The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 28 pot

is Bacon’s materialist philosophy of nature, largely derived
from Telesio.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was equally independent
and systematic and more uncompromisingly materialist
than Bacon. For him everything is matter in motion,
including man (his mental life consists of small move-
ments in the head) and human society, the subject of
Leviathan. There he maintained that reason, in the service
of the supreme value of bodily security, dictates obedience
to an unlimited sovereign. All men are equally liable to
death at the hands of others, so all have the same interest
in the establishment of a supreme power that can protect
them against it. The only circumstance in which obedi-
ence to the state can be rationally withheld is its failure to
provide that protection. Hobbes saw the civil war as the
outcome of the unfettered exercise of a supposed right to
private judgement in matters of belief. He concluded that
the church should be wholly subordinate to the state,
which alone should authorize its doctrines.
Bacon was quietly and Hobbes noisily irreligious.
Hobbes’s excesses were countered by Lord Herbert of
Cherbury (1583–1648) and directly attacked by the Cam-
bridge Platonists, of whom the most important was Ralph
Cudworth (1617–88). Herbert boiled religion down to five
large principles (God exists and should be worshipped
etc.) taken to be intuitively self-evident. Cudworth argued
that mind is wholly distinct from matter and is prior to it in
being constructively essential to our knowledge of it.
The ideas of Herbert underlay the long eighteenth-
century episode of deism. Deism denied the personality of
God and the claims of Christ or anybody else to be the

incarnation of God. Deism was espoused by Voltaire, but
had no philosophically distinguished exponents in Eng-
land, although it was defended by many vigorous and
intelligent controversialists. Bolingbroke, who infuriated
Samuel Johnson and Burke, was at least a major public fig-
ure and a brilliant writer. A less extreme form of latitudi-
narianism was inspired by John Locke (1632–1704), as
intimated by the title of his book The Reasonableness of
Christianity. Even more important and influential were his
Two Treatises of Government, whose ideas were communi-
cated to the *philosophes by Voltaire and were central to
the thoughts and actions of the Founding Fathers of the
United States. Locke’s political theory is more a moderate
version of Hobbes’s than wholly opposed to it. Both con-
tend that government is a human contrivance set up to
serve certain human purposes and to be obeyed only to
the extent that it succeeds in serving them. Locke differs
from Hobbes over what the relevant purposes are, adding
liberty and property to Hobbes’s life.
Philosophically, however, Locke is important for mak-
ing the theory of knowledge the heart of the subject, under
the influence of Descartes. Nearly all our knowledge of
matters of fact comes from our *‘ideas’ or private sense-
impressions. We infer from them external, material
causes which we may conclude resemble them as far as
the measurable qualities of interest to physics are con-
cerned. We can infer God from the evident existence of
intelligence in the world. We can form abstract ideas, but
no abstract universals correspond to them, only resem-
blances. Of most matters of fact we do not have certain

knowledge, only probable opinion.
The theory of knowledge of the Irish George Berkeley
(1685–1753) is largely a critical commentary on that of
Locke, which accepts Locke’s first, empiricist principle.
The inference Locke proposes from ‘ideas’ to objects is
unacceptable. The involuntariness of their occurrence
shows that they have a cause outside us, but it can only be
spiritual, that is to say God, who, as well as administering
to us those we perceive, sustains in his own mind the ideas
unperceived by us whose existence is suggested by
continuity.
The Scottish David Hume (1711–76) is conventionally
seen as carrying on directly from Locke and Berkeley,
though there were other influences on him—his Scottish
predecessor Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and the
French sceptic and apostle of tolerance Pierre Bayle.
Impressions are all that we really know and all inferences
from them to other modes of being, whether material as
in Locke or spiritual as in Berkeley, are unjustifiable. Of
particular importance is his view that our belief in causal
connection, assumed unquestioningly by Locke and con-
fined to the spiritual realm by Berkeley, is an unjustifiable
inference from the intimations of regularity that we actu-
ally perceive. For Hume our beliefs in objects, minds, and
causes can be explained but not validated; they are the out-
come of habit, of instinct rather than intellect. Hume’s
scepticism was less offensive to his contemporaries than
his attacks on religion. The argument from design was
classically demolished in his Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion (1779). Miracles were disposed of by the consider-

ation that the falsity of the testimony on which they were
based was much more probable that that of the well-
attested laws of nature which they flouted.
From the end of the Middle Ages philosophy had been
pursued by independent men of letters rather than teach-
ers in universities. The universities of Scotland came to life
in the eighteenth century, as they were doing in Germany.
In England they remained intellectually torpid until the
nineteenth century was fairly well advanced. Before then
there were some philosophically active clergymen, such
as Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), who sought to establish
the existence and nature of God by rigorous, quasi-
mathematical deduction, and Joseph Butler (1692–1752),
who used an effective critique of Hobbes’s narrowly
egoistic account of human motivation to support a theory
that moral truth is discovered by rational intuition, as had
been less persuasively affirmed by Cudworth, Clarke, and,
rather furtively, Locke.
A casual remark of Locke that God might have attached
the power of thinking to material substance led, by way of
David Hartley’s (1705–57) resolute *associationism and
the belief that the mind is dependent on the brain, to the
full-blooded materialism and *determinism of Joseph
Priestley (1733–1804). Locke’s clerical critics were of less
importance than these independent-minded developers
250 English philosophy
of his thought. A leading theme of eighteenth-century eth-
ical theory had been the doctrine of a moral sense, under-
stood in an almost aesthetically contemplative way by
Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713). His ideas were taken up by

Hutcheson, who parenthetically took the greatest good of
the greatest number to be the common element of the
actions approved by the moral sense. The same idea is pre-
sented more forcefully in Hume. He took the sentiment of
approval arising from disinterested contemplation of con-
duct to be the actual basis of moral judgments, but then
went on to say that what in fact secures approval is con-
duct which is useful or agreeable to the agent or others, a
short step from making general utility the criterion of
right conduct. A more explicit utilitarianism is to be found
in Priestley, in Hartley’s disciple Abraham Tucker
(1705–74), and, above all, in William Paley (1743–1805).
As well as his materialist theory of the mind and his utili-
tarian ethics (from which Bentham derived his funda-
mental principle), Priestley developed a radically
democratic theory of government, arguing that only in a
democratic system do the rulers have an immediate
motive for pursuing the general good. Other friends of the
American and French Revolutions agreed with him,
notably Burke’s critic Thomas Paine and Shelley’s disrep-
utable father-in-law, William Godwin. Burke, the great
conservative opponent of the French, but not of the
American, Revolution, based his opposition on a general
theory of the intrinsic complexity of human society which
makes it inaccessible to the elementary moral arithmetic
of the radicals. He had begun his intellectual career (after
an ironical piece about Bolingbroke) an an aesthetician,
his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful being the first truly philosophical
aesthetic treatise in English.

Hume’s best critics were his compatriots of the Scottish
school of *common sense, all, like Hutcheson, professors.
Thomas Reid (1710–96) saw Hume’s apparently desperate
scepticism as the inevitable consequence of his subject-
ively empiricist starting-point. Perception, he held, is not
the same thing as sensation. He took what were for Hume
imaginative habits to be the expression of self-evident
principles. His ideas were sonorously elaborated by
Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), tricked out with a great deal
of rather unconvincing scholarship by Sir William Hamil-
ton (1788–1856), and imported to Oxford by the stylish
H. L. Mansel (1820–71). The last two of these constituted
the ‘school of intuition’ against whom J. S. Mill repre-
sented his own ‘school of experience’.
Hume’s ideas, particularly his associationist theory of
mind and his utilitarian theory of value, came into their
own as publicly influential through the agency of Jeremy
Bentham (1748–1832) and the ‘philosophical radicals’ who
followed him. James Mill (1773–1836), father of J.S., took
charge of association (and supplied a simple, potent argu-
ment for democracy on utilitarian grounds); Bentham set
to work with the principle of utility, attacking the Lockean
certainties of Blackstone about law and the state, design-
ing legal and penal codes, and defending the principle
itself. John Stuart Mill (1806–73), loyal to his utilitarian
inheritance, gave the principle its best-known defence,
with qualifications that laid it open to criticism. He had
earlier renovated Bacon’s account of *induction and, in
the guise of an attack on Hamilton and Mansel, put for-
ward a reductive view of objects and minds that was to be

carried further by his secular godson Russell. In the wider
world he supplied a rather marginally utilitarian defence
for his belief in extensive liberty and relied more on justice
than utility in his attack on the subjection of women.
By the early nineteenth century, the ancient English
universities were coming to, after a long period of torpor.
J. H. Newman had to educate himself philosophically, but
did so to some purpose, as shown by his University Sermons
(1841), and Grammar of Assent (1870). A recognizably pro-
fessorial professionalism first appears with H. L. Mansel’s
Metaphysics (1857). Apart from his general philosophy,
what made him well known in his own time was his
almost Ockhamist rejection of positive theology in the
interest of faith and revelation. The publication of
The Origin of Species in 1859 caused a turmoil of intellectual
activity spreading far beyond the domain of zoology. Her-
bert Spencer (1820–1903) applied the evolutionary princi-
ple to a large range of topics but nowhere very incisively,
least of all in philosophy. T. H. Huxley (1825–95) was
more impressive, but he was only an occasional philoso-
pher, as was the brilliant, short-lived W. K. Clifford
(1845–79), a kind of English Ernst Mach in whom ideas
like Mill’s were stiffened with much mathematics and
some biology.
By the time of his death in the 1870s the small trickle of
German *idealism introduced in the early years of the cen-
tury by S. T. Coleridge (1772–1834) had swelled to a tide
that was soon to engulf the universities and, with the
retreat of the amateur, the philosophy of England, Scot-
land, and the English-speaking world generally. T. H.

Green (1836–82) introduced it to Oxford, where it was
most memorably, and aggressively, expounded by F. H.
Bradley (1846–1924). In Cambridge a milder version of
idealism was introduced by John Grote (1813–66). J. M. E.
McTaggart (1866–1925), the most talented and systematic
of later Cambridge idealists, was anything but mild, hold-
ing that, in the end, all that exists are individual souls time-
lessly related by love. Green and Bradley held that matter,
space, time, and in Bradley’s case the self were unreal,
internally inconsistent abstractions which the understand-
ing carved out of reality for practical purposes, leaving it
to philosophic reason to represent things as a unified
whole. Idealism had edifying consequences for religion
and politics, eliminating superstitious literalism from the
one and supporting the more Platonic aspects of the status
quo in the other.
It was in this body of ideas that Russell and Moore were
brought up and from which they reacted into a pluralism
which insisted that reality is composed not only of many
things but of things of several different ultimate kinds:
material, mental, abstract. As a byproduct of his herculean
effort to devise a logic strong and flexible enough to derive
English philosophy 251
mathematics from, Russell acquired the intellectual
machinery for the analysis that the plurality of the world
made legitimate. The arrival of Wittgenstein in Cam-
bridge led to the joint invention by him and Russell of log-
ical atomism. Respectable philosophers shied away from
this. C. D. Broad (1887–1971), for example, did not move
far from the positions held by Russell and Moore in 1910:

a Lockean theory of matter, a Cartesian theory of mind,
and a Kantian theory of necessary truth.
The younger English philosophers of the 1930s, influ-
enced by the local *logical atomism and by the positivists
of the *Vienna Circle, saw matter as a system or family of
sense-impressions, actual and possible, mind as a
sequence of experiences, and necessary truth as analytic or
definitional. This was the body of ideas audaciously put
forward by A. J. Ayer (1910–89) and steadily watered
down by him over the following half-century. He rejected
metaphysics more vehemently than Russell, or even
Wittgenstein, and scandalized many by his denial of
meaning to judgements of value. The passage of time has
led to the recognition that his accounts of both meaning
and value are self-refuting.
A realism at Oxford parallel to that of Russell
and Moore in Cambridge derived from John Cook
Wilson. He had been brought up in Bradleyan idealism but
very gradually, and (as it turned out with the posthumous
publication of his writings) very copiously, broke away.
His main theme, the necessary independence of the object
known from the mind that knows it, was elaborated in a
refined and somewhat paradoxical way, by his most gifted
pupil, H. A. Prichard. Most Oxford philosophers from the
Edwardian decade to the present are, whether aware of it
or, as is more usual, not, Cook Wilsonians. In some emi-
nent cases, such as H. H. Price and Gilbert Ryle, other
influences have been importantly at work, largely from
Cambridge. But J. L. Austin was very plainly a product of
the school. There is a marked Cook Wilsonian flavour to

P. F. Strawson’s early critique of formal logic.
Metaphysics did not lie down dead under the attack of
Russell, Wittgenstein, and their followers. Samuel
Alexander (1859–1938) produced one large system of an
evolutionary kind, A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947) another.
They fell on stony ground, flowered briefly, and then for-
feited attention. R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), a late-
Hegelian idealist, not influenced, as Alexander and
Whitehead had been, by recent developments in natural
science, avoided a system, but had some powerful ideas
about art, religion, history, and even the history of
science.
By 1945 and the end of the war idealism had a vestigial
presence on a few Scottish chairs. British, Russellian posi-
tivism was well entrenched, but was taking on a new
inflexion. On the one hand Wittgenstein’s later, informal,
puzzlement-relieving doctrines were seeping, against his
wishes, from Cambridge. (Ryle took them up in Oxford
in his own breezy, even peremptory, manner.) On the
other J. L. Austin (1911–60), with great brilliance, turned a
local, Oxonian practice of lexicographic exactitude
(parallel to that of Moore in Cambridge) into an
enthralling, if only occasionally philosophical, technique.
The influence of Quine and some other American
philosophers turned English philosophy away from the
painstaking analysis of ordinary language after Austin’s
death. The year before, P. F. (now Sir Peter) Strawson
(1919– ) had produced Individuals, a large book on a very
large subject. Its predominant theme is that if there is to be
coherent discourse, objects that are located in space and

endure through time must be presupposed. This broadly
Kantian notion was brought to bear in Strawson’s remark-
able work of Kant interpretation, in which, if much of
Kant is jettisoned, much remains. Since then the style, if
not the doctrine, of Russell and the early Wittgenstein and
of logically, and often scientifically, sophisticated Ameri-
can philosophers under their influence, has obliterated lin-
guistic philosophy. The most admired, if not best-
understood, English philosopher at the end of the twentieth
century was Michael Dummett (1925– ), close student of
the great logician Frege, pertinacious questioner of the
law of excluded middle. Comparably gifted, if less sharply
focused, was the imaginative moral philosopher Bernard
Williams (1929–2003), who doubted the possibility of
giving a fully rational foundation to our moral beliefs and
practices. Along with many of the best of currently active
English philosophers he departed (in his case only par-
tially) to the United States. Perhaps the history of English
philosophy, as distinct from English-language philosophy,
is drawing to its close. If so, it is on terms that few would
have expected as little as thirty years ago. a.q.
*American philosophy; Irish philosophy; Scottish
philosophy; Oxford philosophy; Cambridge philoso-
phy; London philosophy.
M. H. Carré, Phases of Thought in England(Oxford, 1949).
J. H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy
(London, 1931).
J. Seth, English Philosophers and Schools of Philosophy (London,
1912).
W. R. Sorley, A History of English Philosophy (Cambridge, 1920).

Enlightenment. ‘Enlightenment’, and its equivalents in
other European languages, denotes an intellectual move-
ment which began in England in the seventeenth century
(Locke and the deists), and developed in France in the
eighteenth century (Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot, and other
Encyclopaedists) and also (especially under the impetus of
the rationalist philosophy of Christian Wolff ) in Germany
(Mendelssohn, Lessing). But virtually every European
country, and every sphere of life and thought, was affected
by it. The age in which the movement predominated is
known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.
‘Enlightenment’ contrasts with the darkness of irra-
tionality and superstition that supposedly characterized
the Middle Ages, but it is not easy to define in a general
way. Kant, one of the last, as well as the greatest, of
Enlightenment thinkers, said that enlightenment is the
‘emergence of man from his self-imposed infancy. Infancy
is the inability to use one’s reason without the guidance of
252 English philosophy
another. It is self-imposed, when it depends on a defi-
ciency, not of reason, but of the resolve and courage to use
it without external guidance. Thus the watchword of
enlightenment is: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use
one’s own reason!’ Thus the leading doctrines of the
Enlightenment, shared by many, if not all, of its spokes-
men, are these:
1. *Reason is man’s central capacity, and it enables him
not only to think, but to act, correctly.
2. Man is by nature rational and good. (Kant endorsed
the Christian view of a ‘radical evil’ in human nature, but

held that it must be possible to overcome it.)
3. Both an individual and humanity as a whole can
progress to perfection.
4. All men (including, on the view of many, women)
are equal in respect of their rationality, and should thus be
granted equality before the law and individual liberty.
5. Tolerance is to be extended to other creeds and ways
of life. (Lessing conveyed this message in his play Nathan
the Wise (1779).)
6. Beliefs are to be accepted only on the basis of reason,
not on the authority of priests, sacred texts, or tradition.
Thus Enlightenment thinkers tended to atheism, or at
most to a purely natural or rational *deism, shorn of
supernatural and miraculous elements and designed pri-
marily to support an enlightened moral code and, in some
cases, to account for the fact that the universe is a rational
system, wholly accessible to human reason.
7. The Enlightenment devalues local ‘prejudices’ and
customs, which owe their development to historical pecu-
liarities rather than to the exercise of reason. What mat-
ters to the Enlightenment is not whether one is French or
German, but that one is an individual man, united in
brotherhood with all other men by the rationality one
shares with them.
8. In general, the Enlightenment plays down the non-
rational aspects of human nature. Works of art, for
example, should be regular and instructive, the product of
taste rather than genius. Education should impart know-
ledge rather than mould feelings or develop character.
The Enlightenment is in one sense ‘unhistorical’, hold-

ing that all men are at all times (and in all places) funda-
mentally the same in nature and that differences between
them that have arisen over history are superficial and dis-
pensable. But it nevertheless had a considerable influence
on historiography. In his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit
des nations, Voltaire (who coined the phrase ‘philosophie
de l’histoire’) presents the standard Enlightenment view:
history is man’s progressive struggle for rational culture.
The Encyclopaedist Montesquieu anticipated post-
Enlightenment developments by attempting to explain
the laws of a nation in terms of its natural and historical
circumstances.
From its beginnings, but especially from the late eight-
eenth century on, the Enlightenment was subjected to
powerful criticism. Its suggestion that medieval philoso-
phers accepted their beliefs on authority alone will not
withstand a reading of their works. Its wholesale rejection
of traditional beliefs and institutions is vulnerable to
Burke’s (and, with regard to language, J. L. Austin’s)
response that the accumulated wisdom of past gener-
ations is more likely to be correct than the ideas of an indi-
vidual philosopher. Its demand that an individual should
subject all his beliefs to criticism, and accept nothing on
authority (a claim still endorsed in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty), is
thwarted by the gulf between any given individual’s mea-
gre first-hand experience and the range of knowledge now
available to him. Its depreciation of the non-rational
aspects of man and of the differences between cultures, in
favour of a narrowly defined rationality, met with criti-
cism from later thinkers, the best of whom (such as Hegel)

attempted to combine the individualist rationalism of the
Enlightenment with the requirements of a cohesive,
stable community. But some opponents of the Enlighten-
ment, such as Nietzsche, rejected its doctrines over a wide
front, its egalitarianism and belief in progress, as well as
the primacy of reason.
Many of these criticisms have force and are the subject
of continuing debate. But the benefits of the Enlighten-
ment to, for example, historiography, cannot be denied.
Even its critics have little choice but to pay the Enlighten-
ment the compliment of turning its own weapons against
it: the limits of reason can be discerned only by reason
itself.
If it is clear enough when the Age of Enlightenment
began, it is less clear when, or whether, it ended. In one
sense, it seems to end with the French Revolution, which
was in part the result of the Enlightenment and which,
despite its apparent defeat, established the Enlightenment
ideals of popular sovereignty, equality before the law, and
liberalism. It thereby identified the whole people with the
nation, and reinforced nationalism, something less agree-
able to most enlightened tastes. In 1947 Adorno and
Horkheimer argued that the very reason which the
Enlightenment used as a weapon against myth, religion,
and illusion has, in modern technocratic societies, turned
against itself and become self-destructive. But in fairness
to the Enlightenment, it should be added that, if this is so,
reason’s self-destruction relies on the co-operation of pre-
Enlightenment values. m.j.i.
*Enlightenment philosophy.

T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment,
tr. J. Cumming (New York, 1972).
E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ,
1951).
P. J. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (London,
1973).
——The Party of Humanity: Studies in the French Enlightenment
(London, 1964).
Enlightenment philosophy. There is no set of philosoph-
ical doctrines common to all and only those thinkers usu-
ally subsumed under the label *‘Enlightenment’.
However, most of Diderot, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Con-
dorcet, Holbach, Hume, and Kant share a scepticism about
Enlightenment philosophy 253
the metaphysical powers of reason but an optimism about
its power to yield knowledge about the natural, including
the human, world. Enlightenment philosophy is paradig-
matically atheistic or agnostic, anti-theological and some-
times anticlerical. It often entails a liberal scepticism about
the value and legitimacy of the institutions of state.
Enlightenment philosophy characteristically rejects
authority and advocates intellectual and moral self-
reliance.
In his essay ‘An Answer to the Question What is Enlight-
enment?’ Kant says that Enlightenment is essentially
opposed to humanity’s ‘immaturity’, where ‘Immaturity is
the inability to use one’s own understanding without the
guidance of another’. The obstacles to Enlightenment are
political and economic, because ‘I need not think so long
as I can pay; others will soon enough take that tiresome

task over for me’; and ‘The guardians who have kindly
taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon
see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including
the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to
maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous’
(p. 54). The motto of the Enlightenment, sapere aude, ‘dare
to know’, implies that learning requires risk.
The English Enlightenment pre-dated the French,
German, and Scottish Enlightenments and made them
possible. Without the thought of *Bacon, *Locke, and
*Newton, there could have been no Voltaire, Hume, or
Kant. The English empiricists’ reliance on science, rather
than the authority of Aristotle and the Church, and
the advocating of religious, intellectual, and political
toleration were models for les philosophes and the
Aufklärung.
Much Enlightenment writing is not philosophy but
political polemics, anticlerical tracts, and literary essays.
Hume and Kant are the two philosophical giants of the
Enlightenment. Hume’s philosophy is best understood as
motivated by a limit he perceives in empiricism.
Famously, Hume maintains that there are no ideas with-
out impressions: concepts have an empirical origin in
sense perception. However, several concepts prima facie
essential to the intelligibility of experience seem excep-
tions to this empiricism. Causation, identity (including
personal identity), the self, God, morality, private prop-
erty, and physical objects have no clear empirical origin in
the way, for example, that ‘red’ seems to. Hume’s radical-
ism as an Enlightenment philosopher is his questioning

the legitimacy of these concepts, even if their application
is finally given diverse justifications.
In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) Kant argues
that there is no persuasive proof for the existence of God
and the immortality of the soul. Transcendent meta-
physics is impossible, because the attempt to use cat-
egories outside our experience of the spatio-temporal
world leads to contradictions or nonsense. In the Critique
of Practical Reason (1788), however, God and immortality
are reinstated as objects of faith, or ‘postulates of pure prac-
tical reason’. He means that we have to postulate God and
immortality, as well as the free will that was admitted in
the Critique of Pure Reason, as necessary conditions for our
moral lives making sense. Kant writes on the cusp of
ambiguity. On one reading, he criticized reason only to
make room for faith. Free will is then Christian. This Kant
is like Aquinas. On another reading, he reduced God and
the soul to mere fictions. We humans postulate God and
the soul, but there is no God, and there is no immortality,
and the ethical life they presuppose is without theological
or metaphysical foundation. Freedom is then existential.
This Kant is like Nietzsche.
Historically, Enlightenment philosophy is a product of
the decline of the medieval theocentric world picture. The
religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies caused a reactive desire for religious toleration. The
methods of the new science required an openness to intel-
lectual enquiry. Religious and intellectual toleration
required some political freedom, at first, in each state, for
intellectuals, artists, writers, and the bourgeoisie, but then

for a wider population. In Locke’s political philosophy,
legitimate government is only by the consent of the gov-
erned, so is forfeited by the violation of the natural rights
of the governed. That legitimacy was seen to be lost by
James II in 1688, George III in 1776, and Louis XVI in 1789.
The putatively anti-Enlightenment writing found in
post-structuralism and post-modernism rests on a mis-
take. Those movements do not go beyond orthodox Kant-
ian doctrines: there is no metaphysical truth, but a
recurrent propensity to try to find it using something
called ‘reason’; there is no truth or reality accessible inde-
pendently of a conceptual scheme; philosophical prob-
lems depend upon binary oppositions which resist
synthesis; there is no unconstituted metaphysical subject.
s.p.
Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philoso-
phers (New Haven, Conn., 1932).
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 2nd edn., tr. F. C.
A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (Boston, 1955).
Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question What is Enlighten-
ment?’, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge,
1991).
Stephen Priest, The British Empiricists (Harmondsworth, 1990).
entailment. A set of propositions (or statements, or sen-
tences) entails a proposition (etc.) when the latter follows
necessarily (logically, deductively) from the former, i.e.
when an *argument consisting of the former as premisses
and the latter as conclusion is a valid *deduction. The cri-
terion of this is contentious. The classical criterion identi-
fies entailment with strict *implication, where ‘Set Γ

strictly implies A’ means: it is impossible for all members
of Γ to be true without A being true. A variant is: the argu-
ment from Γ to A has a certain form, and no argument of
that form combines true premisses with an untrue conclu-
sion. The classical criterion has the consequences that an
impossibility entails everything and a necessary truth is
entailed by everything (the paradoxes of strict implica-
tion). Accordingly some logicians search for a different cri-
terion, to escape the paradoxes and more generally to
254 Enlightenment philosophy
respect the feeling that a set of propositions should be
required to have some ‘relevance’ to what it entails.
(*Logic, relevance.) c.a.k.
S. Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge, 1978), 198–203.
C. A. Kirwan, Logic and Argument (London, 1978), 55–8.
entelechy. Hans Driesch (1867–1941), this century’s lead-
ing neovitalist, was much impressed with his discovery
that, despite extreme interference in the early stages of
embryological development, some organisms neverthe-
less develop into perfectly formed adults. In a thoroughly
Aristotelian fashion, therefore, he became convinced that
there is some life-element, transcending the purely mater-
ial, controlling and promoting such development. Deny-
ing that this ‘entelechy’ is a force in the usual sense,
Driesch openly argued that it is end-directed. In his later
writings, Driesch moved beyond his Greek influences,
starting to sound more Hegelian, as he argued that all life
culminates ultimately in a ‘supra-personal whole’. m.r.
*vitalism.
H. Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism (London, 1914).

enthusiasm. Used as a term of opprobrium in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries to describe the irrational-
ism and behavioural excesses of latter-day prophets,
religious mystics, utopian social reformers, and other
visionaries. Enthusiasm was the subject of numerous crit-
ical treatises, pamphlets, and essays, including those by
Meric Casaubon (1655); Henry More (1662); and by John
Locke in the fourth edition of the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1700), all of whom emphasized the import-
ance of ‘temperance, humility, and reason’, and espe-
cially tradition, and attempted to discredit conclusions
reached in agitated states of inner illumination. Kant’s
extreme distaste for Schwärmerei is an important
determinant of his ‘critical’ philosophy of religion. From
its appearance in Plato’s Ion, where the poet is described as
‘a light and winged thing, and holy’, but as not possessing
knowledge, enthusiasm has been ‘the other of reason’
which philosophy can neither ignore nor incorporate.
cath.w.
R. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special
Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford,
1950).
enthymeme. Aristotle applied this term to reasoning
from a premiss that is only probably true. Perhaps because
he gave abbreviated examples, it soon came to mean a
*syllogism with an unstated premiss. Thus ‘Dolphins are
mammals, so they suckle their young’ is an enthymeme if
it is granted that mammals suckle their young. But it is dif-
ficult to be sure that a hidden premiss is ‘really there’, and
any silly argument may be turned into a valid one by

arbitrary additions. c.w.
H. W. B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1916),
350–2.
entity: see things.
entropy. A measure of unavailable *energy in a physical
system. Since usable energy is lost in irreversible energy
transfers, entropy increases in closed systems (the second
law of thermodynamics). Entropy is defined in two com-
plementary ways: as the ratio of heat change to absolute
temperature; and as proportional to the statistical prob-
ability of the system’s state. The word also labels informa-
tion theory’s average information per symbol, which is
defined by a formally similar probability function. j.j.m.
J. H. Weaver (ed.), The World of Physics, 3 vols. (New York, 1987),
vol. i, ch. 1.
enumerative induction. Confirmation of a generaliza-
tion by observation of particular instances. Noticing that
all the snowflakes I have ever seen are hexagonal, I might
conclude that all are. Enumerative *induction is usually
distinguished from eliminative induction, which places
weight not on the number of confirming instances, but on
their variety: but given that any pair of snowflakes differs
in some way, the distinction requires an account of which
variations are supposed to matter. m.c.
L. J. Cohen, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Induction and Prob-
ability (Oxford, 1989).
environmental and ecological philosophy. Environ-
mental philosophy encompasses all philosophical reflec-
tion on the relations between human beings and the
non-human environment. Since the discipline grew out of

concerns with how humans ought to behave towards the
natural world, it has been dominated by discussions of
*environmental ethics. In the face of this hegemony, some
writers refer to ‘environmental philosophy’ rather than
‘environmental ethics’ in order to make the point that
they are not primarily concerned with questions of
applied ethics. The reasoning here is that while applied
ethics seeks to bring familiar ethical theories such as utili-
tarianism to bear on practical issues, environmental phil-
osophy is inherently sceptical of attempts to apply
traditional philosophical theories to environmental issues.
This scepticism is born of a belief that the dominant ten-
dencies of Western philosophical thought are inherently
‘anthropocentric’ or perniciously human-centred, and
hence inimical to environmental concern. For these writ-
ers, the proper aim of environmental philosophy is to
develop a new, non-anthropocentric account of the rela-
tion between humans and the natural world, which, it is
hoped, will provide a metaphysical basis for ethical con-
cern for the non-human environment.
Ecological philosophers hold that the science of ecol-
ogy provides an appropriate model for such a non-
anthropocentric position. The focus here is not on the array
of technical concepts employed in modern ecological sci-
ence but on the generally holistic standpoint associated
with the discipline. Ecology is applauded for showing, in
its accounts of energy cycles, food webs, and the like, that
any part of the natural world must be understood as a
environmental and ecological philosophy 255
function of its relations to other parts. Accordingly, an

ecological metaphysics is seen as one that rejects the
Judaeo-Christian and ‘Cartesian’ assumption that humans
are separate from and superior to the natural world, and
replaces it with a conception of the unity of humans and
nature. To corroborate their claims, ecological philoso-
phers, and in particular ‘deep ecologists’, look not just to
ecology, but also to other areas: quantum mechanics and
relativity theory, for instance; appropriately holistic West-
ern philosophies, such as those developed by Spinoza,
Heidegger, and Whitehead; non-Western philosophies
such as Advaita Veda¯nta, Buddhism, and Taoism; and
the world-views of indigenous peoples such as Native
Americans. s.p.j.
*environmental ethics; holism.
C. Belshaw, Environmental Philosophy: Reason, Nature and Human
Concern (Teddington, 2001).
W. Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Founda-
tions for Environmentalism (Boston, 1990).
F. Mathews, The Ecological Self (London, 1991).
environmental ethics. The attempt to expand the moral
framework to *nature and counter human chauvinism by
showing that feathers, fur, species membership, and even
inorganic composition are not barriers to the range of eth-
ical consideration. Peter Singer uses *utilitarian theory to
support equality of consideration for all sentient life-
forms. To act morally in dealing with sentient creatures
requires imaginative empathy, a sense of what it is like to
be a creature of that sort. Tom Regan extends *rights talk
to non-human animals, increasing human duties and
obligations without regarding other animals as moral

agents under reciprocal nets of obligation. Using Kantian
ethical theory, Paul Taylor defends the adoption of a bio-
centric ethical attitude of respect for nature. He grounds
this attitude in the intelligibility of regarding each living
entity as striving to realize its own good and as having the
same inherent worth within a network of teleological cen-
tres of life. Holmes Rolston III argues against preferring
the integrated autonomy of a short-lived individual to the
dynamic life-form of its species, genetically persisting
through millions of years. Species live in biotic communi-
ties: there is no right to life for a species apart from the con-
tinued existence of the ecosystem with which it evolves.
Humans have duties to ecosystems themselves. Recent
developments include hostile critiques of any attempt to
enlarge the moral community by using either utilitarian
or *deontological ethical theory. Also under attack is the
shared presupposition of both capitalist and socialist eco-
nomic systems that nature has value only when trans-
formed by human agency. Ecofeminists hold that an
adequate environmental ethics must recognize important
connections between the oppression of nature and the
oppression of women. Karen J. Warren sees this as based
on a patriarchal conceptual framework mediated by a
logic of domination that legitimates the manipulation
and domestication of the natural. Ecofeminism replaces
negative evaluations of nature and of women by a care-
sensitive ethics based on the ability to care for oneself and
human and non-human others, including ‘earth Others’—
animals, forests, and the land. b.t.
*environmental and ecological philosophy.

Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the
Natural World (Philadelphia, 1988).
K. J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What
it is and Why it Matters (New York, 2000).
Epictetus (c.55–c.135 ad). Originally a slave belonging to
one of the Emperor Nero’s freedmen, and a major Stoic
moralist, he is said to have endured his master’s physical
abuse without complaint, treating his body merely as a
garment. Freed after Nero’s death, he was later exiled by
Domitian to Nicopolis in north-western Greece. His lec-
tures, or Discourses, were recorded by his pupil Arrian.
He did not wholly neglect physics and logic, the other
two parts of *Stoic thought, but concentrated on ethics.
The task of philosophy, he said, is to become like *Socrates,
indifferent to bodily comfort or social applause, in order to
think and act as a citizen of the world, a part of a larger
whole—which should not make us forget that we are also
members of families and ordinary cities, with more particu-
lar duties. When we kiss our child, he warned, we should
be reminding ourselves that this too is mortal: a piece of
advice that some have found disturbing. The indifference,
or apatheia, that he preached is not a lack of love—on the
contrary, as is best understood through his comments on a
distraught father, confessedly unable to tend to his sick son
because the sight upset him. This, said Epictetus, showed
how little he loved his son: apatheiais the opposite of being,
literally, pathetic, and essential for any genuinely loving
action. What he meant by ‘philosophy’ has fixed the popu-
lar meaning of the term ever since, though not the profes-
sional: the lessons that philosophers ought to rehearse, he

said, to write down daily and to put into practice, are the
primacy of individual moral choice, the relative unimport-
ance of body, rank, and estate, and the knowledge of what
is truly their own and what is permitted them. One who
pretends to ‘teach philosophy’ without the knowledge,
virtue, and the strength of soul to cope with distressed and
corrupted souls, ‘and above all the counsel of God advising
him to occupy this office’ is a vulgarizer of the mysteries, a
quack doctor.
The affair is momentous, it is full of mystery, not a chance gift,
nor given to all comers. You are opening up a doctor’s office
although you possess no equipment other than drugs, but when
or how these drugs are applied you neither know nor have ever
taken the trouble to learn. Why do you play at hazard in matters
of the utmost moment? If you find the principles of philosophy
entertaining sit down and turn them over in your mind all by
yourself, but don’t ever call yourself a philosopher.
He did not even claim to be a philosopher himself, nor
what he called ‘a dyed-in-the-wool Jew’, willingly obedi-
ent to God’s command.
It is not clear how he reconciled the fervour of his insist-
ence that we all have choices to make with the Stoic belief
256 environmental and ecological philosophy
in absolute *determinism. Perhaps the reconciliation is a
merely practical one: what is the case we must accept as
God’s inexorable will; what might be the case (as being an
apparent option for us here-now) must be judged as if we
could do other than we shall. A further tension in his
thought concerns our relationship with animal nature: on
the one hand, our affections and impulses are ones we

share with animals, and our superiority lies only in our
duty to be aware of those affections; on the other, vice
exactly is becoming like an animal in ways that he
deplores. He was at any rate too gentle a philosopher to
draw the usual Stoic, and Spinozistic, conclusion that
people were entitled to treat animals exactly as they
pleased. s.r.l.c.
*Stoics.
E. V. Arnold, Roman Stoicism (Cambridge, 1911).
Epictetus, Discourses and Encheiridion, tr. W. A. Oldfather (Lon-
don, 1926).
A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford,
2002).
——and D. N. Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cam-
bridge, 1987).
Epicureanism. Epicureanism consisted of a way of life
directed at worldly *happiness and an atomistic account of
the exclusively material nature of reality. *Atomism, it
was argued, was true. Hence the way pointed out by Epi-
curus could be presented as not merely psychologically
satisfying, but in accord with the true nature of things.
Epicurus established his school of philosophy in 306 bc
just outside the walls of Athens where he purchased a
house for accommodation and a garden in which teaching
took place. He himself was the leader of the community
‘the Garden’ until his death in about 270 when he was suc-
ceeded first by Hermarchus and then, in about 250, by
Polystratus. The Garden was still in existence 450 years
later. But references to Epicureans at Tyre, Sidon, Alexan-
dria, Gadara (in Syria), and elsewhere in the Hellenistic

world before 30 bc indicate active dissemination of
Epicureanism.
In Italy, during the period c.100–c.50 bc, a thriving and
cultured Epicurean community was established in Naples
by Siro and, at nearby Herculaneum, Philodemus of
Gadara (poet and author of fragmentarily surviving Greek
expositions of Epicurus) was ‘house philosopher’ to the
father-in-law of Julius Caesar. In Rome, Amafinius and
others were circulating popular over-simplifications (now
lost) of Epicureanism in Latin, and in the 50s bc Lucretius
completed his full and sophisticated account for Latin
readers. In 45–44 bc Cicero gave the Epicureans consider-
able but unsympathetic attention in his expositions of
Greek philosophy. But 100 years later Epicureanism, true
to its precept ‘live unnoticed’, had yielded place to
*Stoicism as the philosophy favoured by influential
Romans. Nevertheless, Epicurus is much referred to by
Seneca (c.5 bc–ad 65), Plutarch (c.46–c.120) and others.
Epicurus’ rational humanism was enlisted by Lucian
about 180 in ‘Alexander the False Prophet’ and, towards
the end of the second century, Diogenes Flavianus caused
a vast account of Epicurean teaching to be inscribed on the
colonnade of his city Oenoanda (about a quarter, c.5,000
words, has been unearthed). Not long after, Diogenes
Laertius cited Epicurus’ works as ‘the beginning of happi-
ness’. Thereafter we hear little from the Epicureans on
their own behalf and in ad 361 Julianus Caesar wrote
‘indeed the gods have already in their wisdom destroyed
their works so that most of their books have ceased to be’.
Epicurean atomism attracted the opposition of the

Stoics (who had a different materialistic philosophy) and
the criticism of Academic philosophers. But the Epicureans
were always more anxious to preserve and make known
their revered master’s life-enhancing teaching than to
adjust it or its atomistic basis in the light of philosophical
criticism. Thus Epicureanism remained substantially the
same over five centuries.
It encouraged withdrawal from the political and admin-
istrative service of the state into sheltered communities of
like-minded people ruled by friendship and by a common
allegiance to Epicurus. Contrary to social convention, it
admitted men and women, rich and poor, and even slaves
on terms of equality. Its central purpose was happiness: a
mind free from disturbance and a body free from pain. As
a consequence it gained a reputation for attracting volup-
tuaries. But Epicurus’ own words make it abundantly
clear that his ‘hedonism’, theoretically permissive, is in
reality very austere, and Seneca’s judgement is probably
about right: Epicureanism ‘has a bad name, is of ill repute,
and yet undeservedly’ (De vita beata xiii. 1–2).
To Christians the *naturalism of the Epicureans, their
total rejection of active supernatural powers, and their
humanism was anathema. After the fifth century ad, cari-
catured as an embodiment of Antichrist, Epicureanism
retained a tenuous existence in a few manuscripts. It was
rediscovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
and became a major influence upon modern science and
humanism. j.c.a.g.
*Epicurus; ancient philosophy.
D. J. Furley, Two Studies in Greek Atomists (Princeton, NJ,

1967).
Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London, 1992).
A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers, i
(Cambridge, 1987).
Epicurean objection, the. According to Epicurus, a man
who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot
criticize one who denies it, for he admits that this too hap-
pens of necessity. This can be taken as the first in an
intriguing (if elusive) run of philosophical arguments pur-
porting to show that belief in *determinism is self-
invalidating. Since necessitation of a belief does not
exclude one’s having good reasons for it, Epicurus’ argu-
ment remains unclear. A recent suggestion is that the true
force of the argument is in the consequence of determin-
ism that our beliefs are owed to our being caused to make
some discoveries and not others. In that case, however,
the argument would still lack force, since indeterminism
Epicurean objection, the 257
would not only have the consequence of making possible
discoveries that determinism closes off, but also that
we might miss out on discoveries that determinism
necessitates. k.m.
K. Magill, ‘Epicurus, Determinism, and the Security of Knowl-
edge’, Theoria 58 (1992).
T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (Oxford, 1988).
Epicurus (c.341–270 bc). Athenian philosopher who
adopted Democritus’ atomism, possibly emended it in the
light of Aristotle’s criticisms, developed a related ethic,
and established the Garden— the Epicurean school.
Epicurus was an extremely prolific writer. But apart

from his reputedly most important work, On Nature, frac-
tions of which still have a precarious existence in badly
damaged rolls from Herculaneum, almost all that survives
is in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,
book x (second century ad). Diogenes preserves the fol-
lowing: ‘Letter to Herodotus’ on the physical universe,
sense perception, and life; ‘Letter to Pythocles’ on astron-
omy and meteorology; ‘Letter to Menoeceus’ on moral
teachings; and forty ‘Principal Sayings’. Other sayings are
in Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and elsewhere, but by far the
most complete and faithful account of Epicurus’ teachings
is in the great Latin didactic poem De rerum natura by
Lucretius (c.100–55 bc).
Epicurus argues: (a) The universe consists of matter
and void. This fundamental thesis establishes a vast gulf
between Epicureanism and Platonism, Christianity,
Cartesianism, or any other variety of matter–spirit dual-
ism. (b) Matter consists of indestructible and indivisible
particles (‘atoms’) having a variety of shapes and sizes
which, in clusters, make up all things that exist. (c) Atoms
and their movement are a single ultimate fact about the way
things are, but each atom is susceptible to unpredictable
‘swerves’ that result in overall random movements. (d)
No atom is ever brought into being or put out of existence
by divine or any other power. (e) The universe is eternal
and infinitely extended. ( f ) All agglomerates of atoms are
fortuitous and of finite duration. (g) Hence, from (e) and
( f ), there are more worlds than this and this will eventu-
ally disperse. (h) Life is a complex of particularly fine atoms
which form both body and mind in a single natural entity

whose death is irrevocable dispersal of the person. (i) The
gods are inactive and far off, ‘blessed’ and long enduring,
but from whom ‘we nothing have to hope and nothing
fear’. ( j) In such a universe man is delivered from supersti-
tious fear: death is literally nothing to him. (k) The good life
is secured by kindness and friendship with those about
you, and by moderation of appetite so that, although
nothing is forbidden, he who measures his desires by the
utilitarian standard and needs least has the firmest grasp on
happiness.
The logical progression of theses (a) to (k) is not merely
affirmed by the Epicureans as a life-enhancing credo. It
is accompanied by a philosophy of language and an
epistemology affirming the veridical nature of perception,
and it is commended by detailed arguments. For example
(e) is supported by the thought experiment of ‘the javelin
argument’: go to what you suppose to be the limit of
space and throw a javelin in a geometrically straight line. If
it hits nothing, space continues. If it hits something,
(occupied) space continues. Hence the universe is not
finite in any direction (Lucretius, book i, lines 958–83).
Similarly (h) is supported by a formidable and still usable
array of arguments for mind–body identity and mutual
death in Lucretius, book iii, and in Epicurus’ ‘Letter to
Herodotus’.
Widespread but mildly disapproved of in antiquity
because of its self-sufficient privacy, its acceptance of
slaves and women into its communities, and its professed
concern with happiness and the good life, Epicureanism
was anathema to Christianity. It denied a provident

God, affirmed the value of life and the values of this world,
denied immortality, and advocated an account of the
universe wholly at variance with the Christian. The
account was revived in the seventeenth century to
become the basis of modern science; but the world
shaped by modern science has never seemed able to
accept in full the world-view and ethic that gave Epicurus’
system a reasonable claim to be complete, consistent,
and livable. j.c.a.g.
*Epicureanism.
C. Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford, 1928).
D. J. Furley, The Greek Cosmologists, i: The Formation of the Atomic
Theory and its Earliest Critics (Cambridge, 1987).
J. C. A. Gaskin (ed.), The Epicurean Philosophers (London, 1994).
A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (London, 1974).
epiphenomenalism. Group of doctrines about mental–
physical causal relations, which view some or all aspects of
mentality as byproducts of the physical goings-on in the
world.
The classic definition (e.g. in C. D. Broad, The Mind and
its Place in Nature (1925)) ensures that epiphenomenalism
is a species of *dualism. Whereas Descartes, an interac-
tionist, held that mental things both cause and are caused
by physical things, the epiphenomenalist holds that men-
tal things do not cause physical things although they are
caused by them. The epiphenomenalist then can accept
that there are no causal influences on physical events
besides other physical events, and thus can escape one
objection sometimes raised against dualism. But the
epiphenomenalist’s picture of mental events as tacked on

to the physical world, having no causal influence there, is
unappealing: she would seem to think that mental things
feature in the world as accompanying shadows of the
physical—in the realm of ‘pure experience’.
Some non-dualist positions are accused of commitment
to epiphenomenalism. The idea is that the mental is not
caught in the physical causal net, but now not because
mental things aren’t caught there, but because mental
properties of things aren’t caught there, these not being
causally relevant properties. The picture again is one in
which mentality appears causally idle.
258 Epicurean objection, the
Two contemporary physicalist doctrines are alleged to
have specific epiphenomenalist consequences. The first is
*functionalism, which holds that types of mental states are
definable in terms of the causal roles played by their
tokens in an interconnected network. An objection has it
that a causal account omits something crucial to some
mental states—namely the intrinsic nature of those states,
which is accessible only from a first-person perspective.
Some functionalists concede the objection, and say that
although the mental can be circumscribed by way of its
operation in the causal world, none the less subjective fea-
tures of experience, sometimes called qualia, must be
acknowledged, and these indeed are epiphenomenal.
Davidson’s *anomalous monism is the other physicalist
position attacked on grounds of supposed epiphenome-
nalist commitments. Davidson holds that explanations
which introduce terms like ‘believe’ and ‘desire’ are causal
explanations; and he argues that beliefs and desires are

physical by arguing that vocabulary used in stating physi-
cal laws applies to them. An objection claims that because
the real causal power of any state which has a mental prop-
erty must be seen, from Davidson’s perspective, to reside
in some lawlike physical property that it has, mental prop-
erties must be acknowledged by Davidson to be not gen-
uinely causally relevant, but rather epiphenomenal,
inefficacious. An answer may be that, since there are two
different sorts of causal explanation, some events simply
do possess two different properties each of which has
causal relevance. But a problem may remain: it seems that
conceiving of mental events in the physical terms in which
causal laws are framed, it can be hard to persist in thinking
that our talk of them using mental terms can offer gen-
uinely causal explanations of what happens.
The objection made to Davidson might be made
against any materialist who allows a gap between, on the
one hand, the metaphysics of mental causation, which
concentrates on properties characterized in the physical
sciences, and, on the other hand, what we actually know
about the nature and existence of mental causation, which
derives from everyday explanations of people and their
doings. j.horn.
*mental indispensability.
Jerry Fodor, ‘Making Mind Matter More’, Philosophical Topics
(1989).
John Heil and Alfred Mele (eds.), Mental Causation (Oxford,
1993).
Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly
(1982).

epistemic. Like ‘epistemological’, an adjective derived
from ‘episte¯me¯’, a Greek word for knowledge. Anything
thus described has some relation to knowledge (or at least
to the justification for belief), or to the general theory of
these (epistemology). A proposition is epistemic if and
only if it has some implication for what, in some circum-
stances, is rationally worthy of belief. l.f.s.
R. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966),
ch. 1.
epistemological relativism: see relativism, episte-
mological.
epistemology, feminist. Feminist philosophers have crit-
icized common-sense, philosophical, and scientific know-
ledge both as regards content (e.g. the alleged fact that
women are less rational than men) and more importantly
as regards structure. The perpetration of absurd but
socially powerfully ‘knowledge’ in such fields as social the-
ory and social science is interpreted by feminist philoso-
phers as bound up with the tendency for Western
philosophers and scientists to see the world dualistically.
Invariably, one side of each duality has been privileged
over the other—objective knowledge is superior to sub-
jective opinion, masculinity to femininity, science to
other forms of knowledge and theory, reason to emotion,
the mind to the body, and so on. Further, such oppositions
are systematically linked, so that objectivity, masculinity,
reason, and science seem to be bound up with one
another. Thus the conception of knowledge, and episte-
mology itself, participates in a structure of inequality
which is gendered.

What sense might we make of ‘feminist epistemology’?
Philosophers have developed a variety of options. First,
that ‘knowledge’ is actually constructed and understood
from a particular social standpoint. The dualistic tendency
identified is not a matter of stupidity or malice, but is
determined by a social standpoint and the corresponding
network of meanings and values. We must therefore con-
sider the implications of thinking about knowledge from
alternative standpoints. Second, that we should focus on
relations between *subjectivity and *objectivity, or *rea-
son and *emotion, not see them as oppositions. Third,
that we take seriously the place—which has tended to be
erased in conventional epistemology—of emotion, sub-
jectivity, and the body in knowledge. Fourth, that we
cease to think of reason and emotion as normatively the
province of men and women respectively. Fifth, some
feminist epistemologists have concentrated on revaluing
the ‘feminine’ sides of the dualisms—e.g. denigrating
abstract reason and valorizing the role of emotion—argu-
ing in effect that ‘women’s knowledge’ is of a higher
quality. e.j.f.
*feminist philosophy.
Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (eds.), Women, Knowledge
and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (London,
1989).
Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (eds.), Knowing the
Difference: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology (London,
1994).
Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in West-
ern Philosophy (London, 1984).

epistemology, genetic. Term originally coined by James
Mark Baldwin to characterize an account of the acquisi-
tion of knowledge and understanding in developmental
terms. It was taken over by Jean Piaget to describe his own
general, and biological, theory of the development of
epistemology, genetic 259