The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 35 potx

jean-jacques rousseau, wild man of French literature,
harbinger of Romanticism; his polemical demand for pop-
ular legitimation of government inspired the revolu-
tionaries of 1789.
auguste comte expounded in the 1830s a positivist theory
of knowledge, and put forward sociology as the newest and
most complex of the sciences.
henri bergson distinguished experienced time from mea-
sured time, assigning greater reality to the former; parallel to
this was his distinction of the roles of intuition and intellect in
acquisition of knowledge.
maurice merleau-ponty argued that a person’s appre-
hension of the outside world is a two-way process: each, in
different senses, gives meaning to the other.
french philosophy
Understanding these movements is complicated by three
factors: what passes for philosophy in France is distorted by
its Anglo-American readership; any ‘movement’ in philoso-
phy is partly externally constituted by criteria for being a
philosopher; and each influential modern French philoso-
pher has been something other than a philosopher too.
Paradigmatically, phenomenology is the presuppos-
itionless description of the contents of experience, with-
out any prior ontological commitment to the objective
reality or causal properties of those contents. It has both
the quasi-Kantian aim of describing the transcendental
conditions for knowledge and the quasi-Cartesian aim of
providing an ultimate justification of knowledge in the
description of the contents of consciousness or ‘phenom-
ena’. By ‘knowledge’ is meant here ‘all knowledge’ and so,
a fortiori, ‘all philosophical and scientific knowledge’.

In the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty this ‘pure’
or Husserlian phenomenology undergoes a Heideggerian
transformation (which is partly anticipated in the later
writings of Husserl). Notably, the Husserlian thesis that
the world of the natural attitude (roughly, ‘common
sense’) may be ‘suspended’ to facilitate a phenomeno-
logical description of consciousness is rejected and the
existential notion ‘being-in-the-world’ substituted. The
Husserlian transcendental ego (as ground of the world) is
eliminated as not phenomenologically available and a
notion of bodily subjectivity replaces it (notably in Sartre’s
L’Être et le néant and Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la
perception). However, arguably the idea of the body-
subject is also anticipated in the second book of Husserl’s
Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomeno-
logischen Philosophie.
Existentialism is an attempt to solve fundamental prob-
lems about human existence, notably: what it is to be; the
purpose of being; what it is like to face death; the nature of
anxiety; the burden of responsibility and freedom; the
appropriateness of sexual, political, and religious commit-
ments. Existentialism is a reaction against both meta-
physics and the essentialism of ‘pure’ phenomenology. Its
principal thesis is that existence is logically prior to essence
and that human essence is not determined a priori but
freely created by human actions. Sartre’s ‘existential’
phenomenology is expounded not only in philosophical
works but in plays, novels, short stories, and political
tracts. The most brilliant existentialist writer was
Simone de Beauvoir. Her Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) explores

the question of the essence of woman: its repressive con-
stitution by men and its possible free constitution by
women.
One of the most ambitious projects of post-war French
philosophy was Sartre’s attempt in Critique de la raison
dialectique (1960) to synthesize existentialism and Marx-
ism. Marxism and existentialism are prima facie mutually
inconsistent philosophies because, while existentialism
emphasizes the freedom of the individual, Marxism is a
kind of social determinism; existentialism explores the
inside of consciousness and the present moment, but
Marxism is a materialism which entails a theory of history;
Marxism claims a scientific and objective status for its find-
ings; existentialism deliberately repudiates this for itself.
Whether Sartre’s putative synthesis is successful or not, in
this effort modern French philosophy was engaged in try-
ing to solve genuine metaphysical problems.
Since the 1960s French philosophy has been a part of the
broadly neo-Kantian anti-metaphysical orthodoxy within
which much European and Anglo-American philosophy
operates. The hallmarks of this paradigm are: the impossi-
bility of solving metaphysical problems (but the inevitabil-
ity of trying to); the linguistic nature of putative
philosophical issues; the minimization of the importance
of consciousness, subjectivity, and the present; the
attempt to ‘end’ philosophy and replace philosophical
problem-solving by something else: political revolution or
reform, an examination of language, writing the history of
philosophy, literary criticism, the natural sciences. The
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst

Jacques Lacan, the Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser,
and the literary critic Roland Barthes all operate within
broadly Kantian assumptions.
The most influential French philosopher at the time of
writing is Jacques Derrida. Although Derrida is frequently
thought of as making a radical break with previous philoso-
phy, this is in fact far from the case. His strategies may be
novel within literary criticism, but they are familiar to any-
one who has studied Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heideg-
ger. All these thinkers are involved, in differing senses
and degrees, in a critique of something called ‘Western
metaphysics’, and the permutations of that critique have
been the ruling philosophical orthodoxy for the last two
centuries.
Modern French philosophy is usually thought to be a
part of ‘modern continental philosophy’, which is con-
trasted with Anglo-American ‘analytical’ (or *‘analytic’)
philosophy. This distinction does not stand up to geo-
graphical, historical, and philosophical scrutiny and it is an
important task of future philosophy to show this. How-
ever, while philosophers in the English-speaking coun-
tries have usually thought that philosophy (although not a
science) should aspire to the rigour and precision of the
natural sciences, philosophers in modern France have
thought that philosophy should be more like art, more
like literature. The conspicuous stylistic divergence this
has produced has resulted in the illusion of a bifurcation
between two philosophical ‘traditions’ and the mistaken
idea that there is something radical and distinctive called
‘modern French philosophy’. s.p.

*continental philosophy; ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’.
Naguib Balandi, Les Constantes de la pensée française (Paris,
1948).
Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (London, 1946–75),
esp. vol. ix (1975).
Lucien Lévy-Brühl, A History of Modern Philosophy in France, tr. G.
Coblence (London, 1899).
J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris (London, 1986).
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The
Hague, 1960), ii.
French philosophy 321
French philosophy today. Recent French philosophy is
marked by the decline of the master-thinker. There has
been no replacement for the Sartre of the 1950s, the
Lévi-Strauss of the 1960s, and the Foucault of the 1970s.
Jacques Derrida does continue his immensely productive
career and has interestingly expanded his epistemological
and metaphysical development of deconstructive read-
ings of texts into ethics and politics. Also, there are
important philosophers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy and
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who have taken up his dense
and nervously involuted philosophical style. But Derrida’s
impact has from the beginning been much greater in the
United States and in literature departments. In so far as
there are today ‘major figures’ of philosophy in France,
they are presences from the past such as Emmanuel
Levinas and Paul Ricœur, who are of same generation as
Sartre, but whose thought was long marginalized, in
large part because of its religious roots and implications
( Jewish in the case of Levinas, Christian in the case of

Ricœur).
As early as the 1930s, Levinas helped introduce
Husserl and Heidegger to the French intellectual
scene. At first mainly an expositor and critic of their
thought, he gradually developed his own distinctive
philosophical vision, which appeared with full force in his
1961 book, Totality and Infinity. Here Levinas claimed that
our concrete experience of other people involves an
absolute ethical obligation toward them, a view developed
in the larger context of his insistence that almost all of
Western philosophy has been contaminated by an
effort to reduce the other (including not only other people
but difference in general) to unifying categories of
sameness. Levinas explicitly relates our absolute ethical
obligation to religion, but he is almost obsessively
cautious in denying the adequacy of any of our efforts to
speak about God.
Ricœur’s early work (for example, his influential trans-
lation of, and commentary on, Husserl’s Ideas) was also
important for the introduction of phenomenology into
France, and his own philosophical views originated from
his effort to apply the phenomenological method of care-
fully describing our immediate experience to the domain
of freedom, sin, and evil. His work on these topics
developed through several volumes, but increasingly
moved beyond phenomenological description to a
hermeneutic standpoint, indebted to Heidegger and
Gadamer, which emphasized the need not just to describe
our experience but to interpret it in a wider literary,
cultural, and historical context. Ricœur’s hermeneutic

philosophy provided the basis for his perceptive critiques
of the structuralist and post-structualist philosophies that
dominated France during the 1960s and 1970s.
The turn to Levinas and Ricœur has been accompanied
by a revival of interest in phenomenology, although
the focus has been more on Husserl and Heidegger than
on the French existential phenomenologists Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty. Here Jean-Luc Marion has done
especially important work, which opens new directions of
phenomenological reflection and connects them with reli-
gious themes (Marion is also a major Catholic theologian).
Michel Henry and Jean-François Courtine have also con-
tributed to the return to phenomenology.
The new-found importance of Ricœur and Levinas
(and the return to phenomenology) corresponds to a reac-
tion against the philosophical and political radicalism asso-
ciated with the 1968 student revolution. The same
reaction underlies the return to broadly Kantian thinking
in the writings of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. For example,
in their jointly authored French Philosophy of the Sixties,
Ferry and Renaut agree that Heidegger and his followers
have undermined the idea of a ‘self-transparent subject
that lays claim to mastery of everything that exists’; i.e. the
transcendental ego of Kantian idealism. But they go on to
argue against the post-structuralist elimination of the sub-
ject as a category of theoretical philosophy and for the
reality of an ego that is not metaphysically privileged but
embedded in historical reality and nevertheless the sub-
ject of ethical rights and responsibilities.
Ferry and Renaut also represent an important revival of

liberal poltical theory in France. Whereas earlier thinkers,
from Sartre through Lyotard and Deleuze, seemed to
allow no alternatives to leftist radicalism or rightist reac-
tion, there is now a striking move to the centre, which has
led to a new respect for previously marginalized writers
such as Albert Camus and Raymond Aron, and has led
important philosophers to see genuine possibilities of
co-operation with established governments. (Luc Ferry,
for example, is currently Minister of Education.)
The current French scene also includes a lively interest
in analytic philosophy. There are roots for this interest in a
long and distinguished French tradition of logic and phil-
osophy of mathematics, beginning with Louis Couturat
at the turn of the twentieth century and continuing
through Jean Nicod, Jacques Herbrand, and Jean Cavail-
lès. But this group had relatively little impact, partly
because none of its members lived beyond the age of fifty.
Today, the most prominent French philosopher with a
strong commitment to the analytic approach is Jacques
Bouveresse, whose earlier work was largely inspired by
Wittgenstein, on whom he wrote important commen-
taries, and whose thought he used as a basis for his own
discussions of epistemology and philosophy of mind.
More recently, Bouveresse has presented himself as in the
line of ‘Austrian philosophy’, which he sees as beginning
with Bolzano’s critique of Kant and continuing through
Brentano and Meinong to Wittgenstein and the *Vienna
Circle. This Austrian line ignored Hegel and his idealistic
successors, thereby avoiding the philosophical styles
and questions that characterize recent ‘continental’

philosophy.
More recently, there has emerged a group of younger
French analytic philosophers centred on the Centre de
Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA) at the
École Polytechnique, and subsequently at the Institut
Nicod. Pascal Engel (who did his doctoral work with
Bouveresse), Pierre Jacob, and Daniel Andler are just
322 French philosophy today
a few of the French philosophers who have become
significant contributors to, for example, analytic philoso-
phy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of science.
There is no doubt that France is quickly taking its place
in the increasingly international enterprise of analytic
philosophy. The question remaining is whether there
will develop a distinctively French school of analytic
philosophy or whether French analytic philosophers
will remain individual contributors to discussions defined
by the dominant interests of American and British
philosophy.
A category frequently employed in discussions of
recent French philosophy is that of ‘French feminist
philosophers’. There is no doubt that feminist themes
loom large in the work of major French philosophers from
Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray and beyond. But
much of the work of many important feminist thinkers in
France (e.g. Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva) is well beyond
the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, and the work of
the major ‘feminist philosophers’ deserves attention even
apart from their contributions to feminist discussions.
Luce Irigaray, for example, is best regarded as a ‘philoso-

pher of difference’, in the general manner of Derrida,
Lyotard, and Deleuze. Her focus has been on sexual
difference, but in a way that uses feminist issues to over-
come what she sees as limitations in traditional thought
about the most fundamental issues of human existence.
Similarly, Michèle Le Doeuff develops her feminist
thought in the context of a historically informed phil-
osophy of science. Her work is particularly interesting
because, while originating in the distinctively French trad-
ition of history and philosophy of science (particularly the
work of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem),
it also readily engages with Anglo-American work on
science.
Finally, mention should be made of two increasingly
influential, if hard to categorize, philosophers: Michel
Serres and Alain Badiou. Serres began as a philosopher
of science, broadly in the manner of Bachelard, who
questioned orthodox distinctions between science and
non-science. He later developed, in a series of academic
best-sellers, a poetico-philosophical cosmology that pre-
sents a metaphysics inspired by chaos theory and fractal
geometry. Badiou likewise combines mathematics and
ontology in a systematic philosophy that challenges the
historicist assumptions of French philosophy of the 1970s
and 1980s and rejects the post-structuralist claim that the
end of philosophy is near.
Philosophy without master-thinkers has its advan-
tanges. Recent French thought lacks the dramatic and dis-
ruptive originality of thinkers such as Sartre and Foucault,
but it has, in many cases, a stylistic clarity and theoretical

openness that were long missing from the philosophical
scene. As in the early years of the twentieth century, early
twenty-first-century French philosophy is less drastically
creative but, perhaps, more able to contribute to the
civility and rationality of its age. On the other hand,
there is a real danger that this more subdued mode of
philosophizing will split into various elements (phenom-
enology, feminism, analytic philosophy), each merely
part of an international discussion, and lose the distinctive
flair that has characterized French philosophy for the last
sixty years. g.g.
F. Dosse, History of Structuralism, tr. D. Glassman (Minneapolis,
1997).
L. Ferry and A. Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, tr. M.
Catani (Amherst, Mass., 1990).
A. P. Griffiths (ed.), Contemporary French Philosophy (Cambridge,
1987).
G. Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
2001).
M. Lilla (ed.), New French Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ,
1994).
E. Matthews, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (Oxford,
1996).
frequency theory: see probability.
Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939). Freud is sometimes said to
have discovered the *unconscious, but it is not a claim he
made himself. The unconscious which he did not discover
is the notion that if those everyday explanations which
invoke motives, desires, impulses, etc., and normally
carry the implication that the subject is authoritative with

respect to them, are extended to cases in which this impli-
cation is suspended, behaviour otherwise perplexing can
be explained. This notion of the unconscious pre-dates
Freud. What distinguishes Freud’s unconscious is the
notion that when the subject’s loss of authority with
respect to his own mental states is due to a process he
called ‘repression’, these states are subject to transform-
ations which render them unrecognizable by the subject
and may have pathological consequences. The conviction
that, when the subject came to stand to these contents as
to his accessible ones, they were deprived of pathogenic
power, yielded a therapeutic method.
Two ingredients were added to produce the character-
istic Freudian view of the springs of action—sexuality and
infancy. What gave Freud’s aetiological speculations their
further distinctiveness were the diagnostic procedures on
which they were based, in particular the use of interpret-
ation and free association. When these were applied to
dreams, errors, and the behaviour of the patient towards
the therapist in the analytic setting (‘the transference’),
they uncovered the repressed pathogenic material. This
material was found to display two invariable features—it
dated from infancy and pertained to the subject’s infantile
sexual life.
At first the pathogenic episodes in question were
thought to be sexual molestation (‘the seduction theory’);
these were later replaced by the child’s struggle with its
own incestuous and perverse wishes (‘the Oedipus com-
plex’ and ‘polymorphous perversity’). The transition from
the seduction theory to its successor, the infantile Oedipus

complex, was facilitated when, during Freud’s self-
analysis, an infantile memory of being sexually excited by
his mother’s nudity was aroused. This helped persuade
Freud, Sigmund 323
him that the sexual material which had led him to impute
infantile seductions to his patients could have an
alternative source in their self-protectively distorted
infantile incestuous fantasizing. The anomaly involved in
accounting for the neuroses of predominantly female
patients by invoking the desires of male infants for their
mothers escaped notice for some time, but eventually
prompted a suspicion that Freud’s aetiological specula-
tions were more remote from clinical experience and
dependent on idiosyncratic pre-occupations than the
tradition acknowledged.
The major developments in Freud’s theorizing after the
First World War comprised the replacement of the ori-
ginal division between conscious and unconscious with a
tripartite division into id, ego, and superego (with the
corollary that portions of the ego were unconscious); the
reconstrual of anxiety as the cause rather than the product
of repression; the stipulation that the self-preservative
instincts were themselves libidinal, with the further exten-
sion of the concept of libido to encompass an indeterminate
range of phenomena previously excluded, and the intro-
duction of a death instinct. The rationales for these
changes are still disputed and their implications for clinical
practice unclear. Attempts to clarify Freud’s metapsycho-
logical speculations or reduce them to consistency have
proved vain to date and the suggestion has been often

made that they be abandoned.
Freud’s postulation of a death instinct, an impulse to
return to a pre-organic state of quietude, has in particular
provoked much scepticism. It was introduced in 1922, for
a combination of reasons which have been found so inad-
equate that Ernest Jones thought it necessary to impute
the innovation to some personal motive which, Max
Schur maintained, was the death of a beloved daughter in
the influenza epidemic of 1919. The relative contribution
of this episode, and of Schopenhauer’s view that the goal
of life is death, can only be a matter for conjecture. Freud
tells us that on his visit to America he was impressed by a
sign which read, ‘why live when you can be buried for
ten dollars?’ This suggests a temperamental affinity with
the notion of a death instinct which may have led him to
overlook its theoretical deficiencies.
Freud’s extension of the concept libido to encompass
‘love for parents and children, friendship, love for human-
ity in general, devotion to concrete objects and abstract
ideas’ also occasioned misgivings in some quarters. It was
not clear why such impulses should be repressed, or how,
if repressed, they would produce the phenomena of neu-
roses whose apparently minute articulation with sexual
mentation in its previously restricted, carnal sense gave
Freud’s early libidinal accounts of symptom-formation
their persuasive power. Some critics felt entitled to impute
the tenacity with which Freud clung to a sexual conception
of libido to some deeply personal compulsion and could
have cited in support the incoherence between his asser-
tion that the majority of mankind feel degraded by the sex-

ual act and are reluctant to perform it and his contradictory
insistence that sexual gratification is ‘one of . . . life’s
culminations’ and that ‘apart from a few perverse fanatics
all the world knows this and conducts life accordingly’.
During his lifetime Freud was generally regarded as a
figure of unquestionable integrity. Several more recent
memorialists and commentators have offered a less flat-
tering picture of someone whose pronouncements were
too often dominated by the polemical needs of the
moment and whose probity deserted him whenever his
more profound interests were at stake. f.c.
*psychoanalysis, philosophical problems of; Reich;
unconscious and subconcious mind.
R. Dalbiez, The Method and Doctrine of Freud (London, 1940).
Ernest Jones, Freud: Life and Work (New York, 1953–7).
M. MacMillan, Freud Evaluated (Amsterdam, 1990).
Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York, 1972).
friendship. Attachment characterized by disinterestedness
and esteem. Aristotle contrasts friendship proper with rela-
tionships entered into for pleasure or advantage, ‘because
in them the friend is not loved for being what he is in
himself’. The philosophical problems of friendship are to
explain: (1) how friendship can be worth while if not for
pleasure or advantage, since, as Aristotle observes, ‘no one
would choose a friendless existence on condition of having
all the other good things in the world’; (2) how friendship,
like family relationships, can generate obligations not had
towards those who are not my friends; (3) how it can be
justifiable to love you as a friend while withholding friend-
ship from others who share the qualities I esteem in you,

since to do otherwise is not (for example) to ‘love you for
yourself alone and not your yellow hair’ (Yeats). p.g.
*loyalty; fraternity; love.
L. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London, 1980).
function. A function takes objects (*‘arguments’) and
maps them on to objects (‘values’). For example, the add-
ition function defined on the set of natural numbers takes
pairs of natural numbers as its arguments and maps each
pair, say 2 and 3, on to the value, here 5, which is the
sum of the pair. Functions are often identified with set-
theoretical constructions. So the doubling function, with
the set of natural numbers as its domain of arguments, is
identified with the set of ordered pairs,
〈x,y〉, such that y is
twice x. Functions need not be numerical; Frege took con-
cepts to be functions which mapped objects on to truth-
values. (This has little connection with the non-technical
sense of ‘function’, roughly ‘purpose’, which is also, of
course, widely used by philosophers.) a.d.o.
P. Suppes, Introduction to Logic (Princeton, NJ, 1957), ch. 11.
functional explanation: see teleological explanation.
functionalism. The theory that the condition for being in
a mental state should be given by the functional role of the
state, that is, in terms of its standard causal relationships,
rather than by supposed intrinsic features of the state. The
324 Freud, Sigmund
role is normally envisaged as being specified in terms of
which states (typically) produce it and which other states
and behavioural outputs will (typically) be produced by it
when the state interacts with further mental states and

perceptual inputs. The theory, pioneered by David Arm-
strong and Hilary Putnam, improves on *behaviourism
because it recognizes that behaviour results from clusters
of mental states, and allows that the term for the state, e.g.
‘S’s pain’, refers to a real inner condition which has the
functional role. In one version the functional analysis was
supposed to be a priori, and a ground for affirming a materi-
alist *identity theory. Putnam proposed it as a scientific
alternative to identity theories, and analysed function in
terms of *Turing machines. Discussion has concerned
whether conscious states can be exhaustively analysed in
functional terms. A modified version has been suggested
in which function is explained in terms of biological
(rather than causal) role. p.f.s.
*consciousness; consciousness, its irreducibility;
inverted spectrum; mind, syntax, and semantics; dual-
ism; Putnam.
N. Block, ‘Troubles With Functionalism’, in N. Block (ed.), Read-
ings in Philosophical Psychology, i (London, 1980).
future: see time.
future contingents. On one definition, a future contin-
gent is a claim about the future, or is the content of a
future-tense indicative sentence. On another, it is the pos-
sible truth-condition for such a claim: a future state of
affairs that might or might not obtain. It may be argued
that future contingent claims are neither true nor false
until the states of affairs they are used to predict obtain or
fail to obtain. s.p.
*sea-battle argument.
Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione, ed. J. L. Ackrill (Oxford,

1963): De Interpretatione, book IX.
William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings: A Selection (Indiana-
polis, 1990).
future generations. Do we have moral obligations to
future generations? Most of us believe that we do. We are
obligated, for example, not to harm them in certain ways
and also to share the earth’s resources with them in a way
that is just. Some theorists have argued that we are obli-
gated to ensure that future generations will exist (or at
least not to prevent them from existing), while others
have claimed that we owe it to them, by controlling popula-
tion growth, to ensure that there are not too many future
people existing at any one time.
Moral theories have, however, had notorious problems
in providing an adequate account of the foundations of
these obligations. For example, those theories that regard
morality as a set of conventions that it is in our interests to
obey because they facilitate peace and co-operation can-
not ground obligations to future people since the latter
cannot benefit or harm us (except perhaps posthu-
mously). And hypothetical contractarianism (*contract,
social), to which many theorists have appealed, has been
unable to determine who should be included among the
contractors who must reach agreement on principles of
justice between generations. Some have argued that the
contractors should all be members of a single generation;
others have said that they should include everyone who
has ever lived or ever will live; while others have claimed
that they should include all possible people. Each of these
proposals has proven unsatisfactory.

Given the problems with approaches of these sorts,
many have thought that the best approach is simply to
assume that our behaviour must be constrained by a
respect for the rights and interests of future people in
much the same way that it is constrained by the rights and
interests of existing people. There are, of course, prob-
lems with predicting how our acts will affect future
people, what their needs and interests will be, and so on.
And there is a further question whether, because there are
presumably so many of them relative to us, we are entitled
to apply a discount rate to their interests according to their
temporal distance from us. But it has been thought that
these problems are in principle manageable.
Views of this sort are, however, all vulnerable to a
powerful objection, advanced by Derek Parfit, which is
based on the fact that most of the decisions that we make
that have a substantial impact on the future quality of life
also affect who will exist in the future. For the implemen-
tation of a social policy has widespread effects on the
details of people’s lives—e.g. who meets whom, who mar-
ries whom, and when people conceive their children.
These effects help to determine who comes to exist. But, if
it is true of a future person that he would not have existed
had a certain policy not been implemented in the past,
then, unless his life is not worth living, it cannot be worse
for him that the policy was adopted. Hence even policies
that pollute the environment or deplete resources may not
be worse for future people, or violate their rights, since
those people may owe their existence to the fact that those
policies were implemented.

Parfit and others have concluded from this that our
obligations with respect to future people must be based,
not on facts about how our acts affect individuals for bet-
ter or worse, but on considerations that are more imper-
sonal in character. But traditional moral theories that take
an impersonal form—such as the total and average ver-
sions of *consequentialism—have proved to have notori-
ously implausible implications when applied to questions
concerning future and possible people. (*Population.)
Hence reflection on our obligations to future generations
has resulted in a profound challenge to moral theory itself.
j.m
cm.
Brian Barry, ‘Justice between Generations’, in Liberty and Justice
(Oxford, 1991).
Peter Laslett and James S. Fishkin (eds.), Justice between Age Groups
and Generations (New Haven, Conn., 1992).
D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).
future generations 325
326 fuzzy logic
fuzzy logic. Logical system which allows degrees of truth.
For example, where ‘1’ denotes truth, and ‘0’ falsity, p
might be true to degree 0.7 and so false to degree 0.3. In
general, if p is true to degree n, then p is false to degree
1 – n. Fuzzy logic is a departure from classical logic,
because a proposition may be to some extent both true
and false, and a proposition and its negation to some
extent both true. Classical logic, in a sense, is a version of
fuzzy logic, that version in which the only admissible
truth-values in the range from 0 to 1 are 0 and 1.

Arguably, fuzzy logic does justice to the intuitive idea
that some indicative sentences are not wholly true and not
wholly false. For example, the claim ‘He is in the room’
seems not wholly true and not wholly false but partly true
and partly false if he is leaving the room at the time of
utterance. s.p.
A. Kandel, Fuzzy Mathematical Techniques with Applications
(Boston, 1986).
L. A. Zadeh, ‘Fuzzy Sets’, Information and Control (1965).
Gabirol, Ibn: see Ibn Gabirol.
Gadamer, Hans Georg (1900–2002). German philosopher
who was a pupil of Heidegger and the leading modern
exponent of *hermeneutics.
In Truth and Method (1960; tr. London, 1975), he tries to
clarify the phenomenon of *understanding. Understand-
ing (Verstehen) contrasts with the explanation
(Erklären) characteristic of the natural sciences. Under-
standing is performed both by cultural scientists and by
non-scientists; even natural scientists understand each
other’s speech and writing. We understand utterances,
texts, people, works of art, and historical events. Earlier
hermeneuticists attempted to refine a methodology for
the proper interpretation of such entities. But they failed
to grasp that their own understanding of an object, and the
methodological principles they devised, were historically
conditioned. Cultures change over history. The inter-
preter of a text from a past culture belongs to and is
conditioned by his own different culture; he is an
‘effective-historical consciousness’ who views the past
and its remnants from a particular *‘horizon’, involving a

particular ‘pre-understanding’. His understanding thus
involves an interplay between past and present, a ‘fusion
of horizons’. Plato, for example, is interpreted differently
by Neoplatonists of the sixth century ad, by nineteenth-
century Germans, and by twentieth-century English
scholars. We cannot decide which of these interpretations
is correct, since any verdict we give is historically condi-
tioned and liable to revision by a later age. (We cannot
even be sure that our interpretation of past interpretations
is correct.) At best our interpretation can be ‘authentic’,
making the best reflective use of the pre-understanding or
‘prejudice’ from which we inevitably begin. Thus we
should explore our own pre-understanding and all the
relations to the world and to history that it involves. Our
understanding of the past and its remains not only
depends on, but also promotes, our ‘self-understanding’.
In Truth and Method Gadamer begins with the under-
standing of works of art, and several later essays concern
art (The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cam-
bridge, 1986)). His central concern is the experience of art,
rather than our judgements about art or the intentions
and genius of the artist, and he tries to describe it as accur-
ately as possible. The artwork rather than the audience is
the pivot of this experience, and thus ‘play’ is a suitable
term to describe it, in the sense of a game that ‘tends to
master the players’. Truth is not the exclusive preserve of
science; thus not only interpretations of art, but the art-
work itself, make a claim to truth. Works of art are not isol-
ated from the world, and the experience of art ‘does not
leave him who has it unchanged’. An authentic experience

of it involves not a historical reconstruction of the circum-
stances of its original production, but a living relationship
to it which shows that it still has something to say in our
epoch.
Gadamer devoted several works to the interpretation
of other philosophers, especially Heidegger, Hegel, and
Plato. His interpretations depend on certain principles
which are not universally shared. We must take account
of the nature of the text, whether it is, for example, a pol-
ished dialogue or a set of lecture notes. We must also take
account of the context in which a statement is made, its
intended audience, and the question which it is designed
to answer. For example, an argument in a Platonic dia-
logue should not be considered and assessed simply as an
isolated argument. We should consider its role in the dia-
logue, its effect on the specific audience to which it is
addressed, and the background question to which it is a
response. Gadamer thus purports to replace the logic of
propositions with ‘the logic of question and answer’. (He
argues, in The Idea of the Good in Platonic–Aristotelian Philoso-
phy (1978; tr. New Haven, Conn., 1986), that if we inter-
pret Plato and Aristotle in this way we shall see that their
thought is in essence continuous and that they have far
more in common than is usually supposed.) Despite his
admiration for Hegel, Gadamer is at odds with him here:
for Hegel, unlike Schleiermacher, Plato’s use of the dia-
logue form is an essentially irrelevant adornment for a
philosophical system which can be better expressed in
continuous prose. m.j.i.
R. Dostal (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge,

2002).
H. J. Silverman (ed.), Gadamer and Hermeneutics (London, 1991).
G. Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Oxford,
1987).
J. C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn.,
1985).
G
Galen (ad 129–c.200). Greek doctor and philosopher from
Pergamon, Asia Minor. Although known principally as a
doctor, he wrote many books devoted to philosophical
topics. He advocated the study of logic and the theory of
demonstration as essential for being a good doctor, and
wrote several books on logical theory. He also wrote
works concerning causation, psychology, moral philoso-
phy, language, and rhetoric, as well as commentaries on
Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, and Epicurus, and polemical
books against the Stoics. Most of these are now lost.
He probably did not invent the fourth figure of Aris-
totelian syllogistic, but certainly did make one important
contribution to logical theory, in his Introduction to Logic.
He saw that neither Aristotelian nor Stoic logic could
account for the validity of the following inference: a = b,
b = c, therefore a = c. To account for its validity, and that
of other arguments like it, he introduced a third kind of
syllogism, ‘relational syllogisms’.
Galen thinks that there is a systematic or logical way of
discovering the truths of medicine—i.e. the theory of
demonstration. But he also concedes that experience plays
a role in the acquisition of medical knowledge. It is there-
fore a matter of some interest what his precise position is

concerning how medical knowledge is acquired, and how
it relates to the schools of medicine of his time. b.m.
Jonathan Barnes, ‘“A Third Kind of Syllogism”—Galen and the
Logic of Relations’, in R. Sharples (ed.), Modern Thinkers and
Ancient Thinkers (London, 1993).
Michael Frede, ‘On Galen’s Epistemology’, in Essays in Ancient
Philosophy (Oxford, 1987).
R. Walzer and M. Frede (eds.), Galen: Three Treatises on the Nature
of Science (Indianapolis, 1985).
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo was an astronomer
and physicist whose influence on the development of sci-
entific and philosophical thought can hardly be over-
stated. No retiring scholar but a controversialist at home
in the leading universities and palaces of Renaissance Italy
until condemned by the Roman Inquisition, Galileo
opposed by both word and deed the imposition of author-
ity on the study of natural phenomena, and supported
freedom of inquiry and expression.
In opposition to *Aristotelianism, Galileo insisted that
mathematics was at the heart of physics. He developed his
laws of motion by introducing careful measurement into
empirical investigations, and combined this with thought
experiments and deductive argument to show that he was
no narrow inductivist or empiricist. He then demolished
the naked-eye astronomy that had existed from prehis-
toric times by turning his telescope to the sky, discovering
evidence that was decisive against the Aristotelian–Ptolem-
aic cosmos while supporting Copernicus.
The story of Galileo’s conflict with the Roman Church
is well known—how in 1633 he was condemned for

endorsing Copernicanism in his Dialogue Concerning the
Two Chief World Systems (1632), having been forbidden to
do so in 1616. Nevertheless, the standard interpretation of
this story has been disputed by Redondi, who, using
previously unexplored Vatican archives, claims that
Galileo’s real crime in the eyes of the Church was not his
Copernicanism but his atomist theory of matter, which
was incompatible with the doctrine of transubstantiation,
and therefore challenged the sacrament of the Eucharist.
But a potentially capital accusation of heresy against so well
known a figure as Galileo would have been a dangerous
scandal, so he faced the lesser, trumped-up charges instead.
Publicly Galileo recanted, but his further scientific
work shows that in spite of the real danger he continued to
defend the free exercise of human reason and experience
and remained a steadfast pioneer of science as a secular
vocation, while never wavering in his attachment to
religion. a.bel.
*persecution of philosophers.
Peter Machamer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cam-
bridge, 1998).
Pietro Redondi, Galileo: Heretic (London, 1988).
gambler’s fallacy, or Monte Carlo fallacy. ‘Red has come
up a lot recently; so probably it won’t come up next time.’
This is not itself so much a fallacy as just a bad reason. The
underlying fallacy is to infer from, say, ‘The probability of
five reds running is low’ to ‘Given four reds running, the
probability of a fifth is low’. The earlier outcomes do not
affect the probability of a red next time; or, if they do, they
must make it higher, by being evidence of bias in the

wheel. c.a.k.
game theory. The formalized study of rational action in
situations where the welfare of each agent in a group
depends on how other group members act. A game is
specified by, for each participating agent, a set of permit-
ted strategies and a set of preferences between outcomes.
Agents are ‘perfectly rational’: in particular, they act so as
to maximize expected utility, where expected utility is a
measure of the likely benefit to them of their actions given
their preferences between outcomes. The game specifica-
tion and each agent’s rationality are standardly presumed
to be common knowledge: each agent knows these, each
agent knows that the other agents know these, and so on.
So each agent acts assuming that the other agents are
rational and that they will act on the same assumption.
Solutions to games standardly prescribe Nash equilibria:
each agent’s strategy must maximize expected utility
given the strategies of the others. t.p.
*decision theory.
R. Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York, 1957).
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869–1948). Hindu
political activist with the uncompromising religious–
philosophical ideal that non-injury is the only means to
truth. In an age ravaged by two world wars, Gandhi suc-
cessfully practised the method of non-violence in mass
*civil-disobedience movements against racism in South
Africa and against colonialism and untouchability in India.
This method he called satya¯graha or ‘zest for truth’. In
328 Galen
Gandhi’s moral philosophy, *means and ends form a con-

tinuum, and no end ever justifies large-scale killing. In any
conflict, the antagonist should be looked upon as a fellow
searcher for truth. He should be won over through per-
suasion and self-suffering, not through deceit and brute
force. Such unarmed resistance, far from being passive,
calls for active love and self-control, which eventually
makes individuals fit for political self-government. a.c.
Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy
of Conflict (Princeton, NJ, 1988).
Garden, the: see Epicureanism.
Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655). A Catholic priest too often
known to philosophers merely as the author of a set of
objections to Descartes’s Meditations, Gassendi was an
important and influential seventeenth-century figure in
his own right. Gassendi used the scepticism of Sextus
Empiricus against Aristotle and *Aristotelianism, though
it is doubtful that he was himself a whole-hearted sceptic.
His espousal of Epicurean *atomism, combined with his
voluntarism and consequent empiricism, had a profound
effect on the subsequent philosophy of the century,
strongly influencing both Boyle and Newton. Like them,
he was a mechanist, but not a materialist. It was largely as
a result of his efforts that atomism was seen as a viable can-
didate for the vacancy created by the increasing unsatis-
factoriness of both the Aristotelian and the Paracelsan
pictures of the world. j.j.m.
Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Nat-
ural Philosophy (Dordrecht, 1987).
Gauthier, David (1932– ). Canadian moral philosopher
who has specialized in the study of the relationship

between reason and morality. He is a leading contempor-
ary proponent of the view, descending from Hobbes, that
morality is based on the long-term self-interest of each
individual, rather than on any inherent concern or respect
for the interests or moral standing of others. Gauthier has
tried to develop this ‘contractarian’ approach, and its
determinate implications, using the tools of rational
choice theory, culminating in his influential Morals by
Agreement (1986). Gauthier has also written a series of
intriguing articles that offer radical reinterpretations of
Locke, Kant, and Hume, drawing out their contractarian
elements. Gauthier is currently the Distinguished Service
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.
w.k.
*contract, social.
David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford, 1986).
gavagai: see translation, indeterminacy of.
Geach, Peter Thomas (1919– ). British logician with
wide-ranging philosophical interests. An admirer and
expositor of McTaggart. Mental Acts (1958) attacks abstrac-
tionism and dispositionalist accounts of mind, and
interestingly modifies Russell’s account of judgement.
Reference and Generality (1962) demonstrates the inad-
equacy of medieval and modern theories of suppositio or
*denotation. Thus in ‘Every soldier swears’, ‘every sol-
dier’ does not stand for some entity which is said to swear,
but ‘every’ indicates the way in which the predicate
‘swear’ latches on to the subject ‘soldier’. A vigorous
defence of Christian morality and *theodicy is given in
The Virtues and Providence and Evil (both 1977). He holds

the controversial view that something could be the same
A, but not the same B, as something (relative identity).
Geach’s style is combative, jargon-free, and exploits for-
gotten riches of English vocabulary. Elizabeth Anscombe
was his wife. c.j.f.w.
Harry A. Lewis (ed.), Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters (Dor-
drecht, 1991).
Geist
: see spirit.
gender. Term introduced by feminists in order that the
social aspect of sexual difference should not be ignored.
When the difference between male and female human
beings is treated as one of ‘sex’, it may be thought to be
accounted for biologically. Speaking of gender, one
acknowledges the socio-cultural determination of the
concepts women and men, and admits a conception of
women and men as distinguished primarily by a difference
of social position. j.horn.
*feminism; sex.
Christine Delphy, Close to Home (London, 1984), intro.
generalization. As this term is most commonly used, a
generalization is an ‘all’ statement, to the effect that all
objects of a certain general kind possess a certain prop-
erty—for example, the statement ‘All planets move in
elliptical orbits’. It is customary to distinguish between
‘lawlike’ and ‘accidental’ generalizations, the one just
cited being lawlike whereas one such as ‘All the coins in
my pocket are silver’ is accidental. How to analyse this dis-
tinction is a disputed issue, but it is widely accepted that
only lawlike generalizations support corresponding

counterfactual *conditionals. Thus ‘All planets move in
elliptical orbits’ implies ‘If Vulcan were a planet, it would
move in an elliptical orbit’, whereas ‘All the coins in my
pocket are silver’ does not imply ‘If this penny were in my
pocket, it would be silver’. e.j.l.
N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th edn. (Cambridge,
Mass., 1983).
generalization, rule of. An inference rule of the *predi-
cate or functional calculus. Let α be an individual variable
and Φ a *well-formed formula. The rule is:
From Φ infer (
α)Φ,
where Φ holds for any arbitrary individual.
The notation ‘(
α)’ represents the universal quantifier and
is read ‘For all
α’. Alternative notations are ‘Π
α
’ and ‘∀
α
’.
generalization, rule of 329