meta-ethical theory continued when in 1994 Michael Smith published The Moral Problem, an attempt at reconcil- ing a form of moral rationalism with a Humean approach to motivation. A different way of approaching philosophical, political, and moral problems, incorporating psychological and sociological perspectives, has inspired a distinctive school of Australian feminist philosophy, in the hands of Moira Gatens, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, whose writing inter- sects to an extent with a developing interest in, and indeed resurgence of, European philosophy in both Australia and New Zealand. Matching the synthesis of analytic and European styles of philosophizing championed by Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty in the United States, a similar convergence has characterized recent Australian writing by Max Deutscher, Jeff Malpas, Paul Redding, and a few others. Applied ethics has lately received recognition, and large-scale financial support, in keeping with earlier Aus- tralian pioneering studies in environmental philosophy by Routley, Passmore, Val Routley (later Plumwood), Robert Elliot, and others. Debates on social and political justice, poverty, abortion, bioethics, and biomedical ethics have been subject to philosophically informed scrutiny by writ- ers like Michael Tooley, Genevieve Lloyd, Peter Singer, Freya Mathews, Janna Thompson, and Rai Gaita. While some of these arguments have taken on a life of their own, disengaged from technical issues within philosophy itself, the emergence of intellectual debate at home and over- seas featuring these and other thinkers is a powerful testi- mony to the continuing vigour and influence of Australian philosophy. a.bre. *New Zealand philosophy; women in philosophy. C. A. J. Coady, ‘Australia, Philosophy in’, in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London, 1998). S. A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia (St Lucia, Queens- land, 1984). J. T. J. Srzednicki and D. Wood (eds.), Essays on Philosophy in Aus- tralia (Dordrecht, 1992). authenticity. The condition of those, according to Hei- degger, who understand the existential structure of their lives. Heidegger held that each of us acquires an identity from our situation—our family, culture, etc. Usually we just absorb this identity uncritically, but to let one’s values and goals remain fixed without critical reflection on them is ‘inauthentic’. The ‘authentic’ individual, who has been aroused from everyday concerns by Angst, takes responsi- bility for their life and thereby ‘chooses’ their own iden- tity. But Heidegger also holds that some degree of inauthenticity is unavoidable: the critical assessment of values presupposes an uncritical acceptance of them, and the practical necessities of life give a priority to unreflect- ive action over critical deliberation. So, as Heidegger makes clear, authenticity is like Christian salvation: a state which ‘fallen’ individuals cannot guarantee by their own efforts. t.r.b. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford, 1962), sects. 38, 41, 61–6. authority. An authority is a person or group having a right to do or to demand something, including the right to demand that other people do something. Authority is invariably and justifiably discussed along- side *power. The joint discussion is justifiable not only because the concepts overlap in confusing ways but also because both are essential for an adequate analysis of polit- ical and legal systems. Authority is of course used in contexts other than the legal and political. We speak in various contexts of people being ‘in authority’, ‘having authority’, and ‘being author- ized’. What is common to all these usages is the essential idea of having some sort of right or entitlement to behave in the way indicated, or that the behaviour is in some way ‘legitimate’ (another concept essentially related to author- ity). This analysis applies also to Max Weber’s account of authority, which has exerted a large influence on socio- logical theory. Weber distinguishes three kinds of author- ity: rational–legal, traditional, and charismatic. In rational– legal authority the right to give orders or to act in certain ways derives from an office or role held within a set of rules setting out rights and duties. Traditional authority exists because those accepting the authority see it as deriving from a long and hallowed tradition of obedience to a leader. Charismatic authority exists where exceptional abilities cause a person to be followed or obeyed, and the exceptional ability is perceived as conferring a right to lead. (We must add the last clause or charismatic authority will become simply charismatic power.) If authority is to be effective the person in authority must also possess power. But the two are distinct: a gov- ernment in exile may be legitimate or be in authority or be de jure, whereas the de facto rulers may have power while lacking the authority. But while that is true as far as it goes the situation is more complex than that neat distinction suggests. A schoolteacher may be in authority, but have no authority with his pupils. This means not just that he lacks power to influence them; it also means that in some sense they do not regard him as legitimate. The same situ- ation could happen politically. The explanation of the paradox lies in a separation which has taken place between two sorts of legitimization: in terms of rules and in terms of popular approval. A second complication in distin- guishing authority from power is that for some people or groups the source of their power lies in the fact that they are in authority. We could then say that authority is their ‘power-base’ (as it is sometimes called), just as wealth, mili- tary might, or physical beauty might be power-bases. If we stress this line of thought, then it would be possible to make ‘power’ the dominant concept and authority would become a subset of power, and some political theorists and sociologists might take this line. But it is more usual, and probably it is philosophically preferable, to contrast authority as a de jure or normative concept with power as a de facto or causal concept, and allow that in some cases there can be overlap. No consistent distinction between the two can be derived from ordinary usage or political 70 Australian philosophy and legal discourse, and some measure of stipulation is inevitable. We are left with one sense of ‘authority’ to fit in— where we speak of a person as being (say) an authority on birds or the seventeenth century. But this sense can be accommodated into our analysis: the authority has passed recognized examinations, published in the journals, and written the books which entitle or give the right to pro- nounce on the subject. r.s.d. A. de Crespigny and A. Wertheimer (eds.), Contemporary Political Theory (London, 1970). C. J. Friedrich (ed.), Authority: Nomos, i (New York, 1958). J. Raz (ed.), Authority (Oxford, 1990). Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, tr. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York, 1947). autobiography, philosophical. The role and aims of autobiography have changed in fundamental ways in the course of the history of philosophy. Marcus Aurelius, author of a quasi-autobiographical Meditations, noted that nothing is as morally uplifting and joyful as meditating on a virtuous life, and this provided a rationale for autobiog- raphy from antiquity up to the modern era. Descartes, in the autobiographical sections of his Discourse on Method (1637), was not so much concerned to register how he felt and worked, but rather with how someone in this position should have felt and worked: the story he tells is designed to be morally and intellectually uplifting, and would doubtless have seen the kind of aims that have guided nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiography as mere self-indulgence and an amoral form of narcissism, a genre useless for moral or personal guidance. Hume and Rousseau, writing in the eighteenth century, presented their lives—the first briefly, the second at length—as vir- tuous and blameless, although in Rousseau’s case this did not prevent him from revealing personal and sexual details. The idea of a person having a history other than that which typifies a particular aspect of some general human condition receives its first expression in the late sixteenth century in the Essays of Montaigne. Montaigne initiated his project of self-exploration with the traditional aim of discovering a universal human nature, but what he ended up doing was something completely different: he discovered himself, his thoughts, feelings, emotions. Although biography continued primarily within a didactic genre up to the end of the nineteenth century, Montaigne initiated an understanding of subjectivity which—in the hands of Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, and others—fostered a notion of the self as a centralized locus of subjectivity. This philosophical understanding of subjectivity gradually changed what was possible at the biographical level. From the end of the nineteenth century, developments in areas such as psychoanalysis allowed a deepening of the way in which affective states were thought of, and this had a very significant impact on the genre of biography, encouraging the inclusion of detailed material which would have been thought irrelevant or inappropriate in earlier conceptions of the genre. It also had a reductive effect, however, levelling differences between the philosopher, the politician, and the artist, for example, so that individual psychology now became the focus of biography. One of the main values of philosophical autobiography is that it can show us the struggle to develop philosophical theories—a struggle which involves hestitations, mis- takes, and uncertainties—that helps demystify claims to special access to truth. Another is providing a context for philosophical views—this is especially the case in J. S. Mill’s autobiography—which enables us to see how they arose out of general political and economic concerns, for example, giving us a sense of how philosophers have elu- cidated particularly intractable problems by translating them into a philosophical form. However, like any other form of autobiography, philosophers can use the genre to obfuscate or to rationalize their beliefs or behaviour. Descartes, for example, was keen for his readers to believe that he never rose before midday and spent little time on philosophy, for this was how he saw the behaviour of a gentleman, whereas in fact he spent the whole of his day on philosophical and related questions. Russell intimated in his autobiography that his shift of interest from philoso- phy to social questions in the early 1920s was the result of his experiences in the First World War, but as more recent biographical and autobiographical work has shown, the shift derives rather from his meeting with D. H. Lawrence, whom he later came to regard as a proto- Fascist and whose influence he disowned. Few philosophical autobiographies stand out as great works of literature, but the autobiographical writings of Augustine, Rousseau, Mill, and Simone de Beauvoir (many would also include at least the first volume of Rus- sell’s autobiography in this list) stand out as classics, and are likely to be read as long as philosophy exists. s.g. Augustine, Confessions, tr. H. Chadwick, (Oxford, 1991). Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Harmondsworth, 2001). —— Force of Circumstance (New York, 1994). —— Prime of Life (Harmondsworth, 1965). R. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, tr. D. Clarke (Harmondsworth, 1999). M. de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. D. Frame (Stanford, Calif., 1965). J J. Rousseau, Confessions (1782) (Harmondsworth, 1953). B. Russell, Autobiography (London, 1967). autonomy and heteronomy. Correlative terms, developed by Kant, of very wide applicability to moral the- ory. Autonomy (Greek ‘self’ + ‘law’) understands the moral imperative as the moral agent’s own freely and rationally adopted moral policy. As moral agents, we are all subject to the moral law, but we repudiate all maxims (personal policies of action) which ‘cannot accord with the will’s own enactment of universal law’ (Groundwork, ch. 2). All alternative accounts, where moral law is commanded from without, are heteronomous (the law of ‘another’). autonomy and heteronomy 71 Among heteronomous theories are those that see moral imperatives as commands of the state or of society, or even as the commands of a deity. No less heter- onomous is a theory that identifies the source of moral- ity with some contingent drive or sentiment in one’s empirical psychology. For a Kantian moralist, moral maturity crucially involves the recognition of autonomy. There is an important link here with *freedom. Heteron- omy, in any form, entails that we are passive under some command or impulsion which we do not, can not, initiate. In contrast, if we autonomously recognize and endorse a moral value, make it our own, we are acting (when we obey it) as we have most deeply and freely resolved to act. What autonomy amounts to, however, has been interpreted in radically different ways: by some as the dis- cerning and ‘enacting’—through common rational proced- ures—of a common moral law. This was Kant’s own position. As reworked by certain Existentialists, analytical philosophers, and radical educationalists, autonomy has amounted to the individual’s total sovereignty over his or her ‘choice’ of moral values and self-construction, a view that accords a unique importance to *‘authenticity’, free- dom from ‘mauvaise foi’. This extreme version of auton- omy is seriously and dangerously flawed. It is hard or impossible, for one thing, to justify in its own terms the place it gives to the virtue of authenticity itself. Again, it would seem to imply that any value-claim whatever (‘maximize suffering’, say) is vindicated so long as it stems from individual, ‘autonomous’ decision. In practice, such implications tend to be masked by smuggling into a theory basic, common judgements of value not at all derived from individual decision. r.w.h. *autonomy in applied ethics; bad faith. H. E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, 1990). I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, in H. J. Paton (ed.), The Moral Law (London, 1948). Charles Taylor, ‘Responsibility for Self’, in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will (Oxford, 1982). autonomy in applied ethics. The concept of personal autonomy, used in a broad sense which goes beyond its Kantian origins, has been much invoked in recent writing on issues in *applied ethics. It has been suggested, for instance, that the wrongness of *killing rests, in part, on the fact that to deprive someone of their life is normally to violate their autonomy. This account carries the implica- tion that the moral prohibition of taking life would not apply in a case where someone wished their life to be ended—for instance, in the case of voluntary *euthanasia. On the contrary, respect for the person’s autonomy would then require one to comply with their wishes. Another application of the concept in *medical ethics is the suggestion that the importance of ‘informed consent’ in relations between the patient and the medical practi- tioner rests on respect for personal autonomy. In political philosophy, the idea of persons as autonomous agents underlies liberal theories of *justice such as that of Rawls, as well as liberal defences of more specific political values such as *freedom of speech and expression. And in the philosophy of education, the pro- motion of personal autonomy has been identified as one of the principal aims of education. These various uses of the concept have prompted attempts at a more precise account of what autonomy is. Our idea of the autonomous person seems to involve more than just the capacity to act on particular desires and choices. It suggests a more general capacity to be self- determining, to be in control of one’s own life. At this point some writers have found helpful the distinction between first-order desires and second-order desires; the autonomous person is one who is able to assess his or her own first-order desires, to reject or modify some of them and to endorse others, and to act upon these second-order preferences. r.j.n. *freedom; autonomy and heteronomy; autonomy, personal. Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge, 1988). Richard Lindley, Autonomy (London, 1986). Avecebrol: see Ibn Gabirol. Avenarius, Richard (1843–96). German positivist and empiricist philosopher who argues for the elimination of cognitive preconceptions which generate metaphysical dualisms and obscure the findings of ‘pure experience’. Avenarius holds that prima facie mutually inconsistent philosophies presuppose a ‘natural realism’ entailing the existence of physical objects and other minds. Avenarius’ ‘empirio-criticism’ putatively exposes metaphysics as a spurious branch of philosophy and urges its replacement by the natural sciences, which have an empirical justifica- tion in the findings of pure experience. Avenarius may be thought of as an empiricist neo-Kantian whose 1888–90 work Kritik der Reinen Erfahrung (Critique of Pure Experi- ence) anticipates in important respects the empiricism of James and the Logical Positivists and the phenomenology of Husserl. Avenarius’ work was influential in Russia and was one of the targets of Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908). s.p. *neo-Kantianism; positivism. Richard Avenarius, Kritik der Reinen Erfahrung, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1891). —— Der Menschliche Weltbegriff (Leipzig, 1891). Friedrich Raab, Die Philosophie von Richard Avenarius (Leipzig, 1912). Averroës (c.1126–98). Andalusian philosopher acclaimed as the greatest Aristotelian commentator, though his work had little impact in the East. His principal works, surviving in Hebrew and Latin and studied in the West to the mid-seventeenth century, consist of commentaries on Aristotelian texts and on Plato’s Republic. His text, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, written in response to al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s attack on philosophy, illustrates Averroës’s 72 autonomy and heteronomy contention that theologians are incapable of reaching the highest demonstrative knowledge and are thus unfit to interpret divine law correctly. His Aristotelian commen- taries principally sought: (1) to cleanse the Islamic philo- sophical corpus from Neoplatonist emanationist views; (2) to separate pure philosophy from theological argu- ments by al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ and Avicenna, among others; and thus (3) to recover ‘pure’ Aristotelian thought. h.z. *Aristotelianism. Averroës, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, tr. S. Van den Bergh (Oxford, 1954). Avicenna (980–1037). Persian philosopher, scientist, and physician, widely called ‘The Supreme Master’; he held an unsurpassed position in *Islamic philosophy. His works, including the Canon of Medicine, are cited throughout most medieval Latin philosophical and medical texts. The sub- ject of more commentaries, glosses, and superglosses than any other Islamic philosopher, they have inspired gener- ations of thinkers, including Persian poets. His philosoph- ical works—especially Healing: Directives and Remarks, and Deliverance—define Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, one of the three dominant schools of Islamic philosophy. His contributions to science and philosophy are extra- ordinary in scope. He is thought to be the first logician to clearly define temporal modalities in propositions, to diag- nose and identify many diseases, and to identify a specific number of pulse beats in diagnosis. His best-known philo- sophical formulations are: (1) the ontological distinction between essence and existence, in which the essences of existing entities cannot be explained as actualized forms of their material potentialities without an existing cause whose existence, while coexistent with the caused and perceived essence, is prior in rank (later designated ‘pri- mary of existence over essence’ and redefined by Molla¯ S . adra¯); (2) the ontological distinctions of possible, impos- sible, and necessary being—i.e. the Avicennan con- structed whole of reality consisting of ranked and ordered ontic entities, each the cause of the existence of the one ranking below it. Since infinity is impossible in this sys- tem, every entity is a distinct being and must be contin- gent, except for the top of the ontological chain, which is necessary. This is because existence is observed and vac- uum is proven impossible; therefore the Necessary Being’s essence and existence are identical, so It is self- existent and the cause of all other existent entities. This philosophical existence proof, denoted in Latin texts as Avicennan, is generally considered novel within the his- tory of philosophy. h.z. L. Goodman, Avicenna (London, 1992). G. M. Wickens (ed.), Avicenna, Scientist and Philosopher: A Mil- lenary Symposium (London, 1952). awareness, sense. *Perception of objects and conditions by means of the senses. Normally taken to include proprioception—awareness of the position and move- ment of one’s own limbs, for example—and to exclude (because not a form of sense awareness) *introspection of mental states. Sensory awareness of external objects is mediated by particular bodily organs (eyes, nose, etc.) and gives rise to distinctive types of experience (visual, olfactory, etc.). f.d. *sense-data. M. Perkins, Sensing the World (Indianapolis, 1983). axiological ethics. That portion of ethics that is con- cerned specifically with *values. Unlike the portions con- cerned with morality and with social justice, axiological ethics does not focus directly on what we should do. Instead it centres on questions of what is worth pursuing or promoting and what should be avoided, along with issues of what such questions mean and of whether and how there is any way of arriving at answers to them that constitute knowledge. Many philosophers have offered systematic accounts of what is of value without much indication of how their answers are justified or of why they should be taken as having some kind of objective validity. But much of the current philosophical interest in axiological ethics centres on the epistemology (if any) of values. The issue of justification arises whether or not a set of values is systematic. If it is, then we may ask whether whatever organizes the system has any validity. If it is not, then one wants to know whether the diverse value judge- ments represent merely personal (or societal) invention or preference, or instead have something more objective to be said for them. G. E. Moore’s answer, ‘intuition’, is no longer regarded by many people as satisfactory. A possible outcome always is that there is no justifica- tion for values beyond the dictates or preferences of par- ticular persons or societies. This amounts to a value anti- realism (a denial that judgements of value can have any objective validity), parallel to, but distinct from, moral anti-realism. Indeed it looks possible to be a moral anti- realist but to hold that some things or styles of life really are better than others, and Nietzsche sometimes sounds as if he has this combination of views. Conversely, moral realists who lean toward a contractual view of moral validity sometimes sound unwilling to affirm any object- ive values apart from those of a certain kind of political or social order. One promising line is to regard judgements of value as characteristically rooted in emotions. John Stuart Mill held, for example, that desire has the same relation to knowledge about what is desirable as our senses and intro- spection have to knowledge about the world. Everyone desires pleasure and only pleasure, he held, which gives some kind of objective validity to the judgement that pleasure is the *good. Other philosophers, not so ready to make claims about the uniformity of the human sense of value, have suggested that values are rooted in particular preferences, or in approval, or in responses such as delight, admiration, repugnance, or disgust. A judgement of value could be justifiable if the emotion at its root is justified. axiological ethics 73 There also are interesting questions concerning how values are related to self and to sense of self. Much modern discussion of values has treated them in the context of our deciding what things to have or not to have in our lives. There may be an influence of consumerism in this: the focus is on things, relationships, and states of mind to be had rather than on the nature of the person who might have them. But there is psychological evidence that what is broadly the same kind of thing or relationship can have different impacts on the lives of different people, and also that *happiness (which is often treated as a cluster of major values) has a close link with self-esteem, and more generally with sense of self. It is instructive that in both Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of values the process of becoming a particular kind of person is treated as paramount. j.j.k. *well-being; right action. J. N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London, 1970). James Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford, 1986). G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903). J. Raz et al., The Practice of Value (Oxford, 2003). axiom. An axiom is one of a select set of propositions, presumed true by a system of logic or a theory, from which all other propositions which the system or theory endorses as true are deducible—these derived propos- itions being called *theorems of the system or theory. Thus, Pythagoras’ theorem is deducible from the axioms of Euclidean geometry. The axioms and theorems of a system of logic—for instance, of the *propositional cal- culus—are regarded as being true of logical *necessity. e.j.l. *axiomatic method; deduction. W. V. Quine, Methods of Logic, 3rd edn. (London, 1974). axiomatic method. Thinkers in a tradition including Euclid, Newton, Hilbert, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, and others have used the axiomatic method to present dif- ferent subject-matters as formal and coherent theories, all propositions of which are deducible from a clearly speci- fied set of initial assumptions. A fully formalized axiomatic system contains (i) primitive symbols, (ii) rules of forma- tion distinguishing well-formed from ill-formed expres- sions, (iii) definitions, (iv) *axioms, and (v) rules of inference establishing how theorems are proved. It is a formal *calculus which must be distinguished carefully from its interpretation, the latter being a semantic notion associating the system with the models of which it holds true. Desirable characteristics of axiomatic systems are consistency (freedom from contradiction), completeness (sufficient strength to enable all semantically true propos- itions to be proved), and independence of axioms. Unsuc- cessful attempts to show the independence of Euclid’s parallel postulate led in the nineteenth century to the dis- covery of non-Euclidean geometries. s.m cc. R. Blanché, Axiomatics (London, 1962). Ayer, Alfred Jules (1910–89). British philosopher, pub- lished his first book Language, Truth and Logic in 1936. It remains the classic statement in English of *Logical Posi- tivism. Its central doctrine is that there are just two sorts of cognitively meaningful statement, those which are, in principle, empirically verifiable (observationally testable) and those which are analytic (true simply in virtue of lin- guistic rules). Scientific statements and statements of ordinary fact belong to the first class, while statements of mathematics and of logic belong to the second. Religious and metaphysical statements, such as that God exists (or, indeed, that he does not), or that there is a realm of things in themselves behind phenomena, are meaningless, because they belong to neither class. Basic ethical state- ments are regarded similarly as factually meaningless but are allowed an emotive meaning (that is, they express emotional attitudes). That Ayer is not disfavouring them as such, as he is the religious and metaphysical ones, is made clearer in later works. As for philosophy, its task is logical clarification of the basic concepts of science, not the attempt to say how things truly are. His later works move steadily away from doctrinaire Logical Positivism, but much of its spirit is retained, in par- ticular the view that religion is nonsense whenever it is not simply false. Ayer saw himself as essentially advocat- ing an *empiricism in the tradition of Hume, rendered more forceful by the devices of modern logic. Metaphysics is treated with more respect in so far as conceptual clarifi- cation is seen as itself illuminating the world to which our concepts apply. Certain themes are recurrent in his substantial later œuvre, such as the meaning and justification of statements about other minds, about personal identity, and above all about the nature of our knowledge of the physical world. While he was originally a phenomenalist, his later view is that physical objects are posits in a theory, the point of which is to enable us to predict our sense-data, but which is not reducible to facts about them. He also wrote import- antly on probability and induction. Ethically he espoused a qualified utilitarianism, though interpreting the *great- est happiness principle as the expression of an optional fundamental attitude. Perhaps his finest book is The Problem of Knowledge (1956). This sees epistemology as primarily an effort to jus- tify ordinary claims to *knowledge against philosophical scepticism. One knows that p if and only if one believes that p, has a right to be sure on the matter, and is, in fact, right that p is so. *Scepticism arises when there appears to be a logical gap between our only possible evidence for the existence and character of things of a certain sort and our ordinary confident claims to knowledge about them. For example, our access to the physical world seems to be only via our own sense-data, to the minds of others via their behaviour, and to the past via our memories. There are four types of possible solution. (1) Naïve realism holds that the problematic things are, after all, directly given to us, so that we somehow directly perceive physical objects, other minds, or the past, without the intermediary of any 74 axiological ethics Ayer, A. J. 75 sense-data, behaviour, or memories which are mere repre- sentations of them. (2) Reductionism reduces the existence of the problematic things to the holding of suitable patterns among the evidential data, e.g. sense-data, behaviour, or memory images and historical records. (3) The scientific approach tries to show that after all the inference from the evidence to the conclusion has a scientifically respectable inductive character. The difficulty here is that there can be no inductive grounds for moving from Xs to Ys, if we have no possible access to the latter except by the former. (4) The method of descriptive analysis, largely favoured by Ayer (though somewhat modified later) simply describes how we do, in fact, base our beliefs on the evidence and shows that the complaint that these are not well based is unrea- sonable as making an impossible demand. In spite of his iconoclasm Ayer had no truck with some of the wilder assaults upon traditional philosophical thought, such as ordinary-language philosophy on the one hand, and behaviourism and physicalism on the other. t.l.s.s. *London philosophy; Oxford philosophy; verification principle; tender- and tough-minded. A. J. Ayer, Perception and Identity, ed. G. F. Macdonald (London, 1979). L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer, The Library of Living Philosophers, xxi (La Salle, Ill., 1992). John Foster, A. J. Ayer, The Arguments of the Philosophers (London, 1985). A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.) A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (London, 1991). Babbage–Chambers paradox. Charles Babbage (1791– 1871), mathematician and almost-inventor of the digital computer, observed in his Ninth Bridgwater Thesis (1838) that his calculating engine could produce the series of nat- ural numbers from 1 to 100,000,000, and then—without any interference— produce 100,000,001; 100,010,002; 100,030,003; 100,060,004; ‘and so on’ for many hundred terms, till yet another rule came into play. This realiza- tion, that the same process might suddenly reveal another law (and so that *miracles could not be ruled out), was fur- ther developed by Robert Chambers (1802–71) to explain the differences between successive geological eras: the ‘same process’ operated by different laws to produce unpredictable changes. As an account of *evolution, or of miracles, the story proved unpopular. As an anticipation of Goodman’s problem with grue, and Wittgenstein’s with the notion of rule-following, it retains its interest: no finite string of observations or operations can identify what rule is being followed, or what its correct application might require in the future. s.r.l.c. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of Creation (Edinburgh, 1844). Doron Swade, The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (London, 2001). Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962). Bachelard’s studies of the emergence of scientific *objectivity anticipated some of the conclusions of Popper and Kuhn without exerting any direct influence. His reputation depends, however, less on his anti-positivism and his discovery of ‘epistemological ruptures’ than on his studies of poetic language, day- dream, and phenomenology, and their application to episodes in the history of science. Like Bacon, Bachelard regarded the projection of subjective values and interests into the experience of the physical world as impediments to knowledge. In Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (1938), which he described as a ‘psychoanalysis of knowledge’, he showed how the emergence of an objective and quantified science required depersonalization and abstraction, emo- tional restraint, and ‘taciturnity’. His intention was not thereby to discredit subjectivity. Rather, he placed the capacity for reverie, which he saw as the source of great poetry as well as of abject sentimentality and imaginary physical theories, at the centre of his theory of the human mind, and he understood that affective engagement with ‘things’ was a condition of scientific productivity. ‘Psycho- analysis’, in Bachelard’s terms, did not refer to the Freudian study of sublimated drives of the individual, but to the dis- closure of *archetypes, which Jung’s studies on alchemy of the early 1930s had first shown to have a bearing on the interpretation of early chemical theories and the practice of alchemy. In his study of eighteenth-century experi- ments with fire, La Psychanalyse du feu (1938), Bachelard showed how the phenomenology of fire as painful, dan- gerous, soothing, purifying, destructive, and a symbol of life and passion, determined scientific discourse. Other studies on air, water, and earth, which, like fire, have since been deconstituted as subjects of scientific inquiry, showed how they too were ‘dreamt’ by the eighteenth century. Bachelard’s influence on the early work of Foucault and other French theorists of his generation is significant. cath.w. C. G. Christofides, ‘Gaston Bachelard and the Imagination of Matter’, Revue internationale de philosophie (1963). P. Quillet, Bachelard: Présentation, choix de textes, bibliographie (Paris, 1964). Mary Tiles, Gaston Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge, 1984). backgammon. Board game for two players, renowned among philosophers as one of Hume’s methods of recov- ery from philosophical melancholy and *scepticism. ‘I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I can- not find in my heart to enter into them any farther’ (A Treatise of Human Nature, i. iv. 7). If we may follow Adam Smith’s account of Hume in later life, however, the philosopher’s favourite game was actually whist. j.bro. background. The previously acquired understanding or knowledge that allows utterances, beliefs, and actions to have explicit meaning for us. The problem of the back- ground has recently received philosophical attention with respect to meaning in language, knowledge in science, and objectivity in interpretation. Words and utterances presuppose an implicit and a holistic understanding of beliefs and practices. Observation and justification in the B sciences function only against the background of shared paradigms of understanding acquired in scientific socializa- tion. And the necessary reliance of any interpreter on her own prior understanding rules out the possibility of any neutral perspective in cultural interpretation. There is dis- agreement about whether the background is basically con- ceptual and symbolic in nature—and thus in principle explicable—or whether it is mainly practical and pre- propositional—and therefore can never be captured fully in theory. h h.k. *hermeneutics; holism. H. Dreyfus, ‘Holism and Hermeneutics’, Review of Metaphysics (1981). backwards causation. This is the idea that a cause may be later in time than its effect. In the case of physical processes and human actions we naturally assume that the direction of causation is from earlier to later time. The play in a football match causes the final result; it would be absurd to believe that the result could cause the earlier play. On the other hand, people do sometimes suppose that prayer or more overt religious rituals might have causal influence on what has happened at an earlier time. Aristotle argued extensively in favour of a different mode of backward, or teleological, causation, with the following examples: the goal (e.g. health) as the cause of purposive activity (e.g. physical exercise), or a developed natural product (e.g. an oak) as the cause of the process which culminates in it (the developing acorn). A thorough discussion of the issue is provided by Michael Dummett, ‘Can an Effect Precede its Cause?’ and ‘Bringing about the Past’, in Truth and Other Enigmas (London, 1978). j.d.g.e. *causality; teleological explanation. Bacon, Francis (1561–1626). Lawyer, politician, and philosopher at the Courts of Elizabeth Tudor and her suc- cessor James Stuart. Bacon had two great ambitions. One was political, where he was helped initially by his kinship with the Cecil family; and at the summit of his career he held the office of Lord Chancellor for four years before being gaoled on an unfair charge of corruption. His other ambition was philosophical—to refound human know- ledge on the basis of a systematic methodology for scien- tific inquiry. Part of this methodology was institutional, in that Bacon saw the advancement of science as a social activity. So he wished to set up a college for the purpose, equipped with all necessary research facilities—laboratories, botan- ical and zoological gardens, specialist technicians, etc. Though he failed to secure royal support for this venture in his own lifetime, he was widely credited later in the seventeenth century with having inspired the foundation of the Royal Society. But Bacon’s methodology also proposed, within an over- all framework for the reclassification of the sciences, a dis- tinctively inductive structure for the study of nature. He advocated in his Novum Organum (London, 1620) that scientists interrogate nature by their *experiments in order to be able to tabulate both the various circumstances in which instances of the phenomenon under investigation have been found to be present and also the circumstances under which they have been found to be absent. For example, Bacon found heat present in the sun’s rays, in flame, and in boiling liquids, but absent in the moon’s and stars’ rays, in phosphorescence, and in natural liquids. More- over, scientists should concentrate in their investigations on certain important kinds of experimentally reproducible situ- ation, which Bacon called ‘prerogative instances’. To the extent that scientists thus discover a circumstance which correlates uniquely with the phenomenon—i.e. is always present when it is present and always absent when it is absent—they have discovered its proximate *explanation (or ‘form’) and have acquired power to reproduce it at will. But the investigator should also aim to make a gradual ascent to more and more comprehensive laws, and will acquire greater and greater certainty as he or she moves up the pyramid of laws. At the same time each law that is reached should lead him to new kinds of experiment, that is, to kinds of experiment over and above those that led to the discovery of the law. Bacon insisted that his methodology, like Aristotle’s syllogistic, is just as applicable to normative as to factual issues. He held that it has a role in *jurisprudence, for example, as well as in natural science, because legal maxims in English common law, just like the axioms of nature in science, are grounded on induction from indi- vidual cases and then, once formulated, are applied back to determine new particulars. Bacon was therefore keen to emphasize that good legal reports were as valuable for jurisprudential induction as good reports of experimental results were for scientific induction. By the former we reduce uncertainty about our legal rights and duties: by the latter we reduce uncertainty about what is the case in nature. And negative instances, he held (anticipating Popper), are of primary importance in both inquiries, in order to eliminate false propositions. This is because there is only a limited number of ultimate forms, and so falsificatory evidence, by conclusively excluding incorrect hypotheses, permits firmer progress than verificatory evi- dence does towards identifying the correct hypothesis. Correspondingly Bacon repudiated as ‘childish’ the method of *induction by simple enumeration, whereby a generalization that is as yet unfalsified is supposed to acquire support that varies in strength with the number of known instances that verify it. But Bacon cautioned that his new method of induction would not get properly under way unless those trying to practise it repudiated four kinds of intellectual *idol—per- ceptual illusions (‘idols of the tribe’), personal biases (‘idols of the cave’), linguistic confusions (‘idols of the market-place’), and dogmatic philosophical systems (‘idols of the theatre’). l.j.c. *hypothetico-deductive method. Bacon, Francis 77 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. M. Silverthorne and L. Jardine (Cambridge, 2000). —— The Major Works, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford, 2002). M. Hesse, ‘Francis Bacon’, in D. J. O’Connor (ed.), A Critical His- tory of Western Philosophy (New York, 1964). M. Pentenon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cam- bridge, 1996). P. Urbach, Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science (La Salle, Ill., 1987). Bacon, Roger (c.1220–c.1292). A student and a teacher at both Oxford and Paris, he devoted many years to the study of science, especially optics and alchemy. Bacon, a member of the Franciscan Order, wrote extensively in the fields of philosophy, theology, and science. He was in many ways an independent thinker, though he was undoubtedly deeply influenced by his teacher Robert Grosseteste, and of course by Aristotle, whose writings were reaching Christian Europe via the Arab commentators. Of the latter, Bacon had an especial admir- ation for Avicenna and Averroës. Although during the Middle Ages he was perhaps chiefly known for his alchem- ical works, it is his epistemology that now attracts greatest attention, and especially as that relates to his writings on optics. In particular he was interested in light and visual perception. If something is at a distance from us, how can we be aware of it? The answer given is that similitudes or images, or species, emanate from the object, pass through the intervening space, and strike the eye. Without this multiplicity of species in the medium seeing could not occur. Questions concerning the metaphysical and epi- stemological status of species occupied Bacon and were to occupy many who followed him; questions such as whether species take up space, and whether they are vis- ible, or instead are partial causes, and no more than that, of the visibility of the things from which they emanate. Bacon believed that there are also species corresponding to non-visual accidents in things, but his main work was in the field of visual perception. a.bro. S. Easton, Roger Bacon and his Search for a Universal Science (Oxford, 1952). bad faith. Sartre’s conception of *self-deception. Accord- ing to Sartre, bad faith involves the deliberate creation in myself of the appearance of a belief which I in fact know to be false. Sartre claims that we are able to play this trick on ourselves because of ambiguities in our nature, because we are not ‘in-ourselves’ what we are ‘for-ourselves’, and so on. In his view, in bad faith we exploit these ambiguities in reflection upon ourselves to avoid facing up to painful facts about ourselves. Sartre imagines a homosexual deny- ing his homosexuality on the ground that he is not ‘in him- self’ a homosexual. These ambiguities, Sartre holds, enable one to account for self-deception without postulat- ing an unconscious self that controls the conscious one: the phenomenon exemplifies the complexity of our reflex- ive structures, not the agency of a secret self. t.r.b. J P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes (London, 1958), pt. i, ch. 2. Bain, Alexander (1818–1903). A weaver’s son, he was born in Aberdeen and studied at Marischal College. He antici- pates *pragmatism. In The Senses and the Intellect (London, 1855) he says that perception depends on a muscular sense and on distinguishing one’s body from the world. There is one substance with two sets of properties, mental and physical. In The Emotions and the Will (London, 1859) he says that belief belongs with agency and is for action. He was variously professorial assistant, public lecturer, jour- nalist, civil servant (sanitation reform in London), and Professor of Logic and Rhetoric in Aberdeen. He was friendly with J. S. Mill and radical Utilitarian circles in Lon- don, and personally knew Darwin, Comte, Herschel, Fara- day, and Wundt. Much of his writing was deflationary as he tried to promote the union of physiology, psychology, and philosophy, for which he founded the philosophical journal Mind. v.h. *associationism; Scottish philosophy. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975). Russian philosopher of language and literature, famous for his concepts of dialogism and ‘heteroglossia’. For Bakhtin, the basic linguistic act is the utterance. Utterances acquire meaning only in dialogue, which is always situated in a social–cultural context where a multiplicity of different languages intersect (political, technical, literary, interper- sonal, etc.). From this emerges a conception of person- hood where we author ourselves in dialogue with others and subject to the reinterpretations they give us. Bakhtin’s writings on the novel as the literary embodiment of heteroglossia have been very influential, particularly his work on Dostoevsky’s ‘polyphonic’ novel, and many find in his dialogism a critique of totalitarianism. Significant also are his early works on linguistics and psychology, Marxist in orientation and published under names of other members of Bakhtin’s circle (though authorship of these works is disputed). Bakhtin lived in Vitebsk and Leningrad before being exiled to Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1934. He later taught literature for many years at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute in Saransk. d.bak. *Russian philosophy. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981). —— Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Min- neapolis, 1984). Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich (1814–76). Russian revolutionist, the moving spirit of nineteenth-century *anarchism. Although remembered mostly for his revolutionary passion, he was learned, intelligent, and philosophically reflective. In moments of intermittent recess from insurrection and imprisonment he wrote influential formulations of anarchist philosophy and inci- sive and insightful criticisms of Marxism. He maintained that political power was intrinsically oppressive whether wielded by the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Real free- dom was possible only after the destruction of the status 78 Bacon, Francis quo. But the individual’s freedom was so bound up with that of society that nothing short of ‘collectivism’, a non- governmental system based on voluntary co-operation without private property and with reward according to contribution, was required. In philosophical outlook he was a voluntaristic determinist, respectful of the authority of science but sharply critical of the authority of scientists. A keen materialist, he was ferociously anti-theological. k.w. G. P. Maximoff (ed.), The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (London, 1953). bald man paradox. Suppose a man has a full head of hair: if he loses one hair he will still have a full head of hair. But if he loses enough hairs he will become bald. Clearly, though, there is no particular number of hairs whose loss marks the transition to baldness. How can a series of changes, each of which makes no difference to his having a full head of hair, make a difference to his having a full head of hair? This is an example of an ancient para- dox called *sorites (from the Greek word meaning ‘heaped’), after a well-known variant which involves the removal of grains of sand from a heap of sand. m.c. *vagueness. See R. M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (Cambridge, 1988) for sorites. Barbara, Celarent. The opening of an 800-year-old hexa- meter verse incorporating the mnemonic names of valid *syllogisms. Described by De Morgan as ‘magic words . . . more full of meaning than any that ever were made’, and by Jevons as ‘barbarous and wholly unscientific’. The vowels signify *quantity and quality, but most of the remaining letters are also logically important, especially regarding ‘reduction’, the derivation of some syllogistic forms from others. c.w. *logic, traditional. W. S. Jevons, Elementary Lessons in Logic (London, 1897), lesson xvii. A. Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2005), ch. 3. barber paradox. The barber in a certain village is a man who shaves all and only those men in the village who do not shave themselves. Is he a man who shaves himself? If he is then he isn’t, and if he isn’t then he is. It follows that he is a man who both does and does not shave himself. This con- tradiction shows that the apparently innocent italicized description can apply to no one. Formally, the paradox resembles *Russell’s paradox of the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. The latter though is not so easy to dispose of, since it is generated by an assumption—that every predicate determines a class— which cannot simply be abandoned. m.c. M. Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z (London, 2002). Barcan formula. A principle which says, roughly, that if it is possible that something As (or has A) then there is some- thing that possibly As (or has A). In the first formalization of quantified *modal logic, R. C. Barcan (later Marcus) introduced such an axiom schema: BF. ◊( ∃α) A — 3 (∃α)◊A. The principle BF, provable equivalents of BF, and some schemata from which BF was deducible came to be desig- nated as the ‘Barcan formula’. The plausibility of BF was questioned. Marcus sketched a model-theoretic proof of BF’s validity on the assumption that domains of alternative possible ‘interpretations’ (worlds) were coextensive. Saul Kripke showed that on his semantics for modality, where coextensive domains are not assumed, neither BF nor its converse is valid. r.b.m. R. Barcan Marcus, Journal of Symbolic Logic (1946, 1947); Synthese (1961). —— Modalities (Oxford, 1993). Barnes, Jonathan (1942– ). Professor of Ancient Philoso- phy at the Sorbonne in Paris, formerly at Oxford and Geneva. Although Barnes’s contributions to the under- standing of ancient philosophy are both philosophy and history, historical reconstruction never overrides the attempt to solve philosophical problems by reference to ancient texts. Notably, Barnes is the author of the two- volume work The Presocratic Philosophers (1979), and studies of Aristotle, ranging from the translation and commen- tary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (1975) to Aristotle (1982) and many papers. Barnes is also one of the editors of the series of volumes Articles on Aristotle and the editor of Early Greek Philosophy (1987). His early work The Onto- logical Argument (1972) is a rigorous examination of that putative proof of the existence of God. s.p. *ontological argument for the existence of God. Barry, Brian (1936– ). Among the leaders of the move in recent decades to make moral and political philosophy relevant to public policy and current political debates. As an intellectual descendant of the Scottish Enlightenment project, Barry addresses the intersection of moral, polit- ical, and economic issues and arguments. He violates the norms of twentieth-century moral and political philoso- phy by grounding his arguments in unwashed data rather than fanciful examples. His major concern has been with *justice, arguing that the best theories are grounded in mutual advantage, or fairness, or both. He has also writ- ten on democracy, voting, ethnic conflict, welfare policy, communitarianism, legal theory, future generations, migration, and economic and sociological theories of collective behaviour. r.har. Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley, Calif., 1989). —— Justice as Impartiality (Oxford, 1995). —— Culture and Equality (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Barth, Karl (1886–1968). Swiss theologian and biblical scholar, notable particularly for his early polemical work on the Epistle to the Romans (1919) and later for 9,000 pages of Church Dogmatics. Philosophically Barth is inter- esting because he adopts a form of extreme realism Barth, Karl 79 . for instance, that the wrongness of *killing rests, in part, on the fact that to deprive someone of their life is normally to violate their autonomy. This account carries the implica- tion that the moral. wished their life to be ended—for instance, in the case of voluntary *euthanasia. On the contrary, respect for the person’s autonomy would then require one to comply with their wishes. Another. them. For example, our access to the physical world seems to be only via our own sense-data, to the minds of others via their behaviour, and to the past via our memories. There are four types of possible