The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 53 pptx

usage, but because, given the relevant political commu-
nity’s history, they are morally true (while being
irreducibly distinct from utilitarian or other collective-
goal-based policies); and that legal theory, as adjudica-
tion’s prologue, is a practical enterprise of ‘creative
interpretation’, participating in developing a ‘liberal’ legal
system which, without violating integrity by repudiating
too many of its ‘materials’ (constitution, enactments, and
precedents), will treat citizens with equality of concern
and respect. The debate about these theses asks whether
Dworkin’s rather unarticulated moral theory is sound,
whether the analogy with creative literary interpretation
is not a new form of reductive explanation, and whether
the claim that the law, even in hard cases, can always be
identified by moral reasoning about the legal materials is
not, likewise, a reductive oversight of law’s dependence
on authoritative choice (will) between reasonable alterna-
tives still legally open. j.m.f.
Guido Fasso, Storia della filosofia del diritto (Bologna, 1970).
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980).
Wolfgang Friedmann, Legal Theory, 5th edn. (London, 1967).
H. F. Jolowicz, Lectures on Jurisprudence (London, 1963).
J. M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford, 1992).
Alfred Verdross, Abendlaendische Rechtsphilosophie (Vienna,
1958).
Michel Villey, Leçons d’histoire de la philosophie du droit (Paris,
1957).
law, indeterminacy in: see indeterminacy in law.
law, moral: see moral law.
law, natural: see natural law; laws, natural or scientific.
law, positive. A term ( jus positivum) launched in philo-

sophical commentary (Thierry of Chartres, c.1135, then
Abelard), and focusing legal theory on to law’s sources
(positum, Latin ‘laid down’). As Aquinas noted, earlier ter-
minology confused rules ‘human’ in use with rules human
in origin, though Plato and Aristotle had in substance dis-
tinguished (positive) law from morality. (*Natural law.)
Human positive law includes rules (e.g. against mur-
der) and institutions (e.g. punishment) belonging also to
natural law (i.e. morally required willy-nilly). Hart called
these the ‘minimum content of natural law’, but meant
the minimum content of positive law. Most laws are
‘purely positive’; what they require was not morally
required until their positing (though Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics v. 1134
b
, exaggerates in saying that they are on
‘matters [morally] indifferent in themselves’). j.m.f.
*law, history of the philosophy of; feminist philosophy
of law; law and continental philosophy.
Karl Olivecrona, Law as Fact, 2nd edn. (London, 1971).
law, problems of the philosophy of. How can there be
a philosophy of law distinct from ethics, political
philosophy, or a general social theory building on social
anthropology and comparative history?
If ethics inquires into standards of right judgement in
deliberation towards choice and action, philosophy of law
investigates the relation of those standards to the direct-
ives laid down, by usage or authoritative decision, to
guide people’s actions in political community and
thereby, purportedly, protect basic interests or rights, dis-

tribute burdens and advantages fairly, and restore the
position of persons wronged. Thus legal philosophy goes
beyond but cannot elude the main problems in ethics:
whether moral propositions can be known as true;
whether moral truths include intrinsic goods and reasons
for action richer than Kantian conformity with reason’s
universalizing abstractness; whether right judgement is
by maximizing values consequent on choice; how far
choice is free and intention morally decisive.
If political philosophy investigates the grounds on
which persons may (and do) claim authority to shape a
community’s actions by directing individual conduct,
legal philosophy investigates reasons for and ways of mak-
ing such authority and its exercise conditional on criteria
of form (source, scope or vires, procedure, promulgation
and publicity, adjudicative integrity, etc.). Thus legal phil-
osophy adds to but is enmeshed in political philosophy’s
main issues: e.g. whether authority is justified by consent
or by intent to benefit; whether interests are rights and
rights secure equality, liberty, or other benefits; whether
political action is well understood on the model of deci-
sions in economics or competitive games.
If social theory generalizes from knowledge of particu-
lar societies and events in their history, legal philosophy
investigates how such societies can be implicit subjects or
bearers of legal systems’ elements. It thus confronts main
problems of general social theory: how to identify a sub-
ject-matter which can subsist as regimes and constitutions
change and disappear; how to select and justify descriptive
and analytical concepts and terms, given the variety of

social self-interpretations and competing vocabularies dis-
closed by ethnography and comparative historical and
cross-cultural studies.
Legal philosophy is often (e.g. John Austin, H. L. A.
Hart, Joseph Raz) divided into analytical and critical. Ana-
lytical jurisprudence is to consider the definition of law,
the theory of legal system, the analysis of legal concepts
such as duty, transaction, and intention, and the theory of
legal reasoning, especially in adjudication. Critical philoso-
phy of law is to evaluate law and legal obligation, the
minimum substantive content of legal systems, the inter-
locking procedural virtues called the rule of law, etc. But
against such a division, and the similar recent division
between conceptual (or explanatory) and justificatory, it
can be said that legal systems are created and maintained
for reasons, and these like every reason for action presup-
pose and/or propose evaluation(s). Any general account
of legal systems (or of the concept of law and legal system)
must identify those shaping evaluations.
Still, cannot descriptive or conceptual analysis of
law’s character as means to end(s) proceed without
evaluating—and a fortiori, or at least, without morally
500 law, history of the philosophy of
evaluating—the diverse purposes and uses to which the
instrument is put? It seems not. For law’s characteristic
purport as obligatory and authoritative, like its purport as
stipulating appropriate procedures and requiring fair trials
and judgments based on truth, itself proposes an evalu-
ation and critique—mainly if not exclusively moral—of
alternative social conditions (anarchy, arbitrary domin-

ation). How, then, could there be an adequately inward
understanding or analysis of what characterizes diverse
legal systems—an account showing why law deserves a
place in any truly general account of human social life—
without an understanding of the ways law’s characteristic
features themselves (even when being unjustly manipu-
lated) manifest a critical evaluation of, and value-affirming
constructive response to, the sorts of injustice or other
lesion of human good which are inherent in lawlessness?
(Analogously, one may understand, describe, and analyse
an argument without accepting or approving it; but can
one understand, describe, or analyse argument unless one
accepts some arguments as good and adopts as normative
for one’s description the criteria by which their soundness
is recognizable?)
Law is somehow an institution or product of human
deliberative reasoning, and addressed to human delibera-
tive reasoning. Laws and legal systems, like the human
persons who are their makers and subjects, somehow
belong to all the four sorts of order with which human rea-
son is concerned—roughly, natural, logical, moral, and
cultural/technical. Using the conventional symbols and
syntax of an ordinary language, and supplementing them
with new conventions and techniques, legal rules articu-
late conceptions of the natural order (which reason does
not make but only considers), of logical consistency and
implication, and above all of rightness and wrongness in
official and unofficial deliberation and action. This articu-
lation is highly reflexive: Kelsen’s slogan ‘the law regulates
its own creation’ captures some of this reflexivity. Indeed,

even philosophical reflections on law (and nature, logic,
morality, and non-legal techniques) are often found
among the concepts and terms manipulated in making,
interpreting, and using legal rules, institutions, and
processes. Legal philosophy is always tempted to resolve
the resulting complexity into the relative simplicity of just
one paradigm of order, on the basis of just one paradigm
of description, analysis, or explanation.
Take causation. Some legal-philosophical accounts,
particularly German accounts since Kant, have proposed
that causing is by physical movements, and is unaffected
by acting persons’ purposes or other states of mind (which
are relevant only to imputing culpability or legal liability).
Such accounts of human causality are modelled on nat-
ural-scientific accounts of causality as regularities, or prob-
abilities, or some inherent property of objects or events.
Some other legal theories of causation, particularly Ameri-
can theories, have reduced ‘cause in fact’ to the minimal
conditio sine qua non (‘But for C, E would not have
occurred’), and contended that ‘cause in law’ is merely a
construct of social (i.e. moral and/or cultural) policies
about who is now to take the blame and/or pay. Against
these reductions stands an account such as Hart and
Honoré’s. It accepts that judicial findings that someone’s
act caused some event and/or loss are justified by consid-
erations substantially independent of moral conclusions
or other policies about liability (blame and recompense); it
adds, however, that the same is true of judicial findings
that the event or loss was caused by someone’s omission.
It accepts that all such findings are similar to scientific, his-

torical, and common-sense conceptions in distinguishing
the causally relevant as a subclass of conditions sine qua
non. But, on Hart and Honoré’s account, the central causal
concept, of deviation from normal conditions, itself
extends to include conditions culturally established as con-
ventional expectations or legal duties; attributions of
causal responsibility are nested in, but are not reducible to,
conceptions of role- and liability-responsibility, distribu-
tions of burden of proof, criteria and methods of proof, and
other, in themselves non-causal considerations. The com-
plexity of such a non-reductive account mirrors the irre-
ducible complexity of the life, deeds, and efficacy of beings
who live in the natural world as reasoning and choosing
agents, artificers and creators.
Again, take legal personality. Some say: only members
of the natural species human being are properly the sub-
ject of legal relations; lawyers’ talk of other juridical sub-
jects (corporations, unincorporated associations, ships,
idols, etc.) is of mere, albeit useful, fictions. Others (e.g.
Kelsen) say: the status of legal person is simply a creation
of the law, which freely bestows or withholds it; the logic
of legal rules leaves no room for attributing to human
beings a legally cognizable priority. Another approach
denies that human associations are mere fictions,
acknowledges the convenience of attributing to associ-
ations and even non-human entities the status of subject of
legal rules and processes, accepts that in a logical analysis
of legal rules and relationships the human subject has no
priority, but maintains that since the very point of guiding
deliberation by law is to protect and promote the good of

human beings, and since, prior to any human decision,
subjects of that kind are naturally constituted as persons,
in their radical potentiality and/or actuality, laws are rad-
ically disordered precisely as laws when they deny to any
human being (slaves, embryos, et al.) the ‘equal protection
of the law’ (minimally, equality of fundamental legal sta-
tus and immunity).
As the foregoing makes evident, the vexed problem of
defining law cannot be resolved by any purely ‘analytical’ or
conceptual technique aspiring to be neutral and conceptu-
ally prior to the taking of substantive positions on disputed
questions about, for example, the natural and the moral
orders. Of course, stipulative definitions and/or lexico-
graphical clarifications assist inquiry and should avoid beg-
ging disputed questions. But explanatory definitions
summarize the results of, not linguistic data or regulations
for, philosophical reflection. In legal philosophy it is particu-
larly easy to see the value of a long-neglected classical
technique announced by Aristotle, practised by his
law, problems of the philosophy of 501
medieval followers, and revived, if not fully consistently
deployed, by Hart: take as the subject of an explanatory def-
inition the central case of the explanandum (and correspond-
ingly the focal meaning of the term signifying that reality),
and treat as secondary and relatively peripheral, but by no
means unimportant or irrelevant, the many realities which
instantiate the central case in only a watered-down, imma-
ture, or defective way (and correspondingly the secondary
uses of the term). Then one can say that a legal system
which denies the legal personality and/or fails to protect the

fundamental rights of some members of the human com-
munity it regulates and serves is not merely unjust and
immoral but also a poor specimen of a legal system.
But note: such a thesis depends on the further, widely
disputed premiss that what counts as the central case or
fine specimen of a subject-matter of social (e.g. legal) phil-
osophy is settled by reference to the evaluative concerns
not of ‘bad citizens’ concerned only to avoid sanctions (as
American legal realists proposed), nor of morally uncon-
cerned judges or other officials as such (as Hart proposed),
but rather of people who understand, accept, and pro-
mote law as a morally motivated and justified response to
the evils and injustices of legally unregulated human rela-
tionships. The premiss is most easily defended when law is
being considered in the course of a philosophical reflec-
tion which is from beginning to end practical, that is, con-
cerned with the question, What should I (the reflecting
person, the philosopher) choose and do?—a question
asked not in relation to some particular situation and
objective, but in the open horizon of one’s whole life. That
is the question shaping the whole course of Aristotle’s
two-volume philosophical reflection on ‘human affairs’,
his Ethics and Politics, and of philosophical work clear-
headedly in the same broad tradition. When this is the
question, unjust laws and morally unconcerned or
immoral viewpoints, though instructive, are evidently as
non-central as, analogously, fallacious forms of argument
are non-central (though instructive) in a philosophy of
argumentation, and doomed strategies, bad recipes, or
quack remedies are non-central (though instructive) in the

arts of war, cooking, or medicine. Still, the premiss can also
be defended even when the legal- or social-philosophical
question is not itself practical, but descriptive, seeking
merely to understand law, contemplatively, as a kind of
reality found in many times and places. The defence will
be dialectical: only those who understand, accept, com-
mend, and promote the rule of law as an indispensable
means of avoiding the evils and injustices of legally unregu-
lated communities and relationships have sufficient rea-
son not only to maintain and uphold the rule of law when
it is in place but also, when it is not in place, to (re)intro-
duce it, with just that complex set of features which legal
philosophers of every school agree are its characteristics.
Such issues of definition and explanatory methodology
are issues within the order of logic, i.e. of the rational
order we introduce into our own thinking. Some of the
problems peculiar to legal philosophy arise primarily
within this order. How does the propositional character of
legal rules differ from that of legal principles or other legal
standards? What are the types of logical opposition
between rules, and to what extent is contradiction
between rules possible in a legal system? Are all rules of, or
at least reducible to, one logical type, such as the imposing
of obligation on pain of sanction or the hypothetical
authorization of sanctions? If so, are the logical types cor-
related with the social functions or point of different sorts
of rules? What are the irreducibly distinct types of right
(perhaps claim, liberty, power, immunity)? Are rights
mere logical constructs from, or shadows of, a logically or
explanatorily prior concept of duty? Is a liberty (permis-

sion) the mere absence of a contrary duty, or does it entail
a prohibition of some (or all) types of interference by A in
the exercise of B’s liberty, and if so would it always or ever
entail that B has a liberty-right to do what he ought not to?
These and similar issues have an irreducibly logical core.
But progress in resolving them requires close attention to
the special meaning and use of terms such as ‘rule’, ‘obliga-
tion’, ‘right’, and ‘liberty’ within the specific cultural and
technical construct called the law. That construct, in turn,
characteristically serves certain human purposes, and does
so by guiding deliberation. A truly general account of it
cannot be limited to recording the purposes, aims, and
techniques of one people, or to reproducing in a ‘detached’
mode their ‘committed’ discourse. It must, therefore,
engage to some extent in reflection on the moral order
(which we bring by reason into our deliberations towards
choice and action), by asking when action is intelligently
related to basic human purposes and reasons for action. In
short, all the questions listed in the preceding paragraph
require the taking of some position on the point of law. Is
law most illuminatingly regarded as an instrument of
social control, whatever the controllers’ purposes—an
instrument which merely happens to have the inherent
capacity to serve justice, rights, and the common good, as
hammers merely happen to have the inherent capacity to
serve as murder weapons, paperweights, or wall decor-
ations? Or does such an interpretation render much of the
law’s vocabulary and logic unintelligible or, at least, rad-
ically unexplained? Is law to serve liberty above all, or is the
liberty it serves (if it does) only one among many funda-

mental benefits? Such questions may seem remote from a
strictly logical analysis, but answers to them have proved
to be necessary (though not sufficient) for analysis of the
structure of legal systems as interrelated propositions or
quasi-propositional meaning contents.
Efforts to reduce problems of legal philosophy to the
logical order have issued in striking failures: e.g. Hobbes’s
attempt to explain contractual obligation by equating
breach with logical absurdity; or Kant’s claim that since B’s
wrong contradicts A’s rightful use of freedom, A’s (or C’s)
use of coercion ‘to hinder’ B’s wrong must, ‘by virtue of
the law of non-contradiction’, be compatible with rightful
freedom. As such failures powerfully suggest, the norma-
tivity of practical reasoning and legal norms is not
reducible to logic’s normativity, but rests on the necessity
of means to or respect for basic ends.
502 law, problems of the philosophy of
Some have handled law-related moral problems and
concepts by declaring them foreign to legal philosophy, or
redefining them as cultural/technical, not moral. Does
the injustice of a law affect its authority, validity, or
authoritativeness? Is equity a matter simply of interpret-
ation, or can it correct the intentions of the law givers? Do
laws (and contracts) creating obligations entail no more
than an obligation to pay the penalty (or damages) for
‘non-fulfilment’? (And if so, is the last-mentioned obliga-
tion reducible to an obligation not to assault the bailiffs?
And so on . . .) Problems such as these have been said to be
matter merely for individual conscience, morality, or
ethics. But in the proper (conscientious) performance of

their judicial office as such, judges cannot avoid such ques-
tions. And there are others even more essentially con-
cerned with the adjudicative role. Is it right for a judge to
change the law at the cost of defeating the legitimate
expectations of the unsuccessful litigant? Or to override
the deliberately adopted policies of a democratic major-
ity? Can judges rely upon their own personal knowledge
unsupported or even opposed by the evidence admissibly
tendered in the case? And then there are the responsibil-
ities summarized in the ideal of a rule of law (Rechtsstaat):
to ensure that there is law and that it is clear, coherent, sta-
ble, public, practicable, non-retroactive, general, and
above all respected in official (including judicial) action. Is
this set of purposes and features of legal ordering morally
neutral (like the sharpness of a knife for cutting)? Or must
the set, taken as a whole, have the moral purpose of secur-
ing a relationship of reciprocity between rulers and ruled,
in recognition of the dignity and rights of the ruled?
To conclude that such questions are properly part of
legal philosophy is not to take sides in the perennial debate
whether to define the law as whatever standards are cog-
nizable from social-factual sources (legislation, custom,
judicial precedent), or rather as whatever standards judges
should take into account in giving judgment.
It remains that laws are manifestly in the cultural/tech-
nical order (order which, by reasoning, we bring into mat-
ter subject to our power); they are objects created by
human decision as an instrument of social co-ordination.
This aspect of law’s positivity seems put in question both
by theories (*legal realism) which reduce the law to a pre-

diction of judicial action, and by theories (e.g. Dworkin’s
‘law as integrity’) which locate the law not in any existing
rules and standards (considered to be merely ‘legal mate-
rials’) but only in the act of judgment by a judge who, in a
‘creative interpretation’ subjects the ‘legal materials’ to
ultimately individual moral assessment.
Law’s many and varied artefacts include first the rules
of law themselves. Even those rules which give legal
expression to a moral norm are truly positive laws and
usually of an artificial form: the law does not formally for-
bid murder, but rather specifies that murder is an offence,
attaches penalties, disqualifications, and other legal conse-
quences to offences, and posits (usually by implication)
that ‘offences’ are not to be committed. Still, most legal
rules are no mere repromulgations of moral norms, but
products of an irreducibly creative social decision. Their
authenticity is a matter not immediately of moral truth,
but rather of the considerations of form, source, and pro-
cedure encapsulated in the characteristically legal concept
of validity.
Most other legal artefacts can be classed under another
characteristically legal term: institutions. Legal institu-
tions include not only public bodies such as courts and legis-
latures, but also types of legal arrangement involving
clusters of rules (contract, sale, property, corporations,
crime, delict, etc.) and specific instances of such types,
deliberately instituted for the sake of their legal effect
(thus a particular delict or crime). And these artefacts are
to be distinguished from any documents used to create or
record them. Obviously, then, the description and explan-

ation of such artefacts would be complex even if the cul-
tural/technical order could be sealed off from the orders
of nature, logic, and morality. But it cannot, and some of
the most intense debates in contemporary legal philoso-
phy concern the moral and other (e.g. causation) founda-
tions of the legal institutions of crime, tort (delict),
contract, and property.
Other legal artefacts include definitions, whose pur-
pose is not, as in legal philosophy, to summarize an under-
standing of central (and non-central) cases and focal (and
secondary) meanings, but rather to assign objects and
topics of human social life to universal classes for the pur-
poses of a given rule (e.g. taxing or registering ‘ships’); and
inference rules establishing presumptions for legal judg-
ment on facts. Definitions and inference rules meet in the
peculiarly legal practice of deeming Xto be an instance of Y.
Many problems of legal philosophy are displayed in the
problems associated with the interpretation of constitu-
tions, statutes, judgments, and other legal instruments
(documents) and arrangements. Should legal interpreters
find and follow the commitments originally made in the
morally significant choices and intentions of the makers?
Or should they give the language used—a set of conven-
tional objects deployed to make a new and free-standing
cultural object (the constitution, the Act of . . ., etc.)—a
new meaning and effect in accordance with new conven-
tional understandings of the language? Are not both the
act of legislation and the act of judicial interpretation
(though immediately and directly exercises of a cultural
technique) limited in their plasticity or malleability not

only by other conventions but also by the natural given-
ness of certain necessary pre-conditions for human action,
by the requirements of logical coherence, and by the
moral significance of every human act?
Reflections on these and other ways in which legal phil-
osophy is distinct from ethics, political philosophy, and
general social theory are compatible with expecting
(anticipating and requiring) that its concepts and theses be
compatible and even harmonious with the concepts and
theses of those other disciplines or modes of inquiry. For it
is one and the same set of persons and communities of
persons that is the subject (subject-matter and agent) of
them all. j.m.f.
law, problems of the philosophy of 503
*causality.
Jules Coleman, The Practice of Principle (Oxford, 2001).
—— and Scott Shapiro (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jurispru-
dence and Philosophy of Law (Oxford, 2002).
Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
Robert George (ed.), Natural Law Theory (Oxford, 1992).
—— (ed.), The Autonomy of Law (Oxford, 1996).
H. L. A. Hart and Tony Honoré, Causation in the Law, 2nd edn.
(Oxford, 1985).
Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford, 1979).
law, rule of: see rule of law.
law, scepticism about. Scepticism about law can be
understood in at least two senses. In a weaker meaning it
is most usually attached to criticisms of the legal profes-
sion and refers to scepticism about specific features of
legal practice and procedure. In this sense it dates back at

least to Plato’s castigation of forensic oratory as narrow,
constrained, manipulative, and untruthful in the Gorgias
and Theaetetus. In subsequent history criticism of the
venality and immorality of legal practice has tended to
focus on the obscurity and illogicality of legal argument as
well as upon the arbitrariness of legal judgment. From
Rabelais to the modern schools of *legal realism, sceptics
have argued that legal decision-making is divorced from
legal rules and that the power of law-making lies in the
unfettered discretion of judges, tribunals, and law
enforcement agencies. In contemporary Anglo-American
jurisprudence the term ‘rule scepticism’ thus denotes a
scepticism about the necessary relationship between legal
rules or the ‘law in books’ and judicial practice, while ‘fact
scepticism’ asserts that the indeterminacy of fact-finding
procedures renders all reference to rules problematic.
In a stronger sense, scepticism about law extends the
criticism of the arbitrariness or injustice of legal judgment
into arguments for the abolition of law, or predictions of
the end of law. In this meaning, criticism of the profession
and practice of law are taken cumulatively to condemn
the institution of law as an unethical and unnecessary
form of human relation. In this sense the earliest radical
scepticism about law is to be associated with Sir Thomas
More’s fictional Utopia and subsequently with the various
strands of anarchist and socialist political theory. The
broad argument of such theories has been that the ideal of
human *freedom and specifically of self-determination is
antithetical to the demands of legal governance. To the
extent that *law is necessarily coercive and repressive of

human autonomy it is an evil and can have no part to play
in a free society. The authority of law is in this perspective
an ideological manipulation and is predicated upon a
domination or repression of the ultimate human good
which resides in a society of free association. The practice
of law was perceived to be violent, irrational, and neces-
sary only for the preservation of private property or the
good of an élite minority.
While early anarchistic and utopian-socialist argu-
ments against law tended to be either nostalgic, recalling a
primitive age of innocence, or oneiric, specifying utopia in
terms of an ideal but unmapped future territory, a more
substantive scepticism about law emerged within the
*Marxist tradition of political theory. Where Marx had
adverted somewhat incidentally and allusively to an end
of history, a communist society in which freedom would
displace law and in which the state would wither away,
subsequent elaborations of a Marxist critique of law
developed more specific analyses of legal domination. In
its strongest form, Marxist scepticism about law proceeds
from an analysis of economic exploitation and argues that
the legal order and its substantive rules are a more or less
complex reflection of the class relations which constitute
the reality of social experience. Within this broadly deter-
ministic view of legal relations scepticism about law takes
the form of critique of the ideology of the rule of law. Far
from treating all legal subjects as free and equal before the
law, legal rules are ideological in the sense of masking the
real (economic) conditions of *inequality and constraint
which predetermine the content and the effect of law.

In what is arguably its most sophisticated expression in
the writings of the post-revolutionary Russian jurist
Pashukanis, law was to be understood as a direct expres-
sion of the commodity form of production and the legal
subject was no more than the fictively free and equal sub-
ject who would come to market and buy and sell. The
legal relation was thus exemplified by contract and by the
unequal economic conditions within which goods were
exchanged. For Pashukanis, the legal form was thus a
bourgeois species of human relation and law would come
to an end with the demise of the economic system upon
which it was based. While contemporary scepticism
about law derives, both directly and indirectly, from
Marxist and *communitarian anarchist critiques of law, it
tends to be more partial and less millenarian in its
approaches. Contemporary critical legal scholarship is
broadly reformist in its goals yet also argues that law
exploits and dominates to the benefit of vested economic
and political interests. In common with *feminist analyses
of law, critical jurisprudence thus proposes an ethical cri-
tique law. The doctrinal tradition and its various positivis-
tic justifications are analysed as abstract mystifications of
the substantive injustices of legal practice. While such
criticisms of law do not predict a foreseeable end to the
legal order they are sceptical of the ethical value of law and
argue in favour of alternative forms of relation and of
social regulation. p.good.
*indeterminacy in law; law, problems of the philosophy
of.
M. Cain and A. Hunt (eds.), Marx and Engels on Law (London,

1979).
J. N. Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (first pub. 1930; Garden City,
NY, 1963).
E. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory (London,
1978).
D. Sugarman (ed.), Legality, Ideology and the State (London, 1983).
R. M. Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge,
Mass., 1986).
504 law, problems of the philosophy of
P. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.,
1991).
R. P. Wolff, In Defence of Anarchism (New York, 1976).
law and continental philosophy. In its contemporary
usage within Anglo-American jurisprudence, continental
philosophy refers most broadly to the non-analytic trad-
itions of modern European thought. In this generic sense,
*continental philosophy refers initially to Hegelian, Marx-
ian, and Husserlian theories of law and of meaning. In a
more recent and particular sense it refers to theoretical and
methodological positions associated with or developed
from structural linguistics, literary theory, and psy-
choanalysis. The classic texts are read mainly through
their contemporary expositors but the translation and use
of continental thought bears an aura of radicalism. Conti-
nental philosophy has the connotation of a reaction
against the dominant tradition and methodology of com-
mon law jurisprudence. Exponents of continental theory,
who may generally be termed critical legal scholars, are
critical of the *positivism and *empiricism of Anglo-
American legal theory and specifically of the belief in the

autonomy of law and the determinacy of legal rules.
Drawing widely, and often rather loosely, upon a variety
of different areas of continental thought, critical legal
scholarship seeks to deconstruct the established tradition
and legitimizing function of common-law jurisprudence
and to elaborate in its place more democratic and ethically
based theories of the plurality of laws and of the indeter-
minacy or socially constructed and contingent character
of legal meanings.
The use of continental philosophy as a form or source of
critique draws upon too wide a range of thinkers and disci-
plines for it to be possible to provide a synoptic account of
such scholarship. It is possible, however, to point to certain
common themes, which include a pronounced compara-
tive dimension to legal study and a concern with the tex-
tual character of law and its cultural determinations, an
interest which suggests a turn towards historicism. The
more distinctive ethical and ontological themes of conti-
nental philosophy, the concerns with being and nothing-
ness, identity and difference, similarity and otherness, find
a translation and application in a variety of critical theories
of legal textuality. While continental influence upon legal
scholarship cannot be reduced to radical *hermeneutics, it
may not be inaccurate to point to a shared desire to provide
political and ethical readings of the legal tradition and of its
texts. In this sense the turn to continental philosophy has
become synonymous with a pluralistic and interdiscipli-
nary critique of the unity and insularity of the legal tradi-
tion. Drawing latterly upon disciplines or movements as
distinct as *phenomenology, *feminism, psychoanalysis,

literary criticism, and *discourse theory, critical scholar-
ship uses continental philosophy to attack the closure of
law and to undermine the doctrinal belief in the law as a
discrete system of rules. p.good.
D. Carlson et al. (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice
(New York, 1992).
D. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruc-
tion and the Law (New York, 1993).
V. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge, 1980).
Costas Douzinas et al., Postmodern Jurisprudence (London, 1989).
Peter Goodrich, Legal Discourse (London, 1987).
law and morals. Legal philosophers have debated three
views about the connection between legal and moral
truth—between what the law is and what it should be.
One view—*legal positivism—insists that legal reason-
ing is entirely factual: what the law is depends only upon
what has been declared to be law by whichever officials
the public treats as having that authority, or on similar his-
torical facts, and on nothing else. On that view, though
moral views that are popular within a community are very
likely to influence the laws its legislators adopt, there is no
necessary connection between law and moral truth, and
abstract moral considerations play no role in deciding
what the law is.
According to a second—apparently opposite—view,
which is a version of so-called *‘natural law’ theory, legal
reasoning is identical with moral reasoning, so that, at
least on fundamental matters, the only real law in force in
any community is the moral law, and any laws a legisla-
ture might make contrary to that moral law are invalid.

On that view, the alleged legal system of a tyranny like
Nazi Germany is not law at all.
On the third view, legal reasoning interprets rather
than simply describes or judges legal history: it aims to
reformulate past legal decisions in the most coherent and
morally attractive way consistent with the facts of legal
history, that is, with the words past legislators used, the
concrete orders past judges actually made, and the politi-
cal and moral traditions of the community. Understood as
interpretative in this sense, legal reasoning is not just his-
torical investigation, nor abstract moral reasoning about
what rules or principles would be appropriate to an ideally
just world, but combines elements of both.
Neither of the first two positions fits the actual practice
of lawyers and judges. Contrary to legal positivism, they
often offer moral arguments to support their claims about
what the law actually is when the law is controversial or
unclear: when the question arises, for example, whether
the right to ‘due process of law’ in the American Constitu-
tion includes the right to freedom of choice about abor-
tion, or whether a particular string of past judicial
decisions allowing people injured in accidents to recover
damages for their pain and suffering does or does not
‘embody’ a more general principle allowing recovery for
any kind of emotional damage. Lawyers and judges
divide, in their opinions about such matters, in ways that
plainly reflect their moral convictions. They all concede,
however, contrary to the natural law theory I described,
that there is often a gap between what the law is and what
they believe it should be: even lawyers who believe that

tax rates are unjustly high or low do not declare them
invalid on that ground, and even lawyers who think that
the laws of Nazi Germany were so unjust that they should
law and morals 505
not have been enforced by Nazi judges hesitate to say that
they were not law at all.
The third, interpretative, view of law fits the practices
of lawyers, judges, and other legal officials naturally and
convincingly, however. It explains why, in some cases,
they recognize as law even what they believe to be unjust:
no ‘interpretation’ of the tax code which substituted a dif-
ferent tax rate could count as a genuine interpretation of
the text. It also explains why, in other kinds of cases,
judges do treat moral considerations as relevant. In con-
troversial cases, when a variety of different interpretations
would each fit the abstract statutory language or the
results of actual past decisions, judges must choose among
them by deciding which interpretation—which under-
standing of the due process clause or of liability for emo-
tional damages, for example—better reflects people’s
moral and political rights and obligations.
It may be objected that on the interpretative view law is
inherently *subjective: that there is no law except what
the judge thinks it is. But that presupposes that the moral-
ity of rights and obligations is inherently subjective. If it is,
then so is law, at least in controversial cases. But though
many legal philosophers have endorsed the subjectivity of
morals as a philosophical thesis, few actually respect it in
practice, and arguments for it are implausible. r.d.
*moral scepticism.

Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
Lon Luvois Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, Conn., 1964).
H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961).
laws, natural or scientific. In normal discourse, the term
‘law of nature’ signifies some basic or fundamental prin-
ciple of science, such as Newton’s law of universal gravita-
tion, or the second law of thermodynamics. Such truths as
‘Water always boils at 100° C at standard pressure’, or ‘Air
resistance is proportional to velocity’ are normally consid-
ered to be too specific to qualify as laws of nature. Within
the philosophy of science, however, all these generaliza-
tions are counted alike as laws of nature. This is because
one of the central problems in the philosophy of science is
to explain what distinguishes general truths of all these
kinds from accidental patterns.
This problem arises as a corollary of David Hume’s
analysis of *causality as *constant conjunction. Philosophers
prior to Hume assumed that causation involves some
power by which causes produce their effects, some cement,
so to speak, which binds cause and effect together. But
Hume argued that there is no such cement. All we observe
is first the occurrence of the cause, followed by the occur-
rence of the effect. There is nothing to bind them together,
apart from the fact that they are constantly conjoined, in
the sense that events like the causes are always, as it hap-
pens, followed by events like the effect.
But if causal laws involve nothing more than constant
conjunction, an obvious problem arises. Suppose the fol-
lowing statement is true: ‘Whenever I go to Paris, it rains’.
Then my going to Paris is constantly conjoined with its

raining there. But we wouldn’t on this account want to
count this as a causal law. It doesn’t rain because I go to
Paris. It just so happens that my visits are invariably fol-
lowed by rain. However, what then distinguishes real laws
of nature from such accidentally true generalizations? For
Hume tells us that there isn’t anything more than constant
conjunction involved in genuine laws either.
Note that genuine laws but not accidents support
*counterfactual conditionals. Compare ‘If the water in
that kettle had been at 100° C, it would have started boil-
ing’ (true) with ‘If I had gone to Paris last week, it would
have started raining’ (false). Taken on its own, however,
this contrast simply restates the problem. For however we
understand counterfactual claims, we will still need some
explanation of why laws but not accidents support them,
if both are simply statements of constant conjunction.
There are two general lines of solution to the problem
of distinguishing laws from accidents. The first remains
faithful to the Humean view that law statements assert
nothing more than constant conjunction, and then seeks
to explain why some statements of constant conjunc-
tion—the laws—are more important than others—the
accidents. The alternative, non-Humean strategy rejects
the Humean presupposition that laws involve nothing
more than constant conjunction, and instead postulates a
relationship of ‘necessitation’ or *nomic necessity which
obtains between event-types which are related by law, but
not between those which are only accidentally conjoined.
At first sight it might seem easy to develop the Humean
strategy. Cannot we simply require that laws be truly gen-

eral, and not restricted to such things as what happened to
a particular person in a particular city at particular times?
However, this does not get to the heart of the matter. For
even if we formulate our example in general terms, not
mentioning me or Paris, but specifying a certain kind of
person and city, it may still be that the only instances of
these kinds in the universe are still, by accident, constantly
conjoined with rain. Conversely, there seem to be exam-
ples of laws which are restricted in space and time, such as
Kepler’s law that the planets move in ellipses, which is spe-
cific to our solar system.
A better suggestion is that accidents, unlike laws, are no
good for predicting the future. This is not because acci-
dental patterns cannot stretch into the future, but rather
because, when they do, we cannot know that they are
true. J. L. Mackie has argued that laws differ from acci-
dents in that they are inductively supported by their
instances, whereas accidents can only be known to be true
after all their instances have been exhaustively checked.
However, even if Mackie’s criterion is necessary for
lawhood, it is not clear whether it is sufficient: couldn’t
some inductively anticipatable patterns still be accidents?
Perhaps a better Humean solution is that proposed by
F. P. Ramsey, and later revived by David Lewis: laws are
those true generalizations that can be fitted into an ideal
systematization of knowledge—or, as Ramsey put it, laws
are a ‘consequence of those propositions which we should
take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as
506 law and morals
simply as possible in a deductive system’. Accidents are

then those true generalizations which cannot be explained
within such an ideal theory.
In recent years a number of philosophers have rejected
the Humean tradition, arguing that no account, however
sophisticated, which equates laws with constant conjunc-
tions can do justice to the real content of laws. In the late
1970s D. M. Armstrong, Fred Dretske, and Michael
Tooley independently developed the thesis that laws
express a relationship of ‘necessitation’ between proper-
ties. This relationship holds between properties which are
related by law, but not between those which are only acci-
dentally conjoined. So laws involve something more than
Humean regularity: necessitation implies constant con-
junction, but not conversely. Defenders of this view do
not wish to suggest that the relationship of necessitation
can be known *a priori; rather, which properties necessi-
tate which others is an empirical matter to be settled by a
posteriori investigation.
Critics of the non-Humean approach complain that
merely postulating a relationship of necessitation leaves
the philosophical issues unsolved. Hume himself rejected
necessitation on the grounds that it is not observable.
Contemporary critics do not object to unobservability
per se, but they do object that the non-Humean view gives
no real explanation of what necessitation adds to constant
conjunction, and of exactly why this extra component
should support counterfactual claims about what would
happen if things were different.
Despite these objections, some version of the non-
Humean approach to laws may prove necessary to deal

with probabilistic laws, that is, laws which say that all As
have a probability p of being Bs. The natural generaliza-
tion of the Humean approach would take these laws to
state, not that A is constantly conjoined with B, but rather
that 100p per cent of As are conjoined with Bs. Humeans
could then seek to explain why some such statements of
proportionate conjunction are regarded seriously as laws,
while others are merely accidents. The difficulty facing
this Humean approach, however, is that the exact propor-
tionate conjunction of 100p per cent of As with Bs is not
even a necessary condition for the truth of the probabilis-
tic law—for example, a unique type of coin may have a 0.5
probability of heads, and yet, by chance, come down
heads six times in the only ten tosses that are ever made
with it. For this reason, it is uncontroversial that proba-
bilistic laws state something other than actual propor-
tions. Non-Humeans conclude that they state
quantitative relationships of necessitation—property A
necessitates property B to degree p. Whether this is the
only way to construe such laws, however, will remain an
open question as long as the interpretation of *probability
is an area of active philosophical controversy. d.p.
*ceteris paribus.
D. M. Armstrong, What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge, 1983).
T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (Oxford, 1988), ch. 1.
D. Papineau, ‘Laws and Accidents’, in G. Macdonald and
C. Wright (eds.), Fact, Science and Morality (Oxford, 1986).
laws of thought. Traditionally these are ‘What is, is’ (con-
fusingly called the law of identity) and ‘Nothing both is
and is not’ (the law of *non-contradiction); and sometimes

also the law of *excluded middle. They are certainly not
descriptive laws, telling how people think, but rather pre-
scriptive, telling people how to think or, more precisely,
to reason. (*Reasoning.) So a better name is ‘rules of logic’.
There is no good reason to select these laws as special,
although the first two of them are not often disputed.
Even logicians with the meanest conception of the scope
of deductive reasoning, such as the supporters of *Intu-
itionism, need to add other laws to the first two (besides,
non-deductive reasoning might have laws too). And even
logicians with the most generous conception of that scope
know that all three laws can be presented as ‘theorems’,
derivable from some alternative basis. c.a.k.
I. M. Copi, Introduction to Logic (London, 1978), 306–8.
learning. The acquisition of a form of knowledge or abil-
ity through the use of experience. Not all modifications of
behaviour as a result of experience involve learning,
although behaviourist theories of learning tend to assume
otherwise. It is far from clear that changes of behaviour
brought about by conditioning should be thought of as
involving learning; the same applies to the biological phe-
nomenon of ‘imprinting’, whereby something that hap-
pens at a certain point of an animal’s life determines a
subsequent form of behaviour. For learning to take place
experience has to be used in some way, so that what results
is in a genuine sense knowledge or is dependent on
knowledge. On the other hand, learning need not involve
intellectual processes such as those involved in inference,
although an inference may produce new knowledge and if
it involves experience it may then be a process of learning.

It is arguable that all learning itself presupposes know-
ledge in some way, and this raises problems for *genetic
epistemology. d.w.h.
D. W. Hamlyn, Perception, Learning and the Self (London, 1983).
learning paradox. Hegel held that whatever we learn is
part of an infinite wealth of knowledge, thoughts, etc. con-
tained in a completely indivisible ego. If we do not
remember what is learned we do not possess it and yet it is
none the less there within us. It is preserved in us in spite
of the fact that it does not exist. This doctrine concerning
learning might well be called a paradox.
Other candidates for paradox concerning learning
might be found in Plato arising from arguments tending to
show that certain things are unlearnable because they
must be known before any process of learning could be
undertaken. j.c.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Subjectiven Geistes, tr. M. J. Petry as
Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ii (Dordrecht, 1978), sect.
403.
Lebensweisheit
: see popular philosophy.
Lebenswelt
: see life and science.
Lebenswelt
507
Le Dœuff, Michèle (1948– ). French philosopher with a
scholarly interest in the philosophy of Francis Bacon, and
More’s *utopianism. She questions the boundaries of phi-
losophy, while insisting upon philosophy’s importance
(‘Ants and Women’). She is critical of professional

philosophers’ neglectful attitude to science, and argues
that disputes within sciences are often epistemological
(that is, properly philosophical). In Hipparchia’s Choice she
questions philosophy’s pretensions to being a unique
practice which achieves a pure clarity: philosophy is
inevitably shaped by language, metaphor, and power rela-
tions. According to Le Dœuff feminists make a special
contribution. Their critique of gender categories in philos-
ophy, science, and the humanities is empirical, philosoph-
ical, political, and interdisciplinary. Feminists see clearly
how discourses are elevated to the status of ‘philosophical’
by a process in which social power is involved. e.j.f.
*feminism; Héloïse complex.
Michèle Le Dœuff, ‘Ants and Women, or Philosophy without
Borders’, in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Contemporary French Phi-
losophy (Cambridge, 1987).
—— Hipparchia’s Choice (Oxford, 1991).
Left, the. Parties of egalitarian transformation, claiming
to speak for the ‘people’, or the dispossessed and impover-
ished among them. The term supposedly derives from
seating arrangements in the French revolutionary assem-
blies. But older connotations of left-sidedness, having to
do with irregular, spontaneous, free-wheeling, suspicious,
or dangerous (gauche or sinister) attitudes and behaviour,
may also play a part. If the designation is attributable to
right-minded and respectable people, it is presumably
derogatory. But it may also have been willingly embraced
as a sign of oppositionist commitments. m.walz.
*equality; well-being.
Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire (eds.), The Socialist Idea

(New York, 1974).
Left and Right Hegelians: see Hegelianism.
legal positivism, intending to oppose *natural law the-
ory, denies any ‘necessary connexion between law and
morality’. Central theses among a loose cluster: (1) law is
definable and explainable without evaluative predicates
or presuppositions; (2) the law (e.g. of England now) is
identifiable from exclusively factual sources (e.g. legisla-
tion, judicial precedents). Some versions deny that there is
knowable moral truth. Most understand positive law as
products of will, some as imperatives. j.m.f.
*law, positive.
Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition
(Oxford, 1986).
legal realism maintains that positive law’s normativity is
reducible to social facts. American legal realists (e.g.
Holmes, Llewellyn), influenced by *pragmatism, sug-
gested that law is not really rules as directives but official
(particularly judicial) behaviour which legal propositions
predict. Scandinavian legal realists (e.g. Olivecrona, Ross),
more anti-metaphysical and nearer Comte’s *positivism,
typically hold that law’s reality consists in experiences of
being bound that are induced (‘mystically’ or ‘psychologi-
cally’) by legal directives. j.m.f.
*law, positive.
Karl Olivecrona, Law as Fact, 2nd edn. (London, 1971).
legitimacy. Theories of legitimization attempt to offer
reasons why a given state deserves the allegiance of its
members. In a famous analysis, Max Weber identified
three sources of legitimacy—traditions and customs,

legal–rational procedures (e.g. voting), and individual
charisma—some combination of which can be found in
most political systems. Many philosophers have felt
unhappy with this scheme, however, which leaves out
substantive questions about the justice of the state and the
protection it offers the individuals who belong to it. These
theories have generally argued that a state’s legitimacy
depends upon its upholding certain human *rights, a
thesis that is often expressed in terms of its ability to meet
the criteria one would expect to emerge from some form
of social contract between autonomous agents. This posi-
tion was classically expressed by Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau, and in more recent times by Rawls, although
with important differences. r.p.b.
D. Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Basingstoke, 1991).
M. Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich
(Berkeley, Calif., 1978), pt. 1, ch. 3.
Lehrer, Keith (1936– ). Arizona-based philosopher, best
known for work in epistemology and philosophy of mind.
Lehrer has steadfastly defended ‘coherence’ theories of
*knowledge. The human mind, he argues, is essentially
self-reflective: minds are ‘metaminds’. Knowledge, justi-
fied belief, and freedom stem from the capacity to reflect
on one’s beliefs and desires and to evaluate these in the
light of one’s intellectual and practical values. A positive
evaluation of a belief leads to its ‘acceptance’; a positive
evaluation of a desire to a preference for its satisfaction.
When such evaluations are ‘trustworthy’ they yield,
respectively, knowledge (providing the accepted belief is
true) and freedom. In the social domain, one’s positive

evaluation of the beliefs and desires of others produces
‘consensus’. j.heil
*justification, epistemic.
K. Lehrer, Metamind (Oxford, 1990).
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716), eminent ration-
alist philosopher who was born in Leipzig and died in
Hanover. Leibniz was acquainted with all the major scien-
tific developments of the second half of the seventeenth
century. He made important contributions in geology,
linguistics, historiography, mathematics, and physics, as
well as philosophy. His professional training was in the
law; he earned his living in the Court of Hanover by
508 Le Dœuff, Michèle
combining the roles of councillor, diplomat, librarian, and
historian. He did his philosophy (as well as his physics and
mathematics) in his spare time. Although the vast bulk of
Leibniz’s writings remained unpublished at his death, and
a considerable amount is still unpublished, his contribu-
tions in the law, mathematics, physics, and philosophy
were known and appreciated by his educated European
contemporaries in virtue of what he did publish and in
virtue of his vast correspondence with intellectuals in a
variety of fields. He was best known in his lifetime for his
contributions to mathematics, especially to the develop-
ment of the *calculus. The debate concerning to whom
priority of discovery should be assigned—Newton or
Leibniz—captured the attention of their contemporaries.
Current scholarly opinion seems to have reached the con-
clusion that each discovered the basic foundations of the
calculus independently, that Newton’s discovery pre-

ceded that of Leibniz’s, but Leibniz’s publication of the
basic theory of the calculus preceded that of Newton.
Although Leibniz published only one book on philoso-
phy in his lifetime—The Theodicy (1710)—he did publish
considerable philosophical work in the leading learned
European journals of the time; for example, ‘Meditations
on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas’ (1684), ‘Brief Demon-
stration of a Notable Error of Descartes’ (1686), ‘Whether
the Essence of Body Consists in Extension’ (1691), ‘New
System of Nature’ (1695), and ‘On Nature Itself’ (1698). He
also wrote a book-length study of John Locke’s *empiri-
cism, New Essays on Human Understanding, but decided not
to publish it when he learned of Locke’s death.
Leibniz’s philosophical thinking underwent significant
development; the mature metaphysics, presented in bare-
bones form in the Monadology (1714), is strikingly different
from his early work on the nature of bodies. None the less,
certain themes persist—the requirement that the basic
individuals of an acceptable *ontology (the individual
*substances) satisfy the most rigorous standards of sub-
stantial unity, and the requirement that individual sub-
stances be endowed with causal powers and, hence, be
centres of genuine activity. In the Monadology Leibniz pre-
sented the main outlines of his mature metaphysical sys-
tem unaccompanied by much in the way of
argumentation in favour of the conclusions therein pre-
sented. Consider, for example, the first two paragraphs of
the Monadology:
1. The Monad, which we shall discuss here, is nothing
but a simple substance that enters into composites—sim-

ple, i.e. without parts.
2. And there must be simple substances, since there are
composites; for the composite is nothing more than a col-
lection, or aggregate, of simples.
These are striking doctrines. If true, the consequence
would seem to be that there are no spatially extended
substances. But surely the argument of paragraph 2 is in
need of considerable support. Perhaps the most complete
formulation of the relevant doctrines, and Leibniz’s
reasons for accepting these doctrines, occurs in his
correspondence (1698–1706) with Burcher de Volder, a
professor of philosophy at the University of Leiden. In this
correspondence Leibniz formulated his basic ontological
thesis in the following passage:
considering matters accurately, it must be said that there is noth-
ing in things except simple substances, and, in them, nothing but
perception and appetite. Moreover, matter and motion are not so
much substances or things as they are the phenomena of percipi-
ent beings, the reality of which is located in the harmony of each
percipient with itself (with respect to different times) and with
other percipients.
In this passage Leibniz claimed that the basic individ-
uals are immaterial entities lacking spatial parts whose
properties are a function of their perceptions and
appetites. In the correspondence with de Volder, as in the
Monadology, Leibniz presented his major metaphysical
theses concerning these simple immaterial substances.
With respect to *causality he held the following theses.
God creates, conserves, and concurs in the actions of each
created substance. Each state of a created monad is a

causal consequence of its preceding state, except for its ini-
tial state at creation and any other states that result from
miraculous divine intervention. While intrasubstantial
causality is the rule among created substances, according
to Leibniz, he denied the possibility of intersubstantial
causal relations among created substances. In what he
denied, he agreed with Malebranche, but in affirming
spontaneity, i.e. that each individual substance is the cause
of its own states, he separated himself from Malebranche’s
occasionalism. The doctrine of the spontaneity of sub-
stance ensured for Leibniz that created individual sub-
stances were centres of activity, a feature he took to be a
necessary condition of genuine individuality.
Leibniz was sensitive to the idea that this scheme is at
odds with common sense—that there appear to be mater-
ial entities that are spatially extended, existing in space,
causally interacting with each other and with us. More
than some of his rationalist contemporaries, Leibniz took
the claims of common-sense seriously. In the second sen-
tence of the passage quoted above Leibniz outlined his
way of ‘saving the appearances’ that are sufficiently well-
founded to deserve saving. Two theses are at the heart of
his effort: (1) the thesis that each created monad perceives
every other monad with varying levels of distinctness; (2)
the thesis that God so programmed the monads at cre-
ation that, although none causally interacts with any
other, each has the perceptions we would expect it to
have, were they to interact, and each has the perceptions
we would expect it to have, were there extended material
objects that are perceived. The first is the thesis of univer-

sal expression; the second, the thesis of the *pre-
established harmony. In the case of material objects, Leibniz
formulated the rudiments of a version of phenomenalism,
based on the pre-established harmony among the percep-
tions of the monads. In the case of apparent causal interac-
tions among monads, Leibniz proposed an analysis
according to which the underlying reality is an increase in
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 509