The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 54 potx

the clarity of the relevant perceptions of the apparent
causal agent, accompanied by a corresponding decrease in
the clarity of the relevant perceptions of the entity appar-
ently acted upon.
Leibniz’s mature metaphysics includes a threefold clas-
sification of entities that must be accorded some degree of
reality: ideal entities, well-founded phenomena, and
actual existents, i.e. monads with their perceptions and
appetites. Material objects are examples of well-founded
phenomena, according to Leibniz, while space and time
are ideal entities. In the following passage from another
letter to de Volder, Leibniz formulated the distinction
between actual and ideal entities:
in actual entities there is nothing but discrete quantity, namely,
the multitude of monads, i.e. simple substances . . . But continu-
ous quantity is something ideal, which pertains to possibles, and
to actuals, insofar as they are possible. Indeed, a continuum
involves indeterminate parts, whereas, by contrast, there is noth-
ing indefinite in actual entities, in which every division that can be
made, is made. Actual things are composed in the manner that a
number is composed of unities, ideal things are composed in the
manner that a number is composed of fractions. The parts are
actual in the real whole, but not in the ideal. By confusing ideal
things with real substances when we seek actual parts in the order
of possibles and indeterminate parts in the aggregate of actual
things, we entangle ourselves in the labyrinth of the continuum
and in inexplicable contradictions.
Leibniz’s consideration of the labyrinth of the con-
tinuum was one source of his monadology. Ultimately, he
reached the conclusion that whatever can be infinitely
divided without reaching entities that can not be further

divided is not a basic individual in an acceptable ontology.
In part, Leibniz’s reasoning here turns on his beliefs that
divisible entities of the sort noted can not satisfy the stand-
ards for substantial unity required of basic individuals.
The originality and complexity of Leibniz’s reasoning
concerning these topics is on display in his correspond-
ence with de Volder, and in his correspondence with
Arnauld. In the process of refining the metaphysical con-
siderations that shaped the monadology, Leibniz formu-
lated and defended the following doctrines: the *identity
of indiscernibles—the thesis that individual substances differ
with respect to their intrinsic, non-relational properties; the
theory of minute perceptions—that each created monad
has some perceptions of which it lacks awareness; as well as
the theses of universal expression, the pre-established
harmony, and spontaneity, previously mentioned.
An important element in Leibniz’s treatment of entities
he regarded as ideal is his treatment of *space and *time,
which is formulated in his correspondence with Samuel
Clarke. Leibniz set out to explicate the notion of place and
space in terms of the spatial relations among material
objects, thereby avoiding commitment to space as an
independent entity.
Another route to Leibniz’s monadology may be traced
beginning from some of his conclusions concerning cer-
tain of the well-founded phenomena, in particular, mater-
ial objects. He argued that a correct application of Galileo’s
discoveries concerning the acceleration of freely falling
bodies to the phenomena of impact established that force is
not to be identified with quantity of motion, i.e. mass times

velocity, as Descartes had held, but is to be measured by
mass times the velocity squared. From these physical
results, Leibniz drew important metaphysical conclu-
sions—that force, unlike quantity of motion, cannot be
identified with some mode of extension and that, there-
fore, Descartes was mistaken in identifying matter with
extension and its modifications. He concluded that each
material substance must have an immaterial component, a
substantial form, which accounts for its active force.
The labyrinth of the continuum, previously noted, is
one of two labyrinths that, according to Leibniz, vex the
human mind. The second concerns the possibility of free
choice. The nub of this problem for Leibniz is to explain
how things might have been otherwise than they are.
Leibniz was committed to the concept-containment
account of truth, i.e. that a proposition is true just in case
the concept of its predicate is contained in the concept of
its subject. But that seems to imply that all true proposi-
tions are conceptually true, and, hence, necessarily true,
and that, therefore, things could not have been otherwise
than they are. Leibniz denied that all conceptually true
propositions are necessarily true, employing the doctrine
of infinite analysis, affirming that in the case of contingent
truths, the subject concept contains the predicate concept,
but there is no finite analysis of the relevant concepts that
establishes that fact. By contrast, Leibniz argued that in
the case of necessary truths there is always a finite analysis
of the relevant concepts that constitutes a proof of the
proposition in question.
Leibniz made important contributions to philosophical

theology. The Theodicy contains his solution to the prob-
lem of *evil, i.e. to the question how the facts concerning
evil in this world can be consistent with the conception of
God as omnipotent, morally perfect, and creator—a con-
ception to which Leibniz was committed. One basic ele-
ment in his answer to this question is his thesis that this is
the best possible world. In outline, Leibniz reached this
conclusion in the following manner. He was totally com-
mitted to the *principle of sufficient reason, i.e. the thesis
that for every state of affairs that obtains there must be a
sufficient reason why it obtains. Applied to God’s choice
of a possible world to create, the principle of sufficient rea-
son implies that God must have a sufficient reason for cre-
ating just this world, according to Leibniz. But, given
God’s moral perfection, this reason must have to do with
the value of the world selected. Hence, the world selected
must be the best possible.
Leibniz also made what he took to be a significant con-
tribution to the formulation of the *ontological argument
for the existence of God. He claimed that the ontological
argument, as formulated by Descartes, for example,
proved that a perfect being exists, with one crucial pro-
viso, namely, the premiss that a perfect being is possible.
Leibniz believed that none of his predecessors had shown
this premiss to be true, and so he set out to do so. The basic
510 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
idea of his purported proof is this. A perfect being is a being
with every perfection. A perfection is a simple, positive
property. Therefore, there can be no demonstration that
there is a formal contradiction involved in supposing that

one and the same entity has all the perfections. Since there
can be no demonstration of a formal contradiction, it must
be possible for one and the same being to have them all.
Such a being would be a perfect being. Hence, a perfect
being is possible.
Although Leibniz was not as taken with epistemo-
logical problems as Descartes or the British Empiricists,
none the less he made significant contributions to the the-
ory of knowledge. In his commentary on John Locke, the
New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz argued force-
fully for the thesis that the mind is furnished with innate
ideas. Leibniz summarized his debate with Locke on this
point as follows:
Our differences are on matters of some importance. It is a matter
of knowing if the soul in itself is entirely empty like a writing
tablet on which nothing has as yet been written (tabula rasa) . . .
and if everything inscribed there comes solely from the senses
and experience, or if the soul contains originally the sources of
various concepts and doctrines that external objects merely
reveal on occasion.
The claim that some concepts and doctrines are innate
to the mind is important for Leibniz’s metaphysics as well
as his theory of knowledge, because he held that some of
the central concepts of metaphysics, e.g. the concepts of
self, substance, and causation, are innate.
Throughout his career, Leibniz developed various sys-
tems of formal logic, most based on the concept contain-
ment account of truth, previously mentioned. Some of
those systems provide the elements of an approach to for-
mal logic that is a genuine alternative to Aristotelian logic

and contemporary quantification theory. r.c.sle.
The definitive edn. of Leibniz’s work, still a long way from com-
pletion, will be G. W. Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Darm-
stadt, 1923– ). Series 2 and 6 are, respectively, the philosophical
correspondence and writings. Currently, the most useful edn. is
G. W. Leibniz: Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt, 7
vols. (Berlin, 1875–90).
The best source of bibliographic information concerning Leib-
niz’s work is Émile Ravier, Bibliographie des Œuvres de Leibniz
(Paris, 1937), as supplemented by Paul Schrecker, ‘Une bibliogra-
phie de Leibniz’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger
(1938).
The best source of bibliographic information concerning the
secondary literature on Leibniz’s work is Kurt Muller and Albert
Heinekamp (eds.), Leibniz-Bibliographie: Die Literatur uber Leibniz
bis 1980 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984).
The most complete edn. of Leibniz’s philosophical work in
English is Leroy E. Loemker, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosoph-
ical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht, 1969). Also available are the
New Essays on Human Understanding, tr. Peter Remnant and
Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, 1981), and the Theodicy, ed. Austin
Farrer, tr. E. M. Huggard (New Haven, Conn., 1952). A useful
selection with introduction and notes is Leibniz: Philosophical
Texts, tr. and ed. R. Woolhouse and R. Francks (Oxford,
1998).
As a sample of the vast secondary literature on Leibniz, the fol-
lowing may be recommended: C. D. Broad, Leibniz: An Introduc-
tion (Cambridge, 1975); Benson Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz
(Oxford, 1986); Nicholas Rescher, Leibniz: An Introduction to his
Philosophy (Totowa, NJ, 1979); Catherine Wilson, Leibniz’s Meta-

physics (Manchester, 1989); N. Jolley (ed.), The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Leibniz (Cambridge, 1994).
Leibniz’s law: see identity of indiscernibles.
lemma. A lemma is a proposition put forward in the
course of an *argument, often accompanied by its own
proof. It thus differs from a premiss in that it need not
occur at the start of the argument. In discussions of know-
ledge, the ‘No false lemmas’ principle is sometimes men-
tioned: this is the principle that a belief will not count as
knowledge if the chain of reasoning that leads to it con-
tains a false lemma. r.p.l.t.
W. Hodges, Logic, sect. 11 (Harmondsworth, 1977).
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924). Lenin was
the leader of the Bolshevik faction in Russian politics and
architect of the 1917 Revolution. Although thus not pri-
marily interested in philosophy, his two major contribu-
tions in this field were of considerable influence.
The first of these, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
(1909) was an extended polemic against his fellow Bolshe-
vik Bogdanov’s espousal of Mach’s view that the world
consisted entirely of sensations. Lenin’s account was
largely a simplified version of the philosophy found in
Engels’s later writings. It consisted in a fairly crude materi-
alism whose central themes were the two doctrines of the
external reality of the world and the ‘copy’ theory of
knowledge. Lenin was not so much interested here in the
philosophical arguments as in maintaining his view that,
under the circumstances, this was the only philosophy
that would benefit the proletariat.
After the 1914 débâcle, however, Lenin took a much less

instrumental view of philosophy. In order to reorientate
his perspective in face of the catastrophe that had over-
taken European socialism, Lenin spent an amazing
amount of time studying Hegel in great detail. The con-
trast between *materialism and *idealism characteristic of
his earlier work was now replaced by a contrast between
dialectical and non-dialectical thinking. Lenin emphasized
the influence of Hegel’s Logicon Marx and even went so far
as to claim that human consciousness not only reflected
the objective world but created it. Although only pub-
lished posthumously in 1929, the Philosophical Notebooks in
which this study was recorded did much to renew interest
in the Hegelian roots of Marxism. d.m
cl.
*empirio-criticism.
L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London, 1972).
V. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Moscow, 1964).
—— Collected Works, xxxviii: Philosophical Notebooks (Moscow,
1967).
lesbian feminism. Lesbian feminists are largely concerned
with issues at the intersection of female identity and
lesbian feminism 511
sexual–affectional orientation. Issues which arise at this
intersection are distinct from those that arise around
sex–gender and sexual–affectional orientation in general.
Most lesbian feminists hold that self-conscious lesbianism
threatens dominant political and social systems in a way
that other identities (e.g. as woman or as gay man) do not.
The reasoning is this: Patriarchal systems are founded on
valuing men above women. Both heterosexuality and

male *homosexuality preserves this valuing of men above
women. Only lesbian *feminism which explicitly values
women and is largely unconcerned with men really chal-
lenges this valuing. For a woman to love another woman is
thus a political and revolutionary act. Other philosophical
issues associated with lesbian feminism include: whether
lesbian identity is essential or socially constructed,
whether there is a distinctly lesbian ethics, whether lesbian
feminists should be separatists (withdraw as far as possible
from patriarchal political and social systems). c.m
ck.
Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality (Trumansbrug, NY, 1983).
Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silences (New York, 1979).
Les´niewski, Stanislaw (1886–1939). Polish logician. He
reacted to the logical *paradoxes by demanding extreme
rigour in logic. For example, he maintained that a system
of logic should involve no assumptions about the world,
except what is involved in identifying a written formula.
This led him to develop three unorthodox axiomatic sys-
tems of logic: protothetic, ontology, and mereology. Pro-
tothetic is a system of propositional logic based on the
notion of equivalence, mereology axiomatizes the
part–whole relation, and ontology involves a controversial
attempt to interpret *quantifiers without assuming that
anything exists beyond written expressions. Les´niewski
also proposed an unusually sophisticated theory of *defin-
itions. His influence has largely been indirect, through his
students (notably Tarski, whose definition of truth owes
much to him). This may change if his writings become
available in English. w.a.h.

Peter M. Simons, ‘Les´niewski’s Logic and its Relation to Classical
and Free Logics’, in Georg Dorn and P. Weingartner (eds.),
Foundations of Logic and Linguistics: Problems and their Solutions
(New York, 1985).
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81). German philoso-
pher and dramatist, who upheld the *Enlightenment
ideals of freedom and tolerance, but in aesthetics antici-
pated Romanticism. In Laocoon: On the Limits of Painting
and Poetry (1766) he tried to distinguish the laws governing
the literary and the pictorial arts, and opposed Winckel-
mann’s classical aesthetics, in favour of expressive art free
of formal constraints. In a series of papers, the Hamburg
Dramaturgy (1767–9), he discussed the true nature of
Aristotelian catharsis and the superiority of Shakespeare
to French tragedy. His theological works, especially
The Education of the Human Race (1780), attacked religious
dogmatism in the name of true religion. ‘What education
is to the individual man, revelation is to the whole human
race’: an age in which men will fulfil their duty for its
own sake will follow the present age of pleasure and ambi-
tion. His avowal of Spinozism, just before his death,
stimulated the revival of Spinoza, previously treated as a
‘dead dog’. m.j.i.
A. Ugrinsky (ed.), Lessing and the Enlightenment (London, 1986).
Leucippus (5th century bc). The founder of *atomism.
Virtually nothing is known of his life, and his very exist-
ence was disputed in antiquity, but his role as the origina-
tor of atomism is firmly attested by Aristotle and
Theophrastus, though the evidence does not allow any
distinction between his doctrines and those of his more

celebrated successor Democritus. He wrote a comprehen-
sive account of the universe, the Great World-System. The
single surviving quotation from his work (from a work
entitled On Mind, which may have been a part of the Great
World-System) asserts universal *determinism: ‘Nothing
happens at random, but everything from a rational prin-
ciple and of necessity.’ c.c.w.t.
D. Furley, The Greek Cosmologists (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 9.
Leviathan. LEVIATHAN or the Matter, Form, and Power of A
COMMONWEALTH Ecclesiastical and Civil, Hobbes’s master-
piece on moral and political philosophy, was published in
1651 (Latin version 1668). The title comes from chapter 41
of the book of Job. The leviathan is a sea monster who ‘is a
king over all the children of pride’ (verse 34). That Hobbes
chose Leviathan as the title of his book shows that he
regarded pride, in particular the view that the individual
citizen knows enough to challenge the laws of the sover-
eign, as providing an explanation of why an artificial
leviathan, the state, needs to have absolute power. The
book is divided into four parts: the first provides an
account of persons prior to the state; the second shows
how the state must be constructed to serve its purpose,
lasting peace; the third shows how this is compatible with
Christian Scripture; and the fourth is an attack on Roman
Catholicism. The importance of religion is shown by
the fact that the third and fourth parts comprise half of
the book. b.g.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–1995). French philosopher
influenced by *phenomenology and *Jewish philosophy.
Born in Lithuania, Levinas introduced phenomenology

into France in the 1930s after studying with Husserl and
Heidegger, thinkers to whom he owes a clear debt. His lec-
tures (Time and the Other (1948) ) introduced themes such as
time, death, and relations with others which are expanded
in his major work, Totality and Infinity (1961). His main con-
cern is to delineate an ethical ‘face-to-face’ relation with the
Other, which, while immediate and singular, is none the
less transcendent. Seeking such a possibility takes him to
the ‘limits of phenomenology’, and to criticize many previ-
ous philosophers for their preoccupations with ontology.
In Otherwise than Being (1974) he seeks language forms
which might circumvent such preoccupations, and enable
an ethical exchange with the *Other. Levinas also published
religious Talmudic readings. a.c.a.
512 lesbian feminism
*French philosophy, today.
Sean Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford, 1989).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908– ). Anthropologist and
ethnographer; leading exponent of the method of *struc-
turalism as applied to myth, ritual, oral narrative, kinship
systems, and modes of symbolic representation. His aim is
not so much to interpret particular instances, but rather to
reveal the underlying structure—the deep grammar of
mythical thought—which unites the otherwise endless
multiplicity of culture-specific meanings and forms. Thus
an ancient Greek and a modern Amerindian or Eskimo
myth may well turn out, despite all their surface differ-
ences, to derive from the same generative matrix of con-
flicts posed and resolved. For Lévi-Strauss, mythical
thought is a kind of ‘bricolage’, a logic that makes do with

all manner of found or improvised cultural material, but
which cannot be regarded as in any sense more ‘primitive’
than our own. His work thus combines a rigorous formal-
ism with an immense range of sources—drawing upon
cultures past and present—and a style that on occasion
seeks to orchestrate these themes in a quasi-Wagnerian
polyphony of themes. c.n.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, tr. J. and D. Weight-
man (New York, 1969).
—— The View from Afar, tr. J. Neugroschel and P. Hoss (New
York, 1985).
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1857–1939). Largely remembered for
his studies Primitive Mentality and How Natives Think.
Lévy-Bruhl argued that the mentality of so-called primi-
tive peoples was radically different from that of Western
rationality. He characterized primitive experience as
‘mystical’ in the sense of being dominated by affectivity,
whereas scientific experience is largely cognitive. Further-
more, the ‘pre-logical thought’ of primitive peoples is
bound, not so much by the law of non-contradiction, as by
participation, as when members of a totemic group under-
stand themselves to be identical with their totem. How-
ever, in the Notebooks written during his last two years,
Lévy-Bruhl conceded that the isolation of a general primi-
tive mentality had misdirected him: mystical participation
is more easily observable among primitive peoples, but is
present in every mind. r.l.b.
J. Cazeneuve, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (New York, 1972).
Lewis, Clarence Irving (1883–1964). American philoso-
pher whose early work focused on symbolic and modal

logic and who then went on to work in epistemology, gen-
eral value theory, social philosophy, and ethics. He argued
that empirical knowledge depends upon both a sensuous
or subjective *‘given’ and an *a priori set of principles and
categories through which we interpret the given. Accord-
ing to his ‘conceptualistic pragmatism’, however, the a
priori ‘has alternatives’; it is not a set of eternal or self-evident
truths or necessary structures of the mind, but a set of
conceptual schemes whose organization of our experience
is subject to modification on pragmatic grounds, subject to
change, that is, when it does not conduce to the ‘long-run
satisfaction’ of our human needs. k.h.
P. A. Schilpp, The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (La Salle, Ill., 1966).
Lewis, David K. (1941–2001). One of the most important
and influential figures in American philosophy in the late
twentieth century. Lewis studied at Harvard with Quine,
and spent four years at UCLA (in the company of Mon-
tague and Carnap) before moving to Princeton, where he
taught for thirty years. He was also a regular visitor to Aus-
tralia, where he found, and helped to shape, a lively phil-
osophical scene. He contributed significantly to the
philosophies of mind, language, and logic, but he is best
known for his systematic metaphysical system dominated
by two ideas. One is the thesis he calls ‘Humean superve-
nience’: the claim that the world entirely consists of local
physical matters of fact, and all other facts supervene on
these facts. (*Supervenience.) This thesis is Humean in its
denial of necessary connections between matters of fact.
The other is his modal realism: other possible worlds and
their inhabitants exist. (*Possible worlds.) Lewis argues for

his modal realism by appealing to its philosophical utility:
real possible worlds are invoked to explain such diverse
phenomena as causation, conditionals, the contents of
propositional attitudes, and the nature of properties. As
Lewis says, his modal realism has met with many ‘incredu-
lous stares’ but few convincing counter-arguments. t.c.
*modal realism.
D. K. Lewis, Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1986).
Lexicon, the Philosophical. Originally compiled by
Daniel Dennett and Joe Lambert, and later by Dennett
alone, this collection of definitions converts proper names
of (mostly twentieth-century) philosophers into common
nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. Entry examples fol-
low. braithwaite, n. The interval of time between two
books. ‘His second book followed his first after a long
braithwaite.’ carnap, n. A formally defined symbol, oper-
ator, special bit of notation. grice, n. Conceptual intricacy.
‘His examination of Hume is distinguished by erudition
and grice.’ Hence, griceful, adj., and griceless, adj., ‘An obvi-
ous and griceless polemic’. hintikka, n. A measure of belief,
the smallest logically discernible difference between
beliefs; ‘He argued with me all night, but did not alter my
beliefs one hintikka.’ quine, v. To deny resolutely the exist-
ence or importance of something real or significant.
‘Some philosophers have quined classes, and some have
even quined physical objects.’ Occasionally used intr.,
e.g., ‘You think I quine, sir. I assure you I do not!’ The
eighth edition of the Lexicon is available from the Ameri-
can Philosophical Association. d.h.s.
lex talionis.

The law of retaliation, according to which
deserved *punishment is neither more nor less than the
harm done in a crime, and ideally mirrors the crime. It
appears in the Code of Hammurabi (c.1700 bc) but is best
lex talionis
513
known in the biblical statement ‘life for life, eye for eye,
tooth for tooth . . . wound for wound . . . ’ (Exodus 21:
22–5). Commentators agree that the biblical lex talionis
was introduced as a moral upper bound on permissible
*revenge, i.e. take in retaliation no more than an eye for an
eye, etc.
Lex talionis, also referred to as jus talionis (the right of
retaliation), e.g. by Kant, is most plausibly confined to
crimes against the person. Yet even here adjustments
must be made; thus, the Code of Hammurabi provided
that the son who strikes his father is not to be struck in
return; he is to lose his hand. As Blackstone pointed out in
his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–70), ‘there
are very many crimes, that will in no shape admit of these
penalties, without manifest absurdity and wickedness’.
h.a.b.
Marvin Henberg, Retribution: Evil for Evil in Ethics Law, and Litera-
ture (Philadelphia, 1990).
li
: see Confucianism.
liar paradox. Semantic paradox, known in antiquity,
focus of much recent work. Jack says ‘I am now speaking
falsely’, referring to the words he is then uttering. If Jack
speaks truly when he says he is speaking falsely, he is

speaking falsely. If he is speaking falsely when this is what
he says is going on, he is speaking truly. So what he says is
true if, and only if, it is false; which seems absurd. One
response claims that Jack says nothing true and nothing
false. But a variant makes trouble: Jill says ‘I am now not
speaking truly’. If Jill is not speaking truly when this is
what she says she is up to, she is speaking truly. If she is
speaking truly, then she must be doing what she says, that
is, not speakingly truly. So, it seems, what she says is true
if, and only if, it is not true. r.m.s.
*paradoxes.
Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch. 5.
liberalism. One of the major political ideologies of the
modern world, liberalism is distinguished by the import-
ance it attaches to the civil and political *rights of individ-
uals. Liberals demand a substantial realm of personal
*freedom—including freedom of conscience, speech,
association, occupation, and, more recently, sexuality—
which the state should not intrude upon, except to protect
others from harm. Major philosophical exponents of liber-
alism include Locke, Kant, Constant, Humboldt, J. S. Mill,
Green, Hobhouse, and, in the post-war era, Berlin, Hart,
Rawls, and Dworkin.
Liberalism first emerged as an important movement in
Europe in the sixteenth century. Today, particularly after
the decline of *communism, it is the dominant ideology in
many parts of the world. There are two familiar ways of
explaining the rise of liberalism. On one view, liberalism
grew out of the recognition that *toleration was the only
alternative to the Wars of Religion. After innumerable

wars, both Protestants and Catholics accepted that the
state could not impose a common faith, and that the only
stable basis for a political regime was to separate Church
and State. Liberalism has simply extended this principle
from the sphere of religion to other areas of social life
where citizens have conflicting beliefs about the meaning
of life. A liberal state does not seek to resolve these con-
flicts, but rather provides a ‘neutral’ framework within
which citizens can pursue their diverse conceptions of the
good life. Liberalism, on this view, is the only humane
response to the inevitable pluralism and diversity of mod-
ern societies.
Liberalism’s critics, however, argue that liberalism
emerged as the ideological justification for the rise of *cap-
italism, and that its image of the autonomous individual is
simply a glorification of the pursuit of self-interest in the
market. Liberalism replaced the web of mutual obliga-
tions which bound people together in ethnic, religious, or
other communities with a society predicated on competi-
tion and atomistic *individualism.
There is perhaps some truth in both of these explana-
tions. Liberalism was historically associated with capital-
ism, although most liberals today accept that *justice
requires regulating the market to ensure equality of
opportunity. Those who continue to defend free markets
and absolute property rights, such as Hayek and Nozick,
are now called classical liberals or *libertarians, as
opposed to welfare liberals or liberal egalitarians, such as
Rawls and Dworkin. (In Europe, the term ‘liberal’ is more
likely to refer to a defender of the free market; in North

America, to a defender of the welfare state.)
A major challenge for liberal philosophers has been to
explain why individual freedom should have priority over
competing values such as community or *perfectionism.
Why should the state allow individuals to criticize and
abandon the traditional customs of the community, or
engage in degrading or worthless life styles?
It is often assumed that the defence of liberalism must
ultimately rest on some form of *subjectivism or *scepti-
cism about values. If people’s values are merely subjective
preferences, lacking any rational or objective basis, then
there is no justification for the state to prefer some ways of
life over others.
Few liberals have endorsed this subjectivist argument,
although it is commonly attributed to them by critics. Sub-
jectivism provides a weak defence of individual freedom.
For one thing, it conflicts with the way most people under-
stand the value of their own lives, since we typically
assume that some ways of leading our lives are intrinsically
better than others. Moreover, if subjectivism were true, it
would leave liberal values equally without rational foun-
dation. When liberals argue that a state which upholds
individual rights and equality of opportunity is better than
a totalitarian or caste society, they view this as a rationally
defensible moral belief, not simply as their subjective pref-
erence. But if claims about rights and justice are rationally
defensible, then so presumably are claims about the value
of different conceptions of the good. As a result, most
liberals have sought to defend freedom of choice without
514

lex talionis
denying that the worth of different conceptions of the
good life can be rationally evaluated.
There are a variety of non-sceptical arguments for free-
dom of choice within the liberal tradition. *Utilitarian and
*pragmatist liberals offer various reasons why state coer-
cion and paternalism are counter-productive over the
long-term. For example, they argue that truth emerges
from free debate with falsehood, and that valuable ways of
life emerge from initially unsuccessful experiments in liv-
ing. Moreover, giving the state the power to decide which
ways of life are valuable and which are not increases the
potential for the abuse of state power, arbitrary discrim-
ination, tyranny, and civil strife. The advocates of
different ways of life will end up fighting over which con-
ceptions of the good should be promoted by the state, and
which should be discouraged. Given that the merits of dif-
ferent ways of life are controversial, liberalism’s neutrality
provides the only way for the proponents of conflicting
ways of life to live together.
These considerations are not insignificant, but they
provide only contingent and indirect support for freedom.
They point to various undesirable social consequences
that might accompany the restriction on individual lib-
erty, but they do not yet provide any reason for thinking
that individuals have an inherent right to a certain sphere
of liberty, or that there is any intrinsic injustice in limiting
people’s freedom.
Many liberals have sought to find a more principled
argument for individual freedom. Kantian liberals, for

example, argue that the capacity for rational *autonomy is
the highest capacity humans possess, and so is worthy of
inherent respect. To restrict someone’s freedom of
choice, on this Kantian view, is to treat them as less than a
fully mature and responsible human being, and this is
wrong regardless of the desirable or undesirable social
consequences that might follow. To respect someone
entails respecting her capacity to judge for herself which
customs, practices and traditions are worth maintaining.
This Kantian view has been very influential in the lib-
eral tradition. However, it rests on a controversial claim
about the nature of moral value and moral respect. The
Kantian view is disputed by many cultural and religious
traditions that emphasize instead the value of piety, defer-
ence to authority, and respect for tradition. Indeed, many
critics argue that using the state to promote the Kantian
ideal of rational autonomy is as ‘sectarian’ as using the
state to promote Protestantism, and as likely to lead to
civil strife. Some groups, particularly conservative reli-
gious groups, will view the state promotion of Kantian
autonomy as a direct attack on their own way of life.
Critics of the Kantian approach argue that liberals
should therefore avoid appealing to the value of auton-
omy, and instead defend liberalism simply as the only
viable basis for peaceful coexistence in culturally and reli-
giously plural societies. These ‘modus vivendi’ liberals
argue that liberalism should be defended as guaranteeing
tolerance between different ways of life, not as promoting
the autonomy of individuals.
Kantian liberals respond, however, that without

appealing to the value of individual autonomy, there is no
reason why coexistence between groups should take the
form of guaranteeing the rights of individuals. Why not
just allow each group in society to organize itself as it sees
fit, even if this involves restricting the rights of its individ-
ual members? Enforcing individual rights sometimes
means interfering with, rather than tolerating, various
group practices, and this can only be justified (or so Kan-
tians claim) by invoking the value of individual autonomy.
This internecine disagreement between Kantian auton-
omy-based liberals and modus vivendi, tolerance-based liber-
als remains unresolved. (The two sides are also sometimes
described as ‘comprehensive’ versus ‘political’ liberals, or as
‘Enlightenment’ versus ‘Reformation’ liberals.)
Even if one accepts the liberal commitment to individ-
ual freedom, there are questions about its social and cul-
tural pre-conditions. The capacity to make choices in a
rational and informed manner is not innate—it must be
developed in the course of one’s upbringing and educa-
tion. Moreover, freedom of choice is only meaningful if
individuals have an adequate range of options to choose
from—that is, if diverse life-styles and customs exist in soci-
ety. Some *communitarian critics argue that liberalism has
not attended to these wider social pre-conditions of *lib-
erty. Indeed, critics argue that the unfettered exercise of
individual freedom of choice will undermine the forms of
family and community life which help develop people’s
capacity for choice and provide people with meaningful
options. On this view, liberalism is self-defeating—liberals
privilege individual rights, even when this undermines the

social conditions which make individual freedom valuable.
Liberals respond to this criticism by arguing that indi-
vidual rights, far from dissolving valuable social groups
and associations, provide the best protection for them.
Those groups which are truly worthy of people’s alle-
giance will survive through the free assent and voluntary
participation of their members. Those groups which need
state support to survive, because they cannot maintain or
recruit members, are often not worthy of allegiance or
support. The example of religious toleration suggests that
there is some merit to this liberal response. Legal guaran-
tees of individual freedom of conscience have provided
ample protection for a wide range of religious groups,
while preventing the dangers that often accompany state-
sponsored religion. Whether this example can be general-
ized is open to debate.
A similar question has been raised about the long-term
political stability of a liberal society. Non-liberal societies
are typically held together by shared conceptions of the
good, such as a common religion, or by common ethni-
city. Members of these societies are willing to make sacri-
fices for each other because of their commonalities. But
what holds a society together when its members come
from different ethnic and racial backgrounds and do not
share a common conception of the good life?
Some liberals suggest that the tie that binds the citizens
of a liberal society is simply a shared commitment to
liberalism 515
liberal principles of freedom and *equality. It is debatable
whether this is a ‘thick’ enough bond to keep a *multicul-

tural society together. After all, a liberal society makes
many demands of its members: they must be willing to
accept considerable sacrifices (e.g. military service), to
take an interest in public affairs, and to exercise self-
restraint in their personal actions and political demands.
Liberals have tended to focus on the rights of *citizenship,
but a liberal society would stop functioning if its citizens
did not also accept certain duties and exercise certain
virtues. It seems likely that a sense of commonality is
needed for individuals to accept these sorts of duties.
*Conservative critics have argued that the stability of lib-
eral societies is based on a pre-liberal sense of shared iden-
tity. Citizens of England, for example, do not see each other
primarily as individual rights-holders, but as fellow mem-
bers of the English *nation, with a shared history and cul-
ture. This gives rise to a sense of solidarity which is prior to,
and deeper than, a shared commitment to liberalism. It is
this national solidarity which explains why the English
work together, and make sacrifices for each other. Conser-
vatives worry that this sense of being members of the same
‘people’ or culture or community is gradually being eroded
by the individualism of liberal rights, which treats people in
abstraction from their communal ties and responsibilities.
Interestingly, many nineteenth-century liberals, agreed
that liberalism is viable only in countries with a sense of
common nationhood, a new shared by some recent theo-
rists of ‘liberal nationalism’. Most post-war liberal theo-
rists, however, have rejected the idea that liberalism
should ally itself with nationalism, and have instead
asserted that a common commitment to liberal principles

is a sufficient basis for social unity even in multicultural
countries. Habermas’s idea of ‘constitutional patriotism’
is one example of this view, explicitly offered as an alter-
native to nationalist theories of social cohesion.
One difficulty with this view is that it provides no guid-
ance on how the boundaries of distinct political commu-
nities should be drawn. Indeed, it provides no explanation
for why there should be distinct political communities at
all. Why shouldn’t all societies that share liberal values
merge into a single state, aiming ultimately to create a sin-
gle world state? If we reject the nationalist belief that states
have the right and responsibility to express particular
national identities, languages, and cultures, why shouldn’t
liberals favour abolishing existing nation-states and
replacing them with a thoroughgoing *cosmopolitanism
of open borders within a single global state?
Few liberal theorists are willing to take this step
towards an unqualified liberal cosmopolitanism, and most
believe that nation-states remain the only viable forum for
the implementation of liberal-democratic values. Yet
equally few liberals are willing to acknowledge that these
liberal nation-states depend for their viability not only on
adherence to liberal values, but also on the inculcation of
deeper feelings of national identity.
Whether the cohesion of a liberal society depends on
some prior sense of identity remains an important topic
for debate. Whatever the explanation, national liberal
societies have in fact proven remarkably stable. Dire
warnings about liberalism’s inability to contain the cen-
trifugal tendencies of individual freedom can be found in

every generation for the last three centuries, yet it appears
that liberal societies have managed to endure while vari-
ous forms of monarchy, theocracy, authoritarianism, and
communism have come and gone.
Despite these disagreements about its philosophical
foundations and sociological feasibility, the basic lan-
guage of liberalism—individual rights, liberty, equality of
opportunity—has become the dominant language of pub-
lic discourse in most modern democracies. w.k.
*anti-communism; civil society; liberty and equality;
utilitarianism; well-being.
Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, in A Matter of Principle (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1985).
L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (Oxford, 1964).
J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative
Government, ed. H. B. Acton (London, 1972).
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993).
Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and its Critics (New York, 1984).
Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
libertarianism. The theory about freedom that despite
what has happened in the past, and given the present state
of affairs and ourselves just as they are, we can choose or
decide differently than we do—act so as to make the
future different. Libertarianism asserts the freedom of the
*will or *origination, and is contrasted with *determin-
ism. Contemporary libertarians may cite quantum
mechanics as evidence that determinism is false. Even if
this is so, the random behaviour of atoms certainly does
not by itself make for the freedom and moral responsibil-
ity asserted by libertarians. r.c.w.

*freedom and determinism; determinism, scientific.
C. A. Campbell, ‘Is “Freewill” a Pseudo-Problem?’, Mind (1951).
J. C. Eccles and K. R. Popper, The Self and its Brain (Berlin, 1977).
libertarianism, left ‘Left-libertarianism’ is a new term for
an old conception of *justice, dating back to Grotius. It
combines the *libertarian assumption that each person pos-
sesses a natural right of self-ownership over his person with
the *egalitarian premiss that natural resources should be
shared equally. Right-wing libertarians argue that the right
of self-ownership entails the right to appropriate unequal
parts of the external world, such as unequal amounts of
land. According to left-libertarians, however, the world’s
natural resources were initially unowned, or belonged
equally to all, and it is illegitimate for anyone to claim exclu-
sive private ownership of these resources to the detriment
of others. Such private appropriation is legitimate only if
everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if those who
appropriate more are taxed to compensate those who are
thereby excluded from what was once common property.
Historic proponents of this view include Thomas Paine,
Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. Recent exponents
include Philippe Van Parijs and Hillel Steiner. w.k.
516 liberalism
*libertarianism, political.
P. Vallentyne and H. Steiner (eds.), Left-Libertarianism and its Crit-
ics (Basingstoke, 2000).
libertarianism, political. A theory grounded in the right
of free choice. Libertarianism comes in at least two vari-
eties, both with roots in the writings of John Locke. One
variety starts from the stipulation of particular *rights,

often by direct intuition. The other grounds individual
rights in causal assumptions about what leads to *freedom
and productivity. Some libertarians mix these elements,
arguing from intuition but hedging their discussions with
references to the effects of a system of rights. Two issues,
one conceptual and one practical, drive much of the dis-
cussion of libertarianism. Conceptually, there is a conflict
between individual interest and its collective provision—
it is odd that libertarian rights may work against our inter-
ests. Practically, it seems virtually impossible that a state
could arise and survive by strictly libertarian principles in
a competitive world. r.c.w.
*libertarianism, left
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974).
libertinism. A sixteenth- and seventeenth-century,
mainly French and Italian, current which rejected Christ-
ian revelation and set up reason and nature alone as the
criteria of morality, law, and politics. The term libertin was
first used by Calvin against religious dissenters who
wanted freedom of conscience in matters of faith and
morals. Libertinism was then applied more widely to the
following positions: the rejection as invalid of theology
and metaphysics anchored to ‘divine’ revelation (espe-
cially the immortality of the soul, punishments and
rewards in the afterlife, teleology in nature, and a provi-
dential ordering of history); pluralism in matters of reli-
gion and ethics; a sceptical defence of doubt in
philosophical and religious matters; assertion of the his-
torical origin and consequent human fabrication of reli-
gions, creeds, and dogmas; *atheism or at least *deism;

and Epicureanism. Major French figures include Pierre
Charron, Montaigne, François de La Mothe le Vayer, and
Pierre Gassendi. In Italy, libertine thinkers like Pietro
Pomponazzi, Giulio Cesare Vanini, Bruno, and Cam-
panella follow a naturalistic interpretation of Aristotelian
psychology and physics. A popular image of the allegedly
depraved libertine is preserved in the character of Don
Juan–Don Giovanni: sexually promiscuous, atheist,
mocker of human and divine law. l.p.
R. Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVII
e
siè-
cle (Geneva, 1983).
G. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini (Florence, 1983).
liberty. What is political liberty? In the ancient world, par-
ticularly among the Greeks, to be free was to be able to
participate in the government of one’s city. The laws were
valid only if one had had the right to take part in making
and unmaking them. To be free was not to be forced to
obey laws made by others for one but not by one. This kind
of *democracy entailed that government and laws could
penetrate into every province of life. Man was not free,
nor did he claim freedom, from such supervision. All
democrats claimed was that every man was equally liable
to criticism, investigation, and if need be arraignment
before the laws, or other arrangements, in the establishing
and maintaining of which all the citizens had the right to
participate.
In the modern world, a new idea—most clearly formu-
lated by Benjamin Constant—makes itself felt, namely

that there is a province of life—private life—with which it
is thought undesirable, save in exceptional circumstances,
for public authority to interfere. The central question
posed by the ancient world is ‘Who shall govern me?’
Some said a monarch, some said the best, or the richest, or
the bravest, or the majority, or the law courts, or the unan-
imous vote of all. In the modern world, an equally impor-
tant question is ‘How much government should there be?’
The ancient world assumed that life was one, and that laws
and the government covered the whole of it—there was
no reason to protect any corner of it from such supervi-
sion. In the modern world, whether historically because of
struggles of the Churches against intervention by the secu-
lar State, or of the State against the Church, or as a result of
the growth of private enterprise, industry, commerce, and
its desire for protection against State interference, or for
whatever reason, we proceed on the assumption that
there is a frontier between public and private life; and that,
however small the private sphere may be, within it I can do
as I please—live as I like, believe what I want, say what I
please—provided this does not interfere with the similar
rights of others, or undermine the order which makes this
kind of arrangement possible. This is the classical liberal
view, in whole or part expressed in various declarations of
the rights of man in America and France, and in the writ-
ings of men like Locke, Voltaire, Tom Paine, Constant,
and John Stuart Mill. When we speak of civil liberties or
civilized values, this is part of what is meant.
The assumption that men need protection against each
other and against the government is something which has

never been fully accepted in any part of the world, and
what I have called the ancient Greek or classical point of
view comes back in the form of arguments such as this:
‘You say that an individual has the right to choose the kind
of life he or she prefers. But does this apply to everyone? If
the individual is ignorant, immature, uneducated, men-
tally crippled, denied adequate opportunities of health
and development, he or she will not know how to choose.
Such a person will never truly know what it is he or she
really wants. If there are others who understand what
human nature is and what it craves, and if they do for peo-
ple, perhaps by some measure of control, what they
would be doing for themselves if they were wiser, better
informed, maturer, more developed, are they curtailing
the freedom of these others? They are interfering with
people as they are, but only in order to enable them to do
what they would do if they knew enough, or were always
liberty 517
at their best, instead of yielding to irrational motives, or
behaving childishly, or allowing the animal side of their
nature the upper hand. Is this then interference at all? If
parents or teachers compel unwilling children to go to
school or to work hard, in the name of what those children
must really want, even though they may not know it,
since that is what all men and women as such must want
because they are human, then are they curtailing the lib-
erty of the children? Surely not. Teachers and parents are
bringing out their submerged or real selves, and catering
to their needs, as against the transient demands of the
more superficial self which greater maturity will slough

off like a skin.’
If you substitute for parents a church or a party or a
state, you get a theory on which much modern authority
is based. We are told that to obey these institutions is but
to obey ourselves, and therefore no slavery, for these insti-
tutions embody ourselves at our best and wisest, and self-
restraint is not restraint, self-control is not slavery.
The battle between these two views, in all kinds of ver-
sions, has been one of the cardinal political issues of mod-
ern times. One side says that to put the bottle beyond the
dipsomaniac’s reach is not to curtail his liberties; if he is
prevented from drinking, even by force, he will be health-
ier and therefore better capable of playing his part as man
and citizen, will be more himself, and therefore freer, than
if he reaches the bottle and destroys his health and sanity.
The fact that he does not know this is merely a symptom
of his disease, or ignorance of his own true wishes. The
other side denies not that anti-social behaviour must be
restrained, or that there is a case for preventing men from
harming themselves or from harming the welfare of their
children or of others, but that such a restraint, though jus-
tified, is liberty. Liberty may have to be curtailed to make
room for other good things, security or peace or health; or
liberty today may have to be curtailed to make possible
wider liberty tomorrow; but to curtail freedom is not to
provide it, and compulsion, no matter how well justified,
is compulsion and not liberty. Freedom, such people say,
is only one value among many, and if it is an obstacle to
the securing of other equally important ends, or interferes
with other people’s opportunities of reaching these ends,

it must make way.
To this the other side replies that this presupposes a
division of life into private and public—it assumes that
men may wish in their private lives to do what others may
not like, and therefore need protection from these oth-
ers—but that this view of human nature rests on a funda-
mental mistake. The human being is one, and in the ideal
society, when everyone’s faculties are developed, nobody
will ever want to do anything that others may resent or
wish to stop. The proper purpose of reformers and revo-
lutionaries is to knock down walls between men, bring
everything into the open, make men and women live
together without partitions, so that what one wants all
want. The desire to be left alone, to be allowed to do what
one wishes without needing to account for it to some tri-
bunal—one’s family, or one’s employers, or one’s party,
or one’s government, or indeed the whole of one’s soci-
ety—this desire is a symptom of maladjustment. To ask
for freedom from society is to ask for freedom from one-
self. This must be cured by altering property relations as
socialists desire to do, or by eliminating critical reason as
some religious sects and, for that matter, communist and
fascist regimes seek to do.
In one view—which might be called organic—all sepa-
rateness is bad, and the notion of human rights which
must not be trampled on is that of dams—walls demanded
by human beings to separate them from one another,
needed perhaps in a bad society, but with no place in a
justly organized world in which all human streams flow
into one undivided human river. On the second or liberal

view, human rights, and the idea of a private sphere in
which I am free from scrutiny, is indispensable to that
minimum of independence which everyone needs if he is
to develop, each on his own lines; for variety is of the
essence of the human race, not a passing condition. Pro-
ponents of this view think that destruction of such rights
in order to build one universal self-directing human soci-
ety—of everyone marching towards the same rational
ends—destroys that area for individual choice, however
small, without which life does not seem worth living.
In a crude and, some have maintained, a distorted form,
totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have stood for one of
these views: while liberal democracies incline to the other.
And, of course, varieties and combinations of these views,
and compromises between them, are possible. They are the
two cardinal ideas that have faced one another and domi-
nated the world since, say, the Renaissance. i.b.
*freedom through goodness and reason; political
freedom.
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969), esp. ‘Two
Concepts of Liberty’.
—— ‘Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty’, in Russian
Thinkers (London, 1978).
John Gray, Liberalism (Milton Keynes, 1986).
J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859).
David Miller (ed.), Liberty (Oxford, 1991).
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993).
liberty and equality. Some philosophers have argued that
these two values are bound to conflict with one another.
Given the differences in people’s abilities, they say, there

will be an inevitable tendency for some to be more suc-
cessful than others. Inequalities can therefore be prevented
only by the strict exercise of authority to limit the prosper-
ity of the more successful. To this others have replied that
all members of society need to share equally in the mater-
ial wealth and political power which are the pre-conditions
of effective freedom; liberty and equality are therefore not
conflicting but complementary values. r.j.n.
*liberty; equality; political freedom; well-being.
Richard Norman, Free and Equal (Oxford, 1987).
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742–99). German
physicist whose fame rests, apart from an experiment in
518 liberty
electricity, on aphorisms. He was a man of the Enlighten-
ment: ‘All the mischief in the world may be put down to
the general, indiscriminate veneration of old laws, old cus-
toms and old religion.’ He straddles *Kantianism and
*scepticism: ‘If an angel were to tell us his philosophy, I
think many of his statements might sound like “2 × 2=
13”.’ He doubted even Descartes’s *cogito: ‘It thinks, we
really ought to say, just as we say, it thunders. To say cogito
is too much, if we translate this as “I think” ’; ‘I and myself.
I feel myself—these are two distinct things. Our false phil-
osophy is incorporated in our whole language; we cannot
reason without, so to speak, reasoning wrongly. We over-
look the fact that speaking, no matter of what, is itself a phil-
osophy.’ Schopenhauer often quotes him, and Hegel, in his
Phenomenology of Spirit, cites his satirical critique of
Lavater’s theory of physiognomy (On Physiognomy
(1778) ). What he said of others applies to himself: ‘Earth

has greater need of their kind than Heaven.’ m.j.i.
J. P. Stern, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (Blooming-
ton, Ind., 1959).
lie, noble: see noble lie.
Lieh Tzu. Daoist philosopher (440?–360 bc?). The Lieh Tzu
text (c.third century ad?) is polysemic in style: a collection
of narratives having multiple application—cosmological,
linguistic, personal, socio-political. Developing the
philosophies of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, it interprets the
processes of life and death with a yin-yang cosmology.
Investigation of the way (tao) is not a theoretical enter-
prise, but a psycho-physical discipline resulting in an
embodied understanding of processes of transformation,
and in an exceptional skill in negotiating our life activities.
s.c.
The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao, tr. A. C. Graham (New York,
1990).
life. This, the distinguishing feature of organisms, is best
thought of as involving some kind of complex organiza-
tion, giving an ability to use energy sources for self-
maintenance and reproduction. Efforts to find some dis-
tinctive substance characterizing life have proven as futile
as they have been heroic. The one thing which is clear is
that any analysis of life must accept and appreciate that
there will be many borderline instances, like viruses. Incon-
venient as this may be for the lexicographer, this is precisely
what *evolution theory would lead us to expect. m.r.
*vitalism.
J. B. S. Haldane, ‘What is Life?’; repr. in M. Ruse, Philosophy of
Biology (New York, 1989).

life, form of: see form of life.
life, the good. Perhaps the most fundamental question in
ethics is that posed by Socrates: How should one live? But
this question covers not just the ‘moral’ aspects of our con-
duct, such as the observance of duties, or our contribution
to the general welfare, but also those other more personal
and individual aspects of a life which may make it worth-
while, or give it meaning. Aristotle’s theory of virtue
aimed to lay down the ingredients of eudaimonia (or
human fulfilment), and though this included many ele-
ments of what we would now call morality, it was also
concerned with the good life for humans in the sense of a
flourishing or successful life. Later *Stoic and *Christian
systems of ethics continued this tradition, though often in
a more ‘inner-oriented’ way: they gave particular promi-
nence to what we might now call ‘spiritual’ practices, the
cultivation of disciplines aimed at deepening our self-
awareness, and enabling us to live harmonious and
ordered lives.
Several modern philosophers have been interested in
these more personal and individual aspects of what makes
a life worthwhile, and have begun to reconsider notions
that were prominent in the ethical writings of earlier
ages—the importance of character, self-reflection, the
nature of the self , and the relationship between the intel-
lect and the emotions. The stress on the ‘interior’ dimen-
sion connects up with the ancient theme of self-awareness
as basic to the good life, as in the Delphic motto, ‘Know
thyself’; the ‘descent into the inner self’ was also a
fundamental theme of St Augustine’s famous ethical and

religious work, the Confessions. More recently, psychoana-
lytic writers have underlined the importance of uncover-
ing the hidden drives and projections that may distort our
perceptions and choices, and this has influenced philo-
sophical work on self-integration as fundamental to the
good life. There are also important philosophical ques-
tions to be asked about the relationship between these
broadly ethical concerns and other quite distinct ingredi-
ents of good human lives, such as creativity and artistic
achievement, the pursuit of which may often appear to
conflict with personal equilibrium or commitments to
others. Finally, a good human life is often supposed to be
one that has meaning; it may be asked whether this simply
refers to the fact that a life contains various individually
worthwhile ingredients, or whether it implies some over-
arching purpose or goal. j.cot.
John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge,
1998).
Charles Guignon (ed.), The Good Life (Indianapolis, 1999).
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford, 1995).
John Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives (Ithaca, NY, 1995).
Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
life, the meaning of. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is one
of those Big Questions about Ultimate Things that recent
philosophers have so often been accused of neglecting. It
may invite the retort that the meaning of our lives is what
we care to give them; we cannot expect meanings to be
handed to us on a plate, and even if they were, what use
would they be to us? God may have his purposes in creat-

ing me, but why should I adopt them? First I must be con-
vinced that they are good purposes (we can ignore the
effects of the threat of hell-fire on non-conformists), and if
life, the meaning of 519