The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 66 potx

any claim about the world. Subjectivists, by contrast,
deflated ethics by treating moral and evaluative claims as
mere descriptions of the emotions or preferences of speak-
ers—‘this is good’ being equivalent in meaning to ‘I like
(or prefer) this’. Finally, prescriptivists likened moral and
indeed all evaluative claims to imperatives—‘this is good
(or right)’ being regarded as meaning the same as ‘choose
this (sort of thing)!’—and sought to induce a certain ration-
ality into moral discourse via a logic of imperatives.
More recently, meta-ethicists have focused more
directly on the question whether moral and other value-
claims correspond to reality or are in any sense objective,
and there have been a wide variety of different and oppos-
ing responses to that question. Given the apparent wide-
spread disagreement about ethical (and other) values that
has existed between different societies and different
epochs of the same society, there is reason to wonder
whether there really are any facts or truths for ethics to dis-
cover, and although most ethicists ever since Socrates
have tended to believe in one or another form of moral
objectivity, the problem remains of justifying such object-
ivity in the face of continually different forms of scepti-
cism about its possibility.
However, in addition to meta-ethical questions, ethics
naturally leads to certain substantive (non-semantical)
metaphysical issues, and perhaps most important among
these is the question of *free will. If human beings lack free
will, then, it has traditionally been argued, they cannot be
held responsible for their actions and cannot be bound by
moral obligations any more than animals or small chil-
dren are. So those who have systematically elaborated one

or another view of moral right and wrong and of human
good have also usually thought it necessary to defend (or
at least explicitly assume) the existence of human free-
dom, and that defence, in the first instance, has usually
involved saying something about freedom in relation to
causal *determinism. If the universe is universally gov-
erned by causal laws, then human freedom would seem to
be very much in jeopardy. So defenders of morality typ-
ically feel called upon either to deny determinism and
argue that human beings are in important ways not sub-
ject to causal determination or else to show that causal
determinism does not in fact deprive us of free agency.
Another metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical issue that
moral philosophers have devoted attention to concerns
the human capacity for morality. Most moral codes and
moral philosophies require, for example, that people
occasionally put aside self-interest in the name of honour,
fairness, decency, loyalty, or the general good, but if one is
a psychological egoist, one will hold that people lack the
capacity for these forms of self-sacrifice, and it then
becomes problematic whether human beings really have
the obligations that various ethically non-egoistic theories
or views claim they do. As a result, psychological egoism,
most notably at the hands of Bishop Butler, has been the
target of philosophical criticisms on the part of philoso-
phers wishing to defend one or another substantive, eth-
ically non-egoistic morality.
But even if one rejects both forms of egoism, there are
questions about how much morality validly or fairly can
demand of people, and some of these issues arise in con-

nection with utilitarianism and Kantianism. Utilitarianism
is usually stated in a ‘maximizing’ form that treats it as a
necessary and sufficient condition of right action that one
do the best one circumstantially can for humankind as a
whole (or for all sentient beings). But such a doctrine
seems to entail that if one is in a position to relieve the suf-
fering, hunger, or disease of others, one is morally obli-
gated to do so, even if that means giving up one’s life plans
and most of what one really cares about in life. Unless
one’s current life does as much good on the whole for
people, one must give up one’s life plans to the extent neces-
sary to confer greater benefits on (prevent greater harm
to) other people. The utilitarian moral standard is thus
very demanding, and some philosophers have questioned
whether morality can properly, or, one might say, fairly,
require so much of people. In particular, it may be won-
dered whether people, most people, have the capacity to
live up to such a stringent morality as maximizing utilitar-
ianism presents. Utilitarianism requires that one always
do the most good one can for people and in effect leaves
no room for what are called supererogatory degrees of
morality, for going beyond the call of duty. And this seems
too demanding because it means, in effect, that if one fails
always to do the most for humankind that one can, if one
isn’t like Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, one acts wrongly
and fails to fulfil one’s moral obligations. Thus if ethical
egoism is too undemanding, morally speaking, so too, on
the other side, does utilitarianism seem too demanding
upon human nature.
Kantianism can likewise be seen as grating against our

human nature or capacities, not by demanding too much
sacrifice of self-interest, but by insisting that only moral
conscientiousness is a proper and laudable moral motive.
If one gives out of fellow-feeling or friendship to another
human being, one’s act lacks all moral worth, according to
Kant, because one’s action was not performed out of a
sense of duty and respect for the moral law. Many philoso-
phers have thought such a view of moral virtue to be too
narrow and out of keeping with human psychology, and
feminists like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings have
argued, contrary to Kant, that a morally good person will
directly focus on other people and their welfare, rather
than be guided by a sense of duty. In fact, there has been
and remains a great deal of disagreement over what kinds
of motive really are morally praiseworthy and worthy of
encouragement.
Today moral philosophers are very much engaged in all
the kinds of issue we have discussed here. There may be
no generally accepted solutions to (most of) these prob-
lems, but there is also no doubt that moral philosophers
have been developing a better critical understanding of
their nature and of what solutions to them might look like.
m.s.
*moral knowledge; moral particularism; pornography.
630 moral philosophy, problems of
F. Feldman, An Introduction to Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978).
P. Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley, Calif., 1978).
T. Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca,
NY, 1992).
L. Pojman, Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong (Belmont, Calif.,

1990).
T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.,
1998).
S. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford, 1982).
M. Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford, 2001).
J. J. C. Smart and B. A. O. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against
(Cambridge, 1973).
B. A. O. Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York,
1972).
moral pluralism holds that the foundational level of
morality consists of a plurality of values or duties. For
example, *equality and aggregate *well-being are often
claimed to be values that serve as the foundation for the
rest of morality. According to other pluralistic theories,
the foundational level of morality is instead composed of
duties not to physically harm others, not to harm or take
others’ possessions, not to break one’s promises, not to
tell lies, plus general duties to do good for others, and
duties of extra concern for those with whom one has spe-
cial connections. Different versions of moral pluralism
add to or subtract from such lists of foundational duties or
values.
Most moral pluralists hold that we do not have strict
principles of priority that will resolve all conflicts among
the foundational values or duties. These moral pluralists
hold that we thus to need to exercise judgement in order
to resolve some conflicts among these values or duties.
Giving judgement such a large role, however, strikes crit-
ics of moral pluralism as failing to provide a defensible
decision procedure for moral deliberation. b.h.

W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford, 1930, 2002).
P. Stratton-Lake (ed.), Ethical Intuitionism (Oxford, 2002).
moral psychology. A part of moral theory devoted to the
analysis of concepts used to describe the psychological
make-up of persons as moral *agents, and the examination
of normative issues involving those concepts. Some of
these concepts may be explored for their own sake, e.g.
the ideas of fear, anxiety, despair, or *love, and here the
aim is to understand emotional states, motivations, or
relationships of major importance in the lives of human
beings.
Moral psychology also explores moral-emotional
aspects of important moral practices. When the actions of
responsible persons are morally wrong, those who hold
them to account typically expect the wrongdoers to experi-
ence such negative moral *emotions as guilt, shame,
remorse, or regret. Moral psychology attempts to under-
stand the cognitive and phenomenological structures of
such emotions, the differences among them, and the con-
ditions under which they are justified or not. These emo-
tions are usually thought of as painful, and as reflecting a
change in a person’s standing in the moral community.
Ordinarily, pain is construed as a condition from which a
person is entitled to seek immediate relief. In the case of
the negative moral emotions, then, how long must a per-
son suffer them? And how may a person suffering them
gain release from them, and perhaps restoration to good
standing in the moral community? Here the notions of
forgiveness, mercy, excuse, and repentance become
important, and the practices of making amends and of

moral or legal punishment need investigation. Accord-
ingly, moral-psychological inquiry may lead on to the the-
ory of punishment and the philosophy of law.
There are positive moral-emotional states to be under-
stood, too, such as the satisfaction, contentment, or pride
one may take in doing right, and the humility that may be
recommended when such positive states turn toward
arrogance. Approaches to these issues concerning the
negative and positive moral emotions may be influenced
by prior inquiries into the ideas of freedom and intentional-
ity, and into the logic of moral deliberation and practical
reasoning. Under a wide interpretation, moral psychology
may be considered to include these latter inquiries as well.
n.s.c.
*moral judgement; expressivism in ethics.
S. W. Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford, 1999).
Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Identity,
Character, and Morality (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
Herbert Morris, On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley, Calif., 1976).
moral realism. The view that moral beliefs and judge-
ments can be true or false, that there exist moral proper-
ties to which moral agents are attentive or inattentive,
sensitive or insensitive, that moral values are discovered,
not willed into existence nor constituted by emotional
reactions. Far from being a function of wishes, wants, and
desires, moral demands furnish reasons for acting, reasons
that take precedence over any other reasons. Debate cen-
tres on the nature and credentials of moral properties as
the moral realist understands them. In what sense are they
‘real’? Real, as irreducible to discrete affective experiences

of individuals. In this and other respects they share charac-
teristics of the *‘secondary qualities’ of our life-world: fil-
tered by our mentality, but not on that account illusory.
They can be well-founded, making a real difference to
situations and individuals that possess (or lack) them.
Moral realists are arguably justified in displaying the
inadequacies of subjectivist moral theories; but less suc-
cessful so far in developing a convincing positive account
of the ‘reality’ of values. r.w.h.
*truth; realism and anti-realism; emotive theory; pre-
scriptivism; moral scepticism; quasi-realism.
D. McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford, 1988).
I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London, 1970).
—— Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London, 1992).
G. Sayre-McCord, Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, NY, 1988).
morals and law: see law and morals.
morals, enforcement of: see enforcement of morals.
morals, enforcement of 631
moral scepticism. We must distinguish two kinds of
*scepticism about the possibility of objectively valid
moral judgements. Internal scepticism argues that it is a
mistake in moral judgement to make certain kinds of moral
evaluation or criticism or (in the case of global internal
scepticism) to make any such judgements at all. Examples
of the latter, global scepticism, include the argument
that morality is ridiculous because there is no God, that it
is misconceived because all human decisions and acts are
predetermined, and that it is barren because there is no
point or purpose in human life anyway. Such scepticism is
internal to morality because it is based on normative, eth-

ical assumptions about the true or adequate ground of
moral claims: it assumes that a basis for morality would
exist if there were a God, or if human acts were genuinely
free, or if the universe including human life could be
understood as planned and purposeful. Each of these
assumptions represents an abstract normative judge-
ment—an assumption about the true grounds of moral
commitment—even though each claims to generate scep-
tical conclusions. Internal scepticism is powerful and
threatening, for those who find its underlying assump-
tions persuasive, because it is practical: it must change the
behaviour of anyone who is converted to it. People who
sincerely believe that morality is bunk because free will is
an illusion must reject moral restraints for themselves,
and refuse to criticize others for behaving dishonestly or in
ways other people find morally wicked.
External scepticism, on the other hand, is supposedly
based not on abstract or general normative assumptions
about the adequate grounds of moral commitment or
responsibility, but rather on wholly non-moral, philo-
sophical assumptions about the possibility of any kind of
objective *truth or *knowledge. Contemporary examples
include Gilbert Harman’s argument that moral judge-
ments cannot count as objective knowledge because
moral beliefs are not caused by anything in the world, and
John Mackie’s argument that there cannot be moral facts
because moral properties would be such ‘queer’ entities.
External scepticism is widely thought to have only the-
oretical rather than practical consequences—someone
who is converted to the philosophical opinion that moral-

ity is a matter not of objective truth or falsity but rather of
subjective reaction need not, on this view, change his first-
order moral convictions—he may still think that dishon-
esty is detestable or that genocide is wicked—though he
will now recognize that these are not ordinary beliefs
about some objective reality, but are only expressions of
his own subjective state of mind.
It is very difficult, however, to make any real sense of
the idea of external moral scepticism. Consider the state-
ments that supposedly express this kind of scepticism: that
genocide is not ‘really’ or ‘objectively’ immoral, or that its
immorality is not ‘out there, in the universe’, or that its
immorality is not ‘part of the fabric of the universe’, for
example. It is, in fact, impossible to assign any sceptical
sense to such philosophically loaded or metaphorical
statements that does not make them equivalent in mean-
ing to the simple internally sceptical statement (which is,
of course, full of practical consequences) that genocide is
not immoral. Since the latter is plainly a moral judgement,
and could be supported, if at all, only through internally
sceptical abstract moral claims of the kind I mentioned,
there is no such thing as external scepticism. The only
intelligible moral scepticism is internal to morality.
That is an important conclusion, among other reasons
because many philosophers have assumed that *subject-
ivism, *relativism, and other forms of moral scepticism
can be established by default; that is, that since we cannot
prove that abortion or taxation or racial discrimination are
or are not morally wicked to those who think the con-
trary, it follows that there is no objective truth in moral

matters. But if we understand the denial of objective
moral truth as a piece of internal rather than supposedly
external scepticism, we see that it is as much in need of a
positive moral argument as any other moral position, and
its supporters can no more win by default than can their
non-sceptical opponents. Whether you accept some gen-
eral sceptical position about morality—for example, the
subjectivist position that moral obligations only hold for
those who accept them, or the relativist position that
moral obligations hold only within a community whose
conventional morality endorses that obligation—must
depend on whether you accept whatever moral argu-
ments can be made for these particular forms of scepti-
cism—that it is wrong to condemn people morally unless
they act in a way they themselves believe to be wrong, for
instance. In fact, very few people (including those philoso-
phers who claim to be external sceptics) find that they can
actually accept those arguments or embrace and act on
the internally sceptical conclusions they recommend.
r.d.
*ethical objectivism; ethical relativism; moral realism.
Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford, 1977).
R. Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge, 2002).
John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth,
1977).
moral sense. ‘Moral sense’ is the name given by, for
example, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume to the
capacity we have to distinguish virtue from vice. Such
moral philosophers are referred to as sentimentalists,

because we are supposed by them to feel things to be good
or bad rather than to reason that they are so. However, in
Hume’s philosophy such feelings are not divorced from
judgement. A feeling of admiration for virtuous action is
properly called ‘moral sense’ only if it arises from disinter-
ested reflection on the good tendencies of such actions in
general. Moral sense, like aesthetic taste, may be ill-
founded or well-founded. This view was taken for granted
by, for example, Jane Austen, who thought it a fault if
someone did not ‘feel as he ought’. Since the moral the-
ories of Kant, however, it has generally been held that
moral judgements are matters either of reason or of
purely personal preference. m.warn.
632 moral scepticism
*conscience; moral realism.
J. L. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London, 1980).
moral sentiments. States of mind associated with moral
character and response, including guilt, anger, shame,
pride, sympathy, hatred, resentment, and other feelings
and emotions connected with approval and disapproval.
According to the eighteenth-century sentimentalists,
moral distinctions are explicable in terms of non-rational
sentiments experienced by agents in response to states of
the world, including states of character. Thus to be virtu-
ous is to be such as to elicit approval or sympathy in
others. On some views, including that of Hume, moral
judgements of approval and disapproval are themselves a
kind of experienced sentiment. The distinction between
sentimentalists and their opponents is undermined by
cognitivist theories of the *emotions, according to which

propositionally articulated emotions are partly consti-
tuted by beliefs with their own conditions of correctness.
If moral sentiments have distinctive conditions of correct-
ness as given by the nature of their objects, then the eight-
eenth-century distinction between reason and sentiment
is put into question. h.l.
*Hume.
J. Schneewind (ed.), Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant
(Cambridge, 2003).
moral virtues: see virtues.
more things in heaven and earth
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
(Shakespeare, Hamlet)
What Hamlet says to his friend Horatio could be an
indictment of *philosophy in general or specifically of
Horatio’s philosophy. Or if, as some Shakespearian
scholars contend, the correct reading is ‘our’, the philosophy
referred to could be that of Horatio and Hamlet, whose
undergraduate faith in rationality Hamlet may be mock-
ing, or of all humans. No amount of scholarship, however,
will dislodge people’s tendency to counter scepticism
about the supernatural, or philosophical stringency, with
this quotation. The quoter usually purports to ally him or
herself to ‘the Bard’, and flourishes Hamlet’s rhetoric as if
it were Shakespeare’s own assertion—and decisive proof
of the existence of God, the paranormal, or anything else
that it is thought desirable to believe in. j.o’g.
mortalism. The mortalist heresy (that human *souls are
mortal—punishable by *death in the 1648 Blasphemy

Ordination) was connected with a burning mid-
seventeenth-century controversy: sentience requires a
soul; all animals perceive; so do ‘brutes’ have immortal souls?
or do we have mortal ones? Both alternatives were cham-
pioned; neither was generally accepted. The mortalist
Richard Overton offered a surprising compromise: body
and soul both die, but both are resurrected. j.j.m.
*immortality.
N. T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1972).
motion. x moves if and only if x is at some place, P
1
, at
some time, t
1
, and x is at some numerically distinct place,
P
2
, at some later time, t
2
, and x exists at some juxtaposed
set of places between P
1
and P
2
and at all times between t
1
and t
2
.

Philosophical problems about motion include: What is
it to begin to move? How long does starting to move last?
as well as the proof or refutation of both the materialist
thesis that all change is motion and the Parmenidean
thesis that change (and, a fortiori, motion) does not exist.
Four of *Zeno’s paradoxes are philosophical problems
about motion: Achilles and the tortoise, the dichotomy,
the flying arrow, and the stadium. s.p.
Aristotle, Physics, bks. i and ii, tr. with intro. and notes by William
Charlton (Oxford, 1970); bks. iii and iv, tr. with intro. and notes
by Edward Hussey (Oxford, 1983).
George Berkeley, De Motu, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop
of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London, 1948–57).
motives and motivation. Explanations of behaviour may
be in terms of reasons—someone waves because he wants
to attract our attention and thinks he may do so thereby—
or in terms of causes—a person shivers as a result of the
cold. But may not reasons themselves be causes? There
are indeed contexts in which ‘cause’ and ‘reason’ may
interchange, as in the phrases ‘give cause’ and ‘give rea-
son’, and we may use ‘because’ with reference to either.
However, there is a use of ‘cause’ in which experimenta-
tion is in principle required to verify that C caused E, as
with cold and shivering, whereas it requires no more than
the agent’s honest word for his reason for acting for this to
be so. Motives have their place among the latter.
Or so it would seem in the simpler cases. But ‘motive’ is
often invoked precisely when there is a departure from
normal reasons. A person goes into a shop to buy a news-
paper. That, he says, is his reason. We wonder about his

motive if we suspect that there is more than meets the eye,
something beyond the declared reason for acting thus.
Might he not be unaware of his true motive?
We may wish to speak of an unconscious motive in such
a case, but it is questionable whether we should sever all
connection with the agent’s awareness. The explanation
why the agent acted can still count as a motive explanation
provided we leave open the possibility that he should
come round to acknowledging that he did indeed act for
the reason suggested. Rule out any such possibility and,
while we may be able to speak in terms of a cause of the
behaviour, we rule out any justification for speaking in
terms of desire, intention, trying, and the like. But, despite
his sincere protestations to the contrary, might it not be
true that a person is acting out of such motives as greed,
vanity, or ambition? That could be so, but in a way that
does not undermine the agent’s honestly avowed reason.
Rather, in the circumstances, we may say, acting as he did
motives and motivation 633
counts as acting out of vanity; or, whatever the protester
may say, ‘greedy’ is just the word for that sort of behav-
iour. So long as this is the point of dispute, it is not one on
which the agent’s authority is final. But nor is it a question
of identifying a cause.
While motive explanations are not causal, an appeal to
causes may explain why such-and-such counts as a reason
for the agent; why, for instance, reasons for acting which
would show a person to be vain carry so much weight
with that person. Relatedly, the cause–reason division
provides a way of finding room for considerations of self-

interest while allowing the possibility of disinterested
motives. Why did A come to B’s assistance? His sincerely
avowed reason: He thought he must, that it was the
proper thing to do. No suggestion that there was anything
in it for A; indeed, the thought that he might in some way
benefit from his act, or at least avoid the guilt which would
come with inaction, did not even enter his head. On the
other hand, there is also the question why A is disposed to
respond altruistically to those in need, and the answer to
this may well lie not with A’s reasons for acting, but with
his upbringing. Perhaps it has taken rewards and punish-
ments to bring him to a state where such other-regarding
considerations weigh with him. Similarly, abuse suffered
by a person as a child may explain how he comes to have
the motives he has, but as a cause, not as something which
figures among his reasons. b.b.r.
*choosing and deciding; egoism and altruism; mental
causation; reasons and causes; volition.
A. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London, 1963).
A. I. Melden, Free Action (London, 1961).
G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1948).
Mo Tzu (579–438bc?). Born in the year of Confucius’ death,
Mo Tzu was his major philosophical rival. He criticized
Confucians for what he perceived to be their élitism,
partiality, nepotism, fatalism, extravagance, and wasteful-
ness. He founded an extraordinary guild of religious,
pacifist, itinerant, artisan soldiers, who practised their
idealistic philosophy of impartial concern jianai (‘universal
love’) by defending weak states against aggressors. Accord-
ing to Mo Tzu, social values (yi) must be imposed with

laws and punishments, to prevent reversion to state of indi-
vidualist antagonism. Mo Tzu proclaimed three standards
for the evaluation of social doctrines: success of historical
precedent, observations of the people, projected utility.
The later Mohists developed theories of optics, and a
logical system of dichotomous distinctions, both linguistic
and evaluative: shi affirmation, fei denial/rejection. s.c.
Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science, ed. A. C. Graham (London,
1978).
Mo Tzu: Basic Writings, tr. Burton Watson (New York, 1963).
moving rows paradox: see stadium paradox.
multiculturalism. Most countries today are ‘multi-
cultural’ in the sense that they contain many distinct
ethno-cultural groups, as a result of the historic incorpor-
ation of minority groups or the admission of new immi-
grants. Multiculturalism, understood as a normative claim
or political *ideology, argues that this ethno-cultural
diversity should be accommodated, not suppressed, and
celebrated, not feared. In this sense, multiculturalism
stands opposed to traditional models of nation building
and *nationalism that sought to create homogeneous
national societies within each state. Multiculturalism
is a widespread movement in both Western political
theory and Western political practice, but its defenders
face two key challenges. First, what are the limits to the
legitimate accommodation of diversity? In particular,
should traditional cultural practices that violate liberal-
democratic norms be tolerated? Second, what holds
multicultural societies together? In particular, can the
celebration of multicultural differences be reconciled with

the promotion of common national identities and loyal-
ties? These issues remain a matter of lively ongoing
debate. w.k.
W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority
Rights (Oxford, 1995).
mundus imaginalis
(‘a¯lam al-khayal). The term was used
first by Sohravardı¯ to define a ‘boundary’ realm that con-
nects the sensory and the abstract intellectual segments of
the whole continuum of being, and is the distinguishing
component of non-Aristotelian *cosmology in *Islamic
philosophy. It is constructed as the locus of visions,
prophecy, and sorcery, and also defines *eschatology.
This wonderland is described by negating Aristotelian
logical principles and laws of physics, and is employed to
explain non-standard experiences such as ‘true dreams’
and ‘miraculous powers’. As the individual subject moves
away from the centre of the sensory segment of the con-
tinuum nearing the boundary realm, qualitative change
takes place. Material bodies change to imaginalis ones;
time changes, no longer confined to measure of linear
space; and space is no longer limited by the Euclidean.
h.z.
*possible worlds.
Fazlur Rahman, ‘Dream, Imagination and ‘A
¯
lam al-Mitha¯l’,
Islamic Studies (1964).
Murdoch, Iris (1919–99). Iris Murdoch DBE, better
known as a novelist than as a philosopher, taught philoso-

phy in Oxford for fifteen years. In 1954 she wrote the first
book in English on Jean-Paul Sartre, relating his early phil-
osophy to his plays and novels. The crossing of bound-
aries between literature and philosophy marks all her
work. Her main philosophical interest is in ethics, and she
held that goodness has a real, though abstract, existence in
the world. This thesis was expounded at length in Meta-
physics as a Guide to Morals (1993). She could be called a
modern Platonist, and wrote perceptively on Plato (e.g.
The Fire and the Sun (1977)). She also wrote about educa-
tion and religion. The actual existence of goodness is, in
634 motives and motivation
her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea
of God. m.warn.
*Platonism; novel, the philosophical.
music. Although we can find philosophical writing on
music as early as Plato and Aristotle, and discussion of it by
philosophers outside the analytic tradition such as
Schopenhauer, Adorno, and Nietzsche, the philosophical
problems which we now identify as comprising the aes-
thetics of music received their first classic treatment by the
Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. Although his treatment
is not always lucid, and debate continues as to what
Hanslick meant, it seems fairly clear that his prime target
was a Romantic conception of music which subsequently
became known as the expressionist theory of art, that
beauty in music depends upon the accurate representa-
tion or expression of the feelings of the composer. (Expres-
sionist theories characteristically maintain that a
psychological state of the artist is communicated via the

work to the listener.) Of most philosophical significance in
his objections are the claim that there is a cognitive elem-
ent in the feelings of hope, anger, etc. A judgement is
involved that may be a necessary component in individu-
ating the particular feeling. Such an element of judgement
is absent in music. The English writer Edmund Gurney, in
a large and rambling book, The Power of Sound, developed,
apparently independently, a parallel line of criticism. Both
emphasize the looseness of fit between music and the
expressive descriptions we make of it. Both are, not
unfairly, viewed as formalists who believe that the worth
of music lies in the beauty of its patterns rather than in its
expressive power.
The aesthetics of music has flowered since the 1980s.
The debate as to how music can be properly described as
‘sad’ or ‘exuberant’ has continued apace. The most widely
held view is probably the view that it is the music itself
which is sad, and not the composer, listener, or performer,
and that we describe the music in this way because of the
way the music moves, because of its pace or the angularity
or otherwise of its lines. However, this orthodoxy has
been challenged by a number of writers, who have argued
that sad music does have a tendency to make the listener
sad, a position which has become known as ‘arousalism’.
There has been much recent philosophical discussion
of what it is for something to be a work of music. The
debate has largely been between Platonists, such as Peter
Kivy, and others. Platonists have tended to argue that the
work of music is an abstract sound pattern which is dis-
covered, rather than created, by its composer. It is fair to

say that the centre of controversy here is how we should
understand the creativity of the composer: Does he create
ex nihilo, or is he more in the position of the great and
innovative scientist whose genius enables him to see what
others have missed? A more moderate Platonism, such as
that of Jerrold Levinson, allows that the work of music is a
pattern or a type of which performances or interpretations
are tokens, but that it is a type which is created by a
composer. Recently, there has been a greater realization of
the extent to which the concept of a work of music is itself
a historical phenomenon which developed as the concert-
hall became the sonic equivalent of the art gallery or
museum, a place where works can be displayed through
performance. Through this, a deep distinction between
work and performance became the norm, with the notion
of fidelity to the work coming progressively to the fore.
Consequent on this, philosophers have become
increasingly interested in a concept which has been cen-
tral to musical performance over the last half-century, the
notion of ‘authentic performance’ or, as it is now some-
times called, the ‘historically informed performance’. The
debate is very involved. Should we attempt to re-create
the sound the composer would have heard or the effect his
music had on the first audiences? Do we have a moral duty
to the composer to present his work as he wished? Should
we give precedence to the tradition of playing the work,
incorporating the insights of generations of interpreters?
There is also a growing interest in the ontology of
music outside the Western classical tradition, such as jazz,
rock, and world music. All in all the aesthetics of music is

currently the liveliest branch of the philosophy of the arts.
r.a.s.
Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, NY,
1994).
—— Musical Works and Performances (Oxford, 2001).
Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford,
1992).
Peter Kivy, Authenticities (Ithaca, NY, 1995).
—— The Fine Art of Repetition (Cambridge, 1993).
—— Sound Sentiment (Philadelphia, 1989).
Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY, 1990).
R. A. Sharpe, Music and Humanism (Oxford, 2000).
my station and its duties: see Bradley.
mysticism. The concept of mysticism is closely related to
that of religious experience, but probably they should not
be thought to be identical. It seems useful to distinguish
mystical experience from numinous experience of the sort
described by Rudolf Otto, and from the more ‘ordinary’
sort of experience of the presence and activity of *God,
which is well illustrated by John Baillie. William James
characterized mystical experience by four marks: tran-
siency, passivity, noetic quality, and ineffability. Perhaps
we should add a fifth, that mystical experiences often, per-
haps characteristically, involve what is now called an
‘altered state of consciousness’—trance, visions, suppres-
sion of cognitive contact with the ordinary world, loss of
the usual distinction between subject and object, weak-
ening or loss of the sense of the self, etc. These features
constitute an interesting ‘syndrome’. Not all *religious
experience is mystical and not every mystical experience

includes all of the features of this syndrome, but there is a
large body of individual testimonies and descriptions
derived from all the major religious traditions (and per-
haps from minor traditions also) which involve many of
these features.
mysticism 635
636 mysticism
Much of this mystical experience is taken to be reli-
giously significant by the subject, but there is an inter-
esting and difficult question about whether all mysticism
is inherently religious, with some (e.g. William Stace) sug-
gesting that it need not be. Some mystical experience is
overtly theistic, having an ostensible reference to God,
roughly as he is conceived in the theistic religions. And it is
dualistic, in the sense of retaining the distinction between
the mystic and the God who is ostensibly experienced.
St Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Catholic of the sixteenth cen-
tury, is a good example of such a mystic. Other mystics,
however, even within the Catholic tradition, tend
towards monism, emphasizing the unity of all things and
the lack of real distinctions, even between the mystic and
the divine reality. Mysticism of the theistic, dualistic sort
seems to generate no particular difficulty for Christian
metaphysics, and indeed often includes specifically Chris-
tian elements, such as visions of Christ. Strongly monistic
mysticism, however, is harder to square with a Christian
view, and when such mystics have themselves been Chris-
tians they have often been suspected of heresy. This sort
of mysticism is likely to find a more comfortable religious
home in the great non-theistic religions.

There are two principal ways of trying to derive some
religious significance from mysticism. The first way is
indirect and inferential, and it is accessible to non-mystics.
It takes the prevalence of reported mystical experience as
a premiss, and derives some conclusion from it in con-
junction with some auxiliary principles. Often an analogy
is drawn with sense-experience. C. D. Broad, for example,
holds that a widely shared sort of experience, tending
towards a similar interpretation, is plausibly taken to be
the result of contact with some corresponding objective
reality (unless we have some special reason to think other-
wise). This, he says, is the way we treat sense-experience,
and mystical experience should be treated likewise.
The other way is especially attractive for the subjects of
mystical experiences which have a strong noetic element.
For in those experiences the subject is strongly convinced
that he or she is acquiring a piece of knowledge, a sort of
revelation, in the course of the experience itself. Such sub-
jects may well take that element of their experience at face
value. Indeed, they may find that the convictions which
are thus generated are among the very strongest in their
entire intellectual life (for example, St Teresa). This way of
assessing the significance of mysticism is, however, not
readily accessible to non-mystics. Normally these power-
ful convictions are generated by the experience itself, in
those who have had that experience, and not in others
who have only the reports of such experiences. In James’s
terminology, mystical experience is ‘authoritative’ for
those who have it, but not for others. g.i.m.
*holy, numinous, and sacred.

John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God (New York, 1959).
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985).
George I. Mavrodes, Belief in God (New York, 1981).
Rodolf Otto, The Idea of The Holy, tr. John W. Harvey (New York,
1970).
St Teresa of Avila, The Life of the Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus (Lon-
don, 1979).
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (first pub. 1911; New York,
1961).
myth of the given. Expression introduced by *Wilfred
Sellars to suggest there is no uninterpreted content of
experience that is foundational in epistemology: e.g.
Locke’s ideas, Hume’s impressions, the sense-data of the
Logical Positivists. The myth of the given implies that
facts can in principle be known non-inferentially. No non-
inferentially known fact presupposes knowledge of any
other fact or general truth. Such non-inferentially known
facts are ultimately authoritative. The attack on the given
is arguably anticipated by Vico and Kant. s.p.
Wilfred Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London, 1963),
ch. 5, sects. 3–11.
Na¯ga¯rjuna ( fl. 150 ad). Greatest sceptic-mystic dialect-
ician of the Voidist school of Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism.
Na¯ga¯rjuna interpreted Buddha’s ‘middle way’ as empti-
ness of all things. This emptiness, best shown through
silence, is realized when assent is withheld from all four
logically possible answers to a metaphysical question (yes,
no, both, neither). For example: ‘Entities do not originate
from themselves, from a wholly other entity, or from

both, and nor do they originate without a cause’. This rele-
gates Buddha’s own teachings about dependent origin-
ation, suffering, selflessness, and *nirvana to the level of
relative rather than absolute truth. These levels of truth
are distinguished to meet the charge of self-refutation
which Na¯ga¯rjuna anticipates: ‘Isn’t the Voidist yelling
“Don’t yell”?’ Somewhat like the sentences of Wittgen-
stein’s Tractatus, the Voidist’s own utterances count as
therapeutically useful nonsense. a.c.
*Buddhist philosophy.
M. Sprung, Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way (London,
1979).
Nagel, Ernest (1901–85). A leading figure in the logical
empiricist movement, Nagel was perhaps somewhat
unfortunate in that he published his definitive work,
The Structure of Science, just one year before Thomas Kuhn
published his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This
latter effectively spelt the end for the ahistorical, prescrip-
tive approach to the philosophy of science that Nagel epit-
omized. Nevertheless, by virtue of his clear, comprehen-
sive, and unemotional approach to the problems of sci-
ence, Nagel did continue to have much influence, particu-
larly in his standard account of ‘reduction’, the process
where one science or theory is absorbed into another.
Seeing this relationship as essentially one of deductive
consequence, the older of the newer, and everything of
physics, Nagel came to consider in some detail the prima
facie distinctive nature of the biological sciences, espe-
cially inasmuch as they use ‘teleological’ or ‘functional’
language. Unexpectedly, inasmuch as he thought this lan-

guage significant, he thought it eliminable, and inasmuch
as it is uneliminable, it is insignificant. Forty subsequent
years of discussion of this subject suggests that this was a
mistaken judgement. m.r.
*logical empiricism; reductionism; teleological explan-
ation.
E. Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961).
M. Ruse, The Philosophy of Biology Today (Albany, NY, 1988).
Nagel, Thomas (1937– ). American philosopher, Professor
at New York University. Nagel’s philosophical work has
been dominated by concern over how to reconcile the per-
sonal, subjective, first-person view we have of events, the
world, of what is valuable and important, and the imper-
sonal, objective, impartial view we have of these things, a
view which is ordinarily thought of as more likely to be true
just because impartial, untainted by local or personal con-
cerns and horizons. His first book, The Possibility of Altruism
(Oxford, 1970), considered issues of this character in con-
nection with reasons for action of a personal or impersonal
kind, but he has pursued related themes into questions in
the philosophy of mind, epistemology, free will, and gen-
eral metaphysics. Possibly his most influential piece is his
journal paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, published in
1974, where he contends that all materialist and functional-
ist theories of mind and consciousness omit the central fact
of *mentality—that there is something it feels like to be in a
certain material or functional state. In this case, we see a
tension between the lived experience intimate to the indi-
vidual subject and the generalizing theoretical accounts
which seem to provide the best overall explanations. This

paper is in his collection Mortal Questions (Cambridge,
1979). He has explored this cluster of issues most fully in The
View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986).
Nagel’s writing is characterized by a lightness which
makes it accessible to a very wide range of readers. He has
written a brief and witty introduction to philosophy, What
Does It All Mean? (Oxford, 1987). n.j.h.d.
*dualism; inequality; functionalism.
naïve realism. A theory of *perception that holds that our
ordinary perception of physical objects is direct, unmedi-
ated by awareness of subjective entities, and that, in nor-
mal perceptual conditions, these objects have the
properties they appear to have. If a pickle tastes sour, the
sun looks orange, and the water feels hot, then, if condi-
tions are normal, the pickle is sour, the sun orange, and the
N
water hot. Tastes, sounds, and colours are not in the heads
of perceivers; they are qualities of the external objects that
are perceived. Seeing an object is not (as *representative
theorists maintain) seeing it, so to speak, on mental televi-
sion where the properties of a subjective *sense-datum or
*percept (e.g. colour) represent or ‘stand in for’ the object-
ive, scientific properties of the external object (wave-
length of reflected light). Although this theory bears the
name ‘naïve’, and is often said to be the view of the person
on the street, it need not deny or conflict with scientific
accounts of perception. It need only deny that one’s per-
ceptual awareness of objective properties involves an
awareness of the properties of subjective (mental) inter-
mediaries. f.d.

H. H. Price, Perception (London, 1932).
names. In the broadest sense of the term ‘name’, names
divide into two classes—proper names and common
names, these being species of singular and general terms
respectively. Proper names are names of individuals, such
as ‘London’, ‘Mars’, and ‘Napoleon’, whereas common
names are names of kinds of individuals, such as ‘city’,
‘planet’, and ‘man’. Not all singular terms are proper
names; for instance, pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘he’ are not, nor
are demonstrative noun phrases like ‘this city’ and ‘that
man’. Definite descriptions, such as ‘the capital city of
England’, are also commonly contrasted with proper
names (though Frege treated them as belonging to the
same semantic category). Similarly, not all general terms
are common names; for instance, adjectival or character-
izing general terms like ‘red’ are not, nor are abstract
nouns like ‘redness’ and ‘bravery’ (if indeed the latter are
deemed to be general terms).
Recently, philosophical debate has focused on proper
names much more than on common names (apart from
the special case of natural-kind terms). A prominent issue
has been whether such names have both sense and refer-
ence, as Frege believed, or whether they are purely refer-
ential devices, as J. S. Mill held and as Kripke now
contends. (An implication of the latter position is that
proper names do not have linguistic meanings specifiable
by way of *definition.) Frege’s claim draws sustenance
from the fact that an identity statement involving two dif-
ferent proper names—for instance, ‘George Orwell is Eric
Blair’—can be informative, which seems to imply that it

expresses a different proposition from that expressed
when one of those names is merely repeated, as in ‘George
Orwell is George Orwell’. On the other hand, Kripke plaus-
ibly argues that speakers can use proper names to refer to
individuals about whom they possess no uniquely identi-
fying information, as when a speaker affirms that Kurt
Gödel proved the *incompleteness theorem even though
she cannot clearly differentiate in thought between Gödel
and many other eminent logicians. (A Fregean *‘sense’ is
supposed to provide just such identifying information
about, or a ‘mode of presentation’ of, its reference.)
For Kripke, proper names are *rigid designators—
in which respect they differ from (most) definite
descriptions—and their reference is secured not by some
‘sense’ which a speaker attaches to them, but rather by an
external causal chain linking the speaker’s use of a name to
an original ‘baptism’ in which the name was first assigned
to a certain individual. As the name is passed on from
speaker to speaker, all that is required for a later recipient
of the name to use it successfully to refer to the individual
originally named by it is that each speaker in the chain
should use it with the intention to refer to the same indi-
vidual as it was used to refer to by the speaker from whom
he received the name. However, this so-called causal the-
ory of reference is not without its difficulties; for instance,
Gareth Evans has argued that it cannot accommodate
some of the ways in which names change their reference
over time.
The Kripkean account of proper names (and natural-
kind terms) as rigid designators is linked to certain meta-

physical doctrines of an essentialist character—such as the
theses of the necessity of identity and of origin—because
of the ways in which such names are thought to behave in
modal contexts. For instance, it is held that, given that
George Orwell is Eric Blair, George Orwell could not have
been different from Eric Blair—though this impossibility
is a posteriori rather than a priori. Similarly, given that
George Orwell was in fact born of certain parents, it is held
to be an a posteriori *metaphysical necessity that he was
born of just those parents. e.j.l.
S. A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980).
A. W. Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference (Oxford, 1993).
N. Salmon, Reference and Essence (Princeton, NJ, 1982).
names, fictional: see fictional names.
names, logically proper: see logically proper names.
narrative. A narrative in its widest sense is a representa-
tion of a sequence of events between which there is some
connection. In this wide sense, a film, for example, can
count as a narrative, even in the absence of an explicit nar-
rator. Not every representation counts as a narrative,
however. A minimal criterion is that the represented
events exhibit some temporal order. The sentence ‘Lucy is
wearing pink today’ thus fails on this criterion to be a nar-
rative. But mere temporal structure is not sufficient. Con-
sider the following: ‘833: Two comets appeared. 834: In
this year Bishop Wulfstan passed away. 835: There were
great floods.’ This is simply a chronicle of events. In a true
narrative, the represented events should exhibit some
causal connectedness, making each event more intelli-
gible than it would be if reported in isolation, or as part of

a mere chronicle. Within this broad category we can go on
to distinguish historical from fictional narrative.
The concept of narrative has of course great interest and
importance for literary theorists, but it has also been of
interest to philosophers. It has, for example, been used by
Alasdair MacIntyre to express the way in which a human
life is a structured, unified whole, and not simply
a series of discrete events. Human actions are made
638 naïve realism
intelligible though being part of a narrative. (This is in
marked contrast to the view expressed in Sartre’s Nausea,
that any narrative misrepresents human life, which in real-
ity is unstructured and has no denouement.) Philosophies of
action that attempt to isolate what are sometimes called
‘basic actions’ that are considered simply as behaviour that
is the outcome of an intention, and then analyse agency in
terms of such actions, thus run the risk of providing an
unduly artificial and idealized picture of what intentional
action consists in. The point can be put in ethical terms: in
so far as we construct our ethical theory from consider-
ation of actions, choices, and situations that are abstracted
from any wider narrative that would give them meaning,
that theory will be correspondingly impoverished.
The link between narrative and our understanding of
*time has been explored within the continental tradition
by Paul Ricœur. r.le p.
*action; basic action; fiction; history, problems of the
philosophy of.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn. (London, 1985).
Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, tr. K. Blamey, K. McLaughlin,

and D. Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1984–8).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. R. Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1965).
nasty, brutish, and short. ‘. . . and which is worst of all,
continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of
man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, i.
xiii. 9). This is one of Hobbes’s most memorable phrases
and comes at the end of his description of what life is like
in the *state of nature when ‘men live without a common
power to keep them all in awe’. This powerful description,
like everything Hobbes writes on moral and political mat-
ters, has as its goal the attempt to persuade people to obey
the law and thereby to avoid civil war. For civil war leads
to the state of nature with all of the horrors mentioned in
the above quote. b.g.
national and regional philosophies: see African; Ameri-
can; Australian; Canadian; Chinese; continental; Croat-
ian; Czech; Danish; English; Finnish; French; German;
Greek philosophy, modern; Indian; Irish; Islamic; Italian;
Japanese; Korean; Latin American; Netherlands; New
Zealand; Norwegian; Polish; Russian; Scottish; Serbian;
Slovene; Spanish; Swedish.
national character. From the time of Vico, it has been
widely held that *human nature develops through history,
with pervasive patterns of thought and behaviour in any
one group of people distinguishing it from others. What,
then, gives the language, culture, and collective experience
of a group its particular identity? For Herder, to whom the
very term *‘nationalism’ is attributed, it was the soul of the
nation to which the group belonged. He argued, against
liberal universalism, that an individual could develop spir-

itually only within a national community, though, unlike
Fichte, he did not think any one nation favoured over the
rest. Recognizing the cultural significance of national char-
acter and history need not be militaristic or supremacist or
based on race. But, if not tempered by a substratum of
timeless and universal values, it can, as demonstrated in
Herder himself, lead to the relativistic conclusion that the
values of different nations are incommensurable, and criti-
cizable only from within. a.o’h.
*conservatism; people, the.
Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London, 1976).
nationalism. A doctrine which holds that national iden-
tity ought to be accorded political recognition, that
nations have rights (to autonomy, *self-determination,
and/or sovereignty), and that the members of the nation
ought to band together in defence of those rights. Nation-
alism can be distinguished from, though it is often in prac-
tice indistinct from, chauvinism, which makes one’s own
national identity the overriding moral–political consider-
ation. The theoretical distinction here runs parallel to the
distinction between individualism and egoism, and it can
be elucidated in the following way: national rights (like
individual *rights) are properly reiterated for each newly
arriving nation (individual). Hence, the limits of these
rights are necessarily fixed by the rights of the nation that
comes next. Chauvinism, by contrast, acknowledges no
limits except those dictated by national interest. It is
entirely possible, then, to be a liberal nationalist, defend-
ing the rights of nations other than one’s own and seeking
negotiated settlements, compromises, even in disputes

involving one’s own. But this position is relatively rare in
political life or, better, it is a position that seems to erode
rapidly whenever the disputed issues touch upon (what
are taken to be) vital national interests.
As an *ideology of identity, attaching political signifi-
cance to the history and culture of an ethnos or *people,
nationalism is a modern phenomenon, though it is not
without precedents and parallels in the ancient world.
Similarly, nations, conceived as groups whose members
are prospective nationalists, are modern creations, polit-
ically fashioned out of diverse social materials. Citizenship,
religious faith, common language, some defining histor-
ical experience: all these in some cases, any one of them in
others, have played a formative part (or, in another ver-
sion of the story, have been exploited by publicists and
politicians) in shaping national identity. The resulting
nationalisms differ among themselves—more political
and open, more ethnic and exclusive—depending on the
achieved shape. But it does not appear that national rights
are dependent in a similar way. They must be (like indi-
vidual rights again) the same for all nations that are pre-
pared to recognize their limits. m.walz.
*national character; international relations, philosophy
of; homeland, right to a.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).
Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1946).
R. McKim and J. McMahan (eds.), The Morality of Nationalism
(New York, 1997).
K. R. Minogue, Nationalism (New York, 1968).

nationalism 639