The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 29 docx

knowledge and intelligence in the individual. Piaget
thought that genetic epistemology could be distinguished
from developmental psychology, but the distinction, as he
made it, was not clear. It might be argued, however, that
just as the prime concern of ordinary *epistemology is to
show how knowledge is possible, so the aim of genetic
epistemology should be to show how the acquisition and
growth of knowledge is possible. This is a matter for genu-
ine philosophical concern. The first instance of such a
philosophical theory, only partially successful, is to be
found in the last chapter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics
and is a response to an argument in Plato’s Meno
that *learning and the acquisition of new knowledge is
impossible. d.w.h.
D. W. Hamlyn, Experience and the Growth of Understanding (Lon-
don, 1978).
epistemology, history of. Epistemology, or the theory of
knowledge, is that branch of philosophy concerned with
the nature of knowledge, its possibility, scope, and general
basis. It has been a major interest of many philosophers
almost from the beginnings of the subject. Often, but not
always, these philosophers have had as their main pre-
occupation the attempt to provide a general basis which
would ensure the possibility of knowledge. For this reason
it is sometimes said that the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were the age of epistemology, in that Descartes
then introduced what is sometimes termed the ‘search for
certainty’, seeking a sure foundation for knowledge, and
was followed in this by other philosophers of the period.
To this end Descartes employed his ‘method of doubt’, a
form of systematic *scepticism, in order to ascertain what

could not be doubted. He found this in his notorious
proposition *‘Cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’),
which, he thought, established the existence of the self as
a thinking thing (although it seems, on the face of it, to
imply only that a thought must have a thinker, and what
that thinker must be like is another matter, as is the ques-
tion whether ‘I think’ itself can be doubted). Given the
thoughts of that self as he construed it, he then sought to
derive from them the existence of God and thereafter that
of the external world, as it came to be called (the world
being external to the mind, the only thing to which, it was
thought, we have direct access).
There was in Descartes’s time a renewed interest in
scepticism, though it is arguable that his systematic scepti-
cism went further than any previous form in that he was
prepared to consider the application of doubt to himself
and not merely to other things. The interest in scepticism
was renewed in that, much earlier, in the period of post-
Aristotelian philosophy, a school of sceptical philosophy
had been founded by Pyrrho. The Greek Sceptics
maintained that they were inquirers, refusing to acknow-
ledge claims to knowledge unless a ‘criterion of truth’, as
it was called, could be produced. The rival philosophical
schools, particularly the *Stoics and *Epicureans, tried to
produce such a criterion, something in experience that
had the mark of certain truth, in what appears to have
been a running debate between them and the Sceptics and
members of Plato’s *Academy who were influenced by
scepticism. The search for a criterion of truth is obviously
a version of the search for certainty.

Plato himself had had little of such concerns, although
he was interested in the nature of knowledge, and Republic
477e6 seems to suggest that the title of knowledge should
be reserved for that over which there cannot be error. By
and large, however, Plato was more concerned with the
question what distinguishes knowledge from belief (doxa),
construed as having something simply before the mind,
and considered as true or false. In his middle period, he
seems to have been so influenced by metaphysical consid-
erations as to be inclined to distinguish knowledge by con-
fining it to a particular realm of entities, his Forms or Ideas.
Later, however, particularly in his dialogue the Theaetetus,
he seems to revert to an idea put forward in the early dia-
logue the Meno, that correct belief can be turned into
knowledge by fixing it by means of a reason or cause. The
Theaetetus gives good reasons for thinking that knowledge
is more than true belief, but fails to find an adequate
account of what the extra thing required can amount to.
(He supposes that it might be some interpretation of the
term *logos—speech, enumeration of the parts of a thing,
or the determination of the thing’s identity—but finds all
three objectionable.) Nevertheless, Plato seems through-
out to have in mind by knowledge a state of mind related
to an object, and the question is what that state and that
relation can be.
Aristotle has similar preconceptions, and is hardly at all
concerned with the justification of knowledge-claims. He
says repeatedly that we think we have knowledge proper
(episte¯me¯) of something when we know its reason or cause.
In his view that reason is brought out when the subject-

matter can be ordered in terms of a demonstrative syllo-
gism (where the premisses and conclusions state essential
or necessary truths about something), the middle term of
which (what the two premisses have in common) gives
that reason. Knowledge proper, therefore, entails bring-
ing its object within a context of explanatory and reason-
giving propositions, which amounts to science as Aristotle
conceived it. He thus thought that knowledge of a thing
involved understanding it in terms of the reasons for it.
(Some recent scholars have said that by ‘knowledge’ Aris-
totle meant understanding, but that is not quite right.)
There is no concern here about exactly what it is to know
that such and such is the case, so-called propositional
knowledge, and even less with the attempt to base know-
ledge-claims on something absolutely certain. That came
in only when the Sceptics, who thought that freedom
from care resulted from it, pressed their scepticism. The
rival schools such as the Stoics had a similar motivation to
some extent in seeking a source of certainty in a ‘criterion
of truth’.
Although Plato thought, at any rate at one time, that
knowledge was reserved for the Forms, and also sug-
gested in his ‘Theory of Recollection’, put forward in his
Meno and Phaedo, that we are born with such knowledge
260 epistemology, genetic
but have to be reminded of it by particular experiences, he
put forward otherwise no general theory about the source
of our knowledge. It is often said that Aristotle thought
that all the materials of knowledge, all the concepts which
it involves, are derived from experience. In my opinion,

there is some doubt about that, although he did think that
the acquisition of knowledge depended in one way or
another on experience. On the other hand, Thomas
Aquinas, the great medieval Aristotelian, certainly
thought that all the materials for knowledge are derived
from experience, although he certainly did not claim that
all knowledge as such is derived from experience (as his
theological concerns indicate). The distinction between
knowledge and its materials (the concepts presupposed by
it) is important and it became crucial in the eighteenth
century. Apart from this, the philosophers of the Middle
Ages contributed little to epistemology that was not avail-
able from the Greeks. It is perhaps worth noting, how-
ever, that Augustine was near enough to the
post-Aristotelians to be influenced by scepticism and pro-
duced a kind of pre-echo of Descartes’s ‘Cogito ergo sum’
in his own ‘Si fallor sum’ (‘If I err, I exist’).
One thing that was novel about the kind of philosophy
that Descartes introduced was its first-person approach.
The general basis for justification of claims to knowledge
was to be found in the individual’s own mind, and the ‘I
think’ is, for Descartes, the basis for any confidence an
individual can have in believing himself to have know-
ledge. The possibility of any further knowledge must be
derived from that. Descartes also introduced the ‘way of
ideas’ as part of that programme. What we are given is
ideas of one kind or another and the problem is how we
can justifiably use them as a basis for belief in a world
which is outside our minds. Perception is just as much a
matter of having ideas as is any other operation of the

mind, and the problem is therefore what kind of justifica-
tion we have for believing that our ideas are representa-
tive of anything. This approach was characteristic of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, and
although it is conventional to divide the philosophers of
the time between those who were rationalists (in empha-
sizing the part played by reason in it) and empiricists (in
emphasizing the part played by experience) they were not
fundamentally at odds in that general approach.
Descartes did not think that all our ideas are derived
from experience, and the rationalists who followed him,
particularly Leibniz, maintained the possibility of innate
ideas, or at least ideas which are independent of experi-
ence or a priori (a term which goes back to Aristotle’s dis-
tinction between knowledge derived from truths which
are prior to demonstration and truths which are posterior
in that they are as yet undemonstrated and may be arrived
at by induction from experience). In fact an a priori idea or
truth does not have to be innate, as Kant was to emphasize
in saying that while all knowledge begins with experience
it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. Thus
the thesis that some knowledge is a priori is quite
compatible with the thesis that no knowledge is innate.
Nevertheless, the rationalists tended to assert the possibil-
ity of innate, and not merely a priori, knowledge, as in
effect did Plato when, in putting forward his ‘Theory of
Recollection’, he claimed that experience reminds us of
knowledge with which we are born. Such knowledge
might be either knowledge of truths or the knowledge
which we may have in having a genuine idea of some-

thing.
Locke, the first of the so-called British Empiricists,
argued vehemently that all our ideas arise from experi-
ence, but he did not think, as did some later empiricists,
including J. S. Mill, that all knowledge of truths was
derived from experience. Some such knowledge, he
thought, rests on intuition and some on demonstration.
Locke did think, however, that experience is the founda-
tion for knowledge in that the simple ideas of sense are the
origin of everything else in the understanding. That
thought was taken further by Berkeley and Hume. The
main epistemological concerns of these philosophers
were, thus, the limits and extent of the human under-
standing, as typified by the central claim of Hume’s
empiricism—that all ideas are derived from impressions
of sense, every simple idea being a copy of a correspond-
ing impression. The problem for Hume, given this, is
what justifies us in going from one impression to another,
and thus, since he thought that belief consisted of a
lively idea related to or associated with a present impres-
sion, what justifies us in belief about anything beyond a
present impression. What justifies us, in particular, in
belief in causality and in a world apart from present
impressions? Hume thought, sceptically, that there was
no such justification; we can explain only what, psycho-
logically, makes us have those beliefs. This is a matter of
custom, producing a determination of the mind, as is
involved in the principles of the association of ideas.
Apart from what they thought about ideas none of
these philosophers thought that knowledge of all truths

was derived solely from experience, although the empiri-
cists tended to suggest that what were in effect a priori
truths were confined to what Hume called ‘relations of
ideas’. Kant made a systematic distinction between ana-
lytic judgements, the truth of which is a priori in depend-
ing on the relations between the ideas involved, and
synthetic judgements which go beyond what is implicit in
the ideas involved. An empiricist would have no problems
about such truths provided that the latter class of judge-
ments are confined to what can be justified by reference to
experience, and are thus a posteriori. But Kant thought
that there were, in addition, synthetic a priori truths—
necessary but more than analytic truths involved in math-
ematics and in the presuppositions of the sciences and of
objective knowledge generally. He also thought, how-
ever, that it was impossible to go beyond what was so pre-
supposed in human understanding, despite what some
philosophers had claimed, and what Hegel, for example,
claimed after him, could be achieved by pure reason.
Kant argued that the attempt to use pure reason in that
way inevitably led to antinomies and other forms of
epistemology, history of 261
contradiction; Hegel thought that such apparent logical
obstacles could be transcended in higher forms of ratio-
nality. The issues can be no more than hinted at here; in
Hegelian philosophy epistemology tends to be swallowed
up in a certain style of metaphysics.
There were almost immediate reactions against Hegel,
but most of them were metaphysically orientated.
Schopenhauer, who reacted to Hegel in a very bad-

tempered and abusive way, urged a return, as far as episte-
mology was concerned, to Kant, although he thought that
the principles of objective knowledge which Kant had
argued for could be reduced to one of four forms of the
*principle of sufficient reason, a principle due originally to
Leibniz. Nietzsche, who was influenced in some ways by
Schopenhauer, even if he misinterpreted him, maintained
the doctrine of the subjectivity of truth—truth is in effect
power. This is a difficult doctrine, to say the least, but it has
had considerable influence on recent continental philoso-
phy. None of this, however, is, strictly speaking, episte-
mology for its own sake.
Outside neo-Kantianism, epistemology in the nine-
teenth century remained almost exclusively an Anglo-
Saxon phenomenon. J. S. Mill, as already indicated, argued
for an extreme empiricism, maintaining that knowledge
of all truths was derived from experience, thus putting a
great deal of weight on the role of induction in arriving at
general truths of all kinds. The end of the century saw the
rise of American *pragmatism, initially in the claim by
C. S. Peirce that the meaningfulness of our ideas is a function
of their contribution to rational conduct. This notion was
misleadingly extended to truth by William James. Because
knowledge entails truth, this inevitably affected concep-
tions of knowledge on the part of these philosophers and
their pragmatist descendants. Perhaps the main epistemo-
logical tenet inherited from Peirce, however, is that of
*‘fallibilism’, the idea that we may always be wrong and
that, from the point of view of knowledge, truth is simply
an ideal limit. This idea has been extremely influential,

although if it is taken to imply that we cannot be certain of
anything it seems quite wrong.
Twentieth-century empiricism, the main subsequent
movement in epistemology, tended to be a kind of rever-
sion to Hume without the psychological dress. It was con-
cerned, however, less with the basis of our ideas than with
the scope and certainty of our knowledge of truths. Logi-
cal Positivists, such as A. J. Ayer, asserted that all knowable
truths are either analytic or empirical—there is no room
for the synthetic a priori. At the same time the problem of
our knowledge of the external world remains because all
that is ‘given’ is to be found in the individual’s experience,
particularly in what have become known as *sense-data
(a notion which is close, at any rate in status, to Hume’s
impressions). Sense-data propositions are indubitable, if
anything is (and Ayer himself vacillated on that point), But
there is then a problem about the relation between sense-
data and so-called material objects—a problem which gen-
erated various epistemological theories of perception,
particularly phenomenalism, the doctrine that material
objects are either bundles of actual and possible sense-data
or what came to be known, following Russell, as logical
constructions from these. The whole notion of the
*‘given’ has subsequently come under criticism from
many sources. But does knowledge need, in any case, an
indubitable basis? Knowledge may entail belief and the
truth of what is believed, but, whatever else it entails, it is
not evident that it is that such truth must be indubitable.
Philosophers have thus, for good reason, most often
ceased to invoke sense-data as perceptual foundations for

knowledge. Interest in that kind of approach to epistemol-
ogy has thereby declined. What has remained of consider-
able interest for philosophers is perhaps twofold. First,
there is the question what knowledge is, what exhaustive
account one is to give of that concept. A short paper by
Edmund Gettier on whether knowledge amounts to justi-
fied true belief (a theory which he supposed was espoused
by Plato), arguing that there could be justified true belief
which did not amount to knowledge, has generated a
whole industry of attempts to give the necessary and suffi-
cient truth-conditions for any proposition of the form ‘X
knows that p’. This, it has been suggested, may be
achieved either by adding further conditions apart from
those involved in speaking of justified true belief or by
eschewing reference to justification and substituting refer-
ence to something like a causal relation between what is
known and the belief involved. Pursuit of the industry
continues with no firm resolution, although it is clear that,
whatever else is entailed, the possibility that the belief is
true by chance must be ruled out.
Second, there is the question, pursued most indefatiga-
bly by some American philosophers, about the general
foundations for our system of beliefs—whether there is
such a foundation, whether it is all a matter of the coher-
ence of our beliefs, or what. So the desire that knowledge
should have foundations in some way is still alive. A ques-
tion that remains open is whether that desire is based on
an illusion concerning the nature of knowledge (whether,
that is, it requires foundations, or whether the appeal to
that architectural image is just a misleading metaphor) or

whether the failure to provide sure foundations is a reason
for despair about the whole idea of knowledge. So the two
problems are in fact connected—as they always have
been, though not equally for every philosopher, as we
have seen. d.w.h.
*epistemology, problems of.
Jonathan Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology
(Oxford, 1985).
Stephen Everson (ed.), Epistemology: Companions to Ancient
Thought, i (Cambridge, 1990).
D. W. Hamlyn, The Theory of Knowledge (London, 1971).
——The Penguin History of Western Philosophy (London, 1987).
R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism (1960; 3rd edn. New York,
2003).
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ,
1980).
B. A. O. Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (London,
1978).
262 epistemology, history of
epistemology, problems of. Epistemology is the study of
our right to the beliefs we have. More generally, we start
from what we might call our cognitive stances, and ask
whether we do well to have those stances. Cognitive
stances include both our beliefs and (what we take to be)
our knowings; and in another dimension they include our
attitudes towards the various strategies and methods we
use to get new beliefs and filter out old ones, as well as the
products of those strategies and methods. Epistemology,
on this showing, is explicitly normative; it is concerned
with whether we have acted well or badly (responsibly or

irresponsibly) in forming the beliefs we have.
In pursuing this enquiry, we do not, of course, ask only
about the beliefs and strategies we find ourselves with at
the beginning. We also ask whether there are not others
which we would do better to have, and whether there are
not others which we should have if we have these ones to
start off with. The hope is to end up with a full account of
how a responsible cognitive agent should behave, with
some assurance that we do not fall too far short of that
ideal.
1. Justification. We can distinguish between two sorts of
belief: the mediated and the unmediated. Mediated beliefs
are those which we reach by some strategy which starts
from other beliefs we have. Inference is such a strategy
(but not the only one); we infer that it will rain soon from
our separate beliefs that it is mid-morning and that it is
growing very dark outside. Mediated beliefs raise the
question of whether the strategy we adopt is one to which
we have a right—one we do well to use. Unmediated
beliefs are those which we adopt without moving to them
from other beliefs we already have. These raise different
problems, which concern the source of our right to believe.
I open my eyes and, because of what I see, immediately
believe that there is a book in front of me. If I do well in
adopting that belief, it is justified (or I am justified in
adopting it). This focus on justification is one way of
expressing the idea that epistemology is normative. What
makes it the case, then, that this belief is justified?
Various answers suggest themselves. One is the *relia-
bilist answer: that the belief is justified because it is the

result of a reliable process. Another is the *coherentist
answer: that this belief is justified because my world is
more coherent with it than it would be without it. A third
is the *foundationalist claim (at least in its classical form)
that this belief is not in fact unmediated, but inferred from
a belief about how things seem to me just now. If this last
were true, we are thrown back to two questions. The first
is whether, and how, the belief about how things seem to
me just now is justified. The second is whether the infer-
ence from that belief is justified. We might ask what princi-
ple of inference is employed. Suppose it is this: that if things
seem to me that way, they probably are that way. What
makes it the case that we do well to use this principle?
2. The structure of justification. This brings us to one particu-
lar question about justification, which has received
much attention. Suppose that we give the justification of a
mediated belief A which appeals to its relation to some
other belief B. This belief, B, justifies that one, A; my belief
that it is Sunday justifies my belief that there will be no
mail today. There is a very strong intuition that B can only
transmit justification to A if it is itself justified. So the ques-
tion whether A is justified has not yet been answered,
when we appealed to B, but only shelved. Whether it is
justified depends on whether B is. What justified B? We
might appeal to some further belief C, but then the prob-
lem will simply recur. We have here the beginnings of an
infinite regress. The first belief in the series is not justified
unless the last one is. But will there ever be a last belief in
the series?
This is the infinite regress of justification. Foundation-

alism takes this regress seriously, and tries to find ‘basic
beliefs’ that are capable of stopping it. Promising ways
of doing this include the idea that basic beliefs are justified
by their source (they are the immediate products of the
sense, perhaps), or by their subject-matter (they concern
the nature of the believer’s current sensory states).
*Empiricism, in this connection, wants in some way to
ground basic beliefs in experience. Foundationalism
concerns itself with the structure of this empiricist
programme.
So a concern with the regress of justification is a con-
cern with the structure of justification. Coherentism tries
to show that a justified set of beliefs need not have the
form of a superstructure resting on a base; the idea here is
that the foundationalist programme is bound to fail, so
that the ‘base’ is left groundless, resting on nothing. If this
were the result, and if foundationalists were right about
the structure of a justified belief set, the only possible con-
clusion would be the sceptical one that none of our beliefs
are in fact justified.
Coherentists reject the base/superstructure distinc-
tion; there are no beliefs which are intrinsically grounds,
and none which are intrinsically superstructure. Beliefs
about experience can be supported by appeal to theory
(which would be going upwards in terms of the founda-
tionalist model), as well as vice versa (theories need the
support of experience). The whole thing is much more of
a mess, and cannot be sorted neatly into layers.
3. Knowledge. Epistemology, as so far explained, focuses
on justification. There is a second focus, on knowledge.

Someone whose belief is justified does well. But justifica-
tion comes in degrees, and so does our epistemic status
(determined by how well we are doing). The top status is
that of knowledge. Someone who knows that p could not
be doing better (at least with respect to p). There is a nat-
ural interest in this top status. Two main questions arise:
what is the most we can hope for, and in what areas do we
get it? The traditional attempts to define knowledge focus
on the first of these. These attempts come in two main
families. The first tries to see knowledge as some clever
form of belief; the best-known form of this view is the
‘tripartite definition’, which takes knowledge to be
(1) belief which is both (2) justified and (3) true. The
epistemology, problems of 263
second family of views takes knowledge to start where
belief gives out. Plato’s version of this was that belief is
concerned with the changing (especially the material
world), and knowledge with the unchanging (e.g. mathe-
matics). Other versions might suggest that we can have
knowledge of our surroundings, but only when some
physical thing is directly present to the mind. On this
approach, knowledge is a direct relation, while belief is
conceived as an indirect relation to the thing believed.
The second question about knowledge, namely what
areas we can get it in, introduces us to the distinction
between global and local. In some areas, we might say,
knowledge is available, and in others it is not—or at least
less freely available. It is common to hear people say that
we have no knowledge of the future, of God, or of right
and wrong, while allowing that there is at least some sci-

entific knowledge and some knowledge of the past (in
memory). Similarly, in discussing the justification of
belief, we might say that our beliefs about our present
surroundings are on firm ground, as firm as that which
supports our (rather different) central theoretical beliefs in
science, while our beliefs about God and about the future
are intrinsically less well supported.
4. Scepticism. Scepticism about knowledge comes in both
global and local forms. The knowledge-sceptic holds that
we cannot achieve knowledge, and this claim could be
made in general (the global variety) or only in certain
areas such as those mentioned above (the local form). The
belief-sceptic is generally held to be more interesting. This
person, in global form, holds that we have no right to any
of our beliefs; none are better than others, and none are
good enough to count as justified. More locally, a belief-
sceptic might say that while we do well in some of our
beliefs about things presently hidden from us (e.g. what is
in the cupboard), we have no right to any beliefs about
right and wrong. Someone who said this would be a moral
sceptic, and the difficulty in that position is to make sure
that the reasons that underlie one’s moral scepticism do
not spread over into other areas. If, for instance, one’s
objection to beliefs about moral matters is that they lie
beyond the reach of observation, one would have to make
the same objection to scientific beliefs about matters too
small to be observed.
So there is a distinction between local and global scepti-
cism, both in the theory of justified belief and in that of
knowledge. Both sorts of scepticism need to be supported

by argument, and one main problem of epistemology is
the attempt to assess and rebut such arguments as they
appear. This is one important way in which we can work
to establish our right to our beliefs.
There have been two classic strands of sceptical argu-
ment in the history of epistemology, the Pyrrhonist and
the Cartesian. *Pyrrhonism (named after its leading fig-
ure, Pyrrho of Elis (c.365–270 bc)) focuses on the justifica-
tion of belief, while the scepticism we inherit from
Descartes starts with knowledge and attempts to move to
belief from there. Descartes argued that we cannot know
something if we are unable to distinguish the case where it
is true from the case where, though false, it seems to be
true. For if we cannot distinguish, then though it may here
be true, for all we know it isn’t; this case might, for all we
can tell, be one where the appearances are deceiving us,
and if so, we can hardly claim to know that they are not.
Though persuasive enough as an argument for know-
ledge-scepticism, this approach cannot easily be extended
to support belief-scepticism; for the fact that I cannot tell
when appearances are deceiving me does little to show
that I have no (or insufficient) reason for my beliefs. Mat-
ters are different with the Pyrrhonist tradition. This is
explicitly aimed at showing that the reasons on one side
are never better than they are on the other. If so, we would
be forced to allow that there is no such thing as a belief that
is favoured by the balance of the reasons, and so to admit
that we cannot defend our right to our beliefs in the only
way available to us, namely that of showing that the evi-
dence supports them. Pyrrhonism focuses on the criteria

by which we distinguish between the true and the false
and argues in various ways that we have no right to those
criteria, and so that they cannot be rationally defended.
One classic move here is to ask what criteria we can use to
evaluate our criteria; if we are to appeal to the very criteria
that are under consideration, we beg the question, and we
have no further criteria to appeal to. Pyrrhonism is here
attacking our cognitive strategies, arguing that none of
them can be defended. Hume’s argument attacking the
rationality of induction is the classic instance.
5.*Naturalism in epistemology. Being normative, episte-
mology is concerned with evaluation—the evaluation of
strategies and their products (beliefs). Among the strat-
egies it evaluates are those of science. So conceived, episte-
mology sits in judgement on all other areas of human
enquiry; it counts as *First Philosophy. (The sceptical
question above asks how epistemology can succeed in
evaluating itself.) Quine attempted to reverse this pos-
ition, and to conceive of epistemology as part of science,
looking to the results of science to answer the questions of
epistemology. This enterprise, called naturalizing episte-
mology, is not impossible. Science does sometimes suc-
ceed in evaluating its own strategies, just as it evaluates its
own instruments. So science is sometimes normative; it
may not only examine our perceptual processes, but also
pronounce on their reliability. But some of the questions
of epistemology seem to resist naturalization, e.g. those
which concern reason rather than observation.
To say that science is sometimes normative, and that
traditional epistemology is a large part of its normative

element, might indeed reverse the relation between epis-
temology and natural science and thereby ‘naturalize’ it.
But this alone would not be enough for many determined
naturalizers. I have been presenting epistemology as a
normative enterprise, whether or not it is placed within
the sphere of natural science. But there are many who sup-
pose that if normative claims and assertions make genuine
sense and are capable of being true or false, they must be
264 epistemology, problems of
somehow identical with natural claims, ones from which
the normativity has been removed. The worry here is that
if normative facts are not identical with natural facts, we
will find ourselves landed with two realms, the realm of
nature (where we find such things as particles, electricity,
and gravity) and the realm of the normative (where we
find such things as duties, responsibilities, and rights),
without there being any way of understanding how those
two realms are co-present in one and the same world.
More aggressively, the question becomes how there is any
room for distinct normative facts in a natural world, the
world that can be studied by science. If we want norma-
tive epistemological facts, then, we will have to show that
those facts are also natural. If we succeeded in doing that,
we would have naturalized epistemology in a much more
dramatic sense.
6. Special areas. There are traditionally four sources of
knowledge (or of justified belief): the senses, *memory,
*introspection, and *reason. Each of these has its episte-
mology. The study of perceptual knowledge asks how
perception manages to yield knowledge of our material

surroundings. To answer this question one obviously
needs to know a certain amount about how the senses
actually work. But that knowledge seems to be not
enough on its own (so perhaps the epistemology of the
senses cannot be naturalized either). There are difficulties
to be faced here which cannot be solved with a bit more
scientific information. One is the sceptical difficulty some-
times called the *veil of perception. If our senses only
reveal knowledge about how things seem, how can we
hope to use them to find out how things really are? The
appearances, on this showing, are obstructing rather than
helping us in our attempts to discern the nature of reality;
perception casts a veil over the world rather than reveal-
ing it to us. Another sceptical difficulty here derives from
the *argument from illusion.
At the other extreme is the epistemology of reason. The
activities of reason are twofold. First there is inference, in
which we move from old knowledge to new knowledge.
The strongest form of this is valid deductive inference,
which occurs when it is not possible that our premisses
(what we are moving from) are true if our conclusion
(what we are moving to) is false. One question here is how
such inference could ever yield new knowledge. Surely the
conclusion must be somehow already contained in the
premisses, if the premisses cannot be true where the con-
clusion is false. The second supposed activity of reason is
the direct discovery of new truths. A truth that can be dis-
covered by the activity of reason alone is called an *a priori
truth, and knowledge of it is a priori knowledge. One of
the great questions in epistemology is how a priori know-

ledge is possible, and what sorts of truth can be known in
this way. Some propositions are true in virtue of their
meaning alone, e.g. that all bachelors are people. We
know this truth, and not by appeal to the senses, to
introspection, or to memory. So we know it by reason.
But propositions of this sort (often called analytic) are
trivial. They give us no substantial knowledge. Can
reason give us substantial knowledge of anything, or is all
a priori knowledge analytic and (therefore) trivial?
For example, if mathematical knowledge is the product of
reason, can it be substantial? Are mathematical truths
merely analytic? We appear to be torn between saying
that mathematical truths are important and saying that
we know them by the activity of reason alone. It was
the attempt to avoid this dilemma that led to Kant’s first
Critique.
7. The place of epistemology. Where does epistemology
come on the philosophical map? I see it as a chapter in the
more general enterprise which is called the philosophy of
mind; it is the evaluative side of that enterprise. In the phil-
osophy of mind we ask about the nature of mental states,
in particular (for present purposes) about the nature of
belief. Our views in epistemology are sensitive to our
answers to that question, just as they are sensitive to sci-
entific results about the nature of perceptual processes.
For instance, our account of the relation between know-
ledge and belief will depend crucially on the way in which
we conceive of belief. Is it a closed state, in which we are
aware merely of representations of things rather than of
things themselves (the veil of belief )? If so, is knowledge

to be merely the best form of such a state—the thinnest
veil? Or is knowledge to be conceived quite differently?
The other philosophical area to which epistemology is
tightly tied is the theory of meaning. The question
whether we are able to know propositions of a certain sort
is sensitive to our account of what those propositions
mean. For instance, if we take statements about a material
world to be a disguised form of statement about experi-
ence, and if we think that our knowledge of experiences is
secure from sceptical attack, we may hope to emerge with
a defence of our ability to know the nature of the material
world. This hope is the hope that *phenomenalism will
solve some of our epistemological problems for us. j.d.
*epistemology, history of; epistemic justification; epis-
temology, genetic; evolutionary epistemology; femi-
nist epistemology; naturalized epistemology; relativism,
epistemological; knowledge.
R. B. Brandom, ‘Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism’, in Articu-
lating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge,
Mass., 2000).
R. M. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 2nd edn. (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ, 1977).
J. Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford,
1985).
A. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.,
1986).
W. V. Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalised’, in Ontological Relativity
(New York, 1969).
W. F. Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, in Sci-
ence, Perception and Reality (London, 1963).

L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford, 1969).
epistemology and psychology. The divorce of philoso-
phy and psychology is a relatively recent affair. Histories
epistemology and psychology 265
of psychology read like histories of philosophy until the
mid-nineteenth century, when the methods and preoccu-
pations of philosophers and psychologists began to
diverge, and psychologists came to regard themselves as
engaged in a fully fledged science emancipated from its
empirically feeble predecessors. In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt
established the first psychological laboratory at the Uni-
versity of Leipzig. Not until well into the twentieth cen-
tury, however, did professional associations and university
departments of philosophy and psychology become dis-
tinct. The disciplines have resisted reconciliation and
maintained a respectful distance ever since.
Academic departmental boundaries aside, W. V. Quine
convinced many philosophers that distinctions between
scientific and philosophical endeavours are tenuous; in
particular, ‘epistemology . . . is a chapter of psychology’.
Traditionally, epistemology sought an unassailable foun-
dation for subsequent empirical theorizing: philosophical
investigation must be independent of, and prior to, empiri-
cal inquiry. The goal was to demonstrate that knowledge
of the world around us could be inferred from sensory
experiences that mediate access to that world. The
grounds for such an inference have proved remarkably dif-
ficult to locate, however. Hume demonstrated that they
were not to be found in reason alone. One possibility is that
talk of a mind-independent world is misplaced: sentences

about physical bodies might be reducible to, or translatable
into, sentences concerning sense experiences. Quine
argues against this possibility, and concludes that the rela-
tion we bear to the physical world is best comprehended
by empirical psychology. It is not that epistemology is to be
replaced by psychology, only that we must cease to regard
epistemology as operating in the classical mode, prior to
and independently of psychology and the natural sciences.
Inspired by Quine, some philosophers have turned to
empirical psychological findings in support of conclusions
concerning traditional philosophical matters. Stephen
Stich, taking the dark view, argues that work in psych-
ology undermines philosophers’ time-honoured trust in
reason as a vehicle, if not a source, of truth. P. M. Church-
land, in dismissing belief and reason as being on a par with
ghosts and devils, favours the replacement of theories of
mind with a properly hard-nosed neuroscience, leaving
little for philosophers to work with. D. C. Dennett finds
answers to age-old philosophical questions about con-
scious experience and belief in cutting-edge work of
psychologists and neuroscientists.
In a more moderate vein, A. I. Goldman, a proponent of
the ‘naturalizing’ of epistemology and metaphysics,
argues that philosophy begins, but does not end, with the
consideration of ‘folk theories’, conceptions of ourselves
and our world embodied in our language and everyday
patterns of thought. Having mapped these folk concep-
tions, we turn to psychologists, anthropologists, and
others for an explanation of their deployment. Suppose, for
instance, that our folk scheme treats colours as objective

features of objects on a par with shapes. We might learn
from psychology and neurobiology that perceived colours
are better regarded as artefacts arising from the operation
of our visual apparatus. Having accepted this, we would be
in a position both to explain and to revise our naïve ‘pre-
theoretical’ conception of colour. We would do so, not on
the basis of a priori reflection, however, but by way of an
explicit appeal to what we took to be empirical fact.
It is by no means universally accepted that philosophy
can, or must, be naturalized in any of these ways. Even so,
many philosophers now concede it is a mistake to assume
that philosophical inquiry could be altogether insulated
from empirical findings in psychology and elsewhere,
hence the emergence of ‘cognitive science’, a disciplinary
hybrid comprising psychologists, computer scientists, lin-
guists, philosophers, and others, striving to understand
the mind and its place in the natural order. Whether
this represents an investigatory advance remains to be
seen. While on the whole laudable, interdisciplinary
co-operation can serve to blur the focus of research.
Philosophers are prone to forget that empirical theories of
mind can incorporate substantive philosophical commit-
ments with shadowy credentials. These may be recycled
back into philosophy, though in a way that disguises their
character. Loosely paraphrasing Wittgenstein: philoso-
phers nowadays risk taking on board conceptual con-
fusions disguised as experimental methods. j.heil.
P. M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1995).
D. C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds (New York, 1996).

A. I. Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social
Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
W. V. Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, in Ontological Relativity
and Other Essays (New York, 1969).
S. P. Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990).
epoche¯.
‘Withholding’ of assent and dissent, i.e. suspense
of judgement. Ancient *scepticism combined a thesis,
‘There is no knowledge’, with a prescription, ‘Practise
epoche¯’. The one leads to the other via a view shared by
some non-sceptics that it is stupid to assent to what you do
not know. And the outcome is delightful: ‘Freedom from
disturbance follows like a shadow’ (Diogenes Laertius on
Pyrrho). But there was, and is, controversy whether gen-
eral epoche¯ is a practicable option. c.a.k.
M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Can the Sceptic Live his Scepticism?’, in M.
Schofield, M. F. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (eds.), Doubt and Dog-
matism (Oxford, 1980); repr. in M. F. Burnyeat (ed.), The Skepti-
cal Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1983).
equality. Currently the most controversial of the great
social ideals. In the abstract, it means that people who are
similarly situated in morally relevant respects should be
treated similarly; but everything depends on what kinds of
similarity count as relevant, and what constitutes similar
treatment. Is a society equal enough if it guarantees all its
citizens the same basic political and legal rights, or should
it try to foster a much more general equality of condition?
Complete equality among persons being impossible, the
266 epistemology and psychology

real meaning of the idea is reduction or amelioration of
*inequality.
Possible interpretations include equality before the
law, equality of political power, equality of opportunity
for social and economic advancement, equality of
resources, equality of welfare, equality of freedom, and
equality of respect. Merely abolishing aristocracy and giv-
ing everybody the vote is compatible with huge inequali-
ties in social condition and political influence. By now it is
relatively uncontroversial in Western societies that gov-
ernments should not discriminate on the basis of race,
religion, sex, or national origin, and that they should dis-
courage such discrimination by private parties. Contro-
versy arises over the extent to which governments should
also aim at greater social and economic equality through
policies of collective social provision, public health and
education, and redistribution of income or wealth, and
whether they should employ policies of affirmative action
to produce greater equality among groups if there has
been discrimination in the past.
The main issue is whether we should regard certain
human inequalities and their consequences as natural, and
only be concerned not to impose further artificial ones, or
whether we should base social policy on the assumption
that all persons are equally deserving of a good life, and
that their society should try to make it possible for them to
have it. This latter goal of positive equality will not be real-
ized through mere equality of opportunity, since equal
opportunity combined with unequal ability and luck pro-
duce very unequal results.

An important alternative view is that equality has no
value in itself, but is significant only for its effects. *Utili-
tarianism, for example, holds that society should be
arranged to maximize the total happiness of its members,
without regard to how benefits and disadvantages are dis-
tributed, except as this affects the total. However, eco-
nomic equality is likely to have instrumental value,
because of the principle of diminishing marginal utility: a
given sum transferred from rich to poor will enhance the
welfare of the latter more than it will decrease the welfare
of the former. But too strong an effort toward equality can
have economic effects which diminish utility. t.n.
*liberty and equality; justice; well-being.
R. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
T. Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York, 1991).
M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York, 1983).
equipollence. The theory of equipollence developed by
some medieval logicians, e.g. Peter of Spain (c.1215–77),
concerned the equivalences that result from inserting a
negation sign before or after a sign of quantity, e.g. ‘Not
every A is B’, ‘Every A is not B’. ‘Equipollence’ later
became synonymous with *equivalence in general.
Tarski, though, defines as ‘equipollent’ two systems of
sentences such that any sentence in one can be derived
from the sentences in the other. c.w.
A. Tarski, Introduction to Logic (New York, 1965), 32–3.
equivalence. Relation between two statements p and q
when p implies q and q implies p. Material equivalence, in
line with *material implication (p implies q unless p is true
and q false; q implies p unless q is true and p false), holds

between p and q if and only if they have the same truth-
value. But equivalence is also often interpreted to require
necessary identity of truth-value and/or identity of con-
tent and/or identity of meaning. s.w.
*equivalence relation.
S. Wolfram, Philosophical Logic (London, 1989), ch. 4. 1.
equivalence relation. An equivalence relation is a binary,
i.e. two-term, relation that is *transitive, *symmetric, and
(strongly) *reflexive; for example, being the same age as is an
equivalence relation, relative to the domain of things with
age. c.a.k.
*equivalence of statements.
W. Hodges, Logic (Harmondsworth, 1977).
equivalences of the form T: see snow is white.
equivocation: see ambiguity.
equivocation, fallacy of. You equivocate when you
mean two things by one or more occurrences of a single
word or phrase. Often this is innocuous, as in puns. But it
will lead to faulty reasoning when an *argument requires
one such meaning in order to entail the intended conclu-
sion, another in order to have true premisses. Usually the
fault is not deceptive, but sometimes it is thought-
provoking, as in: What you are able to do or not do, you
are free not to do; you are able to pay or not pay taxes; so
you are free not to pay them. c.a.k.
*ambiguity.
C. L. Hamblin, Fallacies (London, 1970).
Erasmus, Desiderius (1466–1536). Born in poor circum-
stances in Rotterdam, he attended the University of Paris
where he came into contact with many who were due to

play a crucial role in the new humanist movement. He
rose to become a key figure in *Renaissance humanism,
active as a critic of the Church and of contemporary
mores, and active also as an editor of major writings from
an earlier age, such as the works of the early Fathers of the
Church, and above all the Greek text of the New Testa-
ment. His edition of the New Testament, though inad-
equate in many ways, was a major advance on anything
available in the Middle Ages. Many of his writings, such as
In Praise of Folly, a powerful satire on society both ecclesi-
astical and lay, argue the case for a return to a form of
Christian pietism. Though he attacked many abuses com-
mitted by the Church, abuses which in due course it tried
to stamp out, he was unsympathetic to the Reformation
then under way, as is made clear by his attack on Luther. It
is an irony of history that his works were placed on the
Index by the Council of Trent. a.bro.
Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Rotterdam (London, 1969).
Erasmus, Desiderius 267
Eriugena, John Scotus (c.810–c.877) from Ireland, lived
for years in France where he worked at the Court of
Charles the Bald. He translated a number of works, includ-
ing some by pseudo-Dionysius, from Greek into Latin,
and in addition wrote treatises of his own, in particular On
the Division of Nature, the first great philosophical system
of the Middle Ages. The Division, which was heavily influ-
enced by the Neoplatonism of pseudo-Dionysius, is pre-
sented as a system of Christian thought, but there is room
for dispute over whether it avoids an un-Christian *panthe-
ism. He considers nature under four heads: nature which

creates and is uncreated, nature which is created and cre-
ates, nature which is created and does not create, and
nature which neither creates nor is created. Since God is
said to fall under the first heading, it might well seem that
there is a pantheistic philosophy here, but the distinction
that Eriugena draws between uncreated creator and all else
is sufficient to convince some commentators that he has
found his own way to develop a position which is not far
removed from Christian orthodoxy. a.bro.
John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford, 1988).
error theory of value is the label given by J. L. Mackie to
a position he promoted about the nature of *value.
According to Mackie, although moral judgements in their
meaning aim at something objective, there are in fact no
objective values. Hence our normal moral judgements
involve an error. r.h.
J. L. Mackie, Ethics (Harmondsworth, 1977), ch. 1.
eschatology. That branch of theology concerned with
‘the last things’—death, what follows it for each individ-
ual, and the final fate of the universe. According to trad-
itional Christian theology, death is followed by
resurrection of the dead, God’s judgement on their past
life, and their apportionment to heaven or hell. ‘Realized
eschatology’ is the view that states analogous to the trad-
itional after-death states occur in our present life—e.g.
God’s judgement on the past is a feature of life on
earth. Scholars have found strains of realized eschatology,
as well as traditional eschatology, in the New Testament;
a few very radical theologians defend only realized
eschatology. r.g.s.

R. Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford, 1989),
ch. 12.
esoteric. ‘Inner’. A word coined in the second century ad
to refer to Aristotle’s more difficult works, as contrasted
with his accessible *‘exoteric’ ones. The esoteric works
were intended for more advanced pupils. Their obscurity
gave rise to the story that they concealed Aristotle’s true
doctrines, which were a secret to be revealed only to dis-
ciples. The word was later applied with the sense ‘secret’,
e.g. to the doctrines of Pythagoras’ inner circle. r.j.h.
*Pythagoreanism.
I. Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Göteborg,
1957), 426–43.
ESP phenomena, philosophical implications of. ESP
(extrasensory perception), the supposed ability to receive
information about the world without the use of the recog-
nized senses, raises questions about various aspects of the
physicalistic world-view that dominates current phil-
osophical thinking. Apparent occurrences of ESP, while
often extremely convincing to participants, are difficult to
investigate applying standard scientific canons of repeat-
ability, independence of observation, and applicability of
quantitative measurement. Thus such occurrences, if genu-
ine, question the universality of these canons. Events
supposedly learned of by ESP include ones at great dis-
tances or even of future events; this would violate known
causal relations and so undermine causal theories of per-
ception (how can future events cause the perception of
such events in the present?). More generally, ESP, if it
exists, would appear to be non-physical: ESP is disanalo-

gous to the familiar senses (no known organ of sensation,
no known physical link with events perceived) and so
explanations, perhaps purely mentalistic, outside the cur-
rent physicalistic paradigm seem required. g.c.
J. R. Smythies (ed.), Science and ESP (London, 1967).
esse est percipi.
‘To be is to be perceived.’ Berkeley, in
his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
(1710), asserts (para. 3) of ‘unthinking things’ that ‘their
esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any exist-
ence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive
them’—on the ground that unthinking things, ‘sensible
objects’, are*‘ideas or sensations’. Note that he affirms this
only of ‘unthinking’ things. g.j.w.
A. A. Luce, The Dialectic of Immaterialism (London, 1963),
ch. 6.
essence. There are four grades of *essentialism. According
to grade 1, a thing x is allowed to have a property φ essen-
tially only relative to some other (implicitly or explicitly)
singled-out property that x has (or kind to which it
belongs). Such a property φ is thus a ‘relativistic’ essence,
and the acceptance of such essences requires only accept-
ance of de dicto necessity: that is, it presupposes only the
sort of necessary truth that applies to general propositions
such as the proposition that if something is square then it
has a shape. Locke’s doctrine of ‘nominal essence’ belongs
with this grade of essentialism.
According to grade 2, in addition to such de dicto neces-
sity there is also fundamental *de re necessity. According to
this grade, moreover, it is a necessary truth that any

property possessed essentially by anything is possessed
essentially by everything that possesses it. Thus, necessar-
ily if something is a body, then it is necessarily a body.
Note well: it is not just necessarily a body relative to some
property of it that entails its being a body, it is not just neces-
sarily a body ‘under some description’ that yields its
being a body. No, the thing itself that is a body has that
property not just contingently but necessarily. In a sense
essentiality is, for this intermediate grade, fundamentally
268 Eriugena, John Scotus
a feature of properties. Some properties are essential prop-
erties; and, most would say, some are not. Properties that
are thus essential are in a sense ‘absolute essences’, since
whatever has them must have them essentially.
But there is a higher grade of essentialism, grade 3,
according to which in addition to properties had essen-
tially in the relativistic fashion of the lowest grade and in
the absolute and de re necessary fashion of the second
grade, there are properties had essentially by some
things while they are had but not essentially by other
things. Thus a snowball may be said to be round and
necessarily so (it is of the essence of a snowball, part of its
essential nature, that it be round), but the constituent
piece of snow is round yet not necessarily so. This might
be called ‘particularistic’ essentialism, since one and the
same property might be of the essence of one particular
while it is had by another particular without being of its
essence.
Finally, a higher-yet grade of essentialism, grade 4,
requires that each particular have a property that only it

could possibly have had, in any possible world: its ‘thisness’
or *haecceity. Roundness is a sort of essence that, as we
have seen, is distinctively of the essence of some (only) of
those particulars that have it. A thing’s haecceity, on the
other hand, is in a more extreme fashion distinctively of
the essence of something: for it is a property that is neces-
sarily possessed by that thing in whatever possible world it
might have existed, and one that could not possibly have
been possessed by any other thing.
The higher grades of essentialism give rise to puzzling
conundrums. For example, it seems very plausible that if a
thing has a differential modal property (one that not
everything has or need have), then there must be some
actual (non-modal) property of that thing to explain why it
has that modal property. But this gives rise to a problem
concerning any property that is not only differentially but
also ‘distinctively’ essential, it being possible that some-
thing have it essentially while something else has it also
but not essentially. Take the roundness of a snowball,
which it shares with its constituent piece of snow, even
though one, the snowball, has it essentially, and the other,
the constituent snow, has it also but not essentially. Given
the extent and nature of the similarity in actual properties,
including roundness, between the snowball and the con-
stituent snow, it is hard to see what could possibly explain
the possession of that modal property by that snowball.
Whatever property of the snowball we might appeal to in
order to explain its essential possession of roundness
would seem to be shared by the constituent snow, which
is supposed to have roundness only accidentally. So what

could possibly explain this difference between them, that
one has roundness essentially while the other has it only
accidentally? e.s.
S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).
M. Loux (ed.), The Possible and the Actual (Ithaca, NY, 1979).
A. Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford, 1974).
W. V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.,
1953; 2nd edn. 1961).
essence, individual: see haecceity.
essentialism. The essentialist claims that we can draw an
objective distinction between an object’s essential and
accidental properties, which is not simply a reflection of
how we choose to describe the object. An essential prop-
erty of an object is one that it possesses in every *possible
world in which it exists—or, if one favours *counterpart
theory, it is one that is possessed by every counterpart of
the object in other possible worlds. For example, it may be
urged that it was an essential property of Napoleon that he
was a human being, but only an accidental property of
him that he was Emperor of France. Some supposedly
essential properties of objects, such as Napoleon’s prop-
erty of being human, are shared by other objects of the
same kind, but there may also be essential properties that
are unique to the object possessing them—and these are
said to constitute that object’s individual *essence. In the
case of a human being like Napoleon, one such property
may be his property of having originated from the fusion
of a particular sperm and egg. e.j.l.
E. J. Lowe, A Survey of Metaphysics (Oxford, 2002).
essentially contested concepts. It is sometimes claimed

that the enduring diversity of opinion over, e.g., moral,
political, or religious issues reveals that such questions lie
beyond the domain of rational enquiry. In the 1950s, W. B.
Gallie challenged this claim, arguing that disputes about
concepts like ‘art’, ‘democracy’, and ‘social justice’ are not
merely semantic or attitudinal in character, but often
involve arguments that aspire to be, and sometimes are,
rationally persuasive. None the less, the internal complex-
ity of such concepts ensures that dispute is always prone to
break out. Thus, from the fact that such concepts are
‘essentially contested’, we should not conclude that their
use defies rational assessment. d.bak.
W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955/6).
eternal recurrence. An ancient cosmological idea, seized
upon by Nietzsche, to the effect that everything that
happens is part of an endlessly repeating cycle or sequence
of events. While Nietzsche entertained this idea as an
actual cosmological hypothesis, he first introduced it and
chiefly employed it hypothetically as a kind of test. One
who is able to affirm life even on this supposition will have
what it takes to endure and flourish in the aftermath of all
disillusionment. (See e.g. The Gay Science, sect. 341; Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 3; The Will to Power, sect. 1066.)
r.s.
*cosmology.
John Stambaugh, Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Return (Baltimore,
1972).
eternity. Sometimes used to mean simply the whole of
*time; but more usually used to mean a timeless realm

(with no past or future) in which God lives. Boethius
eternity 269