The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 10 pptx

meta-ethical theory continued when in 1994 Michael
Smith published The Moral Problem, an attempt at reconcil-
ing a form of moral rationalism with a Humean approach
to motivation.
A different way of approaching philosophical, political,
and moral problems, incorporating psychological and
sociological perspectives, has inspired a distinctive school
of Australian feminist philosophy, in the hands of Moira
Gatens, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, whose writing inter-
sects to an extent with a developing interest in, and indeed
resurgence of, European philosophy in both Australia and
New Zealand. Matching the synthesis of analytic and
European styles of philosophizing championed by Hubert
Dreyfus and Richard Rorty in the United States, a similar
convergence has characterized recent Australian writing
by Max Deutscher, Jeff Malpas, Paul Redding, and a few
others. Applied ethics has lately received recognition, and
large-scale financial support, in keeping with earlier Aus-
tralian pioneering studies in environmental philosophy by
Routley, Passmore, Val Routley (later Plumwood), Robert
Elliot, and others. Debates on social and political justice,
poverty, abortion, bioethics, and biomedical ethics have
been subject to philosophically informed scrutiny by writ-
ers like Michael Tooley, Genevieve Lloyd, Peter Singer,
Freya Mathews, Janna Thompson, and Rai Gaita. While
some of these arguments have taken on a life of their own,
disengaged from technical issues within philosophy itself,
the emergence of intellectual debate at home and over-
seas featuring these and other thinkers is a powerful testi-
mony to the continuing vigour and influence of Australian
philosophy. a.bre.

*New Zealand philosophy; women in philosophy.
C. A. J. Coady, ‘Australia, Philosophy in’, in E. Craig (ed.),
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London, 1998).
S. A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia (St Lucia, Queens-
land, 1984).
J. T. J. Srzednicki and D. Wood (eds.), Essays on Philosophy in Aus-
tralia (Dordrecht, 1992).
authenticity. The condition of those, according to Hei-
degger, who understand the existential structure of their
lives. Heidegger held that each of us acquires an identity
from our situation—our family, culture, etc. Usually we
just absorb this identity uncritically, but to let one’s values
and goals remain fixed without critical reflection on them
is ‘inauthentic’. The ‘authentic’ individual, who has been
aroused from everyday concerns by Angst, takes responsi-
bility for their life and thereby ‘chooses’ their own iden-
tity. But Heidegger also holds that some degree of
inauthenticity is unavoidable: the critical assessment of
values presupposes an uncritical acceptance of them, and
the practical necessities of life give a priority to unreflect-
ive action over critical deliberation. So, as Heidegger
makes clear, authenticity is like Christian salvation: a state
which ‘fallen’ individuals cannot guarantee by their own
efforts. t.r.b.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson
(Oxford, 1962), sects. 38, 41, 61–6.
authority. An authority is a person or group having a
right to do or to demand something, including the right to
demand that other people do something.
Authority is invariably and justifiably discussed along-

side *power. The joint discussion is justifiable not only
because the concepts overlap in confusing ways but also
because both are essential for an adequate analysis of polit-
ical and legal systems.
Authority is of course used in contexts other than the
legal and political. We speak in various contexts of people
being ‘in authority’, ‘having authority’, and ‘being author-
ized’. What is common to all these usages is the essential
idea of having some sort of right or entitlement to behave
in the way indicated, or that the behaviour is in some way
‘legitimate’ (another concept essentially related to author-
ity).
This analysis applies also to Max Weber’s account of
authority, which has exerted a large influence on socio-
logical theory. Weber distinguishes three kinds of author-
ity: rational–legal, traditional, and charismatic. In rational–
legal authority the right to give orders or to act in certain
ways derives from an office or role held within a set of rules
setting out rights and duties. Traditional authority exists
because those accepting the authority see it as deriving
from a long and hallowed tradition of obedience to a
leader. Charismatic authority exists where exceptional
abilities cause a person to be followed or obeyed, and the
exceptional ability is perceived as conferring a right to lead.
(We must add the last clause or charismatic authority will
become simply charismatic power.)
If authority is to be effective the person in authority
must also possess power. But the two are distinct: a gov-
ernment in exile may be legitimate or be in authority or be
de jure, whereas the de facto rulers may have power while

lacking the authority. But while that is true as far as it goes
the situation is more complex than that neat distinction
suggests. A schoolteacher may be in authority, but have
no authority with his pupils. This means not just that he
lacks power to influence them; it also means that in some
sense they do not regard him as legitimate. The same situ-
ation could happen politically. The explanation of the
paradox lies in a separation which has taken place between
two sorts of legitimization: in terms of rules and in terms
of popular approval. A second complication in distin-
guishing authority from power is that for some people or
groups the source of their power lies in the fact that they
are in authority. We could then say that authority is their
‘power-base’ (as it is sometimes called), just as wealth, mili-
tary might, or physical beauty might be power-bases. If
we stress this line of thought, then it would be possible to
make ‘power’ the dominant concept and authority would
become a subset of power, and some political theorists
and sociologists might take this line. But it is more usual,
and probably it is philosophically preferable, to contrast
authority as a de jure or normative concept with power as
a de facto or causal concept, and allow that in some cases
there can be overlap. No consistent distinction between
the two can be derived from ordinary usage or political
70 Australian philosophy
and legal discourse, and some measure of stipulation is
inevitable.
We are left with one sense of ‘authority’ to fit in—
where we speak of a person as being (say) an authority on
birds or the seventeenth century. But this sense can be

accommodated into our analysis: the authority has passed
recognized examinations, published in the journals, and
written the books which entitle or give the right to pro-
nounce on the subject. r.s.d.
A. de Crespigny and A. Wertheimer (eds.), Contemporary Political
Theory (London, 1970).
C. J. Friedrich (ed.), Authority: Nomos, i (New York, 1958).
J. Raz (ed.), Authority (Oxford, 1990).
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, tr.
A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York, 1947).
autobiography, philosophical. The role and aims of
autobiography have changed in fundamental ways in the
course of the history of philosophy. Marcus Aurelius,
author of a quasi-autobiographical Meditations, noted that
nothing is as morally uplifting and joyful as meditating on
a virtuous life, and this provided a rationale for autobiog-
raphy from antiquity up to the modern era. Descartes, in
the autobiographical sections of his Discourse on Method
(1637), was not so much concerned to register how he felt
and worked, but rather with how someone in this position
should have felt and worked: the story he tells is designed
to be morally and intellectually uplifting, and would
doubtless have seen the kind of aims that have guided
nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiography as
mere self-indulgence and an amoral form of narcissism, a
genre useless for moral or personal guidance. Hume and
Rousseau, writing in the eighteenth century, presented
their lives—the first briefly, the second at length—as vir-
tuous and blameless, although in Rousseau’s case this did
not prevent him from revealing personal and sexual

details.
The idea of a person having a history other than that
which typifies a particular aspect of some general human
condition receives its first expression in the late sixteenth
century in the Essays of Montaigne. Montaigne initiated
his project of self-exploration with the traditional aim
of discovering a universal human nature, but what he
ended up doing was something completely different: he
discovered himself, his thoughts, feelings, emotions.
Although biography continued primarily within a didactic
genre up to the end of the nineteenth century, Montaigne
initiated an understanding of subjectivity which—in the
hands of Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, and others—fostered
a notion of the self as a centralized locus of subjectivity.
This philosophical understanding of subjectivity gradually
changed what was possible at the biographical level.
From the end of the nineteenth century, developments
in areas such as psychoanalysis allowed a deepening of the
way in which affective states were thought of, and this had
a very significant impact on the genre of biography,
encouraging the inclusion of detailed material which
would have been thought irrelevant or inappropriate in
earlier conceptions of the genre. It also had a reductive
effect, however, levelling differences between the
philosopher, the politician, and the artist, for example,
so that individual psychology now became the focus of
biography.
One of the main values of philosophical autobiography
is that it can show us the struggle to develop philosophical
theories—a struggle which involves hestitations, mis-

takes, and uncertainties—that helps demystify claims to
special access to truth. Another is providing a context for
philosophical views—this is especially the case in J. S.
Mill’s autobiography—which enables us to see how they
arose out of general political and economic concerns, for
example, giving us a sense of how philosophers have elu-
cidated particularly intractable problems by translating
them into a philosophical form. However, like any other
form of autobiography, philosophers can use the genre to
obfuscate or to rationalize their beliefs or behaviour.
Descartes, for example, was keen for his readers to believe
that he never rose before midday and spent little time on
philosophy, for this was how he saw the behaviour of a
gentleman, whereas in fact he spent the whole of his day
on philosophical and related questions. Russell intimated
in his autobiography that his shift of interest from philoso-
phy to social questions in the early 1920s was the result of
his experiences in the First World War, but as more recent
biographical and autobiographical work has shown, the
shift derives rather from his meeting with D. H.
Lawrence, whom he later came to regard as a proto-
Fascist and whose influence he disowned.
Few philosophical autobiographies stand out as great
works of literature, but the autobiographical writings of
Augustine, Rousseau, Mill, and Simone de Beauvoir
(many would also include at least the first volume of Rus-
sell’s autobiography in this list) stand out as classics, and
are likely to be read as long as philosophy exists. s.g.
Augustine, Confessions, tr. H. Chadwick, (Oxford, 1991).
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

(Harmondsworth, 2001).
—— Force of Circumstance (New York, 1994).
—— Prime of Life (Harmondsworth, 1965).
R. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, tr.
D. Clarke (Harmondsworth, 1999).
M. de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. D. Frame
(Stanford, Calif., 1965).
J J. Rousseau, Confessions (1782) (Harmondsworth, 1953).
B. Russell, Autobiography (London, 1967).
autonomy and heteronomy. Correlative terms,
developed by Kant, of very wide applicability to moral the-
ory. Autonomy (Greek ‘self’ + ‘law’) understands the
moral imperative as the moral agent’s own freely and
rationally adopted moral policy. As moral agents, we are
all subject to the moral law, but we repudiate all maxims
(personal policies of action) which ‘cannot accord with the
will’s own enactment of universal law’ (Groundwork, ch. 2).
All alternative accounts, where moral law is commanded
from without, are heteronomous (the law of ‘another’).
autonomy and heteronomy 71
Among heteronomous theories are those that see
moral imperatives as commands of the state or of society,
or even as the commands of a deity. No less heter-
onomous is a theory that identifies the source of moral-
ity with some contingent drive or sentiment in one’s
empirical psychology. For a Kantian moralist, moral
maturity crucially involves the recognition of autonomy.
There is an important link here with *freedom. Heteron-
omy, in any form, entails that we are passive under some
command or impulsion which we do not, can not, initiate.

In contrast, if we autonomously recognize and endorse a
moral value, make it our own, we are acting (when we
obey it) as we have most deeply and freely resolved to act.
What autonomy amounts to, however, has been
interpreted in radically different ways: by some as the dis-
cerning and ‘enacting’—through common rational proced-
ures—of a common moral law. This was Kant’s own
position. As reworked by certain Existentialists, analytical
philosophers, and radical educationalists, autonomy has
amounted to the individual’s total sovereignty over his or
her ‘choice’ of moral values and self-construction, a view
that accords a unique importance to *‘authenticity’, free-
dom from ‘mauvaise foi’. This extreme version of auton-
omy is seriously and dangerously flawed. It is hard or
impossible, for one thing, to justify in its own terms the
place it gives to the virtue of authenticity itself. Again, it
would seem to imply that any value-claim whatever
(‘maximize suffering’, say) is vindicated so long as it stems
from individual, ‘autonomous’ decision. In practice, such
implications tend to be masked by smuggling into a theory
basic, common judgements of value not at all derived
from individual decision. r.w.h.
*autonomy in applied ethics; bad faith.
H. E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, 1990).
I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, in H. J. Paton (ed.),
The Moral Law (London, 1948).
Charles Taylor, ‘Responsibility for Self’, in G. Watson (ed.),
Free Will (Oxford, 1982).
autonomy in applied ethics. The concept of personal
autonomy, used in a broad sense which goes beyond its

Kantian origins, has been much invoked in recent writing
on issues in *applied ethics. It has been suggested, for
instance, that the wrongness of *killing rests, in part, on
the fact that to deprive someone of their life is normally to
violate their autonomy. This account carries the implica-
tion that the moral prohibition of taking life would not
apply in a case where someone wished their life to be
ended—for instance, in the case of voluntary *euthanasia.
On the contrary, respect for the person’s autonomy
would then require one to comply with their wishes.
Another application of the concept in *medical ethics is
the suggestion that the importance of ‘informed consent’
in relations between the patient and the medical practi-
tioner rests on respect for personal autonomy.
In political philosophy, the idea of persons as
autonomous agents underlies liberal theories of *justice
such as that of Rawls, as well as liberal defences of more
specific political values such as *freedom of speech and
expression. And in the philosophy of education, the pro-
motion of personal autonomy has been identified as one
of the principal aims of education.
These various uses of the concept have prompted
attempts at a more precise account of what autonomy is.
Our idea of the autonomous person seems to involve
more than just the capacity to act on particular desires and
choices. It suggests a more general capacity to be self-
determining, to be in control of one’s own life. At this
point some writers have found helpful the distinction
between first-order desires and second-order desires; the
autonomous person is one who is able to assess his or her

own first-order desires, to reject or modify some of them
and to endorse others, and to act upon these second-order
preferences. r.j.n.
*freedom; autonomy and heteronomy; autonomy,
personal.
Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge,
1988).
Richard Lindley, Autonomy (London, 1986).
Avecebrol: see Ibn Gabirol.
Avenarius, Richard (1843–96). German positivist and
empiricist philosopher who argues for the elimination of
cognitive preconceptions which generate metaphysical
dualisms and obscure the findings of ‘pure experience’.
Avenarius holds that prima facie mutually inconsistent
philosophies presuppose a ‘natural realism’ entailing the
existence of physical objects and other minds. Avenarius’
‘empirio-criticism’ putatively exposes metaphysics as a
spurious branch of philosophy and urges its replacement
by the natural sciences, which have an empirical justifica-
tion in the findings of pure experience. Avenarius may be
thought of as an empiricist neo-Kantian whose 1888–90
work Kritik der Reinen Erfahrung (Critique of Pure Experi-
ence) anticipates in important respects the empiricism of
James and the Logical Positivists and the phenomenology
of Husserl. Avenarius’ work was influential in Russia and
was one of the targets of Lenin’s book Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism (1908). s.p.
*neo-Kantianism; positivism.
Richard Avenarius, Kritik der Reinen Erfahrung, 2 vols. (Leipzig,
1891).

—— Der Menschliche Weltbegriff (Leipzig, 1891).
Friedrich Raab, Die Philosophie von Richard Avenarius (Leipzig,
1912).
Averroës (c.1126–98). Andalusian philosopher acclaimed
as the greatest Aristotelian commentator, though his
work had little impact in the East. His principal works,
surviving in Hebrew and Latin and studied in the West to
the mid-seventeenth century, consist of commentaries
on Aristotelian texts and on Plato’s Republic. His text,
The Incoherence of the Incoherence, written in response to
al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s attack on philosophy, illustrates Averroës’s
72 autonomy and heteronomy
contention that theologians are incapable of reaching the
highest demonstrative knowledge and are thus unfit to
interpret divine law correctly. His Aristotelian commen-
taries principally sought: (1) to cleanse the Islamic philo-
sophical corpus from Neoplatonist emanationist views;
(2) to separate pure philosophy from theological argu-
ments by al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ and Avicenna, among others; and thus
(3) to recover ‘pure’ Aristotelian thought. h.z.
*Aristotelianism.
Averroës, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, tr. S. Van den Bergh
(Oxford, 1954).
Avicenna (980–1037). Persian philosopher, scientist, and
physician, widely called ‘The Supreme Master’; he held an
unsurpassed position in *Islamic philosophy. His works,
including the Canon of Medicine, are cited throughout most
medieval Latin philosophical and medical texts. The sub-
ject of more commentaries, glosses, and superglosses than
any other Islamic philosopher, they have inspired gener-

ations of thinkers, including Persian poets. His philosoph-
ical works—especially Healing: Directives and Remarks, and
Deliverance—define Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, one of
the three dominant schools of Islamic philosophy.
His contributions to science and philosophy are extra-
ordinary in scope. He is thought to be the first logician to
clearly define temporal modalities in propositions, to diag-
nose and identify many diseases, and to identify a specific
number of pulse beats in diagnosis. His best-known philo-
sophical formulations are: (1) the ontological distinction
between essence and existence, in which the essences of
existing entities cannot be explained as actualized forms of
their material potentialities without an existing cause
whose existence, while coexistent with the caused and
perceived essence, is prior in rank (later designated ‘pri-
mary of existence over essence’ and redefined by Molla¯
S
.
adra¯); (2) the ontological distinctions of possible, impos-
sible, and necessary being—i.e. the Avicennan con-
structed whole of reality consisting of ranked and ordered
ontic entities, each the cause of the existence of the one
ranking below it. Since infinity is impossible in this sys-
tem, every entity is a distinct being and must be contin-
gent, except for the top of the ontological chain, which is
necessary. This is because existence is observed and vac-
uum is proven impossible; therefore the Necessary
Being’s essence and existence are identical, so It is self-
existent and the cause of all other existent entities. This
philosophical existence proof, denoted in Latin texts as

Avicennan, is generally considered novel within the his-
tory of philosophy. h.z.
L. Goodman, Avicenna (London, 1992).
G. M. Wickens (ed.), Avicenna, Scientist and Philosopher: A Mil-
lenary Symposium (London, 1952).
awareness, sense. *Perception of objects and conditions
by means of the senses. Normally taken to include
proprioception—awareness of the position and move-
ment of one’s own limbs, for example—and to exclude
(because not a form of sense awareness) *introspection of
mental states. Sensory awareness of external objects is
mediated by particular bodily organs (eyes, nose, etc.)
and gives rise to distinctive types of experience (visual,
olfactory, etc.). f.d.
*sense-data.
M. Perkins, Sensing the World (Indianapolis, 1983).
axiological ethics. That portion of ethics that is con-
cerned specifically with *values. Unlike the portions con-
cerned with morality and with social justice, axiological
ethics does not focus directly on what we should do.
Instead it centres on questions of what is worth pursuing
or promoting and what should be avoided, along with
issues of what such questions mean and of whether and
how there is any way of arriving at answers to them that
constitute knowledge. Many philosophers have offered
systematic accounts of what is of value without much
indication of how their answers are justified or of why
they should be taken as having some kind of objective
validity. But much of the current philosophical interest
in axiological ethics centres on the epistemology (if any)

of values.
The issue of justification arises whether or not a set of
values is systematic. If it is, then we may ask whether
whatever organizes the system has any validity. If it is not,
then one wants to know whether the diverse value judge-
ments represent merely personal (or societal) invention or
preference, or instead have something more objective to
be said for them. G. E. Moore’s answer, ‘intuition’, is no
longer regarded by many people as satisfactory.
A possible outcome always is that there is no justifica-
tion for values beyond the dictates or preferences of par-
ticular persons or societies. This amounts to a value anti-
realism (a denial that judgements of value can have any
objective validity), parallel to, but distinct from, moral
anti-realism. Indeed it looks possible to be a moral anti-
realist but to hold that some things or styles of life really
are better than others, and Nietzsche sometimes sounds as
if he has this combination of views. Conversely, moral
realists who lean toward a contractual view of moral
validity sometimes sound unwilling to affirm any object-
ive values apart from those of a certain kind of political or
social order.
One promising line is to regard judgements of value as
characteristically rooted in emotions. John Stuart Mill
held, for example, that desire has the same relation to
knowledge about what is desirable as our senses and intro-
spection have to knowledge about the world. Everyone
desires pleasure and only pleasure, he held, which gives
some kind of objective validity to the judgement that
pleasure is the *good. Other philosophers, not so ready to

make claims about the uniformity of the human sense of
value, have suggested that values are rooted in particular
preferences, or in approval, or in responses such as delight,
admiration, repugnance, or disgust. A judgement of value
could be justifiable if the emotion at its root is justified.
axiological ethics 73
There also are interesting questions concerning how
values are related to self and to sense of self. Much modern
discussion of values has treated them in the context of our
deciding what things to have or not to have in our lives.
There may be an influence of consumerism in this: the
focus is on things, relationships, and states of mind to be
had rather than on the nature of the person who might
have them. But there is psychological evidence that what
is broadly the same kind of thing or relationship can have
different impacts on the lives of different people, and also
that *happiness (which is often treated as a cluster of
major values) has a close link with self-esteem, and more
generally with sense of self. It is instructive that in both
Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of values the process
of becoming a particular kind of person is treated as
paramount. j.j.k.
*well-being; right action.
J. N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London, 1970).
James Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford, 1986).
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903).
J. Raz et al., The Practice of Value (Oxford, 2003).
axiom. An axiom is one of a select set of propositions,
presumed true by a system of logic or a theory, from
which all other propositions which the system or theory

endorses as true are deducible—these derived propos-
itions being called *theorems of the system or theory.
Thus, Pythagoras’ theorem is deducible from the axioms
of Euclidean geometry. The axioms and theorems of
a system of logic—for instance, of the *propositional cal-
culus—are regarded as being true of logical *necessity.
e.j.l.
*axiomatic method; deduction.
W. V. Quine, Methods of Logic, 3rd edn. (London, 1974).
axiomatic method. Thinkers in a tradition including
Euclid, Newton, Hilbert, Peano, Whitehead and Russell,
and others have used the axiomatic method to present dif-
ferent subject-matters as formal and coherent theories, all
propositions of which are deducible from a clearly speci-
fied set of initial assumptions. A fully formalized axiomatic
system contains (i) primitive symbols, (ii) rules of forma-
tion distinguishing well-formed from ill-formed expres-
sions, (iii) definitions, (iv) *axioms, and (v) rules of
inference establishing how theorems are proved. It is a
formal *calculus which must be distinguished carefully
from its interpretation, the latter being a semantic notion
associating the system with the models of which it holds
true. Desirable characteristics of axiomatic systems are
consistency (freedom from contradiction), completeness
(sufficient strength to enable all semantically true propos-
itions to be proved), and independence of axioms. Unsuc-
cessful attempts to show the independence of Euclid’s
parallel postulate led in the nineteenth century to the dis-
covery of non-Euclidean geometries. s.m
cc.

R. Blanché, Axiomatics (London, 1962).
Ayer, Alfred Jules (1910–89). British philosopher, pub-
lished his first book Language, Truth and Logic in 1936. It
remains the classic statement in English of *Logical Posi-
tivism. Its central doctrine is that there are just two sorts of
cognitively meaningful statement, those which are, in
principle, empirically verifiable (observationally testable)
and those which are analytic (true simply in virtue of lin-
guistic rules). Scientific statements and statements of
ordinary fact belong to the first class, while statements of
mathematics and of logic belong to the second. Religious
and metaphysical statements, such as that God exists (or,
indeed, that he does not), or that there is a realm of things
in themselves behind phenomena, are meaningless,
because they belong to neither class. Basic ethical state-
ments are regarded similarly as factually meaningless but
are allowed an emotive meaning (that is, they express
emotional attitudes). That Ayer is not disfavouring them
as such, as he is the religious and metaphysical ones, is
made clearer in later works. As for philosophy, its task is
logical clarification of the basic concepts of science, not
the attempt to say how things truly are.
His later works move steadily away from doctrinaire
Logical Positivism, but much of its spirit is retained, in par-
ticular the view that religion is nonsense whenever it is
not simply false. Ayer saw himself as essentially advocat-
ing an *empiricism in the tradition of Hume, rendered
more forceful by the devices of modern logic. Metaphysics
is treated with more respect in so far as conceptual clarifi-
cation is seen as itself illuminating the world to which our

concepts apply.
Certain themes are recurrent in his substantial later
œuvre, such as the meaning and justification of statements
about other minds, about personal identity, and above all
about the nature of our knowledge of the physical world.
While he was originally a phenomenalist, his later view is
that physical objects are posits in a theory, the point of
which is to enable us to predict our sense-data, but which
is not reducible to facts about them. He also wrote import-
antly on probability and induction. Ethically he espoused
a qualified utilitarianism, though interpreting the *great-
est happiness principle as the expression of an optional
fundamental attitude.
Perhaps his finest book is The Problem of Knowledge
(1956). This sees epistemology as primarily an effort to jus-
tify ordinary claims to *knowledge against philosophical
scepticism. One knows that p if and only if one believes
that p, has a right to be sure on the matter, and is, in fact,
right that p is so. *Scepticism arises when there appears to
be a logical gap between our only possible evidence for the
existence and character of things of a certain sort and our
ordinary confident claims to knowledge about them. For
example, our access to the physical world seems to be only
via our own sense-data, to the minds of others via their
behaviour, and to the past via our memories. There are
four types of possible solution. (1) Naïve realism holds that
the problematic things are, after all, directly given to us,
so that we somehow directly perceive physical objects,
other minds, or the past, without the intermediary of any
74 axiological ethics

Ayer, A. J. 75
sense-data, behaviour, or memories which are mere repre-
sentations of them. (2) Reductionism reduces the existence
of the problematic things to the holding of suitable patterns
among the evidential data, e.g. sense-data, behaviour, or
memory images and historical records. (3) The scientific
approach tries to show that after all the inference from the
evidence to the conclusion has a scientifically respectable
inductive character. The difficulty here is that there can be
no inductive grounds for moving from Xs to Ys, if we have
no possible access to the latter except by the former. (4) The
method of descriptive analysis, largely favoured by Ayer
(though somewhat modified later) simply describes how
we do, in fact, base our beliefs on the evidence and shows
that the complaint that these are not well based is unrea-
sonable as making an impossible demand.
In spite of his iconoclasm Ayer had no truck with some
of the wilder assaults upon traditional philosophical
thought, such as ordinary-language philosophy on the one
hand, and behaviourism and physicalism on the other.
t.l.s.s.
*London philosophy; Oxford philosophy; verification
principle; tender- and tough-minded.
A. J. Ayer, Perception and Identity, ed. G. F. Macdonald (London,
1979).
L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer, The Library of Living
Philosophers, xxi (La Salle, Ill., 1992).
John Foster, A. J. Ayer, The Arguments of the Philosophers
(London, 1985).
A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.) A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (London,

1991).
Babbage–Chambers paradox. Charles Babbage (1791–
1871), mathematician and almost-inventor of the digital
computer, observed in his Ninth Bridgwater Thesis (1838)
that his calculating engine could produce the series of nat-
ural numbers from 1 to 100,000,000, and then—without
any interference— produce 100,000,001; 100,010,002;
100,030,003; 100,060,004; ‘and so on’ for many hundred
terms, till yet another rule came into play. This realiza-
tion, that the same process might suddenly reveal another
law (and so that *miracles could not be ruled out), was fur-
ther developed by Robert Chambers (1802–71) to explain
the differences between successive geological eras: the
‘same process’ operated by different laws to produce
unpredictable changes. As an account of *evolution, or of
miracles, the story proved unpopular. As an anticipation
of Goodman’s problem with grue, and Wittgenstein’s
with the notion of rule-following, it retains its interest: no
finite string of observations or operations can identify
what rule is being followed, or what its correct application
might require in the future. s.r.l.c.
Robert Chambers, Vestiges of Creation (Edinburgh, 1844).
Doron Swade, The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to
Build the First Computer (London, 2001).
Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962). Bachelard’s studies of the
emergence of scientific *objectivity anticipated some of
the conclusions of Popper and Kuhn without exerting any
direct influence. His reputation depends, however, less on
his anti-positivism and his discovery of ‘epistemological
ruptures’ than on his studies of poetic language, day-

dream, and phenomenology, and their application to
episodes in the history of science. Like Bacon, Bachelard
regarded the projection of subjective values and interests
into the experience of the physical world as impediments
to knowledge. In Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (1938), which
he described as a ‘psychoanalysis of knowledge’, he
showed how the emergence of an objective and quantified
science required depersonalization and abstraction, emo-
tional restraint, and ‘taciturnity’. His intention was not
thereby to discredit subjectivity. Rather, he placed the
capacity for reverie, which he saw as the source of great
poetry as well as of abject sentimentality and imaginary
physical theories, at the centre of his theory of the human
mind, and he understood that affective engagement with
‘things’ was a condition of scientific productivity. ‘Psycho-
analysis’, in Bachelard’s terms, did not refer to the Freudian
study of sublimated drives of the individual, but to the dis-
closure of *archetypes, which Jung’s studies on alchemy
of the early 1930s had first shown to have a bearing on the
interpretation of early chemical theories and the practice
of alchemy. In his study of eighteenth-century experi-
ments with fire, La Psychanalyse du feu (1938), Bachelard
showed how the phenomenology of fire as painful, dan-
gerous, soothing, purifying, destructive, and a symbol of
life and passion, determined scientific discourse. Other
studies on air, water, and earth, which, like fire, have since
been deconstituted as subjects of scientific inquiry, showed
how they too were ‘dreamt’ by the eighteenth century.
Bachelard’s influence on the early work of Foucault and
other French theorists of his generation is significant.

cath.w.
C. G. Christofides, ‘Gaston Bachelard and the Imagination of
Matter’, Revue internationale de philosophie (1963).
P. Quillet, Bachelard: Présentation, choix de textes, bibliographie
(Paris, 1964).
Mary Tiles, Gaston Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge,
1984).
backgammon. Board game for two players, renowned
among philosophers as one of Hume’s methods of recov-
ery from philosophical melancholy and *scepticism. ‘I
dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am
merry with my friends; and when after three or four
hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations,
they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I can-
not find in my heart to enter into them any farther’
(A Treatise of Human Nature, i. iv. 7). If we may follow
Adam Smith’s account of Hume in later life, however, the
philosopher’s favourite game was actually whist. j.bro.
background. The previously acquired understanding or
knowledge that allows utterances, beliefs, and actions to
have explicit meaning for us. The problem of the back-
ground has recently received philosophical attention with
respect to meaning in language, knowledge in science,
and objectivity in interpretation. Words and utterances
presuppose an implicit and a holistic understanding of
beliefs and practices. Observation and justification in the
B
sciences function only against the background of shared
paradigms of understanding acquired in scientific socializa-
tion. And the necessary reliance of any interpreter on

her own prior understanding rules out the possibility of any
neutral perspective in cultural interpretation. There is dis-
agreement about whether the background is basically con-
ceptual and symbolic in nature—and thus in principle
explicable—or whether it is mainly practical and pre-
propositional—and therefore can never be captured fully in
theory. h h.k.
*hermeneutics; holism.
H. Dreyfus, ‘Holism and Hermeneutics’, Review of Metaphysics
(1981).
backwards causation. This is the idea that a cause may be
later in time than its effect. In the case of physical processes
and human actions we naturally assume that the direction
of causation is from earlier to later time. The play in a
football match causes the final result; it would be absurd
to believe that the result could cause the earlier play. On
the other hand, people do sometimes suppose that prayer
or more overt religious rituals might have causal influence
on what has happened at an earlier time. Aristotle argued
extensively in favour of a different mode of backward, or
teleological, causation, with the following examples: the
goal (e.g. health) as the cause of purposive activity (e.g.
physical exercise), or a developed natural product (e.g. an
oak) as the cause of the process which culminates in it (the
developing acorn). A thorough discussion of the issue is
provided by Michael Dummett, ‘Can an Effect Precede its
Cause?’ and ‘Bringing about the Past’, in Truth and Other
Enigmas (London, 1978). j.d.g.e.
*causality; teleological explanation.
Bacon, Francis (1561–1626). Lawyer, politician, and

philosopher at the Courts of Elizabeth Tudor and her suc-
cessor James Stuart. Bacon had two great ambitions. One
was political, where he was helped initially by his kinship
with the Cecil family; and at the summit of his career he
held the office of Lord Chancellor for four years before
being gaoled on an unfair charge of corruption. His other
ambition was philosophical—to refound human know-
ledge on the basis of a systematic methodology for scien-
tific inquiry.
Part of this methodology was institutional, in that
Bacon saw the advancement of science as a social activity.
So he wished to set up a college for the purpose, equipped
with all necessary research facilities—laboratories, botan-
ical and zoological gardens, specialist technicians, etc.
Though he failed to secure royal support for this venture
in his own lifetime, he was widely credited later in the
seventeenth century with having inspired the foundation
of the Royal Society.
But Bacon’s methodology also proposed, within an over-
all framework for the reclassification of the sciences, a dis-
tinctively inductive structure for the study of nature. He
advocated in his Novum Organum (London, 1620) that
scientists interrogate nature by their *experiments in order
to be able to tabulate both the various circumstances in
which instances of the phenomenon under investigation
have been found to be present and also the circumstances
under which they have been found to be absent. For
example, Bacon found heat present in the sun’s rays, in
flame, and in boiling liquids, but absent in the moon’s and
stars’ rays, in phosphorescence, and in natural liquids. More-

over, scientists should concentrate in their investigations on
certain important kinds of experimentally reproducible situ-
ation, which Bacon called ‘prerogative instances’. To the
extent that scientists thus discover a circumstance which
correlates uniquely with the phenomenon—i.e. is always
present when it is present and always absent when it is
absent—they have discovered its proximate *explanation
(or ‘form’) and have acquired power to reproduce it at will.
But the investigator should also aim to make a gradual
ascent to more and more comprehensive laws, and will
acquire greater and greater certainty as he or she moves up
the pyramid of laws. At the same time each law that is
reached should lead him to new kinds of experiment, that is,
to kinds of experiment over and above those that led to the
discovery of the law.
Bacon insisted that his methodology, like Aristotle’s
syllogistic, is just as applicable to normative as to factual
issues. He held that it has a role in *jurisprudence, for
example, as well as in natural science, because legal
maxims in English common law, just like the axioms of
nature in science, are grounded on induction from indi-
vidual cases and then, once formulated, are applied back
to determine new particulars. Bacon was therefore keen
to emphasize that good legal reports were as valuable for
jurisprudential induction as good reports of experimental
results were for scientific induction. By the former we
reduce uncertainty about our legal rights and duties: by
the latter we reduce uncertainty about what is the case in
nature. And negative instances, he held (anticipating
Popper), are of primary importance in both inquiries, in

order to eliminate false propositions. This is because
there is only a limited number of ultimate forms, and so
falsificatory evidence, by conclusively excluding incorrect
hypotheses, permits firmer progress than verificatory evi-
dence does towards identifying the correct hypothesis.
Correspondingly Bacon repudiated as ‘childish’ the
method of *induction by simple enumeration, whereby a
generalization that is as yet unfalsified is supposed to
acquire support that varies in strength with the number of
known instances that verify it.
But Bacon cautioned that his new method of induction
would not get properly under way unless those trying to
practise it repudiated four kinds of intellectual *idol—per-
ceptual illusions (‘idols of the tribe’), personal biases
(‘idols of the cave’), linguistic confusions (‘idols of the
market-place’), and dogmatic philosophical systems
(‘idols of the theatre’). l.j.c.
*hypothetico-deductive method.
Bacon, Francis 77
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. M. Silverthorne and
L. Jardine (Cambridge, 2000).
—— The Major Works, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford, 2002).
M. Hesse, ‘Francis Bacon’, in D. J. O’Connor (ed.), A Critical His-
tory of Western Philosophy (New York, 1964).
M. Pentenon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cam-
bridge, 1996).
P. Urbach, Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science (La Salle, Ill., 1987).
Bacon, Roger (c.1220–c.1292). A student and a teacher at
both Oxford and Paris, he devoted many years to the
study of science, especially optics and alchemy. Bacon, a

member of the Franciscan Order, wrote extensively in the
fields of philosophy, theology, and science.
He was in many ways an independent thinker, though
he was undoubtedly deeply influenced by his teacher
Robert Grosseteste, and of course by Aristotle, whose
writings were reaching Christian Europe via the Arab
commentators. Of the latter, Bacon had an especial admir-
ation for Avicenna and Averroës. Although during the
Middle Ages he was perhaps chiefly known for his alchem-
ical works, it is his epistemology that now attracts greatest
attention, and especially as that relates to his writings on
optics. In particular he was interested in light and visual
perception. If something is at a distance from us, how can
we be aware of it? The answer given is that similitudes or
images, or species, emanate from the object, pass through
the intervening space, and strike the eye. Without this
multiplicity of species in the medium seeing could not
occur. Questions concerning the metaphysical and epi-
stemological status of species occupied Bacon and were to
occupy many who followed him; questions such as
whether species take up space, and whether they are vis-
ible, or instead are partial causes, and no more than that, of
the visibility of the things from which they emanate.
Bacon believed that there are also species corresponding
to non-visual accidents in things, but his main work was in
the field of visual perception. a.bro.
S. Easton, Roger Bacon and his Search for a Universal Science (Oxford,
1952).
bad faith. Sartre’s conception of *self-deception. Accord-
ing to Sartre, bad faith involves the deliberate creation in

myself of the appearance of a belief which I in fact know to
be false. Sartre claims that we are able to play this trick on
ourselves because of ambiguities in our nature, because
we are not ‘in-ourselves’ what we are ‘for-ourselves’, and
so on. In his view, in bad faith we exploit these ambiguities
in reflection upon ourselves to avoid facing up to painful
facts about ourselves. Sartre imagines a homosexual deny-
ing his homosexuality on the ground that he is not ‘in him-
self’ a homosexual. These ambiguities, Sartre holds,
enable one to account for self-deception without postulat-
ing an unconscious self that controls the conscious one:
the phenomenon exemplifies the complexity of our reflex-
ive structures, not the agency of a secret self. t.r.b.
J P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes (London, 1958),
pt. i, ch. 2.
Bain, Alexander (1818–1903). A weaver’s son, he was born
in Aberdeen and studied at Marischal College. He antici-
pates *pragmatism. In The Senses and the Intellect (London,
1855) he says that perception depends on a muscular sense
and on distinguishing one’s body from the world. There is
one substance with two sets of properties, mental and
physical. In The Emotions and the Will (London, 1859) he
says that belief belongs with agency and is for action. He
was variously professorial assistant, public lecturer, jour-
nalist, civil servant (sanitation reform in London), and
Professor of Logic and Rhetoric in Aberdeen. He was
friendly with J. S. Mill and radical Utilitarian circles in Lon-
don, and personally knew Darwin, Comte, Herschel, Fara-
day, and Wundt. Much of his writing was deflationary as
he tried to promote the union of physiology, psychology,

and philosophy, for which he founded the philosophical
journal Mind. v.h.
*associationism; Scottish philosophy.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975). Russian
philosopher of language and literature, famous for his
concepts of dialogism and ‘heteroglossia’. For Bakhtin,
the basic linguistic act is the utterance. Utterances acquire
meaning only in dialogue, which is always situated in a
social–cultural context where a multiplicity of different
languages intersect (political, technical, literary, interper-
sonal, etc.). From this emerges a conception of person-
hood where we author ourselves in dialogue with others
and subject to the reinterpretations they give us. Bakhtin’s
writings on the novel as the literary embodiment of
heteroglossia have been very influential, particularly his
work on Dostoevsky’s ‘polyphonic’ novel, and many find
in his dialogism a critique of totalitarianism. Significant also
are his early works on linguistics and psychology, Marxist
in orientation and published under names of other
members of Bakhtin’s circle (though authorship of these
works is disputed). Bakhtin lived in Vitebsk and Leningrad
before being exiled to Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1934. He
later taught literature for many years at the Mordovian
Pedagogical Institute in Saransk. d.bak.
*Russian philosophy.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981).
—— Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Min-
neapolis, 1984).
Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich (1814–76). Russian

revolutionist, the moving spirit of nineteenth-century
*anarchism. Although remembered mostly for his
revolutionary passion, he was learned, intelligent, and
philosophically reflective. In moments of intermittent
recess from insurrection and imprisonment he wrote
influential formulations of anarchist philosophy and inci-
sive and insightful criticisms of Marxism. He maintained
that political power was intrinsically oppressive whether
wielded by the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Real free-
dom was possible only after the destruction of the status
78 Bacon, Francis
quo. But the individual’s freedom was so bound up with
that of society that nothing short of ‘collectivism’, a non-
governmental system based on voluntary co-operation
without private property and with reward according to
contribution, was required. In philosophical outlook he
was a voluntaristic determinist, respectful of the authority
of science but sharply critical of the authority of scientists.
A keen materialist, he was ferociously anti-theological.
k.w.
G. P. Maximoff (ed.), The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific
Anarchism (London, 1953).
bald man paradox. Suppose a man has a full head of hair:
if he loses one hair he will still have a full head of hair. But
if he loses enough hairs he will become bald. Clearly,
though, there is no particular number of hairs whose loss
marks the transition to baldness. How can a series of
changes, each of which makes no difference to his having
a full head of hair, make a difference to his having a full
head of hair? This is an example of an ancient para-

dox called *sorites (from the Greek word meaning
‘heaped’), after a well-known variant which involves the
removal of grains of sand from a heap of sand. m.c.
*vagueness.
See R. M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (Cambridge, 1988) for sorites.
Barbara, Celarent. The opening of an 800-year-old hexa-
meter verse incorporating the mnemonic names of valid
*syllogisms. Described by De Morgan as ‘magic words . . .
more full of meaning than any that ever were made’, and
by Jevons as ‘barbarous and wholly unscientific’. The
vowels signify *quantity and quality, but most of the
remaining letters are also logically important, especially
regarding ‘reduction’, the derivation of some syllogistic
forms from others. c.w.
*logic, traditional.
W. S. Jevons, Elementary Lessons in Logic (London, 1897), lesson
xvii.
A. Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2005), ch. 3.
barber paradox. The barber in a certain village is a man
who shaves all and only those men in the village who do not
shave themselves. Is he a man who shaves himself? If he is
then he isn’t, and if he isn’t then he is. It follows that he is a
man who both does and does not shave himself. This con-
tradiction shows that the apparently innocent italicized
description can apply to no one. Formally, the paradox
resembles *Russell’s paradox of the class of all classes
which are not members of themselves. The latter though
is not so easy to dispose of, since it is generated by an
assumption—that every predicate determines a class—
which cannot simply be abandoned. m.c.

M. Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z (London, 2002).
Barcan formula. A principle which says, roughly, that if it
is possible that something As (or has A) then there is some-
thing that possibly As (or has A). In the first formalization
of quantified *modal logic, R. C. Barcan (later Marcus)
introduced such an axiom schema:
BF. ◊(
∃α) A —
3
(∃α)◊A.
The principle BF, provable equivalents of BF, and some
schemata from which BF was deducible came to be desig-
nated as the ‘Barcan formula’.
The plausibility of BF was questioned. Marcus sketched
a model-theoretic proof of BF’s validity on the assumption
that domains of alternative possible ‘interpretations’
(worlds) were coextensive. Saul Kripke showed that on his
semantics for modality, where coextensive domains are
not assumed, neither BF nor its converse is valid. r.b.m.
R. Barcan Marcus, Journal of Symbolic Logic (1946, 1947); Synthese
(1961).
—— Modalities (Oxford, 1993).
Barnes, Jonathan (1942– ). Professor of Ancient Philoso-
phy at the Sorbonne in Paris, formerly at Oxford and
Geneva. Although Barnes’s contributions to the under-
standing of ancient philosophy are both philosophy and
history, historical reconstruction never overrides the
attempt to solve philosophical problems by reference to
ancient texts. Notably, Barnes is the author of the two-
volume work The Presocratic Philosophers (1979), and studies

of Aristotle, ranging from the translation and commen-
tary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (1975) to Aristotle
(1982) and many papers. Barnes is also one of the editors of
the series of volumes Articles on Aristotle and the editor of
Early Greek Philosophy (1987). His early work The Onto-
logical Argument (1972) is a rigorous examination of that
putative proof of the existence of God. s.p.
*ontological argument for the existence of God.
Barry, Brian (1936– ). Among the leaders of the move in
recent decades to make moral and political philosophy
relevant to public policy and current political debates. As
an intellectual descendant of the Scottish Enlightenment
project, Barry addresses the intersection of moral, polit-
ical, and economic issues and arguments. He violates the
norms of twentieth-century moral and political philoso-
phy by grounding his arguments in unwashed data rather
than fanciful examples. His major concern has been with
*justice, arguing that the best theories are grounded in
mutual advantage, or fairness, or both. He has also writ-
ten on democracy, voting, ethnic conflict, welfare policy,
communitarianism, legal theory, future generations,
migration, and economic and sociological theories of
collective behaviour. r.har.
Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).
—— Justice as Impartiality (Oxford, 1995).
—— Culture and Equality (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
Barth, Karl (1886–1968). Swiss theologian and biblical
scholar, notable particularly for his early polemical work
on the Epistle to the Romans (1919) and later for 9,000
pages of Church Dogmatics. Philosophically Barth is inter-

esting because he adopts a form of extreme realism
Barth, Karl 79