The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 89 pdf

emphasis he places on *consciousness as an intrinsic fea-
ture of the mind, put him at odds with behaviouristic,
functional, and other materialistic theories of mind. For
Searle, although the mind emerges from the body, it pos-
sesses an ineliminable subjective character with which
materialistic accounts cannot adequately deal. In relation
to this claim, he uses his famous *Chinese room argument
to show that even though a ‘system’ (a computer and a
person) inside a room can manipulate Chinese symbols, it
does not necessarily operate on the level of meaning. To
do that, mental (intentional) concepts need to be intro-
duced into the system. n.f.
J. R. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1969).
—— The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
secondary qualities: see primary and secondary qualities.
seeing as. In his later writings, Wittgenstein showed an
interest in the phenomenon to which the Gestalt psycholo-
gists had drawn attention, of seeing (or hearing, or, . . .)
something assomething. The *duck-rabbit is an example: a
picture that can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit. Part
of Wittgenstein’s interest in this phenomenon had to do
with his rejection of a naïve account of *perception; he took
the interpretation of what is seen to be less separable from
seeing itself than empiricist philosophers had been wont to
think. But perception was not his only concern. We see one
continuation of a number-series as ‘more natural’ or ‘sim-
pler’ than another; see one grouping of objects in a class as
‘cutting Nature at the joints’, another not; and so on. Our
use of concepts depends on ‘seeing as’. r.p.l.t.
*illusion, arguments from.
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M.

Anscombe, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1967).
self. The term ‘self’ is often used interchangeably with
*‘person’, though usually with more emphasis on the
‘inner’, or psychological, dimension of personality than on
outward bodily form. Thus a self is conceived to be a sub-
ject of consciousness, a being capable of thought and experi-
ence and able to engage in deliberative action. More
crucially, a self must have a capacity for *self-consciousness,
which partly explains the aptness of the term ‘self’. Thus a
self is a being that is able to entertain first-person thoughts.
A first-person thought is one whose apt expression in
language requires the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’,
or some equivalent *indexical expression. However, it
may not be right to insist that a self be capable of express-
ing its thoughts in language—even its first-person
thoughts. Happily, we possess locutions for ascribing first-
person thoughts to others without implying that they are
capable of articulating those thoughts. One such locution
is the ‘he himself’ construction. Thus if I ascribe to Fred
the thought that he himself is fat, I ascribe to him a thought
whose apt expression in English by Fred would be ‘I am
fat’, though I do not imply that Fred is capable of so
expressing that thought. Note that we must distinguish
this thought from a similar third-person thought that Fred
might have about himself, whose apt expression in Eng-
lish by Fred might be ‘Fred is fat’ or ‘That person is fat’ (the
latter said by Fred in reference to a person he sees reflected
in a mirror, not realizing that it is himself that he sees).
It is plausible to require of a self not only a capacity to
entertain first-person thoughts but also the possession of

certain kinds of first-person knowledge. For example, it
seems right to insist that a self must know, of any of its pre-
sent, conscious thoughts, experiences, and actions, that
they are its own. This is why the response of Mrs Grad-
grind (in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times), when asked on
her sick-bed whether she was in pain, strikes us as so
bizarre: ‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room, but
I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’ Our possession
of such self-knowledge is connected with the phenom-
enon of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’
(Sydney Shoemaker). An example involving memory is
provided by the apparent absurdity of supposing that I
might accurately remember (as it were, ‘from the inside’)
a meal in a restaurant attended by a number of people, and
yet be in some doubt about whether I was one of those
people. (As against this, however, Derek Parfit has argued
that we could in principle inherit ‘quasi-memories’ from
other people, including first-person ‘memories’ of what
they, but not we, had done.)
So far we have largely been concerned with the meaning
of the term ‘self’, that is, with the essential characteristics
of selfhood. But metaphysicians are also interested in
exploring the nature of the self, that is, what sort of *thing
the self is, if indeed it is a ‘thing’ at all. In traditional terms,
a distinction may be drawn between substantival and non-
substantival theories of the self, the former contending
that the self is a *substance, either physical or non-physical,
the latter that it is a mode of substance. Philosophers like
Hume, who regarded the self as ‘nothing but a bundle of
different perceptions’, effectively treat the self as belonging

to the category of modes. A problem with the Humean
approach is that perceptions—that is, thoughts and experi-
ences—seem to depend for their identity upon the identity
of the selves who possess them, which implies that percep-
tions are modes of selves and hence that the latter have the
status of substances vis-à-vis their thoughts and experi-
ences, rather than being reducible to them. e.j.l.
*homunculus.
D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).
S. Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca, NY, 1963).
B. Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973).
self, bundle theory of the: see bundle theory of the self.
self-consciousness. One view of self-consciousness would
be that it is the *consciousness of a special kind of object,
‘the *self’. In reply, it has been claimed that just as the eye
cannot see itself, so the self, understood as a subject of
awareness, cannot be aware of itself as an object. Accord-
ing to Schopenhauer, for example, the suggestion that a
860 Searle, John R.
subject can be an object to itself would be ‘the most mon-
strous contradiction ever thought of’. More cautiously, it
might be argued that the core of the intuitive notion of self-
consciousness is what might be called introspective self-
awareness, and that one cannot be introspectively aware of
oneself as an object. Sydney Shoemaker’s defence of this
view of introspective self-awareness is to point out that in
those cases in which one might be said to be conscious of
oneself as an object—seeing oneself in a mirror, for
example—one always has to identify the presented object
as oneself. Since identification always carries with it the

possibility of misidentification, first-person statements based
on such awareness are not ‘immune to error through mis-
identification’ relative to the first-person pronoun. Yet, it
seems to be a requirement on introspective self-awareness
that it is capable of grounding first-person statements that
are immune to this kind of error.
To say that a statement of the form ‘I am F’ is immune
to error through misidentification relative to the first-
person pronoun is to say that the following is not possible:
one knows that someone is F, but one’s statement is mis-
taken because, and only because, the person one knows to
be F is not oneself. For example, if one were to judge ‘I am
in pain’ on the basis of feeling pain, it could not happen
that the person one knows to be in pain is not oneself. If
self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error
through misidentification, then the awareness on which
they are based may be introspective, but could not be
awareness of oneself as an object.
Kant expressed this point by saying that the self as it is in
itself cannot be ‘intuited’ or perceived by means of *inner
sense. Since, for Kant, knowledge of an object requires both
a concept and an intuition of it, he concluded that know-
ledge of the self as it is in itself is impossible. Kant did not,
however, accept the Humean idea that there is no more to
self-consciousness than consciousness of subjectless mental
occurrences. Instead, he argued that consciousness of self
consists in an ability to ascribe one’s thoughts and experi-
ences to oneself. The self-ascription of experiences was in
turn claimed to require experience and knowledge of
objects other than oneself. A variation on this suggestion is

the idea, associated with P. F. Strawson, that for one to be
able to ascribe experiences to oneself, one must also be able
to ascribe them to subjects other than oneself.
A somewhat different approach would be to claim that
self-consciousness necessarily involves awareness of one’s
own body. Since bodily self-ascriptions such as ‘My legs
are crossed’ appear to be immune to error through
misidentification when based on awareness of one’s own
body ‘from the inside’, this makes it plausible that such
awareness is a genuine form of self-consciousness. If bod-
ily awareness is also awareness of oneself as an object, then
Shoemaker’s argument may not, after all, be decisive.
On the other hand, some have argued that the peculiari-
ties of bodily awareness are such as to cast doubt on the
idea that it is awareness of oneself as an object. The sug-
gestion that self-consciousness requires bodily awareness
is also controversial. q.c.
*introspection.
J. L. Bermúdez, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge,
Mass., 1998).
Q. Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge (Oxford, 1994).
G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).
S. Shoemaker, Identity, Cause, and Mind, expanded edn. (Oxford,
2003).
—— The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1996).
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959).
L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958).
self-control. Traditionally, a capacity to conduct oneself
as one judges best when tempted to do otherwise.
Self-control is the contrary of weakness of will or *akrasia.

Aristotle distinguishes self-control (enkrateia) from
temperance (so¯phrosune¯). The latter, a moral virtue, is
possessed only by individuals who have no improper or
excessive desires regarding bodily pleasures and pains;
self-controlled individuals have such desires, but they
characteristically resist them, acting as they judge best. On
more recent views, self-control may be exhibited in any
sphere in which motivational states compete with a per-
son’s values, principles, or practical judgements, including
practical and theoretical reasoning and the gathering and
assessment of evidence for motivationally attractive or
unattractive hypotheses (e.g. the hypothesis that one is
popular or that one’s spouse has been unfaithful). a.r.m.
A. R. Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy
(Oxford, 1995).
self-deception. Everything about the concept of ‘self-
deception’ is controversial among philosophers, begin-
ning with its definition. That human beings play a large
and often wilful role in perpetuating their own ignorance
and befuddlement is beyond dispute; but how legitimate
is the traditional characterization of the activities sub-
sumed under this role as ‘self-deception’?
Dictionaries define the term unilluminatingly as the act
of deceiving oneself or the state of being deceived by one-
self. Since deception involves intentional misleading, such
a definition invites the question precisely how one can
both intend to be misled by oneself and succeed in such an
endeavour. Can the *self perhaps be divided into a deceiv-
ing and a deceived part, as in Freud’s view of the uncon-
scious keeping information from the conscious self? Or

must one adopt Sartre’s paradoxical view, in Being and
Nothingness, that ‘I must know, as deceiver, the truth that
is masked from me as deceived’?
Many reject such views as logically or psychologically
impossible. Some claim that ‘self-deception’ refers to one
or more of four restrictions on perception, none of which
need involve the paradox of simultaneously deceiving and
being deceived: first, the ignorance resulting from our
necessarily limited capacity to respond to incoming inform-
ation; second, the ‘psychic numbing’ that constitutes a
reflex response to prolonged exposure to facts which
would, if truly confronted each time, be difficult to bear—
as when children shield themselves from fully responding
self-deception 861
to the violence they witness within the family or on televi-
sion; third, mechanisms of denial whereby we may end up
deceived about information that would otherwise be too
painful to confront, even though we are not consciously
deceiving ourselves; and, fourth, processes of more con-
scious avoidance such as procrastination, rationalization,
and compartmentalization.
Advocates of political and religious doctrines have fur-
ther disputed the nature of what we hide from ourselves.
The greater their zeal in promoting particular truths, the
more tempting it becomes for them to assume that non-
believers are not merely in error but actually engaged in
blocking truths they would otherwise have to acknow-
ledge as utterly self-evident. In practice, this assumption
easily leads to indoctrination and worse, as witch-hunts
ancient and modern make clear.

A final controversy about self-deception, however
defined, has to do with its desirability. The injunction of
the Delphic Oracle—‘Know thyself’—that underlies
much philosophy has long been pitted against dismal sus-
picions of what we would find if we took the Oracle ser-
iously. The drive for attaining greater understanding
about ourselves and our role in the world has clashed with
the fear of inviting revulsion or misfortune by probing too
deeply. Some have further claimed that judicious self-
deception is conducive to better mental and physical well-
being, as if to underline Jonathan Swift’s (ironical) remark,
in A Tale of a Tub, defining happiness as ‘the perpetual
Possession of being well Deceived’.
The continuing debate over the desirability of self-
deception reveals two incompatible views of optimal
human functioning. These views, in turn, generate incom-
patible conceptions of the role of all involved in therapy: to
what extent and by what means should they encourage
fuller self-understanding, or on the contrary promote in
patients what they take to be life-enhancing false beliefs? If
therapists choose the latter path, they run up, once more,
against one of the paradoxes of self-deception: for how can
they be honest with patients about their intent and about
any illusory belief they wish to encourage? But if they can-
not, why should their patients trust them? s.b.
*lying.
Sissela Bok, ‘Secrecy and Self-Deception’, in Secrets: On the Ethics
of Concealment and Revelation (New York, 1992).
Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (London, 1969).
Mike Martin (ed.), Self-Deception and Self-Understanding: New

Essays in Philosophy and Psychology (Lawrence, Kan., 1985).
Alfred R. Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton, NJ, 2001).
self-defeating theories. In the simplest sense, a theory is
self-defeating if the truth of the theory would imply the
falsity of the theory. However, the expression is usually
applied to theories that purport to guide action in some
sense—particularly normative ethical theories. A theory is
self-defeating if attempting to achieve what the theory
says ought to be achieved is bound to fail because of that
attempt. The best-known example is sometimes referred
to as the paradox of hedonism. Hedonism tells us that hap-
piness is the ultimate goal, but clearly if we spend our lives
single-mindedly seeking happiness, we are unlikely to
achieve it. *Parfit introduces distinctions between individ-
ually self-defeating theories (self-defeating when one per-
son acts according to the theory) and collectively
self-defeating theories (self-defeating when a group of
people act according to the theory), and between indir-
ectly self-defeating theories (self-defeating when the aims
of the theory are consciously adopted by the agent) and
directly self-defeating theories (self-defeating when the
aims of the theory are successfully achieved by the agent).
Some forms of consequentialism seem to be indirectly
self-defeating in the same way that hedonism is indirectly
self-defeating. e.j.m.
D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).
self-determination, political. The rule of a particular
group of people—nation or religious community or, more
simply, the residents of a place— over their own affairs.
Self-determination is not the same as self-government,

which usually implies some version of *democracy. A
group of people, freed, say, from imperial rule, might
choose the government of a king, an oligarchy, or a clerical
élite and, assuming that the choice is not coerced from out-
side, this would still be called self-determination. A right to
self-determination is a right to make choices of that sort. In
recent times, this right is most often claimed on behalf of a
nation. (*Nationalism.) But the character and standing of
the ‘self ’ in ‘self-determination’ is often a matter of dispute.
In principle, the right was invented for the sake of existing
collective selves, but it may also happen that collectivities
are invented in order to exercise the right. m.walz.
*homeland, right to a.
Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination
(New York, 1970).
Dov Ronen, The Quest for Self-Determination (New Haven, Conn.,
1979).
self-interest: see egoism, psychological.
self-love: see Butler.
self-regarding and other-regarding actions. A distinc-
tion among actions which becomes important if one
attempts to formulate *liberalism by defining an area of
conduct in which society has no business to interfere; as
does J. S. Mill, when he says that ‘the only part of the con-
duct of any one, for which he is amenable to society’ is that
which concerns the interests of others. Critics claim the
distinction cannot be made. j.m.s.
*liberty; state intervention; public and private.
J. S. Mill, On Liberty.
Sellars, Roy Wood (1880–1973). American critical realist,

evolutionary naturalist, materialist, and socialist who
taught at the University of Michigan. Knowing, for Sellars,
is an activity which, in disclosing objects by means of
862 self-deception
ideas, is about external things and consequently tran-
scends the cognitive organism. ‘The sensory complex
arises in the brain under patterned stimulation of the sense
organs and has the role of guidance of response. Such
guidance is a transcending role . . . we do not need to get
mystical about transcendence.’ Evolutionary *naturalism
is not reductive, since nature undergoes cumulative
change in which new patterns emerge. ‘Matter is . . . exist-
ent in its own right. And I shall think it in terms of the cat-
egory of substance’, not process. For Sellars, *‘socialism is
a democratic movement whose purpose is in securing of
an economic organization of society which will give the
maximum possible at any one time of justice and liberty.’
His son, Wilfrid Sellars, acknowledged close philosophical
affinity with his father, though he wrote in the idiom of a
different generation. p.h.h.
*Critical Realism; materialism.
R. W. Sellars, Critical Realism (Chicago, 1916).
Symposium in Honor of Roy Wood Sellars (Philosophy and Phenom-
enological Research, 15; 1954).
Sellars, Wilfrid (1912–89). American philosopher notable
for his thoroughgoing investigations in metaphysics and
the philosophy of mind. He distinguishes between the
manifest image of man as a being with beliefs, desires, and
intentions, and the scientific image of him as an embodied
being subject to study by physicists, biochemists, and

physiologists. The task of reconciling those two images is
a major problem in the philosophy of mind. Typical of
Sellars’s own approach to the problem is his verbal behav-
iourist account of thought and meaning in terms of the
functional role of linguistic items. (*Functionalism.)
Thought is inner speech which is modelled on overt
speech, and overt speech is the exercise of a capacity to use
words and sentences appropriately in relation to the world
and to each other. Thus nothing repugnant to the scien-
tific image is invoked. o.r.j.
*myth of the given.
W. Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and its History (Dordrecht, 1974).
—— Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with intro. by R. Rorty
and study guide by R. Brandom (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
semantic ascent. The move from talk about the world to
talk about the semantic properties of a language (e.g. the
move from ‘Snow is white’ to ‘“Snow is white” is true’).
This is said to involve ascent because of the doctrine that
the semantic properties of a language L cannot, in general,
be expressed in L itself, but only in a higher *metalan-
guage. The move is useful because ascent to a semantic
level enables one to express certain kinds of generaliza-
tions that are otherwise inexpressible. Thus, the sentence
‘Every axiom of Peano arithmetic is true’ makes, it is
argued, a claim about numbers. But, since Peano arith-
metic contains infinitely many axioms, the claim cannot
be expressed, without resorting to semantic ascent, by any
finite sentence. a.gup.
W. V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970).
semantics. InFoundations of the Theory of Signs (1938) C. W.

Morris divided the general study of signs (*semiotics) into
three branches. These are *syntactics, or the study of the
relation of signs to other signs; semantics, or the study of
the relation of signs to the things they represent; and
*pragmatics, or the study of the relation of signs to their
users. Semantics is thus the general study of the interpret-
ation of *signs, and in particular the interpretation of the
sentences and words of languages. Following Carnap, it is
commonly divided into pure semantics, or the study of
artificial and formally specified languages in the abstract,
and applied semantics, or the study of natural, empirically
given languages such as English or French. The language
studied is called the *object language, and the language in
which interpretations are given, the *metalanguage. A
semantic statement typically mentions a sentence or other
term of the object language, and says what it means, or
refers to, or what otherwise provides its interpretation
using the metalanguage. An object language can function
as its own metalanguage, at least to an extent circum-
scribed by the need to avoid semantic *paradoxes. A *for-
mal semantics is a fully systematic description of the way
in which an object language is to be interpreted, standardly
given by a recursive account of the way in which larger
meanings or truth-conditions for entire and progressively
more complex sentences depend upon the interpretations
assigned to their elements.
The fundamental problems for semantics are first to
discover what linguistic categories we need to distinguish,
and then the kind of description of the function of terms
that is appropriate. The great advances in the subject came

with realizing, for instance, that ‘Some men are mortal’ is
semantically quite different from ‘Aristotle is mortal’: the
phrase ‘some men’ does not function as a name or ‘term’
interpreted as referring to some men. The difference in
function is clearly seen when we look at the different kinds
of inference such expressions create. The theory of this dif-
ference (quantification theory) is well understood, but
other semantic problems have proved less tractable. Are
we content to say of a *name, for example, that it refers to
its bearer? In that case we see no difference between two
names that have the same bearer. Or is some more fine-
grained description needed, separating what is said about
each of two such names? The former option makes for a
more simple and logically more tractable system (exten-
sional semantics) while the latter initiates a search for prin-
ciples governing the more fine-grained (intensional)
features that separate terms with the same extension, but
which mean different things. Controversies in semantics
frequently centre on the use of various devices, such as
possible worlds, to provide the necessary interpretations.
But it is generally accepted that the more fine-grained the
discriminations or contexts that a language permits, the
richer are the categories and descriptions that a semantics
must adopt in representing its structure.
Even when these problems are solved, others remain
for a full philosophical semantics. For any semantics is apt
to deal in terms such as *reference, predication, and
semantics 863
*truth, and perhaps in addition the richer intensional con-
cepts of *meaning, *sense, and *synonymy. And even if

we are quite happy using such terms, the question
remains in virtue of what they apply (for instance, do predi-
cates mean what they do in virtue of shared universals,
and what are *universals and how do we apprehend
them?). If we consider a pure or formal specification of a
language as an abstract structure, then the equivalent
problem will be the question what is necessary for it to be
correctly attributed to a population. Divisions rapidly
arise over whether the appropriate empirical grounding is
given by one kind of fact or another. These problems sep-
arate semantics in a narrow sense from the wider concerns
of the philosophy of language. s.w.b.
*semiotics; language, problems of the philosophy of;
Montague.
R. Carnap, Introduction to Semantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1947).
P. Ludlow (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Language (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1997).
semantics, formal: see formal semantics.
semantic theory of truth. This theory was developed by
Tarski, who was particularly concerned to overcome the
semantic *paradoxes to which talk of *truth gives rise in
natural languages, such as the *liar paradox. He held that
truth could only be adequately defined for a language
which did not contain its own truth-predicate. Calling
such a language, L, the object language, Tarski undertook
to provide a definition by *recursion of truth-in-L, the def-
inition being formulated in an appropriate *metalan-
guage. For such a definition to be satisfactory, Tarski held,
it would have to enable one to prove all true equivalences
of the form ‘S is true-in-L if and only if p’, where ‘S’ is a

structural specification of a sentence of L and p constitutes
the correct translation of that sentence into the metalan-
guage. He showed how this task could indeed be carried
out for certain artificial, formalized languages, but
believed that the method could not be extended to pro-
vide a definition of truth for any natural language, such as
English. e.j.l.
*snow is white.
S. Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge, 1978).
semiotics. General theory of *signs. Peirce distinguished
three kinds of sign: icons, which are like the objects signi-
fied (e.g. naturalistic paintings); natural signs (e.g. clouds
signify rain); and conventional signs (e.g. red for danger,
and at least the majority of words). Semiotics is usually
divided into three fields: *semantics, the study of mean-
ing; *syntactics, the study of (surface ‘grammatical’ and
also ‘deep’) structure; and *pragmatics, which deals
with the extra-linguistic purposes and effects of com-
munications. a.j.l.
C. W. Morris, Signification and Significance (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968).
Sen, Amartya K. (1933– ). Indian economist and philoso-
pher at Harvard, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics
in 1998. Working on the foundations of welfare and
development economics, Sen is a leading theorist of social
choice. In the debate following *Arrow’s paradox, Sen has
been a critic of *welfarism, which appraises the value of
outcomes wholly in terms of individuals’ preferences
between them. Sen has argued for a consequentialist
ethics that incorporates respect for rights in its doctrine of

the good. He raised the ‘paradox of the Paretian liberal’—
an inconsistency, given plausible background assump-
tions, between the welfarist claim that if everyone prefers
an A to a B, then A must rank above B in a social ordering,
and a condition of minimal liberty that each agent possess
a personal sphere where her preferences dictate the social
ordering. Sen has worked on the nature of personal *well-
being and the measurement of poverty. t.p.
A. K. Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford, 1982).
—— On Economic Inequality, new edn. (Oxford, 1997).
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.2 bc–ad 65). Stoic, tutor to
Nero, chief administrator of the Roman Empire with Bur-
rus ad 54–62, and author of ten Moral Discourses, 124 Moral
Epistles, a satire on Claudius, nine tragedies, and a work on
natural philosophy. At worst Seneca is an unoriginal
philosopher and a contrived stylist. At best, in the Epistles
and Discourses (note particularly ‘De providentia’, a Stoic
dissertation on suffering, and ‘Ad Marciam de consola-
tione’, addressed to a mother on the death of her sons), he
writes with a vividness of illustration and a persuasive bril-
liance unrivalled in philosophy: philosophy is practical
goodness; excessive passion is evil; external goods are ulti-
mately valueless; life is infinitely worth while; tragedy can
be overcome or endured. Driven to suicide by Nero, his
reputation and his life alike were blighted by his infamous
pupil. j.c.a.g.
*Stoicism.
V. Sørensen, Seneca: The Humanist at the Court of Nero (Edinburgh,
1984).
sensation. The subjective aspect of *perception—usually

taken to denote the sensory (as opposed to conceptual)
phase of a perceptual process. In hearing a concert, for
instance, the sensation is the conscious auditory event pre-
ceding whatever thoughts and beliefs (if any) the sensa-
tion arouses in the perceiver. One might hear—thus have
a sensation caused by—a French horn without coming to
know or believe that it is a French horn. One might
misidentify it as a trombone or not have any thoughts at
all about it. This, presumably, is what happens with ani-
mals and young children. They can hear French horns.
They can, therefore, have sensations—perhaps even sen-
sations similar to ours—without these sensations neces-
sarily producing beliefs similar to ours. Perhaps (though
this is controversial and depends on just what is meant by
having a *belief) they can have sensations (be sentient)
without having any beliefs at all.
864 semantics
Aside from the sensations (visual, auditory, olfactory,
and so on) associated with the various sense modalities,
there is also a wide variety of other sensory-like phenom-
ena that are ordinarily classified as sensations: twinges,
tickles, pains, itches, thirst, hunger, feelings of sexual
arousal, and so on. If there is any feature that distinguishes
this odd assortment of mental entities, it is, perhaps, their
introspectively salient quality. The sound of a French
horn is utterly unlike the look or feel of a French horn. If
the sensation is identified, as it typically is in the case of
perceptual awareness, with the way things sound, look,
and feel, then these sensations, though they are all of the
same thing (a French horn), have an intrinsic, an intro-

spectively obvious, quality that distinguishes them from
one another. This is quite unlike such *propositional atti-
tudes as thought, belief, judgement, and knowledge.
Beliefs differ only with respect to their content—the
proposition believed—not in their intrinsic quality or
‘feel’ to the person having them. Sensations, on the other
hand, can be of, about, or directed upon the same thing
(a French horn)—thus having, in this sense, the same con-
tent—and yet remain entirely different. As a result,
thoughts are classified in terms of their *intentionality,
what they are of or about, while sensations are specified in
terms of their intrinsic character, what they feel or seem
like to the person having them, quite apart from what, if
anything, they are of or about.
A second feature of sensations that sets them apart from
such discursive events as reasoning, thinking, knowing,
and remembering is that sensations are, in the first
instance at least, independent of the conceptual or intel-
lectual assets (if any) of the subject. One cannot want
chocolate, believe that there are chocolates in the box, or
remember that one ate chocolate without understanding
what chocolate is. One can, however, taste chocolate,
smell it, and see it—and in this sense have chocolate
sensations—while remaining completely ignorant of
what chocolate is. In this way sensations constitute a primi-
tive level of mental existence. They occur at a level—pre-
sumably in certain animals—at which discursive thought
and reason are, if possible at all, not well developed. One
does not need the concept of an itch or a pain, the capacity
to have itch-thoughts and pain-beliefs, in order to feel

itches and pains.
Though sensations, unlike thoughts, differ from one
another in some intrinsic way, their epistemological status
remains moot. Is one directly aware of (say) a visual sensa-
tion when one perceives, in a perfectly normal way, an
external object? If so, is one aware of two things in normal
perception—the external object (we say we perceive) and
the internal sensation which it (the object) arouses in us?
Or is one directly aware of only one thing, the sensation,
while the external object is reached (known? perceived?)
by some inferential or constructive mental process (thus
being known or perceived indirectly) as the *representa-
tive theory maintains? Or is one only aware of the external
object, the internal sensation being known only by
inference, as *naïve realism asserts? If so, how is one’s
knowledge—which seems direct—of the character of
sensations to be understood? f.d.
A. Clark, A Theory of Sentience (Oxford, 2000).
F. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge,
Mass., 1981).
C. Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford, 1983).
B. Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London, 1921).
sense, manifold of: see manifold of sense.
sense and reference. Standard translations of Frege’s
terms Sinn and Bedeutung, originating in his 1892 paper
‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’. The reference of an expres-
sion is the entity it stands for: referring expressions stand
for objects, predicates stand for *functions (in the math-
ematical sense, which Frege called ‘concepts’), and sen-
tences stand for truth-values. Referring expressions and

predicates combine to form whole sentences, whose
references are a function of the references of their parts.
Senses are ‘modes of presentation’ of *references: the
terms ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ have the same reference but dif-
ferent senses. Sense was initially introduced by Frege to
solve the puzzle of identity: if ‘Cicero’ has the same refer-
ence as ‘Tully’, then how can ‘Cicero is Tully’ be inform-
ative when ‘Cicero is Cicero’ is not? The senses of the parts
of sentences combine to form the senses of sentences,
which Frege called ‘thoughts’. t.c.
*connotation and denotation; meaning.
Gottlob Frege, ‘On Sense and Meaning’, in Translations from the
Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. P. T. Geach and Max
Black (Oxford, 1980).
sense awareness: see awareness, sense.
sense-data. Subjective entities (allegedly) having the
properties the perceived external object (if there is one)
appears to have. In seeing a white circle under red light
and at an oblique angle, the sense-datum would be red and
elliptical (the way the white circle looks). According to
sense-data theorists, one perceives an external object, a
white circle, but what one senses (is acquainted with,
directly apprehends) is a red ellipse: the subjective sense-
datum. Then, if one is clever (and knows about the funny
lighting), one infers, on the basis of the sense-data one
directly apprehends, that there is (probably) a white circle
causing the red, elliptical sense-datum. In this way our
knowledge of sense-data is supposed to provide a founda-
tion for all empirical knowledge. f.d.
*perception; phenomenalism; representative theory of

perception.
B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York, 1959), ch. 1.
C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London, 1923), chs. 7 and 8.
sensibility. In one sense this can mean a set of individual or
collective dispositions to emotions, attitudes, and feelings.
As such, sensibility is relevant especially to value theory,
including ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Arguably, there are
at least three important interrelated types of judgement one
sensibility 865
can make about a sensibility: that some constitutive emo-
tions can be criticized or justified against criticism in various
ways (e.g. are ‘irrational’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘well-founded’,
etc.); that some constitutive emotions ought to be regu-
lated in certain ways, in light of criticism; and that individual
or collective responsibility is appropriate for some of the
emotions, in light of the possibility of regulation. e.t.s.
*aesthetic attitude; taste.
Ronald B. De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge,
Mass., 1987).
sentences: see statements and sentences.
sentential calculus. Where a *proposition is understood
to be a completely interpreted indicative sentence of a lan-
guage, ‘sentential calculus’ and *‘propositional calculus’
may be used interchangeably.
Where, as in Frege, a proposition is an abstract entity
which is the sense or content of a sentence, those objects
are represented by sentences. Different sentences in a given
or a different language may express the same proposition.
Given the elusiveness of such entities, the logic of inter-
preted sentences remains the vehicle for presenting the

logic of propositions as in the propositional calculus.
r.b.m.
B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972).
sentential function. An expression which can be joined to
another expression or expressions to form a sentence. Sen-
tential functions include *connectives, such as ‘and’,
which form a complex sentence from a sentence or sen-
tences. Predicates are also counted as sentential functions
since, for example, the predicate ‘ . . . is wise’ when joined
with the singular term ‘Socrates’ forms the sentence
‘Socrates is wise’. a.d.o.
sentimentalism: see moral sense.
sentiments. A sentiment is an attitude, in favour of or
against people and their actions, which may involve both
*judgement and *emotion. The term ‘sentiment’ has also
been used, as by Hume and Smith, to refer to a possible
basis for our moral attitudes. In this use sentiment is a feel-
ing which the objects of moral appraisal evoke in us; as a
possible basis for our moral attitudes, sentiment is
opposed to reason. t.p.
A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759).
Serbian philosophy.
1863–1945. Emerging after the foundation of Belgrade
University in 1863, Serbian philosophy gained a reputa-
tion through the work of Branislav Petronijevic´, whose
articles were later cited as authoritative in such works as
Lee’s Zeno of Elea (Cambridge, 1936) and Boyer’s The Con-
cepts of the Calculus (New York, 1939).
1940s–1960s. The philosophical tradition was dismantled
in post-war Yugoslavia by the communist regime. The

official establishment of ‘humanist Marxism’ followed the
1953 ideological cleansing of ‘dogmatists’. The critical atti-
tude of members of the ‘Praxis Group’ such as Svetozar
Stojanovic´ to the governing regime led to their dismissal
from Belgrade University in 1975. The international
reputation of ‘Praxis Marxism’ partly rests on non-
philosophical grounds. Non-Marxist approaches were not
tolerated and Alexandar Kron’s work in formal logic
represents the only such achievement of that time.
1970s and since. Although both politicians and Marxist aca-
demics became more tolerant in the early 1970s, it is hard
to understand how a critical mass of analytically orien-
tated, practically self-taught non-Marxist students was
reached so quickly. The ‘September Meetings’ in
Dubrovnik, established in the early 1980s by David
Charles, Timothy Williamson, and their Belgrade col-
leagues, resulted in what was later called the
‘England–Belgrade axis’. The distinctively analytic char-
acter of Serbian philosophy is underlined in that fourteen
of the sixteen Yugoslav contributors to the collection cited
below are, or have been, active at Belgrade University.
Hopefully, though now either spread throughout the
world or still working at home under unfriendly condi-
tions, some will make important contributions to meta-
physics, logic, epistemology, philosophical psychology,
ethics, philosophy of action, and philosophy of science.
Very well trained in philosophical analysis and symbolic
logic, they are particularly successful in using thought
experiments and the *reductio ad absurdum method. m.a.
*Croatian philosophy; Slovene philosophy.

A. Pavkovic´ (ed.), Contemporary Yugoslav Philosophy: The Analytic
Approach (Dordrecht, 1988).
set theory. The property of being human is said to ‘pick
out’ or ‘determine’ the set of all human beings. This has
subsets—the sets of Scots, English, etc.—and members—
e.g. David Hume and Jane Austen. At least normally, if not
always, a set is not a member of itself: thus the set of City
University philosophers is not itself, alas, another philoso-
pher, who could help increasing numbers of students. It is
an abstract object.
Our basic logical thoughts often embody relations
between sets, subsets, and members, for example in syllo-
gistic argument. Thus ‘All robots are musical’ says ‘The set
of robots is a subset of the set of musical things’; or, every
member of the first set is a member of the second. Between
1874 and 1897 Cantor developed an astonishingly rich the-
ory of infinite sets, including ones whose members are
ordered, and sets having even more members than the so-
called ‘denumerably’ infinite set of all integers—thus prov-
ing the existence of ‘higher’ infinities. Later, Russell and
Whitehead tried to show that pure mathematics is a
branch of the logic of sets, and is thus *analytic. Set theory
has applications within many areas of mathematics.
It is therefore extremely embarrassing that our simplest
intuitive thoughts about sets very quickly lead to contra-
diction. For if every property determines a set, then the set
866 sensibility
(R) of all ‘normal’ sets, namely, ‘those which are not mem-
bers of themselves’ is, if a member of itself, then not, and
vice versa (*Russell’s paradox). Alternative set theories are

formal, symbolic expressions of relationships between
sets which attempt to avoid contradictions with minimal
loss of intuitive acceptability. The Russellian approach
rejects as malformed symbolic expressions of both ‘S is a
member of itself ’ and its denial. Sets are put in hierarchies,
and one can only meaningfully express membership rela-
tions between sets of immediately neighbouring levels.
Such an axiomatization may be consistent, but only
through inordinate loss of expressive power. Zermelo–
Fraenkel–Skolem set theory only allows the construction of
sets from properties when certain other conditions obtain:
these entail the non-existence of R. Von Neumann–
Bernays– Gödel set theory is more comprehensive but
even more complex. It allows the existence of R, but it is
not a member of any other set (it is then called a ‘class’).
This seems counter-intuitive: for if R exists, then why
should there not be a merely two-membered set contain-
ing, say, R plus the set of all philosophers?. a.j.l.
Abraham Fraenkel, ‘Set Theory’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967).
Paul Halmos, Naïve Set Theory (Princeton, NJ, 1960).
Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy (Oxford, 2004).
sex. Biological feature distinguishing males and females in
respect of their reproductive roles (contrast *gender).
Thus, by extension, sex is thought of as a biological drive
which gives rise to activity that typically results in repro-
duction, or as that activity itself. This suggests that the
kind of explanation required for such activity is a bio-
logical one, occasioning such protestations as ‘My sex life
is not my fault: I’m programmed by my genes’. As well as

presupposing a crude determinism, this underplays the
role of *culture in giving rise to multifarious forms of sex-
ual activity (e.g. *homosexuality). Yet sexual desire has
usually been viewed as a blind desire, i.e. one the desir-
ability of whose object is not apparent to reason. It is
perhaps for this reason that the character of Freudian
explanations of behaviour in terms of sexual desire (and
their scope) remains mysterious. p.g.
*sexual morality.
Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire (London, 1986).
sex, philosophy of. The theoretical examination of
human sexuality, desire, and pleasure. Analysis has
focused on the attempt to establish non-moral standards
to rank sexual behaviours as ‘natural’ or good, as opposed
to perverse or bad. Central to this examination is deter-
mining whether sexual desire is localized simultaneously
within the phantasmatic as well as the sensory boundaries
of the skin. Thomas Nagel reworks Sartre’s notion of ‘a
double reciprocal incarnation’ into an account of sexual
desire as a serial unfolding of nested desirings of two
reflective persons. On this view, the category of perverted
sex would extend to include any solitary sexual practice.
This analysis of sexual desire in terms of reciprocating psy-
chic structurings has ramifications for justifications of
sado-masochism. Patrick Hopkins argues that rape simu-
lations are logically distinct from rapes, since certain sex-
ual behaviours cannot be properly individuated except by
their links with a shared sexual imaginary. Robert
Solomon not only continues this mentalist reading of sex-
ual desire, but refigures bodily gestures as having seman-

tic content: an intimate behaviour is a ‘natural expression’
that can be perverse if untruthful or feigned. Alan Gold-
man, on the other hand, rejects any account of sexual
desire that is not straightforwardly ‘bodily’. For Goldman,
sexual desire is directed toward the physicality of another
person and involves only a minimal, short-lived psycho-
logical component. On this account, the deliberate delay
of coitus and bestiality each count as perverse. Other
issues involve Kant’s claim that objectification is necessar-
ily involved in any sexual relation between persons.
Martha Nussbaum separates ‘benign’ objectification from
the malignant sorts marked by one or more of the follow-
ing: viewing the desired other as essentially replaceable,
lacking ‘boundary-integrity’, and failing to be the posses-
sor and owner of a unique personal narrative.
Michel Foucault challenges this entire analytic schema
by running a genealogy of sex. On his view, sex for
modern subjects in the West is discursive: subjectivities,
bodies, and pleasures are produced by the operations of a
particular regime of knowledge/power/pleasure. Fou-
cault delineates ‘a scientia sexualis’ that naturalizes the phe-
nomena it extracts and organizes through medicalizing
the confession, replacing the priest with the psycho-
analyst. He claims that any natural/unnatural schematic
is a mythic construction, since there is no non-linguistic
access to any pre-social human nature. b.t.
*sex; sexual morality.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. i: An Introduction,
tr. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978).
Alan Soble (ed.), The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, 3rd

edn. (Lanham, Md., 1997).
sexism. Thought or practice which may permeate lan-
guage and which assumes women’s inferiority to men.
The existence of sexism is acknowledged from a variety of
ideological perspectives, and sexism may be conceived
either as something one encounters instances of, or as a
pervasive phenomenon endemic to society. Thus ‘sexist’ is
applied pejoratively to individuals and to institutions both
by liberal feminists and by feminists who advocate a radical
transformation of existing *gender relations. j.horn.
*feminism.
Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A. Elliston, and Jane English
(eds.), Feminism and Philosophy (Totowa, NJ, 1977).
Sextus Empiricus (ad c.200). Sceptic and physician. Sextus,
about whose life we know practically nothing, wrote a
number of works on the complex history of the Sceptical
movement. The surviving works are: Outlines of Pyrrhonism;
Sextus Empiricus 867
Against the Dogmatists; and Against the Professors. The
second two are usually coupled together and titled Against
the Mathematicians, that is, all those who profess any sort of
technical knowledge. Outlines of Pyrrhonism provides an
account of the philosophy of Pyrrho, including a compari-
son of *Pyrrhonism with versions of Academic *scepti-
cism. The other works examine at considerable length
various dogmatic claims in the arts and sciences and scepti-
cal strategies that may be employed to undermine confi-
dence in them. These works are therefore a mine of
information on many ancient philosophical schools. Sex-
tus argues for the superiority of Pyrrho’s Scepticism to that

of the *Academy, although the difference between these
are disputed in the scholarship. Although Sextus is unre-
lentingly critical of all other philosophical positions, he
believes that Scepticism has a positive practical purpose,
namely, the tranquillity of soul arising from abandoning
the quest for knowledge of any sort. l.p.g.
Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (eds.), The Modes of Scepticism
(Cambridge, 1985).
Jonathan Barnes, The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1990).
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed. and tr. J. Annas and
J. Barnes, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 2000).
Philip P. Hallie (ed.), Sextus Empiricus (Indianapolis, 1985).
sexual morality. Principles of right conduct in matters of
*sex, or their observance. Two questions arise: What sex-
ual acts are morally permissible? With whom are they per-
missible?
The view that some kinds of sexual act are morally
wrong can spring from several sources. The most obvious
employs the *consequentialist test of whether they cause
harm. Thus some sexually sadistic acts may, by this criter-
ion, be condemned, though de Sade himself would reply
that they cause less harm than the acts resulting from their
repression. In the absence of reliable empirical evidence
on the effects of sexual behaviour (e.g. of reading pornog-
raphy), non-consequentialist criteria may be turned to.
One employs the notion that some kinds of sexual acts are
unnatural and therefore wrong. Two problems arise.
First, the mere fact that many sexual acts are not con-
ducive to reproduction (or to other biological purposes)
does nothing to show that they are unnatural, in the sense

of tending, or intended, to frustrate what, if anything, is
*natural to human beings. Second, even if they were, they
would not thereby be shown to be immoral without
further premisses such as the Roman Catholic belief that
what is contrary to created nature’s purposes is wrong
because contrary to its Creator’s will.
A more widely acceptable criterion condemns some
kinds of sexual acts as failing to treat those with whom
they are performed, or oneself, as *persons rather than as
objects. Kant seems to have treated all sex like this, hold-
ing that ‘sexual love makes of the loved person an object of
appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the per-
son is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been
sucked dry’. Sartre thinks of ordinary sexual desire as
aiming to avoid this, but failing, so that either one makes
the other an object, as in sadism, or one becomes an object
for the other, as in masochism. With Sartre’s pessimism
discarded, this has provided an influential criterion, par-
ticularly for *feminism. It does, however, require add-
itional argument to conclude that depersonalized sex is
morally impermissible.
The view that a sexual partner should be treated as a
person offers one in a series of answers to the question
with whom one may, morally, have sexual relations. The
most stringent answer restricts sex to *marriage partners,
ruling out, inter alia, *homosexuality; the next to those in
a relationship of *love, ruling out casual sex; then to those
desired and respected as persons, excluding, perhaps,
prostitution; and uncontroversially, to consenting adults,
ruling out sex with children and animals, who are incapable

of informed consent. The first three answers correspond
roughly to three general approaches in moral philosophy.
The ban on extramarital sex goes with an ethics of *duty.
The restriction of sex to love implies an ethics of *care. And
the person-centred approach emphasizes an ethics of
*virtue, of self-creation rather than spontaneity. It may not
be fanciful to suggest that the application of each approach
here is a reaction to viewing sex as a potentially disruptive
force—disruptive, respectively, to society at large, so that
exceptionless formal restrictions need to be imposed; to
personal relationships, so that sex must be tied to concern
for another’s welfare; and to the individuals themselves,
whose integrity as persons is put at risk by it.
Few philosophers have, by contrast, developed an
ethics of sexuality as something other than an appetite
requiring regulation. They have, however, attacked the
first two moral restrictions—on consequentialist grounds,
like Plato, as socially dysfunctional; on the grounds that
they inhibit individual *automony in relationships; and on
feminist grounds that they impose a pattern of relation-
ships which actually benefits men at the expense of
women. As to the third restriction, Nagel bravely main-
tains that ‘bad sex is generally better than none at all’.
Yet such *essentialist assumptions about sexuality run
counter to currently popular views, deriving from femi-
nism and *post-structuralism, which see different sexual-
ities as constitutive of people’s identities as e.g. a lesbian
woman or a straight man. These identities, like those of any
cultural minority, are regarded as prior to and formative of
the particular moralities which apply to them. Thus the

attempt to formulate general principles of sexual conduct is
viewed (as in a wider *ethical relativism) as the imposition
of the morality of one identity group—typically that of
straight men—at the expense of members of others. There
are, however, many difficulties with this approach: how
fine-grained are the relevant sexual identities? Are all iden-
tities (e.g. paedophile) to be tolerated, and, if not, why not?
Is the implied *libertarianism compatible with social
organization? Can the objections to a general ethical rela-
tivism be evaded? The absence of a middle way between
universalizing and relativizing approaches to sexual moral-
ity is sympathetic to contemporary practical, as well as
philosophical, uncertainties in this area of life. p.g.
868 Sextus Empiricus
R. Baker and F. Elliston (eds.), Philosophy of Sex (Buffalo, 1984).
T. Nagel, ‘Sexual Perversion’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge,
1979).
I. Primoratz, Ethics and Sex (London, 1999).
A. Soble (ed.), The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings,
3rd edn. (Lanham, Md., 1997).
J. Weeks, Invented Moralities (Cambridge, 1995).
Shaftesbury, third Earl of (1671–1713). Named Anthony
Ashley Cooper, like his descendant, the nineteenth-
century philanthropist, he is normally known simply as
Shaftesbury. Partly educated under the politically radical
Locke (though he later criticized Locke on both ethics and
epistemology), he was an early, if not always consistent,
representative, in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opin-
ions, Times (1711), of the *‘moral sense’ doctrine in ethics,
inventing that phrase. For much of the time, though not all

of it, he emphasized feeling rather than reason as the
source of morality: we approve of, or take pleasure in the
contemplation of, virtue, and this is because we are by
nature altruistic and not just selfish. Morality with him
becomes human-orientated rather than God-orientated,
though religion can motivate us further towards it. He also
foreshadowed to some extent *utilitarianism, which came
to prominence later in the eighteenth century. a.r.l.
S. Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens,
Oh., 1967).
shame. An emotion that serves as the focal point of ethics
in many ancient and non-Western philosophies, but its
comparative neglect in many ethical theories is illustra-
tive. The Judaeo-Christian tradition and many modern
theories place considerable emphasis on *guilt, but the dif-
ference between shame and guilt is profound and symp-
tomatic of a larger omission in ethics. Guilt (not causal or
legal guilt, but the feeling of guilt) is a highly individualistic
emotion, a matter of self-scrutiny and self-condemnation.
Shame, by contrast, is a highly social *emotion, and it has
to do with violating a common trust, ‘letting the others
down’. Like guilt, it is self-accusatory, but it is so through
the eyes of others, as an inextricable member of a group or
a community. The capacity to feel shame has thus been
cited as a pre-condition of all the virtues, as in the
Ethiopian proverb ‘Where there is no shame, there is no
honour’. Thus Aristotle, in his Ethics, takes shame to be a
‘quasi-virtue’. It is not good to feel shame, because it is not
good to have done something about which to be ashamed,
but to do something wrong and not feel shame is the

ultimate proof of a wicked character. r.c.sol.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis, 1985).
Shoemaker, Sydney (1931– ). American philosopher at
Cornell, known principally for his work in metaphysics and
the philosophy of mind. In the former he has argued for the
possibility of time without change. He has defended a
causal theory of properties, which has as a consequence
that the laws of nature are a posteriori necessary rather
than contingent; and a causal theory of identity over time.
In the philosophy of mind he is a vocal proponent of ana-
lytic *functionalism, in defence of which he offers a subtle
discussion of *qualia: he denies the possibility of absent
qualia, that someone might be functionally identical to us,
yet lack qualitative mental states; but accepts the possibility
of inverted qualia, that two people may be be functionally
alike but differ in their qualitative mental states. In add-
ition, his work has covered personal identity, memory, self-
consciousness, and dualism. m.g.f.m.
S. Shoemaker, The First-Person Perspective and other Essays (Cam-
bridge, 1996).
—— Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays, expanded edn.
(Oxford, 2003).
side constraints: see ends and means.
Sidgwick, Henry (1838–1900). British moral philosopher,
who developed the most sensitive, sophisticated (and com-
plicated) account of *utilitarianism in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Sidgwick was educated as a classical scholar at
Cambridge, resigned his college position because of reli-
gious doubts in 1869, but later became the first secular Pro-
fessor of Philosophy at Cambridge (1883). He was the

professor when McTaggart, Russell, and Moore were phil-
osophy students. Sidgwick wrote on many areas, but his
only great work is The Methods of Ethics (1874; and then five
other editions in his lifetime). This is not intended as a
defence of utilitarianism so much as an account of the ways
in which it is possible to reach a rational basis for action.
Starting with common sense, Sidgwick identifies three
such methods: *intuitionism, universal hedonism (i.e. utili-
tarianism), and individual *hedonism (i.e. *egoism). He
finds that the particular maxims of common-sense moral-
ity do not meet the criteria he lays down for something
being an intuitively self-evident principle; but that these
are met by certain ‘absolute practical principles’ of a more
abstract nature, such as that future good is as important as
present good, or ‘that the good of any one individual is of
no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say
so) of the Universe, than the good of any other’. With such
principles he manages to reconcile intuitionism and utili-
tarianism. However, he thinks that egoism is also an intui-
tive principle of action, which would only be made
compatible with utilitarianism by the work of God. Being
reluctant to introduce God for this purpose, Sidgwick had
no solution for what he called the ‘dualism of *practical
reason’, and hence ended the first edition with the sombre
words that ‘the prolonged effort of the human intellect to
frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct is seen to have
been foredoomed to inevitable failure’. r.h.
J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy
(Oxford, 1977).
Bart Schultz (ed.), Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992).

sign and symbol. A distinction first explored in these
terms by C. S. Peirce. Signs are a highly general category,
including natural indications of things. Spots are a sign of
measles, clouds a sign of rain to come. A sign of a state of
sign and symbol 869