The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 39 pps

harmed. Problems for the view are especially salient in the
ethics of creation. Imagine an embryologist who can
choose which embryos to implant in women seeking to
have children. She knows which embryos would be born
with a painful genetic condition and which without. Does
choosing embryos with the condition harm the resultant
offspring? On the above view, it does not. For the choice
with respect to each potential individual is existence with
pain versus non-existence. The net gain of existing minus
some pain must in most cases be more than not existing.
Even if one concedes that comparing existence with non-
existence is not to compare like with like, the problem
remains. For, then, against what should we compare the
offspring’s medical state? The offspring’s suffering is,
nevertheless, due to the embryologist’s choice. This
perhaps points to some non-consequentialist features of
harm, focusing, perhaps, on harmers’ intentions, or some
other characteristics of their actions.
A further problem is avoiding a collapse of the notion of
harm into the related notion of wrong, or being wronged.
If harming me is simply the commission of a morally
wrongful act against me, then there will be as many
notions of harm as there are moral principles of rightful
action towards others which can be breached. A key ques-
tion here is whether there can be a harmful but not wrong-
ful act. Examples of accidental, or unavoidable, harms
might bear out this distinction. There are also cases where
we can place a person at a (morally) wrongful disadvan-
tage, yet would decline to call this a harm. s.m g.
*consequentialism; ethics.
J. Feinberg, ‘Wrongful Life and the Counterfactual Element in

Harming’, in his Freedom and Fulfilment (Princeton, NJ, 1992).
D. Parfit, ‘The Non-Identity Problem’, in Reasons and Persons
(Oxford, 1984).
Harman, Gilbert (1938– ). Professor of Philosophy at
Princeton University, best known for contributions in the
philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it
is common to equate ‘being rational’ with ‘being logical’,
Harman distinguishes these sharply. Logic provides a the-
ory of implication relations among sentences. ‘If A then B’,
coupled with ‘A’, logically implies ‘B’. An agent’s accept-
ing the first two statements, however, does not thereby
rationally oblige him to infer or accept the third. At most,
reason demands acceptance of ‘B’ or the rejection of either
‘If A then B’ or ‘A’. In ethics, Harman advances a robust
*moral relativism according to which what agents ‘ought’
to do depends on socially reinforced principles they come
to acquire. Agents imbued with different principles will be
differently motivated, hence morally judge and act in dif-
ferent ways. j.heil
G. Harman, Change in View (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
—— Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind (Oxford, 1999).
—— Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy
(Oxford, 2000).
harmony, logical. In a *natural deduction formalization
of logic, harmony is a relation between the introduction
and elimination rules governing a logical constant which
renders them in accord with one another: it is not possible
to infer from a statement of a given form more than is war-
ranted by the way in which that statement was arrived at
in the first instance. The condition for this to hold good is

precisely the condition that the basic step of normalization
can be carried out with respect to a given logical constant,
namely that, whenever in a deduction a statement is
derived by an introduction rule, only to be used immedi-
ately as the major premiss of an elimination rule, a short
cut is always possible that makes no use of that statement.
This condition is plausible independently of Prawitz’s idea
for a proof-theoretic justification of the elimination rules:
namely as a formulation of the requirement of harmony
between introduction and elimination rules. For if, with
respect to a given logical constant, such harmony does not
obtain, the addition of that constant to the language is a
non-conservative extension, in that we can derive conclu-
sions not containing that constant from premisses not
containing it that we could not have derived in the lan-
guage lacking the constant.
Disharmony occurs when the elimination rules are
stronger than is warranted by the introduction rules,
taken collectively. It can also occur that they are weaker.
This may also be seen as a defect, though its effects are less
serious: the condition that the elimination rules be no
weaker than they need be may be termed stability.
If we distinguish what justifies the assertion of a form of
statement and the consequences that follow from accept-
ing it as two aspects of the linguistic practice governing it,
these notions of harmony and of stability may be general-
ized from logic to the whole of language. They then
become conditions, stronger than the requirement of con-
sistency, for the proper functioning of a language, ones
not guaranteed satisfaction by the mere existence and use

of that language. m.d.
Nuel D. Belnap, ‘Tonk, Plonk and Plink’, Analysis (1962); repr. in
P. F. Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic (Oxford, 1967).
M. Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.,
1991).
A. N. Prior, ‘The Runabout Inference-Ticket’, Analysis (1960); repr.
in P. F. Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic (Oxford, 1967).
harmony, pre-established. A theory associated with the
philosophy of G. W. Leibniz. It is a basic thesis of Leibniz’s
philosophy that there are no causal interactions between
created *substances, although there appear to be. Accord-
ing to Leibniz the states of a created substance are causal
consequences of its own preceding states, except for its ini-
tial state, which is brought about by God at its creation.
Leibniz held that God so created substances that, although
they do not causally interact, they behave just as we
would expect them to behave were they to causally inter-
act. Leibniz utilized this theory in order to provide an
explanation for the relation of the mind to the body,
although that is not its basic motivation. r.c.sle.
*occasionalism.
360 harm
G. W. Leibniz, ‘New System of Nature’, in G. W. Leibniz: Philo-
sophical Essays, ed. and tr. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber
(Indianapolis, 1989).
Hart, H. L. A. (1907–92). Philosopher and lawyer who with
J. L. Austin was central to late 1940s Oxford analytical
philosophy. His work while Oxford’s Professor of Jurispru-
dence (1952–68) transformed philosophy of law (particu-
larly analytical jurisprudence and *legal positivism) by

opening it to social theory mindful of the ‘internal point of
view’ of social actors, and so to normative political and
moral theory (conceived by Hart in liberal and Humean
fashion). For Hart, our language is a reminder of the
complexity and inner dimension of human affairs; philo-
sophically sophisticated attention to it undermines simpli-
fying and sceptical reductivisms, whether about causation
(Causation in the Law (1959)), punishment and the mental
element in crime (Punishment and Responsibility (1968)), or
the general structure and functions of law (The Concept of
Law (1961); Essays on Bentham (1982)). j.m.f.
*law, history of the philosophy of; law, problems of the
philosophy of.
H. L. A. Hart, Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford, 1983).
Nicola Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble
Dream (Oxford, 2004).
Neil MacCormick, H. L. A. Hart (London, 1981).
Hartley, David (1705–57). Hartley’s interest was in the
body’s role in the production and association of ideas; he
found the key in Newton’s theory of vibrations. Hartley’s
major writing in English appeared in 1749. Here he de-
velops the view that vibratory motions in the brain are set
up by the nerves receiving impressions of external objects,
acting through the ether, and these vibrations typically
continue in the brain, as sensations, a short time after the
removal of the external objects. Hartley’s is a physiologi-
cal explanation of the short persistence of a feeling after
the removal of the stimulus. He also undertakes a ‘deduc-
tion’ of the character of each type of sensation from the
theory of vibrations. Ideas of heat, cold, sight, etc. and sex-

ual desires result from the vibratory effect in the
‘medullary Particles’, specifically from the kind and local-
ity of the vibrations in the brain, and the line of direction of
influences from nerves to the brain.
His writings contain a ‘natural Assent’ argument for a
first cause and an account of moral–political matters and
their dependence upon ‘the Christian Revelation’. d.g.
*associationism.
David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his
Expectations: Containing Observations on the Frame of the Human
Body and Mind, and on their Mutual Connexions and Influences
(first pub. 1749; Hildesheim, 1967).
Hartmann, Eduard von (1842–1906). German philosopher
who tried to reconcile Schopenhauer with Hegel,
Schelling, and Leibniz. In The Philosophy of the Unconscious
(1869; tr. London, 1931) he argued that the unconscious
*Absolute is both will and idea, which respectively
account for the existence of the world and its orderly
nature. Will appears in suffering, idea in order and con-
sciousness. Thus there are grounds for both *pessimism
and optimism, and, since the Absolute is one, these must
be reconciled. As the cosmic process advances, idea pre-
vails over will, making possible aesthetic and intellectual
pleasures. But intellectual development increases our
capacity for pain, and material progress suppresses spir-
itual values. Hence ultimate happiness is not attainable in
this world, in heaven, or by endless progress towards an
earthly paradise. These illusions are ruses employed by the
absolute to induce mankind to propagate itself. We will
eventually shed illusions and commit collective suicide—

the final, redeeming triumph of idea over will. m.j.i.
D. N. K. Darnoi, The Unconscious and Eduard von Hartmann (The
Hague, 1967).
Hartmann, Nicolai (1882–1950). German philosopher
who abandoned his original neo-Kantian belief that object-
ive reality is a mental construct and, in, for example, New
Ways of Ontology (1942; tr. Chicago, 1953), developed a
realist *ontology. There are various levels of being: inor-
ganic, organic, spiritual, etc. A higher level is rooted in a
lower, but not wholly determined by it. Some categories
are involved at all levels of being: e.g. unity and multipli-
city, persistence and change. But each level has its own
complex of categories (e.g. matter and causality at the
inorganic level) which apply to a higher level (e.g. organic
life) only with modifications. As well as general ontology,
Hartmann produced a series of ‘regional ontologies’,
exploring the categories of, for example, the human spirit
and its objectifications and those of inorganic and organic
nature. In Ethics (1926; tr. London, from 1932) he de-
veloped a non-formal theory of values which, though
objective, have only ideal being and affect the world only
in so far as men act on them. He denies the existence of a
providential God, since it is incompatible with human
*freedom. Unlike Heidegger, he was concerned with
beings, not *being. m.j.i.
W. Stegmüller, Main Currents in German, British, American Philoso-
phy (Bloomington, Ind., 1969).
Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000). American process
philosopher and theologian at the University of Chicago
and the University of Texas who continued to the end of

the twentieth century the ‘process’ tradition in which
*becoming is the primary reality. Although strongly influ-
enced by his teacher Alfred North Whitehead, some of his
ideas antedate his encounter with Whitehead and others
are improvements on him. Like Whitehead, he holds a
panexperientialism in which the basic units of reality are
creative, experiential events. This doctrine does not imply
that the reality of an electron is very similar to the reality
of human consciousness, only that both are on a continu-
ous spectrum of processive reality. Hartshorne’s chief
improvements are in the theory of compound individuals.
Hartshorne and Whitehead, as pantheists, hold that God
transcends the world while including it. But, whereas for
Hartshorne, Charles 361
Whitehead God is a single, everlasting entity, for Hartshorne
God is a temporal society of experiential occasions.
Also an ornithologist, he published notable studies of
birdsong. p.h.h.
*process philosophy.
C. Hartshorne, Reality as a Social Process (Boston, 1953).
Robert Kane and Stephen H. Phillips (eds.), Hartshorne, Process
Philosophy and Theology (Albany, NY, 1989).
Harvard philosophy. Harvard was founded in 1635, a cen-
tury and a half before the achievement of independence
by the United States. There were two distinguished
philosophers during the colonial period, but they were
both Yale men: Jonathan Edwards, the most rigid of deter-
minists, and the American Samuel Johnson, a follower of
Berkeley. The first capable Harvard philosopher was
Francis Bowen, an adherent of the Scottish common-

sense philosophy of Reid and Dugald Stewart, which
dominated American universities from soon after its
introduction to the country at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century. At Harvard it was expounded by Levi
Hedge from 1795 to 1832 and then by Bowen from 1835 to
1889. The practical attraction of Scottish common-sense
philosophy was that it offered a rational alternative to the
fanatical excesses of Calvinist orthodoxy while resisting,
on another front, the speculative nebulosities of the ama-
teur philosophers of the Transcendentalist movement.
C. S. Peirce, William James, and their early associate
Chauncey Wright were all Bowen’s pupils.
In the 1870s these three and others, including John
Fiske, disciple of Herbert Spencer, formed a Metaphysical
Society in which, under the influence of the prevailing
Darwinian evolutionism, the ideas were worked out that
were to constitute pragmatism, a Harvard invention.
Peirce, like Wright, the most positivistic of the group, and
Fiske, was associated only informally with Harvard after
graduation. But his close relation to the much more
immediately influential James gave his ideas, much more
sophisticated than those of James, some currency. James
was soon joined at Harvard by Josiah Royce, who com-
bined an up-to-date interest in logic with the kind of ideal-
ism which holds that only mind is real and that all finite
minds are included in an absolute mind.
James’s most gifted student, George Santayana, was
also his intellectually most disobedient one. Both were
naturalists who wanted to find some place for religion in
the scheme of things, but they went about the project in

very different ways. James adjusted his concepts of truth
and reality so as to accommodate his spiritual yearnings;
Santayana affirmed the materiality of the real and saw
mind as at once its product and decorator. He contributed
in 1920 to the collective volume *Critical Realism. The
organizer of the earlier collection *The New Realism (1912)
had been Ralph Barton Perry, another Harvard teacher,
loyal to the memory, if not the doctrine, of William
James. He went on to write large, soft-centred books
about ethics and the theory of value.
James died in 1910, Peirce in 1914, Royce in 1916, and
Santayana had departed for Europe in 1912. It seemed that
the golden age of Harvard philosophy, and of philosophy
in America in general, had come to an end. Whitehead
arrived in the mid-1920s to begin, in his sixties, a product-
ive and obscurely brilliant new career as a speculative
cosmologist, but he had little effect outside a small circle
of devotees and a distantly admiring element in the gen-
eral reading public. Harvard philosophy turned from
James’s conversational breeziness, Royce’s pulpit elo-
quence, and Santayana’s civilized belletrism to an al-
together more rigorous and professional mode of
philosophizing. The emblem of this change was C. I.
Lewis, intensional logician, analytic theorist of know-
ledge, and combatively naturalist theorist of value, the
best philosopher of the inter-war years in the United
States. His abler associates were unproductive, his pro-
ductive colleagues were not all that able. He was, there-
fore, somewhat solitary. But his main doctrines had a
considerable overlap with those of the analytic philoso-

phers of Britain and the Logical Positivists of Europe.
W. V. Quine arrived for graduate study in Lewis’s time.
From the start his interest in formal logic was accom-
panied by a concern for its philosophical underpinnings.
He visited the Vienna Circle and was soon discarding
some of their most treasured substantive beliefs, although
not their methods and aims. As aspects of a comprehen-
sive suspicion of the clarity and usefulness of the idea of
*meaning, he rejected the distinction between analytic
truths (true in virtue of the meaning of their terms) and
synthetic truths, reinstated ontology (condemned by the
positivists as meaningless metaphysics), and denied the
reducibility of all significant discourse to individually
meaningful reports of immediate experience.
Something like a new golden age was clearly under way
by the time of his Word and Object (1960). Harvard now
established itself as the most important philosophical
centre in the English-speaking world, reversing a cultural
dependence on British philosophy which had been
interrupted, but not overturned, by the episode of
*pragmatism. Quine’s early ally Nelson Goodman joined
him there, as, later, did Hilary Putnam and Robert Nozick.
a.q.
*American philosophy.
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven,
Conn., 1977).
—— A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford, 2001).
S. P. Upham (ed.), Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the
Harvard Review of Philosophy (New York, 2002).
Morton G. White, Science and Sentiment in America (New York,

1971).
Hayek, Friedrich August von (1899–1992). Although
often regarded primarily as an economist (for which he
won the Nobel Prize in 1974), Hayek’s philosophical work
was fundamental to his thinking. His basic insight is epi-
stemological. Human knowledge is limited and reason
constrained in many ways. These limitations become
362 Hartshorne, Charles
particularly acute when attempting to survey and predict
the workings of a large society, not just because of its com-
plexity, but also because of general difficulties in knowing
human social and economic behaviour in advance of the
decision of agents, and because any predicting agency will
itself become a player in the game. But the knowledge dis-
persed among millions of individual agents can be ampli-
fied and captured through the workings of the free
market, and condenses in spontaneously developing trad-
itions and customs. Hayek’s epistemology thus leads to a
defence of moral and institutional *conservatism, as
against rationalistic reformers, and of the free market, as
against command economics (which interfere ineffi-
ciently with the flow of economic information within a
society). The neglect of Hayek’s ideas by philosophers is
unfortunate because, though at times unclear and incom-
plete, they are both suggestive and influential. a.o’h.
F. A. von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (London, 1988).
J. Gray, Hayek on Liberty (Oxford, 1986).
heap, paradox of the. Paradox due to vagueness. With a
single grain of sand, you cannot make a heap. If you cannot
make a heap with the grains you have, you cannot make

one with just one more. So even with 10 million grains you
cannot make a heap. Despite its antiquity, ‘heap’ may be
badly chosen: arguably, you can make a heap of sand with
just four or more grains (enough to make a stable heaping-
up without adhesive). But the paradox can be recast, e.g.: 1
is a small number, and any number bigger by 1 than a small
number is small; so all numbers are small. Responses
include: denying the major premiss, that is, affirming that
there is a sharp cut-off (even if we don’t know where); and
(alternatively) avoiding the conclusion by revamping clas-
sical logic and semantics. r.m.s.
J. C. Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox (Oxford,
2003).
Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch. 2.
heaven. The abode of God and the angels. Celestial para-
dise. The ultimate destination of the redeemed (e.g. in
Job 3, Hebrews 12, and Luke 16). Once wholly free of sin,
souls or resurrected persons in heaven enjoy the Beatific
Vision, the intuition of God’s essence. According to Job 3,
the wicked no longer trouble those in heaven, the weary
are at rest, both ‘small’ and ‘great’ are there, and the slave
is free from the master. There are graphic descriptions of
heaven in Revelation and in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Although spatial, heaven is not spatially related to ordin-
ary space-time. Travel to heaven is only by dying and
redemption, not by *motion, so the existence of heaven is
inconsistent with the Kant’s thesis that there is only one
space, because putatively distinct spaces will turn out to
be spatially related. Heaven exists now (Romans 10: 6, 1
Thessalonians 1: 10, 4: 16) but is concealed by ordinary

space-time events and sin. At death, the presence of God is
revealed. s.p.
*hell.
St Augustine, The City of God (Harmondsworth, 1972).
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (London, 1963–75).
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp-Smith
(London, 1978), esp. ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’.
Alister McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven (Oxford, 2003).
hedonic calculus. If the ultimate object of moral en-
deavour is to maximize pleasure, satisfaction, happiness;
and if pleasures, miseries, and pains can be meaningfully
represented on a single scale, and summed, then it may be
thought possible to quantify the overall value or disvalue
of particular acts or policies, and the desirability of intro-
ducing, or rescinding, laws. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
proposed a ‘felicific calculus’ which would take account of
such factors as intensity, duration, the likelihood of an
action producing further pleasure or unwanted pain . . .
But the project of such a calculus must fail: human good
and evil cannot be reduced to homogeneous sensation,
positive and negative. Such a scale cannot display the
moral urgency of remedying great evils, nor acknowledge
that some pleasurable sensations (those of the sadist and
rapist, for example) count wholly for the bad. r.w.h.
*utilitarianism.
J. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legisla-
tion (1789).
hedonism. The doctrine that *pleasure is the *good. It
falls into three main types not always distinguished by
their proponents:

1. Psychological hedonism: pleasure is the only pos-
sible object of desire or pursuit. This may be held on
observational grounds, or be thought to be necessi-
tated by what we mean by ‘desire’.
2. Evaluative hedonism: pleasure is what we ought to
desire or pursue.
3. Rationalizing hedonism: pleasure is the only object
that makes a pursuit rational.
(2) and (3), when made explicit, seem to suppose the falsity
of (1) in that they suppose it possible, wickedly or ir-
rationally, to pursue something other than pleasure.
Usually the pleasure in question has been thought to be
the subject’s own pleasure, and so the view has been a
form of egoism; but there is no reason in theory why it
should not be the pleasure of humans, or even of sentient
beings generally. Where psychological hedonism is in
question, this has not proved a popular line, but utilitar-
ians have developed altruistic versions of (2).
Utilitarians are committed to comprehensive and long-
term calculations of pleasure. Egoists may also consider
the subject’s long-term pleasure; or they may consider
that the immediate option which in itself yields or is
thought to yield greater pleasure ought to be or is pur-
sued. Some hedonists seem only or mainly to have
so-called physical pleasures in mind; others, like John Stuart
Mill, have a penchant for the pleasures of civilized dis-
course. There are clearly, then, many versions of hedon-
ism, and two apparently identical views may, further,
hedonism 363
turn out to be very different when one considers the pro-

ponents’ views of the nature of pleasure.
Arguments for hedonism will vary according to type.
Psychological hedonists ought to show either that all pur-
suits are in fact aimed at what the subject takes to yield
pleasure; or that we only count as really wanted what the
subject either believes will produce pleasure, or is pleased
at the prospect of. There is a risk of retreating into the sec-
ond kind of position whenever the arguments for the first
begin to look a little shaky. There is a further risk of mov-
ing without notice from points about what the subject
thinks will yield most pleasure to points about what they
view with most pleasure in prospect, and in general to do
the rounds of a variety of explanations in the pleasure fam-
ily without inquiring whether there is a legitimate route
from one to the other.
Evaluative hedonists may be content to describe their
end to us in the hope of winning converts. Sometimes it
seems that a supposedly familiar morality is taken as given
and desirable, and hedonism is propounded, and so
defended, as the rationale of our moral thought and prac-
tice. This is particularly likely to happen with utilitarian-
ism, which might, it is hoped, be seen both as making
sense of what we do and as enabling us to see how to sort
out the muddles we get into morally. Most forms of he-
donism are egoistic in form and are seen by opponents,
and sometimes by proponents, as hostile to traditional
morality and Victorian values.
Rationalizing hedonists will tend to invite us, by con-
sideration of examples, to recognize that our criterion of
rationality is the presence of a bedrock justification in

terms of pleasure. This is usually a version of psycho-
logical hedonism applied not to all our pursuits or desires,
but to our practice of reflective evaluation.
All long-term versions of hedonism have to face the
problem of how pleasure is to be measured. These prob-
lems are aggravated if there have to be cross-personal
comparisons, as in utilitarianism.
In classical Greece and Rome (*hedonism, ancient), the
doctrine was in various forms popular and much dis-
cussed. It underwent a revival in post-Cartesian philoso-
phy, especially among the British Empiricists, although
the most unequivocal hedonist, Helvétius, was produced
by the continent of Europe. In Britain it tended either to
take a utilitarian form, or to be made the basis of a utilitar-
ian development. A combination of partial truth, general
cynicism about human motivation, and confusion of a
variety of different familiar explanations of behaviour will
probably ensure the recurrent attractiveness of some form
of the doctrine. j.c.b.g.
*self-defeating theories; utilitarianism.
Richard B. Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1959).
Roger Crisp, Mill on Utilitarianism (London, 1997).
Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford, 2004).
Justin Gosling, Pleasure and Desire (Oxford, 1969).
John Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians (Oxford, 1958).
John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London, 1989).
T. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London, 1987).
hedonism, ancient. The central questions of ancient ethi-
cal theory concerned the nature of the good life (i.e. the
life most worth living) and the conditions of its achieve-

ment. (*Eudaimonia.) Given that focus, the role of *pleas-
ure in the good life was a topic which, throughout
antiquity, was rarely far from the central area of debate. In
particular, the thesis that pleasure is the good was urged
on different grounds by various individuals and schools,
and as vigorously disputed by their opponents.
The Pre-Platonic Period. The pre-philosophical beginnings
of Greek ethical thought, represented by the didactic
poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries bc, show an
ambivalent attitude to pleasure. While a few passages
advocate the cultivation of the pleasures of the moment,
the prevailing attitude is cautious, stressing the dangers of
excessive indulgence. Yet the latter attitude too can tend
towards a more enlightened hedonism, as in the *Sophist
Prodicus’ fable of the choice of Heracles between virtue
and vice, in which the hero chooses virtue on the ground
that, while vice offers more immediate pleasure, virtue
offers a pleasanter life in the long run, taking into account
the pleasures of good reputation and friendship, which are
forfeited by a life of vice. This contrast between immedi-
ate pleasure and the pleasure of one’s life, viewed as a
whole, comes to the fore in Democritus, who is reported
to have held that the supreme good is a state of tranquillity
of mind (thereby anticipating Epicurus’ doctrine of
*ataraxia. But tranquillity must be conceived, not merely
negatively, as the absence of disturbance, but as a pleasant
state. Democritus seems, then, to have maintained that
the choice of particular pleasures and pains must be made
on the basis of their contribution to the good life, i.e. to the
pleasant life of tranquillity (for which his own term was

euthumia, whose ordinary sense is cheerfulness). This
‘enlightened’ hedonism may be contrasted with the view
of Aristippus, that the supreme good is the pleasure of
the moment.
Plato. Traces of both kinds of hedonism may be discerned
in the dialogues. In the Protagoras Socrates presents
(whether as his own position or as the best available basis
for popular morality is disputed) a version of Democritean
enlightened hedonism, incorporating the idea of a calcu-
lus of pleasures and pains. Callicles in the Gorgias, on the
other hand, advocates the Aristippean ideal of a life
devoted to the satisfaction of short-term bodily appetite,
supporting this evaluation by the claim that the goal to
which nature prompts every agent (indeed every animal)
is the satisfaction of its desires, and by the identification of
pleasure with the satisfaction of desire, a conception
which is not distinguished from that of the making good of
a physiological deficiency. The conception of pleasure as a
natural goal is central to most ancient discussions of he-
donism. The modern distinction between psychological
hedonism (a theory of motivation) and evaluative he-
donism (a theory of value) was not drawn. Rather, both
proponents and opponents of hedonism agreed that the
natural direction of motivation, for humans as well as for
364 hedonism
other animals, either determined or served as evidence for
the good of the organism thus motivated, but differed on
whether that direction was towards pleasure. Socrates’
response to Callicles is therefore to argue that every agent
is naturally motivated to seek his own good, not his

immediate pleasure, and that the pursuit of one’s good
requires that one differentiate good (i.e. good-promoting)
pleasures from bad (i.e. harmful) ones. Plato’s own views
on the topic seem to have undergone some development.
While he may at an early stage have espoused Dem-
ocritean hedonism (if the hedonism of the Protagoras rep-
resents his own view), the position defended in the middle
and later dialogues is that, while the good life is indeed
pleasant (and in the Republic the pleasantest of all lives) its
pleasantness is merely an adjunct to its goodness, which
consists, not in pleasantness, but in rationality.
Aristotle. Like Plato, Aristotle both provides evidence of
ongoing debate on the value of pleasure and contributes
to that debate himself. The Nicomachean Ethics contains
two substantial and independent treatments of pleasure
(that in book vii probably belonging originally to the
Eudemian Ethics), each of which starts from a confronta-
tion of various opposed views, the extreme positions
being on the one hand the view of the contemporary
philosopher and mathematician Eudoxus that pleasure is
the *good, and on the other the thesis, usually attributed
to Plato’s nephew Speusippus, that pleasure is an evil. Of
those two, Aristotle’s own position is closer to the former,
but it is dubious whether he endorses Eudoxus’ view with-
out qualification. He rebuts the attacks on pleasure by
arguing that they rely on a mistaken account of its nature,
namely the view (see above) that pleasure consists in the
process of remedying a natural deficiency in the organism.
For Aristotle, pleasure is not any kind of process. Rather it
occurs when a natural potentiality (e.g. for thought or per-

ception) is realized in perfect conditions (when, for
instance, the mind is working well, free from distractions,
thinking about worthwhile objects, etc.). Every kind of
actualization has its own specific pleasure, e.g. the pleas-
ures of thought, and the bodily pleasures of sex, food, and
drink. Since eudaimonia itself consists in excellent realiza-
tion of the capacities for thought and for rational choice, it
follows that the good life is characterized by the greatest
degree of pleasure. It is, however, disputed whether Aris-
totle goes so far as to identify the perfection of perfect real-
ization with its pleasantness. While he appears to endorse
that identification in Nicomachean Ethics vii, in book x he
appears to say (obscurely) that pleasure is not perfection
itself, but a feature supervenient on it ‘like the bloom on
the cheek of youth’ (1174
b
33). He gives no hint, however,
of what that feature might be, and some commentators
argue that it is nothing other than perfection itself, and
that what it supervenes upon is not (as normally assumed)
perfection, but the simple activity.
The Post-Aristotelian Period. Some of the positions men-
tioned above continued to have their adherents in this
period. Among proponents of hedonism a major dispute
was that between on the one hand the *Cyrenaics, who
developed the Calliclean position by maintaining that the
supreme good is the pleasure of the moment and that bod-
ily pleasures are of higher value than mental, and on the
other Epicurus and his school, who developed the Dem-
ocritean ideal of the life of pleasant tranquillity as the

supreme good. Epicurus took over Eudoxus’ argument
that the natural impulse of all animals to seek pleasure
shows it to be good, and distinguished two types of pleas-
ure, that experienced when the organism is making good
a deficiency and that experienced when the organism is in
a stable state, free from all pain or disturbance; the latter
type was assigned supreme value. His identification of the
latter with the absence of pain has been criticized as con-
fused, but seems in fact to have been the unexceptionable
doctrine that a painless, trouble-free life is ipso facto
pleasant. c.c.w.t.
*hedonism.
D. Bostock, ‘Pleasure and Activity in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Phronesis
(1988).
J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure
(Oxford, 1982).
J. M. Rist, ‘Pleasure 360–300 bc’, Phoenix (1974).
J. Tenkku, The Evaluation of Pleasure in Plato’s Ethics (Helsinki,
1956).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831). Of all the
major Western philosophers, Hegel has gained the repu-
tation of being the most impenetrable. He was a formid-
able critic of his predecessor Immanuel Kant and a
formative influence on Karl Marx. Through his influence
on Marx, Hegel’s thought has changed the course of nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century history.
Hegel lived and worked in what we now know as Ger-
many, although in his time the many independent states
of the region had not been united into one nation. He
came of age at the time of the French Revolution, sharing

what he later called ‘the jubilation of this epoch’. His
career included periods as a private tutor, and nine years as
the headmaster of a secondary school, before his growing
reputation gained him a university chair. He ended his
days as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin,
which under the reformed Prussian monarchy was
becoming the intellectual centre of the German states.
Hegel wrote several long and dense books, of which the
most important are The Phenomenology of Mind, The Science
of Logic, and The Philosophy of Right. His Encyclopedia of
the Philosophical Sciences is a summary version of his
philosophical system. A number of other works were
delivered as lectures, and in some cases published after his
death from his lecture notes. These include his Lectures on
the Philosophy of History, Lectures on Aesthetics, Lectures on
the Philosophy of Religion, and Lectures on the History of
Philosophy.
Hegel is a difficult thinker because all his work reflects a
systematic view of the world, and he makes few conces-
sions to those not familiar with his way of thinking. In
addition his style is anything but ‘user-friendly’; at first
Hegel, G. W. F. 365
g. w. f. hegel: the lasting hostility of most Anglophone
philosophers to his difficult and ambitious system failed to
prevent the diffusion of his influence into most streams of
philosophy.
karl marx adopted Hegel’s theory of the process of his-
torical development, but gave matter rather than spirit the
central role in the process. So it was that his philosophy
came to be described as dialectical, historical, or scientific

materialism; for him, production is the determining mate-
rial function of humans.
georg lukacs, Hungary’s most famous philosopher.
The life of a prominent public intellectual was not a tran-
quil one in the Communist world. Twice briefly a gov-
ernment minister, twice exiled, Lukacs was endlessly
attacked by rival ideologues but managed to survive
Stalin’s Russia and grow old in his native city of Budapest.
benedetto croce developed a Hegelian philosophy of
spirit, of which his aesthetics was most notable, and put
forward a view of philosophy as history. The second great
Neapolitan philosopher, 650 years after Aquinas.
continental european philosophy: the influence of hegel
glance most readers will find his sentences simply incom-
prehensible. This has led some to denounce him as a char-
latan, hiding an emptiness of thought behind a deliberate
obscurity of expression in order to give an air of profund-
ity. Yet the meaning of Hegel’s writing does, eventually,
become apparent after careful study. Though his philo-
sophical system as a whole finds few adherents today,
his writings yield original insights and arguments that
illuminate many philosophical, social, and political issues.
The easiest point of entry to Hegel’s thought is his Lec-
tures on the Philosophy of History. One of Hegel’s greatest
contributions to our intellectual heritage is—as Marx
appreciated—his grasp of the historically conditioned
nature of our thinking. One might ask why a philosopher
should write a work that is, in one sense, a brief outline of
the history of the world, from ancient times to his own
day. The answer is that for Hegel the facts of history are

raw material to which the philosopher must give some
sense. For Hegel thought that history displays a rational
process of development, and, by studying it, we can
understand our own nature and place in the world. This
idea of history having meaning can be interpreted as a
reworking of the religious idea that the world was created
by a being with some purpose in mind; but it may also be
understood in a more limited way, as a claim that history
has a direction that we can discern, and is heading to a goal
that we can welcome.
Hegel presents his view of the direction of history in a
famous sentence from the introduction to The Philosophy
of History: ‘The history of the world is none other than the
progress of the consciousness of freedom.’ The remainder
of the work is a long illustration of this thought. Hegel
begins with the ancient empires of China, India, and Per-
sia. Here, he says, only one individual—the ruler—is free.
The subjects of these oriental despots, Hegel thought,
lacked not merely political freedom, but even the very
awareness that they are capable of forming their own
judgements about right or wrong. It was only in ancient
Greece that the principle of free individual thinking
developed, and even then Hegel saw the Greeks as so
closely identified with their city-state, and so much ruled
by its habits and customs, that they did not see themselves
as independent individuals in the modern sense. Though
the spark of individuality was lit by the critical thinking of
Socrates, individuality did not triumph until the Prot-
estant Reformation recognized that each individual can
find his or her own salvation, and gave the right of

individual conscience its proper place.
For Hegel the course of history since the Reformation
has been governed by the need to transform the world so
as to reflect the newly recognized principle of individual
freedom. The era of the *Enlightenment, culminating in
the French Revolution, was an attempt to abolish every
institution that depended on mere custom, and instead
ensure that the light of reason, to which every individual
can freely assent, guides every aspect of our political and
social lives. To Hegel this attempt was based on a ‘glorious
mental dawn’: the understanding that thought ought to
govern reality, instead of the other way around. Yet the
French revolutionaries misunderstood reason, taking it in
too abstract a way, without considering the nature of
existing communities and the way in which these com-
munities have formed their inhabitants. Thus the abstract
universalism of the Enlightenment led to the excesses of
the guillotine. Yet now that we understand what is
needed, Hegel concluded, a fully rational organization of
the world—and hence a truly free community—is ready
to unfold.
Hegel’s conception of freedom is central to his thought,
but it often misleads modern readers brought up on a con-
ception of freedom made popular through the writings of
such classical liberal thinkers as John Stuart Mill. Accord-
ing to the standard liberal conception, I am free when I am
left alone, not interfered with, and able to choose as I
please. (*Freedom and determinism; *liberty; political
freedom.) This is, for example, the sense of freedom used
by economists who picture consumers as free when there

are no restrictions on the goods and services they can
choose to buy in a free market. Hegel thought this an
utterly superficial notion of freedom, because it does not
probe beneath the surface and ask why individuals make
the choices they do. Hegel saw these choices as often
determined by external forces which effectively control
us. He even anticipates, by more than a century, the mod-
ern critique of the consumer society as creating needs in
order to satisfy them: he points out that the need for
greater ‘comfort’ does not arise within us, but ‘is sug-
gested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its
creation’.
Behind such insights lies Hegel’s grasp of history as a
process that shapes our choices and our very nature. So to
be left alone to make our own choices without interfer-
ence by others is not to be free; it is merely to be subjected
to the historical forces of our own times. Real freedom
begins with the realization that instead of allowing these
forces to control us, we can take control of them. But how
can this happen? As long as we see ourselves as independ-
ent beings with conflicting wills, we will always regard the
existence of other human beings as something alien to
ourselves, placing limits on our own freedom. In the clas-
sical liberal tradition, that is simply the way the world is,
and there is nothing that can be done about it. For Hegel,
however, the problem is overcome when we recognize
that all human beings share a common ability to reason.
Hence if a community can be built on a rational basis,
every human being can accept it, not as something alien,
but as an expression of his or her own rational will. Our

duty and our self-interest will then coincide, for our duty
will be rationally based, and our true interest is to realize
our nature as a rational being.
In his belief that we are free only when we act in accor-
dance with our reason, Hegel is in agreement with Kant;
and so too when he sees our duty as based on our reason;
but Hegel criticized Kant’s notion of morality, based as it
is on a *categorical imperative derived from pure reason,
as too abstract, a bare formal framework lacking all
Hegel, G. W. F. 367
content. Moreover, on Kant’s view human beings are des-
tined for perpetual conflict between duty and interest.
They will always be subject to desires that they must sup-
press if they are to act as the categorical imperative com-
mands. A purely rational morality like Kant’s, Hegel
thought, needs to be combined in some way with the eth-
ical customs that are part of our nature as beings of a par-
ticular time and place. Thus Hegel sought a synthesis
between our concrete ethical nature, formed in a specific
community, and the rational aspect of our being. When
this synthesis was achieved, we would have a community
in which each of us would find our own fulfilment, while
contributing to the well-being of the whole. We would be
free both in the subjective sense, in that we could do as we
wished to do, and in the objective sense, in that we would
rationally determine the course of our history, instead of
being determined by it. This would then be a truly rational
state, reconciling individual freedom with the values of
community.
In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes this rational

community in a manner that parallels—though is not
identical with—the Prussian monarchy of his own day.
For this he was accused by Schopenhauer of selling him-
self to his employer. After Hegel’s death, the Young
Hegelians, a group of young radicals that for a time
included Marx among its members, thought that in The
Philosophy of Right Hegel had betrayed the essence of his
own philosophy. They determined to develop his ideas in
a way that was truer to the core of his thought than Hegel
himself had been. From this group arose the criticism of
religion developed by Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuer-
bach, Max Stirner’s individual anarchism, developed in his
The Ego and its Own, and such early writings of Marx as The
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The
German Ideology.
More recently Karl Popper has seen Hegel as a precur-
sor of the modern totalitarian state. Popper argues that by
exalting the rational state and using the concept of free-
dom in a way that denies that irrational choices are truly
free, Hegel made it possible for later authoritarian rulers
to justify their tyranny by saying that they must force their
citizens to be free. It may be true that Hegel’s philosophy
is open to this misreading, but it is a misreading. The real
Hegel supported constitutional monarchy, the rule of law,
trial by jury, and (by the standards of his day) considerable
freedom of expression. He would never have regarded the
kind of state set up by Hitler or Stalin as a rational state
with free citizens.
Yet Popper has touched on a real problem in Hegel’s
philosophy. Hegel was driven by an extraordinary opti-

mism about the prospects of overcoming conflict
between human beings, and hence of bringing about a
rational and harmonious community. The roots of this
optimistic view lie in his metaphysics, and especially in his
concept of Geist. This German word can be rendered in
English, according to the context, either as *‘spirit’ or as
*‘mind’. In the former sense it can have religious connota-
tions; in the second it is the normal word used to describe
the mental or intellectual side of our being, as distinct
from the physical. Because the German term covers both
these meanings, Hegel is able to use it in a way that sug-
gests an overarching collective Mind that is an active force
throughout history, and of which all individual minds—
that is, all human beings, considered in their mental
aspect—are a part. Thus Hegel sees the study of history as
a way of getting to know the nature of Geist, and sees the
rational state as Geist objectified. Since there is no ideal
English translation, I shall henceforth use the capitalized
term ‘Mind’ to express Hegel’s concept of Geist.
Hegel’s greatest work is his The Phenomenology of Mind
(sometimes referred to in English as The Phenomenology of
Spirit), described by Marx as ‘the true birthplace and secret
of Hegel’s philosophy’. In it Hegel seeks to show that all
human intellectual development up to now is the logically
necessary working out of Mind’s coming to know itself.
The logic of this process is, however, not the traditional
logic of the *syllogism, but rather Hegel’s own dialectical
logic. In dialectical logic, we start from a given position—
as an example, we might take the customary ethics of
ancient Greece. Then we find that this position contains

within itself the seeds of its own destruction, in the form
of an internal contradiction. The questioning of a Socrates
leads eventually to the downfall of customary ethics,
for example, and its replacement during the Reformation
by a morality based on individual conscience alone. Yet
this too is one-sided and unstable, and so we must
move to a third position, the rational community. This
third position combines the positive aspects of its two
predecessors.
This *dialectic is sometimes referred to as a movement
from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. In the example given,
the customary morality of ancient Greece is the thesis, the
Reformation morality of individual conscience its antith-
esis, and the rational community is the synthesis of the
two. This last is, in Hegel’s philosophy of history, the final
synthesis, but in other instances, the synthesis of one stage
of the dialectic can serve as the thesis for a new dialectical
movement. In The Science of Logic, Hegel applies the same
method to the abstract categories with which we think.
Here Hegel starts with the bare notion of existence, or
being, and argues that since this bare notion of being has
no content at all, it cannot be anything. Thus it must be
nothing, the antithesis of being. Being and nothing, how-
ever, are opposites, constantly moving in and apart from
each other; they require to be brought together under the
synthesis, becoming. Then the dialectic moves on,
through many more obscure stages, until in the end Hegel
claims to be able to demonstrate the necessity of absolute
*idealism: that is, that the only thing that is ultimately real
is the absolute idea, which is Mind, knowing itself as all

reality.
Absolute idealism seems a strange doctrine, but it was
by no means unique to Hegel. Kant had already argued
that the mind constitutes the known universe because we
can only know things within a framework of our own cre-
ation, namely the categories of time, space, and substance.
368 Hegel, G. W. F.
Yet Kant thought that beyond these categories there must
be the *‘thing-in-itself’, forever unknowable. In doing
away with the ‘thing-in-itself’, and saying that all we know
is also all that there is, Hegel was following the line of
Kantian criticism developed earlier by Johann Fichte.
Both The Phenomenology of Mind and The Science of Logic,
then, have the same process as their subject, the process of
Mind coming to know itself as ultimate reality. In the Phe-
nomenology this process is presented by an attempt to show
the logical necessity inherent in the historical develop-
ment of human consciousness. In the Logic it is shown as a
pure dialectical necessity, as (Hegel tells us) showing ‘God
as he is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature
and of a finite mind’. The Logic is, therefore, by far the
more abstract and difficult work. The Phenomenology is, by
comparison (but only by comparison), a gripping account
of how the finite minds of human beings progress to a
point at which they can see that the world beyond them is
not alien or hostile to them, but a part of themselves. This
is so, because Mind alone is all that is real, and each finite
mind is a part of Mind.
One curious aspect of the enterprise of the Phenomen-
ology is that it seeks to understand a process that is com-

pleted by the fact that it is understood. The goal of all
history is that mind should come to understand itself as
the only ultimate reality. When is that understanding first
achieved? By Hegel himself in the Phenomenology! If Hegel
is to be believed, the closing pages of his masterpiece are
no mere description of the culmination of everything that
has happened since finite minds were first created: they are
that culmination.
In the light of Hegel’s belief that all finite minds share in
a greater underlying reality, we can appreciate why he
should have believed in the possibility of a form of society
that transcended all conflicts between the individual and
the collective, and was truly free while at the same time in
no sense anarchic. We can also see why this belief should
have made it possible for Hegel’s ideas to lead some of his
successors, Marx among them, to a similarly misplaced
optimism about the possibility of avoiding such conflicts.
For while Marx claimed to have rejected the ‘mysticism’ in
which Hegel enveloped his system, Marx never freed him-
self from the conviction that history is tending toward a
final destination in which there will be complete harmony
between the interests of the individual and the common
interests of the community. That is why he believed that
*communism would be a condition in which everyone
freely advanced the common interests of all. p.s.
*Hegelianism.
F. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge,
1993).
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, tr A. V. Miller
(Oxford, 1977).

—— Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1967).
—— Hegel’s Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller (London, 1969).
—— Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York,
1956).
Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford, 1992).
—— Hegel (London, 1983).
Richard Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduc-
tion (Brighton, 1976).
Peter Singer, Hegel (Oxford, 1983).
Robert Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York, 1983).
Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1979).
Hegelianism. ‘Hegelianism’ refers not only to the doc-
trines and methods of Hegel himself, but to those of his
followers, especially, but not only, in Germany.
Even in Hegel’s lifetime, the obscurity and ambiguity of
his teaching gave rise to disagreement over its signifi-
cance. Does his claim that ‘what is rational is actual and
what is actual is rational’ imply that everything that exists,
including for example the Prussian state, is as it should be,
or rather that whatever is not as it should be, even though
it exists, is not genuinely ‘actual’? Do his resounding trib-
utes to the *freedom and self-consciousness attained in the
modern world imply that significant history, including the
history of philosophy, has come to an end? Does his belief
that *God is not distinct from the world mean that God
does exist or that he does not? Does his claim that religion
and philosophy have the same ‘content’ but present it in
different ‘forms’ (imagination and thought, respectively)
imply that religion and the Church are now dispensable?
Does his assertion that the spirit is eternal amount to an

endorsement of the orthodox belief in immortality?
Hegel himself does not supply unequivocal answers to
these questions, and this omission is connected with sev-
eral important features of his thought:
1. Hegel believed his own philosophy to be not ‘one-
sided’, like most philosophies of the past, but the ‘univer-
sal’ philosophy, embracing and ‘sublating’ (or
cannibalizing) all significant past philosophies, doing just-
ice to realism or materialism as well as idealism, to athe-
ism as well as theism, and so on. (But Hegel is not a dualist,
or a monist, or a pluralist. The best numerical account of
him is that he is a Three-in-One-ist.)
2. Another reason why Hegel’s system refuses to yield
‘straight’ answers to ‘straight’ questions is that he
attempts to examine the terms in which questions are
framed, often pre-empting them for purposes of his own,
or assigning them a developing series of interconnected
meanings. Does Hegel believe that God exists? It depends
on what we mean by ‘God’, ‘believe’, and ‘exist’.
3. He believes that at their extreme points opposites
veer into each other. For example, if we take theism ser-
iously and say that a truly infinite God cannot be distinct
from the world, but must be in some sense identical with
it, this takes us to the brink of saying that the world is
everything and God nothing.
4. In the past, humanity has advanced owing in part to
its tendency to reflect on its own condition. In reflecting
on a philosophy, we develop new thoughts or categories
that are at most implicit in the philosophy on which we
reflect, and in reflecting on historical events we acquire

new thoughts that were not available to the participants
in those events. We cannot learn from history, since in
Hegelianism 369