The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy

Jonathan Rée, J.O. Urmson, Jonathan Rée, J.O. Urmson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134331765
• Édition: 3
• Sujet: Filosofia
• Sous-sujet: Storia e teoria della filosofia

On its first appearance in 1960, the Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy established itself as a classic; this third edition builds on its original strengths but brings it completely up to date. The Concise Encyclopedia offers a lively, readable, comprehensive and authoritative treatment of Western philosophy as a whole, incorporating scintillating articles by many leading philosophical authors. It serves not only as a convenient reference work, but also as an engaging introduction to philosophy.

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Pantheism Pantheism, or the doctrine that everything is divine, and that God and Nature are identical, is more often an instrument of poetic expression than a conclusion of philosophical argument. The great exception here is SPINOZA. Spinoza’s initial definition of substance inexorably leads to the conclusion that there can only be one substance, truly so-called, and that it must be infinite. For there could be nothing other than itself to limit it and so constitute it finite. Spinoza’s definition of God, which follows the traditional definitions, makes God the possessor of infinite attributes. But the only being of infinite attributes is the one substance, which is Nature. Hence God and Nature must be identical. The history of Spinoza’s reputation illustrates the knife-edge along which the pantheist walks. From the standpoint of the theist, a pantheist appears to reduce God to Nature, and is thus essentially an atheist. From the standpoint of the Sceptic, the pantheist takes an unwarrantedly religious view of Nature, and appears as a covert theist. All metaphysical doctrines, such as IDEALISM, which assert that the Universe is a Unity tend towards pantheism. For the Universe is then something more than any of its finite parts; and there can be no deity distinct from it. It may be surmised that the collapse of such metaphysical doctrines deprives intellectual pantheism of its only support. (A.MACI.)

Parmenides Greek philosopher from Elea in Southern Italy, born about 515 BC. He wrote a philosophical poem consisting of a prologue and two parts, of which considerable fragments have survived. The prologue describes Parmenides’ meeting with a goddess who reveals the truth outlined in the first part of the poem; of the two possible paths of inquiry, It is and It is not, only the first is tenable – ‘for you could not know what is not (for this is impossible), nor could you give expression to it’. Thus Parmenides recognized the existential ‘is not’ as an artificial concept, but was then misled – by his inability to distinguish the existential and predicative ‘is’ – into denying that negative predication was possible. This seemed to entail that there could be no differentiation in the real world (since if A can be distinguished from B then A is not B, which was, by Parmenides’ logic, impossible). Thus reality, ‘that which is’, had to be single, homogeneous, indivisible, everlasting and motionless. Being itself was spatially finite, ‘like the mass of a well-rounded sphere’. Some of Parmenides’ arguments against not-being were perhaps directed against PYTHAGOREAN dualism. But he himself, in the fragmentary second part of his poem, which professedly gave ‘the opinions of mortals’ and was ‘deceitful’, outlined a cosmology in which the world was composed of two opposed substances or ‘forms’, fire and night. What was evidently quite an elaborate account included explanations of thought and knowledge (produced by the excess of one opposite, the hot or the cold, in the limbs), and astronomy, which had points in common with ANAXIMANDER. The purpose of this ‘Way of Seeming’ is obscure. Perhaps Parmenides felt that his conception of Being was too austere for practical life and ordinary people, and wished to show that the apparent world could be accounted for on the basis of a single pair of sensible opposites, without introducing so-called reality-principles like the ‘Limit’ and ‘Unlimited’ of the Pythagoreans. (G.S.K.)

Pascal, Blaise (1623–62) French mathematician, scientist and theologian, and one of the earliest great French prose writers. His earlier years were devoted to mathematics and the physical sciences; his experiments with the barometer are famous, the ascent of the Puy de Dôme by his brother at his direction being a decisive confirmation of the new theory of air pressure. In 1654 Pascal underwent a profound experience of religious conversion; he became a strong adherent of the Jansenists and much of his energy was henceforth devoted to theological and religious propaganda and controversy. He continued however to work occasionally at mathematics, doing work on the theory of the cycloid preparatory to the theory of the calculus, and laying the basis of the mathematical theory of PROBABILITY. Pascal’s posthumously published Pensées cover a range of philosophical issues; most notably he argues for the reasonableness of faith on the ground that there are no rational grounds either for belief or disbelief and so belief is not less reasonable than disbelief; but this being so it is wiser to gamble on the truth of religion since this policy involves success if religion is true and no significant loss if it is false. The section on geometry also has some wise and clear remarks on definition and the nature of deductive systems. (J.O.U.)

Peano, Giuseppe (1858–1932) Italian mathematician who pioneered the project of reducing MATHEMATICS to LOGIC.

Pearson, Karl (1857–36) English scientist, supporter of an austere positivism and authoritarian socialism, and author of The Grammar of Science (1892).

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914) C. S. Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, son of America’s leading mathematician Benjamin Peirce. Much of his early formation was scientific; he came to philosophy through reading Friedrich SCHILLER and was later enthralled by KANT. He associated with most of the leading American thinkers of his day – including JAMES, Wright and Holmes – but obtained little academic recognition and was never appointed to a permanent university post. He spent most of the latter part of his life almost as a recluse and died in comparative poverty in 1914. He published a number of articles but no book on philosophy. Much of his best work remained unpublished until the appearance of the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce (8 vols, 1931–58).

1 Epistemology. The central problem in modern EPISTEMOLOGY has been to reconcile the subjective nature of thought with our claim to know things distinct from thought. This had not been a problem for ARISTOTLE, who considered that the mind simply discovered an order in reality. But Kant inverted Aristotle’s position and claimed that the order in our knowledge came from the mind. Peirce accepted the modern problem and offered his own solution.

He began by maintaining that we are conscious that we have direct experience of the real – that is, of things that exist whether we think about them or not. Moreover, if we are to avoid unpleasant surprises, we must endeavour to adapt our conduct to these things. So far he agrees with Aristotle. But it is clear that we deal with things according to our ideas of them – on selective constructions which are based on partial experience coloured by our history, circumstances and purposes. The selective nature of knowledge led Peirce to agree with Kant that the order in knowledge is to some extent constructed by the mind. He next set about showing that if we examine what an idea or concept is we should be able to reconcile what is true in Aristotle and Kant.

In reply to the question, ‘what is a concept?’, Peirce formulated in 1878 his famous PRAGMATIC maxim: ‘Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’ He illustrates the maxim by saying that our idea of ‘wine’ means nothing ‘but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses’. So too, if we call a thing ‘hard’, we mean that ‘it will not be scratched by many other substances’. He summed up: ‘Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects.’ Peirce offers his maxim as an instrument for distinguishing true knowledge from false. True knowledge – a correct idea of an object – enables us to predict what will happen when we come to deal with that object. In fact for Peirce all our ideas are analogous to scientific hypotheses.

Peirce’s 1878 formulation of the maxim contained in germ his later views. But it was formulated for explaining our ideas of material things, and seemed to leave no place for regulative ideas such as moral goodness. Furthermore, William James and the popular pragmatists took the maxim in a phenomenalist sense. In later years Peirce insisted that pragmatism (or ‘pragmaticism’ as he called his doctrine, to distinguish it from that of James and others) teaches that an idea has meaning through any possible practical conduct that it can lead to or regulate. It does not have to lead to immediate sensory verification; it need only give meaning to our conduct in some way – like the notion of truth as an ideal – limit, which has no direct sensory content, but inspires us to keep adding to our knowledge. Peirce completed his theory by saying that each idea gives rise to a possibility of regular conduct in regard to what it expresses. Hence each idea is finally interpreted in a ‘habit’, and these habits – the interpretants of our ideas – are ‘guides to action’. Our ideas find living and consistent expression in our habitual modes of conduct.

But any inquirer’s knowledge of a given object or situation will always be inadequate, so it is not enough for a single individual to apply the maxim. A research community gathers more knowledge than any single individual and works to overcome mistakes in individual verification. Knowledge is pooled and correction is a cooperative affair. But the community may itself be wrong, and every inquirer has to envisage their research within the indefinitely continuing, constantly growing company of inquirers. Searchers after truth are always on their way towards a state of perfect knowledge; but they will never reach it.

The need for honesty in scrutinizing one’s data, integrity in cooperating with others, and a genuine love of truth, led Peirce to believe that the struggle for truth is not only intellectual, but moral. The work of forming concepts, drawing consequences, and verifying them must be carried out in a self-disciplined and cooperative way within the community of seekers and against the background of the social ideal-limit of truth.

2 Categories. Like Aristotle, Peirce wanted to classify the main aspects of reality through a doctrine of CATEGORIES. But where Aristotle’s categories had been objectivist, Peirce believed that categories should express aspects of the world in terms of our direct perceptive experience. He formulated three such categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. (a) Firstness is the spontaneous aspect of things, exemplified especially in the free surge of the mind in the formation of hypotheses: it indicates life, growth and variety in the universe. Any instance of Firstness, such as an act of immediate consciousness before it is reflected on, is an undifferentiated unity; but otherness and the struggle it leads to are also inescapable facts of experience – hence the next category. (b) Secondness points to the element of resistance and duality in experience – to ‘existence’, or ‘that mode of being which lies in opposition to another’. For Peirce, ‘a thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist’, and existence is not a predicate but something that is experienced when our willing and perceiving come up against the ‘brute’ aspect of the world and the sheer individuality of things. But spontaneity and opposition do not exhaust our experience of reality–there is also continuity or regularity, or Thirdness. (c) Thirdness, according to Peirce, is ‘Law’. We can reflect on an idea like ‘wine’ or ‘hard’ and see that it applies to many things; this shows that there is regularity in the real, and this is the foundation of law. ‘Law’ or ‘general principles’ are ‘active’ in things, and the uniformities we discover in the real order have meaning for us only insofar as we can act regularly in their regard; hence we can conceive the laws of the universe as analogous to our own habits of action.

3 God, self and immortality. Peirce accepted as a philosophical hypothesis the idea of a personal and omnipotent God, and outlined several arguments for the reality of such a Being. (a) The living variety of the universe and the spontaneity that finds its highest expression in human personality enables us to perceive an infinite Spontaneity or Firstness at the source of all instances of Firstness. (b) It is clear that an order of dynamic finality exists in the world – exemplified in the manner in which the human mind is adapted to interpreting and predicting the course of nature through the hypotheses of science. The only explanation of this mutual adaptation of parts of the world is that an absolute Mind has presided over their creation and development. (c) When we reflect on the hypothesis of God as the creative source of the universe, we are gradually impelled to accept it: an instinctive belief in God fits every movement of our nature. Peirce concluded that God is unlimited in knowledge and power, and if we are forced to conceive him to some extent in the human image, such anthropomorphism is not so much false as figurative.

Peirce laid such stress on the connexions that each ego has with others and the rest of the universe that some passages suggest that he rejected the Cartesian unitary self. He also insisted that we have to interpret our own thoughts: they are as much signs to us as are the words of other people and the things of the universe. But where other pragmatists sought to reduce human personality to a ‘bundle of habits’, he argued that ‘unity must be given as a centre for habits’. About immortality, Peirce never made up his mind. Early in his career he argued that the inability of MATERIALISM to explain much of the universe counted in its favour, while the dependence of the mind on the body counted against. As the years went on he laid more stress on the spiritual aspects of the universe as evidence for personal immortality, but stopped short of saying that such evidence was conclusive.

Peirce exercised little real influence during his life. William James popularized a form of pragmatism derived largely from a misunderstanding of Peirce’s pragmatic principle and his insistence on moral effort in the search for truth. ROYCE’s theory of the social infinite owes a lot to Peirce’s teaching on the community of inquirers but Peirce dismissed Royce’s logic. DEWEY took over some of the empirical emphases in Peirce’s methodology. But by and large Peirce’s general philosophy made no impact until the publication of the Collected Papers. See also AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. (J.O’C.)

Peripatetic ‘Peripatetic’ is an ancient nickname for ARISTOTLE and his followers, based on the tradition that when they discussed philosophy they walked as they talked.

Personal Identity In PLATO’s Symposium, the wise Diotima raises the question how any of us can be said to continue in existence from infancy to old age, when both body and soul are bound to change out of all recognition. If the successive episodes in a life are like beads, what is the thread that strings them all together? Her answer is that such continuity is guaranteed only for the Gods, and that the rest of us can only approximate to it, partly by working to sustain our physical and intellectual fitness, and partly by having lots of children. Socrates is more puzzled than satisfied with Diotima’s solution, but the question was left in suspense in the high philosophical tradition for nearly two millennia; it seems to have been generally assumed that the basic subject of experience was a SUBSTANCE – either spiritual or material or some kind of combination of the two, perhaps the ‘substantial form’ of the Aristotelians (see AQUINAS). In the seventeenth century, however, the concept of substance began to come under pressure. In the Essay concerning human understanding (1689), Locke insisted that complex IDEAS could only be understood if they were broken down into simple elements drawn directly from experience, and ideas of substances began to appear far more fragile, problematic and artificial than they had ever seemed before. But Locke had an implicit belief in immortality, and in a God who would issue eternal rewards and punishments adjusted to how we have conducted ourselves in this life. He realized that this belief would be quite empty if our afterlife were not in some sense a continuation of our earthly existence: otherwise we might just as well be annihilated on our death and replaced with someone completely different. Locke’s proposal was that the continuity that mattered for moral and theological purposes depended not on substances but on relations, specifically relations of ‘sameness’ (or ‘identity’, to use the scholastic word). Moreover the subject of these relations was essentially a moral agent (or ‘person’, to use another scholastic word). That was how, in Section I of Book II of the Essay, the notion of ‘personal identity’ first saw the light of day. Locke argued that the relations that underlay it were not a matter of substantial permanence, but a combination of ‘consciousness’, or an intimate interior knowledge of one’s own past experience, and ‘concernment’, or an intimate involvement with one’s future prospects: ‘for if we take wholly away all Consciousness of our Actions and Sensations, especially of Pleasure and Pain, and the concernment that accompanies it, it will be hard to know wherein to place personal Identity.’

This doctrine, barely sketched in the first edition of the Essay, was elaborated in the second (1694), where Locke asserted boldly that the boundaries of a ‘personal self’ coincide with those of consciousness. Moral responsibility for past deeds extends ‘as far as that consciousness reaches, and no farther; as everyone who reflects will perceive’. The ‘self’ in short was a product of consciousness as much as its object; and it was only through consciousness that it could ‘appropriate’ past deeds and make them its own. The doctrine that our memories define who we are is a hard one, and perhaps irredeemably paradoxical: how after all can we identify our memories as ours unless we are already able to identify ourselves as ourselves? In the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) David HUME revelled in the difficulties, suggesting that personal identity is an illusion or a ‘fiction’, and citing the absurdities it gives rise to as a further incentive to general philosophical SCEPTICISM. During the nineteenth century, however, the dissemination of Locke’s argument led to a change in the meaning of ‘personal identity’, and eventually of ‘identity’ itself: the words no longer referred to a supposed principle of permanence behind the jumbled confusion of experience, but to people’s subjective memories and their conscious sense of who they were, or indeed of which group they belonged to. This shift in meaning gave rise to ‘identity politics’, and obscured the historical and conceptual origins of the problem of personal identity. {J.R.}

Peter Lombard (c.1095–c.1160) Author of a compilation of theological wisdom known as the Sentences, which became one of the most popular textbooks for philosophical instruction in medieval Universities; see also BONAVENTURA, SCOTUS.

Peter of Spain Petrus Hispanus, also known as Peter of Spain, lived in the thirteenth century, and is now generally identified with Petrus Juliani who was born c.1210 in Lisbon, studied at Paris, and was elected to the Papacy as John XXI in 1276, dying in 1277 owing to the collapse of a study which he had had built. His Summulae Logicales, with its new method of describing the SYLLOGISM, remained a fundamental logical text till the seventeenth century. (I.T.)

Phenomenalism Phenomenalism is the doctrine that human knowledge is confined to the appearances (phenomena) presented to the senses or, less restrictively, that appearances are the ultimate foundation of all our knowledge. It takes two main forms: first a general theory of knowledge and second a theory of perception.

(1) As a general theory of knowledge, phenomenalism states that we can know nothing that is not given to us in sense-experience; hence it denies, with more or less thoroughness, the validity of inferences made from things that fall within our sense-experience to things lying outside it. One version, sometimes called gnosticism, asserts that, although we cannot infer the character of what lies outside our ...