The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 15 pot

false. An argument of the calculus is defined to be valid
just in case in any interpretation in which all the premisses
are true, the conclusion is also true. Then the minimum
requirement for the rules of inference is that they be
sound: if there is a proof of A from a set Γ, then the argu-
ment with the members of Γ as premisses and A as con-
clusion is valid. a.d.o.
A. Church, Introduction to Mathematical Logic (Princeton, NJ,
1956), i introduction, sect. 7.
W. Kneale and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962),
ch. 9.
E. J. Lemmon, Beginning Logic (London, 1965).
calculus, predicate: see predicate calculus.
calculus, propositional: see propositional calculus.
Calvin, John (Jean) (1509–64). French theologian.
Reformer active in Geneva. A principal founder of Protest-
antism, his main theological doctrine is absolute predestin-
ation, which entails the inevitability of the eternal
salvation of the elect and the eternal damnation of the
unchosen, irrespective of perceived desert but according
to the will of God. The inamissibility of *grace is a
logical consequence of absolute predestination (because Fis
inamissible if and only if F is not liable to be lost). Calvin’s
theology entails the Lutheran doctrines that Scripture is
the only guide to faith, there is human free will before but
not after the Fall of Adam, and the distinguishing of the
righteous from the sinful is by faith alone (sola fide), not
works. Calvinism is characterized by a strong emphasis on
the omnipotence of God and human sin, rather than
God’s benevolence and human freedom. *Barth’s argu-
ments against the possibility of *natural theology and

insistence on the unique importance of God’s self-
revelation in Christ lend support to Calvinism. s.p.
*Calvinism.
John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion (Grand Rapids,
Mich., 1987).
Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford, 2004).
Alister E. McGrath (ed.), The Christian Theology Reader (Oxford,
2002), pp. 425–6.
Calvinism. Based primarily upon the teachings of John
Calvin (1509–64), Calvinism has a doctrinal side and a cul-
tural side. The former stresses the sovereignty of God, the
goodness of his creation, the sinfulness of human crea-
tures, the sole authority of Scripture, and (though not as
centrally as commonly believed) the predestination of his
creatures to eternal life made possible by Christ’s redemp-
tive work. The latter (built on the theme of the goodness
of creation) stresses an approach to culture which empha-
sizes involvement, hard work, and material success rather
than withdrawal and other-worldly flight. Often charac-
terized as deterministic, the teachings of Calvinism are
perfectly compatible with the *freedom of the will, as
(non-compatibilist) philosophers understand this notion.
Thus, for example, the doctrine of pre-destination entails
that one’s final state is determined, but it does not entail
that one is unfree with respect to all of the numerous deci-
sions one makes over the course of one’s life. Unlike
Lutheranism, Calvinism has evolved out of the teachings
of more than one individual; besides Calvin, these include
Zwingli, Melanchthon, and Bucer. g.f.m.
*compatibilism and incompatibilism.

P. Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford, 2004).
J. T. McNeill, History and Character of Calvinism (Oxford, 1954).
Cambridge change. If a predicate is true of an object x at a
time t, but not true of x at a later time, then x has under-
gone what P. T. Geach has called a ‘Cambridge change’.
Many philosophers believe that Cambridge change is
necessary but not sufficient for genuine *change. For
example, when my brother grows taller than me, I
become shorter than him. I have undergone a Cambridge
change, but not a genuine change. t.c.
Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Causality and Properties’, in Identity, Cause
and Mind (Cambridge, 1984).
Cambridge philosophy. In the Middle Ages Cambridge
was a good deal smaller than Oxford and produced no
philosopher to compare with Oxford’s Duns Scotus or
Ockham. Francis Bacon was the first important philoso-
pher to study at Cambridge, although he, like Hobbes,
Locke, and Bentham at Oxford, thought little of the
instruction he had received at his university. The first sig-
nificant teachers of philosophy at Cambridge were the
mid-seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, espe-
cially Cudworth and Henry More. For the most part
members of the strongly Calvinist Emmanuel College,
they were hostile to all kinds of fanatical enthusiasm and
argued for the rationality of religion against Calvinism,
Laudian High Anglicanism, and the Erastianism of
Hobbes. They sought to found morality on reason, not
will, whether of God or king, and, against Descartes’s
mechanism argued that the world as a whole is a unity,
animated throughout by purpose.

Samuel Clarke, writing in the early years of the eight-
eenth century, was the most mathematically minded of
philosopher-theologians and very much a product of
Newton’s Cambridge, although he did not teach there. He
defended, against Leibniz, Newton’s theory of space as
absolute. His abstract lucidities were echoed, towards the
end of the century, in the ethics and theology of William
Paley, Christian utilitarian and authoritative expounder of
the ‘evidences’ of Christianity.
A lonely figure in the unphilosophical Cambridge of the
mid-nineteenth century was William Whewell. His
account of scientific thinking as *hypothetico-deductive,
with hypothesis being prior to observation, was unfairly
criticized, and unreasonably obliterated, by J. S. Mill.
Whewell’s views, unlike Mill’s, were based on wide experi-
ence of scientific work and profound knowledge of the
history of science. John Grote revived philosophy in Cam-
bridge later in the century, and by the end of it the subject
120 calculus
philosophy in britain: early twentieth century
ludwig wittgenstein: his influence coursed twice
through Western philosophy, first via Logical Positivism in
the 1930s and 1940s, then through a diaspora of disciples in
the 1950s and 1960s. The open texture and vatic style of his
writings allow endless discovery and reinterpretation.
bertrand russell transcended the successive influences
of Bradley, Moore, Frege, and Wittgenstein to emerge as
the most widely read British philosopher of the twentieth
century.
g. e. moore defended the value of common sense and clar-

ity in philosophy and inspired a generation of British intel-
lectuals with his ethical writings.
r. g. collingwood, the last bastion of idealism in inter-
war Oxford, stressed the historical nature of the philo-
sophical enterprise.
was pursued there with distinction by the idealists James
Ward and J. M. E. McTaggart—the second of whom
derived extra-ordinary conclusions with seemingly rigor-
ous logic from self-evident premisses in crystalline
prose—and the utilitarian moral philosopher Henry Sidg-
wick, an inspiring example of intellectual scrupulousness.
Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, who were to over-
whelm the prevailing idealist consensus, were pupils
of these three. In the first decade of this century Russell,
with A. N. Whitehead, produced Principia Mathematica,
expanding the range and increasing the systematic charac-
ter of logic and purporting to derive mathematics from it.
He brought the topic of meaning to the centre of philoso-
phy and, with his theory of descriptions, supplied an
exemplary instance of how it should be analysed. Moore
set about the doctrines of other philosophers, whether
idealists or utilitarians, with stolid but acute literalness.
Russell and Moore agreed that there are many different
things, of different fundamental kinds, in the world and
that reality is not, as the idealists had concluded, one all-
inclusive mental or spiritual thing.
Wittgenstein came to Cambridge to learn from Russell
and soon reversed the relationship. There is nothing of
Moore in the Tractatus, in which the topics he and Russell
had worked on together are oracularly set out: an

intensely abstract account of the ultimate logical con-
stituents of the world and of our thought and speech
about it. Absent from 1914 to 1929, he came back with a
point of view closer to Moore, at least in taking ordinary
language to be in need, not of replacement, but of a fuller,
deeper understanding. Ramsey, the only disciple he seems
to have respected intellectually, was, like him and Russell,
a mathematician. Dying at 26, he showed enormous
promise. Wittgenstein dominated Cambridge philosophy
until his death in 1953 and for a considerable time after-
wards. But since about 1960 Cambridge philosophy,
much like that of Oxford, has largely lost its distinctive
flavour, perhaps because of the reversal by the philosophy
of the United States of its former colonial dependence on
that of Britain. a.q.
*London philosophy; Oxford philosophy; English phil-
osophy; British philosophy today.
Cambridge Platonists A school of seventeenth-century
English philosophers who found in Platonism a way of
criticizing Hobbes and of defending Christianity against
the fanaticism of Puritans, Calvinists, and Prelatists.
The Cambridge Platonists included Ralph Cudworth
(1617–80), who is perhaps best known, John Smith
(1618–52), Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), and Nathaniel
Culverwell (1618–50). All these thinkers were from
Emmanuel College, and to these we can add Henry More
(1614–87) who was from Christ’s College. Ralph Cud-
worth eventually became Master of Christ’s (for over
thirty years) and Professor of Hebrew in the University.
His major work The True Intellectual System of the Universe

(1678) was conceived as a systematic refutation of
Hobbes, and indeed it was a major work of seventeenth-
century philosophical thought. What follows is an
account of the main lines of argument of the Cambridge
Platonists, especially as these are found in Cudworth and
John Smith.
Hobbes’s account of the mind was reductivist—he
argued that it consisted of motions in the substance of the
brain. Perception consisted of a passive registration by the
sense-organs of vibrations received from outside, ‘appar-
itions’ or ‘seemings’, as Hobbes calls them. John Smith in
his Discourse Concerning the Immortality of the Soul points
out, probably following Plotinus, that Hobbes has not dis-
tinguished between the motions of material particles and
our awareness of the motions. He is maintaining, in other
words, that Hobbes lacks an account of *consciousness.
Smith argues that there must be some incorporeal sub-
stance through which we become aware of the ‘seemings’
and by means of which we can interpret and correct them.
For Smith, then, the senses presuppose a mind as their
co-ordinating principle. In a similar sort of way Cudworth
presents a theory of knowledge which anticipates Kant:
mind is not secondary and derivative but ‘senior to the
world, and the architect thereof’.
The doctrine of the eternal and immutable character of
*morality is the most characteristic doctrine of the Cam-
bridge Platonists. Things, including morality, are as they
are by nature and independently of our wills. They have
been created by a God whose will is subject to his wisdom
and goodness. The mind of man is derivative from the

divine mind, which is itself antecedent to all corporeal
things. When human ideas are true they are readings of
the divine thoughts. In other words, there is a realm of
intelligible ideas to which ‘good’ or ‘just’ belong, every bit
as much as geometrical truths. These intelligible and
changeless ideas are rational patterns in the mind of God
and are accessible to human minds through the use of
right reason. It is clear from this that in their metaphysics
and moral philosophy the Cambridge Platonists (influ-
enced by Plato, Plotinus, and Descartes) totally reject
Hobbes.
In their philosophy of religion they reject *Calvinism,
and in particular they reject both the doctrine of the total
depravity of man since the Fall, and also the doctrine of
predestination. They believed in the power of each person
by the light of reason to move towards perfection. It is also
interesting to note that the Cambridge Platonists were
themselves Puritans by origin and education. Their Puri-
tan dislike of ritual, vestments, and stained glass was of
course supported by their belief in Platonism. But they
were mild and tolerant in their views and were sometimes
called the ‘latitude men’. Their position had something in
common with that of Milton, and pointed towards *deism
and the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury. r.s.d.
*latitudinarianism.
S. Hutton, ‘The Cambridge Platonists’, in S. Nadler (ed.), A Com-
panion to Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 2002).
Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London,
1953).
122 Cambridge philosophy

Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639). A highly prolific Ital-
ian philosopher imprisoned for years by the Inquisition for
his *libertinism, Campanella was a contemporary of fel-
low Dominican Giordano Bruno, defender of Galileo
Galilei, and correspondent of the French libertines Gabriel
Naudé and François de La Mothe le Vayer. In Atheismus
Trionfatus (1631), Campanella claimed to expose the argu-
ments for atheism in order to refute them—the triumph
over atheism of the title. But because he proposed a form
of *deism, discoverable by the light of reason alone, of
which Christianity was just one manifestation and Christ
a preacher of a natural morality, the book was denounced
as proclaiming ‘atheism triumphant’, and pillaged for a
more decidedly atheistic tract, Theophrastus Redivivus. In
Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun, investigation of
nature would benefit mankind, whether by means of
political and ethical laws or by technology. Rulers would
use natural philosophy and scientific astrology, purged of
superstition, to control and transform the world. l.p.
G. Ernst, Religione, ragione e natura: Studi su T. Campanella (Milan,
1991).
F. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London,
1964).
Campbell, John (1956– ). British metaphysician and
philosopher of mind, at Berkeley, formerly at Oxford.
Campbell’s distinctive approach to metaphysics and the
philosophy of mind aims to reconcile a broadly Kantian
investigation of the structure of self-conscious thought
about an objective world with the results of empirical
enquiry into the nature of cognition. Past, Space and Self

(1994) undertakes to map out the central conceptual skills
making up the human capacity for self-conscious thought
and distinguishing human beings from other animals.
These conceptual skills involve capacities to think not just
about oneself, but also about space and time and the
nature of physical objects. Reference and Consciousness
(2002) explores the functional role of conscious experi-
ence. Campbell sees conscious attention to objects as
playing a foundational role in thought and action—a foun-
dational role that we can only understand through the
complex interactions between conscious attention and the
subpersonal information-processing mechanisms that
solve the binding problem. j.ber.
Camus, Albert (1913–60). Algerian French philosopher
who is best known for his concept of ‘the *absurd’, which
he described as ‘a widespread sensitivity of our times’ and
defined as a confrontation between our demands for ratio-
nality and justice and the ‘indifferent universe’. He
explored this idea in novels, The Stranger (1942), The Plague
(1947), and The Fall (1956), as well as philosophical essays,
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951). He was
born and grew up in war-torn north Africa, and memories
of the bitter civil war and his experiences under the Nazi
occupation permeated his philosophy. Like his one-time
philosophical friend and colleague Jean-Paul Sartre, he
was obsessed with questions of responsibility, innocence,
and guilt in the face of overwhelming tragedy. In The
Plague, for example, he pits his characters against an invis-
ible, unpredictable, lethal enemy in order to explore the
vicissitudes of responsibility in a situation for which no

one can be blamed. Nevertheless, there are heroes and
there are cads. In his early novel The Stranger, by contrast,
Camus introduces us to a character who is utterly innocent,
despite the fact that he violates virtually all of the dictates of
‘decent’ society, including the prohibition against murder.
Camus’s notion of ‘the absurd’ is best exemplified by
the Greek mythological hero Sisyphus, who was con-
demned by the gods to the endless, futile task of rolling a
rock up a mountain. Nevertheless, Camus assures us, Sisy-
phus is happy. He accepts his futile fate, but he also ‘rebels’
by scorning the gods. In The Stranger, by contrast, the pro-
tagonist had simply accepted the absurdity of life, ‘open-
ing up his heart to the benign indifference of the universe’.
But Camus, like Sartre, also displays a deep appreciation of
what we might call ‘original’ guilt, guilt that is inherent in
our very existence as human beings. In The Fall, a particu-
larly perverse character named Jean-Baptiste Clamence,
who was once a lawyer, makes the conflation of guilt and
innocence a matter of philosophical principle. How could
one be innocent in a world that is absurd? Camus won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. r.c.sol.
*existentialism.
D. Sprintzen, Camus: A Critical Examination (Philadelphia, 1988).
Canadian philosophy. Something of Canada’s national
character is reflected in the philosophical effort of three
centuries. Starting from 1665 with the teaching of the
Ratio Studiorum at the Jesuit Collège in Quebec, empha-
sis was placed on the writings of Aristotle and Aquinas
which were thought to serve the higher objectives of the-
ology. From early in the nineteenth century, the philo-

sophical programme of French Canada was to resist the
attractions of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlight-
enment. In due course, efforts were made to articulate a
positive Catholic philosophy which, as it emerged, under-
wrote the ultramontanism which prevailed in French
Canada until the 1960s. In English Canada philosophy
originated with the founding of the first universities in
Maritimes in the eighteenth century. In most cases, the
university had a religious affiliation, and it is natural that
there should have been a preoccupation with the philo-
sophical foundations of religion. Canada’s harsh climate
also called forth a serious interest in the philosophy of
nature, and her emerging social pluralism issued in the
philosophical analysis of politics.
Genuine philosophical ability was widely scattered
across the country, and no English-speaking university
could represent itself as the centre of philosophical effort
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but
Toronto began in the early 1920s to achieve a hegemony
that would endure for nearly fifty years. In 1929 the Insti-
tute of Mediaeval Studies (later the Pontifical Institute)
was established in that city, and it is to this day one of the
Canadian philosophy 123
world’s leading centres for such work. George Brett and
later Fulton H. Anderson shaped the philosophy depart-
ment at the University of Toronto into one of the fore-
most places for the study of the history of philosophy.
Canada had made substantial and internationally rec-
ognized contributions to medieval studies and the history
of philosophy generally, but in the 1960s the Quiet Revo-

lution was under way in Quebec, and everywhere Sputnik
worked its magic. Canada came to know unprecedented
expansion of its universities, in both size and number. In
Quebec philosophy became more vigorously secular and
made significant contributions to the intellectual founda-
tions of her own social transformation. Anglophone
philosophers were turning their attention away from the
history of philosophy and from cultural self-examination,
and were positioning themselves in research programmes
set elsewhere, chiefly those of the analytic philosophers of
Cambridge, of positivism and its critics, mainly in the
United States, of Oxford linguistic philosophy, and of post-
war phenomenology and existentialism in France and
Germany.
The University of Western Ontario assembled an inter-
nationally recognized team of philosophers of science,
and a monograph series was launched. The Canadian
Philosophical Association originated its official journal,
Dialogue, in 1961, and this was followed ten years later by
the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Russell: The Journal of
the Bertrand Russell Archives (based at McMaster Univer-
sity). In the same year the Society for Exact Philosophy
came into being. Laval théologique et philosophique was born
in 1945, and Philosophiques in 1974.
After the transformations of the 1960s it may be said
that professional Canadian philosophy lost much of the
discernibly Canadian character that it had had previously.
Canadian researchers now work on specialized problems,
and employ methods to do so, which resist narrowly
national definition. Even so, there are exceptions to this

trend. George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965) and Tech-
nology and Empire (1969) had an influence well beyond the
universities, and did much to underwrite a resurgence of
Canadian cultural nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Grant’s work was in the main greeted unsympathetic-
ally by academically based philosophers. They found its
arguments unrigorous and its Platonized anglicanism
over-sentimental. Thus, while several Canadians, both at
home and abroad, are in the forefront of various branches
of philosophical enquiry, less amply exemplified are con-
centrations of ‘analytically approved’ research accom-
plishment that have a recognizably Canadian ‘signature’.
In the case of Australia, one tends to think of materialism;
present-day Oxford calls to mind neo-Kantianism; and so
on. In some areas, Canadians have achieved dominance,
whether in Gauthier’s work on contractarian ethics, van
Fraassen’s promotion of constructive empiricism, the
Woods–Walton approach to fallacy theory, or the develop-
ment of preservationist variations of paraconsistent
logic by Peter Schotch, R. E. Jennings, and Bryson Brown.
In only one area, however, can there be said to exist a
professionally well-respected signature that reflects a dis-
tinctively Canadian philosophical character. This is the
philosophy of multiculturalism, typified by the works of
Will Kymlicka. Leslie Armour has also provided the
estimable service of showing how deep is the Canadian
intellectual preoccupation with multiculturalism, which
pre-dates by generations Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. So
Kymlicka (and certain of his critics, such as Edward
Andrew) are building upon a thick analytical foundation.

In the Canadian tradition, a just citizenship must
respect a fundamental difference between the rights of
immigrants and the constitutionally protected distinctive-
ness of aboriginals and Québécois. While all immigrants
must have the right to acquire citizenship, neither Can-
adian policy nor practice favours an open border. So there
is a problem about what ethno-cultural justice requires in
the case of illegals, or ‘metrics’ as Kymlicka calls them.
Both Charles Taylor and Kymlicka reflect in their writings
the Canadian openness to ethnic diversity. Taylor sees
religion as essential to ‘deep diversity’. Kymlicka concedes
the impossibility of separating culture and politics, but
favours the expungement of the religious from the polit-
ical. Canadian multicultural politics is an accommodation
of cleavages both ethnic and linguistic. It is not surprising,
therefore, that her leading political philosophers should
emphasize the Canadian confederal state as the appropri-
ate governing structure. Some critics see in these arrange-
ments the loss of Canada’s former distinctiveness, its
replacement by a timorous and unconfident new nation-
alism of the affirmative of otherness, and a misappropri-
ation of the founding rationale of confederation. j.woo.
*American philosophy; Australian philosophy.
Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review (1986): vol. 25 mainly
devoted to philosophy in Canada.
Leslie Armour, The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community
(Ottawa, 1981).
Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski (eds.), Can Liberal Pluralism be
Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern
Europe (Oxford, 2002).

Cantor, Georg (1845–1918). Cantor created the math-
ematics of the *infinite as well as effectively creating *set
theory. A set has the same number of members as another
if each member of either set can be paired with a unique
member of the other. If a set can be put into such a one-to-
one correspondence with the integers it is said to be
denumerable. Cantor demonstrated the denumerability
of algebraic numbers (roots of polynomial equations with
integer coefficients), and the non-denumerability of the
real numbers, numbers whose decimal expansion need
not repeat or terminate (1873, diagonal proof 1891). Can-
tor’s continuum hypothesis (there is no set intermediate
in size between the integers and the real numbers) was
proved by P. J. Cohen (1963), following a partial result by
Gödel (1938), to be consistent with but underivable from
normal set theory. j.j.m.
Joseph Warren Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philo-
sophy of the Infinite (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
124 Canadian philosophy
Cantor’s paradox. How many points are there in a line
segment? As Cantor’s diagonal proof reveals, infinitely
more than there are integers. And in the infinite plane? Just
as many as there are in the line segment. Indeed and in
general, precisely as many as there are in a space of n
dimensions, n ≥ 1. ‘I see it,’ Cantor wrote to Dedekind,
‘but I don’t believe it.’ Is this infinite number of points,
then, the highest degree of *infinity available? No. Cantor
also proved that for any set, a set with more members (the
original set’s power set, consisting of all its subsets) is
constructible. Thus there is no greatest set. Hence also

(Cantor’s paradox) there is not a set of all sets, since such
a supposed total set would at once yield a larger one.
j.j.m.
M. M. Zuckerman, Sets and Transfinite Numbers (New York, 1974).
capacity. A capacity is a *power or ability (either natural
or acquired) of a *thing or person, and as such one of its
real (because causally effective) properties. The natural
capacities of inanimate objects, such as the capacity of cop-
per to conduct electricity, are dispositional properties
whose ascription entails the truth of corresponding sub-
junctive conditionals, such as that an electric current
would flow in a copper wire if a potential difference were
applied to its ends. But the capacities of persons the exer-
cise of which is subject to their voluntary control, such as
a person’s capacity to speak English, do not sustain such a
pattern of entailments and are consequently not strictly
*dispositions. Ascribing to something a capacity to F is not
the same as saying that it is naturally possible for that thing
to F, since circumstances can obtain in which a thing’s
capacity to F cannot be exercised. e.j.l.
*causality; propensity; potentiality.
R. Tuomela (ed.), Dispositions (Dordrecht, 1978).
capitalism. The modern, market-based, commodity-
producing economic system controlled by ‘capital’, that
is, purchasing-power used to hire labour for wages. The
term was first used prominently, and pejoratively, by
Marx, but for defenders of the system it has become a term
of praise.
Marx sees the origins of capitalism in the forcible expro-
priation of European peasants and small artisans during

the later Middle Ages, leading to a separation between the
*bourgeoisie or capitalist class, who privately own the
means of production, and the proletariat or working class.
Possessing no such means, proletarians can live only by
selling their labour power to members of the bourgeoisie.
Ownership of the means of production gives the bour-
geoisie a decisive bargaining advantage over the prole-
tariat, which shows itself in the form of the profit and
interest on capital, resulting from the *exploitation of
wage labour. One central claim of Marxian economics is
that capitalism has been responsible for a colossal growth
in humanity’s productive capabilities. Another is that cap-
ital has an inherent tendency to accumulate, concentrat-
ing social power in the hands of the capitalist class and
bringing the exploited working class more and more
under its economic domination. The potential for a higher
society and a better life which capitalism has made pos-
sible can be realized for the vast majority only if the
workers are emancipated from the domination of capital.
Defenders of capitalism deny the charge that wage
labourers are exploited, citing the indispensable economic
functions performed by capitalists, such as managerial and
supervisory labour, saving, and the assumption of risks.
Critics of capitalism respond that in principle there is no
reason why these functions must be performed by capital-
ists. Workers need not be supervised by those who repre-
sent interests antagonistic to theirs; capitalists typically
bear fewer burdens of deprivation than workers do for the
sake of social saving, and if capitalists are rewarded for
risk-taking, the system offers no similar rewards to work-

ers, who nevertheless risk losing their livelihood when an
enterprise fails. They see capitalists as ‘rewarded’ for per-
forming these functions only because the system gives
them greater control over production, saving, and risk-
taking, hence putting them in a position to reap the fruits
of economic co-operation, accumulation, and good for-
tune. Profit and interest on capital are not rewards for
managing, saving, and risk-taking, but rather conse-
quences of capital’s social power to exploit labour.
To this defenders of capitalism will reply that the failure
of the Soviet system reveals capitalism to be the most effi-
cient way yet discovered to manage a modern economic
system. To grant this point, however, is not in the least to
concede that capitalism is not exploitative, only that we
have yet to find an efficient modern economic system
which does not exploit workers. It is doubtless a troubling
fact that we have not, but this fact provides us with no rea-
son for feeling any loyalty to the capitalist system and
leaves untouched the basic Marxian reason to seek an
alternative to capitalism. a.w.w.
*anti-communism; democracy and capitalism; global-
ization, morality, and politics.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974).
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1982).
Karl Marx, Capital, tr. Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach (London,
1976).
Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London, 1983).
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New
York, 1951).
Paul Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development (London, 1962).

capital punishment. The question whether it is morally
permissible for the state to execute any of its citizens
and, if so, under what circumstances, has been debated
by philosophers, sociologists, and politicians ever since
the middle of the eighteenth century. The arguments
supporting capital punishment have usually been divided
into those based on ‘justice’, which in this context
simply means retribution, and those based on ‘utility’.
The appeal to *justice usually takes the following form:
people deserve to suffer for wrongdoing. In the case of
criminal wrongdoing the suffering takes the form of legal
capital punishment 125
*punishment; and justice requires that the most severe
crimes, especially murder, be punished with the severest
penalty—death. It should be emphasized that somebody
who reasons in this way is not committed to a defence of
the *lex talionis—the principle of ‘an eye for an eye’.
There are four major utilitarian arguments favouring
the death penalty. It is said to deter, and to prevent the exe-
cuted criminals from repeating their crimes, it is less cruel
than life imprisonment (and hence should be welcomed
by the criminal), and it brings a measure of satisfaction to
the family and friends of the victim as well as to other citi-
zens outraged by the crime.
Of the arguments against capital punishment by far the
most important is that sooner or later innocent persons
are certain to be executed. The only way to avoid this is to
abolish capital punishment altogether. Another argument
is that capital punishment lowers the ‘tone’ of the society
in which it is practised. Civilized societies do not tolerate

the torture of prisoners and they would not do so even if
torture could be shown to have a deterrent effect. It has
also been argued by Dostoevsky and Camus that capital
punishment is unjust on retributionist assumptions
because the anticipatory suffering of the person who is to
be executed is immeasurably greater than that of his vic-
tim. Finally, Arthur Koestler and Clarence Darrow have
argued that capital punishment must be unjust because
human beings never act freely and hence should not be
blamed and punished for even the most terrible acts.
Koestler did not see that this argument would undermine
all punishment. Darrow saw this and favoured the aboli-
tion of punishment altogether (as distinct from detention
for purposes of social protection).
By way of commentary it should be mentioned that stat-
istical studies in all parts of the world have shown that
capital punishment does not deter, or rather that its deter-
rent effect is no greater than that of life imprisonment. If
anything, capital punishment tends to inflame certain dis-
turbed individuals and thus leads to an increase in murder.
This fact, together with what is known about the fallibility
of witnesses and juries and the bias and even corruption of
prosecutors, has convinced many educated persons
throughout the world, regardless of their political affili-
ation, that there is no place for capital punishment in a civ-
ilized society. p.e.
H. A. Bedau (ed.), The Death Penalty in America, 4th edn. (New
York, 1988).
—— ‘Capital Punishment’, in H. LaFollette (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook to Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2003).

Thorsten Sellin (ed.), Capital Punishment (New York, 1967).
care, ethics of. This term refers to a group of moral reflec-
tions about the moral emotion and virtue of care that
emerged from feminist theory. The hypothesis that
‘women speak in a different voice’—‘the voice of care’—
rose to prominence in Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different
Voice (1982). Through empirical research, she claimed to
discover a female voice stressing empathic association
with others and a sense of being responsible and caring.
Gilligan thus identified two modes of relationship and two
modes of moral thinking: an ethic of care and an ethic of
rights.
Allied developments then occurred in philosophical
ethics. For example, Annette Baier argued that the reason-
ing and methods of women in ethical theory is noticeably
different from traditional theories. She found in them the
same different voice that Gilligan heard. She criticizes the
near-exclusive emphasis in traditional moral philosophy
on universal rules and principles, to the neglect of sym-
pathy with and concern for others. The ethics of care there-
fore promotes traits in intimate personal relationships,
such as sympathy, compassion, fidelity, discernment,
love, and trustworthiness. t.l.b.
*feminism; feminist philosophy.
A. Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970). German empiricist philoso-
pher and logician who moved to the United States in 1935.
Carnap was a pupil of Frege and much influenced by him,
as well as by Russell and Wittgenstein. He was a prom-
inent member of the *Vienna Circle and a leading expo-

nent of *Logical Positivism before the Second World War.
Technical rigour was a hallmark of his important contri-
butions to formal semantics, the philosophy of science,
and the foundations of inductive *probability.
Carnap’s most important early work was Der logische
Aufbau der Welt (1928), translated under the title The
Logical Structure of the World (1967). This attempted to spell
out in some detail the radical empiricist programme of
reconstructing human knowledge of the social and
physical world and other minds on the basis of individual
experience, using as the sole starting-point the relation of
remembered similarity between experiences. Carnap
originally believed that all meaningful physical concepts
were definable in terms of experience, in accordance with
a strong version of the principle of *verifiability. Later he
moderated this view to accommodate the fact that the
language of physics is not exhaustively translatable into
the language of sense experience. He also came to put
more emphasis on his belief that the method of con-
struction used in the Aufbau could with equal legitimacy
be used to construct individual psychology on a physic-
alist basis.
In The Logical Syntax of Language (1934; Eng. tr. 1937),
Carnap deployed his technical skills to develop a rigorous
formal account of the structure of any possible language,
seeing this as a necessary preliminary to the pursuit of the
only form of philosophical inquiry deemed legitimate by
him—logical analysis. In the foreword of that book he
memorably states his view that ‘Philosophy is to
be replaced by the logic of science [and] the logic of science

is nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of
science’ (p. xiii). Later, however, Carnap became more
concerned with the *semantics of natural and formal lan-
guages, doing work which culminated in his important
and influential book Meaning and Necessity (1947), which
126 capital punishment
laid the foundations of much subsequent work in the
semantics of *modal logic. In that book Carnap argues in
favour of an alternative to Frege’s theory of *sense and ref-
erence, called by him the ‘method of extension and inten-
sion’. Carnap held that this method provided the most
economical account of the logical behaviour of expres-
sions in modal contexts—for instance, the expressions ‘9’
and ‘7’ in the sentence ‘9 is necessarily greater than 7’. His
criticism of Frege involved a rejection of the traditional
category of *names, conceived as a class of expressions
each of which stood for a unique thing.
After the Second World War, Carnap’s energies were
increasingly devoted to the development of inductive
logic as a branch of probability theory, resulting in his
magisterial volume Logical Foundations of Probability (1950)
and many subsequent publications. This interest was con-
tinuous with his earlier ones, since his concern was to put
on a rigorous footing the notion, central to scientific
method, of the confirmation of a hypothesis by empirical
evidence. Although he had abandoned a strong form of
the principle of verifiability, he continued to adhere to a
fundamentally empiricist theory of meaning which
required scientific hypotheses to be susceptible to empirical
confirmation. He also, in consequence, adhered to the

*analytic–synthetic distinction, notwithstanding the stric-
tures of W. V. Quine—though their differences on this
issue were perhaps less substantial than they appeared to
be, since Carnap was always insistent that logical princi-
ples themselves are always a matter for freely chosen con-
vention, to be justified on pragmatic grounds. In all
matters of logic and mathematics, Carnap espoused what
he called the principle of tolerance: ‘It is not our business
to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions’
(Logical Syntax, 51). e.j.l.
*confirmation; formal and material mode.
R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in
Philosophy, tr. R. A. George (London, 1967).
—— Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic,
2nd edn. (Chicago, 1956).
P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, Ill.,
1963).
Carneades (214–129 bc). Head of Plato’s *Academy, who
followed Arcesilaus in emphasizing the sceptical rather
than the dogmatic elements in Plato’s legacy. Carneades
scandalized Cato the Elder by arguing in favour of justice
and against it on successive days. Holding that certainty is
impossible and that we should always suspend judge-
ment, he nevertheless claimed that we should be guided
by the ‘probable’ (in the sense of ‘approvable’ or persua-
sive, not of statistical likelihood). Criticizing both Stoic
and Epicurean views in the debate on freedom and
determinism, he anticipated Gilbert Ryle on the truth of
future contingents and Richard Taylor on agent caus-
ation; but whether he himself did, or as a Sceptic consist-

ently could, assert a libertarian position is controversial.
r.w.s.
A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (London, 1974).
—— and D. N. Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cam-
bridge, 1987). Texts and commentary.
Carroll, Lewis (1832–98). Pseudonym of the Revd Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics don at Christ Church,
Oxford. Best known for his Alice stories, which brim over
with logical puzzles and absurdities and have been duly
pillaged by philosophers. Coming at the tail-end of the
degenerating programme of Aristotelian logic, his contri-
butions to formal logic are inevitably insignificant, their
only lasting value being their testimony to his inimitable
talent for devising extraordinary syllogisms. Carroll’s
most important philosophical article is the characteristic-
ally quaint and deceptively light ‘What the Tortoise Said
to Achilles’ (Mind (1895)). He hints at a deep problem
about the epistemology of valid inference, demonstrating
that the acceptance of a rule of inference cannot be identi-
fied with the acceptance of a conditional proposition.
a.d.o.
J. Fisher (ed.), The Magic of Lewis Carroll (London, 1973).
Special centenary issue of the journal Mind (1995), including the
original 1895 article.
Cartesianism. Name given to the movement inaugurated
by René Descartes (after ‘Cartesius’, the Latin version of
his name); it shaped the philosophical landscape of the
early modern period, and its influence, even today, is by
no means entirely exhausted. In the decades following
Descartes’s death, Cartesianism was seen primarily as a

new programme for physical science, based on math-
ematical principles. Descartes had defined matter as res
extensa, or ‘extended substance’, that is to say, whatever
has length, breadth, and height. The Cartesian pro-
gramme was to exhibit all physical phenomena as explic-
able in terms of the ‘modes’ or modifications of extension;
in effect, this meant showing how all the apparent com-
plexity and diversity of matter could be accounted for sim-
ply by reference to the size, shape, and motion of the
particles of which it was composed. ‘I freely acknow-
ledge’, Descartes had written in his Principles of Philosophy
(1644) ‘that I recognize no matter in corporeal *things
apart from that which the geometers call quantity, and
take as the object of their demonstrations, i.e. that to
which every kind of division shape and motion is applic-
able’ (pt. ii, art. 64).
The appeal of the Cartesian approach in the latter half
of the seventeenth century undoubtedly owed much to its
rejection of occult forms and qualities, and its insistence
that physics should invoke only the ‘clearly and distinctly
perceivable’ properties of mathematics. A growing body
of critics, however, pointed out that mere extension in
three dimensions could yield only an inert and passive uni-
verse. To generate *motion in the system, the Cartesians
had to have recourse to God, whom Descartes had
described as ‘the primary cause of motion, who in the
beginning created matter along with its motion and rest,
and now preserves the same amount of motion as he put
there in the beginning’ (Principles, pt. ii, art. 36). Though
Cartesianism 127

this may seem to be a piece of ad hoc metaphysics, the cash
value of the appeal to immutable and continuous divine
action in the Cartesian system was the rejection of the
Aristotelian assumption that all matter tended ‘naturally’
to come to rest, and its replacement with the Cartesian
principle of the persistence of motion in a straight line
(what has subsequently come to be known as the law of
inertia). The idea of the conservation of motion was
highly influential for the subsequent development of
physics. In later Newtonian physics, however, what is
conserved is mass times velocity, and neither of these
notions is to be found in Descartes; as the working-out of
Descartes’s ‘rules of impact’ make clear, what is conserved
is ‘quantity of motion’, measured simply as the product of
size (volume) and speed (the latter factor, unlike the more
modern notion of velocity, is not held to be affected by a
change in direction of motion).
Although, from a scientific point of view, the eventual
downfall of Cartesian physics was a result of Isaac New-
ton’s formulating mathematical covering laws of far
greater predictive power than anything Descartes had
been able to devise, many of the philosophical debates
over Cartesianism centred on its denial of any inherent
power or force in matter. To some, notably Descartes’s
deviant disciple Nicolas Malebranche, this was a positive
advantage: if *causality involves the necessitating of
effects, only God has the requisite power to count as a
genuine causal agent; matter is, of itself, wholly inert—
mere ‘extended stuff’. For G. W. Leibniz, by contrast, it is
a violation of the *principle of sufficient reason to see

physics as merely a series of arbitrary, divinely decreed
covering laws; the behaviour of matter must proceed
from something inherent in its nature, and hence (contra
the Cartesians), some recourse must be had to the notion
of force or power in things. Such debates indicate the
extent to which the ‘new’ Cartesian physics opened up
serious questions about the nature of causation in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century, paving the way
for David Hume’s eventual radical critique of the very
idea of causal power.
Among philosophers today, the main feature of Carte-
sianism which remains of interest is its theory of the mind.
Descartes, in the celebrated theory known as *dualism,
had maintained that the mind is an entirely separate sub-
stance from the body, and, moreover, that its nature is
wholly distinct from the nature of anything physical: it is
an incorporeal, indivisible, non-spatial, unextended thing,
which is ‘entirely distinct from the body, and would not
fail to be what it is even if the body did not exist’ (Discourse
on the Method, pt. iv). The Cartesian view of the mind as a
*‘ghost in the machine’ of the body (to use Gilbert Ryle’s
celebrated phrase) has few takers nowadays. To begin
with, its view of the nature of the mind remains essentially
obscure: we are simply told what the mind is not (not
extended, not divisible), but are not given any explana-
torily satisfying account of what it is. Moreover, even
granted the existence of such supposed purely spiritual
substance, it is far from clear how it could interact with the
mechanism of the body in the required way. When I
decide to go for a walk my legs move, but if the chain of

impulses generating the requisite muscle movements is
traced back through the nervous system to the brain, the
causal process is somehow mysteriously initiated by a
ghostly *‘volition’ whose nature, and relationship to the
observed physical events, remains beyond the reach of
explanatory science. The form of Cartesianism proposed
by Descartes’s disciples in the late seventeenth century
was content to leave mind–body correlations as irre-
ducible regularities decreed by God: God obligingly
ordains that the required bodily movements occur when I
decide to go for a walk; conversely, he ordains that sensa-
tions of an appropriate kind (e.g. of pain or of colour)
should ‘arise’ in the soul when the organs of the body are
stimulated. Cartesianism thus typically leads to an *‘occa-
sionalism’ with respect to the relation between mind and
body: bodily events are the ‘occasion’ for the production
of mental events and vice versa, but such productivity
remains beyond the reach of human science—not just
something we cannot so far explain, but something that
no scientific account, however sophisticated, could ever
in principle explain.
Cartesian attempts to resolve this puzzle tended to gen-
erate further obscurities. Descartes himself sometimes
seems to have viewed the mind or soul as a kind of non-
physical ‘homunculus’ dwelling inside the brain (he iden-
tified the *pineal gland or conarion as the ‘principal seat’ of
the soul). Some scholastic philosophers had argued for the
existence of a common sensorium where the data from
the five specialized senses are integrated (a notion can-
vassed by Aristotle (see De anima, bk. iii, ch. 1, 425

a
14)).
One might have expected Descartes to have rejected this
idea, both in the light of his resolute hostility to received
scholastic doctrine, and also because of his conception of
the mind as an incorporeal substance; in fact, however, he
not only accepted it, but incorporated it into his own the-
ory of mind–body interaction. The pineal gland receives
data (via the nerves) from all parts of the body, and it is
only after the data have been integrated in the gland into a
unitary signal or impression that any sensory awareness
can occur. ‘The mind’, Descartes wrote in the Sixth Medi-
tation, ‘is not immediately affected by all parts of the body,
but only by the brain, or perhaps just by one small part of
the brain, namely the part containing the “common
sense”.’ In his later work, The Passions of the Soul, Descartes
observes that ‘there must necessarily be some place where
the two images coming through the two eyes, or the two
impressions coming from a single object through the
double organs of any other sense, can come together in a
single image or impression before reaching the soul, so
that they do not present to it two objects instead of one’
(art. 32). The argument is a curious one, since it is not at
first sight apparent why a unitary image in the conscious
mind requires a unitary signal or impression in the brain.
Writing to Mersenne on 24 December 1640, Descartes
reflected that ‘the only alternative is to suppose that the
soul is not joined immediately to any solid part of the
128 Cartesianism
body, but only to the animal spirits which are in its con-

cavities, and which enter or leave it continually like the
water of a river. That would certainly be thought too
absurd.’ The suggestion seems far from absurd to the
modern reader, accustomed to the notion that *con-
sciousness arises from just such a shifting and elusive inter-
play of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex. But to have
contemplated the possibility that consciousness could
arise from purely physical processes would have taken
Descartes away from dualism entirely, and have made the
notion of a separate substance called the mind or soul
redundant—a step the Cartesians were not prepared to
take, since they followed Descartes in insisting that the
complexities of conscious thought could never be
explained by the operations of ‘mere matter’.
The reason that the Cartesian approach to the mind is
not yet extinct is that some philosophers continue to
maintain that there is something about consciousness that
eludes the explanatory apparatus of physical science. Here
a further feature of Cartesianism has been very influential,
namely its stress on the subjective or ‘first-personal’
aspects of human experience. The Cartesian search for
knowledge starts from the private meditations of the soli-
tary thinker; and in the course of those meditations
Descartes rapidly arrives at the doctrine of the perfect
‘transparency’ of the mind—the view that I have direct
and privileged access to the contents of my mind, and that
I know my own nature as a conscious being better than
that of any ‘external’ objects. From here, Descartes moves
on to the conclusion that my own experiences (e.g. of
hunger, thirst, pleasure, and pain) have a phenomenal

character that is vividly accessible ‘from the inside’, but
which necessarily lacks the kind of objective clarity and
distinctness that belongs to the quantitative language of
physical science. This notion of the essential privacy of our
conscious experience has been attacked in our own cen-
tury, notably by Ludwig Wittgenstein, but still retains a
hold. Thus the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel
has argued that the character of experience, ‘what it is like’
for the experiencing organism, cannot be captured by any
physicalist account of the world. Such a perspective may
not inappropriately be called ‘Cartesian’ even though its
advocates tend to reject Descartes’s doctrine of a non-
physical separable substance called ‘the mind’, since it
continues to be held that certain aspects of the mental are
sui generis and not reducible to the objective descriptions
of physics. Although it is too early to say whether such
residual Cartesianism will retain a permanent philosoph-
ical foothold, its present survival, over 300 years after the
death of its founder, is testimony to the enduring appeal
of Descartes’s approach to the complex problem of con-
sciousness and its relation to the physical word. j.cot.
*light of nature.
D. M. Clarke, Occult Powers and Hypotheses (Oxford, 1989).
T. M. Lennon et al. (eds.), Problems of Cartesianism (Kingston, 1982).
L. E. Loeb, From Descartes to Hume (Ithaca, NY, 1981).
S. Nadler, Causation in Early Modern Philosophy (Pennsylvania,
1993).
T. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism (Cambridge, 2002).
R. A. Watson, The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ, 1987).

Cartwright, Nancy (1943– ). American philosopher (at
Stanford and the London School of Econoics) who views
the higher-level laws of physics as instruments of explan-
ation and prediction which are not true, and whose pre-
dictive and explanatory value does not require them to be
true. Unlike many instrumentalists, she is a realist about
the causal factors mentioned by the *laws—including
so-called ‘theoretical entities’ generally considered unob-
servable. The phenomena that physicists try to explain,
she says, are produced by interactions of non-Humean
causal factors which are too numerous, whose interac-
tions are too complicated, and whose influences differ too
much from one physical setting to another for the phe-
nomena they produce to be systematically explained or
predicted without recourse to simplifications, idealiza-
tions, and unrealistic generalizations. The falsity of the
laws, simplifications, and idealizations are the price physi-
cists must pay for useful and cognitively manageable pic-
tures of the physical universe. Cartwright has written
extensively on scientific explanation, the epistemology of
science, and problems in the philosophy of quantum
physics. She was married to Stuart Hampshire. j.b.b.
*methodology.
Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford, 1983).
—— The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cam-
bridge, 1999).
Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945). German philosopher who
was a neo-Kantian, but differed from Kant in two respects.
First, while he agreed that we need some a priori *cat-
egories to organize experience, these are not, as Kant

believed, the same at all times: our categories develop
over history. Second, his early researches in the philoso-
phy of science, especially on the mathematization of
physics, led him beyond Kant’s central focus on scientific
knowledge to a consideration of all symbolizing activ-
ities—language, myth, religion, etc.—which are, on his
view, the distinguishing feature of man and are all, along
with science, of equal status.
His Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–31; tr. New
Haven, Conn., 1953–7) attempts to give a unified account
of ‘symbolic representation’. Our systems of symbols con-
stitute the world, since there is no reality in itself apart
from our symbolizations. Conversely, man himself is
essentially the source of various symbolizing activities.
The philosopher’s task is thus to describe man’s symboliz-
ing activities, and the categories involved in them,
throughout history. m.j.i.
*neo-Kantianism.
P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (New York, 1949).
casuistry. The art of resolving problems of *conscience.
The starting-point for the exercise of casuistry is the
casuistry 129