The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 26 potx

somewhat immune.) Rousseau’s work can also be seen
as the start of a pervasive interest in the details of child
development in educational thought, even if the details of
the work of such as Piaget and Kohlberg owe more to the
category-based philosophical psychology of Kant than to
Rousseau himself.
Despite differing radically on the beneficence of an
unreformed nature, Plato and Rousseau were at one in
seeing education as part of an overarching political and
social project. So, indeed, did Dewey, whose philosophy
of education combines Rousseauian child-centredness and
hostility to traditional learning with a pragmatic socialism.
Throughout his long and active life, Dewey was involved
with experimental schools and educational reform. He
linked meaningful education with the child’s own
attempts to solve problems arising from its own funda-
mentally social experience. The ‘full meaning’ of studies is
secured only when they become ‘integral parts of the
child’s conduct and character . . . as organic parts of his
present needs and aims—which in turn are social’. Trad-
itional education produces only barren symbols and flat
residues of real knowledge. In addition it reinforces and
perpetuates *élitism and social divisions. The classroom
should be ‘a social enterprise in which all individuals have
an opportunity to contribute’, in which ‘all are engaged in
communal projects’, a sort of democracy in miniature in
which the teacher himself is not an ‘external boss or dicta-
tor’, imposing curricular standards alien to the pupils’
lives and experiences, but rather the ‘leader of group activ-
ities’, who gives the group not ‘cast-iron’ results, but rather
starting-points to be developed through the contributions

of all involved.
Dewey hopes that children will discover everything
which it is useful for them to know by working on projects
suggested by objects and materials from their everyday
life. If this means that they never get round to studying the
history and classics prescribed by the traditional curricu-
lum, so much the better. Dewey shares Rousseau’s hostil-
ity to all that. He is, in addition, Baconian in his hostility to
an inner life which is not generally shared and shareable,
and also to any form of study not clearly directed to prac-
tical problem-solving.
There will be little need to emphasize the way in which
Dewey’s educational ideas are, like Rousseau’s, live.
Dewey reinforces Rousseau’s child-centredness with the
Baconian thought that what the child should be centring
on are problems and practice. Dewey would obliterate
any distinction between training (in what conduces to the
pursuit of practical problem-solving) and education (in
what it is good to know in and for itself ).
Education, in this sense, is a thoroughly classical con-
cept, which since the time of Socrates and Aristotle has
never entirely disappeared in institutions of learning.
Even in medieval times, the minority who studied philoso-
phy and theology strove to understand the rationale for
what the rest believed, and perhaps only a minority will
ever be capable of rationality in that sense. Similarly, even
the most Baconian and Deweyesque programmes of
study have never succeeded entirely in quenching the
desire of some for a more liberal education. Nor has the
notion of liberal learning as an end in itself lacked vocal

and eloquent defenders, whenever it has been under
threat.
Thus, in the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold and
Cardinal Newman both preached the virtues of an educa-
tion in which the pupil would, in Arnold’s words, be
inducted into ‘the best that has been thought and said’.
Arnold, the school inspector, hoped that a kingdom in
which such an education prevailed would be bathed in
sweetness and light. His ideas owe something to Schiller,
who hoped for a similar result from aesthetic education,
and something to Coleridge, who wrote of a non-
religious clerisy, an educated élite who would leaven the
rest of society. Newman is notable for his insistence on a
rounded education, the aim of which was not narrow spe-
cialism, but development of the capacity to see all things in
relation to each other. Whether Newman thought this
was a possibility in schooling prior to the university edu-
cation about which he actually wrote is unclear, but the
tenor of his thought is undoubtedly in the tradition of
Socrates and Aristotle.
But does a liberal education of the sort envisaged by
Arnold and Newman produce the results they wanted?
Can it? As we have already seen, Rousseau and Dewey, in
their different ways, argue that an education based on
authority and cultural canons may alienate, produce only
inert knowledge, and be socially divisive to boot.
Nietzsche, too, wrote of the grammar school education
from which he profited as producing only pedants and
old maids. More radically, in his deconstructive moods, he
questioned whether what we claimed to know and

value was either true or valuable as opposed to a mask for
power relations and (not entirely consistently) whether
the scientific quest to discover the truth about nature and
ourselves was not, in a deep sense, life-denying. And,
today, those who see education in terms of the transmis-
sion of the best that has been thought and known are
haunted by the image of the Goethe-reading camp
commandant and Hitler’s enthusiasm for Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony.
My own feeling is that since Plato philosophers have
expected too much and often the wrong things from edu-
cation. Education should indeed touch the soul, and turn
it, though it is a moot point whether it should turn it
inward, as suggested, though in rather different ways, by
both Plato and Rousseau. It should involve the formation
of habits of behaviour and learning, habits which, contra
Rousseau, are not in any obvious sense natural. But even
the best moral education cannot guarantee a moral
response, nor, contra Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey, an
improved society. And the recommendations of Rousseau
and Dewey are educationally harmful if they direct educa-
tors away from what education can and ought to do:
namely to introduce the young to what their elders
believe is the best that has been done in the various forms
of knowledge and experience that have been developed.
230 education, history of the philosophy of
Doing that, even successfully, is no guarantee against
wickedness, individual or social. But there are forms of
barbarism other than those of the tyrant; and a society
which, in the spirit of Bacon and Dewey, makes no dis-

tinction between education and training for problem-
solving is one. a.o’h.
M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869).
D. E. Cooper, Authenticity and Learning (London, 1983).
J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York, 1916).
M. Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven, Conn.,
1989).
A. O’Hear, Education, Society and Human Nature (London,
1981).
R. S. Peters, Essays on Educators (London, 1981).
education, problems of the philosophy of. An area
where philosophical understanding is applied to the illu-
mination of issues in education—where this notion covers
upbringing within the family as well as learning in schools
and other institutions. Systematic studies of this kind
began in the USA in the mid-twentieth-century and
slightly later in Britain and its commonwealth. To begin
with, much work was done on investigating concepts like
education, teaching, and indoctrination, on the assump-
tion that to be a regular, respectable branch of philosophy
like aesthetics or philosophy of religion, philosophy of
education required its own puzzling concepts paralleling
the concepts of art or god. Over time, however, work on
these notions proved to be not so much puzzling as
unbearably dull. Most philosophers of education in
Britain, Holland, and Canada, as well as in more enlight-
ened corners of the USA and Australasia, began to recon-
strue their discipline as a form of applied philosophy,
whose task is to clarify the aims, content, methods, and
distribution of education appropriate to contemporary

society. As such, philosophy of education in some ways
resembles *medical ethics, which brings moral philoso-
phy and philosophy of mind to bear on dilemmas faced by
health care professionals. The philosophical horizons of
philosophy of education are, however, wider, covering—
as we shall see—issues drawn from virtually every area of
general philosophy.
Hirstian liberal education. A major preoccupation
over the past three decades has been with an education,
parental or institutional, suitable for a liberal society. Paul
Hirst’s early and influential account of liberal education
saw it as the development of the student’s rational mind,
consisting in an induction into logically distinct patterns of
reasoning and imagining found in various ‘forms of
knowledge’—mathematics, physical science, human sci-
ence, history, philosophy, literature and the fine arts,
moral knowledge, and (possibly) religion—each with its
own unique concepts and tests for truth.
A liberal education in this sense was all about acquiring
these forms of knowledge for their own sake—as con-
trasted with some extrinsic purpose as when studying
physics to become an engineer. The theory was popular
with educational reformers up to government level wish-
ing to extend to the many the rigorous intellectual educa-
tion hitherto enjoyed only by the few.
But it ran into difficulties. These were partly specific—
about whether, for instance, there are unique concepts in
history, or whether literature and the fine arts constitute a
form of *knowledge. But there was also a more general
problem about why the central aim should be the pursuit

of knowledge for its own sake. Hirst’s Kantian or ‘tran-
scendental’ defence, found also in Peters, that one cannot
sensibly ask why knowledge should be pursued because
the questioner is already committed to its pursuit, proved
unconvincing—partly because a sceptical questioner is
clearly not so committed.
Educational aims in a liberal society. It became clear that one
had to start further back than Hirst, with a comprehensive
assessment of educational aims. This, in turn, demanded
some picture of the kind of society within which these
aims would operate. In the last thirty years work on aims
and content has usually been conducted within a liberal-
democratic framework and has been, and continues to be,
strongly influenced by ideas in general philosophy on
*liberalism and liberal values.
Much of the recent history of philosophy of education
can be read as an attempt to formulate a defensible
account of an education suitable for a liberal society and to
detach this from more problematic versions. Already the
Peters–Hirst version of liberal education had drawn the
fire of some Marxists and other left-wingers who saw
the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake as an ideal
suitable only to a leisured élite.
Many writers have located a more universally applic-
able aim in the cultivation of personal *autonomy. The
basic notion here is that everyone should be equipped to
determine his or her own major goals in life and not have
these paternalistically imposed, whether by custom, par-
ents, teachers, or religious and political leaders. This is
not, of course, to rule out aims to do with expanding

knowledge, since in order to be autonomous one needs a
good understanding of options available to one, as well as
of the social world within which one chooses one’s goals.
But the focus is now less exclusively than with Hirst on the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Quite what the autonomy ideal should include beyond
this bare statement has been the topic of much dispute,
some invoking the notion of following a life plan, others
rejecting this, some putting what others see as excessive
weight on rationality, and so on. Personal autonomy has
also had to be distinguished from the more general notion
of personal well-being. In tradition-directed societies those
responsible for children’s upbringing seek to promote their
well-being, but hardly their autonomy, given that goals are
ascribed by custom and not chosen. The practical import
of this is clear as soon as one reflects on the multicultural
nature of British or American society and the duties which
religions may impose upon parents and communities to
bring up their children in values at odds with personal
autonomy. Should the liberal state favour aims to do with
education, problems of the philosophy of 231
self-determination, or should it be neutral for all but
commonly agreed values? Should it prevent parents and
non-state schools from bringing children up in non-liberal
values? Much will turn in these discussions on how terms
like ‘liberal’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘neutrality’ are interpreted.
Further issues arise about the nature of personal *well-
being. If this is in part to do with the achievement of one’s
major goals, then are there limits on what these can con-
sist in? An educator will certainly want to rule out goals

which harm other people. In general philosophy the claim
that personal flourishing necessarily involves altruistic or
moral concern has been constantly disputed since Thrasy-
machus’ challenge to Socrates in book 1 of *Plato’s
Republic. From the educator’s point of view, however,
there seems every reason to bring children up to see their
own good as inextricably intermeshed with others’.
On this view, moral education would not be, as it is
often taken to be, a separate area of education. Yet what-
ever its status, there are differences in its conception.
Commonly it has had to do with bringing about behav-
iour in accordance either with moral codes or with higher-
order rational moral principles. But recent work on
virtue ethics has called this rules-based approach into
question, suggesting that we should rather think first of
how to bring children up to be kind, courageous, friendly,
co-operative, loyal. (*Virtues.) This is a far from being an
ivory-tower matter: it has implications, for instance, for
the way we think about teacher-training—as well as about
parental education and the role of the media in the forma-
tion and deformation of character.
Another uncertainty over the notion of personal well-
being is whether what John Stuart Mill called the ‘higher’
*pleasures—intellectual and aesthetic enjoyments—must
form a part of a child’s future goal-structures, or whether,
say, a life of well-being could consist wholly in sex, drink-
ing Budweiser, watching TV, and playing computer
games. Have parents and teachers any responsibility to
steer children towards the more exalted alternative, or
would the true liberal leave things wholly open?

Of course, in promoting autonomy educators will in
any case want to open up intellectual and aesthetic activ-
ities as possible options, but there may be grounds for
them to do more than this. Suppose we take experience of
the arts. If the theory is true that this constitutes an
autonomous world of its own, so that listening to music is
docketed as a leisure pursuit on all fours with pumping
iron or bass-fishing, educators may have to be content
with the ‘options’ position. But if aesthetic experience has
deeper contributions to make to human well-being—as a
form of social bonding, for instance, or as a way of pro-
moting self-understanding or psychic harmony—parents
and teachers may well be justified in encouraging pupils to
adopt a way of life in which the arts occupy an important
place. (*Aesthetics, problems of.)
At the root of many of these issues about personal well-
being is the question whether this notion is to be under-
stood in terms of the satisfaction of major informed
preferences or in some other way. On the preference-
satisfaction account, the education system and the market
for consumer goods and services, so often seen as at odds
over their values, could be seen as working hand in hand,
each having the function of revealing and supplying pos-
sible intrinsic ends—further study of science, say, in the
first case, and personalized number-plates on the other.
Another view of personal well-being sees this not as a
function of individual desire, but in terms of the attain-
ment of such goods as intimacy, self-knowledge, auton-
omy, aesthetic activity, physical pleasures—although
there are still unresolved issues about whether these

goods are derivable in some way from human nature or
culturally generated. On the second view of well-being,
education has a role distinct from that of the market—in
revealing these goods to learners and disposing them to
value them. Further work on the aims of education
depends on the resolution of this central issue, which has
now become a major focus of debate in general ethics.
Education and politics. Vocational aims lie outside a Hirst-
ian account of liberal education, but other accounts which
stress personal autonomy will seek to equip pupils with an
understanding of a wide range of vocational as well as
non-vocational options. There are also wider issues about
what attitudes parents, teachers, and other educators
should encourage towards work in general. Is there still
room for some version of the traditional ‘work-ethic’, or is
this a jettisonable remnant from a more religious culture?
What place does work play in personal well-being, intrin-
sically as well as instrumentally? Does only ‘meaningful
work’ count? Should education be for a Work Society or
for an Activity Society?
Education for work, in its turn, is inextricable from edu-
cation for citizenship, about which there are, again, differ-
ent variants, partly depending on one’s view of a liberal
society. Leaner ones focus only on the knowledge
required for informed political decisions, while others add
to this the dispositions, or political virtues, demanded of
the citizen. Should the education system have a hand in
nurturing such qualities as tolerance, a sense of justice,
political courage, and civic friendship? Or when it tran-
scends the aim of mere understanding and begins to shape

young people’s characters in a certain direction, is it
becoming a vehicle of indoctrination?
What place among political virtues should there be for
attachment to one’s national community? Is education for
patriotism at odds with liberal values, since it favours the
interests of a particular community rather than those of
human beings more generally? Some philosophers have
argued that we should think more in terms of education for
global citizenship—while others have claimed that patriot-
ism is not the same as chauvinism and that imbuing a love
of country need not bring with it the idea that that country
is somehow superior to others.
So much for aims of education, closely intertwined as
they are. One task of philosophy of education is to explore
interrelationships between them in the interests of a
coherent, synoptic, and defensible account. The content
232 education, problems of the philosophy of
of aims apart, there is also the question of who should
determine them. While some other countries have
recently loosened state control in favour of schools and
teachers, England and Wales moved in 1988 from profes-
sional to political determination of the curriculum. Many
of us would applaud political control in principle, holding
that there are good reasons for it in the democratic right of
every citizen—as distinct from sectional groups like teach-
ers or parents—to participate in major decisions shaping
the social future. At the same time there are good liberal
reasons why teachers should be given considerable auton-
omy in implementing these decisions. Political control of
aims and curricula should be far from heavy-handed.

Whether the detailed, test-led, minutely prescriptive, and
incoherent provisions of the 1988 National Curriculum
met this requirement is not a matter on which a philoso-
pher should pronounce. In 2000 the English and Welsh
school curriculum was provided—for the first time in its
history, remarkably enough—with an extensive set of
general aims. In so far as these are adequate, they provide
a touchstone for assessing how much of the traditional
content of school education needs to be retained. Is there
still a place for religious education? What weight should
be placed on acquiring a foreign language? What room is
there for contemporary history in schools? Why learn
maths? How justified is the traditional weight on theor-
etical enquiry as compared with practical activity and
rationality? At the more school-focused end of their work,
philosophers of education in several countries are now
working with policy-makers on questions like these.
That the state should play any role in determining the
curriculum would be rejected by some libertarian
thinkers about education. The content of schooling, like
its provision, is, on their view, ideally a matter for the pri-
vate sector. Their views overlap with those of some reli-
gious thinkers anxious to preserve and enlarge the domain
of private faith schools. The assumption in both views is
that parents should have the right to determine what the
aims and content of their children’s education should be.
(We are talking of moral rights. That they have legal rights
in many contexts is uncontestable.) This is often asserted,
but the grounds for it are dubious. Parents do not own
their children, so no right can be based on this. But neither

are they in a privileged position to know what is in the best
interest of their children, as individuals and as citizens.
While parents have rights arising from their responsibil-
ities—e.g. the right to exclude a busybody neighbour from
interfering with their child’s upbringing—it is not at all
clear whether they have any other kind of moral right.
Over the last three decades the force of Aristotle’s
insistence that education must begin from a political
framework has become increasingly evident. Here the dis-
tribution of education has been much discussed. Would it
be fairer to give all children a common education in the
same schools? Or to divide them by school and curriculum
according to their IQ, giftedness, specialist talents, par-
ents’ religious and other preferences, parents’ ability to
pay for private education? To egalitarians, arguments for
division often appear flaky rationalizations of an élitist,
class-based system. Are intelligence and giftedness, as
claimed, largely innate (see below)? What is giftedness,
anyway? Is the ‘equality of opportunity’ on which
arguments for selection often rely another vehicle of
rationalization?
Some see a stronger argument for a selective system in
the claim that giving able students special provision is in
the general interest, since this will help to maximize the
benefits they are likely to bestow on society and the econ-
omy—or, following *Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, in the
claim that this is likely to improve the well-being of the
most disadvantaged. Are these arguments more solid? Is
there too much obsession with selection, as some would
say, at the cost of doing more, and more immediately, for

the educationally deprived?
Children’s minds and learning. ‘Child-centred’ education
can mean different things, including—defensibly—an
education which puts children’s flourishing first and
school subjects second. It can also refer to a conception of
education as a process of biological development akin to
the growth of plants or animal bodies. It is doubtful
whether the notions of mental or moral development—
found, for instance, in theories like Piaget’s—make logical
sense. If development is always development towards a
biologically given mature state (such as the fully grown
tree or human body), it might seem that nothing could
count as this in the non-physical areas just mentioned. An
assumption in developmentalism, shared with other psy-
chological theories applied to education, like those of
Chomsky and Skinner, is that learning is a matter of an
individual’s causal interactions with the environment,
whether or not these are also powered by developmental
forces from within.
These psychological viewpoints bring us back again to
the wider issue of what education is appropriate for a lib-
eral society. One conception of this, reflected in the theo-
ries just mentioned, starts, as classical liberalism in general
started, from a picture of pupils as atomic individuals. On
an alternative model, heavily influenced by Wittgenstein-
ian arguments against the possibility of private conceptual
schemes, learning is essentially a social enterprise, involv-
ing the induction of the pupil into publicly agreed rules,
practices, and values. This second view lies behind the
‘forms of knowledge’ approach to the curriculum, as well

as behind broader and more recent conceptions, in some
ways more Deweyan in outlook, stressing induction into
a wider range of co-operative social activities and institu-
tions, including, as well as intellectual and aesthetic activ-
ities, occupations, sports and leisure, family life, and
attachments to local or national communities.
Whether a liberal account of education can accommo-
date these more collective purposes is central to the
increasingly embattled debates between liberal and com-
munitarian thinkers in the field. If liberalism is tied, as
some claim, to atomistic notions of the person, to the
hegemony of the free market, and to the privileging of
education, problems of the philosophy of 233
egoism over altruism, are its days not rightly numbered?
Or are those right who say that a liberal education can
encompass and celebrate the idea that individuals are
social beings and should cherish their interpersonal
attachments, whether at the level of intimate relation-
ships or more widely at the level of the nation or other
forms of community?
Underlying any account of education must lie some
kind of conception of *human nature. The relative weight
to be placed on biological and on social aspects of this is a
central issue in the field. It emerges, for instance, in dis-
cussions of whether concepts can be acquired by abstrac-
tion from experience—a topic which links Locke directly
with the child-centred nursery. It is at the root of contro-
versies about the nature of intelligence and the IQ, con-
cepts which in their Galtonian form interestingly share the
assumption in biological developmentalism that there are

ceilings (of the mature tree) beyond which individuals
cannot move. The political significance of such an
assumption should be plain. If many children possess low
intellectual ceilings, there seems a powerful reason for
providing them with a different, less demanding form of
education than the more able. This is one of the argu-
ments for a selective system, already mentioned. But what
justification is there for the view that we all have our indi-
vidually differing mental ceilings? Is it verifiable? Is it falsi-
fiable? Or is it, as some would say, as untestable as beliefs
at the heart of other ideological systems, like the belief in
the existence of God?
More generally, differences over human nature lie
behind the broad division among those philosophies of
education, often of *Kantian inspiration, like those of
Peters and the early Hirst, which see education above all
as developing (in the transitive sense) forms of rationality;
and those, often influenced by *Aristotle, which, while
still attached to rationality, especially practical rationality,
pay more attention to the ways in which our biologically
given desires and feelings are shaped into virtues, activ-
ities, attitudes, and reactions necessary to our flourishing.
(Hirst, in his more recent writings, has forsaken the first
for the second camp.)
The topic of the education of *emotion and feeling illus-
trates this division. On one view, found in Peters, emotion
is a form of passivity which can obstruct the rational life:
children need to learn how to control and canalize it and
bring it under the sway of reason. On another, emotions
have also a more positive, active role, fear, anger, and

sympathy, for instance, being the bases of children’s
acquisition of the virtues of courage, self-control, and
altruistic virtues like friendliness and benevolence. The
educative role of the arts, especially literature, in such a
refinement of the emotions brings us back to the place
of aesthetic activities in the good life and the liberal
curriculum.
These are some of the ways in which philosophers have
investigated children’s minds. Another area of interest has
been in thinking skills. Governments across the world
have recently promoted these in school curricula, often in
the belief that teaching generalizable skills of logical,
creative, and critical thinking is an antidote to the regime
of fact learning and rote recall which plagues educational
systems from Nanjing to Nantucket. But do general think-
ing skills exist? In what way can the critical thinking
developed in history lessons be transferred to the math-
ematics classroom? Are there logically different kinds of
imagining and reasoning found in epistemologically dif-
ferent areas—a claim we saw embedded in the Hirstian
form of liberal education?
There is much in this brief account which has had to be
omitted—work, for instance, on the cultivation of the
imagination, higher education, lifelong learning, the nature
of mathematical education, the teaching of history, the
Internet, and a host of other specific topics—to say nothing
of more grandiose abstract inquiries into the challenges and
perils of something called *post-modernism. j.p.w.
*teaching philosophy.
E. Callan, Creating Citizens (Oxford, 1997).

D. E. Cooper (ed.), Education, Values and Mind (London,
1986).
D. W. Hamlyn, Experience and the Growth of Understanding
(London, 1978).
P. Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum (London, 1974).
J. Kleinig, Philosophical Issues in Education (London, 1982).
R. S. Peters (ed.), The Philosophy of Education(Oxford, 1973).
K. Strike, Liberty and Learning (Oxford, 1982).
J. White, The Child’s Mind (London, 2002).
Edwards, Jonathan (1703–58). Perhaps the foremost of
Puritan theologians and philosophers, Edwards, after
graduating from Yale in 1720, held a series of pastorates
and ministerial posts in the American colonies. This left
him time to compose the writings in which he system-
atizes and justifies the Puritan theme of the utter depend-
ence of humanity and nature on God.
Edwards argues from the unthinkability of the notion
of absolute nothingness to the eternal existence of being;
this necessary eternal being must be infinite and
omnipresent and cannot be solid. It can only be space, or
God. Furthermore, consciousness and being are the same
since it is unthinkable that something could exist from all
eternity and nothing be conscious of it.
There is another route to this same idealistic conclu-
sion. Edwards agrees with the view often attributed to
Locke that secondary qualities such as colour and taste
exist not in objects but in the mind. But Edwards holds
that *primary qualities have a similar existence: solidity is
just resistance, shape is the termination of resistance, and
motion is the communication of resistance from space to

space. Yet ‘resistance is nothing else but the actual exer-
tion of God’s power’; so resistance exists in God’s mind
and ‘the world is therefore an ideal one’, existing in God’s
mind through his free act of creation and in our minds
through God’s communicating it to us in a series of regu-
lar ideas. These claims, reminiscent of Berkeley, were
probably arrived at without any knowledge of Berkeley’s
reasoning.
234 education, problems of the philosophy of
As the world is entirely dependent on God’s continued
creation of it, so our wills are entirely dependent on the
causes that God has predestined for them. The Arminians
of Edwards’s time believed that human choices were
spontaneous and self-determined. This violates the prin-
ciple of universal causality that Edwards took from New-
ton; thus an act of will is determined by its strongest
motives. Further, to say that in a *free act a free choice
determines the will involves an infinite regress, for on this
characterization that free choice must be determined by a
prior free choice, and so on.
The solution is to deny any meaningfulness to talk of a
free will—rather freedom is something that belongs to a
person when not hindered in doing what one wills. How
one comes to perform this act of willing has no bearing on
its freedom; thus Edwards can hold that choices can be
entirely predestined by God and nevertheless that an
agent not prevented from carrying them out is free.
Indeed Edwards can reconcile freedom not only with
*Calvinism but with Newtonian science, which sees
nature as entirely determined.

Moral judgements are based on sentiment and not on
reason: by a sense of beauty one perceives the beauty of
heart, or virtuous motive, in a virtuous act. There are
two kinds of *beauty—there is benevolence or love of
being in general, which is the only true, spiritual, or divine
beauty, and which is relished by a divine sense activated
by God only in the few he has elected to heaven. The other
kind of beauty consists in harmony, proportion, and uni-
formity in variety; this is a secondary, natural, inferior
beauty perceived by a natural sense. Although nothing is
approved by the one sense not approved by the other, true
virtue consists in acting according to the former beauty.
Only the saint whose inner motives have been entirely
changed by God is capable of acting without the taint of
self-love found even in the most just or altruistic but non-
saintly individuals. Once again Edwards unifies his reli-
gious commitments with secular thought: an ethics of
sainthood is reconciled with an account of ordinary
ethical belief. c.c.
Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought in its British
Context (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981).
Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards
(Princeton, NJ, 1988).
John E. Smith, Jonathan Edwards: Puritan, Preacher, Philosopher
(Notre Dame, Ind., 1993).
Edwards, Paul (1923– ). American philosopher who is
mixed one part analytic philosopher to one part
*philosophe. Although Edwards is best known as the edi-
tor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 vols., 1967),
a massive Enlightenment work with a notable analytic

sensibility, his own widely discussed work focuses on such
traditional philosophical issues as God, free will, immor-
tality, induction, and the nature of value-judgements.
Articles and books by him include: ‘Bertrand Russell’s
Doubts about Induction’ (1949), The Logic of Moral
Discourse (1955), ‘Hard and Soft Determinism’ (1958),
‘The Cosmological Argument’ (1959), ‘Atheism’ (1967),
Buber and Buberism (1970), Heidegger on Death (1979), ‘The
Case against Reincarnation’ (1986–7, in four parts),
Voltaire (1989), and Immortality (1992). A deep respect for
science and common sense mark Edwards’s writings, and
he is well known for his use of humour as a lethal weapon
against philosophers whom he regards as pompous pur-
veyors of platitudes, especially Heidegger and Tillich.
m.w.
*capital punishment; God and the philosophers.
‘Heidegger’s Quest for Being’, Philosophy (1989) captures the
distinctive flavour of Edwards’s work.
effect: see causality.
egalitarianism: see equality; inequality; justice; liberty
and equality; socialism; well-being.
ego. What ‘I’ stands for, the subject’s essence. Plato and
Descartes thought a person could exist disembodied.
Locke imagined that a prince could swap bodies with a
cobbler. It is hard to see how these stories could be intelli-
gible (not to say true) without conceding the existence of
an incorporeal ego, a subject for thinking, feeling, and
willing, which makes each person who they are. But
Hume sought in vain to observe his core *self, and contem-
poraries who share Hobbes’s hostility to mysterious non-

physical substances wonder whether the stories make
sense after all! It needs to be explained, however, why
ghost stories at least seem to make sense for people,
whereas we can make nothing of disembodied trees, and
the thought that the Lada should swap identities with the
Mercedes Benz (there being no physical change) strikes us
immediately as absurd. j.e.r.s.
J. Glover, I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity
(Harmondsworth, 1988).
egocentric particulars. The referents of some words—
notably pronouns and demonstrative expressions like
‘this’, ‘here’, and ‘now’—depend in a systematic way on
who utters them, when, where, and with what pointing
gestures or referential intentions. The particulars (people,
objects, events, places, times) thus referred to have been
described as ‘egocentric’ (in a purely logical sense of the
word, i.e. context-dependent). l.f.s.
*contextual definition.
B. Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London, 1940), ch. 7.
egocentric predicament. This name was given by Ralph
Barton Perry to Berkeley’s argument that anything sup-
posed by an opponent of *idealism to be a thing ‘without
the mind’ is, by virtue of that supposition, just another
idea ‘within the mind’ whose *esse est percipi. Berkeley
believed, in Perry’s words, that ‘One cannot conceive
things to exist apart from consciousness because to con-
ceive is ipso facto to bring within consciousness.’ The
egocentric predicament 235
predicament, Perry says, does nothing to prove there are
no things without the mind, which is what Berkeley was

trying to prove in setting up the argument. Neither the
idealist nor the realist can use this predicament to prove
his point about unperceived objects. l.w.b.
Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (New York,
1925), 129ff.
egoism, psychological. The theory that all human
actions are motivated by self-interest. Taken as a factual
claim based on observation, this is obviously false: people
are often motivated by emotions like anger, love, or fear,
by altruism or pride, by the desire for knowledge or the
hatred of injustice. However, egoism can seem true on the
basis of a general argument which shows that all these
apparently distinct motives, if properly analysed, are
really examples of self-interest after all—that any motive
must be. The argument is that every voluntary act is
something the person on balance wants to do, something
he does because he desires to do it; therefore, he does it in
order to satisfy his desire to do it; therefore, the act is really
self-interested. Even if it seems to sacrifice the person’s
interests, its aim is to satisfy his predominant desires.
This argument has several things wrong with it. First, as
Joseph Butler pointed out, the motive of self-interest
would have nothing to aim at unless the person had other
motives as well. For example, if you are hungry it is in
your interest to eat. But hunger is a desire whose object is
eating, and not your interests. Self-interest is a different,
second-order desire that has as its object the satisfaction of
other, first-order desires, like hunger, which also motivate
us directly. And some first-order desires are for things
quite apart from oneself. If you donate money to famine

relief, your motive is that you don’t want other people to
starve; your motive is not that you want to satisfy your
desire that other people not starve. You may feel good if
you donate the money and bad if you don’t, but that’s
because you already think there’s a reason to donate: the
feelings don’t explain the motive, rather the motive
explains the feelings.
Another problem with the argument is that it considers
only the influence of present desires on choice. But even if
an act aimed at the greatest possible satisfaction of present
desires, that would not make it self-interested, because a
self-interested action must take into account all one’s
interests, future as well as present. So if someone refuses a
cholera inoculation during an epidemic, out of fear of the
needle, and later contracts cholera, the refusal may have
satisfied his strongest desire at the time, but it was not self-
interested. Psychological egoism should not be confused
with ethical egoism, the view that each person ought to do
what will best advance his own interests. t.n.
*Mandeville.
F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, essay vii: ‘Selfishness and Self-
Sacrifice’.
Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons, esp. 11 and 12: ‘On the Love of our
Neighbor’.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,
app. ii: ‘Of Self-Love’.
egoism and altruism. Does morality require a person to
act for the good of others, or can its requirements be con-
sistently seen as means to self-fulfilment for the moral
agent? If the latter, some egoists will argue that only the

thought of benefit or gratification to myself can in any case
motivate me to action (*egoism psychological); others,
‘ethical egoists’, claim that although I could aim at the
good of another, the moral life is in fact the life that maxi-
mizes good-for-me, if not always in the shorter term, then
reliably over a lifetime. It is a highly challengeable—
indeed unconvincing—claim: situations arise, e.g. when
some virtually undetectable injustice offers a person great
reward and no deterrents. On such a theory, not even con-
science would deter. Central to the very notion of a moral
imperative is the idea that it has authority to override all
other considerations, self-interest notably among them,
and to rule out the thought of calculating and quantifying
the balance for and against advantage to self on particular
occasions of moral obligation. Again, if as an egoist I pro-
pose an ethical theory that everyone should understand the
object of moral endeavour to be the pursuit of his or her individ-
ual good, the proposing of such a universal policy must
itself conflict with my own pursuit of my individual good.
I cannot really want others to attend to their good, as dis-
tinct from my own! But if I simply assert, as a personal
manifesto (or, indeed, write it secretly in my diary), ‘I am
going to pursue my own fulfilment only, and I understand
morality as precisely a means to that’—then I achieve con-
sistency—but express no public moral theory.
It is not true that everything we can be said to ‘want’ or
‘desire’ is an enhancement or fulfilment of the self. We
may want to give way to irrational rage or to wayward sex-
ual desire, to hurt another or indeed to help another—
without manifesting ‘self-love’ in any of these instances.

My rage or aggression may in fact be self-destructive. The
beginning of altruism is the realization that not all good
and bad are good-for-me and bad-for-me: that certain
others—my close friends, say—have joys and sufferings dis-
tinct from mine, but for which I have a sympathetic
concern—and for their sake, not my own. I may then
acknowledge that others beyond the small circle of my
friends are not fundamentally different—and so reach the
belief that there are objective goods and bads as such. As
one self among the others I cannot claim special privileges
simply for being the individual that I am! If it is neither
impossible nor irrational to act simply for the sake of
another, the occurrence of satisfaction or ‘good con-
science’ when we have done so is not sufficient ground for
the egoist to claim that it was only for these ‘rewards’ that
the acts were performed.
Nor on the other hand does the possibility of altruism
mean that it is a constant moral necessity: an altruist can
allow that in most circumstances I can act far more effect-
ively on my own behalf than can any other person. A sim-
ple but crucial step separates a broken-backed ethical
236 egocentric predicament
egoism from a minimally acceptable and consistent moral
theory. It involves the recognition of others as more than
instrumental to my fulfilment. I may promote my own
interests and personal fulfilment, so long as I do not
encroach upon the pursuit by others of their fulfilment.
That is to recognize other persons as limits to my action:
altruism may, of course, go beyond that in seeking posi-
tively to advance their good. r.w.h.

D. P. Gauthier (ed.), Morality and Rational Self-Interest (Princeton,
NJ, 1970).
J. Hospers, Human Conduct (London, 1961).
eidetic imagery. Enjoyed by those who can imagine or
recall something as if it were in front of their eyes. Unlike
hallucinators, they remain in control of what they ‘see’,
even (as in the extraordinary case reported by Luria) to the
extent of improving the lighting! The philosophical chal-
lenge is that an inner-perception story looks unavoidable,
despite threatened regressive and sceptical arguments
that have made imagist accounts of ordinary perception
unpopular. j.e.r.s.
*image; perception.
A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (New York, 1968).
eidetic reduction: see Husserl.
Eightfold Path: see Buddhist philosophy.
Einfühlung
: see empathy.
Einstein, Albert (1879–1955). German physicist most
famous for founding relativity theory on the basis of two
simple, empirically well-confirmed principles: that the
laws of physics should be the same for all observers
regardless of their state of motion, and that all such
observers will measure the speed of light to be the same.
As a consequence of these principles, he dramatically
departed from traditional conceptions of substance and
time by proving the equivalence of mass and energy,
E = mc
2
, and deducing that the spatio-temporal coordi-

nates used by two observers in relative motion to express
the laws of physics must be related so that their judge-
ments differ over which events occur simultaneously. Ein-
stein is also remembered for his opposition to the
orthodox interpretation of *quantum mechanics—
though his oft-quoted quip ‘God does not play with dice’
does little justice to his other main criticism that the inter-
pretation fails to deliver a determinate, measurement-
independent description of physical reality. Among
Einstein’s numerous other contributions to physics, two
stand out: his hypothesis that light is composed of tiny dis-
crete packets of energy called photons (for which he
officially won his Nobel Prize); and his analysis of the
curved trajectory of a body under gravity as, in fact,
‘straight line’ motion occurring in a curved *space-time
that has a shape fashioned by the distribution of matter
within it. r.cli.
*determinism.
A. Pais, ‘Subtle is the Lord . . . ’: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein
(Oxford, 1982).
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paradox. In general,
quantum mechanics (QM) provides only probabilistic
information about the possible results of measurements.
The question arises whether this is because the world is
genuinely indeterministic and, prior to measurement, the
physical system measured does not possess determinate
properties corresponding to the measurement outcomes,
or whether it is because QM gives an incomplete
description of a fully deterministic world. Might the QM
description of a system be supplemented, so that the

augmented description fully determines the results of
measurements?
In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen argued that QM
is incomplete. They considered a system of two spatially
separated particles, A and B, in a particular quantum state,
Ψ. Ψ does not determine the results of measuring the pos-
itions of A and B but, given the result obtained on measuring
A’s position, it does allow one to predict B’s position with
certainty. It therefore seems that B has a determinate pos-
ition immediately after A’s position is measured. But
because A and B are spatially separated, B’s position can-
not be made determinate as a result of the measurement
of A’s position without there being some sort of ‘action at
a distance’. In order to uphold a principle of locality (that
there can be no action at a distance), EPR conclude that B
must have had a determinate position all along and that
QM is thus incomplete. However, *Bell’s theorem shows
that regarding QM as incomplete is not sufficient to save
locality. o.p.
*quantum theory and philosophy.
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, ‘Can Quantum-mechanical
Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?’,
Physical Review (1935).
A. Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory,
2nd edn. (Chicago, 1996).
élan vital.
The key concept in the theory of ‘creative evo-
lution’ proposed by the French philosopher Henri Berg-
son (1859–1941). Much influenced by Darwin and (even
more) by Herbert Spencer, Bergson nevertheless felt that

a purely materialistic approach to *evolution is unable to
capture both the origination of new complex organs and
the general rise of life up the order of being. He therefore
argued that there is a kind of vital spirit (élan vital) which
powers organic evolution. Bergson denied that he was
painting an end-directed picture; but, as in such pictures,
Bergson’s scheme left humans in a familiar place, namely at
the top. m.r.
H. Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice (Paris, 1907); tr. as Creative
Evolution (London, 1911).
Eleatics. A collective name for three philosophers active
in the early to mid-fifth century bc: Parmenides, Zeno of
Elea, and Melissus; after Elea (now Velia) in Southern
Italy, the native city of the first two. Nothing is known of
Eleatics 237
any other philosophers who may have been active at Elea
or shared the Eleatic approach (but Plato, Sophist 242c–d
suggests there may have been some), apart from the
Sophist Gorgias (see below), and, according to a dubious
tradition, Xenophanes. There is no evidence of any formal
‘school’, nor even of personal contact between Melissus
and the other two. Grouping the Eleatics together is justi-
fied by the similarities of method, arguments, and results
found in the extant remains of their writings and in other
testimony. (For individual details: *Parmenides; *Zeno of
Elea; *Melissus.)
Common to the Eleatics was a rejection of sense
experience as a way to truth, and the acceptance of
mathematical standards of clarity and necessity in argu-
ment. Parmenides and Melissus claimed to start from pre-

misses indubitable to reason, and to argue deductively
from these. Zeno, with destructive intent, took only the
premisses of opponents and claimed to deduce contradic-
tions from them. His weapon, frequently used by the
others too, is reductio ad absurdum of the contrary
thesis.
The influence of the Eleatics was immediate, deep, and
lasting. They raised the standards of reasoning all round,
and intensified the demand for sharply defined objects of
knowledge. Both the later Pre-Socratics and Aristotle,
who rejected their conclusions, took their arguments seri-
ously, and were driven to take up positions on the meta-
physical questions they raised. Gorgias (one of the
*Sophists) argued in Eleatic style to sceptical conclusions
in his work ‘On Nature or What Is Not’. Plato’s acknow-
ledgement to them is made in his scene-setting in the
Parmenides and in the role of the ‘Eleatic Stranger’ in the
Sophist and Politicus. Most subsequent philosophical
analysis in the ancient period, particularly of logical and
mathematical concepts, is ultimately indebted to their
techniques and insights. e.l.h.
J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, i (London, 1979),
chs. 9–14.
elenchus.
A Greek word, signifying questioning someone
with a view to testing or examining the cogency or cred-
ibility of what they have said. Such questioning was
wholly central to Socrates’ method of examining the ideas
of others, as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues (such as the
Protagoras). In his hands, this examination was almost

always intended to show up confusions, inconsistencies,
or other flaws in his opponents’ positions, so elenchus
came to signify a refutation or disproval of some point of
view. Accompanied by his noted *irony, Socrates’ fond-
ness for refuting views won him no friends. n.j.h.d.
Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford, 1953) is a
central text for this.
eliminativism. Extreme materialist doctrine advocating
the elimination of everyday psychological concepts in
favour of neuroscientific ones.
The doctrine is sometimes cast in the claim that *folk
psychology is false. This seems incredible: if it were
correct, then (belief being a state of folk psychology) it
could not be true that anyone believed it.
The doctrine is usually premissed on (a) a metaphysical
thesis purporting to show the need to reduce common-
sense categories to categories of some mature science
(*reductionism), (b) a purported demonstration that our
commonsense psychological categories are not such as to
match up with those that could be used in any scientific
account. j.horn.
Paul Churchland, ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional
Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy (1981).
élitism. The belief that in any society there exist or ought
to exist groups of those pre-eminent in any given field,
including the political. In the Seventh Letter (326a–b)
Plato wrote. ‘The human race will not see better days until
either the stock of those who rightly and genuinely follow
philosophy acquire political authority, or else the class
who have political control be led by some dispensation of

providence to become real philosophers.’ Plato thus holds
both that it is possible to identify individuals who are by
nature or grace specially fitted to rule, and that those so
identified should rule. Both tenets will be questioned, the
first by those dubious that there is a special identifiable tal-
ent for political leadership, and the second by those who
want political power diffused rather than concentrated in
the hands of a demarcated élite. However, even rule by
‘the people’ in practice often becomes rule by a new polit-
ical élite: perhaps the most prudent course is to follow Karl
Popper, for whom the most important political question is
notwho should rule, but rather how rulers can be regularly
and peacefully got rid of by the ruled. Popper’s position
tacitly admits the likelihood of political élites and sets
about devising the means to control them.
While the term ‘élitist’ has lately become a term of
abuse, the existence of élites in various areas of life is an
inevitable consequence of the unequal distribution of
human powers combined with a degree of social mobility
and division of labour, which enables some of those who
excel in a valued field to devote themselves to the devel-
opment of their talent. To object to this in itself seems, as
Nietzsche urged, to be little more than a symptom of envy
on the part of the untalented. What is more questionable
in Nietzsche is the claim that ‘the good of humanity’ lies
‘only in its highest specimens’. If members of élites behave
as though they believed Nietzsche, they will doubtless
provoke in their fellows expression of the resentful egali-
tarianism to which Nietzsche himself took such strong
objection.

If élitism is, at least on the surface, to be distinguished
from egalitarianism, it must also be distinguished from a
belief in the virtues of an hereditary class system. Those
who owe their position to birth are not necessarily tal-
ented in any sphere, and so do not, in the strict sense of the
term, count as part of an élite. One of the objections to rule
by a political élite chosen because of its members’ admin-
istrative or political skills is that such people may have lit-
tle sense of the duties which go or ought to go with rule.
238 Eleatics
The magnanimity of noblesse oblige often eludes the meri-
tocrat, who lacks that sense of responsibility to the under-
dog which in good times should be part of the upbringing
of the aristocrat.
Élitism, then, is one of the marks of that type of classless
society in which the talented are allowed to rise from any
starting position. A thoroughgoing élitism, indeed, while
not ostensibly egalitarian, would have to embody a princi-
ple of *equality of opportunity whereby everyone in a soci-
ety was free to rise where his or her talents led. In practice,
such a principle may lead to a constant levelling-off of out-
comes, and to preventing members of élites from giving
advantages to their children. Élitism then, if not tempered
with a right of parents to give special advantages to their
children, will drift towards the very egalitarianism it set out
to oppose. There may also be worries about the effect the
rapid social mobility implied by a society structured on
achievement rather than on class would have on culture
and social continuity more generally. a.o’h.
*conservatism; inequality; justice; socialism.

T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London,
1948).
K. Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London,
1940).
V. Pareto, The Mind and Society (London, 1935).
Elster, Jon (1940– ). Norwegian social and political theo-
rist who has taught in Norway, France, and the United
States. In his prolific and lively writings, which focus on
social theory and rationality, Elster employs a wide range
of conceptual tools drawn from philosophy, logic, game
theory, economics, and psychology. His critical examin-
ation of Marx’s social theories formed a cornerstone of
so-called analytical *Marxism, while his insistence on the
need to look for the micro-foundations of social change,
together with the light his analyses of problems in theories
of rational action throw on the many faces of irrationality,
and the role of emotion, have provided a multi-
disciplinary resource for the detailed explanation of
complex and large-scale social phenomena. a.h.
Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality
(Cambridge, 1983).
embodiment. The doctrine in aesthetics and elsewhere
that all and only cultural entities and phenomena (per-
sons, artworks, actions) exhibit indissolubly complex
properties that are at once material and intentional. The
intentional features signify the collective linguistic, semi-
otic, and institutional aspects of societal life. On the argu-
ment, the mind–body problem proves to be a restricted
form of a more general culture–nature problem. The the-
sis is taken to provide the minimal metaphysics of the

human sciences, the arts, morality, and the like, that is,
those inquiries that admit intrinsically interpretable phe-
nomena. The admission entails the non-reductive sui
generis nature of cultural emergence relative to physical
nature. j.m.
*intentionality.
Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ,
1980).
——Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht, 1984).
embraced and reluctant desires. Reluctant desires are
those desires we would prefer not to have and act on.
Embraced desires are first-order desires, perhaps consti-
tuting life-hopes, which we actually desire to have. Reluc-
tant desires operate in frustrating or obstructing
circumstances (a weary writer’s watching television),
embraced desires in satisfying or enabling ones (the
writer’s keenness to complete her promising novel). Act-
ing-out of embraced desires is having a freedom consistent
with determinism; what is inconsistent with it is another
kind of freedom we want—one having to do not with
either kind of desire but with origination. j.o’g.
H. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’,
Journal of Philosophy (1971).
T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and
Life-Hopes (Oxford, 1988), ch. 7.
emergence. In the philosophy of mind, emergentism is
the view that conscious mental states are not reducible to
neurological states of the brain, even though they first
came into existence only as a result of the evolution of
increasing levels of neurological complexity in higher ani-

mals. The emergentist may accept that conscious states,
such as thoughts and perceptions, need somehow to be
‘realized by’ or ‘grounded in’ underlying neurological
states of the subject’s brain, but will typically contend that
conscious states make a contribution to the causal explan-
ation of animal and human behaviour over and above
any explanation that can be provided by neurological
states alone. Whether this should be taken to imply that
supposedly emergent phenomena like consciousness
introduce into the world genuinely novel causal powers is
a disputed matter, turning in part on contested issues in
the philosophy of causation and causal explanation. Men-
tal phenomena are not the only ones that have been
claimed to be emergent, even if they provide the most fre-
quently cited examples. e.j.l.
A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim (eds.), Emergence or Reduc-
tion? (Berlin, 1992).
emergent properties. A property of a complex system
is said to be ‘emergent’ just in case, although it arises out
of the properties and relations characterizing its simpler
constituents, it is neither predictable from, nor reducible
to, these lower-level characteristics. According to
emergentism, which flourished during the first half of
this century, many properties of wholes are emergent in
that sense, and hence ‘genuinely novel’ features of the
world in which these wholes have evolved. For example,
the transparency of water was held to be emergent on the
ground that it could not be inferred from the properties of
the hydrogen and oxygen atoms of which water is
composed. Emergent properties were contrasted with

‘additive’ or ‘resultant’ properties, e.g. the mass of an
emergent properties 239