The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Edward Craig, Edward Craig

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134344086
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Philosophie
• Categoria: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The Shorter REP presents the very best of the acclaimed ten volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy in a single volume. It makes a selection of the most important entries available for the first time and covers all you need to know about philosophy, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein and animals and ethics to scientific method.
Comprising over 900 entries and covering the major philosophers and philosophical topics, The Shorter REP includes the following special features:

• Unrivalled coverage of major philosophers, themes, movements and periods making the volume indispensable for any student or general reader
• Fully cross-referenced
• Revised versions of many of the most important entries, including fresh suggestions for further reading
• Over twenty brand new entries on important new topics such as Cloning and Sustainability
• entries by many leading philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Onora O'Neill, T.M. Scanlon and Anthony Appiah
• Striking new text design to help locate key entries quickly and easily

An outstanding guide to all things philosophical, The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an unrivalled introduction to the subject for students and general readers alike.

M

MACH, ERNST (1838–1916)

Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. Though not one of the great philosophers, he was tremendously influential in the development of ‘scientific philosophy’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A vigorous opponent of ‘metaphysics’, he was celebrated as a progenitor of logical positivism. His work is regarded as a limiting case of pure empiricism; he stands between the empiricism of Hume and J.S. Mill, and that of the Vienna Circle.

Mach’s positivist conception of science saw its aims as descriptive and predictive; explanation is downgraded. Scientific laws and theories are economical means of describing phenomena. Theories that refer to unobservable entities –including atomic theory –may impede inquiry. They should be eliminated where possible in favour of theories involving ‘direct descriptions’ of phenomena. Mach claimed to be a scientist, not a philosopher, but the ‘Machian philosophy’ was ‘neutral monism’. Close to phenomenalism, it saw the world as functionally related complexes of sensations, and aspired to anti-metaphysical neutrality.

See also: RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF

ANDY HAMILTON

MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ (1469–1527)

Florentine diplomat, dramatist and political thinker, Machiavelli’s treatise, Il principe (The Prince) (1532), has earned him notoriety as a political immoralist (or at least an amoralist) and a teacher of evil. In The Prince, Machiavelli posits a complex relationship between ethics and politics that associates princely virtu` with the capacity to know and act within the political world as it ‘is’, and with the beastly abilities to dispense violence and practise deception. Behind this argument dwells the distinctly Machiavellian insight that politics is a realm of appearances where the practice of moral or Christian virtues often results in a prince’s ruin, while knowing ‘how not to be good’ may result in greater security and wellbeing for both prince and people. Machiavelli warns that the prince’s possibilities for success in this matter are always mediated by fortune; hence the prudent prince is one who is prepared to resist fortune by adapting his procedure to the times and his nature to ‘the necessity of the case’.

A less notorious but equally influential text is the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy) (1531), in which Machiavelli offers a defence of popular liberty and republican government that takes the ancient republic of Rome as its model and emphasizes the role of the people in the ‘public administration’ of the city. However, Machiavelli also argues that a republic is only as successful in self-governance as its citizens are infused with civic virtu` and therefore not corrupted. Accordingly, he praises the work of political founders who craft republican laws and institutions, and religious founders who fuse God and patria as one in the people’s hearts. The apparent tension between Machiavelli’s republican sympathies in Discourses and his elitist proclivities in The Prince has helped to fuel a vast interpretive literature concerning his political attitudes, his theory of politics, and the nature and meaning of ‘machia-vellianism’ in Western political thought.

See also: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY; REPUBLICANISM

MARY G. DIETZ

MACINTYRE, ALASDAIR (1929–)

Alasdair MacIntyre has contributed to the diverse fields of social, moral and political philosophy. He is one of the leading proponents of a virtue ethical approach in moral philosophy, part of a wider attempt to recover an Aristotelian conception of both morality and politics. His return to ancient sources has been powered by a critical indictment of the modern moral predicament, which MacIntyre regards as theoretically confused and practically fragmented; only a return to a tradition which synthesizes Aristotelian and Augustinian themes will restore rationality and intelligibility to contemporary moral and political life.

See also: VIRTUE ETHICS

ALAN THOMAS

MCTAGGART, JOHN MCTAGGART ELLIS (1866–1925)

McTaggart was one of the last of the ‘British Idealists’, the group of British philosophers, such as B. Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley, who took their inspiration from Hegel. In his early writings from the 1890s, McTaggart gave a critical exposition of themes from Hegel’s logic before advancing his own distinctive idealist positions concerning time, the mind, and reality in general. But in his writings from 1910 he developed an independent account of the structure of existence from which he then argued for the same idealist positions as before.

The thesis for which McTaggart is now most famous is that of the unreality of time; what is even more difficult to come to terms with is his thesis that the ultimate reality of the world comprises a community of selves wholly constituted by their loving perceptions of each other. This thesis is a manifestation of a mysticism that is an essential element in McTaggart’s philosophy; yet this mysticism is combined with a rationalist determination, reminiscent of Spinoza, to vindicate mystical insights by the light of pure reason alone.

THOMAS BALDWIN

MAGIC

Magic is the art of influencing the workings of nature through occult powers. It can be found in most societies throughout history. It is often defined by contrast with other subjects, such as science, rationality and religion. Practitioners of magic might fashion themselves as necromancers, magi or natural philosophers; and accused practitioners were often labelled as sorcerers, heretics or witches. Concentrated, though at times incoherent, expositions of what we might call the epistemology of magic reached their height in European philosophy in late antiquity in the writings of Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus; this interest was rekindled in the Renaissance in the writings of Agrippa, Pico, Ficino and others in what is often described as the Hermetic or Occultist tradition. Whether magic worked according to natural, demonic or divine forces was debated, and during the Renaissance demonology shifted from a theological to a natural philosophical pursuit. In the Middle Ages explaining how magic worked was a concern of theologians; in the Renaissance it was a concern of natural philosophers and physicians; and in the modern period it is a concern of anthropologists and historians. Magic has always been associated with trickery and danger, and with knowledge and power.

See also: AGRIPPA VON NETTESHEIM; BRUNO, G.; CAMPANELLA, T.; FICINO, M.; HERMETISM; KABALLAH; NEOPLATONISM; PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE; POMPONAZZI, PIETRO; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY

LAUREN KASSELL

MAIMON, MOSES BEN

See Maimonides, Moses

MAIMONIDES, MOSES (1138–1204)

Called the Rambam in the Hebrew sources, an acronym on his name, and known in Islamic texts as Musa ibn Maimun, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon is best known in theWest as Moses Maimonides and is generally recognized as the greatest of the medieval Jewish philosophers. Maimonides lived his mature life in Egypt and earned his living as a physician. He was the author of ten medical works but gained fame in his own lifetime for his work on Jewish law (halakhah), chiefly the Kitab al-Fara’id (Sefer ha- Mitzvot, that is, the Book of the Commandments), cataloguing the traditional 613 commandments of the Pentateuch; Kitab al-Siraj (Sefer ha-Maor, Perush ha-Mishnah, Commentary on the Mishnah); and, above all, the Mishneh Torah (The Law in Review), a comprehensive and still authoritative code of rabbinic law. The clarity and definitiveness of the Mishneh Torah led to its criticism and (after Maimonides’ death) even condemnation by some rabbis, who prized the ongoing dialectic of Talmudic disputation and felt suspicious of Maimo-nides’ rationalism.

Maimonides’ philosophic masterpiece, the Dala-lat al-Ha’irin or Guide to the Perplexed, was written in Arabic, with a view to helping the more intellectually inquisitive readers of the Torah, who were troubled by the apparent disparity between biblical and scientific/philosophical ideas. The work frames a powerful but not supercilious rationalism that locates and accommodates many biblical postulates and profits from the instruction of the rabbinic (Talmudic) sources and from critical appropriation of the achievements of Muslim philosophers and theologians and their Greek predecessors. It defends the doctrine of the world’s creation against the eternalism of Neoplatonic Aristotelians but rejects the notion that creation (or eternity) is subject to proof. Rather, Maimonides argues, creation is preferable to its alternative, and more plausible, because it preserves the idea of divine volition as an explanation for the emergence of complexity from divine simplicity, and because it marks the difference God’s act made to the existence and nature of the world.

God is pure perfection and absolute simplicity. The Torah’s anthropomorphisms themselves lead us to that realization, if we follow the dialectic by which prophetic language directs us to ever higher conceptions of divine transcendence. Biblical poetry and the concrete demands of the Law are accommodations to our creaturely limitations. Such accommodations are made possible by the material side of the prophet’s nature, as manifested in language and imagination, which are, no less than intellect, expressions of God. For matter in general is an expression of God, apprehensible to us through what seems wilful or arbitrary in nature. It is not a positive principle or hypostasis, but it is a necessary concomitant of the act of creation itself. For without it nothing other than God would exist. Our task as humans is to discipline our material natures –not to battle or seek to destroy them but to put them to work in behalf of our self-perfection, through which our inner, intellectual affinity to God will be realized.

Maimonides’ synthetic approach, accommodating to one another the insights of reason and the teachings of Scripture and tradition, was highly valued by Aquinas, who frequently cites him, and by other European philosophers such as Jean Bodin. Leibniz warmly appreciated Maimonides’ thought, as his reading notes reveal. Among subsequent Jewish thinkers, Maimonides’ work became the paradigm of Jewish rationalism for his admirers and detractors alike. His philosophy was at the core of the philosophic tradition that Spinoza addressed. Even today practitioners of Jewish philosophy stake out their positions in reference to Maimonides and formulate their own views as appropriations, variants or interpretations of the elements of his thought.

See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF; HALAKHAH; MIDRASH; RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF

L.E. GOODMAN

MAISTRE, JOSEPH DE (1753–1821)

Count Joseph de Maistre was a major theorist of the Counter-Enlightenment, whose writings inspired generations of French Catholic royalists and stimulated thinkers diverse as Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte and Charles Maurras. He is known especially for his providential interpretation of the French Revolution, his support for a Bourbon Restoration in France, his opposition to all contractual theories of government, his arguments in favour of papal infallibility, his philosophical speculations on violence and bloodshed, his critique of John Locke’s epistemology and his attack on Francis Bacon’s ‘scientism’.

See also: CONSERVATISM

RICHARD A. LEBRUN

MALEBRANCHE, NICOLAS (1638–1715)

Nicolas Malebranche, a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism –of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent –is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect –material, cognitive and moral –of the universe.

STEVEN NADLER

MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670–1733)

Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) scandalized contemporaries by arguing that the flourishing commercial society they valued depended on vices they denounced. It resulted not only from the complementary satisfaction of appetites but was also based upon pride, envy and shame, which Mandeville traced to ‘self-liking’. Numerous individuals, driven by their own desires, acted independently to produce goods which required extensive, cooperative operations –an idea central to the economic concept of a market.

Mandeville initially appeared to credit ‘skilful politicians’ with originating morality and society. However, in defending and expounding his views, he set out ‘conjectural histories’ of the gradual development of many complex social activities and institutions, including language and society itself, thereby denying that they had been invented by public spirited heroes. Throughout his works, Mandeville adopted a strict criterion of virtue, repeatedly denying that he was advocating, rather than exposing, the vices he identified as inherent in human society.

M.M. GOLDSMITH

MANICHEISM

Manicheism is a defunct religion, born in Mesopotamia in the third century ad and last attested in the sixteenth century in China. Its founder, Mani (c.216–76), had some familiarity with Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, and aimed to supplant them all. He taught a form of dualism, influenced by earlier Gnostics: God is opposed by forces of darkness; they, not God, created human beings, who nevertheless contain particles of light which can be released by abstemious living. Two points of contrast with Catholic Christianity are particularly striking. First, in Manicheism, sinfulness is the natural state of human beings (because of their creators), and does not stem from Adam’s Fall. Second, the Manichean God did not create and does not control the forces of darkness (although he will eventually triumph); hence the problem of evil does not arise in as stark a form as it does for the all-powerful Christian God.

Although Mani’s own missionary journeys took him eastwards, it was in the Roman Empire to the west that the main impact of his teaching was first felt; Augustine of Hippo was an ...