The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 30 pdf

defined it as the ‘total and perfect possession at once of an
endless life’. It seemed unthinkable that for God there
should be a ‘no longer’ and a ‘not yet’. Most Christian
thinkers since the fourth century (unlike the authors of the
Bible) held that God exists outside time, but in his timeless
realm simultaneously acts at and knows about every
moment of time. It is, however, doubtful if this is a coher-
ent claim—if God sees some event in 500 bc as it happens
and sees some other event in 2000 ad as it happens and
all divine seeings are simultaneous with each other,
then 500 bc must be the same year as 2000 ad—which is
absurd. r.g.s.
N. Pike, God and Timelessness (London, 1970).
ethical formalism. A type of ethical theory which defines
*moral judgements in terms of their logical form (for
example, as ‘laws’ or ‘universal prescriptions’) rather than
their content (for example, as judgements about what
actions will best promote human well-being). The term
often also carries critical connotations. Kant, for example,
has been criticized for defining morality in terms of the
formal feature of being a ‘universal law’, and then
attempting to derive from this formal feature various con-
crete moral duties. r.j.n.
*prescriptivism.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, various
edns., e.g. tr. H. J. Paton (London, 1948).
G. J. Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London, 1967).
ethical naturalism: see naturalism, ethical.
ethical objectivism: see objectivism and subjectivism,
ethical.
ethical relativism: see relativism, ethical.

ethical subjectivism: see objectivism and subjectivism,
ethical.
ethical voluntarism: see voluntarism, ethical.
ethics: see moral philosophy.
ethics, applied: see applied ethics.
ethics, axiological: see axiological ethics.
ethics, bio-: see bioethics.
ethics, business: see business ethics.
ethics, Chinese: see Chinese philosophy; Confucianism.
ethics, deontological: see deontological ethics.
ethics, divine command: see divine command ethics.
ethics, emotive theory of: see emotive theory of ethics.
ethics, environmental: see environmental ethics.
ethics, evolutionary: see evolutionary ethics.
ethics, feminist: see feminist ethics.
ethics, Japanese: see Japanese philosophy.
ethics, Kantian: see Kantian ethics.
ethics, medical: see medical ethics.
ethics, naturalistic: see naturalism, ethical.
ethics and aesthetics. The two traditional branches of
the theory of value. Aesthetics understood as value theory
concerns itself with the value of perceptual and imagina-
tive experiences to be had from engagement with objects,
both natural and man-made, or with the value inherent in
those objects in relation to human lives. More broadly,
aesthetics as value theory may be said to be concerned
with intrinsic value generally. Ethics as value theory con-
cerns itself with the evaluation of human conduct, with
how human beings ought fundamentally to behave, par-
ticularly in relation to one another. Ethics and aesthetics

are thus connected, in that part of the answer to the
broader question ethics asks most likely involves an
answer to the narrower question aesthetics asks, regard-
ing what is worthwhile experiencing for its own sake, or
what sorts of things enrich human lives. Furthermore,
issues about the reality and objectivity of ethical and aes-
thetic values are more or less parallel.
Certain ethical theories, most notably virtue ethics of
either an Aristotelian or Nietzschean sort, seem to make
an aesthetic appeal at base, valorizing characters or
actions or lives that display unity, balance, or grace, and
making holistic grasp of situations in their concrete detail,
rather than formulaic application of rules, the sine qua non
of sound moral judgement. Even Kantian moral theory,
with its emphasis on the good will as the ultimate source
of value, might be seen as grounding morality in some-
thing’s having a certain form or structure, an arguably aes-
thetic notion.
On the other hand, most accounts of aesthetic evalu-
ation, and more particularly, the evaluation of art, allow
that ethical considerations play a genuine role in such
evaluation, one more or less central according the sort of
artwork involved. Thus the ethical perspective embodied
in, or conveyed by, a novel or film can be held to be
ineliminably relevant to its evaluation as art, because
appreciation of the work requires sharing or entering into
that perspective to some extent, and yet such engagement
might not be merited or justified. The moral dimension of
artistic evaluation is most prominent with representa-
tional works having sexual, violent, or racist content, but

it can be argued that even pure instrumental music has an
270 eternity
artistically relevant moral aspect, turning on the character
of the mind one engages with in listening. j.lev.
*art and morality.
José Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner (eds.), Art and Moral-
ity (London, 2003).
Noël Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview’, Ethics
(2000).
Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersec-
tion (Cambridge, 1998).
ethics and morality. ‘Morality’ and ‘ethics’ are terms
often used as synonyms: an ethical issue just is a moral
issue. Increasingly, however, the term ‘ethics’ is being
used to apply to specialized areas of morality, such as medi-
cine, business, the environment, and so on. Where pro-
fessions are involved, a governing body will typically draw
up a code of ethics for its members. ‘Ethics’ in this sense
can be thought of as a subset of morality, being that aspect
of morality concerned with the moral obligations pertain-
ing to the practice of a profession. On the other hand,
some philosophers, from Socrates to Bernard Williams,
use ‘ethics’ in a broad sense to refer to reflective answers
to the question ‘How should I live?’. If we accept this
broad sense of ‘ethics’, then morality becomes a subset
of ethics, being that aspect of ethics concerned with
obligation. r.s.d.
Brenda Almond and Donald Hill (eds.), Applied Philosophy:
Morals and Metaphysics in Contemporary Debate (London,
1991).

Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London,
1985).
ethics of belief: see belief, ethics of.
ethics of care: see care, ethics of.
eudaimonia.
Literally ‘having a good guardian spirit’, i.e.
the state of having an objectively desirable life, universally
agreed by ancient philosophical theory and popular
thought to be the supreme human good. This objective
character distinguishes it from the modern concept of
*happiness, i.e. of a subjectively satisfactory life. Much
ancient theory concerns the question of what constitutes
the good life, e.g. whether virtue is sufficient for it, as
Socrates and the Stoics held, or whether external goods
such as good fortune are also necessary, as Aristotle main-
tained. Immoralists such as Thrasymachus (in Plato’s
Republic) sought to discredit morality by arguing that it
prevents the achievement of eudaimonia, while its defend-
ers (including Plato) argued that it is necessary and/or suf-
ficient. The Kantian conception of morality binding on
rational beings independently of their well-being was
absent from Greek thought. c.c.w.t.
*well-being.
J. Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York, 1993).
T. H. Irwin, ‘Stoic and Aristotelian Conceptions of Happiness’, in
M. Schofield and G. Striker (eds.), The Norms of Nature (Cam-
bridge, 1986).
euthanasia. Originally, the word ‘euthanasia’ was
derived from two Greek roots meaning ‘good death’. The
term subsequently came to have two distinct meanings:

(1) the act or practice of painlessly putting to death those
who suffer from terminal conditions (active euthanasia);
(2) intentionally not preventing death in those who suffer
from terminal conditions (passive euthanasia). The sec-
ond meaning came into usage when technological
advances in medicine made it possible to prolong the lives
of persons without hope of recovery. Eventually, the
requirement of a ‘terminal condition’ was dropped in
many proposed definitions.
Perhaps the most accurate general meaning today is
that euthanasia occurs if and only if: (1) the death is
intended by at least one other person who is either the
cause of *death or a causally relevant condition of the
death; (2) the person put to death is either acutely suffer-
ing or irreversibly comatose (or soon will be), and this is
the reason for intending the person’s death; and (3) the
means chosen to produce the death must be as painless as
possible, or there must be a sufficient moral justification
for a more painful method.
If a person requests the termination of his or her life, the
action is called voluntary euthanasia (and often also
assisted *suicide). If the person is not mentally competent
to make an informed request, the action is called non-
voluntary euthanasia. Both forms should be distinguished
from involuntary euthanasia, which involves a person
capable of making an informed request, but who has not
done so. Involuntary euthanasia is universally con-
demned and plays no role in current moral controversies.
A final set of distinctions appeals to the active–passive dis-
tinction: passive euthanasia involves letting someone die

from a disease or injury, whereas active euthanasia
involves taking active steps to end a person’s life. All of
these distinctions suffer from borderline cases and various
forms of unclarity.
The centre of recent public and philosophical contro-
versy has been over voluntary active euthanasia (VAE),
especially physician-assisted suicide. Supporters of VAE
argue that there are cases in which relief from suffering
supersedes all other consequences and that respect for
autonomy obligates society to respect the decisions of
those who elect euthanasia. If competent patients have a
legal and moral right to refuse treatment that brings about
their deaths, there is a similar right to enlist the assistance
of physicians or others to help patients cause their deaths
by an active means. Proponents of VAE primarily look to
circumstances in which (1) a condition has become over-
whelmingly burdensome for a patient, (2) pain manage-
ment for the patient is inadequate, and (3) only a physician
seems capable of bringing relief.
The laws of most nations and the codes of medical and
research ethics from the Hippocratic corpus to today’s
major professional codes strictly prohibit VAE (and all
forms of merciful hastened death), even if a patient has a
good reason for wanting to die. Although courts have
often defended the rights of patients in cases of passive
euthanasia 271
euthanasia, courts have rarely allowed any form of what
they judged to be VAE.
Those who defend laws and medical traditions opposed
to VAE often appeal to either (1) professional-role obliga-

tions that prohibit killing or (2) the social consequences
that would result from changing these traditions. The first
argument is straightforward: *killing patients is inconsist-
ent with the roles of nursing, care-giving, and healing.
The second argument is more complex and has been at
the centre of many discussions. This argument is referred
to as the wedge argument or the *slippery slope argu-
ment, and proceeds roughly as follows: although particu-
lar acts of active termination of life are sometimes morally
justified, the social consequences of sanctioning such prac-
tices of killing would run serious risks of abuse and misuse
and, on balance, would cause more harm than benefit.
The argument is not that these negative consequences
will occur immediately, but that they will grow incremen-
tally over time, with an ever-increasing risk of unjustified
termination. t.l.b.
T. L. Beauchamp and R. M. Veatch (eds.), Ethical Issues in Death
and Dying (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997).
Baruch A. Brody (ed.), Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Con-
temporary Themes (Dordrecht, 1989).
G. Dworkin, R. G. Frey, and S. Bok, Euthanasia and Physician-
Assisted Suicide: For and Against (New York, 1998).
James Rachels, The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (Oxford,
1986).
Euthyphro problem. Euthyphro, in the Platonic dialogue
named after him, attempts to define ‘the pious’ as ‘the
god-loved’. Socrates responds with the famous question:
‘Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it
pious because they love it?’ (Euthyphro 10a).
The general point behind the discussion that follows

seems to be this: No normative term (such as ‘the pious’ or
‘the *right’) can be defined satisfactorily as what some
rational authority, such as God or the gods, loves or com-
mands, unless we suppose that the command or approval
is without rational justification. Alternatively, if we sup-
pose the approval or command to be rationally justified,
then it is to that justification, rather than to the action or
attitude of the authority, that we must look for the meaning
of the normative term. g.b.m.
S. Marc Cohen, ‘Socrates on the Definition of Piety’, in
G. Vlastos (ed.), The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, NY,
1971).
evaluation: see value.
Evans, Gareth (1946–80). Evans was part of a post-1970
flowering of work in Oxford on mind and language, influ-
enced by the American Donald Davidson (see also Dum-
mett, McDowell, Peacocke, Crispin Wright). His
posthumous book The Varieties of Reference develops
McDowell’s idea that aspects of mind such as thinking
about individual objects are forms of embeddedness in an
environment. This departs radically from *Cartesianism,
according to which thinking is a process that takes place
essentially independently of the nature or even existence
of an environment. Evans has been particularly influential
in stressing that thinking is grounded in bodily capacities
and abilities, and this work continues the Oxford Kantian
tradition, associated with Strawson, of laying down the
conditions for the objectivity of thought. His very
early death was, like Ramsey’s, a serious loss for British
philosophy. g.w.m

cc.
*reference.
G. Evans, Collected Papers (Oxford, 1985).
event. Roughly, a happening, occurrence, or episode: for
example, the General Strike, the sinking of the Titanic, the
arrival of the guests, the local jumble sale. Events need not
be momentous: the fall of a sparrow is as much an event as
the fall of the Roman Empire.
According to most accounts, events need not be instant-
aneous, nor even of brief duration. Ordinary language
attempts to distinguish events from processes, but most
modern theories of events show no interest in this distinc-
tion. An event is sometimes defined as a change (for
example, the loss or acquisition of a property by some-
thing) or composite of changes. However, many theories
of events include states that consist in things’ having (or
retaining) properties (e.g. the lawn’s staying wet) as well
as changes that consist in their acquiring or losing them
(e.g. the lawn’s becoming dry). On this liberal view, a rest
may be as good as a change as a candidate for an event.
‘An event’ is ambiguous: it may mean a particular
event, occurring only once, with a particular duration and
location (e.g. the 1992 Grand National), or a ‘type-event’
that can occur repeatedly (e.g. the Grand National that is a
famous annual event). Events in the first sense are some-
times described as ‘concrete particulars’ (also *‘tokens’ as
opposed to ‘types’); events in the second sense as *‘univer-
sals’ and as ‘abstract’. Most contemporary theorists
(Chisholm was an exception) are primarily concerned
with events as particulars.

What distinguishes particular events from ‘things’? We
speak of events as occurring, but we do not say this of mater-
ial objects like tortoises, books, and pebbles. And we seem
to think that the whole of a tortoise or a rock is there at any
time in its existence, whereas (excepting instantaneous
events) only part of an event is present at any one time.
However, many are unimpressed by these facts. ‘A thing
. . . is simply a long event [with certain characteristics]’,
wrote C. D. Broad (Scientific Thought, 393), and many
philosophers have reduced material objects to series of
events. (*Identity; mereology.) On the other hand, Aris-
totle, Strawson, and others have held that at least some
material objects belong to an ontological *category dis-
tinct from, and prior to, that of events. (*Substance;
*things; *ontology.)
The category of events is the focus of much recent dis-
cussion of *action, the *mind–body problem, and *causal-
ity, especially in work influenced by Davidson. Davidson
272 euthanasia
has emphasized the significance of questions about the
*individuation of events. When do we have one event
rather than two? When do different descriptions pick out
the same event? Could a mental occurrence (e.g. one of
my decisions) be identical with some physical event in my
brain? Was Oedipus’ marriage to Jocasta the same event as
his marriage to his mother? If my hammering woke the cat
next door and also caused the fall of the vase, was my ham-
mering the same event as my waking of the cat, with the
consequence (if causality is a genuine relation between
events) that my waking of the cat caused the fall of the

vase? (*Extensionality.) These are not mere conundrums:
satisfactory answers are needed if we are to give coherent
accounts of *mentality, *intention, *responsibility, and
causation. (*Reasons and causes; *fact.)
Davidson’s answers to these puzzles appear to be inde-
pendent of his much-criticized criterion for the identity of
events: that events are identical if and only if they have
exactly the same causes and effects. (Indeed, this criterion
does not appear to help us to answer substantive questions
about event identity such as our question whether the
hammering was the waking of the cat.) Davidson sub-
sequently abandoned his ‘causal’ criterion in favour of the
principle (also held by Quine) that events are identical just
in case they occupy exactly the same places at the same
times. Yet another criterion (proposed by Jaegwon Kim) is
that events are identical when they consist in the same
objects’ having the same properties at the same times.
Another issue concerns the identity of events in differ-
ent possible circumstances. Would it have been the same
death if it had been a shooting rather than a stabbing? If it
had happened at a different time or location? (*Essence.)
Such questions must be addressed by theories that appeal
to *counterfactual conditionals when assigning causes
to, or attributing responsibility for, particular events.
p.j.m.
*process.
J. Bennett, Events and their Names (Indianapolis, 1988).
C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (Paterson, NJ, 1959).
D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980).
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959).

evidence. That body of belief, often of an observational
sort, which supports some less well-established hypothe-
sis. Doubtless the wise man should apportion his belief to
the evidence he has, but problems lie in formalizing the
notion of evidential support. Logically ‘All ravens are
black’ is equivalent to ‘All non-black things are non-
ravens’, and if logically equivalent statements are con-
firmed by the same evidence, an irrelevant green violin is
evidence for all ravens being black. Equally troubling is the
fact that a black raven seen today logically supports
mankind’s belief that all ravens are black, but also a Mart-
ian’s contrary belief that all ravens are blite (= black if
observed before the year 2000, and otherwise white). In
practice these philosophically well-known dilemmas trou-
ble us not; in life we assess how some evidence bears
on a *theory against a background of shared but
unformalizable assumptions about the nature of the world
and degrees of evidential support. a.o’h.
*confirmation; induction; grue.
N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th edn. (1983).
evil, human. The suffering which results from morally
wrong human choices, especially when the moral wrong
is of an extreme kind. Moral evil can be contrasted with
natural evil, such as the suffering and death caused by
earthquakes or other natural disasters. Whereas natural
evil creates a problem for theology, moral evil creates one
for secular moral philosophy.
The first of these problems is whether evil is a predicate
primarily applicable to human agents or to the effects of
human choices. It is certainly true that there can be evil

effects which follow from sincerely held beliefs, such as
political ideologies or religious fundamentalism. This is
the evil of fanaticism. But to the extent that the common
thread in all fanaticism is the belief that individual suffer-
ing is unimportant compared to the righteousness of the
cause, the sincerity of the beliefs cannot exonerate the per-
petrators from the charge of evil. A second source of evil is
self-interest. The pursuit of self-interest at the expense of
others is a common form of moral wrongdoing, but when
the others are made to suffer in outstandingly bad ways,
then we enter the sphere of moral evil. This is the evil of
Macbeth. A third sort of moral evil lies in the enjoyment
which many people seem to obtain from the infliction of
suffering for its own sake. Closely related to this evil in
human agency is the way in which some people try to
compensate for their own feelings of inadequacy by dom-
inating and humiliating their captives. Of course, evil
desires of the sort mentioned could not be expressed
unless the social and political conditions of a regime
encouraged or at least permitted them. Hence, a fourth
root for the growth of moral evil lies in the will of political
rulers. Sometimes regimes actively encourage terror, and
sometimes they remain silent for political reasons in the
face of known perpetrators of evil.
A fifth source of moral evil lies in a failure in moral
imagination. It is well known that a psychopath is unable
to imagine the sufferings he will cause, but the same can be
true on a large scale at the political level. An example here
is the use of napalm or nuclear weapons. Since the victims
are remote, it is easy to fail to imagine their sufferings. Of

course, this failure of the moral imagination happens more
easily if the enemy has already been humiliated or can be
depicted in some impersonal sort of way as subhuman, as
happened at the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, or to the Jews
in Nazi Germany, or to the Vietcong in the Vietnam War.
R. L. Stevenson in ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ brings out in fic-
tion the chilling truth that we have a dual nature, and that
all of us may be capable of moral evil in certain circum-
stances. Perhaps the upsurge of pressure from advocates
of human rights can help a little to combat moral evil,
although there is a risk that human rights will be trivialized
by their use in minor legal grievances. r.s.d.
evil, human 273
*evil, problem of.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth
Century (London, 2001).
Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling (London, 1992).
F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, in The Complete Works of
Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 13, ed. Oscar Levy (Edinburgh,
1910).
evil, the problem of. In Christianity and other Western
religions, God is supposed to be omnipotent (i.e. able to
do anything logically possible), omniscient (i.e. to know
everything logically possible to know), and perfectly
good; yet manifestly there is evil (e.g. pain and other suf-
fering) in the world. Atheists have argued that since an
omnipotent being could prevent evil if he chose, an omni-
scient being would know how to do so and a perfectly
good being would always choose to do so, there is no
*God of the kind supposed. The problem of evil has

always been the most powerful objection to traditional
theism. The usual response of theists to this ‘problem’ is to
deny that a perfectly good being will always choose to pre-
vent evil, claiming that allowing some evils may make
possible greater goods. If God is to allow evil to occur, it
must not be logically possible to bring about the greater
goods by any better route. Some theists have held that,
being only human, we cannot be expected to know for
which greater goods the evils of our world are needed. But
it seems unreasonable to believe that there are any such
goods without some demonstration as to what they are,
i.e. without a *‘theodicy’. Central to most theodicies is the
‘freewill defence’. This claims that the greater good of
humans having a free choice between good and evil
involves no one, not even God, preventing them from
bringing about evil. Theodicy needs one or more further
defences to explain why God allows evil of kinds for which
humans are not responsible, such as the pain of currently
unpreventable disease. The ‘higher-order goods defence’
claims that such evils give humans opportunities to per-
form, in response to them, heroic actions of showing
courage, patience, and sympathy, opportunities which
they would not otherwise have. This does still leave the
problem of what justifies God in allowing some (e.g. bat-
tered babies) to suffer for the benefit of others (e.g. par-
ents, social workers, etc. having free choices). The theist
may argue in reply that God who gives us life has the right
to allow some to suffer for a limited time, that it is a privi-
lege to be used by God for a useful purpose, and that there
is always the possibility of compensation in an afterlife.

The crux of the problem is whether such defences are ade-
quate for dealing with the kinds and amount of evil we
find around us. r.g.s.
*evil, human.
M. M. Adams and R. M. Adams (eds.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford,
1990).
A. Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (London, 1975), pt. 1a.
R. Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979), chs. 9–11.
evil demon, evil spirit: see malin génie.
evolution. Evolution, the idea that the world and its con-
tents—particularly organisms—have developed from
primitive beginnings through natural processes, is a child
of the *Enlightenment. Until that time, the Christian story
of Creation combined with the essentialist thought of the
Greeks, prevented people from thinking of origins in such
a non-miraculous manner. What the Scientific Revolution
started, with its successful subsumption of so much to nat-
ural regularity and material cause, was finished by the rise
of hopes and beliefs in progress, the ideology of upward
change and improvement in the human lot, encouraged
by an ever-increasing knowledge and control of nature’s
processes. In France particularly, but also in Britain and
Germany, people moved easily from a belief in social and
cultural *progress to an analogous belief in upward devel-
opment in the world of life, which latter development was
then taken as confirmation of their social beliefs!
Most notorious of the early evolutionists was the
Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, whose Philosophie
zoologique (1809) offered the first full-length treatment of
the subject. Interestingly, the inheritance of acquired

characteristics, the mechanism to which Lamarck gave his
name, played only a minor role in his thinking, which was
much more dominated by a desire to turn the static Chain
of Being into an ever-moving escalator. More influential,
perhaps, were the German *Naturphilosophs, who saw
repeated patterns running through nature, and who
linked this belief naturally with one of the unity of the
organic world. Not that most of these thinkers or those
sympathetic to them (such as Goethe) became full-blown
evolutionists. In the spirit of the time, the idea was always
more significant than the reality.
It was therefore to be the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury before the picture of all-embracing development—
now known as evolution and distinguished from the
development of the individual organism—became an
established doctrine and entered the halls of respectable
science. Credit for this is due to the English naturalist
Charles Darwin, who presented his theory of evolution
through natural selection in his On the Origin of Species
(1859). Starting with the Malthusian struggle for exist-
ence, Darwin argued that successful organisms in life’s
battles will tend to differ from the unsuccessful. There will
thus be a ‘natural selection’ of the ‘fittest’—the successful
giraffe will have a longer neck than the unsuccessful
giraffe. It was Darwin’s claim that, over time, this will lead
to significant permanent change. Darwin, however, had
no adequate theory of heredity. This gap was filled in the
twentieth century by the new science of genetics, which
itself dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century
and the ideas of Darwin’s then unknown contemporary,

the monk Gregor Mendel.
Evolution raises questions of considerable philosoph-
ical interest and much controversy. Most obviously, there
are matters to do with the science itself. Is it, as critics often
claim, ‘just a theory and not a fact’? Comments of this ilk
play on an equivocation on the word *theory. If one is ask-
ing whether evolution as such is well established, then this
274 evil, human
is a matter beyond reasonable doubt. Palaeontology, bio-
geography, embryology, anatomy, and more all point to
evolutionary origins. But if one is asking about a particular
theory, then serious debate continues. Darwinian selection
speaks to the fact that organisms seem well designed—they
are ‘adapted’. Critics argue either that Darwinism is
inadequate to account for this phenomenon, or (taking the
counter tack) that the fit between organisms and their
world is nowhere like as tight as the Darwinian supposes. In
either case, other mechanisms must be sought.
As pressing, there is the question whether our thinking
on evolution can profitably be applied to the traditional
problems of philosophy, especially epistemology and
ethics. Traditional philosophers, most notably, in recent
years, Wittgenstein, tend to rear back from such sugges-
tions like vampires before garlic. But, thanks especially to
the enthusiasm of Herbert Spencer, there has always been
a steady stream of biological thinkers who extend their
thinking to philosophy. Complementing them, there have
generally been a few philosophers who suspect that the
fact that we humans are the product of a long, slow nat-
ural process of evolution rather than the miraculous prod-

ucts of a Good God working on the Sixth Day may indeed
be significant. *Evolutionary epistemology and *evolu-
tionary ethics are hardly yet respectable, but today—
thanks especially to some who think that perhaps
evolution can be brought to work in conjunction with the
insights and achievements of traditional philosophy
rather that as a replacing rival—they thrive and offer new
directions as never before. m.r.
*evolution and philosophy.
J. Dupré, Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (Oxford,
2003).
R. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution (Chicago, 1991).
M. Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution (Chicago, 1979).
—— Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology
(Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
evolution and philosophy. *Evolution is the belief that
the organic world, including our own species, is the
product of a long, slow, natural process of development
from forms very different, extremely simple, and probably
themselves the result of natural processes that turned the
inorganic into the living. There have been many causal
theories of evolution, but the dominant one today dates to
the Origin of Species, published in 1859, by the English nat-
uralist Charles Darwin. He pointed to the struggle for exist-
ence that rules universally in the living world, and argued
that this leads to a natural selection of the fitter over the
less fit, with consequent ongoing change.
Many philosophers, most famously Ludwig Wittgen-
stein, have argued that evolution has no implications at all
for philosophy. Others, starting with Darwin himself, dis-

agree, thinking that the natural evolutionary origins of
human beings has to make a difference to our thinking
about knowledge (epistemology), as well as to our think-
ing about morality (ethics). Some philosophers indeed—
notably the American pragmatists—have thought that
evolution must be one of the basic starting-points of any
attempt to understand human nature and how it functions
in the world.
Applying evolution—selection theory in particular—to
problems of knowledge (‘*evolutionary epistemology’)
usually takes one of two forms. The first is to argue ana-
logically from the biological situation to the cultural
world. There is a struggle for existence among organisms
leading to a natural selection; so, likewise, there is a strug-
gle for existence among ideas leading to a selection of the
best, which then survive and rule for a while. The philoso-
pher Karl Popper argued that this is precisely what he was
referring to when he spoke of the need of scientific theo-
ries to be falsifiable—always ready to battle out their
claims in the intellectual struggle for survival. The second
approach is to take a literal position, pointing to the fact
that the way in which humans think is itself moulded by
selection. In other words, as was argued by W. V. Quine,
our beliefs about causation and the virtues of such epi-
stemic notions as prediction are beliefs that we have
because they served well the ends of our would-be ances-
tors. There is therefore no ultimate justification for think-
ing causally. It is just that those proto-humans who
learned to associate fire with burning survived and repro-
duced, and those that did not, did not.

Applying evolution—again selection theory in particu-
lar—to problems of morality (‘*evolutionary ethics’) like-
wise takes one of two forms. The first, due especially to
Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer, goes from the
processes of evolution to the way that things ought to
be—notoriously from the struggle for existence to the
promotion of laissez-faire socio-economics. More recent
exponents have been the English biologist Julian Huxley,
who argued for large-scale public works in the name of
Darwinism, and today the American biologist Edward
O. Wilson, who thinks that the evolutionary process
justifies conservation. Famously, this whole line of think-
ing was severely criticized by G. E. Moore in his Principia
Ethica, where it was claimed that such an approach to
morality (often called ‘Social Darwinism’) commits the
naturalistic fallacy, a version of the illicit move noted by
David Hume, where one goes without cause or reason
from statements of fact to statements of obligation.
The second approach to evolutionary ethics parallels
the second approach to evolutionary epistemology, in this
case arguing that human moral thought and behaviour is
a result of evolution, particularly of the fact that in the
struggle co-operation (what biologists call ‘altruism’) is
often a better strategy than outright warfare. Better to
share a cake than to run the risk of getting no cake at all. At
the normative level of ethics (What should I do?), there
has been much recent interest in evolutionary strategies
(often based on principles of game theory) that might gen-
erate the norms that we hold dear. In his Theory of Justice,
John Rawls argued for a contractarian theory of ethics

(justice as fairness), suggesting that the original contract
was not one put in place by conscious human intention
but a result of the genes as chosen by natural selection. At
evolution and philosophy 275
the meta-ethical level of discussion (Why should I do what
I should do?), there is still considerable disagreement.
Some think, as in epistemology, that because a feature like
morality is adaptive, this does not preclude its giving a true
picture of reality. There may well be objective or real
moral norms. Others are less sure, and incline to scepti-
cism, thinking that perhaps in some sense the whole of
(normative) morality is an illusion put in place by our
genes to make us good social co-operators.
Recently, there has been much interest by philosophers
of mind in the implications of evolutionary thought for a
full understanding of the mind’s operating and function-
ing. If indeed selection cares not about truth but about
success—Patricia Churchland speaks of the 4-F impera-
tives, Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction—can
we possibly expect that the mind receives a true account
of external reality? Some, notably Popper (following the
ethologist Konrad Lorenz), think that this is no major
problem. Others, notably the Christian philosopher Alvin
Plantinga, think it spells the end of any approach to under-
standing using Darwinian evolution. Most, like philoso-
pher Ruth Millikan, take a middle line. One can be
mistaken, but evolutionary theory itself dictates the sorts
of times when one might be mistaken—for instance,
when there are no selective advantages in having the
truth. If a fast train is bearing down on one, then the strong

presumption is that selection is not about to deceive—
there are no obvious reasons why one should be deceived
into thinking it exists if it does not, and very good reasons
why one should not be deceived if it does exist. m.r.
R. Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice
(Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
K. R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography
(LaSalle, Ill., 1976).
M. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philoso-
phy, 2nd edn. (Buffalo, 1998).
E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
evolutionary epistemology. This is an approach to the
theory of knowledge claiming that the very fact that we
humans are the end-product of a natural process of *evo-
lution must be a significant factor in the ways in which we
know and understand the world. Part of an overall con-
temporary move towards a naturalized epistemology, it
comes in two main forms. One argues that the growth of
knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is akin to the
evolutionary growth of organisms. Everything is in flux,
forever moving towards some new level. Moreover, just
as there is a struggle for existence in the organic world, so
also is there a struggle in the world of concepts, with the
consequent selection of the ‘fittest’. There is, of course, a
major disanalogy, in that the raw stuff of *biology—
‘mutations’—are random, in the sense of not occurring
according to need, whereas the raw stuff of science—‘dis-
coveries’—generally come in response to need and are
directed to such need. Hence, the growing popularity of
the other form of evolutionary epistemology, which

claims that all knowledge is shaped and informed by
certain innate principles (like the laws of logic and math-
ematics, as well as such epistemic norms as a preference
for simplicity) which have selected into human thought
because of their adaptive value. Controversial is the ques-
tion whether these principles represent the necessary con-
ditions of rational thought (that is, the synthetic a priori)
or are merely contingent and non-unique, and could well
have been quite different. Is the logic on Andromeda as dif-
ferent from that of Aristotle as the slithering of the snake is
different from the walking of the human? Equally contro-
versial is the question whether such a philosophy points to
the conclusion that knowledge is a generally faithful map-
ping of a real (human-perception-independent) world, or
whether one is pointed towards some sort of pragmatic or
coherence theory of truth. m.r.
*evolutionary ethics; evolution and philosophy.
M. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philoso-
phy (Oxford, 1986).
evolutionary ethics. This is a body of theory which seeks
to locate moral institutions within the main ideas of evo-
lutionary biology. The general thesis is that we value
things and persons in accordance with their capacity to
sustain and maintain survival in evolutionary terms. For
example, it may be thought that friendship and altruism
are valued because they preserve members of the human
species against violence. Objections to this approach
come, partly, from those who reject its strategy of deriv-
ing values from facts about human nature, and partly from
those who accuse it of over-simplifying factual issues

about what strategies actually ensure survival. As an
example of the latter kind of difficulty, it has been objected
that even if a certain practice has been successful, its previ-
ous environment may be unstable; so it would be bad
practice, despite its evolutionary success. j.d.g.e.
*evolutionary epistemology.
M. Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? (Dordrecht, 1979) con-
tains a sympathetic but critical account of the subject.
examination paradox. The teacher says that some time
next week there will be an unexpected examination: on
the morning of the relevant day, the students will not
know it will happen on that day. The students reason that
the teacher cannot set the examination on the last day of
the week, for when that day comes they would expect it.
He cannot set it on the penultimate day, for when that day
comes, and knowing from the previous reasoning that it
cannot be held on the last day, they would expect it on the
penultimate day. And so on for each possible day. So there
cannot be an unexpected examination! r.m.s.
*prediction paradox.
Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch. 4.
excluded middle, law of. The oldest principle so called is
Aristotle’s ‘There is nothing between asserting and deny-
ing’, i.e. ‘If neither “yes” nor “no” truly answers the ques-
tion “Is it the case that P?”, nothing does’. This can slide
276 evolution and philosophy
into ‘Either “P” or “not-P” is true’, and further into ‘Every
proposition is true or false’ (more properly called the law
of *bivalence). In modern logic the law usually called
excluded middle is ‘“P or not-P” is valid’, i.e. true on all

interpretations of ‘P’. c.a.k.
W. V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970),
83–5.
existence. ‘Existence’, a key term of *ontology, in one
sense refers to the sum total of reality—everything that
exists—and in another to the elusive characteristic of
*being, which differentiates real *things from fictional
ones. But whether there really is such a characteristic is
debatable, because it is often held that ‘exist’ is not a first-
level predicate. What this means is that ‘exist’ does not
express a property of objects, as verbs like ‘shine’ and ‘fall’
do. According to Frege and Russell, ‘exist’ is a second-level
predicate, expressing a property of properties. Thus ‘God
exists’ does not have the same logical form as ‘Sirius
shines’, predicating a property of a particular object.
Rather, it is equivalent to ‘Godhood is instantiated’, assert-
ing that the property of being divine has at least one
instance, or that there is at least one thing possessing that
property. According to Frege and Russell, in a tradition
reaching back to Kant, Anselm’s *ontological argument for
God’s existence is vitiated by its failure to grasp this point.
W. V. Quine’s famous dictum ‘To be is to be the value of
a variable’ takes the Frege–Russell account of existence as its
inspiration, and implies that the entities to whose existence
a theory is committed are precisely those which need to be
invoked to interpret the quantified sentences of the theory.
But this controversially assumes an ‘objectual’ rather than a
‘substitutional’ interpretation of the quantifiers. According
to the latter, ‘There is at least one thing which is F’ is true
just in case there is some true sentence of the form ‘a is F’,

where ‘a’ is a singular term. Thus, if ‘Pegasus is identical
with Pegasus’ is deemed true despite the non-existence
of Pegasus, ‘There is at least one thing which is identical
with Pegasus’ must likewise be deemed true, whence
adherents of this account must repudiate Quine’s dictum.
The thought that fictional entities like Pegasus have
some reality despite lacking full-blooded existence is a
tempting one, often associated with Meinong. But accord-
ing to David Lewis’s more recent doctrine of modal real-
ism, Pegasus and other possible but non-actual objects do
have full-blooded existence, and differ from actual objects
only in residing in other *possible worlds. This doctrine
requires one to distinguish sharply between existence and
actuality, treating the latter as an indexical notion akin to
those of being here and now. On Lewis’s view, Pegasus is
just as ‘actual’ in the worlds in which it exists as Julius
Caesar is in ‘our’ world, and the objects existing in a world
are all actual to its inhabitants in just the way that all
moments of time are present or ‘now’ to those experiencing
them. Such a view may, however, be accused of grossly
inflating existence, understood as the sum total of reality.
Perhaps the biggest metaphysical problem concerning
existence is why anything should exist at all—why there
should be something rather than nothing. Physicists can
maybe tell us why matter exists, adverting to conditions
obtaining shortly after the Big Bang; perhaps they can even
explain the existence of time and space, if this is as intim-
ately linked to the existence of matter and energy as
modern cosmologists suggest. But the metaphysical ques-
tion clearly goes beyond such merely empirical considera-

tions. One response is to say that the question is absurd,
because it erroneously presupposes that we can make
sense of the idea of absolute nothingness as a genuine alter-
native to the existence of at least something. On this view,
we mistake the contingency of the things that do exist for a
contingency in the fact that anything whatever exists.
However, while it may indeed be impossible to imagine a
world in which nothing exists, the notion of a wholly
empty world does not seem obviously incoherent. e.j.l.
*‘to be’, the verb.
D. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford, 1986).
W. V. Quine, ‘On What There Is’, in From a Logical Point of View
(Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
Bede Rundle, Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
(Oxford, 2004).
C. J. F. Williams, What is Existence? (Oxford, 1981).
existence, contingent and necessary: see contingent and
necessary existence.
existence precedes essence. An existentialist formula
which signifies that we make ourselves the individuals we
are. Heidegger uses the formula to indicate that for each
*‘Dasein’, its ‘being’ or ‘essence’ is the way in which it
shapes its life, its manner of ‘existence’ (in his special
sense). Sartre interprets the formula in the light of his
emphasis upon free choice: we are what we ‘choose’ our-
selves to be. t.r.b.
*existentialism.
J P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. P. Mairet (London,
1948).
existentialism. ‘Existentialism’ is a loose term for the

reaction, led by Kierkegaard, against the abstract rational-
ism of Hegel’s philosophy. As against Hegel’s conception
of ‘absolute consciousness’ within which all oppositions
are supposedly reconciled, Kierkegaard insisted on the
irreducibility of the subjective, personal dimension of
human life. He characterized this in terms of the perspect-
ive of the ‘existing individual’, and it is from this special
use of the term ‘existence’ to describe a distinctively
human mode of being that existentialism gets its name.
Kierkegaard’s successors include the German philoso-
phers Heidegger and Jaspers and the French philosophers
Sartre and Marcel (who actually coined the term ‘existen-
tialism’). I shall concentrate here only on aspects of the
works of Heidegger and Sartre in addition to those of
Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard rejected the claim, which he took (perhaps
unfairly) to be Hegel’s, that we can look forward to a time
existentialism 277
postwar french philosophy
jean-paul sartre became the archetype of the French
intellectual: deep and difficult, against convention, politic-
ally committed, with a recognized role as a critic of culture
and society, in a café, with a cigarette.
simone de beauvoir brought to existentialist morality,
which exalted freedom, awareness of the importance of the
social context of choice, and in particular of the power-
relations between the sexes.
michel foucault, in his histories of madness, sexuality,
and punishment, examined how societies control dis-
course and knowledge and thus power.

louis althusser offered, in the 1960s, a new Marxist ap-
proach to social and cultural theory, rejecting the principle
of reductive explanation in terms of economic factors.
when the different interests and concerns of people can be
satisfied through their comprehension within an all-
embracing objective understanding of the universe. For,
according to Kierkegaard, no such synthesis can do justice
to an individual’s concern for their own life; hence, he
argues, even though Kantian epistemology correctly
implies that we should recognize that our own subjective
perceptions are just the manifestation of our objective
situation in the world, we cannot similarly resolve ethical
questions by subjecting our moral consciousness to
an impersonal deliberative perspective. For ethical ques-
tions essentially concern ourselves; in asking ourselves
how we are to lead our lives, we deceive ourselves if we
pretend that the adoption of an objective, impersonal
understanding of our situation will by itself provide an
answer.
Kierkegaard takes it that this relationship between
ethics and subjectivity is a two-way relationship. Not only
are ethical questions essentially first-person, the ‘real sub-
ject’ is also ‘the ethically existing subject’, as he puts it. He
also holds, however, that we should not think of our exist-
ence as ‘real subjects’ as a feature of our lives which we can
just take for granted (comparable, say, to our embodi-
ment). Instead (and here he remains to some degree
Hegelian) he thinks that it is an aspect of our lives that
needs to be developed if we are to achieve our full poten-
tial as individuals; the fact of our ‘existence’ implies that

we cannot avoid first-person practical questions, but we
may well lack a coherent conception of ourselves by refer-
ence to which we can begin to answer them. How, then, is
such a conception to be acquired? How is one to ‘become
an individual’? Not, certainly, by acquiring more know-
ledge of the world. Instead we have to engage the will: it is
by making choices and commitments (such as marriage)
which enable us to develop long-term interests that we
give our lives an ethical structure. When Kierkegaard
writes that ‘it is impossible to exist without passion’, he
means that it is only by entering into engagements whose
fate can arouse the passions that we gain a sense of
our own identity and in that way become an ‘existing
individual’.
Nothing so far explicitly implies that in becoming such
an individual one becomes a virtuous one. But
Kierkegaard takes it that the good life for a person is one
that fulfils the requirement that that person live as an indi-
vidual. The basic idea here is that one is able to make sense
of one’s life as a whole only through personal conduct and
relationships with others which manifest the virtues. This
may not seem persuasive. In Kierkegaard’s case, however,
this thesis is presented in the context of the further belief
that no one can create a life for themselves which will sur-
vive the vicissitudes of fortune without making ‘the leap
of faith’, a personal commitment to the kind of life lived by
Jesus Christ, i.e. without becoming ‘Christlike’. What
stands behind this belief is the experience of *‘Angst’—vari-
ously translated as ‘dread’ or ‘anxiety’. Kierkegaard’s
claim is both that this experience reveals to us the unsatis-

factory nature of a life that depends on the contingencies
of success or human love, and that we are thereby moti-
vated to commit ourselves to an ‘ethico-religious’ life
which offers a salvation that is not dependent upon such
contingencies because it rests upon a relationship with
God.
Heidegger follows Kierkegaard in using the term Exist-
enz to describe the mode of being that is distinctive of
human life (or *Dasein, as Heidegger would put it), and he
explicitly contrasts this mode of being with that of the
everyday objects which we categorize in terms of their use
(the Zuhandenheit) and that of those objects which we
think of as altogether independent of us (the Vorhanden-
heit). Heidegger also holds that the distinctive feature of
human existence arises from the irreducibility of the prac-
tical concern we each face concerning our lives: for each of
us ‘our own being is an issue’, and the way in which we
face up to this issue determines the nature of our exist-
ence. There is no fixed human essence which gives a
structure to human life that is independent of the engage-
ments and goals which, by giving us a sense of our own
practical identity, fill out our existence.
Where Heidegger differs from Kierkegaard is in assign-
ing this ‘existential’ thesis an absolutely fundamental role
in general metaphysics. He maintains that the answer to
the question of being in general is to be found by a line of
inquiry which commences with an inquiry into the ‘exist-
ential’ constitution of Dasein, i.e. human life. Since, as we
have seen, Dasein’s existence involves a practical concern
for itself, it is not surprising that a metaphysics which

builds out from this has many similarities with pragma-
tism. So when Heidegger proceeds to develop his account
of Dasein’s ‘existence’ as ‘being-in-the-world’, he makes it
clear that our fundamental mode of being-in-the-world is
action (rather than, say, contemplative perception), and
that we basically understand the world in terms of the cat-
egories which enter into the explanation of our actions.
So, for example, although Heidegger endorses Kant’s
claim that spatiality is an essential element of our experi-
ence of the world, he argues that we should not think of
this spatiality in terms of the space of physical theory (as
Kant did); instead, we should think of it as the ‘existential
space’ of everyday life, that spatiality which is conceived in
essentially egocentric and practical terms.
Heidegger’s ‘existential pragmatism’ goes beyond
Kierkegaard’s existentialism, and in other respects, too, he
modifies important aspects of Kierkegaard’s conception of
existence. Where Kierkegaard linked the ‘passionate’
nature of human existence directly to the will, to the sub-
ject’s chosen commitments, Heidegger argues that our
emotions characteristically reflect cares and concerns that
we have not chosen, since they arise from involvements
which we just find ourselves ‘thrown’ into (e.g. our coun-
try, our family, and, more fundamentally, those aspects of
our world which simply record our everyday needs). Hei-
degger then argues that these involvements provide an
essential background for the practical undertakings of
everyday life whereby we seek to meet our needs and
answer the demands that arise from our unchosen
existentialism 279