The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 13 pot

starting point and final arbiter, everything else, including
its body, becomes the external world, whose nature, and
even existence, is forever doubtful, perhaps mind-
dependent. Yet, as Thomas Reid put it, ‘reason’s light’ and
the senses’ corollary dimness ‘both came out of the
same shop’, so each is likely to be as faulty—or effective—
as the other. j.o’g.
Blanshard, Brand (1892–1987). American, educated
partly in England as a Rhodes Scholar, who defended
*rationalism and *idealism during an era in which they
had few defenders. He taught at the University of Mich-
igan, Swarthmore, Columbia, and for most of his career at
Yale University. He argued against the doctrine of Hume
that causation is merely the constant conjunction of
events and the view of *Logical Positivism that a priori
statements are merely consequences of linguistic conven-
tions. There are, Blanshard said, genuine ‘necessary con-
nections’ in the world. A naturalist in ethics, Blanshard
held that ‘to call an experience intrinsically good is to say
that it is fulfilling and satisfying’. Since he granted ‘that the
word “good” has [in addition] an aura of emotional and
associative meaning’, he could ‘keep emotive meaning
and also keep it in its place’. A naturalist in religion too, he
took ‘the service of reason’ as his religion. ‘That service
calls for the use of one’s reason to embrace as much as one
can of the reason implicit in the universe, and its use at the
same time to define and harmonize the ends of practical
life.’ Blanshard’s personal demeanour was one of extraor-
dinary graciousness. p.h.h.
P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (La Salle, Ill.,
1980).

blindsight. Absence of visual awareness despite the pres-
ence of visual capacity. Some brain-damaged humans
retain discriminative capacities in portions of the visual
field—manifested, for example, in correct ‘guesses’ con-
cerning what is there—in which they report they can see
nothing. (Removal of the visual cortex in the rhesus mon-
key also apparently induces blindsight.) Philosophical
interest arises because the phenomenon casts doubt on
the relation usually assumed between *consciousness and
*perception. j.horn.
L. Weiskrantz, Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications (Oxford,
1986).
Bloch, Ernst (1885–1977). Bloch believed that reality is an
ongoing ‘mediation’ between object and subject. This
somewhat baffling claim should be read in the light of the
fact that, although his reputation in the West was as a lead-
ing Marxist philosopher, in respects Bloch’s debts
were to the deeper and more ancient roots of *Natur-
philosophie. Apparently, the basic stuff of existence
(Urgrund) has a kind of teleological drive towards the end
of the life process (Endziel). Causally, this is all driven by a
fundamental cosmic force—‘hunger’—which Bloch saw
as translatable into ‘hope’ in our own species. Politically,
the end-point translates into a utopia where the exploit-
ation of humans by fellow humans has ceased. m.r.
E. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Berlin, 1954–9).
W. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London, 1982).
Block, Ned (1942– ). American philosopher, best known
for his work on *images and his inventive objections to
*behaviourism and *functionalism. Consider a chess-

playing computer in which every possible position has
been stored in memory, together with a good move which
it makes automatically if that position turns up. Its high
standard of play could hardly be ascribed to its intelligence.
Block describes an analogous program (even more
remote from practical possibility) for a robot. It would
have the behavioural capacities of an intelligent person,
but ‘the intelligence of a toaster’. If its practical impossibil-
ity may be disregarded, it looks like a counter-example to
behaviourism. Against functionalism Block uses similarly
ingenious examples to emphasize the problems posed by
the alleged possibilities of transposed and absent *‘qualia’.
Functionalists reply that his reasoning begs the question.
r.k.
N. Block, ‘Troubles with Functionalism’, excerpt repr. in Mind
and Cognition, ed. W. G. Lycan (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
boat, Neurath’s. ‘We are like sailors who have to rebuild
their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dis-
mantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best com-
ponents.’ Originated by Neurath and later adopted by
Quine, this simile depicts anti-*foundationalism and *nat-
uralism. For Neurath, the simile goes beyond epistemol-
ogy. His pragmatism encompasses the social sciences and
extends to society and politics: knowledge and life are
built without foundations. n.c.
t.u.
N. Cartwright, K. Fleck, J. Cat, and T. Uebel, On Neurath’s Boat
(Cambridge, 1994).
Otto Neurath, ‘Protokollsätze’, Erkenntnis (1932–3), repr. as
‘Protocol Statements’, in Otto Neurath, Philosophical Papers

1913–1946, ed. and tr. R. S. Cohen and M. Neurath (Dordrecht,
1983).
Bobbio, Norberto (1909–2004). Leading Italian philoso-
pher of politics and law, who taught in the university of
his native Turin and became a life senator in 1984. His aim
was a synthesis of the liberal concern with individual lib-
erty, rights, and the rule of law with the socialist concern
with equality and social justice. Bobbio’s main contribu-
tion was to democratic theory. On the one hand, he criti-
cized participatory theorists for concentrating on who
holds power to the neglect of the moral and practical issue
of how power is exercised. He believed that a liberal con-
stitutionalist democracy, including social along with civil
and political rights, to be the only feasible and legitimate
form of democratic rule in modern societies. On the other
hand, he believed that democratic decision-making can
and should be extended over a far greater range of centres
of power than simply central government. He contended
100 bladders of philosophy
that battles over where you can vote have now replaced
the debates over who can vote as the key area for demo-
cratic advance. r.p.b.
*Italian philosophy.
Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1987),
ch. 8.
Bodin, Jean (1530–96). French political theorist cele-
brated for Six livres de la république (1576). Like Hobbes,
with whom he has some ideas in common, Bodin feared
civil war. His Republic was inspired by that feeling, and he
belonged to a group known as the Politiques, who wished

to support royal power as the safeguard of peace. He
regarded the natural grouping of the family as the main-
stay of social order, and made the principle of absolute
sovereignty the defining principle of the state. He allowed
that the state, based solely on sovereign power, might be
monarchical or democratic, but argued that the only
really well-ordered state was one with undivided power,
a monarchy. His advocacy of undivided sovereign
power was not consistently combined with his belief in
constitu-tionalism. r.s.d.
*conservatism.
G. H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London, 1937).
body. One of the most fundamental concepts in philoso-
phy because of the role it plays in the picture of an ‘exter-
nal world’ composed of three-dimensional entities which
we perceive. Generally contrasted in this sense with space,
the medium containing these entities, bodies are also con-
trasted with minds (except in the thinking of materialists
like Hobbes) because the external world containing bod-
ies is not external to my own body; it is rather that my
body is itself one of them. Once this picture holds sway,
two great problems emerge. One is that, if my knowledge
of reality is confined to my own perceptions, how can I be
certain what the world is really like, or even that it exists at
all? Almost all the great philosophers have regarded these
as difficult questions, some concluding that there is no
external world, some that we can’t know what it is like.
This is not surprising: given the picture of perceptual
experience which generates such questions, they are
unanswerable. If my perceptions are private mental

phenomena, the gap between them and the ‘physical’
world is unbridgeable.
The other great problem is that I appear in this scheme
of things to have a special and peculiar relationship with
one of the entities in the physical world, which is my body.
But it is difficult to say why I believe, as it is generally
claimed I do, that it belongs to me. Descartes was inclined
to think that I regard it as mine because it always accom-
panies me, which might be called the ‘stray dog’ concep-
tion of ownership. It ought to be clear, however, that any
such account is confused: it relies on describing me, and
where I am, in terms that are ruled out by the picture
which generates the problem. If I am, as Descartes
thought, a mind, a non-spatial entity, it makes no sense to
say where I am, and hence no sense to suggest that my
body might be in the same place or close by.
Both these alleged problems, then, have tormented
philosophers endlessly precisely because they are gener-
ated by a metaphysical picture which makes them
insoluble. c.w.
M. Proudfoot (ed.), The Philosophy of Body (Oxford, 2003).
C. Williamson, ‘Attitudes Towards the Body: Philosophy and
Common Sense’, Philosophical Quarterly, 40, no. 161 (1990).
body and mind: see mind–body problem.
Boethius, Anucius Manlius Severinus (c.480–c.526).
Roman patrician, Master of the Offices under the Italian
king Theodoric, later accused of treason and magic,
imprisoned at Pavia, tortured and executed; an early emi-
nence in the tradition of Latin philosophy stretching for-
ward to Kant. Besides commentaries on Cicero,

Porphyry, and Aristotle, essays on logic, and short trea-
tises on the Trinity, we still have from him textbooks on
his ‘quadrivium’ of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and
music, intended for his own darkening times but destined
to serve all the Latin Middle Ages. Their tone is Platonist,
their aim not practice but understanding of the cosmos as
befits a ‘liberal’ education. In prison he wrote the incom-
parable Consolation of Philosophy, which contains (at 5. 6) a
famous definition of *eternity as ‘perfect possession all at
the same time of endless life’, and perhaps the first clear
statement of the difference between conditional and sim-
ple necessity (the necessity that he’s-walking-if-you-
know-he-is does not—when added to the fact that you
know he is—‘drag with it’ the necessity that he’s-walking).
For many centuries Aristotle was known in the West only
from two of Boethius’ translations. c.a.k.
*Platonism.
H. Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology,
and Philosophy (Oxford, 1981).
J. Marenbon, Boethius (Oxford, 2003).
Bogdanov, Alexandr Alexandrovich (1873– 1928), real
name Malinovsky. Bolshevik philosopher and ideologist
who developed ‘empirio-monism’, a combination of
Marxism and the positivist *‘empirio-criticism’ of Mach
and Ave-narius. Empirio-monism advances an extreme
collectivism where reality is ‘socially organized experi-
ence’ and the distinction between individual minds (i.e.
between individual ways of organizing experience) will
dissolve once social conflict is eradicated by communism.
Bogdanov was a significant leader of the Bolshevik fac-

tion until 1909, when Lenin condemned Russian empirio-
criticism as a revisionist heresy. Thereafter Bogdanov’s
political star declined, though he continued to develop his
ideas, first in science fiction, then in the ‘general organiza-
tional science’ of tektology. After the 1917 revolution,
Bogdanov was influential in the ‘proletarian culture’
movement. He died in the service of his collectivist
ideals after performing upon himself an experiment in
Bogdanov, Alexandr Alexandrovich 101
blood transfusion designed to promote ‘the comradely
exchange of life’. d.bak.
A. A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1904–6).
—— Essays in Tektology, tr. George Gorelik (Seaside, Calif., 1980).
Bohr, Niels (1885–1962). Danish physicist and Nobel
prize-winner (1922). Bohr made important contributions
to atomic theory and nuclear physics (the liquid drop
model) and, indirectly, influenced the rise of molecular
biology. Much to his surprise he found that his early
(1910) belief that experience is basically ambiguous was
supported by ‘hard and solid’ scientific evidence: concepts
firmly grounded in facts divide into mutually exclusive
or ‘complementary’ groups all of which are needed for
stating what we know, though the use of any particular
group rules out the use of the rest. According to Bohr
different cultures, different concepts or attitudes within
a particular culture (truth and clarity, love and justice),
and different methodological approaches (mechanicism
and teleology in the life sciences) are related in a similar
way. Bohr believed that the problems created by the
paradoxical status of human beings—they are part of the

world and yet put themselves outside of it when claiming
to possess knowledge—are resolved by using comple-
mentarity descriptions instead of a single ‘objective’
frame. p.k.f.
A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times in Physics, Philosophy and Polity (Oxford,
1991). Literature, analysis, and biography.
Boltzmann, Ludwig (1844–1906). As philosopher of sci-
ence Boltzmann emphasized, against the positivist phe-
nomenalists (Mach, Duhem), the role of invented
hypotheses and the importance of posited unobservable
theoretical entities and properties. He defended atomism
in a period in which it was under sceptical attack. Along
with J. C. Maxwell he is the inventor of modern statistical
mechanics, his contributions including the Boltzmann
equation, the H-theorem allegedly proving irreversible
approach to equilibrium, and the ergodic hypothesis. His
was also the discovery of the association of entropy with
the probability of the micro-states of a system. He intro-
duced the first ‘anthropic’ argument into physics in his dis-
cussion of the place of non-equilibrium in an (allegedly)
mostly equilibrium universe and originated the claim that
entropic increase in time is the ground of all of our intui-
tive distinctions between past and future. l.s.
*theory.
E. Broda, Ludwig Boltzmann (Vienna, 1955).
Bolzano, Bernard (1781–1848). Bohemian philosopher,
mathematician, and logician; a late follower of Leibnizian
rationalism and a critic of Kant’s philosophy of mathemat-
ics. Bolzano developed a special logico-ontological atom-
ism directed against radical scepticism and subjectivism.

The objectivity of knowledge had to be secured by the
existence of non-linguistic entities (ideas, propositions,
and truths) independent of human beings and prior to cog-
nition. As mathematician Bolzano helped to establish the
foundations of analysis (for example, the Bolzano–Weier-
strass theorem), attempted to elaborate mathematical
method, and anticipated some basic ideas of Cantor’s set
theory. His major work, Wissenschaftslehre (1837), con-
tains various contributions to logic and semantics con-
cerning the relations of compatibility, derivability, and
con-sequence, the deduction theorem, and the logic of
classes, entailment, and probability. He was also influen-
tial as a social moralist. m.p.
k.b.
J. Sebestik, Logique et mathématique chez Bernard Bolzano (Paris,
1992).
Bonaventure, St (1221–74). A native of Tuscany, he
joined the Franciscan Order, and subsequently studied at
Paris under Alexander of Hales, who influenced him
strongly. He later became Professor of Theology at Paris,
before being appointed Minister-General of the Francis-
cans (1257), and Cardinal in the year before his death. His
writings are in the Augustinian tradition but he did not
ignore the writings of Aristotle. Bonaventure, always
more a theologian than a philosopher, rejected important
parts of Aristotle’s system, for that system failed to take
account of central truths such as the divinity of Christ
and the triunity of God. Amongst other doctrines he
rejected Aristotle’s teaching on the eternity of the world.
Bonaventure’s great contemporary Aquinas had argued,

contrary to Aristotle, that reason alone could not settle the
issue whether the world was eternal, but Bonaventure
rejected Aquinas’s position also, and held instead that
Aristotle’s doctrine was impossible, for if the world had
indeed lasted for an infinite time the infinite must be get-
ting bigger because each new day is a further period of
time added to an infinitely long period; yet there cannot be
two infinites one of which is bigger than the other. It is
therefore a matter of reason and not of faith that the world
has not existed from all eternity. a.bro.
E. Gilson, The Philosophy of Bonaventure (London, 1938).
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1906–45). German Lutheran theo-
logian martyred by the Nazis. His ‘non-religious inter-
pretation of biblical concepts’ has been misunderstood as
a kind of secularism. In fact, Bonhoeffer thinks that the
growth of scientific atheism in the West provides an
opportunity to dispense with God as an empty intellectual
postulate, and return to the living *God who suffers as
Christ: the self-revelation that essentially distinguishes
Christianity from other religions. This ‘theology of the
cross’ is apparent as early as the dissertation Akt und Sein
(1931), his most overtly philosophical work. The cost of
discipleship argued for in Nachfolge (1937) is the death of
the old worldly self in submission to Christ. Nazism shows
that human beings are not naturally religious, and Hitler is
the anti-Christ. Theologically, Bonhoeffer’s thought
emphasizes the immanence rather than the *transcend-
ence of God. In this it is arguably consistent with some
102 Bogdanov, Alexandr Alexandrovich
twentieth-century positivist, materialist, and naturalist

attacks on the possibility of metaphysics. s.p.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being (Akt und Sein), tr. Bernard
Noble (London, 1963).
—— The Cost of Discipleship (Nachfolge), tr. R. H. Fuller with revi-
sions by Irmgard Booth and a forward by Bishop G. K. A. Bell
(London, 1971).
—— Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E. Bethge (London, 1971).
boo–hoorah theory. Apt nickname for crude version of
*emotivism. The theory states that we use ethical words
to express our feelings or attitudes and to evoke similar
feelings or attitudes in other people. Hence, ‘. . . is wrong’
or ‘. . . is right’ amount only to ‘Boo!’ or ‘Hoorah!’ This
provides only an embryonic theory of moral language,
involving a sharp distinction between facts and values.
The theory was developed into more subtle versions of
emotivism. r.s.d.
*emotive theory of ethics.
A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1936), ch. 6.
Boole, George (1815–64). Mathematician, born in Lin-
coln and died while Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s
College, Cork. In 1847 Boole proposed a *calculus for
proving *syllogisms; it involved translating each syllogism
into arithmetical notation and then eliminating a variable
with the help of the laws of arithmetic (such as x + y =
y + x) together with the new law x
2
= x. Boole’s creatively
chaotic ideas led directly to the invention of *propos-
itional calculus and *Boolean algebras, after tidying up by
W. S. Jevons, C. S. Peirce, and others. Boole gave several

different interpretations of his calculus, interpreting the
variables either as propositions or as classes, or even as
periods of time. With hindsight we can see Boole’s sug-
gested correspondences between these interpretations as
early steps in *formal semantics. w.a.h.
George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are
Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (Lon-
don, 1854; repr. New York, 1958).
Boolean algebra. A simple and elegant type of algebraic
structure. In 1847 George Boole gave the structure its first
unrefined description as part of his development of an
algebra of logic. His aim was to translate sentences
expressing logical relations into algebraic equations which
were then to be manipulated according to algebraic laws
to determine what can be deduced from the original sen-
tences. The algebraic laws can be thought of as axioms
governing the operations they mention. Boole saw that
the axioms do not have a unique subject matter but rather
characterize a type of structure. This generalizing move
enabled the Boolean structure to be discerned in a wide
variety of domains; for example, there are Boolean alge-
bras of propositions, sets, and switching-circuits.
In formal terms, a Boolean algebra is a structure con-
taining a set B, two binary functions (intersection or
meet) and ∨ (union or join) on B, one unary function '
(complementation) on B, and two distinguished elements
0 (the null-element) and 1 (the unit-element) of B, satisfy-
ing the following axioms, for all x, y, z ∈ B:
1. x ∨ (y ∨ z)=(xy) ∨ z and x (yz)=(xy)
z.

2. x ∨ y = y ∨ x and xy= yx.
3. x ∨ (yz)=(x ∨ y)(x ∨ z) and x (y ∨ z)=
(xy) ∨ (xz).
4. x ∨ x' = 1 and xx'=0.
5. x ∨
0=x and x 1=x.
A binary relation ≤ on B is defined as x ≤y ↔ xy= x;
≤ partially orders B. To see that the algebra of sets is a
Boolean algebra let B be the power set of any set S,be
set-theoretic intersection, ∨ be set-theoretic union, ' be
complementation with respect to S, 0 be the null set, and 1
be S. Then ≤ is set-theoretic inclusion. a.d.o.
R. R. Stoll, Set Theory and Logic (San Francisco, 1961), ch. 6.
bootstrapping. An anti-holist account of theory-testing
designed to show how *evidence can count for or against
a single hypothesis instead of the entire theory it belongs
to. Bootstrapping construes the confirmation of a hypoth-
esis, H, by evidence, E, as depending upon whether an
instance of H can be deductively or probabilistically
derived from E together with other hypotheses (‘boot-
straps’) from the theory H belongs to. Unlike *hypo-
thetico-deductive accounts, bootstrapping does not have
as a consequence that evidence which supports any
hypothesis equally supports any consistent conjunction of
that hypothesis and any irrelevant propositions you
choose. j.b.b.
Clark Glymour, Theory and Evidence (Princeton, NJ, 1980).
Bosanquet, Bernard (1848–1923). British philosopher
who, influenced by T. H. Green, was, along with F. H.
Bradley, one of the chief promoters of Hegelian, or

absolute, *idealism in late nineteenth-century England.
He taught for a while at Oxford (and more briefly later at
St Andrews) but spent most of his life as a writer and
engaged in the politics of charity. Less sceptical and more
purely Hegelian than Bradley, he wrote on metaphysics
and logic: Knowledge and Reality (1885); Logic; or, The Morph-
ology of Knowledge (1888). Probably his best work is
The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899; 4 edns.; frequently
repr.). In it he identifies the individual’s real will with the
state and hence holds that ‘the common self or moral per-
son of society is more real than the apparent individual’.
Given this great importance of the state as ‘the fly-wheel
of our life’, he easily constructs a retributive theory of pun-
ishment in which punishment is someone’s ‘right, of
which he must not be defrauded’. r.h.
A. J. M. Milne, The Social Philosophy of English Idealism (London,
1962).
bourgeoisie and proletariat. In Marxian theory, the two
most historically influential social classes in modern
∨
∨
∨
∨
∨∨
∨∨∨
∨∨
∨
∨∨∨ ∨
∨
bourgeoisie and proletariat 103

capitalist society, which is fundamentally characterized by
the *class struggle. The bourgeoisie are those who pri-
vately own the means of production and live from the
profits and interest on capital; the proletariat is the class of
wage-labourers hired and exploited by capital. Marx
credits the bourgeoisie with creating the productive forces
which are the foundation of modern society; but he thinks
the potential of these forces to serve humanity will be actu-
alized only after the social order has been revolutionized
by the proletariat. a.w.w.
*dictatorship of the proletariat.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York,
1974).
G. A. Cohen, ‘Bourgeoisie and Proletarians’, in S. Avineri (ed.),
Marxist Socialism (New York, 1973).
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Har-
mondsworth, 1968).
Boyle, Robert (1627–91). Boyle is well known as a scientist
but underrated as a philosopher. He wrote interestingly,
lengthily, and with more philosophical sophistication
than the admiring Locke on topics such as atheism, atom-
ism, epistemology, God’s existence, miracles, natural
laws, qualities, and scientific method. Emphasizing experi-
ment over theory Boyle refused, as Leibniz complained to
Huygens, to construct global theories. Boyle’s universe
involved God at every stage as creator, designer, sus-
tainer, and frequent intervener. For example, God ‘almost
every moment in the day’ works ‘Physical Miracles’ by
forming ‘Animals of such a Compounded nature, as the . . .
Laws of matter & motion, would not w

th
out a peculiar
interposition of God, be able to produce’. None the less, in
science appeal to God was inappropriate: all ‘intelligible’
explanations must be in terms of minute corpuscles of
matter and their motions. j.j.m.
Michael Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle Reconsidered (Cambridge,
1993).
bracketing. An essential part of Husserl’s so-called phe-
nomenological reduction. According to Husserl, and some
of his followers, we can describe the objects of our minds as
phenomena only after we have bracketed their existence. By
bracketing the objective world, one suspends judgement
about the existence of the things around us. The botanist, for
example, takes for granted that there are trees and studies
their characteristics. The phenomenologist does not deny
that the botanist is right, but he puts the existence assump-
tion in brackets, and tries to describe the phenomena pre-
cisely as they present themselves to him. For example, the
phenomenologist may study the object of a mental act of
seeing a tree, the precise what of what he is seeing at that
moment, irrespective of whether his perception is correct,
of whether there are trees, or even of whether there are any
perceptual objects at all. r.g.
*phenomenology.
For Husserl’s description of bracketing see Edmund Husserl,
Ideas, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, 1962), 96–101.
Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846–1924). British philoso-
pher, fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Bradley is indis-
putably the greatest British philosopher between J. S. Mill

and Bertrand Russell. His philosophy is a late example of
the movement of British philosophers away from the trad-
ition of British *empiricism towards German *idealism,
in particular Hegel. However, despite himself, he was
much nearer to British Empiricism than other British
idealists of the period such as T. H. Green and Bernard
Bosanquet.
Ethical Studies (1876) was his most Hegelian work. Con-
tending that a moral outlook must be justified by the form
of ‘self-realization’ it offers, Bradley examines a series
of moral systems which in turn rectify each other’s
contradictions.
*Hedonism, whether individualist or universalist, pre-
sents itself initially as the most attractively down to earth
of moral theories. But the maximization of pleasure pro-
vides no genuine form of self-realization for anyone. The
pleasures of different times form no real totality, since
they never exist together, and can never constitute a state
of affairs of which anyone can say: ‘Here I have that which
I was seeking’.
Bradley now turns to the sharply opposed Kantian ideal
of ‘duty for duty’s sake’. Here the good is identified with
sheer rationality; one is to behave only in a way which one
could will universalized without contradiction. This
advances on hedo-nism in recognizing the self as somehow
a ‘universal’ rather than as a series of ‘perishing particu-
lars’. But its purely formal notion of morality provides nei-
ther a definite guide nor any proper human satisfaction.
Next comes the vastly superior Hegelian morality of
‘my station and its duties’. Here the demands of morality

are no longer those of a remote logical abstraction, with
no appeal for flesh and blood, but those of a role in a con-
crete historical community such as provides a satisfying
life for the real empirical man. Much more satisfactory as
is this social ethic than the two preceding, it cannot be the
final truth. For the community itself may be rotten with a
morality to be transcended; moreover, full self-realization
need not be purely social.
These limitations push us on to what Bradley calls ‘ideal
morality’. The basic injunction here is to realize every-
where the best self, and our idea of our best self, though it
must arise from the ideals we learn in the family and in life
in the community, may develop beyond it to take account
of values learnt from other societies or based on internal
criticisms of our own society. The basic test for the
adequacy of an ideal morality is that it satisfies the indi-
vidual as a ‘concrete universal’, that is as an individual
whose life is a unity, resting on his unity with his kind,
rather than, like the other three theories respectively, as a
mere series of experiences, or as some abstract pure ego,
or as being entirely socially conditioned.
In his next great work, The Principles of Logic (1883), the
Empiricists’ psychologistic approach to logic is criticized
in a manner not unlike Husserl, but, like Husserl, he
includes the examination of strictly necessary features of
104 bourgeoisie and proletariat
thinking within its remit. A main theme is the inadequa-
cies of the traditional Aristotelian analysis of judgements
into subject and predicate. There are many propositions
(e.g. existential and relational ones) and related forms of

inference which escape this net.
Ultimately every judgement ascribes a single (normally
complex) idea as predicate to Reality as subject. Reality is
that greater whole of which the perceptual manifold pre-
sents itself as an incomplete fragment. There are intri-
guing similarities and contrasts between Bradley’s position
here and that of Bertrand Russell, whose theory of definite
*descriptions (talking of the King of France where Bradley
talks of the King of Utopia) as belonging logically to the
predicate owes somewhat to him, as does his account of
existential (also universal) propositions. For Russell the
most basic factual propositions concern particulars with
which we are acquainted; those whose grammatical sub-
jects are only identified by description are logically deriva-
tive. Bradley is even more insistent that it is only because
our access to Reality is not entirely conceptual that we get
beyond the circle of our own ideas in thought and treats
demonstratives quite similarly, though holding that they
must be dropped in fundamental theory.
*Inference is the construction of a larger mental repre-
sentation put together from those which constitute the
premisses, and reading off a conclusion from the holistic
character it turns out to possess (oddly anticipative,
though without any whiff of materialism, of suggestions
by some current ‘cognitive scientists’).
Appearance and Reality (1893) is the main statement of
his metaphysics. Book i,Appearance, argues that most ordin-
ary things (e.g. things and their qualities, time and space,
causation, the self, even things-in-themselves) are merely
appearances, while book ii, Reality, strains to characterize,

with more final truth, the Reality they so usefully mis-
represent to us, namely the *Absolute, a single cosmic
experience of which we (so far as we truly are at all) are
components.
In calling something an appearance Bradley means, pri-
marily, that the concept of it only gives a pragmatically
useful way of thinking about some aspect of the world of
which, being incoherent, it cannot give us a finally satis-
factory grasp. Something in the Absolute, for example,
corresponds to Time, but it is so unlike Time, as we ordin-
arily conceive it, that thus conceived it is ultimately an
illusion. However, reality (as predicate) is a matter of
degree, that is, our concepts are true (and conversely false)
of reality (as thing) in different degrees. The concept of the
Absolute is more adequate than that of *time, but both are
just our way of grappling with what the intellect cannot
finally grasp. This is established by two main lines of argu-
ment, firstly, that reality must have a unitary togetherness
which cannot be captured by the ordinary conception of
many distinct things in relation, secondly, that all concrete
reality must somehow be psychical in its nature. Reality is
somehow one vast eternal self-experiencing many-in-one.
Though often presented somewhat sophistically, there is
a vein of powerful argument to back this conclusion up.
The most famous feature of the first line of argument is
his attempt to show that the idea that the world consists in
a multiplicity of distinct things standing in various rela-
tions to each other is incoherent. For when two terms
stand in a certain relation, we must either think of the rela-
tion as a separable component in the total state of affairs or

in some other way. (1) If you think of it as some kind of
separable component, then it seems to require to be related
to its terms by fresh relations, and these to be related to
those relations and their terms by further ones, and so on
in an impossible regress. (2) To avoid this you may treat
the relation as an aspect of one or other of the terms, or
divide it into two aspects one pertaining to each of the
terms. But in either case the terms are apparently left
apart, each simply possessing a feature which does not
bring it together with the other one. (3) Finally, you
may treat the relation as an aspect of the terms taken
together as constituting a unit. But that betrays the very
notion of a relation by merging the terms between
which they hold into a single thing; moreover, their
togetherness does not seem particularly due to the rela-
tion since they have already (logically speaking) to be
together to provide a home for it. In effect, Bradley’s pos-
ition is that relational thought allows us to shift between
thinking of a thing as something conceivable independ-
ently of how it stands to other things and thinking of it as
a mere aspect of some larger whole they jointly help to
constitute, two ways of conceiving it which militate
against each other.
Bradley’s solution is that for one thing to be (as we would
ordinarily somewhat distortingly put it) related to another is
in the end always a matter of their being aspects of some
more comprehensive and more genuinely concrete individ-
ual, conceived apart from which they are necessarily to
some extent misconceived. If so, and since everything is
somehow related (as we would ordinarily put it) to every-

thing else, there must be some maximally comprehensive
and concrete individual (the Absolute) from which every-
thing else is an abstraction.
That this ultimate individual must be a single cosmic
experience including everything is established by the sec-
ond line of argument according to which we can form no
genuine conception of an unexperienced reality. An appli-
cation of this principle at the level of finite existence
shows that it consists ultimately of myriad finite centres of
experience and their presentations on the basis of which
they construct the world of common sense, while the
monistic argument shows that these centres must pertain
to a Whole conceived apart from which they are partly
misconceived.
In some respects his form of absolute idealism receives a
better presentation in his Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).
This also contains the classic statement of a *coherence
theory of truth and knowledge. His contention that there
are no basic judgements beyond revision, and that the
whole system of our thought continually faces experi-
ence as a whole, has strong affinities with aspects of the
work of W. V. Quine. Nicholas Rescher has derived much
Bradley, F. H. 105
of his own elaborate coherence theory of truth from
Bradley. t.l.s.s.
L. McHenry, Whitehead and Bradley: A Comparative Analysis
(Albany, NY, 1992).
A. Manser, Bradley’s Logic (Oxford, 1983).
——and Guy Stock (eds.), The Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (Oxford,
1984).

Nicholas Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford,
1973).
T. L. S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Real-
ity (La Salle, Ill., 1993).
Richard Wollheim, F. H. Bradley (Harmondsworth, 1959).
brain in a vat. Contemporary counterpart of Descartes’s
hypothesis that one’s beliefs are induced by an evil genius.
Used within a premiss in arguments for scepticism, the
hypothesis says that nothing exists except one’s brain—in
a vat, in order that its electrochemical activity should be
sustained—so that whatever may seem to one to be the
case, its seeming so is accounted for by such activity alone.
The sceptic invites one to say ‘For all I know, I am a brain
in a vat, and there is no external world’.
Brains in vats are introduced also in philosophy of mind
in connection with the idea that a person’s psychological
faculties require nothing but a brain’s operations. The idea
may be questioned, and will be by the supporters of *anti-
individualism and others. j.horn.
*malin génie.
Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, 1981),
ch. 1.
Braithwaite, Richard Bevan (1900–90). Professor of Phil-
osophy at Cambridge, mainly known for his staunchly
empiricist views within philosophy of science. Thus he
followed Hume in believing that laws of nature do not
embody any kind of necessity but are, objectively, merely
constant correlations. Braithwaite also attempted to apply
the mathematical theory of games within moral philoso-
phy, and to reinterpret religious statements as declar-

ations of intention to accept particular moral ways of
living.
Rather than considering scientific assertions in their
rough-and-tumble variety of uses within scientific com-
munities, in Scientific Explanation Braithwaite described
uninterpreted formal systems, and how a tough empiricist
might give them meaning as scientific statements. Within
this basic framework he discussed the standard problems
of theoretical terms, models, probability, induction, laws,
causation, and explanation. a.j.l.
*Cambridge philosophy; empiricism.
R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (Cambridge, 1955).
Brandom, Robert B. (1950– ). Distinguished Service Pro-
fessor at the University of Pittsburgh, working largely in
the philosophy of language, but also in metaphysics and
the history of philosophy. His prominent book Making it
Explicit defends and develops an inferentialist, as opposed
to a representationalist, approach to the relationship
between language and the world. This approach starts by
explaining the *pragmatics of language in terms of the
inferences which language-users should accept and the
attitudes other language-users should have to those infer-
ences; so the norms of language use must be understood
in social terms. *Semantics is then explained in terms of
pragmatics; according to Brandom, the meanings of
words depend on their roles in inference. By understand-
ing the way those inferences allow certain substitutions,
Brandom claims to explain the representational language
of truth and reference. His work is influenced by *prag-
matism, in particular the *neo-pragmatism of *Sellars, as

well as by *Hegel’s construction of objectivity out of the
process of dialectic. r.a.k.s.
R. Brandom, Making it Explicit (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
——Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of
Intentionality (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
Brentano, Franz (1838–1917). German philosopher edu-
cated at Würzburg, Munich, Berlin, and Münster Univer-
sities. He was awarded his Ph.D. at Tübingen University
in absentia in 1862. Two years later he was ordained a
priest. In 1866 he wrote his habilitation thesis and was
appointed Privatdozentat the University of Würzburg. His
best-known book, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint
(tr. London, 1973), appeared first in Leipzig, in 1874.
Brentano was called the same year to the University of
Vienna as full Professor of Philosophy. After he left the
Catholic Church and got married in 1879 he had to resign
the professorship, but continued to serve as Privatdozent at
Vienna University until 1894. He spent the following
years mostly in Florence, and finally in Zurich, where
he died.
The Background: The Philosophy of Aristotle.Franz Brentano’s
work was inspired by the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he
regarded as a ‘man for all times’. Much of Brentano’s work,
although critical in spirit, is dedicated to Aristotelian issues.
His doctoral dissertation The Several Senses of Being in Aris-
totle (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1862; tr. Berkeley, Calif., 1981)
and his habilitation thesis on The Psychology of Aristotle
(Mainz, 1867; tr. Berkeley, Calif., 1977) focus on Brentano’s
chief preoccupations, psychology and *ontology. Brentano
also investigates these topics in his lectures on metaphysics

which began in 1867.
Metaphysics, says Brentano, in order to be established
as a strict science, has first to seek for a basis in certainty.
Scientific knowledge has to show itself either as evi-
dent, and therefore true, or at least as highly probable.
Immediately evident thoughts, for Brentano, are the
‘Archimedean points’ of all our knowledge and arguments,
and of all sciences (The True and the Evident (tr. London,
1966)). Secondly, metaphysics has to deal with ontological
questions, (a) in a narrow sense, where it is *‘phenom-
enology of mind’, and (b) in a wider sense, where it is
the ontology of things other than ourselves: the world,
God (On the Existence of God (tr. The Hague, 1987)), the
cosmos.
106 Bradley, F. H.
The Ontology of Mind: Psychology and Phenomenology.
Brentano’s psychology starts from an empirical standpoint.
Empirical psychology, in his view, is to be defined as the
science of inner experience or awareness. This conscious
awareness, considered in itself, presents itself as being
(a) intentionally related to external entities, and (b) reflex-
ively related to itself. Brentano analyses both relations in
order to describe the ultimate elements of the experienced,
intentional structure of the mind. This he does in his theory
of *intentionality. He sets out to analyse the epistemic sta-
tus of these phenomena in his Descriptive Psychology (Ham-
burg, 1982; tr. London, 1994), which he also called
‘descriptive phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenognosis’. His
aim is ‘to define the elements of the human consciousness
and of their interconnections (as far as possible) in an

exhaustive manner, in order to give us a general notion of
the entire human consciousness’ (ibid. 1–2). Brentano gives
a ‘pure description’ of the facts of consciousness, rather
than a consideration of the physiological genesis of our
conscious phenomena, since such a genetic psychology
must rest on a descriptive psychology. In order to give a
complete description (‘microscopic analysis’) of the phe-
nomena of the human mind, philosophical psychology
must first and foremost examine ‘mental phenomena’,
‘functions’, or ‘acts’ (The Psychology of Aristotle and Psych-
ology from an Empirical Standpoint). Thus Brentano became
known as the founder of ‘act psychology’.
All the data of our consciousness, according to
Brentano, are divided into two classes: the class of physical
phenomena and the class of mental phenomena. A mental
phenomenon is, for instance,
[e]very idea or presentation which we acquire either through
sense perception or imagination . . . By presentation I do not
mean that which is presented, but rather the act of presentation
. . . Furthermore, every judgement . . . is a mental phenomenon.
Also to be included under this term is every emotion . . . the term
‘mental phenomena’ applies to presentations as well as to all the
phenomena which are based upon presentations . . . This act of
presentation forms the foundation not merely of the act of judg-
ing but also of desiring and of every other mental act. Nothing can
be judged, desired, hoped or feared, unless one has a presentation
of that thing . . . Examples of physical phenomena, on the other
hand, are a color, a figure, a landscape which I see; a chord which
I hear; warmth, cold, odor which I sense; as well as similar images
which appear in the imagination. (Psychology from an Empirical

Standpoint, 78–80)
The characteristic common positive property of each
mental phenomenon is what was
called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and
what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, refer-
ence to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be
understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity
. . . We can therefore define mental phenomena by saying that
they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally
within themselves. (Ibid. 88–9.)
The characteristics of mental phenomena stated by
Brentano here and elsewhere can be summarized under
three headings.
1. There are three classes of them: presentations, judge-
ments, and emotive phenomena. They are either acts of
presenting which serve as a basis for all other mental acts,
i.e. these other acts necessarily contain presentations as
‘parts’ and are dependent on presentations, which are the
‘fundaments’ or ‘motifs’ for the other ‘superposed’ acts.
This implies that the science of judgements, i.e. logic
(The Theory of Correct Judgement; German edn. Die Lehre
vom richtigen Urteil (Bern, 1956)), and the science of
emotive phenomena, i.e. ethics (The Origin of Our Know-
ledge of Right and Wrong (tr. Westminster, 1902; repr.
London, 1969); The Foundation and Construction of Ethics
(tr. London, 1973)), relies on fundamental psychological
observations of modes of presentations. In a correct judge-
ment, some presentation, or a part of it, is either affirmed
or denied if the categories true or false are evidently
applicable. Analogously, in a correct act of emotion,

something is either loved or hated correctly, or preferred
correctly, motivated by the goodness of what is presented.
Yet acts of judgements and of emotions differ funda-
mentally from acts of presentation (a) because there is
no inner difference in presentations—they are all positive;
(b) because a judgement as well as an act of emotion is not
just a connection or separation of presentations but an
additional judging or emotive act, respectively, on the
ground of what is presented.
2. Mental phenomena (a) are or have an intentional
relation towards a ‘content’ (a thought) or an ‘immanent
object’ (an object thought of); (b) are conscious and
reflexive mental acts. To any conscious act there essen-
tially belongs a relation. And as in any relation, there
are two inseparable correlates. The one correlate is the
conscious mental act itself (the ‘fundament’ of a relation),
the other correlate is that (the ‘terminus’ of a relation)
to which it is directed. The conscious act is always the
real correlate; that about which it thinks is not necessarily
a real adjunct of the act of thinking. I may think about
a unicorn as my thought content. My thinking about
it is real, the unicorn is not. It is a thinker who has
mental phenomena or properties: only individuals, per-
sons, can have psychical properties. Structures or abstract
systems cannot have them. If a psychical state is to
be exemplified, then it can be exemplified only in an
individual.
3. Mental phenomena show a ‘twofold energy’. Each
act, whilst directed towards something, at the same time
and in passing is reflexively directed towards itself. Being

presented with a physical or ‘primary’ object, e.g. a sound,
we are aware of being presented with it. In a mental
phenomenon as such, the consciousness of itself, the
‘secondary object of perception’, is included. This ‘sec-
ondary inner perception’ is a true, self-referential, evident
perception in the strict sense. When an intentional phe-
nomenon occurs to us, we know that it occurs; and in
knowing this we grasp its essential nature. When we
judge, we know what the property of judging is and
what is logically required if an individual is to have such a
property.
Brentano, Franz 107
Ontology of Things. In his philosophy of mind, or
psychology, Brentano deals mainly with inner experience
and sets aside the objects of outer experience.
In the metaphysical context, he argues for the value and
the validity of our mediate, indirect knowledge of bodily
substances and their properties, with properties of all
beings, of God and the world. This ontology in the
broader sense presupposes the ontology of mind, which
thus forms a foundational, integral part of the ontology of
things. So, as the phenomena of human consciousness
essentially are characterized as being ‘intentionally
directed’, the ‘outer world’ analogously is seen as charac-
terized by its teleological structure.
In his description of mental phenomena and their struc-
tural interrelation Brentano aims at a ‘microscopic’ analy-
sis, as remarked earlier, but in his macroscopic cosmology
he sees ‘the whole as end of the parts’. His ontology of
things develops what he had envisaged in his doctoral dis-

sertation, where he attempted a description of Aristotle’s
theory of categories. Brentano differentiates the cat-
egories into (1) objective (‘reelle’) concepts of the kinds
(genera) of being, and (2) semantic (‘logische’) modes
(predicaments) of speaking about being. This differenti-
ation is to be seen not as a fundamental discrepancy, but as
a change of aspects in a description theory of being.
Brentano goes on to emphasize that only real things, ‘res’,
or individuals, not concepts of things, or universals, are
the proper objects of description.
Brentano’s Influence. Brentano’s empirically motivated
philosophy was designed in analogy to the method of nat-
ural science: ‘The adequate method of philosophy is that
of natural science.’ This was the thesis of his habilitation
colloquium and Carl Stumpf, who was then studying
under Brentano, reports that it attracted many students to
him. Among them were Stumpf himself, known for his
Tonpsychologie; Anton Marty (and students of his in the
Prague Linguistic Circle, such as Franz Kafka and Max
Brod), known for his descriptive philosophy of language;
Sigmund Freud; the ‘Graz School’ around Alexius
Meinong, known for its ‘object theory’; Christian von
Ehrenfels, for his ‘Gestalt theory’; Edmund Husserl, for his
phenomenology; Tadeusz Kotarbinski, for his ‘reism’;
Thomas G. Masaryk, for his ‘concretism’; George F. Stout
and his students Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore; the
Würzburg School centred around Oswald Külpe, known
for its experimental psychology of thinking; Max Scheler,
known for his ethics; and Martin Heidegger. Quite a num-
ber of more recent influential thinkers, such as Roderick

M. Chisholm, admit Brentano’s influence, and there is
good reason to call him the ‘grandfather of phenomen-
ology’ (Gilbert Ryle) and ‘terminus a quo of Austrian phil-
osophy’ (Rudolf Haller). w.b.
Wilhelm Baumgartner, Franz-Peter Burkard, and Franz Wied-
mann (eds.), Brentano Studien. An International Yearbook of Franz
Brentano Forschung (Würzburg, 1988– ). Each volume dedi-
cated to a special topic in the tradition of phenomenological
and analytic philosophy.
Roderick M. Chisholm, Brentano and Meinong Studies (Amster-
dam, 1982).
D. Jacquette (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brentano (Cam-
bridge, 2004).
Linda L. McAlister (ed.), The Philosophy of Brentano (London,
1976). Collection of first-class papers on Brentano, and
bibliography.
Brentano’s thesis: see intentionality.
Bridgman, Percy William (1882–1962). Distinguished as a
physicist, Bridgman has had considerable impact on the
philosophy of science in the twentieth century, with his
insistence that the work and results of science, especially
physics, are ‘operational’. Much impressed by Einstein’s
work on relativity and its seemingly paradoxical conclu-
sions about time, Bridgman argued that the only recourse
is a fairly stringent form of instrumentalism, whereby the
concepts of science are reduced or replaced by the oper-
ations necessary to achieve or measure them.
Many professional philosophers have found Bridg-
man’s thinking simplistic, arguing that science simply has
to be ‘open-ended’, reaching beyond its empirical base,

making claims which transcend anything reducible to
operations. Bridgman himself conceded that sometimes
the connection in science between concepts and oper-
ations is ‘indirect’. In the opinion of critics, however,
being ‘indirectly operational’ is somewhat on a par with
being ‘a little bit pregnant’. m.r.
*instrumentalism.
P. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics (New York, 1927).
—— The Way Things Are (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).
P. Frank, The Validation of Scientific Theories (Boston, 1959).
Brightman, Edgar Sheffield (1884–1953). American
exponent at Boston University of personalistic *idealism,
who held that *God created out of a chaotic, irrational
‘Given’, not ex nihilo. The Given’s relation to God is left
somewhat ambiguous, however. Brightman’s attempts to
make his account self-consistent by distinguishing differ-
ent senses of ‘internal to God’ are not entirely convincing.
None the less, Brightman unequivocally stated that God,
finite in power, is growing in perfection through effort in
time. Such a religious metaphysics has affinities with the
process theism of Whitehead and Hartshorne as well as
with the mature views of Royce. Characteristic of one
strain of American philosophical theology is a desire to
cling to the essentials of monotheism while conceiving of
God as a quasi-democratic leader who heroically struggles
to perfect himself and the world, just as he asks lesser
persons to do. p.h.h.
Andrew J. Reck, Recent American Philosophy: Studies of Ten
Representative Thinkers (New York, 1964).
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme (1755–1826). A judge of

appeal and amateur philosopher. He upstaged the aes-
theticians by treating *taste simply as the sense by which
we discern flavours. The charm of personality that carried
108 Brentano, Franz
him unscathed through a lifetime of revolutionary vio-
lence still makes his gastronomic meditations delightful
reading. He does for eating all that Izaak Walton did for
angling, and more. Cooking, which Plato had despised as
a mere ‘routine’, is transmuted into philosophy out of
office hours. In the Meditations ‘On Dreams’ and ‘On the
End of the World’ he shames, respectively, Descartes and
Kant; and we can all profit from his opening Aphorisms,
for instance ‘The discovery of a new dish does more for
the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star’.
w.c.
J. A. Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Tran-
scendental Gastronomy (1825), tr. Peter Davies with biograph-
ical note (New York, 1926).
British philosophy today. Most (although not all) of the
philosophy practised in Britain today is firmly within the
tradition of analytic philosophy, a tradition shared with
North America, South Africa, and Australia (and certain
European countries, especially Germany and Austria). It
would be hard to argue that there was any longer a char-
acteristically British way of doing philosophy. Certainly,
there are no movements peculiar to the country that are as
readily identifiable as that of British empiricism in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the ‘ordinary
language’ philosophy of 1950s Oxford. In addition, the
influence of North American philosophers has been very

substantial, and the initial stimulus for some research pro-
grammes has come from them. (One indication of this
influence is the number of British university chairs taken
up by—or at least offered to—American philosophers in
recent years.) However, any country has its own distinc-
tive intellectual history, even if philosophical problems
and methods are international. The following therefore
attempts to identify in a necessarily very selective way
some trends in the development of philosophy in Britain
since 1970, and some of the key personalities in that devel-
opment, rather than describe in detail any particular set of
problems.
The legacy of Logical Positivism. Following A. J. Ayer’s vig-
orous application of the principles of verificationism to
statements that appear to refer to a reality that is beyond
immediate appearances—statements about the past, for
example, Michael Dummett articulated a more circum-
spect anti-realism concerning such statements. This pro-
ject has been extended by Crispin Wright, who has
developed a detailed account of what is at issue in disputes
concerning the reality of certain kinds of object. A position
intended to be intermediate between *realism and anti-
realism, ‘quasi-realism’, has been articulated by Simon
Blackburn (now back in Britain after an extended stay in
the USA).
Philosophy of language and mind. Greatly influenced by the
American philosophers Saul Kripke and Donald David-
son, work in the philosophy of language in the 1970s (espe-
cially in Oxford) placed the issues of truth and reference
centre stage, representing them as key to a number of

debates. The two prominent questions were: Can the
meaning of sentences be given by an account of what
would make them true? and How do singular terms suc-
ceed in referring to particular objects? Since then, and
partly as a result of the work of Gareth Evans (d. 1980),
there has been a shift of focus towards mental representa-
tion, the corresponding questions being: What deter-
mines the content of a thought? and How does a thought
succeed in being about a particular object? This second
question is sometimes referred to as the problem of
*intentionality. There has also been work on specific
forms of mental representation—for example, spatial rep-
resentation. Interest in the relationship between language
and mind led to the foundation in 1985 of a new British-
based journal, Mind and Language.
Philosophy of mind, on both sides of the Atlantic, was
dominated in the 1970s and 1980s by two aspects of David-
son’s work: the analysis of intentional *action and the
defence of *physicalism (although action had already been
the subject of studies by Stuart Hampshire and Elizabeth
Anscombe). The worry was expressed, however, that
Davidson’s own brand of physicalism (anomalous
monism) was unstable—specifically, that it collapsed into
*epiphenomenalism. In the 1990s, enthusiasm for phys-
icalism waned somewhat with the emergence of doubts as
to whether a non-trivial form of physicalism could be
articulated. These doubts were quite independent of any
renewed enthusiasm for dualistic accounts of the mind.
Among other developments could be mentioned the
interest in computational models of the mind and the

mechanisms underlying ascription of mental states to
others.
Metaphysics. Britain in the 1950s and 1960s was not particu-
larly congenial to metaphysics, although the appearance
in 1959 of P. F. Strawson’s enormously influential Individ-
uals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics was an honourable
exception. The last twenty years, however, has seen a
remarkable resurgence of interest. There has been
increasing confidence in the power of language to capture
substantial truths about the structure of the world, as
opposed to the logical form of sentences, and a greater
willingness to take certain kinds of statement at face value,
as positing the existence of things that are independent of
our conceptual schemes. (Perhaps one can identify the
Australian influence here, through the work of such
philosophers as David Armstrong and J. J. C. Smart, but a
major stimulus has been, once again, American, particu-
larly in the form of David Lewis (d. 2001).) Two debates
might be mentioned as illustrative. (a) Realism concerning
abstract entities. Work in the philosophy of mathematics
has involved a reconstruction of Frege’s work on the
existence of numbers as objects, and the articulation
and defence of a mathematical ‘Platonist’ (i.e. realist)
position, and its extension to abstract entities generally.
What is distinctive about British work in the area is the
attention given to the epistemological problems raised by
Platonism, especially the question of whether it can be
British philosophy today 109