The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 12 pps

fact, is Dumont’s title). Bentham’s claim is that language
which looks as if it is describing what rights there actually
are is in fact suggesting what rights there ought to be. That
is, instead of citing existing rights, the French Declaration
is giving reasons why there ought to be rights. As Ben-
tham puts it in Anarchical Fallacies, ‘a reason for wishing
that a certain right were established, is not that right; want
is not supply; hunger is not bread’. So to suppose that such
rights actually exist is nonsense. Even worse is to suppose
that we can be sure that the correct rights have been found
for all time. For Bentham is a promoter of experimenta-
tion. We have to keep seeing what utility is actually pro-
duced by particular systems of rights. Hence it is an
additional mistake to think that any rights are unalterable
(indefeasible, imprescriptible). This mistake was also
made by the French. Hence the famous slogan. The com-
plete remark from which it comes is ‘natural rights is
simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights,
rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts’.
Natural rights was one attempted answer to the ques-
tion of the source of obedience to the state and the condi-
tions for legitimate revolution. Another attempted
answer also popular in Bentham’s day was the original or
social contract. This device, founding obedience on agree-
ment, was used by the leading contemporary defender of
British law William Blackstone. Bentham ridicules such a
defence in his Fragment on Government. For Bentham, justi-
fication of obedience to government depends upon utility,
that is upon calculation of whether the ‘probable mis-
chiefs of obedience are less than the probable mischiefs of
resistance’.

A contract will not work here for Bentham because, just
like rights, all real contracts are legal contracts. Hence they
are produced by law and government; and cannot there-
fore be used to provide a foundation for law and govern-
ment. Even if its force is not supposed to be the force of a
proper contract but merely that of a promise, or agree-
ment, this again will not help to provide justification. For
whether someone (government or people) should keep
their agreements has, again, for Bentham to be tested by
the calculation of utility. Yet if utility is to be the ultimate
justification of promise-keeping, it would have been bet-
ter to have started there in the first place, rather than (like
Blackstone) traversing a tortuous path through contracts,
original contracts, and largely fictional agreements. Again
Bentham designates the supposed alternative source of
justification to be merely a fiction and, as he puts it in the
Fragment, ‘the indestructible prerogatives of mankind
have no need to be supported upon the sandy foundation of
a fiction’.
Although all justification comes from utility, this does
not mean that Bentham can not support secondary ends;
that is, things which, if promoted, will normally tend to
increase utility. He lays down four such intermediate ends
which should be promoted by the right system of law and
government: subsistence, abundance, security, equality.
These form two pairs so that subsistence (the securing to
people of the means to life) takes precedence over abun-
dance; and securing people’s expectations takes precedence
over equality. The utilitarian argument for this depends
upon the psychological claim that deprivation of the former

member of each pair causes more pain than the latter.
Psychological assumptions also lie behind Bentham’s
promotion of *equality. He claims that (in general) equal
increments of a good will not produce equal increments of
utility. (That is, he claims that there is diminishing mar-
ginal utility.) Therefore, in general, provision of a particu-
lar good will provide more utility for those who already
have less than those who already have more; hence a gen-
eral tendency towards providing goods for the less well-
off; or equality.
Bentham’s is a consequentialist ethic. It looks towards
actual and possible future states of affairs for justification
of right action, not to what happened in the past. (For
example, punishment is not retribution for past action,
but prevention of future harms; obedience to the state is
not because of some past promise, but to prevent future
harms.) This is for Bentham the right, indeed the only pos-
sible, way of thinking correctly about these matters. It
explains his central stance with regard to reform of the
law. The law he found was common law, made by judges,
based on precedent and custom. It came from history. For
this he wanted to substitute statute law, made by demo-
cratic parliaments, and founded on reason. These reasons
would be independent of history and would be in terms of
future benefit. r.h.
*consequentialism; utilitarianism.
J. Dinwiddy, Bentham (Oxford, 1989).
Ross Harrison, Bentham (London, 1983).
H. L. A. Hart, Essays on Bentham (Oxford, 1982).
David Lyons, In the Interest of the Governed (Oxford, 1991).

Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition
(Oxford, 1989).
Frederick Rosen, Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy
(Oxford, 1983).
bent stick in water: see oar in water.
Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1874–1948). Influen-
tial Russian religious philosopher who, after a youthful
flirtation with Marxism of neo-Kantian persuasion,
developed a form of Russian idealism sometimes called
‘Christian existentialism’. According to Berdyaev, what
truly exists is spirit, conceived as a creative process: every
existent, including God, is a self-determining subjectivity
engaged in the realization of value. Human beings attain
personhood only if they realize their creative essence,
which they may do in a society which embodies true com-
munity (sobornost') and which aspires to identity of pur-
pose with God. Berdyaev opposed his vision of ‘personal
socialism’ to both bourgeois individualism and any collect-
ivism that subordinates the individual to the community.
A perceptive critic of totalitarianism, he was expelled from
the USSR in 1922 and settled in Paris. Since the demise of
the Soviet Union, Berdyaev’s writings have enjoyed
renewed popularity in Russia. d.bak.
90 Bentham, Jeremy
N. A. Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, tr. D. Attwater (London,
1933).
—— Solitude and Society, tr. G. Reavey (London, 1938).
—— Dream and Reality, tr. K. Lampert (London, 1950).
Bergmann, Gustav (1906–87). Austrian-born American
philosopher, who taught at the University of Iowa for

forty years, Bergmann disdained all versions of *material-
ism, though he did defend methodological *behav-
iourism. A member of the Vienna Circle and influenced by
Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein, Bergmann wrote
extensively on individuation, universals, and intentional-
ity, often setting out his views by contrasting them with
those of others: Meinong, Brentano, Husserl, Quine,
Strawson, and so on. As an ideal-language philosopher,
Bergmann tried to design a formalism which allows for
the analytic–synthetic distinction and the syntactical fea-
tures of which point to solutions to the ontological prob-
lems. Bergmann’s most striking contribution emerges in
his attempt to show that the truth-bearers of thoughts are
mental states which, though simple, have truth-makers
that are are complex. e.b.a.
*materialism.
Gustav Bergmann, Logic and Reality (Madison, Wis., 1964).
Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941). French philosopher of
Anglo-Polish extraction who worked mainly at the Collège
de France in Paris. Bergson is famous for two main doc-
trines, those of duration and the élan vital. In a letter written
in 1915 he speaks of ‘the intuition of duration’ as ‘the core
of the doctrine’ which any summary of his views must start
from and constantly return to. Duration is time at its most
timelike, as we might put it. For the scientist time is a
homogeneous medium which can be divided into periods
of equal length, and treated for the purposes of the calculus
as analysable at the limit into an infinity of instants with no
length. None of this holds for duration, which is heteroge-
neous, ever-changing without repeating itself, and cannot

be divided into instants (though one interpretation sees
Bergson as led to duration by reflecting on the calculus in
terms of Newton’s doctrine of ‘fluxions’). Duration is
*time as experienced by consciousness, and perhaps Berg-
son’s most important insight is that we do not experience
the world moment by moment but in a fashion essentially
continuous, illustrated by the way we hear a melody,
which cannot consist simply in hearing a succession of dis-
jointed notes. Past, present, and future cannot be so sep-
arated that it becomes impossible for us to know of the past
because only the present is ever present to experience. It is
perhaps rather strange that of the two main philosophers
of time of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, Bergson and McTaggart, neither seems to have paid
any attention to the other. Bergson wrote his main rele-
vant works before McTaggart’s famous 1908 article, but he
never overtly reacted to it and shows no signs of being
influenced by it in his later writings (despite being fluent in
English and having lectured in England).
Born in the year of The Origin of Species Bergson was
familiar enough with the conflict between evolutionism
and religion. His book Creative Evolution, introducing the
élan vital as a sort of life force, probably owed its popular-
ity partly to his attempt, backed by scientific as well as
philosophical arguments, to develop a non-Darwinian
evolutionism that made room for religion, albeit not for
orthodox Christianity. He envisaged a process of constant
change and development, irreversible and unrepeatable
(so that biology is a fundamentally different science from
physics), and governed by the élan, which uses effort and

subtlety to overcome the resistance of matter (an echo of
the divine Craftsman in Plato’s Timaeus?), but is not drawn
by some pre-envisaged end, for that would be a mere
‘inverted mechanism’.
Later in life Bergson turned his attention to morality. Just
as duration could never be generated from time considered
as isolated moments (an argument he also used against
Zeno’s paradoxes of motion), so, he claimed, universal
benevolence could never be achieved by starting with
group loyalties and making the groups ever wider. Group
loyalty always required a contrasting out-group, and could
be transcended only by a qualitative leap of the sort taken
by mystics in their love of all mankind.
Another application Bergson makes of his general phil-
osophy comes in his treatment of *laughter in the short
book of that name. Man is a spiritual outgrowth in a world
which works, along with his body, on mechanical prin-
ciples, and laughter arises when he is seen as reverting to
the mechanical level, primitively when he slips on a
banana skin, sophisticatedly when his conscious actions
unconsciously mimic the mechanical. a.r.l.
*evolution.
H L. Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York, 1946; French origi-
nal 1934). Good starting-point.
L. Kolakowski, Bergson (London, 1985). Brief introduction.
A. R. Lacey, Bergson (London, 1989). General critique of Berg-
son’s philosophy.
Berkeley, George (1685–1753). Berkeley is a most striking
and even unique phenomenon in the history of philoso-
phy. There have been many philosophers who have

constructed bold and sweeping, often strange and aston-
ishing, metaphysical systems. Some, particularly in the
English tradition—for example, Thomas Reid in the eight-
eenth century or G. E. Moore in the twentieth—have
been devoted to the clarification and defence of ‘common
sense’. And some have made it their chief concern to
defend religious faith and doctrine against their perceived
enemies. It is the peculiar achievement of Berkeley that,
with high virtuosity and skill, he contrived to present him-
self in all these roles at once. His readers have differed in
their assessments of the relative weights to be accorded to
these not clearly compatible concerns. It is easy to read
him as primarily a fantastic metaphysician—a line taken,
to his baffled chagrin, by almost all his own contempor-
aries. More recently some, by reaction against this, have
perhaps tended to overstress his credentials as the
Berkeley, George 91
champion of *common sense. His religious apologetics, if
scarcely his dominant interest, were unquestionably sin-
cere. But mainly one should try to see how, not merely
temperamentally but as a lucid theorist, he really did con-
trive to make a coherent whole of his diverse concerns.
The works on which Berkeley’s fame securely rests
were written when he was a very young man. Born and
educated in Ireland, he first visited England in 1713, when
he was 28, and his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philo-
nous was published in that year. But he had by then already
published his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709)
and his major work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge (1710). His later philosophical writings

do little more than defend, amplify, and in one or two
respects amend the comprehensive views thus early
arrived at. It is, in fact, evident from his correspondence
that in his later years concern with philosophical issues
was for long periods wholly displaced by other interests.
In this respect he differs markedly from John Locke—the
chief target of his criticism—whose Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690), long meditated and much
revised, did not appear till its author was nearly 60. The
young Berkeley was apt to commend Locke’s thoughts,
not without irony, as quite creditable for one so far
advanced in years.
A major motive of Locke’s philosophy—with which
Berkeley was well acquainted in his student days—was to
work out the implications of the great achievements of
seventeenth-century science. It had been established
beyond all question, he took it, that the material universe
was really, essentially a system of bodies mechanically
interacting in space—bodies ‘made’, so to speak, of mat-
ter, and really possessing just those qualities (*primary
qualities) required for their mechanical mode of oper-
ation—‘solidity, figure, extension, motion or rest, and
number’. This was the bedrock of Locke’s position. These
bodies operate on, among other things, the sense-organs
of human beings—either through actual contact with the
‘external object’ or, as in vision, by ‘insensible particles’
emitted or reflected from it. This mechanical stimulation
in due course reaches the brain, and thereupon causes
*‘ideas’ to arise in the mind; and these are the items of
which the observer is really aware. In some respects these

ideas faithfully represent to the mind the actual character
of the ‘external world’—bodies really do have ‘solidity’,
etc.—but in others not; ideas of, for instance, sound,
colour, and smell have no real counterparts in physical
reality, but are merely modes in which a suitably consti-
tuted observer is affected by the appropriate mechanical
stimuli.
Berkeley came very early to regard this picture of the
world as at once absurd, dangerous, and repulsive. It was
absurd, he argued, because it implied a fantastic *scepti-
cism, plainly intolerable to good common sense. For how
could an observer, aware only of his own ideas, know
anything of Locke’s ‘external world’? Locke himself had
insisted that colour, for example, is only an apparent, not a
real, feature of that world; but how, in fact, could he know
that our ideas correctly represent to us, in any respect, the
world’s actual character? A sceptic has only to suggest that
our ideas perhaps mislead us not merely in some ways, but
in every way, and it is evident that Locke is left helpless
before that suggestion—unable, indeed, even to assure
himself that any ‘external’ world actually exists. That is
surely, for any person of good sense, an intolerable
position.
But it is also dangerous, Berkeley holds. For—besides
this general leaning towards an absurd scepticism—the
*‘scientism’, as one may perhaps call it, of Locke’s doc-
trine seemed to lead naturally towards materialism and,
by way of universal causal determinism, to atheism also,
and therefore, in Berkeley’s view, to the subversion of all
morality. God is brought in by Locke as the designer, cre-

ator, and starter of the great Machine; but could he show
that matter itself was not eternal, with no beginning and
no creator? Might God turn out to be superfluous? Again,
though Locke himself had made the supposition that
minds are ‘immaterial substances’ and no doubt hoped to
sustain a Christian view of the soul, he had confessed that
he could not disprove the counter-suggestion that con-
sciousness might be merely one of the properties of mat-
ter, and so wholly dependent on the maintenance of
certain purely physical conditions. Thus Locke’s theories
at best permit, at worst positively encourage, denial of
God’s existence and the soul’s immortality; with that
denial religion falls and, in Berkeley’s view, drags morality
after it.
Finally, it is clear from, though less explicit in, Berke-
ley’s words that he was simply oppressed and repelled by
the notion of the universe as a vast machine. Locke loved
mechanisms. He delighted in metaphors of *clocks and
engines, springs, levers, and wheels, and indeed took
mechanics to be the paradigm of satisfactory intelligibil-
ity. All this Berkeley detested. God’s creation, he was sure,
could not really be like that—particularly if, in order to
maintain that it is, we have to assert that its actual appear-
ance is delusive, that ‘the visible beauty of creation’ is to be
regarded as nothing but ‘a false imaginary glare’. Why, to
embrace such a nightmare, should we deny the evidence
of our senses?
What then was to be done? Berkeley thought that the
solution of all these perplexities was obvious, luminously
simple, and ready to hand. As he wrote in his notebook, ‘I

wonder not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious
though amazing truth, I rather wonder at my stupid inad-
vertency in not finding it out before.’ The solution was to
deny the existence of *matter.
First, Berkeley insists, this odd-looking denial is wholly
supportive of common sense. On Locke’s own admission
we are never actually aware of anything but our own
ideas; to deny the existence, then, of his ‘external objects’,
material bodies, is not to take away anything that has ever
entered into our experience. But not only so; it must also
put an end to all sceptical questioning. For Locke was
obliged to concede to the sceptic that our ideas might mis-
lead us about the real character of things, precisely
92 Berkeley, George
because he had regarded things as something other than,
merely ‘represented’ by, our ideas. But if, eliminating the
supposed material body, we adopt the view that the ordin-
ary objects of experience simply are ‘collections of ideas’,
it will be plainly impossible to suggest that things may not
be as they appear to us—even more so, to suggest that
their very existence might be doubted. If an apple is not an
‘external’ material body, but a collection of ideas, then I
may be entirely certain—as of course, Berkeley says, any
person of good sense actually is—both that it exists, and
that it really has the colour, taste, texture, and aroma that
I find in it. Doubt on so simple a matter could only seem to
arise as a result of the quite needless assertion that things
exist, distinct from and in superfluous addition to the ideas
we have.
But surely, it may be objected, our ideas have causes.

We do not generate our own ideas just as we please; they
plainly come to us from some independent source; and
what could this be, if not the ‘external world’? But this
point redounds wholly, Berkeley claims, to his own
advantage. For to cause is to act; and nothing is genuinely
active but the will of an intelligent being. Locke’s inani-
mate material bodies, therefore, could not be true causes
of anything; that ideas occur in our minds as they do, with
such admirable order, coherence, and regularity, must be
by the will of an intelligent being. And of course we know
that there is such a Being—God, eternal, omnipresent,
omnipotent, ‘in whom we live, and move, and have our
being’, ‘who works all in all, and by whom all things con-
sist’. Berkeley wonders at the ‘stupidity and inattention’ of
men who, though every moment ‘surrounded with such
clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected
by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of
light’ (Principles, para. 149).
Finally—and certainly, for Berkeley, most satisfactor-
ily—he finds himself in a position to put the physical sci-
entist firmly in his place. For if there is no matter, no
material bodies, there are no ‘corpuscles’, no ‘insensible
particles’; that whole corpus of mechanistic physical the-
orizing in which Locke delighted cannot possibly be true,
for there is simply nothing for it to be true of. At first, in
his early (though major) work the Principles, Berkeley
embraced this position in the most unqualified form.
There is a modest role for the scientist, he there argued, in
observation and description of the objects of experience,
in the search for true generalizations about the course of

our ideas, that is, of natural phenomena; but all reference
to items supposedly ‘underlying’—supposedly explana-
tory of, and according to Locke more ‘real’ than—human
experience, must be dismissed as moonshine, the product
of mere confusion. But later—regarding, perhaps, as over-
drastic this wholesale dismissal of not only Locke but also,
for example, Gassendi, Newton, and Boyle—he devised a
strikingly ingenious variant position in which, though
running hopelessly against the main tendency of his age,
he foreshadowed the ideas of many contemporary
philosophers of science. In his pamphlet De Motu of 1721,
he still maintained that corpuscular theories of matter, for
example, or the particle theory of light could not be true;
but they may nevertheless be allowed, not indeed as
truths, but as useful fictions. The ‘theory’ of the corpuscu-
lar structure of matter makes possible the exact mathe-
matical expression of formulae, by which we can make
very valuable calculations and predictions; but there is no
need to make the supposition that the corpuscles and par-
ticles of that theory actually exist. So long as it is useful to
us to speak and to calculate as if they exist, let us so speak
and calculate. Such intellectual dodges ‘serve the purpose
of mechanical science and reckoning; but to be of service
to reckoning and mathematical demonstrations is one
thing, to set forth the nature of things is another’. It is
Locke’s concession, one might say, to the physical scien-
tist of metaphysical authority that Berkeley, at every stage,
implacably opposes.
Two of Berkeley’s later works may be mentioned
briefly. His Alciphron (1732) is a long work in dialogue

form, in which the tenets of Anglican orthodoxy are
defended against various types of ‘free-thinking’ and
*deism. Though able enough, it suffers from the artificial-
ity of the convention, and has limited interest now that the
controversies which prompted it are moribund. His last
work was Siris (1744), a very strange, even baffling pro-
duction, in which a most uncharacteristically rambling,
ponderous, and speculative statement of some part of his
earlier opinions leads on to an inquiry into the virtues of
*tar-water, a medicine which Berkeley made popular, and
for the promotion of which he worked in his later years
with surprising zeal.
Berkeley’s main work was slow to exert any influence
on philosophy, though his limited early Essay on vision
became fairly well known. His criticism of Locke, though
not always ideally fair, was for the most part powerful and
well taken; and the transition to his own remarkable doc-
trine of a wholly non-material, theocentric universe,
whose esse was percipi, and in which human ‘spirits’ were
conceived of as conversing directly with the mind of God,
was at least a feat of dazzling ingenuity. But this doctrine
was too extraordinary to be taken quite seriously. The fact
that, so far as the course of actual experience went, he
could insist that it coincided with the customary views of
ordinary life was felt, rightly, to be not enough to make it
actually the same—he was far indeed from being accepted
as the friend of common sense. His strikingly original phil-
osophy of science—really the fundamental area in which
he dissented from Locke—was also much less persuasive
then than it would be if it were propounded today. In the

early eighteenth century it was still possible, even natural,
to regard physical theory as merely a kind of extension of
ordinary observation, offering—or at any rate aiming at—
literal truths of just the same kind, and couched in much the
same terms, as those of everyday experience. Today the
sophistication of physical theory has made this difficult, or
indeed impossible, to believe; but to deny it then was prob-
aby felt not only to be perverse and unnecessary, but also—
entirely rightly, in Berkeley’s case—to constitute an
attempt to undermine the physicist’s prestige. It was his
Berkeley, George 93
misfortune that he opposed, even hated, the ‘scientific
world-view’ at a time when that view was in the first flush
of its general ascendancy.
Berkeley was born near Kilkenny, and educated at
Kilkenny College and, from 1700, at Trinity College,
Dublin. He was a Fellow of that college—though often
absent—from 1707 to 1724. Ordained in 1709, he was
appointed Dean of Derry in 1724, and Bishop of Cloyne in
1734. He married in 1728, and died at his lodgings in Holy-
well Street, Oxford, in 1753, while overseeing the intro-
duction of his son George to Christ Church. Berkeley’s
life, apart from his philosophical writings, is remarkable
chiefly for his curious attempt in middle life to establish a
college in Bermuda. The purpose of this project was
mainly missionary. Berkeley’s hope was to attract to his
college both the colonial settlers of America and the
indigenous American Indians, so that they would in due
course return to their communities as ministers of religion
and purveyors of enlightenment. As Dean of Derry he

devoted to this scheme his considerable energies, powers
of persuasion, and personal charm, and at first succeeded
in securing for it both private and official backing. He was
granted a charter, raised substantial funds by private sub-
scription, and was even promised an ample parliamentary
grant. But the scheme was really impracticable, and was in
the end recognized to be so. Bermuda—as he was perhaps
not clearly aware—is far too distant from the American
mainland to have been an attractive location for his insti-
tution. Berkeley himself set out boldly for America in
1728, but in his absence doubts and hesitations began to
prevail in London. He waited nearly three years for his
promised grant to be paid over, but in 1731 the Prime Min-
ister, Walpole, discreetly indicated that there was no
prospect that his hopes would be gratified. The house
at Newport, Rhode Island, which Berkeley built and
inhabited is still preserved. g.j.w.
*empiricism; Irish philosophy; esse est percipi.
George Berkeley, Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols.
(London, 1949–57).
J. Foster and H. Robinson (eds.), Essays on Berkeley (Oxford, 1985).
G. W. Pitcher, Berkeley (London, 1977).
I. C. Tipton, The Philosophy of Immaterialism (London, 1974).
G. J. Warnock, Berkeley (London, 1953; reissued Oxford, 1982).
K. Winkler, Berkeley: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1989).
Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97). Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia,
into a Jewish family that migrated to England in 1919 in the
wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. He studied at Oxford
and taught philosophy there in the 1930s, becoming a sig-
nificant part of the movement that developed into ‘ordin-

ary language’ philosophy, and publishing influential
papers on the logic of counterfactual conditionals. He
wrote his first book in 1939, on Karl Marx. During the war,
he had diplomatic postings in Washington and, briefly,
Moscow (‘one week’s work in an embassy—that is my
experience—is less of a strain than one day’s teaching at
Oxford’) and met outstanding Russian writers such as
Pasternak and Akhmatova. Back in Oxford, Berlin’s inter-
ests shifted more to the history of ideas with particular ref-
erence to political thought, and in 1957 he was knighted
and appointed to the Chair of Social and Political Theory at
Oxford. He was the first President of Wolfson College,
Oxford (1966–75), and President of the British Academy
from 1974 to 1978.
Berlin was rare amongst historians of thought and phil-
osophy in being himself a substantial philosopher, and it is
this, plus considerable powers of empathy and a wide
range of learning, that gives his explorations of the work
and impact of thinkers as diverse as Vico and de Maistre,
Machiavelli and Herder, such power and fascination. A
lifelong secular liberal, Berlin’s writings on liberal theory
have had a lasting impression on contemporary political
philosophy, his discussions of the concepts of negative and
positive liberty being his best-known contribution.
Equally significant, however, has been his passionate
advocacy of the view that the ends of life cannot form a
unified whole.
Although his concerns and heroes were eclectically
European, Berlin’s method and intellectual temper were
rooted in English philosophical tradition with its stress on

clarity, argument, and vigorous debate. c.a.j.c.
*liberty.
I. Berlin, Against the Current (New York, 1980).
—— Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), reissued with a fifth
essay as Liberty (Oxford, 2002).
Bernoulli’s theorem. The theorem is named after the
Swiss mathematician who first proved it, Jakob Bernoulli.
It is also known as the ‘weak law of large numbers’, and
was historically the first of a cluster of famous limit the-
orems of mathematical *probability. It states that if succes-
sive outcomes, A and not-A, of a sequence of n trials are
independent, and the probability of A at each trial is p, then
the probability that the relative frequency of As in the n
trials differs from p by more than an arbitrarily small
number tends to 0 as n increases. The relation between
probabilities and frequencies established by the theorem
led many people, including Bernoulli, to believe that prob-
abilities could be inferred from observed frequencies.
Whether such an inference is possible is still unresolved.
c.h.
W. Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications
(New York, 1950).
Berry’s paradox is credited to G. G. Berry by Bertrand
Russell. The phrase ‘the least integer not nameable in
fewer than nineteen syllables’ consists of eighteen sylla-
bles. Thus the assumption that there is an ‘integer not
nameable . . . ’ etc., and that the phrase names it, is contra-
dictory. Russell claimed that the phrase ‘denotes’ 111,777,
thus involving himself in the contradiction. The truth
is that 111,777 can be named such things as ‘Russell’s Berry

example number’ or even ‘Joe’. (Nameability in zero syl-
lables raises some interesting questions which, fortunately,
needn’t be discussed to justify dismissing Berry’s puzzle as
94 Berkeley, George
not deeply paradoxical.) Both the assumptions leading to
the *paradox are false. Read aloud, ‘111,777’ has nineteen
syllables, but being named in some way must not be con-
fused with being nameable. j.c.
Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica
(Cambridge, 1961), 61.
Bertrand’s paradox, due to Joseph Bertrand, brings out
an inconsistency in certain *a priori ways of calculating
*probability. What is the probability that the length k of a
‘randomly selected’ chord to a given circle is less than the
length l of a side of an equilateral triangle inscribed in the
circle? Viewing the chord as determined by a line through
a point p on the circumference, k <lif and only if the angle
between the chord and a tangent at p is either < 60° or
> 120°. This is ⅔ the possible angles, which suggests that
the probability that (k<l )=⅔. But one of many other pos-
sibilities is to view the chord as determined by a perpen-
dicular to a radius. k < l if and only if the perpendicular
intersects the radius over half-way between the mid-point
of the circle and the circumference, suggesting the prob-
ability that (k < l )=½. The ‘a priorist’ technique of
finding a ‘random’ method to generate the chord and then
dividing the possibilities for that method to get the prob-
ability thus seems to lead to inconsistency, unless some
method can be shown to be the ‘right’ one. j.c.
Joseph Bertrand, Calcul des probabilités (1889), 4–5; cited by

William Kneale, Probability and Induction (Oxford, 1952).
Bhagavadgı¯ta¯
. ‘Song of God’, a part of the ancient (fifth to
second century bc) epic Maha¯bha¯rata. In the Bhagavadgı¯ta¯
a brave but conscientious prince weakens and turns paci-
fist in the wake of a fratricidal civil war. A philosophical dis-
course by Krishna, who is the Hindu God-in-human form,
is designed to goad him back to his soldierly duty and to his
‘own nature’. It runs to 650 Sanskrit verses, commented
upon for over 1,000 years by Indian philosophers of vari-
ous persuasions. It is famous for metaphysical arguments
for the immortality of the soul, the doctrine of a Supreme
Person (God), transcending but ontologically supporting
both individual consciousness and matter, and a subtle
moral psychology of action vis-à-vis inaction. It teaches
spiritual detachment even in the midst of constant com-
mitment to the most violent of professions. Synthesizing
work, worship, and wisdom, the ensuing ethics of moder-
ation, desirelessness, and equality have a Kantian deonto-
logical ring. There is the overarching theme of a blissful
liberation from the cycle of rebirths. a.c.
*Veda¯nta; deontological ethics; Hindu philosophy;
Indian philosophy.
S
´
ri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gı¯ta¯ (Pondicherry, 1987).
biconditional. A conditional proposition is of the form: If
P then Q. The conditional which is its converse is of the
form: If Q then P. A biconditional, P if and only if Q, is
equivalent to the conjunction of a conditional and its

converse. In notations of the propositional calculus a
biconditional is represented as P ≡ Q or often P ↔ Q. In
the standard propositional calculus (the system of mater-
ial implication) P ≡ Q holds where P and Q have the same
truth value. Where P ≡ Q is a *tautology, PandQ are taken
to be logically equivalent. r.b.m.
*equivalence, logical.
B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972).
bioethics is the study of the moral and social implications
of developments in the biological sciences and the related
technology. This entails considering the value that is or
should be accorded to various forms of life. Are human
beings morally entitled to use other living things, plants or
animals, in any way that they choose? Is there a special
‘sacredness’ or ‘dignity’ attached to human life? If so, does
the stage of development that a human life has reached
nevertheless make a difference to the morality of des-
troying it? Such questions as these are the concern of
bioethics. It is a subject that grew enormously in the late
twentieth century, and most universities now have
professional bioethicists among their members, whether
interested in broadly environmental and ecological issues
or in medical applications of the new technologies.
Bioethics is concerned, for example, with the rights and
wrongs of the genetic manipulation of crops and animals,
including human animals (and at this point there is an
overlap between bioethics and Green political theory).
How are possible advantages to impoverished countries
of genetically modified crops, designed to resist drought
or flooding, to be weighed against the possible exploit-

ation of the poor by chemical or pharmaceutical com-
panies? Is there, in any case, something inherently wrong
with the genetic modification of crops or cattle, different
in kind from the taking of cuttings or the selective breed-
ing that has been part of horticulture and agriculture for
ages past? Is the manipulation of human genes to prevent
a child’s being born with a devastating monogenetic dis-
ease, such as Tay-Sachs’s disease or Duchenne’s Muscular
Distrophy, different in kind from surgical intervention, or
intervention by drugs, which doctors have always prac-
tised in pursuit of their professional goal to alleviate suf-
fering? Some regard genetic intervention as uniquely
sinister; it is thought to contravene the laws of nature by
artificially speeding up the kinds of changes properly
brought about by the slow processes of evolution and nat-
ural selection. Debate about what is or is not ‘natural’ is
curiously emotive. Part of the work of bioethics is to
analyse and evaluate such appeals to Nature.
Of particular importance at the beginning of the
twenty-first century have been the questions raised about
embryonic stem cell research, or therapeutic cloning. This
is a process by which embryos are produced, not by nor-
mal conception, the fertilization of female eggs by male
sperm, but by cell nuclear transfer, where the nucleus of
an egg is removed and replaced by that of another; after
the application of an electric current, the egg with its new
nucleus can develop into an embryo. This is the first part
bioethics 95
of the process of cloning a whole animal, or reproductive
cloning. If a whole animal is to be reproduced, the newly

formed embryo is placed in the uterus of a surrogate ani-
mal and brought to term. Thus Dolly the sheep was
cloned at the end of the twentieth century. But the pur-
pose of therapeutic cloning would be frustrated if an
embryo were allowed to develop beyond its very first
stages. For at the beginning of its life the cells of the
embryo are ‘totipotent’; that is, each may develop in any
direction, to become any of the 120 or so types of cell that
make up the body, or indeed may become part not of the
embryo itself, but of the placenta or umbilical cord. The
purpose of the research is to discover how to direct these
cells (embryonic stem cells) to develop in specific ways, to
become, let us say, cells belonging to the spinal cord, or
the brain, or the skin. The ultimate aim is to produce
banks of cells of particular types that may be used for cell
transplant rather than whole organ transplant. This would
have enormous advantages, in that parts of the body,
including the brain, could receive transplants, and dam-
aged cells would renew themselves permanently. All this
is far in the future; but the possible ethical objections to
such procedures, especially centred on the fact that
embryos would be created and then destroyed when their
use was over, are already among the issues to be argued by
bioethicists.
In fact, at the core of much of their philosophical con-
cern is the status that should be accorded to the human
embryo. In the UK human embryos may be used for
research up to fourteen days after their creation (whether
by fertilization etc. or by nuclear transfer). The Human
Fertilization and Embryology Act (1990) enshrined that

principle in law. At that time, embryos might be used only
for research into issues concerned with fertility, infertility,
and contraception. Later, regulations were introduced
through Parliament which permitted their use in research
into therapeutic cloning, but the fourteen-day limit
remained. The reason for this cut-off point was physio-
logical. Until fourteen or fifteen days from the beginning of
its life, the embryo, however it was brought into being, has
no vestige of a central nervous system, and therefore can
have no conscious experiences of any kind. It is impossible
to cause such an embryo pain. Though its genetic identity
has been fixed, it cannot be regarded as an individual person;
indeed, it may yet divide and become twins or quadruplets.
Using it for research is therefore more akin to using human
tissue than using a child or an adult experimentally.
Such considerations fell, and still fall, to be considered
by bioethicists. For despite the largely evidence-based
arguments of those who supported the 1990 law, there are
many people who dispute the moral acceptability of the
law, and would like to see it changed so that from the
moment it comes into existence an embryo is protected
from being used for research and then destroyed. These
people uphold the principle of the sanctity of human life,
at all its stages.
This principle is strongly supported by most members
of the Roman Catholic Church, and this partly explains
the difference, on bioethical issues, between different
countries, within Europe and beyond. There was a period
when the Roman Catholic Church, following Thomas
Aquinas (himself following Aristotle), held that a human

foetus becomes a full human being, acquiring a soul, at
about forty or ninety days from conception, depending on
its gender. However, in the nineteenth century the
Church decided, rightly, that there could be no certainty
about when the soul entered the body, and that therefore
even the earliest embryo should be given the benefit of
the doubt. It was therefore deemed that immediately after
conception the embryo had, or probably had, a soul, and
was effectively a human person, so that to destroy it was
murder.
Against this there is the argument put forward by,
among others, John Habgood, an eminent bioethicist, a
biologist turned churchman who became archbishop of
York, which holds that we must, as post-Darwinians, take
a developmental view of the human embryo, as we do of
the human race itself. There is no one moment when the
human person springs into existence. The further the col-
lection of cells which forms the human embryo develops,
the more we are properly inclined to accord it the status of
a person, and the higher the value we attach to its life and
life-chances. It was such arguments as these that prevailed
in the UK in 1990. But the arguments continue, and the
issue still dominates bioethics in at least one of its
branches.
Questions raised by the new techniques do not depend
on wholly new moral principles. But they involve apply-
ing moral principles to sometimes wholly new possibil-
ities; and this in turn involves taking a newly long-term
view of possible consequences for society. How would it
be if people could choose the sex of their babies, or, more

startling, choose to alter their genetic make-up before
birth? Could society tolerate a world in which the mixture
of genes a child was born with was no longer a matter of
chance but could be ‘designed’ deliberately? What, if any,
is the fundamental moral objection to the cloning of
human beings, supposing such a thing were ever to
become safe enough to try? Such questions, which used to
be strictly a matter of science fiction, now seem nearer
to reality, and it is the fear of such a reality that causes
bioethicists to be in increasing demand. Their task is to
help people to think clearly about how, in the light of our
new knowledge, we value, or ought to value, life in all its
form, and at all stages of development. m.warn.
John C. Avise, The Genetic Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
John Habgood, Being a Person (London, 1998).
Arlene Klotzko (ed.), The Cloning Sourcebook (Oxford, 2001).
Onora O’Neill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (Cambridge,
2002).
Steven Rose, Lifelines (Harmondsworth, 1998).
Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans (London, 2002).
Mary Warnock, Making Babies (Oxford, 2002).
biological naturalism. The view that mental phenomena
such as *consciousness and *intentionality are natural bio-
96 bioethics
logical phenomena on a par with growth, digestion, or
photosynthesis. Biological naturalism is defined by two
main theses: (1) all mental phenomena from pains, tickles,
and itches to the most abstruse thoughts are caused by
lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain; (2)
mental phenomena are higher-level features of the brain.

Mental phenomena are thus ‘emergent’ in the sense
that they are causally explained by the behaviour of lower-
level elements which do not in themselves individually
have these features. Thus, according to biological natural-
ism, the brain is conscious and consciousness is caused by
the behaviour of lower-level elements such as neurons
even though no single neuron is conscious. Formally
speaking, relations of this sort are common and
unmysterious in nature. For example, a whole system can
be in a liquid state, and the liquid behaviour can be caused
by the behaviour of the molecules even though no single
molecule is liquid. Biological naturalism does not deny
that alternative forms of chemistry might be able to cause
consciousness but insists that since mental phenomena
are in fact caused by brain processes any other system that
caused mental phenomena would have to have causal
powers equivalent to brains. j.r.s.
*anomalous monism; cloning; mind; mind–body
problem.
John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind
(Cambridge, 1983).
—— Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
—— The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
biology, philosophical problems of. The most distinct-
ive feature of biology, from a philosophical point of view,
is its characteristic use of functional or *teleological explan-
ations. These are explanations in which some biological
trait is explained by showing how it is useful for the organ-
ism in question. For example, the function of the polar
bear’s white fur is to camouflage it; the function of human

sweating is to lower body temperature; and so on. The
philosophically interesting aspect of these explanations is
their apparent commitment to teleology: they seem to
explain items (the whiteness, the sweating) in terms of
their consequences (the camouflage, the cooling). By con-
trast, normal causal explanations run in the other direc-
tion, and account for consequences in terms of their
causes.
Until fairly recently most philosophers of biology took
these explanations at face value, and argued that the parts
of integrated systems, like biological organisms, can legit-
imately be explained in terms of their contribution to the
well-being of the whole. In particular, Carl Hempel
argued that such explanations were a subspecies of cover-
ing-law explanations. This approach is now widely
rejected, however. Most contemporary philosophers of
biology now hold that functional explanations in biology
are in fact disguised causal explanations, which explain
biological traits not by looking forward to future beneficial
results, but by looking backwards to the past evolutionary
his-tories in which such results led to the natural selection
of the traits in question. Thus the functional explanation
of the polar bear’s whiteness does not refer to the future
camouflaging of the bears, but to the fact that their
past camouflaging led to the natural selection of their
whiteness.
The centrality of the Darwinian theory of *evolution by
natural selection to biological thinking raises a number of
further philosophical issues. An initial question is whether
the theory has any real predictive content, or whether the

thesis of ‘the survival of the fittest’ simply collapses into
the empty truism that ‘whatever survives, survives’.
However, there are ways of formulating the theory so that
‘fit’ acquires a meaning which is independent of survival.
A related charge is ‘adaptationism’: does not the theory
of evolution by natural selection simply invent evolution-
ary ‘just so stories’ in order to portray all biological traits as
having some selective benefit? In response, supporters of
the theory will admit that some biological traits are acci-
dents that serve no function, but will insist that there is
genuine evidence to show that many other traits have
been selected because of their effects, and that this process
of selection has been crucial to the evolution of species.
At a more detailed level, there is controversy about
which ‘units of selection’ are involved in Darwinian
processes. Should we think of natural selection as operat-
ing primarily on groups, or individuals, or genes? Some
progress with this knotty issue has been made by distin-
guishing ‘replicators’, in the form of the genes which
embody the lasting effects of selection, from ‘vehicles’,
such as individuals and groups, whose survival is usually
the prerequisite for gene survival.
Work on the logic of natural selection has led to the
development of sociobiology, which seeks to understand
animal social behaviour as the genetically based product
of natural selection. Critics of sociobiology object that
much behaviour is non-genetic, especially in higher ani-
mals and humans. Some sociobiologists deny this claim.
Others respond that, even if environmental influences on
behaviour are also important, it is still valuable to under-

stand the evolutionary pressures on those genes which do
affect behaviour.
Biology, along with other special sciences like psychol-
ogy, geology, meteorology, and so on, raises the issue of
*reductionism. Most contemporary philosophers of biol-
ogy are reductionists at least to the extent of denying ‘vital
spirits’ or other emergent biological substances, and
accepting the *supervenience of biological properties on
physical properties. Far fewer, however, are reductionists in
the stricter sense of believing that all biological laws can be
explained by physical laws. Instead they hold that there are
sui generis biological laws, patterns which are common to
biological systems with different physical make-ups, and
which therefore cannot be explained in terms of physical
law alone. d.p.
*causality.
D. Hull and M. Ruse (eds.), Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 1998).
P. Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
biology, philosophical problems of 97
A. Rosenberg, The Structure of Biological Science (Cambridge,
1985).
E. Sober, The Nature of Selection (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
K. Sterelny and P. Griffiths, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Phil-
osophy of Biology (Chicago, 1999).
bivalence. Semantic principle to the effect that every
statement is either true or false. Intuitionists refuse to
affirm this, since for them it would amount to affirming
that every statement can either be proved or disproved,
which no one believes. Three familiar putative counter-
examples are: (1) *vagueness: perhaps ‘This is red’ is nei-

ther true nor false of a borderline case; (2) the *liar paradox
sentence: ‘This sentence is not true’; (3) *reference failure:
if there is no elephant present ‘That elephant has a lean
and hungry look’ is arguably neither true nor false.
Defenders of bivalence tend to urge that putative counter-
examples are not genuine statements. r.m.s.
*intuitionism.
W. Kneale and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962).
Black, Max (1909–88). Influential for contributions to
philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and
science, philosophy of art, conceptual analysis, and inter-
pretative studies of figures such as Wittgenstein and
Frege.
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, he was educated in England
and emigrated to the United States in 1940. In 1977 he
retired as professor at Cornell University but continued in
the programme on science, technology, and society.
There are over 200 items in Black’s bibliography. His
first book critically explores the formalist, logicist, and
intuitionist accounts of mathematics. It remains a staple.
Black was no system-builder. His preoccupation was with
conceptual clarity and sound argument directed toward
well-delineated questions or puzzles concerning, inter
alia, meaning, rules, vagueness, choice, and metaphor.
Throughout his work he showed an uncommon appreci-
ation of common language and common sense. r.b.m.
Max Black, Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1949).
—— Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY, 1962).
—— The Nature of Mathematics (London, 1933).
—— The Prevalence of Humbug (Ithaca, NY, 1983).

black box. A black box is a system whose internal work-
ings are unknown or irrelevant to current purposes. The
computer model of the mind treats the mind as a system
that itself is composed of interacting systems, which
themselves may be composed of further interacting sys-
tems, and so on. The bottom-level primitive processors,
the black boxes that cognitive science leaves unopened,
are understood behaviouristically: what they do (their
input–output function) is in the domain of cognitive sci-
ence, but how they do it is not. (How they do it is in the
domain of electronics or neurophysiology, etc.) Via the
hierarchy of systems, cognitive science explains intelli-
gence, by reducing the capacities of an intelligent system
to the interactions among the capacities of unintelligent
systems, grounded in the bottom-level black boxes. But
the model does not explain *intentionality in this way
since the bottom-level black boxes are themselves inten-
tional systems. n.b.
N. Block, ‘The Computer Model of the Mind’, in D. Osherson and
E. Smith (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, iii: Thinking
(Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
Blackburn, Simon (1944– ). Professor at Cambridge, for-
merly at Oxford and North Carolina, known for his
defence of *quasi-realism about items whose reality has
been much disputed—e.g. values, causes, numbers. As to
values, he argues that the impact of the perceived world
on the mind, together with the beliefs formed thereby,
generate habits, emotions, sentiments, and attitudes
which come to be projected on to the world and to be
regarded as real properties of that world; so commitments

of approval or disapproval become judgements with
truth-values. And rightly so, for values supervene on nat-
ural properties. Thus, such judgements are neither mere
expressions of subjective sentiments nor truths which
obtain independently of human attitudes. And we should
be neither anti-realist nor realist about values; the right
stance is quasi-realism. Blackburn has also published a suc-
cessful popular introduction to philosophy, Think (1999).
o.r.j.
*language, history of the philosophy of; language,
problems of the philosophy of; realism and anti-
realism; philosophy of language.
Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford, 1984).
—— Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford, 1993).
—— Ruling Passions (Oxford, 1999).
black philosophy today takes two principal forms. In one
form, it is a hermeneutic enterprise, offering explications,
interpretations, and exploitations of the traditional wis-
dom of African societies through the concepts and termi-
nology of contemporary Western philosophy. The topics
typically include the general nature of being, the numin-
ous, the nature of human society and the place of human
beings in it, causality and agency, and action. An offshoot
of this instead exploits insights and nuances available in
African languages to enrich philosophical analyses of con-
cepts dealt with in Western philosophy. In its other form,
black philosophy employs the analytical tools of contem-
porary philosophizing in order to characterize the social
history and problems of peoples of African descent to the
extent that these are either peculiar to their experience or

peculiarly exacerbated in their experience.
The first form is enmeshed in a vigorous debate about
the proper classification of the material, and in conse-
quence its possible usefulness. One camp proposes to treat
it as no more than ethnographic material, invaluable in
clarifying self-concepts of Africans. This camp, notwith-
standing the practice of elders gathering in conversation,
regards the material a priori as lacking in individual
98 biology, philosophical problems of
contributions or modifications and critical debate, prin-
cipally because it was originally unscripted; for this camp
proposes scripted authorship and critical debate as sine qua
non tests for the rubric of philosophy. It describes the
hermeneutic account as ethnophilosophy.
A second camp postulates that the tradition is an evolv-
ing result of the collaboration of individual elders whose
discussions and debates are submerged, by the nature of
the case, in the tenets of the oral tradition. It is noted that,
even in the case of the literate early Pythagoreans, critical
debate does not appear to have been permitted, and it
remains a highly speculative thing to impute a specific
view to any of them. Indeed, all their accepted views seem
to have been ascribed to Pythagoras himself, even well
after his death, irrespective of their actual source.
In fact, the idea of philosophy, like that of any discipline,
is quite variable, and there is hardly ever a single overrid-
ing paradigm sufficiently protean to fit philosophy or any
other discipline at every stage in its history. For example,
much of what is admired today as ancient Greek philoso-
phy does not satisfy contemporary notions of philosophy,

and some did not satisfy even Aristotle’s! It would be
equally pointless to try to bring the diversity of today’s
philosophical practices under a single paradigm.
A broader view can discern philosophy at different
points in its evolutionary tree, and can penetrate the den-
sity of the idiom of African philosophy and recognize the
philosophical aspects of its preoccupation and content,
and thereby avoid the superficiality of an inflexible equa-
tion of idiom with myth. It thus becomes clear, for example,
that of two West African peoples, the Diola proposed
corporeally expressed force as a cosmological principle,
denied it a temporal beginning, and made it inexhaustible,
indestructible, and all-encompassing. General quantitative
variations in it were taken to express its creative energy,
and the actualizations of these variations constitute the
diversity of natural forms. Different orders of being come
about through a progressive lessening in its expressive-
ness. By contrast, the celebrated Dogon people postulated
an extremely dense body for their cosmological principle,
and, by appeal to concepts of prefiguration and specific
motions, sought to explain principal and determinative
categories of nature, the four elemental natural masses of
air, fire, water, and earth, as well as consciousness and
human society, etc. Data like the above enjoy a cultural
and historical centrality, but their hermeneutic explica-
tion and its tools are transcultural and transhistorical. In its
variety of versions, the above kind of black philosophy (or
African philosophy) is today supported by a rapidly grow-
ing literature.
The other form of black philosophy is an independent

movement and not a direct development from African
philosophy. It is the more vigorous, the more fully estab-
lished, and the clearer in its aims and methods. It is centred
in the United States. Avoiding metaphysical issues, it con-
centrates on the development of normative concepts of
the identity and emancipation beyond sheer liberty of the
black peoples of the Americas and on strategies for their
application towards social reconstruction of American
societies. Issues of race and moral attitudes and actions
become dominant in it. The discussion of race, however,
is, only now overcoming a remarkable denial of the reality
of race which merely confused the factitious with the ficti-
tious. This form of black philosophy uses techniques of
analytical philosophy to re-cluster and redefine concepts
relating to issues of social identity, social and economic
emancipation and justice, and relations between cultures.
It uses the re-clustered and redefined concepts to direct
the critique of phenomena relating to them. It calls to its
aid the categories and syntheses of the European contin-
ental tradition in philosophy in the endeavour to develop
and illuminate strategies for the existential grounding
of historical readings and the elimination of reifying
processes and bad faith in the continuance of racist
displays.
It has reinvigorated its topics by making the black
experience salient as a modifier of the intuitions, ideals,
common sense, and persuasiveness of argumentation in
the social and normative domain. In this way, it has shed
considerable light on its topics, especially those of social
discrimination, affirmative action, and the underclass. Its

intention, however, is not the mere clarification of con-
cepts, but the promotion of emancipation beyond liberty.
w.e.a.
*negritude.
Gordon R. Lewis (ed.), Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black
Existential Philosophy (New York, 1997).
Henry O. Oruka, ‘Sage Philosophy’, in R. H. Coetzee and A. P. J.
Roux (eds.), The African Philosophy Reader (London, 1998).
Kwasi Wiredu, ‘How not to Compare African Thought with
Western Thought’, in R. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An
Introduction (Washington, DC, 1979).
George Yancy (ed.), ‘Lewis R. Gordon’, in African-
American Philosophers (New York, 1998).
bladders of philosophy
Reason, an Ignis fatuus, in the Mind,
Which leaving light of Nature, sense behind;
Pathless and dang’rous wandring ways it takes,
Through errors Fenny—Boggs, and Thorny Brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower, climbs with pain,
Mountains of Whimseys, heap’d in his own Brain:
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down,
Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown,
Books bear him up awhile, and make him try,
To swim with Bladders of Philosophy . . .
( John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
‘Satyr on Mankind’, lines 12 –21)
Rochester derides the tendency of philosophers and
others to elevate ‘Reason, which Fifty times for one
does err’ over ‘certain instinct’. He declares *reason a
‘cheat’, because it first ‘frames deep Mysteries, then finds

them out’. The doubts it stirs up make ‘Cloysterd
Coxcombs’ follow formulas, not appetites, and drove
Diogenes to abandon the world for a tub. As Rochester
implies, when the reasoning mind is made indubitable
bladders of philosophy 99