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 . 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. 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). 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