The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 48 pdf

and scholastic freedom. The results were complex and far-
reaching. Major outcomes were the creation of Shı¯‘ite
thought based on multiple sources, possessing reason and
defining a political–philosophical place for al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯’s
‘learned’ reformers of law and for the role of a supreme
informed source, whose authority was established by uni-
fied epistemological theories combining Peripatetic and
Illuminationist concepts; and a parallel judicial tradition
based on revealed authority. This period of revival led not
only to the recovery of nearly the entire range of earlier
philosophical works, but also to the third major synthesis
and recomposition of philosophy, which proved consist-
ent with theories of revelation and was accepted by most
contemporaneous religious scholars. While most prob-
lems in earlier syncretic works continued to be debated,
many were also added, refined, and redefined to reflect
this period’s preoccupation with uniform theories.
Foremost thinkers of this period included Mı¯r Da¯ma¯d;
his acclaimed pupil Molla¯S
.
adra¯, and other members of the
School of Isfahan; and Mı¯r Fendereskı¯ and Shaykh Baha¯’ı¯,
who excelled in scientific and mathematical discoveries.
All contributed to what became a systematic reconstruc-
tion defined by Molla¯S
.
adra¯ as ‘metaphysical philosophy’,
which continues to this day as the third independent
school of Islamic philosophy. Structurally distinguished
from both the Peripatetic and the Illuminationist systems,
metaphysical philosophy is principally characterized by a

singular emphasis on the question of being. Logic is sep-
arated and discussed in independent works which include
the subject-matter of the traditional Isagoge, exclude the
Categories and the Poetics, and are divided into three parts:
semantics, formal techniques, and material logic. Molla¯
S
.
adra¯’s own independent magnum opus on metaphysical
philosophy is the voluminous work The Four Intellectual
Journeys. This text begins with the study of being, and
reduces the traditional subject of physics primarily to the
study of time, modality, and motion. A modified theory of
five categories is introduced through a unified theory
named ‘motion-in-category substance’ (also called sub-
stantial motion).
This further serves to explain a uniform theory of
being, further employed to define a unified theory of
knowledge, finally explaining creation as a non-natural,
non-causal ‘substantial motion’ away from the One in
durationless time, a concept taught by Mı¯r Da¯ma¯d, who is
widely known for the theory of creation defined as ‘eter-
nal becoming’ (h
.
udu¯th dahrı¯). Among the philosophical
problems extensively discussed, and reformulated and
refined by Molla¯S
.
adra¯, the following stands out: the refor-
mulated Illuminationist unified epistemological theory
of knowledge by presence, where the foundation

proposition is stated as the unity of the intellect and the
intellected.
The initial creative and innovative phase of this period
soon deteriorated, particularly in the areas of science and
technology. Philosophical activity, however, continued
to take place, mostly among members of the now-defined
clergy groups.
The Post-medieval Period: The Early Seventeenth Century to
the late Twentieth Century. The final period in Islamic phil-
osophy may be distinguished by a scholastic tradition that
continues to the present. One of its main characteristic
components is the acceptance of works by religious
scholars, especially those of Molla¯S
.
adra¯. Although a large
number of philosophers from this period have not been
studied completely, a recent biographical compilation lists
some 400 individuals, each with several works on specific
philosophical and logical subjects. Most of the authors are
identified as members of the clergy class, some of whom
also assumed juridical duties. This scholastic tradition
marks the final acceptance of philosophy by religion. Molla¯
S
.
adra¯ incorporated Fa¯ra¯bı¯’s idea of learned reformers with
Sohravardı¯’s ‘inspired sources of authority’ into a unified
theory. Thus, the select religious scholars, possessing
knowledge and inspiration, were confirmed as the legit-
imate ‘guardians’ of just rule. This unified theory also
became the final channel for the continuity of philosophy.

Although the study of higher levels of philosophy is still
restricted, the scholastic tradition incorporated aspects of
philosophy into the school curricula. One of the first
‘primers’ studied by beginning students includes a section
on logic. Some of the Shı¯
‘a doctrines that accept the role of
independent reason (ijtiha¯d) in principles of jurisprudence
have been central in the scholastic tradition of Islamic phil-
osophy in Iran from the sixteenth century—which marks
the final harmonization of philosophy with religion—to
the present. This is exemplified by many prominent con-
temporary clergy known and revered for their philosoph-
ical teachings, such as Abol-Hasan Qazvı¯nı¯, Alla¯meh
Husayn Taba¯taba¯’ı¯, Mehdi Ashtiya¯nı¯, Jala¯l Ashtiya¯nı¯, and
Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdı¯. The latter also turned to the system-
atic study of contemporary analytic philosophy, receiving
his doctorate in philosophy in Toronto in 1979. His book
The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Know-
ledge by Presence (Albany, NY, 1992) is the first serious work
that describes certain key problems of Islamic philosophy
within a contemporary analytic frame. This type of schol-
arship marks the beginning of a new trend in which some
Islamic philosophers are studying various Western philo-
sophical systems and methods and making attempts to
explain them within the frameworks of one or more of
the three Islamic schools of thought. These scholars are
also attempting to open a dialogue with Western practi-
tioners, thus reaching beyond the limits of previous his-
torical descriptions and generalizations by Muslims and
Orientalists. h.z.

Majid Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy (New York, 1983).
Ibn Kamm’na, Refinement and Commentary on Suhrawardı¯’s Intim-
ations: A Thirteenth Century Text on Natural Philosophy and
Psychology, critical edition, with introduction and analysis by
Hossein Ziai and Ahmed Alwishah (Costa Mesta, 2003).
O. Leaman and S. H. Nasr (eds.), The Routledge History of Islamic
Philosophy (London, 1998).
Mohsen Mahdi, Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Glen-
coe, Ill., 1962).
F. Rahman, ‘Dream, Imagination and ‘Alam al-Mithal’, Islamic
Studies, 3 (1964).
450 Islamic philosophy
M. M. Sharif, A History of Muslim Philosophy, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden,
1963–6).
Sohravardı¯, The Book of Radiance, ed. and tr. Hossein Ziai (Costa
Mesa, 1998).
—— The Philosophy of Illumination, a new critical edition with
English translation, notes, commentary, and introduction by
John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Provo, Ut., 1999).
Islamic philosophy today. Within modern times a num-
ber of themes in Islamic philosophy have become much
discussed. One topic is how distinct that philosophy ought
to be from other types of world philosophy, in particular
systems of thought not based on religion. Another, related
issue is what relationship Islamic philosophy should have
with Western thought. Further, some thinkers in the
Islamic world have taken general philosophical ideas and
have applied them to what they see as the leading issues of
the day within their cultural environment. Finally, trad-
itional ways of doing philosophy have continued, albeit

with some importation of wider theoretical machinery.
An issue which philosophers have dealt with at some
length is the relationship that the Islamic world should
have with the West. This issue is of course one that has
existed for some time, but arose with particular force from
the nineteenth century onwards with the success of colo-
nialism, imperialism, and Zionism in apparently gaining
supremacy over the Islamic world. In earlier periods the
Islamic world had represented a superior cultural and
material force in the world, but over the last few centuries
it had radically declined, and the reasons for this apparent
decadence were, and continue to be, much discussed by
philosophers.
Of great significance was the Nahda, or Islamic renais-
sance, which started in the nineteenth century and really
took root in Egypt. The idea behind it was to maintain a
distinctive Islamic identity within the Islamic world, yet at
the same time incorporate modern scientific and cultural
values, where these are compatible with Islam. The two
leading thinkers were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and
Muhammad ‘Abduh, who both argued that Islam is per-
fectly rational and in no way opposed by Western scien-
tific and cultural ideas. The Egyptian philosopher Mustafa
‘Abd al-Raziq extended their ideas and suggested that all
the main Islamic schools of thought, even the mystical
schools of Sufism which were much suspected by the
Nahda thinkers, are inherently rational and in no way
opposed to the science and rationality which are such an
important feature of Western culture. Some Arab thinkers
have been more sceptical of this point. Muhammad ‘Abd

al-Jabri is critical of much traditional Islamic thought,
arguing that we need to analyse clearly the reasons for the
decline of the Arab world. He calls for a deconstruction of
the clash between those who emphasize the glory of the
Islamic past and those who praise Western modernity.
What is required is a liberation of the Arab consciousness
from its traditional ties with its Islamic heritage, yet also a
cautious attitude to the ideas which have come from the
West and are part and parcel of foreign domination.
Fu‘ad Zakariyya agrees that Arab failure is linked with
the failure to criticize tradition, while Fazlur Rahman
stresses the links between Islam and social progress.
Islamic traditionalism is opposed to Islam itself, since the
religion is in favour of economic and social development
and change. The attempt to fix a rigid, stultified version of
Islam as the ideal is to fail to grasp the ways in which sci-
ence and technology can improve the life-style and moral
welfare of the mass of the community. Zaki Najib
Mahmud is not convinced that philosophy has much to
contribute to this debate. Hasan Hanafi is one of the many
contemporary Arab philosophers who use a novel philo-
sophical technique, in his case phenomenology, to
develop a traditional Islamic concept, that of tawhid, or
unity. He suggests that Islam is dynamic enough to
broaden this notion so that it can provide a generally
acceptable principle of unity and equality for everyone.
He is also critical of the idea of Western progress, sug-
gesting that the West itself is now entering a period of
decadence that will require an infusion of ideas from else-
where, and in particular the East. The idea that Islam is

based on fixed rules he finds unacceptable; it is based on a
revelation appropriate at its own time and place, but now
other interpretations of the message should be adopted to
fit present conditions and represent more accurately the
dynamism of Islam.
It is often said that philosophy declined in the Islamic
world after the death of Ibn Rushd in the twelfth century,
but this is far from the truth. Today there is a lively philo-
sophical presence in most of the Islamic world, often with
the incorporation into Islamic philosophy of ideas like
Logical Positivism, hermeneutics, pragmatism, Hegelian-
ism, and so on. Philosophy continued very vigorously in
the Persian cultural world, especially the philosophy of
Ibn Sı¯na¯ and the Ishraqi (Illuminationist) thinkers
developing and commenting on al-Sohravardı¯ and Molla¯
S
.
adra¯. In Iran philosophy has now moved away from the
theological school, the madrasa, into the university, and a
good example is provided by the thought of Mehdi Ha’iri
Yazdı¯. He develops a complex theory of knowledge by
presence, a form of knowledge which is incorrigible and
which grounds our other knowledge claims using mater-
ial from both Ishraqi thinkers like al-Sohravardı¯, and the
modern philosopher Wittgenstein. ‘Ali Shariati uses the
ishraqi school’s intermediary position between mysticism
and Peripateticism to develop a view of the human being
as having God at its essence while maintaining the scope
to determine its own form of existence. The notion of
unity (tawhid) is seen as therapeutic; it is desiged to estab-

lish both personal and political justice and harmony. He
interprets the main figures of Shı¯‘ite Islam as models for us
not only in a personal sense but also to bring about more
progressive social ideals; he sees them as fulfilling arche-
types which have always been regarded as desirable. Over
time the archetypes themselves have not changed essen-
tially, but they have changed in appearance, to make them
more suitable to the local audiences for whom they are
designed.
Islamic philosophy today 451
This link of the personal and the political is significant in
modern Persian thought. It is well represented by Ayatol-
lah Khomeini, who overthrew the Shah and became both
the spiritual and the temporal ruler of the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran. He argued that religion does not just apply to
private morality but must also be applied to the state as a
whole, and the religious authorities should be in charge of
the state, since only then will the community be rightly
guided. The school of Qom, of which he was a member,
contained also Muhammad Hossein Tabataba’i, Murtaza
Mutahheri, and Muhammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, all
important religious Shı¯‘ite thinkers who none the less
were far from suspicious of intellectual thought coming
from the West. They argued that traditional Islamic phil-
osophy can only gain by opening itself to some of the
important philosophical achievements created outside
the Islamic world. But they uniformly disapproved of the
work of Abdul Soroush, who took a rather critical view of
religion when he applied what he took to be the argu-
ments of Popper, Moore, and Wittgenstein to them.

Soroush was opposed by Sadiq Larijani, the chief repre-
sentative of the school of Qom, who suggested that
Soroush had misapplied the theories of Popper, Stalnaker,
Watkins, and Hempel. It is interesting that the debate
took the form not of religion as opposed to reason, but of
what the correct philosophical view should be, and then
how it should be applied to religion. Soroush upset not
only the school of Qom, but also the supporters of Hei-
degger, so he was quite isolated intellectually in Iran.
Perhaps the best-known Iranian thinker outside the
country is Seyyed Hossein Nasr. He is highly critical of
Western science, praising some of its achievements but
pointing to the ecological consequences of a world-view
which does not acknowledge the presence of God at the
centre of that view. Science without spirituality is without
limits, since there is nothing which it holds sacred, and it
bases itself entirely on measurements of quantities, not on
the quality of existence. More spiritual philosophies are
harmonious and integrative; they embed spiritual values
in the technological agenda, and so make ecological disas-
ters less likely. For him the question is not what the East
should take from the West, but vice versa. Along with this
view he has established in some detail the theoretical pre-
suppositions of Sufism, the school of mysticism in Islamic
thought, and his historical accounts of this doctrine have
played a large role in its increasing domestication outside
of the traditional Islamic world. o.l.
L. Hahn et al. (eds.), The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr
(Chicago, 2001).
M. Ha’iri Yazdı¯, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy:

Knowledge by Presence (New York, 1992).
S. H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy
(London, 1996), chs. 61, 63, 64, 65, 69, 71.
F. Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual
Tradition (Chicago, 1982).
Italian philosophy. A self-consciously Italian philosoph-
ical tradition only developed in the nineteenth century
with the growth of the movement for national unification.
Since that time, Italian philosophy has been dominated by
the rival schools of *idealism and *positivism, with the
important Italian current of *Marxism drawing on both.
However, each of these camps has laid claim to a native
inheritance going back to the Renaissance, and their select-
ive interpretations of their intellectual forebears still find
an echo in some of the standard histories of Italian philos-
ophy. The idealists traced a lineage from the Platonist
*humanism of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the fif-
teenth century, through the rationalist *pantheism of
Bruno and the Baconian utopia of Tommaso Campanella
(1568–1639), to Vico and Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) in
the eighteenth century, which they assimilated to their
own reading and critical elaboration of Kant and Hegel.
The positivists went back to the more scientifically orien-
tated Paduan followers of Aristotle, such as Pietro
Pompanazzi (1462–1525), and found a line of descent that
included the mechanistic *materialism and sensationalism
of Bernardino Telesio (1509–88), Galileo, Machiavelli, and
the social reformers of the Italian Enlightenment, such as
Vico (who they also claimed), Antonio Genovesi (1712–
69), and Gaetano Filangeri (1752–88) in the south, and the

Milanese group of Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), Melchiorre
Gioja (1767–1829), and Gian Domenico Romagnosi
(1765–1835), who were profoundly influenced in their
turn by the *empiricism of Locke and Hume and the asso-
ciationist and utilitarian doctrines of Helvétius, Condillac,
and Bentham. One theme ran through both accounts that
persists up to the present: the dialectical tension between
the two Romes, between Pope and Emperor, the active
and the contemplative life, social emancipation and heav-
enly contemplation.
The two main figures of the positivist school in the
nineteenth century were Carlo Cattaneo (1801–69) and
Roberto Ardigo (1828–1920). The first drew on the
reformers of the Milanese Enlightenment, Vico and
Comte, and urged the need for philosophy to adopt the
methods of the natural sciences and develop into a social
science. Ardigo, a former priest, became the apostle of a
theistic Newtonianism, in which the same mechanistic
‘forces’ explained all physical and psychical phenomena.
In the twentieth century, positivist thinking was con-
tinued by the Italian school of criminology, particularly
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and Enrico Ferri (1846–
1929), historians and social scientists such as Pasquale
Villari (1826–1917), some early Marxists, notably Achille
Loria (1857–1943), and by the pioneering political sociolo-
gists Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Gaetano Mosca
(1858–1941). There were also a number of important
philosophers of science within the empiricist tradition,
notably Giovanni Vailati (1863–1909) and Mario
Calderoni (1879–1914).

Amongst the idealists, Antonio Rosmini-Serbati
(1797–1855) and Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52) mixed the
Italian Neoplatonist tradition with *neo-Kantianism,
attributing in different ways the activity of the Kantian cat-
egories of the understanding to our intuition of the divine
452 Islamic philosophy today
Italian philosophy 453
being. During the revolutions of 1848 they placed their
philosophies at the service of the Catholic-liberal support-
ers of Pius IX as a rival to the humanistic and democratic
nationalism of Giuseppe Mazzini (1804–72), who identi-
fied God with the people, but were condemned by conser-
vatives for heresy. Whilst their thinking was eclipsed in
the north by the positivist tradition in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, it was critically elaborated and secu-
larized by the southern group of Hegelian scholars,
particularly Augusto Vera (1813–85), Bertrando Spaventa
(1817–82), and Francesco De Sanctis (1817–82). They also
sought to integrate the main currents of contemporary
European philosophy with the Italian tradition. Spaventa
argued that there had been a ‘circulation of European
thought’ in which Italian philosophers had either pre-
empted or independently conceived all the main elements
of modern European philosophy, with the Platonists rep-
resenting the rationalists and the Aristotelians the empiri-
cists, and Campanella and Vico anticipating the resolution
of these two schools in Kant and Hegel respectively. This
tradition was continued by Croce and Gentile, who both
evolved explicitly historicist doctrines and whose ideas
dominated Italian philosophy in the early twentieth cen-

tury. Gentile became the official philosopher of *fascism,
and the idealist school also had by far the greatest influ-
ence on Italian Marxism, Antonio Labriola (1843–1904)
being a pupil of Spaventa’s and Gramsci a sympathetic
critic of Croce, although an important positivist strand
also existed, of which Galvano della Volpe (1895–1968)
and Colletti were the main exponents.
Whilst some contemporary philosophers have carried
on the positivist tradition, such as Bobbio in law and pol-
itics and Ludovico Geymonat (1908–91) in the philosophy
of science, most Italian philosophers, such as the existen-
tialists Niccola Abbagnano (1901–90) and Luigi Pareyson
(1918– ) and the post-modernist Vattimo, remain original
reworkers of the German philosophic tradition, although
their attention has shifted from Kant and Hegel to
Nietszche, Husserl, Jaspers, and Heidegger. r.p.b.
Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1987).
J. H. Randall, The Career of Philosophy (New York, 1962).
Guido de Ruggiero, Modern Philosophy (London, 1921).
Jackson, Frank (1943– ). Australian philosopher of mind,
logic, and metaphysics who is noted for his adherence to a
*representative theory of perception and for his work on
*conditionals. Jackson is unusual amongst contemporary
philosophers in defending the existence of *sense-data,
arguing that an adequate account of the truth-conditions
of statements about how things ‘look’ or otherwise
‘appear’ to us phenomenally requires us to admit reference
to such items. In his 1986 essay ‘What Mary Didn’t Know’
he introduced a now-famous thought experiment about
knowledge gained through phenomenal experience.

Jackson’s work on conditionals builds upon Grice’s the-
ory of the indicative conditional as a statement whose
truth-condition is that of the so-called material condi-
tional, making ‘If p, then q’ true if and only if ‘Not both p
and not-q’ is true. In order to defuse apparent counter-
examples to this in natural language, Jackson gives an
account of the assertibility-conditions of conditionals
which explains why we do not always assert a conditional
whose truth-condition we believe to be satisfied. e.j.l.
*Mary, black and white.
F. Jackson, Conditionals (Oxford, 1987).
—— From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis
(Oxford, 1997).
—— Mind, Method, and Conditionals: Selected Essays (London,
1998).
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819), German pietist
philosopher of ‘faith and feeling’. He was the sharpest of
the critics of the intellectualistic German *Enlightenment,
represented chiefly by Wolff and Kant. His philosophy
and character were important in moving German philoso-
phy and literature to a somewhat mystical and Romantic
Weltanschauung.
From Hume’s scepticism Jacobi inferred the inadequacy
of abstract systematic thought and the practical necessity
of irrational belief (David Hume über den Glauben (1787)).
The use of pure reason in philosophy, he held, leads
inevitably to Spinozism (then almost universally con-
demned as pantheism and fatalism). By revealing that Less-
ing shortly before his death had confessed to being a
Spinozist, Jacobi caused a great scandal in making such an

injurious charge against the universally admired Lessing,
and precipitated the so-called Pantheismusstreit between
himself and another anti-Spinozist who was Lessing’s best
friend, Moses Mendelssohn. The Streit was carried on in
books, articles, and personal correspondence circulated
and published without permission. Each participant was
egged on by friends and disciples, and the ensuing quarrel
was not an edifying spectacle. Mendelssohn’s death in 1786
at the height of the dispute prompted allegations that
Jacobi had caused it; these slanderous charges exacerbated
the quarrel and gave it an emotional depth and a personal
drama in which nothing less than the legitimacy of the
entire Enlightenment was at stake. Hamann, Herder,
Goethe, and Kant were soon involved in the battle.
Jacobi and Mendelssohn agreed that pure reason is not
a sufficient instrument for metaphysics and that to avoid
the abyss of Spinozism something else is needed: for
Jacobi it was an act of faith (salto mortale, he called it), for
Mendelssohn it was common sense. Each party appealed
to the practical (i.e. the moral) aspect of Kant’s philoso-
phy. Seeing both participants in the controversy as
enemies of reason, ‘the touchstone of truth’, Kant in What
is Orientation in Thinking? (1786) rejected both of the
opposing views. Jacobi was one of the most effective of
Kant’s critics, famous even in the twentieth century for his
epigram ‘Without the *thing-in-itself I cannot enter the
Kantian philosophy, and with it I cannot remain’. l.w.b.
Lewis White Beck, ch. 1 in The Routledge History of Philosophy,
vol. vi, ed. R. C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (London,
1993).

Frederick C. Beiser, The Faith of Reason: German Philosophy from
Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), chs. 2, 3, and 4.
The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi, tr. G. Vallé,
J. B. Lawson, and C. G. Chappel (Canham, Md., 1988).
Jainism. Atheistic school of *Indian philosophy much
older than Buddhism (dating back to the eighth century
bc) and still alive. The ethical principle of non-violence is
taken by Jainism to an extreme in both practice and the-
ory. To make peace among the endlessly disputing
schools of Indian philosophy, Jaina philosophers made the
metatheoretic move of non-exclusivism, which is spelt
out as a seven-valued logic, illustrated as follows:
(1) From one perspective, the self is permanent.
(2) From another, it is not.
J
(3) From a joint perspective, it is and is not so (succes-
sively).
(4) From a neutral one, it is indescribable.
Adding the combinations of each of 1, 2, and 3 with 4, you
get seven theses, each of which is objectively correct in
that it confesses its own conditionality. Jainism accepts the
notion of eternal souls which assume the form of a human
body and are repeatedly reborn until they are liberated
from pleasurable and painful effects of egoistic actions
called *karma. Jaina logicians affirmed the existence of the
external world, impugning Buddhist idealism. a.c.
*Buddhist philosophy; atheism and agnosticism.
B. K. Matilal, The Central Philosophy of Jainism (Ahmedabad,
1981).
James, William (1842–1910). American philosopher and

psychologist, son of Henry James the Swedenborgian reli-
gious thinker, brother of Henry James the novelist, and
Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Harvard. Only
some of his many concerns can be considered.
1. The Principles of Psychology (1890) is officially com-
mitted to the scientific study of mind, conceived as the
ascertainment of ‘the empirical correlation of the various
sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the
brain’. Although ostensibly avoiding metaphysics, much
of it is as philosophical as psychological. Avoiding meta-
physics means mainly assuming the existence of a physical
world independent of mind, ignoring any philosophical
case against this scientifically necessary presupposition.
Four themes call for notice here.
(i) For James mind is identified with *consciousness,
known primarily through *introspection; scientific psy-
chology explores its physical basis and biological function.
This is evidently to assist the organism to cope with its
environment more flexibly than can inherited behav-
ioural patterns. The criterion for the presence of mind is,
therefore, the occurrence of behaviour which reaches the
same goal, as circumstances alter, through differing
means.
James thinks it unlikely that such behaviour could ever
be explained mechanistically. While consciousness is too
obviously a distinct reality in his eyes for anything like the
brain–mind *identity theories of today even to be con-
sidered, James carefully examines the automaton theory
(*epiphenomenalism) but dismisses it (with debatable
logic) as failing to explain why consciousness has been

picked out for development by natural selection. (James
was strongly influenced by Darwinian ideas.) The old-
fashioned idea of a distinct soul is better, but James’s own
view is rather that ‘the stream of consciousness’ is gener-
ated afresh each moment by the current state of the whole
brain and reacts back on it, and hence on behaviour, with
a modicum of free spontaneity (a view anticipative of the
positions of both Whitehead and Roger Sperry).
(ii) This notion of the *stream of consciousness (or
thought) is the most famous theme in The Principles of
Psychology. Among its varied heirs are stream-of-
consciousness literature (e.g. Gertrude Stein), aspects of
Husserlian phenomenology, and Whiteheadian process
thought. Consciousness comes in a continuous flow with-
out sharp breaks or clearly distinguishable components.
Thus experience is always of a specious present, a stretch
of sensible duration in which the just-past still figures
along with the dawning of the future. As against trad-
itional *empiricism, for which a state of consciousness is a
complex of individually repeatable impressions and ideas,
James contends that no item of consciousness is ever
exactly repeated. I may perceive or think of the same thing
twice but never by way of numerically or qualitatively
identical representations.
(iii) James distinguishes between the I and the Me.
The I is the ultimate thinker, the Me is the object of all
those concerns we call selfish and which the I and its
organism primarily seek to preserve. The Me divides into
the material me, my body and my possessions; the social
Me (or Mes), the image (or images) I present to the various

communities to which I belong; and the spiritual Me,
which covers both my mental capacities and achieve-
ments, and some supposed inner source thereof. As for the
ultimate I, which does the thinking, James, having
dismissed a permanent ego, decides that (if there is such a
thing at all and not simply each total conscious state in
turn) it is the momentary thinker of the total present
thought. Personal identity through time consists in
the fact that the I of one moment adopts the Mes and Is of
earlier times by the peculiarly warm and intimate way
in which it recollects them. ( James pays particular atten-
tion to cases of multiple personality in developing his
account.)
(iv) The subject of *free will was of immense emotional
significance to James. He was rescued from a phase of ser-
ious psychological depression in 1879 partly by discovering
Charles Renouvier’s defence of free will as ‘the sustaining
of a thought because I choose to when I might have other
thoughts’. This is James’s own view. Consciousness can-
not determine what ideas are presented to it but, by effort-
ful selective direction of attention, can decide which will
affect behaviour. This power can neither be proved nor
disproved scientifically, but belief in it is a legitimate exer-
cise of ‘the will to believe’.
James’s naturalistic approach (and his role at Harvard)
contributed significantly to the development of experi-
mental psychology in America (though he had no love of
experiment himself ); his treatment of the various types of
self has had an influence on social psychology; and his
introspectionist investigations enormously influenced

Husserlian *phenomenology and its offshoots. It should
be noted that though James rejects materialism, in any
ordinary sense, he does take what might be called a phe-
nomenological materialist view of many mental
processes, seeing them as the consciousness of physical
states, as in the *James– Lange theory of the emotions or
his replacement of the Kantian ‘I think’ as the constant in
experience by the ‘I breathe’.
James, William 455
2. The best known of James’s purely philosophical
works is Pragmatism (1908). James takes over from C. S.
Peirce the idea that the meaning of a concept lies in its
practical bearings but puts it to different (not necessarily
worse) uses. Truth, for James’s *pragmatism, consists in
useful ideas. Their utility may lie in either the power to
predict experience they confer or their encouragement of
valuable emotion and behaviour. Obvious objections to
this appear less strong when it is realized that James’s
account incorporates what is currently called an external-
ist critique of inherent intentionality (sometimes
expressed as the rejection of the very idea of consciousness
as opposed to experience). Thus an idea (qua piece of ‘flat’
experience) is only about something to the extent that it
produces behaviour fitted to deal with it if it exists, and is
true only if it does so. (Thus my belief that God exists
requires a God it helps me deal with to be true.) This was
a response to his colleague Royce, who claimed that only
through the mediation of a divine mind can thought be
linked to definite external objects and thus enabled James
to avoid the absolute idealism to which he had previously

felt unwillingly forced. Actually James’s pragmatic
account of truth is the fulfilment of a variety of strands in
his prior thought and takes somewhat different forms
according to which is uppermost. Among these are
Peirce’s operationalism, Royce’s account of intentional-
ity, and his own doctrine of the will to believe.
3. James’s other chief philosophical doctrine is radical
empiricism, the view that the ultimate stuff of reality (or at
least all knowable reality) is pure experience. When the
natures or qualia which compose this occur in one kind of
arrangement they constitute minds, when in another,
physical things. (The clash with the earlier denial of
repeatable components of consciousness is modified in his
final pluralistic metaphysics.) This relates to pragmatism
because knowledge is conceived as the way in which the
experience composing a mind leads it to successful negoti-
ation with experience beyond itself (whether in a physical
or a mental arrangement). In Essays in Radical Empiricism
(a posthumous collection of 1904–5 articles) James oscil-
lates between various radical empiricist accounts of the
physical world, a phenomenalist view for which the phys-
ical consists in possible experience, a ‘new realist’ position
for which it consists in sensory vistas only some of them in
minds, and the panpsychist view that the physical consists
in its own inner experience of itself. Upon the whole he
seems to have thought the last the final metaphysical truth
and the second the best analysis of our ordinary concep-
tion of things.
4. An inherited concern with religious issues was
central to James’s thought throughout his life. The Varieties

of Religious Experience (1902) studies the phenomena of
mysticism and *religious experience with a view to an
eventual empirical assessment of their validity, a concern
which also led to James’s substantial involvement in psy-
chical research, while later works, such as A Pluralist Uni-
verse (1909), after sharply attacking the metaphysical
*monism of absolute idealists like Royce and Bradley,
develop a mystical pluralistic metaphysics in which a
‘finite God’, or more interestingly a ‘mother sea of
consciousness’, plays some of the roles of an infinite God
or Absolute, while leaving us an independence we are
refused by monism, and avoiding the apology for evil
which it, along with orthodox *theism, imposes. Death
prevented the completion of a final working-out of his
metaphysics, but Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), which
particularly focuses on the nature of relations and con-
tinuity, taken with other works, sufficiently exhibits its
main outlines.
5. In these later works James allied himself with Henri
Bergson in arguing that conceptual thought cannot do
proper justice to reality. This arises largely from the fact
that concepts can only provide a static picture of a world
which is essentially dynamic. (It was partly by exploiting
this, he argued, that absolute idealists promoted their spe-
cious claim that the familiar world of contingency and
change is somehow unreal, and that Reality proper con-
sists in a static *Absolute.) This is all right so long as that
static picture is used to guide our dynamic dealings with
things, but it leads to trouble when we expect it to provide
a real grasp of the nature of its object. James’s treatment of

the limitations of conceptual thought is related to his prag-
matic conception of truth in a somewhat curious manner.
*Truth, he argued, as a pragmatist, is no mere copy of real-
ity in another conceptual or verbal medium. There would
be little point in it if it were, and we should regard the con-
ceptual symbols in which it consists rather as tools for deal-
ing with (and perhaps sometimes as a worthwhile addition
to) reality than as revelations of its essence. None the less,
James did hanker for something which could provide a
sense of the real essence of things and, since concepts and
truth were precluded from this role, it had to be sought in a
metaphysics which turns us towards reality in some more
intimate way than they do. And here the standard logic by
which we organize our concepts is more an obstacle than
an aid. We should not look for a revelation of reality from
what are merely tools for dealing with it but must do so by
sinking ourselves perceptually in the flux and be prepared
to give an account of a world in process which will capture
something of its essence even if conceptually it contains
some apparent contradictions. The specific upshot of these
reflections is, in effect, a process philosophy, incorporating
an ‘epochal’ view of time, not unlike that later developed
by Whitehead and Hartshorne (who, however, aimed to
put into satisfactory concepts what James thought could
not be adequately conceptualized). t.l.s.s.
A. J. Ayer, The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of
Charles Sanders Peirce and William James (London, 1968). Part 2
on James.
Graham Bird, William James (London, 1986).
Marcus Ford, William James’s Philosophy: A New Perspective

(Amherst, Mass., 1982).
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven,
Conn., 1977), pt. 3.
Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven,
Conn., 1986).
456 James, William
R. A. Putnam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William James
(Cambridge, 1997).
T. L. S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British
Reality (La Salle, Ill., 1993).
James–Lange theory of the emotions. Independently
advanced by Carl G. Lange in 1885 and by William James
in 1884, it holds that an emotion is the experience of an
appropriate physical response to external stimuli. Sadness
and anger don’t make us cry and strike, rather they are the
feeling of doing so. Typical of a note of ‘phenomeno-
logical materialism’ in James, like his substitution of the ‘I
breathe’, as the accompaniment of all consciousness, for
the ‘I think’. t.l.s.s.
Jansenism. This movement in seventeenth-century
French Catholic thought is named after the Fleming Cor-
nelius Otto Jansen (1585–1638), whose treatise Augustinus
inspired it. Jansenists held that it is impossible to do good
works without God’s grace and that this grace is irre-
sistible. They adopted a rigoristic position in Christian
ethics and criticized their Jesuit opponents for moral
laxity. Pascal, who was influenced by and sympathetic to
Jansenism, satirized the moral reasoning of its opponents
in his Lettres provinciales. p.l.q.
N. Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism (Oxford, 1936).

Japanese philosophy. The first thing to be said about
Japanese philosophy is that it does indeed exist. If philoso-
phy is understood as ‘thinking about the fundamental
structures and meaning of human existence in the world’,
it has been practised in Japan for well over a thousand
years. But the most striking feature of Japanese philoso-
phy is its distinctly multiple heritage, drawing as it does
from a variety of Indian, Chinese, indigenous, and—even-
tually—Western sources. Also, compared with most
European philosophies, East Asian thinking tends to focus
on particular, concrete issues, and is correspondingly
uninterested in abstract speculation.
A few initial remarks—of necessity quite general—may
help to orientate the reader to the very different kind of
thinking that one finds in the Japanese tradition. Many of
the philosophical categories that seem natural in the West
are simply not found in East Asian thought. This is in part
a function of the structures of the Chinese and Japanese
languages, which are quite different from the subject–
predicate structure of languages in the Indo-European
family. In Chinese, words that would for us be substan-
tives function more as verbs, corresponding to an experi-
ence of the world as dynamic process rather than as
substance; and in Japanese, so much emphasis is placed on
the predicate that the subject is usually omitted alto-
gether, while there are two verbs for ‘is–exists’—neither
of which is used for the copula.
There are also considerable differences in philosophical
rhetoric and style. In a culture that prizes allusive under-
statement and subtle indirectness in human intercourse,

forcefully to advance arguments in terms of clear and
distinct ideas—let alone to attack or defend a philosoph-
ical position—would be considered boorish to the point of
barbarism. In addition, the ways relative clauses function
in Japanese make for even more indeterminacy. But what
to the Western student of philosophy might seem
impossibly vague may appear to the Japanese reader a
pregnant play of multiple meanings that reflects the actual
complexities of experience. In general, the line between
philosophy and literature is less clearly drawn than in
the West.
Most of the dualisms on which Western philosophy
tends to be predicated—the intelligible as opposed to the
sensible realm, the divine in contrast to the human, cul-
ture versus nature, mind (or spirit) in opposition to body
(or matter), the logical and rational versus the aesthetic
and intuitive—are not prominent in East Asian thinking.
And since Japanese philosophy tends to be firmly
grounded in practice, reading and reflection are best sup-
plemented by engaging in (or at least observing) the rele-
vant practices—going to Japanese theatre, studying
Japanese literature, sitting or walking in *Zen meditation,
practising Japanese arts (whether martial or fine), watch-
ing Japanese films, visiting Japanese gardens, or even
eating in traditional Japanese restaurants.
A major reason for the late start of philosophical think-
ing in Japan was that the indigenous language lacked a sys-
tem of writing. When the Japanese began ‘importing’
Chinese culture around the fifth century, one of the first
things they took over was the ideographic system of writ-

ten Chinese. Three major philosophies were embodied in
the texts that were brought from China over the next few
hundred years: *Confucian, *Taoist, and *Buddhist
thought, all of which—together with the indigenous reli-
gious world-view of Shinto—shaped the subsequent
development of Japanese thought. A major figure in the
introduction of Chinese and Indian culture to Japan was
Ku¯kai (774–835), founder of an esoteric school of Bud-
dhism deriving from Indian tantrism. Like many great
Japanese thinkers, Ku¯kai was a man of many talents and a
paradigm of the religious thinker who is simultaneously
beyond the everyday world and fully engaged in it. He
thus exemplifies two general traits of Japanese philoso-
phy: it has a strong religious component, while being
inherently embodied in practice.
Several centuries later, two other philosophically fertile
schools of Buddhism came to prominence, the first being
the ‘Pure Land’ Buddhism founded by Ho¯nen (1133–1212)
and his disciple Shinran (1173–1262). The other was Zen,
which grew out of Chan Buddhism in China. The intro-
ducers into Japan of the two major Zen schools were Eisai
(1141–1215) for the Rinzai school and Do¯gen (1200–53) for
the So¯to¯ school. Of all the philosophies developed in
Japan, Zen has had the broadest cultural impact. During
the medieval period it profoundly informed the evolution
of such arts as poetry and Noh drama, architecture and
landscape gardening, calligraphy and painting, the tea cere-
mony and flower arrangement, as well as swordsmanship,
archery, and other martial arts.
Japanese philosophy 457

Two figures from the Rinzai school deserve mention as
exemplifying the fusion of Zen thought with practice.
Takuan So¯ho¯ (1573–1645) was a prolific author whose
more speculative works attempted a synthesis of Zen
thinking with neo-Confucian metaphysics, but who is best
known for his writings on the art of the Zen sword.
Takuan explicated the Zen doctrine of ‘no mind’ by show-
ing how, in combat, focusing the mind on any one place,
or letting it ‘stop’ anywhere, leads to disaster; one must
rather let one’s awareness diffuse through the entire body
and beyond, so as to allow immediate response from any
part. This schema—in which rigorous psychophysical
practice carried out over decades leads to an enlightened
spontaneity that is even more rapid and attuned than
instinctual responses—is typical of the Zen discipline that
underlies practice in meditation and the arts. Two later
Zen masters were responsible for a revitalization and
efflorescence of the Rinzai school during the Tokugawa
period, Bankei Yo¯taku (1622–93) and Hakuin Ekaku
(1685–1768). Like Takuan, Hakuin was a man of multiple
talents and is highly regarded as a poet, a painter and cal-
ligrapher, and a thinker of the first rank. For the Rinzai
school Zen practice is a matter of ‘seeing into one’s own
true nature’, which is basically already enlightened.
Hakuin emphasizes that genuine practice consists in
‘uninterrupted meditation in the midst of all activities’
rather than the ‘dead sitting and silent illumination’ advo-
cated by the quietistic schools. (There is a remarkable simi-
larity between Hakuin’s style of writing and Nietzsche’s,
as well as between many of their ideas—especially about

the role of the emotions in the best human life.)
Towards the end of the Tokugawa period a movement
arose in reaction to the dominance of Buddhist and Con-
fucian thinking in Japanese philosophy that came to be
known as the Kokugaku (‘national learning’) school, the
primary figures in which were Motoori Norinaga
(1730–1801) and Hirata Atsune (1776–1843). While recep-
tive to the neo-Confucian Kogaku thinkers’ emphasis on
the earliest classical texts, these men called for a return to
the study of Japanese antiquity. Through a philosophical
reconstruction of Shinto and careful study of the early
classics of Japanese myth and literature, they sought to
recover the ‘true heart’ of ancient Japan as a basis for spir-
itual renewal in the present. While the Kokugaku philoso-
phies are impressive in their philological sophistication,
the exclusiveness of their concern with ‘pure Japanese-
ness’—while understandable in view of the multiple heri-
tage of Japanese culture—tends toward a vehement
nationalism.
Upon the reopening of the country to the West with the
Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese embarked upon a
comprehensive programme of ‘adopting and adapting’
Western philosophies. Around the turn of the century,
thorough engagements with the full historical sweep of
Western philosophy were complemented by special stud-
ies of British *utilitarianism, American *pragmatism,
French *positivism, and—above all *German philosophy
from Leibniz and Kant, through Hegel and Fichte and
Schelling, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The first mas-
terpiece to emerge from the ferment that resulted from

this confluence of the Asian and Western philosophical
traditions was An Inquiry into the Good (1911) by Nishida
Kitaro¯ (1870–1945), an epochal work that sought to articu-
late an original philosophy rooted in the tradition of East
Asian thought by way of concepts derived from Western
philosophy. Over the next thirty years Nishida went on to
elaborate a vast and complex body of thought ranging
over metaphysics and epistemology, ethics and aesthetics,
and philosophy of politics and religion.
Nishida influenced a whole generation of younger
philosophers, many of whom also taught at Kyoto Uni-
versity and came to be known collectively as the Kyoto
School. The thought of these men was often influenced by
religious existentialism and always informed by thorough
study of the history of Western philosophy. Tanabe
Hajime (1885–1962), much influenced by Hegel, wrote
extensively in the fields of ethics and phenomenology and
philosophy of religion from the perspective of Pure Land
Buddhism, while his younger contemporary Nishitani
Keiji (1900–90), more influenced by Nietzsche, wrote
from a more existential standpoint conditioned by Zen.
Watsuji Tetsuro¯ (1889–1960) began his writing career
with insightful studies of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and
Nietzsche, and went on to publish prolifically on Bud-
dhism, Confucianism, the philosophy of the visual and
theatrical arts, and especially ethics.
Several of the major figures in the Kyoto School came
in for severe criticism from their Marxist colleagues—
among whom the most impressive thinker was Tosaka
Jun (1900–45)—for publishing material during the Second

World War that was distinctly nationalistic and right-
wing in tone. The political writings of these thinkers
deserve close attention, since they open some fascinating
perspectives on the difficult question concerning the rela-
tions between a thinker’s politics and his or her philoso-
phy. Unfortunately, much of the recent commentary on
these issues in the United States has come from post-
Marxist Japanologists so ready to point the accusing finger
from positions of ethical superiority that ideological
complacency has tended to take the place of responsible
scholarship in this area.
Three other thinkers of the period deserve mention.
Hatano Seiichi (1877–1950) is distinguished by being a
practising Christian and by his broad competence in the
history of Western philosophy with special emphasis on
the Greeks and philosophy of religion. Miki Kiyoshi
(1897–1945) was an existential humanist, strongly influ-
enced by Marxism for a time, who produced important
works in the fields of social and political philosophy and
philosophical anthropology. Kuki Shu¯zo¯ (1888–1943) was
a cosmopolitan aristocrat who spent the 1920s studying in
Europe, where he made a great impression on both Hei-
degger and Sartre among others. While he is best known
for his subtle work on the aesthetics of Japanese taste, Iki
no ko¯zo¯ (The Structure of ‘Iki’ (1930)), Kuki wrote with
great sophistication in the fields of existential philosophy,
458 Japanese philosophy
literary theory, and modern French thought. He was also
an accomplished poet who wrote numerous belletristic
essays.

At the close of the twentieth century, number of
philosophers (such as Abe Masao, Takeuchi Yoshinori,
Tsujimura Ko¯ichi, and Ueda Shizuteru) were carrying on
the work of the Kyoto School, while their counterparts in
Tokyo (Nakamura Hajime and Yuasa Yasuo) were focus-
ing more on historical issues, especially with regard to
Buddhism. An exciting feature of current philosophy in
Japan is the dialogue being initiated by syntheses of con-
temporary Western thought with the Japanese philosoph-
ical tradition by such thinkers as Sakabe Megumi in Tokyo
and Ohashi Ryo¯suke in Kyoto. g.r.p.
*Buddhist philosophy; Chinese philosophy; Indian
philosophy.
David A. Dilworth and Valdo H. Viglielmo with Agustin Jacinto
Zavala (eds. and tr.), Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy:
Selected Documents (London, 1998).
James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto
School (Honolulu, 2001).
Thomas P. Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person (Honolulu, 1981).
Michael Marra (ed. and tr.), A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics
(Honolulu, 2001).
Graham Parkes, ‘Ways of Japanese Thinking’, in Nancy G. Hume
(ed.), Japanese Aesthetics and Culture (Albany, NY, 1995).
—— ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the Political
Correctness of the Modern Academy’, Philosophy East and
West, 47/3 (1997).
Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969). German philosopher, who was
one of the founders of *existentialism. Originally a psych-
iatrist, his first book was General Psychopathology (1913). Die
Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919) marked his transi-

tion to philosophy. It presented a typology of world-
views, and also introduced his philosophy of Existenz,
which he elaborated in Philosophy (1932; tr. Chicago,
1967–71) and other works. The great philosophical sys-
tems have collapsed, since men are essentially limited,
conditioned and uncertain. We must learn from philoso-
phers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who accept and
probe human finitude. Only three ways of philosophizing
are now open to us: to explore (1) the limits of science
(world-orientation), (2) the self, and (3) what transcends
world and self. World, soul, and God are the three
‘encompassers’, within whose ‘horizons’ we know every-
thing we know: we cannot ascend to the supreme encom-
passer of these horizons, e.g. to Heidegger’s ‘being’.
1. Science has only relative, not absolute, truth. It serves
for the manipulation of measurable objects, but gives no
answers to the crucial questions of life and death. Between
the four spheres of reality—matter, life, soul, spirit—there
are gaps which science will never succeed in filling.
2. The self is Existenz: it has no fixed nature, but is its pos-
sibilities, what it can become. It exists only in ‘communica-
tion’ with other existences. It acts not only within the
routines and rituals of everyday life, but sometimes ‘uncon-
ditionally’, with a freedom amounting to the ‘choice of
itself’. Its condition is starkly revealed in ‘limit-situations’,
such as death, suffering, conflict, and guilt, requiring deci-
sions perplexed by uncertainty and antinomy.
3. World and Existenz point to the transcendent. This is
discernible in the ‘ciphers’ presented by experience and
tradition. One such cipher is the law of the day and the pas-

sion of the night, the perennial conflict between orderly
reason and destructive unreason. Another is the pervasive
defeat of human aspirations. ‘Failure is ultimate’, but to
philosophize is ‘to learn to die’ and ‘to encounter being by
means of failure’. m.j.i.
M. Dufrenne and P. Ricœur, Karl Jaspers et la Philosophie de l’exist-
ence (Paris, 1947).
H. Ehrlich and R. Wisser (eds.), Karl Jaspers Today (Washington
DC, 1988).
P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (La Salle, Ill.,
1957).
jaundice. Favourite philosophical example of how the
state of observers can affect their *perception; used from
Lucretius and Sextus Empiricus, through Berkeley, and
into the twentieth century. ‘In the jaundice, every one
knows that all things seem yellow’ (Berkeley, Three Dia-
logues, i). In sceptics’ hands this was used to show that
(since there was nothing to choose between the jaundiced
eye and the unjaundiced eye) we cannot ascribe to an
object a ‘true colour’. For other philosophers, the example
shows only that, while objects have colours (which in
good circumstances are seen by people with good eye-
sight in good health), a white thing will in particular cir-
cumstances look yellow and a person may even
mistakenly take it to be that colour.
The example may itself be an instance of mistake. It has
been remarked that in jaundice it is the sufferer who looks
yellow to the world, not the world that looks yellow to the
sufferer. j.bro.
*illusion.

J. Annas and J. Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1985),
ch. 4.
Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826). Statesman (third Presi-
dent of the United States) and political theorist, author of
the Declaration of Independence and the (1779) Act for
Establishing Religious Freedom (state of Virginia), among
other political and philosophical documents. Jefferson’s
general philosophical outlook was empiricist and materi-
alist, his religious convictions were deist, and his political
opinions were grounded in Lockean social *contract the-
ory. His vision of representative *democracy required an
educated and self-sufficient populace, and he insisted that
free public education, together with the recognition that
no generation’s political consent could bind another’s,
would promote in the new nation the ‘natural aristocracy’
of ‘virtue and talents’, eliminating the ‘artificial aristoc-
racy’ of ‘wealth and birth’. k.h.
Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New
York, 1978).
Jefferson, Thomas 459