The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 93 pdf

deriving from particular predications, as ‘This is a key’.
Since we do not then have a predicative use of ‘a key’ in
‘There is a key’, nothing which can be attached to the for-
mer phrase can be described as a predicate of a predicate.
It can also be queried whether ‘Something is a key’ fea-
tures a second-order predicate, but now because ‘is a key’
may be said to function in just the same way as in ‘This is a
key’, despite the absence of any namelike term. More gen-
erally, there is good reason for broadening the category of
subject to include a greater range of noun phrases than is
customary, even those that are negative, as ‘nothing’ or
‘no one’. So we might include here ‘Every dog has its day’,
‘Gentlemen prefer blondes’, and ‘Nothing surprises him
any more’. In ‘Every dog has its day’ the phrase ‘every dog’
is a genuine unit, relevantly on a par with ‘Fido’, though of
course not a name. It is relevantly on a par in so far as we
can say: ‘has its day’ is true of every dog. Similarly, ‘prefer
blondes’ is true of gentlemen and ‘surprises him any more’
is true of nothing. The contrast here continues to be with
‘Here is an F’, where we cannot say: ‘is an F’ is true of here.
b.b.r.
P. T. Geach, ‘Subject and Predicate’, Mind (1950).
B. Rundle, Grammar in Philosophy (Oxford, 1979).
P. F. Strawson, Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (Lon-
don, 1974).
subjective truth. This self-consciously paradoxical
description was employed by the Danish philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard to describe the force of passionate con-
viction and commitment, particularly with reference to
religion. The intended contrast, obviously, is objective
truth, scientific truth, matters which can be verified or

established by proof. But ‘subjective truth’, although con-
scientiously ‘unscientific’, is not therefore meaningless or
irrational, as some later positivists would argue (and as
Kierkegaard sometimes suggests himself). Subjective
truth is a commitment to believe, in the face of ‘objective
uncertainty’, in matters which cannot be demonstrated or
verified, such as the existence of God. The defence of such
convictions, in so far as there can be such, are strictly per-
sonal, a matter of personal passion (not mere ‘prefer-
ence’), and refer to an outlook on life, a way of ‘existing’,
rather than a set of cognitive or ontological commitments.
r.c.sol.
*double truth.
S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846; Princeton,
NJ, 1944).
subjectivism: see objectivism and subjectivism.
subjectivity. Pertaining to the subject and his or her par-
ticular perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. The term
pervades modern philosophy, usually contrasted with
‘objectivity’, but it plays various and sometimes ambigu-
ous roles in epistemology, in contemporary Continental
philosophy, and in cognitive science. In casual philosoph-
ical and other conversation, the term often refers to
unargued or unjustified personal feelings and opinions as
opposed to knowledge and justified belief. In epistemol-
ogy, especially since Descartes, the term is often used to
refer to the realm of experience, however circumscribed
and defined, and is typically defined with reference to the
first-person standpoint. The project of much of modern
epistemology, accordingly, has been the attempt to argue

from this admittedly limited standpoint to objective
knowledge, whether by ingenious deduction (Descartes),
causal inference (Locke), transcendental argument
(Kant), dialectical development (Hegel), or phenomeno-
logical analysis (Husserl). In recent Continental philoso-
phy, the subject of subjectivity has been under severe
scrutiny, and the very idea has been rejected by more rad-
ical recent opinion. Revolting against Jean-Paul Sartre,
who followed Descartes in insisting that free subjectivity
(as *‘consciousness’) was the ontological essence of being
human, such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Der-
rida have rejected the notion of ‘the subject’ altogether
and insisted that what is mistakenly identified by that
name is a ‘construction’ of politics, language, and culture.
In cognitive science, subjectivity has been argued, e.g. by
Thomas Nagel, to be the ultimate obstacle to any reduc-
tion of the mental to the physiological. Subjectivity, on
this account, is phenomenological experience, or ‘what
it’s like to be’ a certain conscious being (for example, a
man, a woman, or a bat), the tendency to project (and take
one’s own attitudes as properties of the world). The
notion of subjectivity is also used, particularly in multicul-
tural contexts, to underscore the importance of perspec-
tive, the fact that everyone sees the world from his or her
(or its) individual vantage-point, defined in part by nature,
by culture, and by individual experience. Philosophers
have often asked, Can we ‘escape’ our subjectivity? But
what would it mean to do so? What would it mean not to
do so? r.c.sol.
D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London, 1993).

J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, Ill., 1973).
E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague, 1960).
T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York, 1986).
J P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York, 1956); tr. from
L’Être et le néant (Paris, 1943).
J. Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, 1992).
sublime. The concept of sublimity is seen by some aes-
thetic theorists as of only historical interest, but by others
as a lastingly important mode of response to basic items of
human experience. From the later seventeenth century
there developed accounts of experience of objects that
exceeded our perceptual and imaginative grasp, and
defied neoclassical conceptions of form and *beauty.
Although these objects were daunting and dreadful, they
were nevertheless exhilarating to contemplate: Alpine
crags and ravines, storms at sea, the sky at night . . . Given
this duality, writers differed over the source of our
resilience vis-à-vis such intimidating phenomena. For
Kant, for example, despite the failure of imagination’s syn-
thesizing powers (we cannot realize the interstellar dis-
tances), our reason and our status as free moral beings
900 subject and predicate
allow us to cope with the sheer magnitudes and energies
of phenomenal nature and to be aware of a personal value
that these do not threaten. A religious note was, and is,
never very far from many accounts of sublimity: its dual
quality can be analogous to experience of the divine—a
mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as Rudolf Otto famously
described it in The Holy. r.w.h.
*holy, numinous, and sacred.

P. Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford,
1989).
R. W. Hepburn, ‘The Concept of the Sublime: Has it Any Rele-
vance for Philosophy Today?’, Dialectics and Humanism (1988).
S. Monk, The Sublime (first pub. 1935; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960) is
the classic historical account.
substance and attribute. The idea of substance has been
widely and differently used throughout the history of phil-
osophy from the time of Greeks onward—by Plato, Aris-
totle, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and many other
philosophers. What is perhaps the main distinction
between substance and attribute originally gave support
to the feeling that reality is independent and objective,
robust and solid, that there is something out there which
is abiding and remains the same in spite of varieties and
changes encountered in the world. Substance was taken as
the abiding and constant, while attributes and properties
changed. However, if changing, the attributes and proper-
ties were objective as a result of their association with and
dependence on the substance. Without an underpinning
substance or substratum to which to belong, could they
have reality? Originally, the distinction between sub-
stance and attribute was taken literally, but subsequent
revisionism has often made it almost grammatical or func-
tional (e.g. Leibniz, Hume).
There is indeed reason to believe that the
substance–attribute distinction, like the object–property
distinction, is parasitic on some other distinction. One rea-
son is that when we see an apple, for instance, we grasp it
at once as a whole object. We do not see it, as it were, com-

positionally, first seeing its red shape, then conjoining
with this a taste, a texture, etc., and finally proceeding to
unify these elements into a single apple. We do not per-
ceptually grasp an apple through the distinction between
substance and attribute. Perception seems not to be the
source of the distinction.
With the imposition of the substance–attribute distinc-
tion, objects which initially were perceived as wholes now
come to be analysed or restructured. The need to do so
seems to be pressed upon us by various considerations.
But the manner of the restructuring appears to be sug-
gested not by reality, so to speak, but by the linguistic dis-
tinction between subject and predicate, this being the very
means available to us for describing objects in their var-
ieties and alterations. Whereas the perception of objects is
as wholes, speech, on the other hand, is almost always
construed from parts, and is in this sense compositional.
Conceiving the unitary apple in terms of the distinction
between substance and attribute or object and property
seems to be parasitic on, and a suggestion from, the lin-
guistic distinction between subject and predicate.
Three considerations or aims have moved philosophers
to engage in the restructuring of things in terms of sub-
stance and attribute. The first aim is to secure the ability to
speak of similar objects whose features are nevertheless
being contrasted (e.g. a green banana and a yellow
banana). This aim encourages the idea of the object as
comprising a thoroughly denuded substance (often called
the ultimate subject of properties) on to which the attrib-
utes which it shoulders, and with respect to which object

and object can be compared, are grafted. This view of
things was held by John Locke, who made famous the
phrase ‘substance or something-I-know-not-what’. It was
also formulated by Aristotle in terms of ‘primary sub-
stance’. It was accepted by philosophers for centuries.
While the first aim addresses static and compositional
aspects of the existence of objects, the second addresses
dynamic aspects of the existence of objects, thereby
involving a reference to time, as Kant noted. It secures the
ability to speak of an object remaining the same yet differ-
ent, invoking the idea of *change. In this context, sub-
stance is proclaimed to be the perdurant in change, the
absolutely unchanging core, the ground which enables an
object to be the same in spite of the newness of its features.
The third aim also involves a reference to time, and
addresses intra-active and interactive aspects of the exist-
ence of objects. It imbues an object with the active power
to initiate change in itself (Leibniz) or in another object
(Locke and Kant) and the passive power to allow change
to be initiated in it (Locke and Kant). In this sense, sub-
stance is seen as the ultimate centre of force used in
grounding change-producing actions and causalities.
It is customary to think of substance and attribute in
terms of ordinary things. But it needs to be noted that two
sorts of primary substance have been discussed histor-
ically: material substances for the extended physical world,
and spiritual substances for the non-physical, unextended
world (Descartes). Spiritual or mental substances enter
into the attempted solution of the mind–body problem in
terms of substance *dualism.

All of this still leaves disagreement possible over the
necessity of a conception of substance. There is also the
question of the precise nature of its supposed relations
with the properties of an object. Why do the properties of
an object hang together? How should one think of the
relation between an object and its properties so that prop-
erties do not simply fall off and scatter, but are instead col-
lected in the object? Think of the difference between a
fruit with a pit (where the flesh corresponds to the proper-
ties of an object and the pit corresponds to the primary
substance) and a vegetable like an onion whose layers
aggregate without a supporting pit. This difference
between the two is over a sort of metaphysical arithmetic:
would subtracting just its properties from an object leave
anything behind, the substance or something-I-know-not-
what of John Locke, or would it leave absolutely nothing
behind? w.e.a.
substance and attribute 901
William R. Carter, The Elements of Metaphysics (New York, 1990).
D. W. Hamlyn, Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1984).
Richard Taylor, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963).
substratum: see substance and attribute.
sufficient condition: see necessary and sufficient
condition.
sufficient reason, principle of. Leibniz held that the prin-
ciple of sufficient reason is fundamental to all reasoning. It
states, in his own words, that ‘there can be found no fact
that is true or existent, or any true proposition, without
there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not
otherwise, although we cannot know these reasons in

most cases’. In short, the principle is that nothing is with-
out a reason for its being, and for being as it is: nihil fit sine
ratione.
Schopenhauer devoted his earliest philosophical work
to discussion of the principle, which he characterized as
what ‘authorizes us everywhere to search for the why’. He
rightly criticized his predecessors, Leibniz included, for
misunderstanding it, chiefly by confusing the notions of
reason and cause. Schopenhauer himself distinguished four
distinct explanatory applications of the principle: the phys-
ical (in explaining change in the natural world), the logical
(in deriving truths a priori), the mathematical (in giving
geometrical demonstrations), and the moral (in explain-
ing actions in terms of motives). This classification might
be unsatisfactory, but the principle itself captures some-
thing intuitively compelling, in having it that whatever is
or happens must from some point of view be finally
explicable. a.c.g.
G. W. Leibniz, The Monadology (1714), sects. 31, 32.
A. Schopenhauer, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Rea-
son (1813).
Sufism. A variety of Muslim *mysticism characterized by
the concept of a union of the human being with God
through the power of love. The union was thought by
many to be of the will and it was held that suffering, as well
as love, was a necessary condition of the union. Its days as
a major force in Islam are long since past. a.bro.
A. J. Arberry, Sufism (London, 1950).
suicide. The most conventional definition of ‘suicide’ is
intentionally caused self-destruction. However, several

problems for this simple definition arise from sacrificial
death, martyrdom that could have been avoided, actions
that risk near-certain death or mutilation, refusals of med-
ical treatment with foreknowledge of death, addiction-
induced overdosing, coercion to self-caused death, and
the like. Some definitions of ‘suicide’ have tried to take
account of these cases by not requiring suicidal intent, but
only foreknowledge of death or the acceptance of a risk of
death. These different definitions have led to disagree-
ments over cases—for example, whether Socrates and
Samson committed suicide.
Starkly different views about the moral justifiability of
suicide have also been defended in the history of philoso-
phy. Debates traditionally centred on whether suicide vio-
lates one or more of three types of obligation: to oneself,
to others, or to God. St Thomas Aquinas’s arguments are
typical (Summa Theologiae ii. ii, q. 64, Art. 5):
It is altogether unlawful to kill oneself, for three reasons: [1]
everything naturally keeps itself in being . . . . Wherefore suicide
is . . . contrary to the natural law and to charity. [2] Because . . .
every man is part of the community, and . . . by killing himself he
injures the community. [3] Because life is God’s gift to man, and is
subject to His power . . . . Hence whoever takes his own life, sins
against God.
In a famous rebuttal of such traditional views, David
Hume identified with a handful of pre-Christian classical
writers who considered suicide an honourable and some-
times praiseworthy act. An autonomous suicide, from
Hume’s perspective, is permissible (and on occasion laud-
able) if, on balance, more value is produced for the indi-

vidual or more value is produced for society than would
be produced by not performing the act of taking one’s life
(‘Of Suicide’, posthumous, although suppressed by Hume
in 1757).
Sir William Blackstone (1723–80), codified English law
by using arguments similar to Aquinas’s to explain the
state’s right to prevent and punish suicide. Blackstone cat-
egorized suicide as ‘self-murder’ and a grave felony (Black-
stone’s Commentaries, ch. 14). But when laws against
suicide progressively fell, Hume’s theses came to prevail,
both in Britain and in North America.
Philosophical controversy has recently centred on (1)
*paternalism in suicide intervention and (2) the justifica-
tion of assisted suicide. Regarding (2), see the entry on
euthanasia. Regarding (1), if individuals have a right to
commit suicide, then others appear to have a correlative
obligation not to intervene to prevent the suicide. Yet we
often do intervene, either by reporting a suicide threat or
preventing a suicide attempt. Many believe that we are
justified in intervening in these ways and possibly are
obligated to do so or at least to report suicide threats. But if
there is a right to commit suicide, are we as justified in
intervening as we commonly think? In the case of almost
any similarly intrusive, liberty-limiting action, the person
impeded could successfully sue those who intervene.
No one doubts that we should intervene to prevent sui-
cide by incompetent persons. But if we accept an unre-
stricted, free-choice principle, the imprudent but
competent suicide who would want to live under more
favourable circumstances could not legitimately be pre-

vented from committing suicide. Both law and philoso-
phy continue to struggle with issues about the extent to
which paternalism is justified in such cases, if it is. t.l.b.
M. P. Battin, R. Rhodes, and A. Silvers (eds.), Physician Assisted
Suicide: Expanding the Debate (New York, 1998).
Tom L. Beauchamp, ‘Suicide’, in Tom Regan (ed.), Matters of Life
and Death, 3rd edn. (New York, 1992).
John Donnelly (ed.), Suicide: Right or Wrong? (Buffalo, 1991).
902 substance and attribute
summum bonum
: see good, greatest.
supererogation occurs when one’s action goes beyond
the demands of duty. Supererogatory acts are praise-
worthy to perform but not blameworthy to omit. Saintly
or heroic acts are generally considered to be paradigm
examples. However, some philosophers (for example,
strict act-utilitarians) and theologians (for example, those
who emphasize that God demands our best at every
moment) hold that there is no possibility of performing
good or praiseworthy actions which exceed the demands
of duty, and on their view acts of supererogation are not
possible. g.f.m.
*ideals, moral.
D. Heyd, Supererogation (Cambridge, 1982).
superman (or overman). Nietzsche’s image conveying
the idea of human life enhanced and transformed in a
manner sufficient to render it worthy of affirmation, in
contrast to all that is ‘all too human’ about it, dispensing
with all other-worldly hopes and illusions, and overcom-
ing all disillusionment. The apotheosis of human vitality

and creativity, this image functions as a guiding idea by
reference to which ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ human types can
be distinguished, and as the locus of meaning (‘the mean-
ing of earth’) in Nietzsche’s naturalistic reassessment of
this life in this world. It has élitist rather than racist over-
tones and implications for Nietzsche, emphasizing the
importance of the respects in which human beings indi-
vidually differ in their abilities, and of the manner in which
their differing abilities are cultivated and employed. This
reflects his fundamental conviction that what matters
most, and so what is decisive with respect to human worth
and ‘rank’ alike, is ‘the enhancement of life’, which he con-
ceives above all in terms of the flourishing of cultural life.
(See e.g. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, prologue; The Antichrist,
sect. 4; The Will to Power, sect. 866.) r.s.
*slave morality; great-souled man.
Arthur Danto, Nietzsche (New York, 1965), ch. 7.
superstructure: see base and superstructure.
supervaluation. A method of valuation that supervenes
on several different lower-order valuations. A statement is
super-true (or super-false) if it is true (or false) on all admis-
sible valuations. Otherwise it is neither super-true nor
super-false. Statements in which the components have no
determinate truth-value can thus themselves be super-
true or super-false. ‘This is a really big book, or it’s not’, for
example, is super-true because it is true on all admissible
valuations, even if ‘This is a really big book’ is too vague to
have a single admissible precise valuation. d.h.s.
James D. McCawley, Everything that Linguists have always
Wanted to Know about Logic (but were Ashamed to Ask) (Chicago,

1993).
supervenience. A kind of dependency relation. One set of
properties is supervenient on a second set when they are
so related that there could not be a difference in the first
without there being a difference in the second, though
there could be a difference in the second with no differ-
ence in the first. It has been argued that mental properties
are supervenient upon, rather than nomically identical
with or related to, physical properties. o.r.j.
*psychophysical laws.
David Charles and Kathleen Lennon (eds.), Reduction, Explanation
and Realism (Oxford, 1992).
supposition theory. Medieval philosophers developed
supposition theory in the late twelfth century to specify
the *reference of a term in various propositional contexts.
A term has personal supposition when it is used to talk
about what it signifies, for example ‘lion’ in ‘She is feeding
the lion now’. A term has material supposition when it is
used autonymously to talk about its inscription or utter-
ance, as in ‘Lion has four letters’. A term has formal sup-
position when it stands for a concept or a *universal, as in
‘Lion is a species’. The modes of personal supposition
specify how many objects a term is used to talk about:
either exactly one (discrete supposition) or at least one
(determinate supposition); if the latter, either all instances
(distributive supposition) or several (non-distributive con-
fused supposition). Supposition theory was used to codify
and explain the inferential relations among sentences. It
was an important part of medieval theories of *truth,
*quantification, *entailment, and *fallacy. p.k.

*logic, history of.
Peter King, Jean Buridan’s Logic: The Treatise on Supposition and the
Treatise on Consequences, Synthese Historical Library, xxvii
(Dordrecht, 1985).
survival: see immortality.
Swedish philosophy. The history of Swedish philosophy
contains few really original or pioneering achievements.
To a large extent it has mirrored the general philosophical
development of Europe, though in a way that has been
marked by national prejudices and national concerns.
It was Christianity that first brought Sweden into con-
tact with the higher European culture. In the later Middle
Ages we find Swedish scholars who had studied at Italian
or French universities and were familiar with the best con-
temporary culture. Perhaps the most important figure
was Matthias Ovidi (d. 1350). He was the confessor of
St Bridget but also a learned philosopher and theologian.
His commentary on the Book of Revelation (Expositio
super Apocalypsin) was studied all over Europe.
When Sweden became a great power in the seven-
teenth century it became more interesting to the philoso-
phers of Europe. René Descartes went to Stockholm to
give lessons to Queen Christina—and to die. Samuel
Pufendorf became professor at the newly founded univer-
sity of Lund (1668). And Swedes began to take a keener
Swedish philosophy 903
interest in philosophy. The heavy hand of Lutheran ortho-
doxy lay over all intellectual life in Sweden, so out of
necessity philosophical questions also became theological
ones. The adherents of Aristotle fought a bitter battle with

the adherents of Peter Ramus. The main question was
which philosophy would best serve the purposes of the-
ology. When the new philosophy of Descartes reached
the Swedish universities it was at once suspected of theo-
logical heresy. Indeed *Cartesianism was officially con-
demned by Charles XI in a decree of 1689. Perhaps the
suspected role of Descartes in converting Queen Christina
to Catholicism had some part in the prejudice against
Cartesianism.
The most original philosopher and one of the most fas-
cinating personages of the Swedish seventeenth century
was George Stiernhielm (1598–1672). His unfinished
work Monile Minervae (The Necklace of Minerva) con-
tained the fragments of his philosophy, where hermetic
*mysticism was mingled with Neoplatonic *humanism.
His theory of language stressed the non-arbitrary nature
of words. According to Stiernhielm etymology is the key
to deep insights into the essence of things.
At the end of Sweden’s period as a great power there
appeared another mystic and philosopher who was des-
tined to fame. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) began
his career as a natural scientist, but was later captivated by
theology and religious speculation. Swedenborg’s visions
from the world of the spirits were scornfully dismissed by
Kant as Träume eines Geistersehers (‘dreams of a spirit-seer’).
But to the philosophers of the Romanticism Swedenborg
was an inspired genius. He was not typical of Swedish
eighteenth-century philosophy, however. The philoso-
phy taught at the universities was sterner and drier. The
arid rationalism of Christian Wolff for a long time held

academic philosophy in its thrall. Later the empiricism of
Locke and Hume found some adherents.
The era of Romantic idealism was pioneered by the
Uppsala philosopher Benjamin Höijer (1767–1812).
Höijer was influenced by Kant and Fichte, but developed
their ideas in an original way. His Afhandling om den
philosophiska construktionen (Dissertation on Philosophical
Construction, 1799), anticipated some of Schelling’s the-
ories. It was also favourably reviewed by the German
philosopher. At the same time its emphasis on the liberty
of the thought and the activity of the spirit was regarded
with suspicion by the authorities. Höijer’s academic
career was for a long time held in suspense. His import-
ance to the Swedish philosophy of the next century was
nevertheless immense. The transcendental idealism that
Höijer had introduced held the stage for more than a
hundred years.
The dominant Swedish philosopher of the nineteenth
century was Christoffer Jacob Boström (1797–1866), who
was professor at the university of Uppsala. Boström has
been described variously as ‘the Plato of the North’ and as
‘the Swedish Hegel’. His sternly rational *idealism made
no concessions to empirical reality—material things
didn’t exist. According to Boström true reality was
identical with God and his ideas. Boström worked out his
metaphysical system in great detail. It proved to have
important implications for every sphere of human life,
not least the political one, where Boström’s conclusions
were strictly conservative. Boström had many clever
disciples. In fact ‘Boströmianism’ dominated Swedish

academic philosophy until the turn of the century.
During the first part of the twentieth century Swedish
philosophy was torn between rival schools. Particularly
important was the feud fought between the Uppsala phi-
losophy of Axel Hägerström (1868–1939) and the Lund
philosophy of Hans Larsson (1862–1944). Hägerström
was famous for his *emotive theory of ethics. He denied
the possibility of practical knowledge and the existence of
objective values. According to him values were just pro-
jections of emotional attitudes. Ethical propositions were
said to be neither true nor false, being in fact just noises
indicative of certain emotional states.
Larsson, on the other hand, upheld the *objectivity of
values. But his most important contribution to philoso-
phy lay in the field of aesthetics. His book Poesiens logik
(The Logic of Poetry, 1899), was intended to show that
logical reasoning and poetic intuition are compatible and
indeed complementary.
After 1945 the strong German influence on Swedish
philosophy was broken and was replaced by an Anglo-
Saxon one. Swedish philosophers began to call themselves
‘analytical philosophers’. Among the most influential
philosophers of the first post-war generation were
Ingemar Hedenius and Anders Wedberg.
Ingemar Hedenius (1908–82) became the best-known
philosopher of his generation through his book Tro och
vetande (Belief and Knowledge, 1949). The book contained
a savage attack on Christian dogma and on contemporary
Swedish theology. Hedenius formulated a ‘maxim for
intellectual morality’ (to some extent inspired by Russell),

saying that you should only believe what there are rational
grounds for believing. As Christian belief is muddled,
contradictory, and incompatible with modern science, it
has to be rejected. Some theologians argued that religious
faith is atheoretical and does not aspire to say something
that is true or false. Hedenius rejected this view and tried
to show that Christianity is indeed making statements
about reality and is thus open to philosophical or scientific
refutation.
Anders Wedberg (1913–78) is best known for his work
on the history of philosophy. His Plato’s Philosophy of
Mathematics (1955) is still useful. But his most ambitious
work in the field was his Filosofins historia, i–iii (1958–66,
translated into English as A History of Philosophy (1982–4)).
Wedberg´s aim was to write the history of philosophy in a
new way. He carefully distinguished the philosophical
way of writing history of philosophy (which he chose)
from the historical way (which he left to others). The
philosophical way of doing history of philosophy was to
treat the philosophers of the past as contemporaries, to
look out for what might still be interesting in their theories
from a philosophical point of view, and to interpret them
904 Swedish philosophy
in a way that would make their arguments as coherent and
as plausible as possible, as seen by a modern analytical
philosopher. This should be done, Wedberg argued, even
at the price of the occasional anachronism.
Nowadays Swedish philosophers to a large extent pub-
lish their results in English. Logic, decision theory, and
applied ethics are among the areas where Swedish

philosophers have been particularly successful in recent
decades. s.n.
*Danish philosophy; Norwegian philosophy.
R. E. Olson, and A. M. Paul, Contemporary Philosophy in Scandi-
navia (Baltimore, 1972).
Swinburne, Richard (1934– ). Nolloth Professor of the
Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford from 1985
to 2002. His chief contribution has been to philosophical
theology. Perhaps his most interesting achievement is a
rigorous formulation of a cumulative case for *God’s
existence. In The Existence of God (1979), he used Bayesian
reasoning to argue that the probability of theism is raised
by such things as the existence of the universe, its order,
the existence of consciousness, human opportunities to
do good, the pattern of history, evidence of miracles, and
religious experience. He also argues that the existence of
*evil does not count against the existence of God. His
conclusion is that on our total evidence theism is more
probable than not. Swinburne’s more recent investiga-
tions have focused on distinctively Christian doctrines
such as sin and atonement, sanctification, and revelation.
He has also contributed to philosophy of science through
work on confirmation and on space and time. p.l.q.
*religion, problems of the philosophy of.
R. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2004).
—— The Christian God (Oxford, 1994).
—— Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford, 1998).
syllogism. Originally defined by Aristotle as ‘discourse in
which, certain things being posited, something else neces-
sarily follows’, it came to have the narrower meaning typi-

fied by ‘All men are mortal; Greeks are men; therefore
Greeks are mortal’. Until the revolution in logic in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most logicians
regarded four types of ‘categorical’ proposition as lying at
the heart of proper reasoning: ‘All S are P’, ‘No S are P’,
‘Some S are P’, and ‘Some S are not P’. A syllogism is an
inference made up of three propositions of these types.
Propositions not obviously of these forms (e.g. singulars
like ‘Socrates is a man’) were generally regarded as mere
variants on them, just as apparently non-syllogistic infer-
ences were analysed, and sometimes distorted, to fit the
orthodox structure. A syllogism may be defined as a piece
of reasoning analysable into:
1. three categorical propositions such that the third
(the conclusion) is presented as following from the
first two (the premisses), and
2. three terms such that one of them (the middle term) is
common to the premisses, the second is common to
the conclusion and one of the premisses, and the
third is common to the conclusion and the other
premiss.
The first term (the subject) of the conclusion is called the
minor term, the premiss containing it the minor premiss;
and the second term (the predicate) of the conclusion is
called the major term, the premiss containing it the major
premiss.
Inferences like ‘All men are mortal; all Greeks are men;
all Athenians are Greeks; therefore all Athenians are mor-
tal’ were called polysyllogisms. Polysyllogisms contain
more than two premisses but are analysable into a

sequence of two or more conventional syllogisms.
Syllogisms were classified according to their figure and
mood, and various rules were invoked to distinguish
between valid and invalid forms. c.w.
*logic, traditional.
I. M. Bochenski, Ancient Formal Logic (Amsterdam, 1951), 36–54.
W. D. Ross (ed.), Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics (Oxford,
1949).
symbol: see sign and symbol.
symbolic logic: see logic, formal or symbolic.
symbols, logical: see Appendix on logical symbols; nota-
tions, logical.
symmetric relation. A binary, i.e. two-term, *relation is
symmetric, or symmetrical, when it holds both ways if at
all, i.e. if it holds from x to y, it holds from y to x (in sym-
bols, R is symmetric if and only if
∀x∀y(Rxy → Ryx)); for
example, living with. ‘Asymmetric’ means: if it holds from
x to y, it does not hold from y to x; for example, being half
of. ‘Non-symmetric’ may mean either ‘not symmetric’ or
‘neither symmetric nor asymmetric’. c.a.k.
W. Hodges, Logic (Harmondsworth, 1977).
sympathy. (a) Emotional affinity between two or more
persons similarly affected by a given circumstance or (b)
disorder occasioned in one living entity by the disorder of
another. In moral philosophy, (b) is developed by Hume
to provide a quasi-mechanical psychological explanation
of why the well-being or misery of one person is of con-
cern to others. Adam Smith takes Hume’s ideas further in
his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which sympathy is

the analogous feeling that is experienced by the impartial
observer at the thought of the situation of the other person.
j.c.a.g.
Philip Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics (Oxford, 1972).
syncategorematic. Literally, what is predicated together
with (sc. some other predicate). So traditional logic
defined as syncategorematic a word that converts one or
more simple predicates into what was thought to be a
complex predicate, as in ‘no man’, ‘white and shiny’. The
word now has no technical utility, but is sometimes
syncategorematic 905
906 syncategorematic
applied to logical *constants or other *topic-neutral
expressions, such as ‘not’, ‘every’, ‘if’, ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘must’,
‘the’. c.a.k.
N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (eds.), The Cambridge Translations of
Medieval Philosophical Texts (Cambridge, 1988), i. 163–215.
—— A. J. P. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of
Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982), ch. 11.
syndicalism. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century revo-
lutionary movement among industrial workers aiming at
transferring ownership and control of the means of pro-
duction and distribution from the capitalist class to unions
of workers (syndicats) by means of strikes. Syndicalism
traditionally marched with *anarchism to produce
anarcho-syndicalism. *Sorel misappropriated this term
for his quasi-fascist theory of action through irrational
*violence, but mainstream syndicalism continued as a
radical-left workers’ movement. a.bel.
*worker control.

Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London, 1938).
synonymy. Identity of *meaning. Different occurrences
of the same expression (e.g. word, phrase, sentence) are all
synonymous unless the expression has more than one
meaning. Occurrences of different expressions, in the
same or different languages, may also be synonymous:
e.g. ‘bucket’ with ‘pail’, ‘j’ai froid’ with ‘I am cold’, ‘gift’
with some occurrences of ‘present’. Expressions that apply
in some situation to the same thing or things need not be
synonymous: e.g. ‘I’ and ‘you’ when the former is said by,
and the latter to, someone, or ‘boiled water’ and ‘pure
water’ when boiling and nothing else purifies. Con-
versely, in some situations synonymous expressions are
forced to apply to different things: e.g. ‘I’ said by different
speakers. The view sometimes held that synonymy of
expressions is the same as necessary identity of application
seems incorrect. s.w.
B. Mates, Synonymity, University of California Publications in
Philosophy (Berkeley, Calif., 1950), repr. in L. Linsky (ed.),
Semantics and the Philosophy of Language (Urbana, Ill., 1952).
syntactics. The study of syntax, i.e. of the kinds of expres-
sion in a language, and the rules which govern how they
combine together. In developing modern logic, Frege sug-
gested a theory of syntactic categories which is also applic-
able to natural languages. In Ajdukiewicz’s notation, the
two basic categories are sentences (S), and singular terms
(N); from any categories A and B we can form the new cat-
egory A/B, containing all those expressions which can be
combined with Bs to form As. l.f.s.
*pragmatics; semantics.

K. Ajdukiewicz, ‘On Syntactical Coherence’, Review of Meta-
physics (1966–7).
synthetic a priori judgements. The classification ‘syn-
thetic a priori’ applied to judgements, or to true judge-
ments, owes its origin to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(Introduction, B 1–19). It is a hybrid form constructed
from the separate distinctions between analytic–synthetic
and a posteriori–a priori truth. Kant held that we were
able to know some truths a priori rather than a posteriori,
independently of sense-experience, such as mathematical
truths, and that there was a separate contrast to be drawn
between analytic and synthetic truths. Analytic truths
involved judgements in which the predicate was semantic-
ally contained in the subject-term or alternatively those
whose denial yielded a contradiction. With these separate
classifications four hybrid forms can be theoretically con-
structed, although Kant believed that one (analytic a
posteriori) was impossible and two others (synthetic a
posteriori and analytic a priori) were uninteresting stand-
ard cases. The remaining hybrid, synthetic a priori truth,
was an important innovation, but both controversial and
variously understood. For the Logical Positivists the clas-
sification was contradictory, since they treated the two
basic classifications as equivalent; for Quineans the classi-
fication was flawed since the analytic–synthetic distinc-
tion was ambiguous and rested on an unelucidated notion
of ‘semantic containment’. More recently Kripke’s separ-
ate classifications of necessary–contingent and a priori–a
posteriori truth, and the resulting hybrids necessary a
posteriori and contingent a priori truth, have been

thought to parallel Kant’s innovation. Kripke shares with
Kant the idea that one of the basic classifications (analytic–
synthetic) is semantic, or logical, while the other (a
posteriori–a priori) is epistemic, but their conception of
the resulting hybrids is not the same. Kant’s case for the
existence of synthetic a priori truth rests essentially on the
idea that not all a priori truths owe their status to their
analytic character. If it is allowed that a priori truth is not
necessarily analytic, then some room is available for
synthetic a priori truth. g.h.b.
*analytic and synthetic statements; a priori and a poste-
riori.
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London,
1929).
S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980).
W. V. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical
Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
synthetic statements: see analytic and synthetic state-
ments.
tabula rasa.
A phrase (meaning blank writing-tablet)
from the Latin translation of Aristotle’s De anima (430
a
). It
does not occur in Locke’s Essay (1690), though it is present
in Pierre Coste’s French translation (1700). The Essay, in
its statement of the empiricist thesis that there is nothing
in the mind that was not previously in the senses, speaks
rather of the mind at birth as ‘white paper’ (ii. i. 2), await-
ing ideas from experience. r.s.w.

*empiricism.
R. I. Aaron, John Locke, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1971), 32, 35, 114.
tacit knowledge. Thinkers often perform complex rule-
governed tasks even though they have no conscious or
explicit knowledge of the rules involved. To explain these
capacities, philosophers and psychologists have supposed
that thinkers have unconscious or tacit knowledge of the
rules for executing the tasks. A prominent example is
speakers’ ability to produce and understand indefinitely
many grammatical sentences of their language even
though they cannot state the rules of grammar they con-
form to. To credit speakers with tacit knowledge of gram-
mar is to suppose they have information-bearing states of
mind—inaccessible to consciousness—that encode the
rules of their language and enable speakers to produce and
comprehend grammatical speech. To say that thinkers are
able to perform tasks described by a theory because they
tacitly know the theory is to say that they encode the
information recorded by the theory but not necessarily in
the form in which the theory represents it. b.c.s.
M. Davies, ‘Tacit Knowledge and Subdoxastic States’, in A.
George (ed.), Reflections on Chomsky (Oxford, 1989).
Tagore, Rabindranath (1861–1941). Poet, novelist, play-
wright, literary critic, painter, composer, and education-
ist. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, and refused a
knighthood. Although he deeply influenced the Indian
nationalist movement, he himself embraced a humanist
inter-nationalism. This *humanism also coloured his
metaphysics, in which the universal I of the human
enjoyer bestows beauty and hence truth on an otherwise

valueless universe. The Absolute Person who craves for
the love of a human other remains unknown like the pro-
tagonist of King of the Dark Chamber (Tagore’s play which
Wittgenstein retranslated). Apart from love of nature and
humanity, the highest religion of man, according to
Tagore, is to try to enhance our creativity, which is ‘the
surplus in man’ allowing us an occasional glimpse of the
deeper truth that ‘each of us is King, in our King’s King-
dom’. Thus, we can communicate with God, the cosmic
artist, only through our individual artistic freedom. a.c.
*Indian philosophy.
Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London, 1988).
Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). Widely regarded as Japan’s
next greatest thinker after Nishida, Tanabe is remarkable
for the immense compass of his thought, which ranges
from the philosophy of science and mathematics, through
the philosophy of history, to major works dealing with
ideas from Shin Buddhism and Christianity. Having stud-
ied with Husserl and Heidegger in the mid-1920s, Tanabe
became increasingly influenced by Hegel and Kant; and
during the 1930s he developed a ‘logic of species’ (shu no
ronri), which emphasized the role of the nation (as species)
as mediating between humankind (as genus) and the his-
torical individual. Increasingly concerned with philosophy
of religion, Tanabe wrote towards the end of the Second
World War his major work, Philosophy as Metanoetics, in
which he presented a ‘philosophy without philosophy’
based on the phenomenon of ‘repentance’ (zange) and a
way of thinking purged of the nationalistic elements that
he felt had vitiated the logic of species. g.r.p.

Taitetsu Unno and James Heisig (ed.), The Religious Philosophy of
Tanabe Hajime: The Metanoetic Imperative (Berkeley, Calif.,
1990).
Tantra. Ancient and medieval Sanskrit texts containing
somewhat unorthodox guidelines, followed by Hindus,
Buddhists, and Jainas, for rituals, meditation, and life-
orientation. The Tantras are deeply monistic and idealistic
in spite of positing numerous female and male deities as
immediate objects of worship. Some celebrate the body,
esoteric geometric patterns, and sexuality as instrumental
to spiritual transcendence. Elaborating a transformation-
ist account of *causality, Tantrism identifies the cosmic
knowing–wishing–acting power which has become the
universe with the energy that lies latent in the human
T
body. This feminine power is represented as a coiled snake
at the base of the spinal cord—waiting, as it were, to be
woken up and eventually united with the Supreme Male
Spirit in the cortex. The task is to recognize oneself as iden-
tical with this pulsating all-pervasive World-spirit. This
recognition-philosophy was developed into a full-fledged
metaphysics and epistemology by the great aesthete of
Kashmir Abhinavagupta (ad 980). a.c.
*Indian philosophy; Buddhist philosophy.
Arthur Avalon, Shakti and Shakta (New York, 1978).
tao: see Confucianism.
Taoism. Major school of thought in China which has been
influential on various aspects of Chinese culture, such as
art, literature, and religion. The two best-known Taoist
texts are the Chuang Tzu˘ and the Lao Tzu˘, both probably

composite and compiled in the fourth and third century
bc. Other texts traditionally regarded as Taoist include the
syncretic Huai Nan Tzu˘, composed in the second century
bc, and the Lieh Tzu˘, compiled in the second or third cen-
tury ad. Taoist thought further developed in the third and
fourth century ad, such development being often referred
to as neo-Taoism. Better-known texts of the period
include Wang Pi’s (226–49) commentary on the Lao Tzu˘,
and Kuo Hsiang’s (d. 312) commentary on the Chuang Tzu˘,
which either borrowed from or built on a commentary by
Hsiang Hsiu ( fl. 250). Development of Taoist ideas in this
period subsequently exerted influence on the Chinese
interpretation of Buddhism as well as on the later
development of Confucian thought.
A basic tenet of Taoist thought is that the operation of
the human world should ideally be continuous with that
of the natural order, and that one should restore the conti-
nuity by freeing the self from the restrictive influence of
social norms, moral precepts, and worldly goals. The
Taoist ideal is often characterized in terms of wu wei (non-
action, not-doing); the Chuang Tzu˘ presents it as involving
one’s responding spontaneously to situations with no pre-
conceived goals or preconceptions of what is proper,
while the Lao Tzu˘ presents it as involving few desires and
absence of striving after worldly goals. The actual way of
life involved is subject to different interpretations. For
example, some scholars interpret the Chuang Tzu˘ as advo-
cating a withdrawal from social life, while others interpret
it as advocating a relaxation of concern which is compati-
ble with ordinary social activities. Subsequent develop-

ments of Taoist thought likewise took different directions.
For example, while some Taoist thinkers of the third
century ad advocated a life of disregard for established
social conventions and values, others such as Wang Pi and
Kuo Hsiang regarded the Taoist ideal as compatible with
ordinary ways of life, including social and political partici-
pation. For Kuo Hsiang, the Taoist ideal is, for certain indi-
viduals, even compatible with their being sages in some
more ordinary sense, such as that advocated by the Con-
fucians—it is in the nature of some (but not all) to become
such sages.
Taoist thought also has implications for politics. Wu wei
can characterize the ideal form of government, which
does not teach or impose on the people standards of
behaviour, including those of conventional morality, and
which provides conditions making possible their function-
ing in a way continuous with the natural order. With
regard to the relation between states, the Lao Tzu˘ regards
non-contention as enabling a state to outlast competitors.
There is also a metaphysical dimension to Taoist thought.
For example, the Lao Tzu˘ portrays tao (the Way) as a meta-
physical entity which is the source of all things and which
is characterized by wu (non-being, vacuity), an idea fur-
ther developed in Wang Pi’s commentary. According to
Wang Pi, tao is the ultimate reality which transcends all
distinctions and conceptualizations. Its substance is wu
and its function wu-wei; that is, it does not create or do any-
thing, but just lets things follow their natural course. Sim-
ilarly, the sage has wu as substance and wu-wei as function
in that he has eliminated all attachments of the self and

just lets everything follow its natural course, without
devising and imposing a way of life on himself or others.
k l.s.
*Chinese philosophy; Confucianism.
Chuang Tzu˘: The Inner Chapters, tr. A. C. Graham (London, 1981).
Commentary on the Lao Tzu˘ by Wang Pi, tr. Ariane Rump and
Wing-tsit Chan (Honolulu, 1979).
Lao Tzu˘ (Tao Te Ching), tr. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, 1963).
Tarot. The Tarot pack, in its original form, was invented
in the early fifteenth century, at the Court either of Milan
or of Ferrara. It consists of seventy-eight cards, being
essentially an ordinary pack of cards (save for having four
instead of three court-cards in each suit) to which twenty-
two additional picture-cards, not belonging to any of the
four suits, have been added; the suit-signs are those then
ordinarily used in Italy, and still used in many parts of it,
for ordinary playing-cards. The only use for these cards
recorded before the eighteenth century was to play a par-
ticular type of card-game, still played in numerous ver-
sions in many parts of Europe: one of the picture-cards,
the Fool, or Matto, is a kind of wild card, and the remain-
ing ones, which form a sequence and depict standard sub-
jects such as Love, the Devil, the Star, and so forth, are
permanent trumps. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin
propounded the theory that the cards had been invented
by ancient Egyptian priests as a symbolic expression of
their beliefs; the theory was rapidly exploited by profes-
sional fortune-tellers. In the mid-nineteenth century the
French writer Éliphas Lévi incorporated ‘the Tarot’ into
his cloudy brand of occultist doctrine, principally by

entwining its images with the Kabbalah, with which they
had in origin had nothing to do. In the last twelve years of
the nineteenth century these ideas were taken up in
Britain, and in the early years of the twentieth century
spread throughout the world. m.d.
T. Depaulis, Tarot: Jeu et magie (Paris, 1984).
M. Dummett, The Game of Tarot (London, 1980).
908 Tantra
Tarski, Alfred (1902–83). Tarski was born in Poland, and
taught mathematics at the University of Warsaw until he
emigrated to the United States in 1939. Appointed Profes-
sor of Mathematics at the University of California at
Berkeley in 1946, he made important contributions to the
subject. It is for his work in logic that he is best known to
philosophers, for it established the foundations of modern
logical theory.
The seminal ideas appear in an early paper (tr. as ‘The
Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’ (1935), repr.
in Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics), whose goal was
a definition of truth for sentences, in a way that both
ensures satisfaction of the schema of type T (*‘snow is
white’) and avoids the *liar paradox. In this paper Tarski
distinguishes between a formalized language L, on the one
hand, whose sentences meet a purely syntactical criterion
of well-formedness, and an interpretation
ℑ of L, a structure
consisting of domains of individuals and predicates and
relations defined in these domains, on the other. The
domains supply the values of variables of appropriate type
in the language, and the predicates and relations of

ℑ are
correlated with predicate and relation symbols of L. A gen-
eral characterization of *truth in
ℑ for sentences of L can
then be specified in terms of the inductively defined rela-
tion of *satisfaction. Tarski showed also that this definition
could not be carried out in L itself, but required the
resources of a richer metalanguage (Tarski’s theorem).
If each of a set Q of sentences of L is true in
ℑ, ℑ is said to
be a model of Q. In his 1936 paper ‘On the Concept of Log-
ical Consequence’ (reprinted in Logic, Semantics, and Meta-
mathematics), Tarski founded what quickly became the
accepted theory of logical consequence on the model con-
cept: a sentence s is a consequence of a set P of premisses
just in case, when both are formalized, every model of P is
a model of {s}. Such has been the comprehensiveness of
the Tarskian revolution in logic that only recently have
dissenting voices been raised (for example, Etchemendy,
The Concept of Logical Consequence). c.h.
*semantic theory of truth.
J. Etchemendy, The Concept of Logical Consequence (Cambridge,
Mass., 1990).
A. Tarski, Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics, 2nd edn.
(Indianapolis, 1983).
tar-water. Made by stirring together tar and cold water,
and drawing off the impregnated water after the solid
residues have settled. Advocated by Berkeley in his
strange work Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and
Inquiries (1744) for its ‘extraordinary virtues’ as an all-

purpose medicine. His enthusiasm, though excessive, was
widely shared in the later eighteenth century and, as a
mild antiseptic, tar-water was probably not entirely
useless. g.j.w.
A. A. Luce, The Life of George Berkeley (London, 1949), 196–206.
taste. The appreciative *sensibility of observers who experi-
ence delight when disinterestedly contemplating certain
natural and artefactual objects ranging from meteoroid
showers over Death Valley to performances of Der
Rosenkavalier. This concept evolved from Dominique
Bouhours’s use of ‘la délicatesse’ in 1687 to mark the import-
ance of emotion in aesthetic appreciation and the ultimacy
of individual response over classical canons of correctness.
In England, taste was first modelled as a quasi-perceptual
inner sense of beauty not involving judgement (Hutche-
son). Hume expected standards to be established by isol-
ating features which pleased most serene, experienced
observers. Kant argued that taste judgements were subject-
ive and universally valid. In the twentieth century taste was
redefined by some as a discriminatory sensitivity to aes-
thetic qualities of artworks by insightful percipients. The
correct perception is triggered by knowledge of history,
biography, intention (Croce), or boosted by use of simile
and metaphor like ‘His canvasses are fires, they crackle,
burn, and blaze’ (Frank Sibley). b.t.
Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Art Theory (New York, 1970).
tautology. A *well-formed formula φ of the *propos-
itional calculus is a tautology if the formula is true what-
ever truth-values are assigned to its basic (atomic)
propositional components. This can be determined by

*truth-tables. (*Decision procedure.) Tautologies in the
predicate calculus can be determined by treating quanti-
fied formulae as if they were basic components of well-
formed formulae and testing for tautologousness. For
example,
((x)Fx ∨ ~(x)Fx)
is a tautology, corresponding as it does to (P ∨~P),
whereas
((x)Fx ∨ (x)~Fx)
is not a tautology.
In an earlier use, the entire set of logically valid propos-
itions or analytic truths were sometimes designated as
tautologies.
On still another use, the theorems of the propositional
calculus
φ
≡ (φ ∨ φ)
φ
≡ (φ · φ)
are sometimes described as principles of tautology. r.b.m.
B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972).
E. L. Post, ‘Introduction to a General Theory of Propositions’,
American Journal of Mathematics (1921).
Taylor, Charles (1931– ). Canadian philosopher and polit-
ical theorist (primarily at Oxford and McGill) whose writ-
ing includes a critique of behaviourism in psychology (The
Explanation of Behaviour (1964)), work in and about polit-
ical science, and support for the general view that the
methodology of natural science and that of *social science
(the latter centring on interpretation) differ fundamen-

tally. He has defended positive freedom, contributed to
theory of responsibility, and written on Hegel. Though
not reducible to one theme, Taylor’s work often criticizes
Taylor, Charles 909