, not just temporal welfare.
Grotius and Richard Simon admired him, but Jewish
thinkers often resented the idea of a formal creed and fault
his lack of originality. l.e.g.
Joseph Albo, Sefer ha-Ikkarim, ed. and tr. Isaac Husik, 5 vols.
(Philadelphia, 1929–30; first printed ed. Soncino, 1485).
Alcmaeon of Croton ( fl. c.450 bc). Medical theorist. He

originated the influential quasi-political theory of medi-
cine, one version of which was developed into the ‘four
humours’ pathology which, through Galen, dominated
medieval and early modern medicine. In Alcmaeon’s ver-
sion, four opposed ‘powers’ (hot, cold, wet, dry) are natur-
ally in balance (because their strengths are everywhere in
the right proportion) in the healthy body. A disturbance of
the balance in any way means a damaging preponderance
of one or more powers, and causes conflict. This is disease;
the variety of diseases, and their different natures, are to be
explained by the variety of ways and places in which the
right proportion can be disturbed. e.l.h.
J. Mansfeld, ‘Alcmaeon: “Physikos” or Physician?’, in Kephalaion:
Studies in Greek Philosophy and its Continuation Offered to Profes-
sor C. J. de Vogel (Assen, 1975).
alethic concepts: see deontic logic.
Alexander, Samuel (1859–1938). Australian-born, Oxford-
educated, Alexander spent his career at Manchester Uni-
versity. Trying always to keep abreast of developments in
modern science, particularly psychology and biology,
Alexander is best known for his theory of ‘emergent evo-
lution’, which he expounded in his Space, Time and Deity
(1920). His claim was that existence is hierarchically
ordered, and that there is an ongoing evolutionary process
with the emergence of ever-higher levels of existence.
Through time, therefore, new qualities come into being,
although Alexander would have thought of these as prin-
ciples of organization rather than entities akin to the
Bergsonian élan vital. As a man for whom his Jewishness
was a significant factor, from his combating prejudice at

Oxford to being close to prominent Zionists in Manches-
ter, Alexander felt a keen affinity to Spinoza. Like the
earlier philosopher, Alexander saw mind as at one with
material substance, making itself manifest in the course of
evolution. The next and ultimate emergent, Alexander
supposed, would be God. One presumes that, at this
point, he had left behind the constraints of science,
although apparently he carried with him not a few
eminent men of science. m.r.
*evolution.
S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (London, 1920).
al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯:see Fa¯ra¯bı¯.
algebra, Boolean: see Boolean algebra.
al-Ghazali: see Ghazali.
algorithm. An algorithm is a mechanical procedure for
determining the value of a function for any argument
20
akrasia
from a specified *domain. For example, addition is a func-
tion which maps pairs of natural numbers on to a natural
number (the sum of the pair). The simple paper-and-
pencil rules for determining the sum of any two numbers
are an algorithm for the addition function. A mechanical
procedure for deciding whether a given object has a par-
ticular property is also called an algorithm. So, for exam-
ple, the *truth-table test for deciding whether a formula of
the propositional calculus is a tautology is an algorithm. A
mechanical procedure can be given as a finite set of
instructions which are executed in a stepwise manner,
without appeal to random processes or ingenuity. A

*function is effectively computable if and only if there is an
algorithm for computing it. a.d.o.
H. Rogers, Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability
(New York, 1967), ch. 1.
alienation. A psychological or social evil, characterized
by one or another type of harmful separation, disruption
or fragmentation, which sunders things that belong
together. People are alienated from the political process
when they feel separated from it and powerless in relation
to it; this is alienation because in a democratic society you
belong in the political process, and as a citizen it ought to
belong to you. Reflection on your beliefs, values, or social
order can also alienate you from them. It can undermine
your attachment to them, cause you to feel separated
from them, no longer identified with them, yet without
furnishing anything to take their place; they are yours,
faute de mieux, but no longer truly yours: they are yours,
but you are alienated from them.
The term ‘alienation’ gained currency through Marxian
theory, and is used with special prominence in Marx’s
manuscripts of 1844 (which were first published in 1930).
Marx derived the terms Entäusserung and Entfremdung
from Hegel, who used them to portray the ‘unhappy con-
sciousness’ of the Roman world and the Christian Middle
Ages, when individuals under the Roman Empire,
deprived of the harmonious social and political life pre-
vailing in pagan antiquity, turned inward and directed
their aspirations toward a transcendent Deity and his
other-worldly kingdom. For Hegel, the unhappy con-
sciousness is divided against itself, separated from its

‘essence’, which it has placed in a ‘beyond’.
Marx used essentially the same notion to portray the situ-
ation of modern individuals—especially modern wage
labourers—who are deprived of a fulfilling mode of life
because their life-activity as socially productive agents is
devoid of any sense of communal action or satisfaction
and gives them no ownership over their own lives or their
products. In modern society, individuals are alienated in
so far as their common human essence, the actual
co-operative activity which naturally unites them, is power-
less in their lives, which are subject to an inhuman
power—created by them, but separating and dominating
them instead of being subject to their united will. This is
the power of the market, which is ‘free’ only in the
sense that it is beyond the control of its human creators,
enslaving them by separating them from one another,
from their activity, and from its products.
The German verbs entäussern and entfremden are reflex-
ive, and in both Hegel and Marx alienation is always fun-
damentally self-alienation. Fundamentally, to be alienated
is to be separated from one’s own essence or nature; it is to
be forced to lead a life in which that nature has no oppor-
tunity to be fulfilled or actualized. In this way, the experi-
ence of ‘alienation’ involves a sense of a lack of self-worth
and an absence of meaning in one’s life. Alienation in this
sense is not fundamentally a matter of whether your con-
scious desires are satisfied, or how you experience your
life, but instead of whether your life objectively actualizes
your nature, especially (for both Marx and Hegel) your life
with others as a social being on the basis of a determinate

course of historical development. Their view that alien-
ation, so conceived, can nevertheless have historical con-
sequences, and even be a lever for social change, clearly
involves some sort of realism about the human good: it
makes a difference, psychologically and socially, whether
people actualize their nature, and when they do not, this
fact explains what they think, feel, and do, and it can play a
decisive role in historical change. a.w.w.
*capitalism.
Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1981).
Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York, 1972).
Bertell Ollman, Alienation, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1976).
John Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man (Oxford, 1975).
al-Kindı¯: see Kindı¯.
all: see universal proposition.
Alston, William P. (1921– ). Although he has contributed
to other areas of philosophy, his main interests lie in the
areas of epistemology and philosophy of religion. His
work on *epistemic justification has been particularly
influential, and he has published extensive discussions of
religious language. In Perceiving God (1991), these two
interests come together in a detailed account of the episte-
mology of religious experience. Alston argues that *reli-
gious experiences which are taken by their subjects to be
direct non-sensory experiences of God are perceptual in
character because they involve a presentation or appear-
ance to the subject of something that the subject identifies
as God. He defends the view that such mystical perception
is a source of prima facie justified beliefs about divine
manifestations by arguing for the practical rationality of

engaging in a belief-forming practice that involves
reliance on mystical perception. p.l.q.
*God and the philosophers.
W. P. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language (Ithaca, NY, 1989).
—— Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge
(Ithaca, NY, 1989).
Althusser, Louis (1918–90). The most influential Marxist
philosopher in the 1960s and 1970s, Althusser produced a
Althusser, Louis 21
novel form of Marxism by attempting to integrate into it
the dominant ideas of *structuralism. Born in Algeria and
spending most of his life lecturing at the élite Collège de
France, Althusser and his disciples were much influenced
by the leading currents of Parisian intellectual life.
Althusser’s version of Marxism was in sharp contrast to
the Hegelian and humanist interpretations of Marx that
had gained prominence in the two decades after the Sec-
ond World War. As regards Marx himself, Althusser saw a
sharp epistemological break between the earlier humanist
writings and the later scientific texts: each was governed
by a different problematic or theoretical framework
which determined what questions could be asked on what
presuppositions. In his view, the young Marx propounded
an ideological view of humanity’s *alienation and even-
tual self-recovery, strongly influenced by Hegel; whereas
the later Marx disclosed a science, a theory of social for-
mations and their structural determination.
This later Marx, according to Althusser, had inaugur-
ated a new type of philosophy which underlay his social
scientific analysis. This *dialectical materialism was above

all a theory of knowledge. In a distinctly neo-Kantian vein,
Althusser saw the task of philosophy as the creation of
concepts which were a pre-condition for knowledge. He
insisted on the strict separation of the object of thought
from the real object. Knowledge working on its own
object was a specific form of practice, theoretical practice,
of which Marxist philosophy was the theory.
When applied to society, the result of this epistemology
was the science of historical materialism. Each of the
instances of society—economics, politics, ideology—was
a structure united within a structure of structures. The
complex and uneven relationship of the instances to each
other at a specific time was called by Althusser a ‘conjunc-
ture’. Every conjuncture was said to be ‘overdetermined’
in that each of the levels contributed to determining the
structure as well as being determined by it: determination
was always complex. This structured causality resulted in
a reading of history as process without a subject—as
opposed to the tendency of, for example, Sartre or the
early Marx to see human beings as the active subjects of
the historical process.
Althusser’s account of Marx, in particular its concept
of the problematic and its insistence on the relative
autonomy of the sciences, was a good antidote both to all
types of reductionism and to extreme forms of Hegelian
Marxism. But it does contain severe weaknesses which
have been re-emphasized by the superficiality of his
approach revealed in his autobiography. Its status as an
interpretation of what Marx actually said is dubious;
since any recourse to a real object is ruled out, it is diffi-

cult to see what the criterion of scientificity could be;
and, finally, since the science of dialectical materialism
is cut off from the social formation, Althusser can offer
no satisfactory account of the relation of theory to
practice. d.m
cl.
L. Althusser, For Marx (London, 1965).
G. Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (London, 1987).
—— (ed.), Althusser: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1994).
E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978).
altruism: see egoism and altruism.
ambiguity. A word, expression, or sentence is ambiguous
if it has two or more distinct meanings, e.g. ‘can’, ‘poor
violinist’, ‘Everyone loves a sailor’. In particular contexts it
may be clear with which of its meanings a word etc. is used,
e.g. ‘can’ in ‘I can do it’, or ‘poor violinist’ when what is
under discussion is the merits of orchestral players. s.w.
*vagueness; vague objects.
Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument, 3rd edn. (Belmont,
Calif., 1992).
S. Wolfram, Philosophical Logic (London, 1989), ch. 2. 1.
ambiguous middle, fallacy of. A categorical syllogism
contains two premisses, a conclusion, and three terms.
The premisses contain two occurrences of one of the
terms, the middle term. It is by virtue of relations of the
other two terms to the middle term that the conclusion,
containing the other two terms, follows, given other
constraints. Where the middle term is ambiguous, with
each occurrence differing in meaning, the syllogism is
fallacious, and falls under the fallacy of *four terms. An

example of the fallacy is the inference of:
Bees receive government subsidies.
from the premisses
Bees are producers of honey.
Producers of honey receive government subsidies.
r.b.m.
C. Hamblin, Fallacies (London, 1970).
American philosophy. Philosophizing in the United
States has developed apace over the past century and has
never been in as flourishing a condition as today, with phi-
losophy firmly established as a subject of instruction in
thousands of institutions of higher learning. However, the
nature of the philosophical enterprise is changing, with
the earlier heroic phase of a small group of important
thinkers giving way to a phase of dis-aggregated produc-
tion in a scattered industry of diversified contributors.
Already in colonial times there were various writers
who treated philosophical subjects: theologians like
Jonathan Edwards and philosophically inclined statesmen
like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. But such tal-
ented amateurs exerted no influence on other identifiable
philosophers. More systematic developments had to
await the growth of the university system in the nine-
teenth century, when academic philosophy was imported
from Europe, with idealists dominant at Harvard and
Scottish thought dominant at Princeton, while Kantians
were prominent in Chicago, Hegelians in St Louis,
and Thomists at the Catholic institutions. But even late
into the nineteenth century America’s most significant
philosophers operated outside the academic system,

22 Althusser, Louis
where eccentric thinkers like R. W. Emerson, John Fiske,
C. S. Peirce, and Orestes Brownson never managed to
obtain a secure foothold. However, with the rising import-
ance of the natural sciences, philosophy became the
linchpin that linked them to the liberal arts. The Harvard
of James and Palmer and such distinguished imports as
Santayana and Münsterberg was a harbinger of this, with
philosophy here closely joined to psychology. The influx
of the scientifically trained philosopher-refugees who
crossed the Atlantic after the rise of Nazism greatly inten-
sified this linkage of philosophy to the sciences.
The era between the two world wars saw a flourishing
in American academic philosophy, with people like John
Dewey, C. I. Lewis, R. B. Perry, W. P. Montague, A. O.
Lovejoy, Ernest Nagel, and many others making substan-
tial contributions throughout the domain. And after the
Second World War there was an enormous burgeoning of
the field. Numerous important contributors to philoso-
phy were now at work in America, and the reader will find
individual articles on dozens of them in this Companion.
However, no characteristically American school or
style of philosophizing has developed, excepting one,
namely *pragmatism as originated by C. S. Peirce and
popularized by William James. The pragmatists saw the
validity of standards of meaning, truth, and value as ultim-
ately rooted in consideration of practical efficacy—of
‘what works out in practice’. Though highly influential at
home, this approach met with a very mixed reception
abroad. Bertrand Russell, for example, objected that

beliefs can be useful but plainly false. And various contin-
ental philosophers have disapprovingly seen in pragma-
tism’s concern for practical efficacy—for ‘success’ and
‘paying off’—the expression of characteristically Ameri-
can social attitudes: crude materialism and naïve
democratic populism. Pragmatism was thus looked down
upon as reflecting a quintessentially crass American
tenor of thought—a philosophical expression of the Ameri-
can go-getter spirit with its success-orientated ideology,
and a manifestation of a populist reaction against the
chronic ideological controversies of European philoso-
phizing—epistemological *rationalism versus *empiri-
cism, ontological *materialism versus *idealism, etc.
(Americans, de Tocqueville wrote, seek to ‘échapper à
l’esprit de système’.)
With pragmatism as a somewhat special case, Ameri-
can philosophers past and present have, as a group, been
thoroughly eclectic and have drawn their inspiration for
style and substance from across the entire spectrum of phi-
losophizing. In consequence, American philosophizing as
a whole reflects the world, with its contributors drawing
their inspiration from materialism and idealism, from
Aristotle and Kant, from ancient *scepticism and modern
*phenomenology, etc. What is distinctive about contem-
porary American philosophizing is not so much its
ideas (which, taken individually, could have issued from
the minds and pens of non-Americans), but rather the
enterprise as a whole, viewed as a productive industry
of sorts.
Perhaps the most striking feature of present-day profes-

sional philosophy in North America is its scope and scale.
The American Philosophical Association, to which most
US academic practitioners of the discipline belong, cur-
rently has more than 8,000 members, and the comprehen-
sive Directory of American Philosophers for 2002–3 lists well
over 12,000 philosophers affiliated to colleges and univer-
sities in the USA and Canada. North American philoso-
phers are extraordinarily gregarious by standards
prevailing anywhere else. Apart from the massive Ameri-
can Philosophical Association, there presently exist well
over 1,000 different philosophical societies in the USA and
Canada, most of them with well over 100 members. In part
because of the ‘publish or perish’ syndrome of their aca-
demic base, American philosophers are extraordinarily
productive. They publish well over 200 books per annum
nowadays. And issue by issue they fill up the pages of over
175 journals. Almost 4,000 philosophical publications
(books or articles) and a roughly similar number of sym-
posium papers and conference presentations appear annu-
ally in North America. The comparatively secure place of
philosophy in the ‘liberal arts’ tradition of American colle-
giate education assures it a numerical size that makes for
such professional health. (It is this statistical fact rather
than anything coherent in the traditions themselves that
has led to the ascendancy of American over British philoso-
phy: as with industrial production, America’s intellectual
production is of preponderant volume.)
To be sure, this variation of philosophical approaches
brings conflict in its wake, with each methodological
camp and each school of thought convinced that it alone is

doing competent work and the rest are at best misguided
and probably pernicious. Few philosophers are suffi-
ciently urbane to see philosophical disagreement and con-
troversy as a form of collaboration. Internecine conflict is
particularly acute between the analytic tradition, which
looks to science as the cognitive model, and those who
march to the drum of continental thinkers who—like Niet-
zsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and co.—take not
‘reality’ but cultural artefacts (particularly literature and
even philosophy itself ) as the prime focus of philosophical
concern. (Since deep-rooted values are at stake, there is no
easy compromise here, although in intellectual as in social
matters there is much to be said for live and let live.)
The total number of doctorates awarded by institutions
of higher learning in the USA has been relatively stable at
around 100,000 per annum since 1960. But the production
of philosophy doctorates has declined substantially (along
with that of humanities Ph.D.s in general), sinking from
some 1,200 for 1970–5 to less than 600 by the end of the
century. But even this meagre replenishment rate still
enables the profession to maintain itself at a very substan-
tial level.
Given the scale of the enterprise, it is only natural and to
be expected that such unity as American philosophy
affords is that of an academic industry, not that of a single
doctrinal orientation or school. The size and scope of
the academic establishment exerts a crucial formative
American philosophy 23
influence on the nature of contemporary American phil-
osophy. It means that two different—and sometimes

opposed—tendencies are at work to create a balance of
countervailing forces. The one is an impetus to separate-
ness and differentiation—the desire of individual philoso-
phers to ‘do their own thing’, to have projects of their own
and not be engaged in working on just the same issues as
everyone else. The other is an impetus to togetherness—
the desire of philosophers to find companions, to be able
to interact with others who share their interest to the
extent of providing them with conversation partners and
with a readership of intellectual cogeners. The first, cen-
trifugal tendency means that philosophers will fan out
across the entire reach of the field—that most or all of the
‘ecological niches’ within the problem-domain will be
occupied. The second, centripetal tendency means that
most or all of these problem-subdomains will be multiply
populated—that group or networks of kindred spirits will
form so that the community as a whole will be made up of
subcommunities united by common interests (more
prominently than by common opinions), with each group
divided from the rest by different priorities as to what ‘the
really interesting and important issues’ are. Accordingly,
the most striking aspect of contemporary American phil-
o-sophy is its fragmentation. The scale and complexity of
the enterprise is such that if one seeks in contemporary
American philosophy for a consensus on the problem-
agenda, let alone for agreement on the substantive issues,
then one is predestined to look in vain. Here theory diver-
sity and doctrinal dissonance are the order of the day, and
the only interconnection is that of geographic proximity.
Such unity as American philosophy affords is that of an

academic industry, not that of a single doctrinal orienta-
tion or school. Every doctrine, every theory, every
approach finds its devotees somewhere within the overall
community. On most of the larger issues there are no
dominant majorities. To be sure, some uniformities are
apparent at the localized level. (In the San Francisco Bay
area one’s philosophical discussions might well draw on
model theory, in Princeton possible worlds would be
brought in, in Pittsburgh pragmatic themes would be
prominent, and so on.) But in matters of method and doc-
trine there is a proliferation of schools and tendencies, and
there are few if any all-pervasively dominant trends.
Balkanization reigns supreme.
The extent to which significant, important, and influ-
ential work is currently produced by academics outside
the high-visibility limelight has not been sufficiently rec-
ognized. For better or for worse, in the late twentieth cen-
tury we entered a new philosophical era where what
counts is not just a dominant élite but a vast host of lesser
mortals. Great kingdoms are thus notable by their
absence, and the scene is more like that of medieval
Europe—a collection of small territories ruled by counts-
palatine and prince-bishops. Scattered here and there in
separated castles, a prominent individual philosophical
knight gains a local following of loyal vassals or dedicated
enemies. But no one among the academic philosophers of
today manages to impose their agenda on more than a
minimal fraction of the larger, internally diversified com-
munity. Given that well over 10,000 academic philoso-
phers are at work in North America alone, even the most

influential of contemporary American philosophers is
simply yet another—somewhat larger—fish in a very
populous sea.
As regards those ‘big names’, the fact is that those
bigger fish do not typify what the sea as a whole has to offer.
Matters of philosophical history aside, salient themes and
issues with which American philosophers are grappling at
the present time include: ethical issues in the professions,
the epistemology of information processing, the social
implications of medical technology (abortion, euthanasia,
right to life, medical research issues, informed consent),
feminist issues, distributive justice, human rights, truth
and meaning in mathematics and formalized languages,
the merits and demerits of relativism regarding know-
ledge and morality, the nature of personhood and the
rights and obligations of persons, and many more. None
of these topics was put on the problem-agenda of present
concern by any one particular philosopher. They blos-
somed forth like the leaves of a tree in springtime, appear-
ing in many places at once under the formative impetus of
the Zeitgeist of societal concern. Accordingly, philosoph-
ical innovation in America today is generally not the
response to the preponderant effort of pace-setting indi-
viduals but a genuinely collective effort.
So much for the question of issues. But what of method-
ology and style? Pragmatism and applied philosophy
apart, all of the dominant styles of American philosophy in
the twentieth century—analytic philosophy, scientistic
and logicist philosophizing, neo-Kantianism, phenomen-
ology and ‘Continental’ philosophizing at large—origin-

ated in Europe. As far as philosophical approaches are
concerned, Emerson’s idea of an America moving beyond
the dominance of European tendencies and traditions of
thought has not been realized, and—given currently per-
vasive intellectual globalization—may never be. The
extent to which American philosophy rests on European
antecedents is graphically reflected in the great divide in
the American Philosophical Association between the
‘Analysts’ and the ‘Pluralists’. To all intents and purposes
this split mirrored the opposition in the Germany of the
1920s between the followers of Reichenbach and Carnap,
on the one side, and those of Heidegger and Gadamer, on
the other, the one looking for inspiration and example to
science (especially mathematics and physics), the other to
humanistic studies (especially literature and philology)—
a duality of perspective which itself had deep roots in the
philosophizing of nineteenth-century Germany with its
opposed allegiances, respectively to the Naturwis-
senschaften (Fries, Bolzano, Haeckel) and the Geisteswis-
senschaften (Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dilthey).
A century ago, the historian Henry Adams lamented
the end of the predominance of an oligarchy of the great
and the good in American politics—as it had been in the
days of the Founding Fathers. He regretted the emergence
24 American philosophy
john dewey represented a distinctively American no-
nonsense naturalism in philosophy. He was born in
Schopenhauer’s lifetime and outlived Wittgenstein.
rudolf carnap had established himself at the forefront of
European philosophy when he left Prague for America in

1935. His works exemplify the technical skill and scientific
approach of Logical Positivism.
w. v. quine, the doyen of American philosophy in the late
twentieth century, inherited and promulgated his mentor
Carnap’s view that philosophy should be pursued as part of
natural science.
nelson goodman: a continuing aim of his work was to
examine how language relates to experience, from scien-
tific enquiry to artistic appreciation.
philosophy in america: the twentieth century
of a new order based on the dominance of the masses and
their often self-appointed and generally plebeian repre-
sentatives. Control of the political affairs of the nation had
slipped from the hands of a cultural élite into that of the
unimposing, albeit vociferous, representatives of ordinary
people. In short, democracy was setting in. Precisely this
same transformation from the pre-eminence of great fig-
ures to the predominance of mass movements is now, 100
years on, the established situation in even so intellectual
an enterprise as philosophy. (Not that a sizeable percent-
age of people-at-large take any interest in philosophy; in
this regard the democratization of the field is something
quite different from its popularization.) In its present con-
figuration, American philosophy reflects that ‘revolt of
the masses’ which Ortega y Gasset thought characteristic
of our era. This phenomenon manifests itself not only in
politics and social affairs, but even in intellectual culture,
including philosophy, where Ortega himself actually did
not expect it, since ‘its perfect uselessness protects it’. For
what the past century’s spread of affluence and education

has done through its expansion of cultural literacy is to
broaden the social base of creative intellectual efforts
beyond the imaginings of any earlier time. A cynic might
characterize the current situation as a victory of the
troglodytes over the giants. In the Anglo-Saxon world, at
any rate, cultural innovation in philosophy as elsewhere is
nowadays a matter of trends and fashions set by substan-
tial constituencies that go their own way without seeking
the guidance of agenda-controlling individuals. This results
in a state of affairs that calls for description on a statistical
rather than a biographical basis. (It is ironic to see the par-
tisans of political correctness in academia condemning
philosophy as an élitist discipline at the very moment
when professional philosophy itself has abandoned élitism
and succeeded in reinventing itself in a populist recon-
struction. American philosophy has now well and truly
left ‘the genteel tradition’ behind.)
And so the heroic age of American philosophy, in which
the work of a few ‘big names’ towered over the philo-
sophical landscape like a great mountain range, is now
over. One sign of this is that the topical anthology has in
recent years gained a position of equality with, if not pre-
ponderance over, the monographic philosophical text.
Another sign is that philosophers nowadays are not eccen-
tric geniuses working in obscure isolation, but work-aday
members of the academic bourgeoisie (even if not, as in
continental Europe, civil servants).
The rapid growth of ‘applied philosophy’—that is,
philosophical reflection about detailed issues in science,
law, business, social affairs, computer use, and the like—is

a particularly striking structural feature of contemporary
American philosophy. In particular, the past three decades
have seen a great proliferation of narrowly focused philo-
sophical investigations of particular issues in areas such as
economic justice, social welfare, ecology, abortion, popu-
lation policy, military defence, and so on. This situation
illustrates the most characteristic feature of much of
contemporary English-language philosophizing: the
emphasis on detailed investigation of special issues and
themes. For better or for worse, anglophone philosophers
in recent years have tended to stay away from large-scale
abstract matters of wide and comprehensive scope, char-
acteristic of the earlier era of Whitehead or Dewey, and
generally address their investigations to issues of small-
scale detail.
In line with the increasing specialization and division of
labour, American philosophy has become increasingly
technical in character. Contemporary American philo-
sophical investigations generally make increasingly exten-
sive use of the formal machinery of philosophical
semantics, modal logic, computation theory, psychology,
learning theory, etc. Unfortunately, this increasing techni-
calization of philosophy has been achieved at the expense
of its wider accessibility—and indeed even of its accessibil-
ity to members of the profession. No single thinker com-
mands the whole range of knowledge and interests that
characterizes present-day American philosophy, and
indeed no single university department is so large as to
have on its faculty specialists in every branch of the sub-
ject. The field has outgrown the capacity not only of its

practitioners but even of its institutions.
Do American philosophers exert influence? Here the
critical question is: Upon whom? Certainly as far as the
wider society is concerned, it must be said that the answer
is emphatically negative. American philosophers are not
opinion-shapers: they do not have access to the media, to
the political establishment, to the ‘think tanks’ that seek to
mould public opinion. In so far as they exert an external
influence at all, it is confined to academics of other fields.
Professors of government may read John Rawls, professors
of literature Richard Rorty, professors of linguistics W. V.
Quine. But the writings of such important American
philosophers exert no influence outside the academy. It
was otherwise earlier in the century—in the era of philo-
sophers like William James, John Dewey, and George San-
tayana—when the writings of individual philosophers set
the stage for at least some discussions and debates among a
wider public. But it is certainly not so in the America of
today. American society today does not reflect the con-
cerns of philosophers; the very reverse is the case—where
‘relevant’ at all, the writings of present-day American
philosophers reflect the concerns of the society. n.r.
*American philosophy today; Canadian philosophy;
philosophy, influence of; Harvard philosophy; English
philosophy; continental philosophy; analytic philo-
sophy.
Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy
in America, 2 vols. (New York, 1977).
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven,
Conn., 1977).

—— A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000 (Oxford, 2001).
Nicholas Rescher, American Philosophy Today (Totowa, NJ, 1994).
Interesting perspectives from a continental standpoint are
provided in:
Gérard Deledalle, La Philosophie américaine (Lausanne, 1983).
L. Marcuse, Amerikanisches philosophieren (Hamburg, 1959).
26 American philosophy
American philosophy today. Harvard’s W. V. Quine
(1908–2000) has had a more profound impact on the shape
of *American philosophy in recent decades than any other
single figure, even if no history of the period would be
complete without attention to philosophers like Wilfrid
Sellars (1912–89), David Lewis (1941–2001), Donald
Davidson (1917–2003), Jerry Fodor (b. 1936), Saul Kripke
(b. 1940), and, in moral and political philosophy, Quine’s
colleague John Rawls (1921–2002).
Quine’s attack on the distinction between ‘analytic’
statements (those true in virtue of meaning) and ‘syn-
thetic’ statements (those true in virtue of empirical fact)
cast doubt on the idea that there was a domain of truths
(‘analytic’ or ‘conceptual’ truths) that philosophers were
uniquely suited to analyse. Quine recommended a radical
naturalization of philosophy, such that philosophy would
be continuous with empirical science, as its slightly more
abstract and reflective branch. Versions of such a pro-
gramme have been influential in epistemology (Alvin
Goldman and Stephen Stich at Rutgers in New
Brunswick) and philosophy of mind (Patricia and Paul
Churchland at the University of California at San Diego,
Robert Cummins at the University of California at Davis,

Fodor at Rutgers), and, more recently, in ethics (Gilbert
Harman at Princeton, Peter Railton at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor). Cummins, for example, runs a
‘philosophical lab’ under the slogan ‘no armchair philoso-
phy allowed’, while Harman and Railton argue that ethics
had better attend to what we learn from empirical psy-
chology about the role of character in the explanation of
action. With few exceptions, American philosophers of
mind take themselves to have an obligation to attend to
the findings of psychologists and neuroscientists about the
brain and mental life.
The interdisciplinary and naturalistic turns in philoso-
phy launched by Quine have had other consequences.
Philosophers of science, for example, now routinely have
expertise in one of the special sciences (physics and biology
are the most popular), and, indeed, often publish and par-
ticipate in debates in the cognate field (David Malament at
the University of California at Irvine and Elliott Sober
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison are leading
examples). Philosophers of language (such as the University
of Southern California’s James Higginbotham) now attend
with care to developments in linguistics. Philosophers in
almost all fields feel the need to explain how their subject-
matter—morality, meaning, free will, consciousness—can
be reconciled with a scientific picture of the world.
The Quinean attack on analytic truths and conceptual
analysis has also had an unintended, and somewhat ironic,
consequence: by contributing to the demise of Logical
Positivism, which viewed metaphysical inquiries as non-
sensical, Quine inadvertently opened the door to a new

wave of metaphysical theorizing. Quine’s student, David
Lewis, led the way in returning metaphysical inquiry to
philosophical respectability (though Lewis, unlike some
who followed him, took the findings of empirical science
as a constraint on metaphysical claims). Philosophers like
Lewis and Kripke offered accounts of modal concepts—
such as ‘necessity’ and ‘possibility’—which could then be
deployed in understanding a range of traditional meta-
physical questions about the nature of causation, free will,
meaning, and reference. Metaphysical theorizing about
classic questions relating to time, material objects, sub-
stance, and change has also flourished. The return to
metaphysics has been a prominent feature at several lead-
ing American philosophy departments besides Princeton,
including those at Rutgers (where it coexists with the nat-
uralistic turn, though partly divided along generational
lines), MIT (Robert Stalnaker, Stephen Yablo), and Notre
Dame (Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and others).
A more minor theme in post-Quinean American phil-
osophy has reflected the influence of the later Wittgen-
stein’s quietism: his view that philosophical questions
were predicated on confusions about language, and so
could be dissolved or neutralized. The American pragma-
tist philosopher Richard Rorty (b. 1931) popularized
(some would say vulgarized) Wittgensteinian, Quinean,
and Sellarsian ideas, and reached a large audience outside
academic philosophy with his message that philosophy,
as traditionally conceived, was over. This, unfortunately,
ignored the revival of metaphysical inquiry and the natur-
alized approach to philosophical questions which most

philosophers took to be Quine’s legacy.
The naturalistic and metaphysical developments in
American philosophy in recent decades have coincided
with a revival of systematic inquiries in moral and political
philosophy. Rawls’s 1971 book A Theory of Justice is usually
identified as the turning-point away from the mid-
twentieth-century view that the only philosophical ques-
tions about values were questions about the meaning of
evaluative language. Oddly, Rawls never responded
directly to mid-century doubts about the objectivity of
morality, but his book gave rise, none the less, to a lively
literature on timely questions about distributive justice,
the nature of rights, equality and freedom, and related
topics. Beginning in the late 1970s, naturalistically minded
philosophers began returning to the old ‘meta-ethical’
questions (questions about the meaning and objectivity of
moral judgements), with Allan Gibbard (University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor) breathing new life into the ‘non-
cognitivist’ view that normative judgements are really
expressive of certain attitudes, rather than descriptive of
the world; while the so-called Cornell realists argued, con-
versely, that the objectivity of moral judgements could be
reconciled with a scientific view of the world.
The largesse and largeness of the American university
system—with more than 100 doctoral programmes, turn-
ing out hundreds of Ph.D.s each year—has made it possi-
ble for there to be specialists in every conceivable topic
(from medieval logic to Heidegger’s aesthetics), and for
departments not in the top ranks of the profession to carve
out riches of great distinction. This may go some distance

towards explaining the explosion of work in the history
of philosophy in recent decades, work that strives to
understand figures in their historical context, while also
American philosophy today 27
engaging with them as philosophers, and not simply
museum pieces from the history of ideas. ( Julia Annas at
the University of Arizona, who writes on ancient Greek
philosophers, and the late Margaret Wilson of Princeton,
who wrote on philosophers of the early modern period,
have been influential figures.) Of particular note is the way
in which figures outside the English-speaking traditions of
philosophy have been incorporated into those traditions,
from Allen Wood (Stanford University) on Kant, Hegel,
and Marx, to Hubert Dreyfus (University of California at
Berkeley) on Heidegger and Husserl. German philosophy
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is increasingly a
part of philosophical dialogue and debate in American
philosophy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. b.l.
S. Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge,
2002).
C. Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience, and Reality (Stanford,
Calif., 1988).
H. Kornblith (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology, 2nd edn. (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1994).
R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ,
1979).
P. van Inwagen, Metaphysics, 2nd edn. (Boulder, Colo.,
2002).
amorality. Sometimes but incorrectly used to mean
extreme immorality or wickedness, amorality more prop-

erly signifies the absence, in a person, of any understand-
ing of or concern for moral standards or decencies. In this
sense all babies and small children are amoral, but it is usu-
ally expected of adults that they should not be. If they are,
they will probably commit horrible acts, hence the confu-
sion of meanings noted at the start. But whether amorality
is significant will depend on how we understand the
nature of moral demands and their role in regulating
human conduct; often simple good-naturedness is as
effective as a sense of duty in promoting peace among per-
sons. Amoralists are often depicted as monsters, but the
example just given suggests this is not necessarily so.
What is true is that they are uncommon. Less dramat-
ically, certain acts or choices are amoral, i.e. involve no
moral factors, such as choosing cabbage rather than
carrots for lunch. n.j.h.d.
*evil.
B. A. O. Williams, Morality (Cambridge, 1976) contains a brief
discussion.
amphiboly. That kind of *ambiguity in which the linguis-
tic context allows an expression to be taken in more than
one way. There are several types, and writers differ over
which to include out of: ambiguous grouping or *scope
(‘He had wanted to stand on the top of Everest for ten
years’), linkage (‘When a horse approaches a car, it should
engage low gear’), denotation (‘Catherine disliked Rachel
biting her nails’), and part of speech (‘Save soap and waste
paper’). c.a.k.
C. A. Kirwan, ‘Aristotle and the So-called Fallacy of Equivoca-
tion’, Philosophical Quarterly (1979).

analogy, argument from, for the existence of God: see
teleological argument for the existence of God.
analysis is the philosophical method, or set of methods,
characteristic of much twentieth-century anglophone phil-
osophy, of the type which describes itself as ‘analytic’ to
express allegiance to rigour and precision, science, logical
techniques, and—perhaps most distinctively of all—care-
ful investigation of language as the best means of investi-
gating concepts.
Analysis is pre-eminently a style, not a body of doctrine.
It is piecemeal and particular in its interests. Some of its
practitioners have professed hostility to ‘metaphysics’, by
which they meant system-building efforts of the kind asso-
ciated with Spinoza and Hegel, whose philosophizing
might be called synthetic, in that it ventures to construct
inclusive explanations of the universe. In sharp contrast,
philosophical analysis is best understood by analogy with
analysis in chemistry, as being a process of investigation
into the structure, functioning, and connections of a par-
ticular matter under scrutiny.
Although analytic philosophers look back to Aristotle
and the British Empiricists, especially Hume, as major
influences on their tradition, it is the work of Bertrand
Russell and G. E. Moore at the beginning of the twentieth
century which is the proximate source of analysis so
called.
Moore conceived the philosopher’s task to be a quest
for *definitions as a way of clarifying philosophical claims.
This involves finding a definition of the concept or prop-
osition (not merely the words used to express them) under

discussion. One begins with a concept in need of definition
(the analysandum) and looks for another concept or con-
cepts (the analysans) which will explain or elucidate it.
Indeed Moore made the more stringent demand that
analysans and analysandum should be strictly equivalent.
Russell’s conception of analysis derived from his work in
logic. On his view, the surface forms of language can mis-
lead us philosophically, as when the grammatical similarity
of ‘the table is brown’ and ‘the complexity of the situation is
growing’ leads us to think that tables and complexities exist
in the same way. We must therefore penetrate to the under-
lying logical structure to clarify what is being said. The clas-
sic example is provided by Russell’s theory of *descriptions.
Suppose someone now asserts ‘The present King of France
is wise’. Is the sentence false, or neither true nor false? Rus-
sell argued that it is a concealed three-part conjunction
asserting that there is a king of France, that there is only one
such thing (‘the’ implies uniqueness), and that it is
wise. Since the first conjunct is false, the whole is so.
These early techniques of analysis were soon extended
and varied into practices not restricted either to the giving
of definitions or to the attempt to unearth underlying log-
ical structure. Some philosophers who would standardly
be classified as belonging to the analytic tradition—a
broad church—have explicitly repudiated both the claim
that language has a hidden logical structure (the later
Wittgenstein) and the idea that the chief task of the
28 American philosophy today
philosopher is to state definitions. It has indeed been
argued that this latter view is in any case inapt, for if

definiens and definiendum are strictly equivalent, analysis
is trivial; but if not, it is incorrect.
Analysis has sometimes been claimed to involve
*reduction of one kind of item—in the linguistic mode, a
statement or proposition, or set of them; in the material
mode, entities of given sorts—to items of another kind.
For example, *phenomenalists argue that statements
about physical objects are to be analysed into (translated
into) statements about sense-data. In the philosophy of
mind, *physicalists claim that mental phenomena can be
exhaustively analysed in terms of physical phenomena in
central nervous systems. This second kind of reductive
analysis is eliminative, unlike the first, in holding that it is
the reducing class of phenomena which is real or funda-
mental, and that talk of phenomena in the reduced class is
merely a façon de parler or a function of ignorance.
Other conceptions of analysis have been influential. On
Michael Dummett’s view, analysis consists on elucidating
the nature of thought by investigation of language. The
idea is that to get a philosophical understanding of our-
selves and the world, we have to proceed by way of what
we think about these matters; but our chief and perhaps
only access to what we think is what we say; so analysis
comes down to the philosophical study of meaning. For
P. F. Strawson analysis is the descriptive task of tracing con-
nections between the concepts in our scheme of thought,
with a view among other things to seeing what order of
dependence obtains among them, thereby helping us to
see why, for example, various forms of scepticism need
not trouble us.

These remarks show that the concept of analysis is not
univocal; there is no one method or set of methods which
can be claimed as definitive of it. Philosophers in the ana-
lytic tradition have in practice agreed with the celebrated
dictum of Deng Xiaoping concerning methodology, that
‘it does not matter whether a cat is black or white so long
as it catches mice’. But although there is no defining
method of analysis, there can be said to be a defining
manner, embodied in the ideal characterized in the opening
paragraph above as any careful, detailed, and rigorous
approach which throws light on the nature and implica-
tions of our concepts, characteristically revealed by the
way we employ them in discourse. a.c.g.
*analytic philosophy.
A. Flew (ed.), Essays in Conceptual Analysis (London, 1956).
F. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual
Analysis (Oxford, 1998).
G. E. Moore, ‘Replies to my Critics’, The Philosophy of G. E. Moore,
ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1942).
Bertrand Russell, Essays in Analysis, ed. D. Lackey (London, 1973),
esp. ‘On Denoting’.
analytic and synthetic statements. According to Kant,
an analytic statement (or judgement) is one in which the
concept of the predicate is already contained, or thought,
in the concept of the subject—an example would be the
statement that a vixen is a female fox—whereas a syn-
thetic statement is one in which this is not so, for instance,
the statement that foxes are carnivorous. The *Logical
Positivists, adopting the linguistic turn, held that an ana-
lytic statement is one which is true or false purely in virtue

of the meanings of the words used to make it and the
grammatical rules governing their combination. This def-
inition has the advantages that it does not have application
only to statements of subject–predicate form and avoids
either reliance on the obscure notion of ‘containment’ or
appeal to psychological considerations. Both Kant and the
Logical Positivists assumed that true analytic statements
must express necessary truths knowable *a priori, though
Kant also held that some synthetic statements express
such truths, including mathematical statements like
‘7 plus 5 equals 12’ and metaphysical statements like ‘Every
event has a cause’. The Logical Positivists, by contrast,
held mathematical truths to be analytic, and metaphysical
statements to be nonsensical or meaningless.
Most contemporary philosophers are very wary of
appearing to endorse the analytic–synthetic distinction
following W. V. Quine’s devastating onslaught upon it
(though Grice and Strawson subsequently mounted a vig-
orous rearguard defence of its validity). Quine argues that
this supposed distinction cannot be defined save (circu-
larly) in terms which already presuppose it and that, in any
case, it depends upon an untenable view of meaning. The
positivists had adopted a verificationist theory of *mean-
ing according to which there is a sharp distinction to be
drawn amongst meaningful statements between those
which can only be known to be true on the evidence of
experience (synthetic statements) and those which are
verifiable independently of any possible experience and
which are therefore immune to empirical falsification
(analytic statements). Quine, however, contends that no

such sharp distinction can in principle be drawn, because
our statements are not answerable to the court of experi-
ence individually, but only collectively—and any statement,
even a supposed ‘law’ of logic, is potentially revisable in
the light of experience, though some revisions will have
more far-reaching implications than others for the rest of
our presumed knowledge. e.j.l.
H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, ‘In Defence of a Dogma’, Philo-
sophical Review (1956).
W. V. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical
Point of View, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).
analytic philosophy began with the arrival of Wittgen-
stein in Cambridge in 1912 to study with Russell and, as it
turned out, significantly to influence him. Between the
wars, through the influence of Russell’s writings and
Wittgenstein’s own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922),
analytic philosophy came to dominate British philosophy.
In the 1930s the ideas of Russell and Wittgenstein were
taken up and put forward more radically and systematic-
ally by the Logical Positivists of the *Vienna Circle and
Reichenbach’s circle in Berlin. There were sympathetic
groups in Poland and Scandinavia and some scattered but
analytic philosophy 29