Babz asked:

I came across this philosophy paper...this was the only question on a university term paper:

How would you go about answering this question?

My answer would be, "Why not?" What do you think?

My first, perhaps unkind thought was that you submitted this question out of sheer boredom, for a laugh. As your suggestion shows, you're not looking for an informative answer!

How about, "Because"? — Ha Ha!

However, you say that you actually saw this question on a university term paper. I believe you. I like one word questions. My favourite essay topics are "I" and "S" (on the nature of the self and self-reference; and on Wittgenstein's private language argument concerning the indefininable sensation "S"). So let's do some lateral thinking.

Consider the possibility that you are not being asked the question, "Why?" You are being asked, by the person who set the paper, to consider the question, "Why?", or rather, questions which begin with, "Why...?"

Now, we're getting somewhere. That looks like an interesting question. What is it that especially distinguishes, or is characteristic about questions which begin with, "Why..."?

Cub reporters are taught to always ask the six questions: Who, What, Why Where, When and How? Five out of the six can be answered very simply: The butler (Who) murdered the housekeeper (What) in the library (Where) last night (When) with a samurai sword (How). The odd one out is "Why?" The question, "Why?" seeks an explanation. Whole books can be written seeking to give the explanation for something. Whereas there is only one right answer to the other five questions, there can be different, equally valid, ways of understanding the question "Why?":

• Why did the butler murder the housekeeper, instead of paying her to keep quiet about his affair with the maid?

• Why did the butler murder the housekeeper with a samurai sword, instead of poisoning her?

• Why did the butler choose the library to do the evil deed?

And so on.

So one point to make about explanations is that they are, as Hilary Putnam argues in Meaning and the Moral Sciences 'relative to interest'. There is no such thing as the explanation of something.

The explanations I have listed above all refer to human motives. But there are other kinds of explanations, for example, scientific explanation. Or is this a different kind of explanation? Some philosophers would argue that the explanations we give in 'folk psychology' aren't real explanations at all, but mere descriptions which cover up the real causes of human behaviour of which we remain blissfully ignorant.

Come to think of it:

What is a historical explanation?

What is a philosophical explanation?

— Plenty of meat there, don't you think?

Geoffrey Klempner

Noesis asked:

My Ancient Political Theory class has been reading The Republic. The one question that has perplexed us all is, "What is the Form of the Good, and what is Good?" We need this answered before we can continue our discussion or answer any of our other questions. If anyone has any suggestions about how to find the answer, please let me know.

Aha! You have read Plato and found his epicentre, and in that of our entire Western tradition. I will offer a suggestion of an answer to you.

Plato, as you have doubtless noticed, doesn't answer the question; when asked to come out with the goods and give a full and clear explanation of what the 'Forms' are, he says himself "Do you really want a blind, halting display from me when you can have nice clear accounts from other people?" He prattles on with analogies involving the sun, caves, mariners and lines and generally gets nowhere.

So what are these mysteriously absolute 'Forms'? Words, or language in general, have sometimes been suggested as being the actuality of the Forms. In this way the very word, say "bed" (it always seems to be "bed", "tree", or "desk" with philosophers, presumably because they look around for a suitable word, and those three tend to be the fist things they see)... so that the 'Form' of the bed is the word "bed" itself. But Plato's version is much more interesting...

His account, such as it is, could be summed up as "the Forms are the true essence of things, the reality behind what we see". It is not entirely clear whether Plato is suggesting that The Forms have genuine existence in some other reality to our own, or whether they are a sort of mental construct that allows us to understand the reality behind mere appearance. Either way, you could equally sum up Plato's ideas in the Republic by saying that his view is "Who should rule? Surely the people who know what is for the Good should rule! Only True Philosophers understand what the true Form of Good is, which is to say, understand what the "Forms" are, so they are the only ones who should rule. I can't tell you what the "Forms" are, because you are not a True Philosopher, and only True Philosophers would understand my answer". From this it follows that "I am a True Philosopher, therefore I know what 'Forms' are, therefore I should be permitted to tell everyone else what to do."

You could get exasperated at this and reason that Plato is merely saying, in a rather clever way, what many of us would like to say, namely "I should be in charge". While this might be true, the very fact that you ask the question demonstrates that you already belong to the tradition of Plato.

Many of the conclusions presented in the Republic may seem, with two-and-a-half thousand years of hindsight, just silly. But its method of reaching those conclusions, by a precise process of honest and careful step-by-step searching after absolute answers, has been, and remains, the one great distinguishing feature of the European way of thinking. The great search for 'Forms' underlies the impossible search for perfection which has given rise to Europe's science, politics, psychology, education and much of its angst. It stands in valorous contrast to the world's only other great founder-philosopher, Confucius, whose attachment to harmony and the certainties of tradition built a very different society.

Tanya asked:

Are Plato's philosophies influenced by Buddhist ideas and Eastern philosophies? If so, are there any works written about this comparison?

Both The Buddha and Confucius lived about three hundred years before Plato, so it is quite possible that some of their ideas filtered through to him. But, to be honest, it is very difficult to say. How could we know who is influenced by whom? We can look to either explicit statements that 'I was influenced in this by X' or we could look for similarities between their ideas.

If we look for explicit information, then only documented connection between the ancient Western and Eastern traditions which I am aware of is that of Pyrrho of Elis, a little later than Plato, who is said to have studied under Indian 'sadhu' philosophers (Called the 'gymnosophists', or 'naked philosophers' by the Greeks) while travelling with Alexander the Great. The extreme form of scepticism which Pyrrho came to espouse does indeed seem quite similar to much Hindu thought, but it is quite at odds with the belief in the real existence of absolute knowledge presented by Plato.

Mick asked:

The response to all philosophical questions, e.g. "Does God exist?", "Why are we here?", "What's the meaning of life?" etc, etc , must be, "We don't know" (always assuming that we're honest). I'm 58 yrs. old, of average intelligence (I think), not particularly well-read or educated to a high standard — an ordinary man! I am unable to go beyond this response. I'd appreciate any thoughts on this matter.

I hope this question is theoretical. If you are truly concerned that there is no meaning to life, you may lack some form of essential attachment to what there is in the world around you. However, there is a sense in which it is normal to recognise — and sometimes feel — that life lacks meaning. One philosopher, Thomas Nagel, has pointed out that being able to recognise the absurdity of life is part of what it is to be human: "It is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight — the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought".

There is only a meaning to life which is beyond, or transcends, what we know if we have faith in God. There are philosophical arguments both for and against God, and although we cannot prove God exists, we cannot prove the converse either.

Life may be essentially pointless and futile, but we can give it point and purpose simply by being engaged in the world as it is. Hopefully, you have family, friends and interests which give you a reason to be here or, in other words, provide the point of life. If this is not so, there remains the wider moral community of other persons you interact with daily and the possibility of better, changed circumstances and the arousal of interest in the world around you.

The question "What is the meaning of life" is meaningless because it searches for something outside life itself to provide a point. We want the point to be available to us here and now, as a reason for living and it is. The point, for you, is whatever you find valuable in life for its own sake.

Rachel Browne

I'm not sure that "I don't know" is the only honest answer to the 'big questions'. Another answer, which might be more truthful, is "I don't understand". Because it is often confusing to work out what is actually being asked.

If someone asked me one day at work: "why are we here?", I might give all sorts of answers, like "because we get paid" or "because this is where the office is". Clearly this is not what is being asked when the question is intended philosophically, but it still remains to be asked what in fact is in question here. Again, an explanation of the birds and the bees would not be the answer the questioner is looking for. And it would seem obvious that no scientific answer could ever suffice.

So what is being asked? I must confess that I am not sure, but I would suspect it is the equivalent of shrugging one's shoulders and sighing. It is an expression of confusion, of bewilderment at the brute fact of existence. I really do understand this, but it is not a question. And if it is not a question, then it cannot be answered.

I would suggest that the other examples of questions you gave could be disposed of in a similar way.

Will Greenwood

Peter asked:

Is suicide ethically wrong?

There are at least two reasons why suicide is regarded as ethically wrong. Firstly, if you commit suicide you fail to take the feelings of others into account; those who care about you. It is the essence of morality to think of others. The second consideration is that you have a moral responsibility to yourself. Kant, for instance, argued that we should treat others with respect as Ends in Themselves. As individuals, one amongst others, we too are an end in itself and should treat ourselves with respect. Kant also thought that our moral community was essentially a rational community and it is rational to want to live.

So if ethics is grounded in either feelings or rationality, suicide is immoral.

However, if it is the case that no-one actually cares whether you commit suicide or not, then on the first reason, I cannot see that it would be unethical. You will not hurt anyone, except yourself: And it is not even clear that you would actually be hurting yourself. Our bodies belong solely to us and I think that we have the right to dispose of them as we think fit.

The rationality argument against suicide shows how you would be hurting yourself and applies even if you don't accept Kant's theory of respect. If you have no reason to live, and no desire to do so, suicide would seem to be the rational conclusion. But this would only be so if there was no future possibility of coming to want to live, and this possibility cannot be rejected. If there is an ethical sense to this it would be that one should be good to oneself and allow oneself the chance of some future happiness.

Rachel Browne

Henry asked:

O.K. I may have to admit it, but I am suffering from a chronic state of nervous exhaustion. I am 40 yrs old and have had the problem for 10 years. How can philosophy help me?

I think philosophy can help you. It could have helped you more if you had asked for advice before you let things get to this stage.

From what I know of cases of nervous exhaustion, you are never going to get back to the way you were. That life, the life that led to your being in this state, is over and finished. Whatever regrets you may feel, it is a waste of energy to go over the why's and wherefore's. It is time to move on.

Psychologists emphasize the value of stress. Human beings are equipped to deal with stressful situations. Adrenaline pumps into the blood, with the chemical changes we think more quickly, physically we become stronger and can endure more. But not everyone benefits to the same extent, or relishes the challenge of a stressful life. And no matter who you are, too much stress can hurt you, sometimes permanently.

A philosopher friend once told me that the highest incidence of stomach ulcers amongst academics occurred with those who did philosophy. That is something I can well believe. (I've seen them with their glasses of milk.) Given the choice between some of the philosophy seminars I've attended, and the Roman Colosseum, I'd choose to fight it out with the lions. Nor are things necessarily any easier for the philosopher locked up in their study. Rodin's 'Thinker' is not having a nice time. He is in acute mental pain.

Yet philosophy does not have to be about violent mental combat, or scaling the highest heights. As a student of philosophy, you can learn to enjoy and appreciate the achievements of the great philosophers. You can learn the joy of calm reflection.

The Medieval philosopher Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy while in prison, awaiting what he knew would be an horrific torture and death on the charge of heresy. For the Stoics, philosophy taught that the things we encounter or that happen to us in our lives only hurt us because of our own ignorance, because we fail to see the wider picture or take a sufficiently detached viewpoint. I do think, with the ancients, that the everyday world and its annoyances, disappointment, and grief becomes smaller and less significant as our interest in philosophy becomes more. Try it and see!

Geoffrey Klempner

Ryan asked:

I need help with the following question: What made Greece's golden age "golden"? What important standards and principles were set that are still admired today?

The hegemony of Athens in Greece during the 'golden age' contributed greatly to why we look back at Greece the way we do. From roughly 594 BCE, under a variety of great leaders (Solon, Peisitratos, Kleisthenes and eventually Pericles) the form of government known as democracy evolved and developed in Athens, and Athens exported it to the far reaches of her empire. Compared with the despotism of Xerxes in Persia, say, or the system in Sparta, the Athenian system was clearly enlightened (although they used democracy for their own ruthless imperial ends, not because they gave it a value like we do today). But that is nonetheless one thing that we look back at and admire. I have read that the development of democracy in Athens was crucial to other cultural developments there before and during the 'golden age'.

From democracy (and specifically Athens' ruthlessness in using it as an imperial tool) came money. With money the Athenians were able to build great monuments which we can still visit. On the other hand pre-Socratic philosophers Democritus and Leucippus postulated that the fundamental constituents of matter were atoms, which is not completely antithetical to the modern view. That people were able to have abstract thoughts is because they had the leisure to do so. Athens was rich enough that leisure was affordable.

Drama was virtually invented by the Athenians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are the tragedians we remember, Aristophanes in particular the comic) Many literary scholars still regard the Oedipus Rex as the greatest play ever written. Nietzsche thought that through the great plays of the tragedians came the 'truth' of the absurdity of the universe — that the Greeks not only survived knowing this, but constructed a culture the likes of which has never been seen since.So at the very least, the cultural achievements of the golden age have been a talking point for aesthetes ever since.

What finally of philosophy? A great number of our most fundamental and troubling philosophical questions were first asked (as far as we know) by the pre-Socratics, Socrates himself, Plato and Aristotle. These questions range from the nature of universals, moral realism, freedom and the self. So philosophy more-or-less came into being during this period (not that these are necessarily the questions we should still be pondering over, according to Richard Rorty) The time period of the golden age is short (c.490 to 404 when Athens was defeated in the Peloponnesian war) which makes these achievements all the more amazing.

Many principles we would not agree with today (slavery and corporal punishment) But democracy, a relatively advanced civilisation, wealth, an emphasis on reason in philosophy and creativity in art — these are all aspects of the golden age which continue to amaze its students and which people often feel an affinity with. Its hard to know why it all started and came about so quickly; perhaps because they made money and could afford to.

Adam Gatward

Charlotte asked:

What is moral relativism?

'Moral relativism' is one of the responses you sometimes hear people give in cases of ethical conflict. For example the Romans fed Christians to wild beasts and kept slaves as gladiators, whereas we do not, and regard it as wrong. You can either respond that we are morally more enlightened than the Romans were, that we today have got it right; or you can opt for the relativistic line that there is no answer to these kinds of question. So moral relativism is a denial that there is any single moral code that has universal validity.

Relativists need not deny that there is such a thing as moral truth, although their account of truth will be very different from an absolutist like Kant. Moral truth, to the relativist, is relative to factors which are culturally and historically contingent. So you can be a meta-ethical relativist about truth and justifiability. The wide variety of ethical beliefs in the world is perhaps a point in its favour. How do you even assess the truth of something outside of your own background, language and community?

You can also be a relativist in a slightly different, 'normative' way. This would be to say that we ought to hold that the values of others are as valid as our own. Anthropology has thrown up an exotic array of practises from distant cultures which we simply cannot relate to and even find distasteful (infanticide, cannibalism, head-hunting etc). A moral relativist might claim that we have no normative grounds for judging these kinds of practise by our own moral standards. See my answers to Russ, Charlotte and Duane for some practical examples, and see Geoffrey Klempner's answer to Diana for some thoughts on the 'cultural defence'.

Adam Gatward

Eliza asked:

How did the Presocratics perceive soul? Is Plato's theory of ideas equivalent to religious faith? What is a hypothesis? On what basis did Socrates adopt it ("Phaedo")? All philosophies take something for granted to begin with, a base; but what did the Sophists have as a base? As nihilists of their time was it power (e.g. political)?

Thales, the first Presocratic philosopher, is said to have explained the effect of a magnet on iron by saying that it had a 'soul'. Heraclitus, who taught that the universe was an everlasting divine fire which 'kindles in measures, and goes out in measures' also held that each of us had this fire within us. It is death to allow one's soul to become 'wet'.

Plato's theory of Ideas or 'Forms' is not a religion as you would understand it. There is no personal God that we can pray to. it is a religion of reason. Heraclitus had identified the universal fire with Logos — explanation, reason, account. Reason 'rules' over the ever-changing world of phenomena. All changes, however apparently random or chaotic, are law governed. Plato's world of Forms gives intelligible structure to the Logos, just as his world of phenomena — the world we inhabit, so long as we remain 'imprisoned' in our earthly bodies — represents a world of Heraclitean flux. So in Plato's philosophy we can find, if not religion, then an eschatology. There is rational hope, for those who strive to make their souls more philosophical, more detached from physical things, of an eternal life 'amongst the Forms'.

In the Phaedo, one of the greatest and certainly the most moving of all Plato's dialogues, Socrates, condemned to death for 'impeity' and now facing the very last day of his life, discusses with his friends various arguments for the immortality of the soul. In the course of the discussion, Plato introduces the concept of 'hypothesis'. We may be unsure whether to accept theory A or theory B. One way to proceed is to put forward the 'hypothesis' of A, and see what follows. If the consequences are unacceptable, for example, if the assumption of A leads to a contradiction, then we can examine whether the hypothesis of B fares any better. In that way, the philosopher is able to make progress without assuming a fixed starting point, or 'taking something for granted'. That idea, the idea of dialectic is one Socrates' and Plato's greatest gifts to the Western philosophical tradition.

In Plato's jaundiced view, the Sophists did not practice dialectic. They did not use the method of hypothesis in the search for ultimate truth. They practiced eristic, logic chopping. The Sophists taught how to 'make the weaker argument appear stronger.'

But why should we believe that dialectic, or learning how to demolish hypotheses will ever get you to the truth? Plato's early dialogues show Socrates again and again proving the point that he knew nothing, save the fact that he was ignorant. Every definition of the moral virtues put forward by his helpless interlocutors falls to pieces under his dialectical blade.

Plato got 'religion'. He found his theory of Forms. The Sophists were perhaps wiser to the limits of philosophical method. Some, it is true seemed to tend towards nihilism: like Gorgias who wrote a notorious, some say satirical treatise On What is Not — in which he argued that nothing exists, and even if something did exist no-one could ever know it — or Thrasymachus whose view that 'justice is the interests of the stronger' provides the starting point for Plato's investigation in the Republic. The greatest of all the Sophists, Protagoras, who taught that we ourselves are the 'measure' of values, was not arguing for nihilism. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance makes a convincing case that the Sophists were passionately concerned with values.

Like Nietzsche, their modern counterpart, who repeatedly portrays nihilism as the greatest threat to human culture, the Sophists saw values as ultimately coming from us rather than from a Platonic Heaven. That is not nihilism. It is a way, the Nietzschean would argue — as Russell argued in 'A Free Man's Worship' — to embrace the reality of values without accepting the false comforts of religion.

Geoffrey Klempner

Jocelyn asked:

Is it possible to agree yet disagree with some aspects of a philosophical essay topic? My topic is, "Should philosophy be made compulsory in junior and senior high schools?"

I am not sure whether you are asking: is it possible to agree and disagree with something at the same time? Or are you asking: is it possible to agree with some aspects of an issue and disagree with others?

In the former case, I have never been able to agree with something I disagree with (although I sometimes have no opinion). But when you assess an argument carefully for an essay it is best to defend a position or attack it. Pointing out the weakness in a position you choose to defend does not mean you must disagree with that position in the final analysis. I may agree with capitalism, say; but capitalism has many weaknesses which I would acknowledge if I were writing a defence of it.

In the latter case there are pros and cons to any essay question which you need to weigh up. Some consequences of teaching philosophy in schools you will accept, others you will not like. Finding the balance between the two sets of consequences will be your answer to the question.

So you might agree that philosophy should be taught because it is very interesting or provides good mental training in some way. But you might disagree that students ought to be forced to read 18th century philosophical texts as part of the course because a lot of the texts are often boring and 'kill' the subject for beginners. Or you might think that reading those texts is a good thing for all of us because at the very least it breaks the will! A good way of defending a position you agree with is to point out its possible weaknesses (or the bits that make you uncomfortable) and try and hammer them out of the way or argue that they aren't weaknesses at all.

Adam Gatward

I think you can just put forward the pros and cons for whether philosophy should be taught in school, and then pick out those you agree and disagree with. Its certainly not an easy thing for you to come to a conclusion about.

Rachel Browne

Paul asked:

Who am I?

Well, if you don't know...! I suppose you ask this question having read all the philosophical arguments on the subject of personal identity, and found that there are no ready answers.

Perhaps not. So firstly, you are not your body, because simply to be a body without consciousness would be insufficient to provide you with a sense of "I". Consciousness is essential to personal identity. Secondly, you could wake up in a state of awareness of a completely different body, so there is no particular body which makes you you. Furthermore, we can conceive of disembodied consciousness, so it is not necessary that you have a body at all.

Consciousness looks essential to personal identity. But the question arises what it is about my consciousness that makes me "me". If I lost all my memories, I would still be me. At any particular moment there is no particular thought about anything which makes me "me" except a subjective awareness of the moment. This seems to reduce the idea of "I" to "here" and "now".

This approach gets us nowhere. There is nothing to do but abandon the idea of "me" as my mind or body, and take it as both. It must be a necessary condition for a sense of "I" that I have both a mind and body and am aware of myself as different from others and objects. It also appears to be necessary that I can at least think about myself, and take myself as an "I" and so I must be a language user. In order to be a language user, there must be a community determining the rules of use for the language. If we are able to conceive of a disembodied consciousness with a sense of "I", it is because we are already physically embodied language users in a community. Given that this so, any real sense of who you are is gained by being embodied and having experiences, but it doesn't matter which body or which experiences.

Whichever body and experiences you have, you are a conscious subject with a unique perspective on your body who has thoughts and experiences.

But the idea of a conscious subject as substantial has been abandoned by philosophers. It is now accepted that there is no such thing as the Cartesian "I". There is nothing that we can grasp as "I" beyond the experiences and the contents of the thoughts we have. There is a school of philosophy which holds, with Jacques Lacan, that "Where I am, I don't think, and where I think, I am not". Thinking cuts you off from "being". Once an individual is able to think, to distinguish others and use language, the self — what it is to be — disappears. What you can see, experience and think about are common to all persons, and all there is content, what the experience is of or what the thought is about. You cannot grasp what it is to be — you can have no direct awareness of yourself — prior to gaining the ability to think because as soon as you think the self disappears.

The place of "being" is held by Lacan to be where thought is not, and given that being must be internal, it is located in the unconscious. This doesn't get us anywhere either because we have no direct access to the unconscious.

More positively, we could ignore these two approaches, and look at the self in Sartrean terms. In the words of Phil Washburn: "The true self is what you do spontaneously, naturally, by instinct. If you have to think about who wants you to do something, or about the consequences of doing it, or what people will think, then you are not expressing your real self. We are born with a unique potential, in fact many potentialities."

Rachel Browne

Mark asked:

It has been my experience thus far in philosophy that often when an answer seems very obvious to me, I have not fully understood the question. With that in mind, I want to ask about Anselm's and Augustine's assertion that belief must precede understanding.

It seems obvious to me that this cannot be so. For, belief must be belief in something, and having identified that something, one has (already) begun to understand it. It seems a logical necessity that belief follows understanding. Can someone help me understand Augustine's assertion in a way that would make me more sympathetic to it, or is it just as I see it?

I think you are referring to Anselm's phrase 'credo ut intellegam' (which means 'I believe so that I may understand' ) It is the starting point of his ontological argument in the Proslogion.

I agree with your lack of sympathy for the position but for different reasons. It is not a logical necessity that 'belief follows from understanding' as you suggest. If this were true, understanding the idea of God, say, would be sufficient grounds for a belief in God. I think you are right to say that in order to be able to identify something, you must understand it first. But it doesn't follow from this that understanding is prior to belief.

There is an entire skeptical tradition in philosophy — of which Hume is probably the greatest champion — which holds that some of our fundamental commitments (such as our beliefs in causation, continued and distinct existences, freedom etc) are without rational foundation. Putting it incredibly crudely, when you sit in a chair you believe it won't collapse under you (and it probably won't). But is that belief based on any understanding? The idea is that a lot of our expectations and beliefs are based on custom and habit, not the understanding. We only come to understand much later.

Anselm and Augustine seem to me to be making a similar kind of point: the way we understand the world has to start somewhere, and this starting point (to them) must be with a deeply held faith in the Christian God.

There is an argument called the Parity Argument which might interest you. Lets say you agree with the skeptical tradition that some commitments of secular concern are without rational foundation even though we believe them. So, the argument goes, you are inconsistent if you refuse to yield to religious beliefs merely because they have no rational foundation (i.e. the starting point for understanding the world has to be with a set of beliefs of some sort). So faith in God is a bit like faith in other things.

The Humean take on this is that it is not an inconsistency unless:

1. There is pressure to yield to religious beliefs equal in all respects to the pressure to yield to secular ones.
2. The meta-rational demands for religious belief are equal to the meta-rational demands to believe in an external world etc.
3. Religious beliefs fulfill the same criteria as our non-rationally founded secular beliefs which enable those secular beliefs to be resistant to skepticism.

The criteria are:

1. Conclusions arrived at must be temporally prior to reasoning.
2. They are indispensable as presuppositions for knowledge and conduct for a being living in a coherent relationship with the appearance of things. In practical terms one cannot live in the world unless one carries those beliefs.
3. So, 'natural beliefs' are universal and not simply the dominant ones held by the vulgar. They are ones we all possess.

We conclude, firstly, that it is incontrovertible that religious beliefs are not universal in the manner of (c), and secondly that individuals can and do act perfectly adequately without beliefs in God. The beliefs are not an epistemic requirement for any coherent relation to the appearance of things. So (b) is not fulfilled either and from (1) and (2) we can reject Anselm's point that we must believe in God in order to understand.

Adam Gatward

Charlotte asked:

What is Frege's puzzle? Why did he reject the metalinguistic solution and change to reference and sense? What is his second solution and does it work any better than the first?

and Alex asked:

I'm writing an undergraduate essay about Frege, which is, "Is sense a semantic property of singular terms?" I would greatly appreciate any help on this subject as it is very difficult and I don't understand it!! Thank you.

In his essay, 'On Sense and Reference' ('Uber Sinn und Bedeutung') Frege presents a puzzle about the notion of identity. Identity statements, of the form A=B, can convey factual information about the object designated. To take Frege's example, we now know that the sun we see in the sky is the same object whenever it appears. Once, people did not know this. Or, to quote an example popular with academic philosophers, we all know that Superman is Clark Kent, but Louis Lane does not. If she were to discover Clark Kent's identity, this would be knowledge. But what exactly is this knowledge and how is it represented in the statement, Superman=Clark Kent?

There seem to be just two alternatives:

1. A statement of identity describes a relation which every object holds to itself, and does not hold to any other object.
2. A statement of identity describes a relation which holds between two names which refer to one and the same object.

On alternative (1), when we say that Superman=Clark Kent, what we actually state is that a certain individual is identical with himself. But this is hardly news! On this reading, there is no difference in informational value between the statement, Superman=Clark Kent and the statement, Superman=Superman.

On alternative (2), when we say that Superman=Clark Kent, what we actually state is that the name 'Superman' designates one and the same individual as the name 'Clark Kent'. This 'meta-linguistic' solution which Frege originally adopted, looks more promising. To know that an object is designated by a particular name is a piece of factual information. For example, I ask what my neighbour's new dog is called and she tells me his name is 'Bruce'. Now I know something I didn't know before.

But Frege rejects this second alternative. Why? This is what he says:

[T]his relation would hold between the names or signs only in so far as they named or designated something. It would be mediated by the connexion of each of the two signs with the same designated thing. But this is arbitrary. Nobody can be forbidden to use any arbitrarily producible event or object as a sign for something. In that case the sentence a=b would no longer refer to the subject matter, but only to its mode of designation; we would express no proper knowledge by its means.

Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege P. Geach and M. Black eds. Blackwell 1970.

As an undergraduate, I remember puzzling over this. What is Frege saying? Of course, I am free to invent my own arbitrary name for Bruce. Suppose my name for Bruce is 'Bonzo'. For me, it is not news that 'Bruce' designates the same entity as 'Bonzo'. For you it might be. Not having a great eye for dogs, you are unaware that the naughty 'Bonzo' I point out tearing up my vegetable patch is the very same well behaved 'Bruce' you were introduced to by my neighbour last week when you were invited over for tea. So what's wrong with this account?

There's nothing wrong with it. It is perfectly all right. The statement that 'Bruce' designates the same entity as 'Bonzo' will convey information to you just in the case when the statement that Bruce=Bonzo conveys information. They are not the same statement, of course. The first statement refers to names while the second statement uses names, but does not refer to them. (You refer to a name when you put it in quotation marks.) However, the two statements do the same job.

But that is precisely the reason why the meta-linguistic analysis doesn't make any contribution to solving the original puzzle. It looks as though the meta-linguistic analysis gets you somewhere, whereas in fact it doesn't. The question, which still hasn't been answered is, What is it that is characteristic of all and only those cases of statements of the form A=B or of the form The object designated by 'A'=the object designated by 'B' which succeed in conveying factual information?

Frege's solution is to propose a distinction between the sense of a name and its reference. The reference of a name is the entity which it designates. The sense of the name, for a given individual or group of individuals who use that name, depends upon — now, here comes the difficult bit — something (Frege calls it the 'mode of presentation' of the object) which is not the same as the entity itself. In the statements, 'Superman=Clark Kent' or 'Bruce=Bonzo', the names on each side of the '=' sign have the same reference but a different sense.

Objects, as I would put it, have sides. Every object that we are acquainted with, potentially has sides from which that object would be unrecognizable to us. Occasionally, we succeed in connecting two disconnected sides together and recognize that fact by asserting an identity statement.

It is therefore is absurd to claim that the semantic value of names like 'Bruce' or 'Geoffrey' is the object which they refer to. If that were the case, one would have to conclude that we can never know the meaning of any name. If one did know the meaning of a name, then one would have to know the object from every possible side, knowledge to which, as Frege laconically remarks, "we never attain".

But do names have a semantic value, in Frege's sense? Is there any useful point in looking for the mode of presentation, or sense of a name like 'Bruce', or 'Geoffrey'? Does my neighbour's dog have a 'Bruce' side and a 'Bonzo' side? Only in certain artificially restricted examples. In real life, modes of presentation overlap in exceedingly complex ways. One would have to conclude that Frege's argument for a sense/reference distinction for proper names as a solution to the puzzle about identity statements is totally unconvincing. Names have a fluid and variable currency, not a fixed 'semantic value'.

Geoffrey Klempner

Dear Alex:

It can be difficult to understand sense and reference but I think this is just because reference always seemed to be called "meaning" as if sense was irrelevant to semantic theory. However, there are two different aspects to meaning.

Firstly, there is thought and speech. What we refer to is the object or referent. When we "mean" something, we refer to it and, in doing so, we use a particular sense, or a description. You may know John as "the bloke in the pub" and your friend might know him a "the man who works in the bookshop". You can talk about the same person without knowing it, but you are both talking of the same person (you have the same reference), and you may come to both realise it when you come to agree on senses — or descriptions — under which you know John. Sense is essential to this aspect of meaning. You can't talk about John without a sense, i.e. a description under which you know him, or you wouldn't understand what you were talking about. For Frege, this type of meaning was both sense and reference. It is an account of an individual's understanding of a sentence. Frege called this propositional as opposed to sentential.

The other aspect of "meaning" is the relation between a sentence and the fact in the world. When we use language we use propositions which express our relationship to, or our understanding of, the way the world is. There is what we know of John, but there is also John himself who embodies all facts about himself. The sentence which contains as the referent the word John, picks out John as the individual of whom there are facts which are true or false of him. The sentence "John works in the bookshop" directly refers to a particular person as an objective item and doesn't need to carry sense to have meaning. An ordinary sentence — as opposed to a propositional thought — is given meaning in terms of its truth conditions, so is directly determined by extra-linguistic facts such as those in the world.

Dear Charlotte:

According to Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference, Frege did not abandon one semantic theory for another, but recognised that more than an extensional analysis of sentences was needed if a theory of meaning was to encompass an account of what it is to understand a sentence.

His initial theory of meaning was in terms of truth value. The meaning of a sentence is determined by whether or not a description is true or not of the referent. What Frege realised, which is the reason for his sense/reference distinction, was that in many cases we might know an object or person under one description yet not under another. What an individual knows about a referent is its sense, or intension. The sentence relation between sentences and extra-linguistic entities is extensional and doesn't account for what people understand by their language and a theory of meaning should be able to provide some explanation of differences in understanding as well as being able to underpin a theory of communication.

Evans identifies Frege's initial recognition of the problem of understanding in regard to a theory of meaning in an unpublished letter in which Frege gave an example of a mountain discovered from different directions by two explorers. One explorer calls it 'Afla' and discovers it's height to be 5000 metres, the other calls it 'Ateb' but knows nothing of it's height. The second explorer can successfully refer to the mountain as Ateb and might come to discover that Ateb is 5000 metres high. He would thus believe "Ateb is 5000 metres high" but not "Afla is 5000 metres high" because he doesn't know that Ateb is Afla. Therefore, these cannot be the same thought: There are two senses, one referent. It is possible not to know that the mountain is not snow-capped in the summer, so Frege's theory of sense shows how it is possible to informatively communicate with others about objects. Frege's example of Hesperus and Phosphorus (the evening star and the morning star) in 'On Sense and Reference' illustrates the same point. On the extensional analysis, which Frege came to recognise as inadequate, if you believe that "Ateb is 5000 metres high" then you would believe that "Afla is 5000 metres high".

As a theory of meaning the sense/reference account works to an extent, but lies slightly problematically alongside Frege's account of extensional meaning of sentences. Some sentences, about fiction for instance, include names which do not refer to objects. On a logical extensional analysis, this type of sentence would be false because it fails to refer. If a theory of meaning was simply extensional, a person using a sentence about a fictional character would fail to say anything. There would be sense without reference for a class of propositions and sentences. Michael Dummett, the main interpreter of Frege, has held that for these sentences a third, indeterminate truth value should be introduced. Evans holds that Frege took a more Russellian view of fictional sentences.

One specific problem arising from Frege's account is what Susan Haack in Philosophy of Logics refers to as "The morning star paradox". On the extensional analysis, the morning star is the evening star — both terms refer to the planet Venus — which is an identity relation, and so it is necessary. If the morning star is the evening star then that fact could not be otherwise. However, because there are two senses involved here, it follows that it is contingent. Not everyone knows that the morning star is the evening star. We can easily conceive that they might have been two different stars, given the different senses.

Rachel Browne

Cesar asked:

What is the difference between an emotion and a feeling? What are the common or basic emotions?

I don't know of any philosophers who have distinguished between feelings and emotions. However, it would make sense to say emotions are focused feelings, and that all emotions are feelings, but not all feelings are emotions. A few feelings which I would suggest are not emotions because they are not focused are those of calm, anxiety and general happiness or sadness.

Aristotle thought that to be in an emotional state is to be in a certain "frame of mind", e.g. "People who are afflicted by sickness or poverty or love or thirst or any other unsatisfied desires are prone to anger and easily roused". There must also be a cause of the emotion, such as being "slighted" in the case of anger, and each emotion is related to feelings of pleasure and pain. Emotions also guide our thoughts: In the case of anger, Aristotle points out that we are led to thoughts of retaliation.

Aristotle didn't distinguish between feelings and emotions and so analysed feelings such as calm and friendship as emotions. He characterised calm, as a cooling down after anger, which is to continue to respond to an external cause because you calm down in relation to the person who made you angry. However, a person can simply be calm which is a condition rather than an emotion, or simply feel calm for no particular reason, and calmness in these senses would not fall within Aristotle's definition of an emotion.

If we accept that emotions are focused (actually, or as the content of thought) on particular states of affairs outside the body, then feelings can be characterised as unfocused internal states. A paradigm for feeling is the physical feeling of pain. This has a cause inside rather than outside the body. To be calm or happy in this sense, where there is no external cause, can be taken as a feeling and contrasted with emotions. On this distinction, friendship, as directed at another person would be an emotion.

On this analysis, I suppose that the most common emotion is friendship. It is not really possible to talk of common emotions in general, since many emotions, such as jealousy and anger, depend upon one's being of a personality type.

Rachel Browne

A.C.Hughes asked:

Ultimate universe reality cannot be grasped by mathematics, logic, or philosophy, only by personal experience in progressive conformity to the divine will of a personal God. Neither science, philosophy, nor theology can validate the personality of God. Only the personal experience of the faith-sons of the heavenly Father can effect the actual spiritual realization of the personality of God. True of False?

There is no way of saying whether your statement is true or false although doubtless it is one or the other. You rule out of court the methods we have for assessing the truth of a proposition in your first sentence: on the basis you have given for finding out the facts, I think it is impossible to assess the truth of your claim. You can't have your cake and eat it, and claim that personal experience makes a proposition true and then rule out other methods by which we normally assess it. If your claim is true, then we would have to be able to explain why it is true in other terms to avoid circularity.

I don't know of any way to make a negative statement about truth, bracket it off and then ask whether the whole statement is true or not. On your basis, I could argue:

1. A statement is true if and only if I enjoy one of the faith experiences you describe.
2. Faith experiences are a sufficient criteria for truth.
3. I haven't had such experiences.
4. So, your statement is false.

But this clearly begs the question!

According to Hume, rightly in my view, reports of personal religious experiences are almost always less likely to be true than the intrinsic likelihood of the truth of the agent's being mistaken. So this gives an inductive basis for thinking that your statement about God is false, in a possible world in which the truth of a proposition is assessed externally to the personal faith encounter.

Adam Gatward

False!

Will Greenwood

Adrienne asked:

What determines how we use moral rationalization? Example, the person who is released from jail, knows or should know how to stay out of incarceration, yet they have a history of being a repeat offender. The crime does not necessarily have to be the same offense.

This is the problem that was known in Greek philosophy as the problem of akrasia or 'weakness of will'. The problem is acute for any one who believes that we do the action which, in our view, we have the best reason to do.

In your example, the person released from jail knows that they ought to stay out of trouble. It doesn't matter whether one understands this as a moral 'ought' (the offender has learned the error of their ways) or merely the recognition that they are not clever enough to avoid getting caught. Once out, their resolve weakens and they offend again.

I prefer Socrates' solution to this problem to Aristotle's. For Socrates, 'weakness of will' is not the correct description. The failure is a failure of reason and knowledge. If you really knew it was better not offend again, then you wouldn't do it. When you do offend, it is because your knowledge deserts you at the crucial moment. You get distracted from your goal. Aristotle didn't like this explanation. He thought you could know you were doing the wrong thing by your lights, yet do it under the influence of temptation. On such an occasion, your actions are controlled by your passions, not by your reason.

I cannot accept the idea that there are two distinct causes of our actions, our reasons and our passions. Whatever we do, we do for a reason, even if it is a bad reason. The shoplifter who lusts after a pair of designer jeans takes them for a reason which, in other circumstances would be considered perfectly acceptable. I don't see how the desire for designer jeans can be a reason for action on one occasion (when you can afford to pay for them) but not on another occasion. Of course, there are reasons of various kinds for not shoplifting. These have to be taken into consideration. Yet, at the crucial moment, the reasons for staying on the straight and narrow suddenly seem less convincing. “Yes, I know it is wrong to steal. But I've got no money and it's wrong that other people are rich and I am poor. And in any case, no-one is really going to suffer as a result of my action.” Or, “I know I have been caught many times in the past, but practice makes perfect. This time, I am certain I can get away with it!”

What I think Aristotle is absolutely right about is the crucial importance of habit. However, this can be shoe horned neatly into the Socratic account. The ability to keep ones eyes fixed on an objective and resisting the distractions of momentary temptation is something that can be strengthened or weakened by habit. Thinking is an action just as much as doing. It would be absurd to claim that I perform the mental action of choosing to consider a particular reason, only because I consciously think about the reason for considering that reason. The result would be a vicious regress. In order to consciously think about the reason for considering the first reason, I would have to think about the reason for thinking about the second reason for considering the first reason, and so on.

The knowledge in which moral or prudential virtue in Socrates' sense consists, involves, above all, a certain capacity for memory. It is memory that determines the reasons that occur to us at this or that time, and how we respond to those perceived reasons. “The greatest curse of human beings,” as Max von Sydow's Merlin remarks, “is that they forget!”

Geoffrey Klempner

Yunus asked:

I study electronic engineering in a foreign country. We have been asked to make an essay:

Le savoir est-il ce qui peut s'enseigner?

I understand that question to mean: Is it possible to teach all forms of knowledge?

I think for Plato knowledge is what has a precise content, we can give a definition. I refer to the dialogue Meno which is about a problematic definition of virtue. According to Plato, if something — for example, virtue — is knowledge, then it can be taught.

But if we consider knowledge acquired from experience, and not from a professor, in this case, is it possible to teach this knowledge? Personally, I learnt a lot of things during my work experience that I think someone else couldn't teach me.

Plato thought that we acquire practical 'knowledge' by means of the mere transfer of information, examples being flute-playing and medicine. Real knowledge, for Plato, had to be of the abstract and eternal and when we apply concepts for which we don't have a definition — such as virtue — to the empirical world, we are using beliefs and opinions

Real knowledge is acquired by the "tethering" of right opinion — which is appropriate for geometrical problems — where repeated working out of problems is needed before you can claim to know. It involves "reasoning out the explanation" which is needed for conceptual knowledge such as the definition of "virtue", or knowledge of properties in the empirical world. To tether or reason out the explanation is to fully understand. We can only know certain things. Plato thought that the world was subject to change and flux and could not be an object of knowledge, so real knowledge is that which is attained through reasoning.

Today it is thought sufficient that we know what something means just so long as we can use the concept — this is so for knowledge of the empirical world, at least. "Virtue" is a more difficult concept because it is evaluative, so although we have beliefs about what virtue is, real knowledge can only be achieved by understanding which requires reasoning. We can inform others of our beliefs about virtue, but if we don't actually know what it is we cannot really teach others because we would not pass on knowledge.

I don't know what it is that you have learnt from experience which you feel someone else couldn't teach you. If you have learnt from observation, supposedly you could have been shown. Of course, this would not amount to knowledge according to Plato, and couldn't be taught.

Basically, on teaching, practical knowledge (for Plato and everyone else) can be taught. For abstract knowledge (maths and conceptual definitions), Plato would not allow that this can be taught, because you can only come to know something on your own, having reasoned out the explanation, or having understood. You can only "prompt" (i.e. question) others to acquire a proper understanding for themselves. Philosophers other than Plato might characterise prompts as teaching. For difficult concepts such as "virtue" we do not have definitions, and so on Plato's view and most other people's, we can only transfer information. Where we don't have undisputed explanations, we only have beliefs, and these are what cannot be taught on anyone's account, only conveyed or passed on. This may be characterised as "being taught", by non-Platonists, but it is not the acquisition of knowledge on anyone's account.

I don't know anything about electronic engineering, but perhaps you can achieve a deep understanding as opposed to just following instructions or rules. Understanding is something you do on your own.

Rachel Browne

Trevor asked:

In the obituary of a very distant relative of mine, the following sentence occurs: “It is as an author of valuable books on theology and azilosophy-philosophy that Dr. Miall Edwards will live long in the memory of Welsh ministers and studious laymen.”

Question: What is 'azilosophy'? I have searched the Net, the complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (including the Supplement). Nothing.

The deceased was Dr. David Miall Edwards, a liberal, non-conformist Welsh theologian, who died 1941. Was 'azilosophy' a mis-hearing by the newspaper reporter? If so, what was the word he misheard, please?

I don't think that there is any such word as 'azilosophy'; I haven't been able to find it either, so it is likely that your reporter just got it wrong. The individual in question was a liberal theologian you say: an appropriate word that springs to my mind is 'axiology'. The Encarta dictionary defines 'axiology' as the 'study of the nature, types, and governing criteria of values and value judgements.' It comes from the Greek 'axia' meaning 'value'. Axiological considerations about the universe are sometimes discussed in theology along with 'nomological' considerations: what is the relationship between the values Christians feel about the world, and the world's law-governed deterministic nature.

Adam Gatward

Cat asked:

I've though about this question loads and I'm really confused: Is it possible that all the world just exists in our heads?

If all the things in the world exist in our heads, and our heads are in the world, then our heads exist in our heads. Now that is really confusing!

I suppose what you mean is, Is it possible that all the world exists in our minds, where the existence of a mind does not require the existence of a material object, such as a brain or a skull bone.

The first thing to point out is if I really thought it was possible that there were no material things, and that everything 'external' I see around me is nothing more than a kind of projection of something within my own mind, then I would seriously question whether you exist, as a separate subject with a mind. All I know of you are words on this computer screen! But then I might go on to question whether my wife and children exist. Everything I know of them, just as everything I know of you, is based on experiences in my own mind. Our own experiences are all that any of us ultimately has to go on.

Having got that far, there is still more to doubt. All I know of my past experiences is what I can remember of them now. So my past experiences might be nothing more than a projection of experiences currently occurring in my mind. I could have come into existence one minute ago with all my apparent 'memories' as they are now, and I would never know.

Even if, armed with a good dose of common sense, all these speculations seem to us highly improbable are then still possible? Do they make logical sense? Do I have to remind myself every so often that this wide, wonderful world and all the people in it might, just possibly, be nothing more than a momentary bubble of experience that calls itself 'I'? A mere illusion of a 'world' which appeared out of nowhere and will disappear the next moment into the nothingness from whence it came?

So far as nothing is absolutely certain in philosophy, I have to concede — though I don't like it — that what I have just said is possible.

That's not the question we should be asking. The real question is whether it is possible that we might be persuaded, by the philosophical argument of a Berkeley, or a Leibniz or a Kant, to embrace one or other version of the theory that what we call 'the physical world' is not real in itself, but rather something woven together out of the strands of experience.

Kant's theory is in some ways the most attractive of the three. He held that reality is something apart from the things that appear in our experienced 'worlds'. Berkeley, Leibniz and Kant are all agreed that there cannot be appearances without something behind those appearances, their ultimate source. Kant was the only philosopher out of the three to realize that this 'something' would have to be totally outside all human knowledge and experience.

Geoffrey Klempner

Sian asked:

What would be the consequences for a society without religion?

The consequences for a society which is not completely religious are available to see in all ages. It is rare for religion to be all-pervasive, and today, in Britain, Australia, America, at least, there are multiple religions as well as a vast amount of atheism. I think that religion is useful for laying moral foundations within a society. As the world is, most people who have no commitment to religion are still exposed to religious teaching, but if a society had no history of religion at all, morality would still have an impact.

Morality might be grounded in "rational bargaining" which is a recognition of the rights and freedoms of others, aiming at a peacefully run society, or it may be grounded in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism aims, simplistically, for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and would rule against bad deeds as not conducive to happiness. However, such societies would be simply rule or pleasure governed but there is another element of morality which may be based upon religious teachings, such as forgiveness. Deep moral feeling such as remorse and forgiveness come from the subject rather than some form of organised social rules. If the wrong doer, in committing an immoral act does not suffer himself in terms of remorse then morality really has no inner, subjective, hold and a society without religion might well differ very much from a religious society.

However, without religion there remains the natural feeling people have for one another. This may seem an inadequate thing to rely upon, but I don't believe that people perform charitable acts, or are just good, simply for religious reasons. We all behave well to people we love, just because we love them and where there is love, there is forgiveness and remorse. These moral feelings are easily extended beyond relationships based on the close tie of love. So morality with a deep subjective aspect would exist without religion because religion doesn't necessarily provide us with these feelings if there is also a source in love and the recognition of common humanity.

There will always be natural human fellowship, as well as individual and organised charity. Every human being has a cause which touches him. Each organised charity brings in people with particular interests and sympathies.

I believe that people are capable of living in peace with each other and performing good deeds without religion.

In fact, religious differences often cause social division.

Rachel Browne

Russ asked:

Do you have suggestions for someone who feels caught between the ethics of Apollo and Dionysus? I know Nietzsche fell firmly in the Dionysus camp, but I don't feel like he had it all figured out. I think Aristotle's Golden Mean is more of my kind of ethic. Anyway, I'd be interested in any further readings on the topic.

“The real question is how far a belief furthers and supports life, maintains and disciplines a species” Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche's celebrated distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian can be found in his first book The Birth of Tragedy. If you are interested specifically in ethics, rather than the metaphysical and aesthetic strands of the idea, I think the question to ask is how strong are Nietzsche's arguments against moral realism and what exactly is the outcome of his position. Perhaps thinking about this will help you feel less trapped; Walter Kaufmann's book on Nietzsche is excellent.

Here is my take: Nietzsche claims that we are psychologically prone to error through our desires to conform and to avoid pain (pain in the sense of the terror that seeing the world as nauseatingly absurd can induce in us) Descriptions of moral 'facts' are merely descriptions of a moral attitude. There are no moral phenomena, only moralistic interpretations of them.

This is a specialisation of his general metaphysical view — there are no facts and no order (hence no moral order) at all. In most need of re-evaluation are thus our meta-ethical beliefs concerning the possibility of justifying the ethical beliefs we hold. His is a kind of 'error theory' about how we arrive morally realist conclusions and is essentially a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. In this sense it is somewhat similar to J.L. Mackie's arguments for subjectivism in his book Ethics which I recommend. Nietzsche also offers us a psychological explanation for why this error persists — what is the non-moral provenance of moral interpreting and what is its function in human life (see the quote at the top!)

A good question to consider is whether Nietzsche smuggles in some kind of moral realism with this talk of what is 'life-enhancing'; it sounds like a normative notion based on his interpretation of Darwin. Our nature is x, so we ought to do things to enhance it. His lengthy and bitter criticisms of Christianity (see Anti-Christ) often focus on the thought that Christianity could never be life-enhancing and is indeed inimical to happiness when practised because of the lack of value he sees it as placing on existence in this world.

On a purely personal reading of Nietzsche, I thus think that his moral criticisms of Christianity are actually very much along the lines of Greek virtue theory. So you are right to be thinking of Aristotle and the Golden Mean as a possible alternative to some of the more gloomy aspects of what he says elsewhere. Golden Means (e.g. courage is a mean between cowardice and irrascibility) encourage us to function in the right way — they help us to survive and be happy. If you think Nietzsche gets it wrong with the Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetic (roughly, hide from the absurdity in the first case, glorify it and love it in the second), there is still something powerful in the 'virtue theory' aspects of his thought — a virtue is to fulfill your nature as a human.

Nietzsche also speaks of the relativity of moral values however. Whether this sits a little more difficultly with virtue theory is something I often wonder. As Zarathustra puts it:

Much that one people calls 'good' another calls 'shame' and 'disgrace'. So I found. I found much that we here name evil and there decked in purple...a table of values hangs over every people.

Note that this is not a good argument for 'irrealism' and does not mean that we should abandon ethical realism altogether. Bernard Williams claims that we cannot engage with the ethics of a Medieval Teutonic knight (say) not because his moral beliefs were necessarily false but simply because those beliefs are too remote. Modern realists like David Wiggins and John McDowell would agree with Nietzsche that if you gave up your language and conceptual scheme you would end up in chaos; but does Nietzsche (and Mackie for that matter) make the right moves? Perhaps it is the standard for realism that needs to be weakened, and that abandoning ethical realism completely is not the move to make.

Adam Gatward

Paulo asked:

I would like to know about Private Language in Wittgenstein, but I also want to make connections with arguments of Quine about translation (the famous Rabbit) and the mind as a Museum. I need this because I am trying to put the things in a comparative table for students. Thanks.

At one place in Word and Object, Quine makes a disparaging remark about Wittgenstein's argument against a private language. That it was not in the least bit original, and had all been thought before. I remember reading the remark and thinking that this must have been a kind of blindness on Quine's part. Sure, the philosophers who rejected the idea of a private language before Wittgenstein made the right move. But there is all the difference in the world between rejecting a theory — like the famous incident recorded by Boswell of Dr Johnson kicking a stone in order to refute Berkeleian idealism — because you are convinced by your gut feelings that the theory is wrong, and offering a philosophical argument which shows why the theory is wrong, and uncovers the source of the illusion that tempts us into holding the theory in the first place, which is what Wittgenstein did with his attack on the idea of a private language.

The 'indeterminacy of translation' and the 'inscrutability of reference' are two famous Quinian theses. There is nothing in Wittgenstein that is remotely like the claim that translations from one language to another are underdetermined by all actual and possible data (indeterminacy thesis), or that it is impossible to determine from the structural features of a given language which objects the singular terms of that language refer to (inscrutability thesis). The closest Quine comes to sounding like Wittgenstein is when characterizes the view he is arguing against as involving the picture of the mind as a Museum, with rows of exhibits each labelled with a different word. That is not a philosophical argument, however. It is mere rhetoric.

According to Wittgenstein's private language argument, there is no knowledge of 'objects' independent of a shared language and its resources for identity and individuation. According to Quine, the objects that exist in the universe are relative to our language. So, by changing our notion of identity, we change the way in which reality is carved up into objects. There is no 'absolute', language independent, list of the objects that 'really' exist. Reference is 'inscrutable'.

So, for example, in Quine's famous case of the rabbit, if you came across a tribe who used a word 'gavagai' which they used whenever we used the term 'rabbit', it would be possible in principle to offer an alternative, equally accurate translation according to which 'gavagai' was a term which referred to a 'rabbit part', or, alternatively, to a temporal 'slice' of a four-dimensional space-time rabbit.

Like Quine, Wittgenstein makes his point using an imaginary scenario. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a person attempting to coin a word for an experience whose only impact on the world is in the mind of the subject whose experience it is, which cannot be accounted for or defined in terms of any concepts with which we are familiar.

In a similar way, you could pair off Wittgenstein's argument that there will always in theory be more than one way of interpreting the expression of a given linguistic rule, with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. According to Quine, however much data you gather, it is conceivable that the sentence you have translated into English has an alternative, incompatible translation which is consistent with that data.

I am prepared to concede that in both cases, Quine and Wittgenstein are talking about the same thing. They are trying to get across the same idea. In my admittedly biased view, however, Quine's dialectical approach fails while Wittgenstein's succeeds.

Geoffrey Klempner

Gary asked:

What do moral and aesthetic notions like 'good' and 'bad', 'beautiful' and 'ugly', 'ordered' and 'confused' really signify according to Spinoza? And why do we use them?

For Spinoza, moral and aesthetic concepts are obscure "inadequate ideas" and cannot be true. A moral emotion or an aesthetic judgement is not arrived at scientifically, but is a response to the world, which Spinoza would say is a modification of the body. Because moral and emotional judgements are externally caused by something outside the body affecting the body, they do not belong within a system of logical thought and the concepts involved cannot be clarified logically. It follows that we cannot say what they really signify. This is not a drawback to Spinoza's theory, because it actually is the case that we don't have clear ideas of what we mean by beauty and good.

Because such concepts are inadequate ideas, they do not belong within a coherent system of thought and it follows from this that we cannot even say that moral and aesthetic judgements are true and false because, for Spinoza, the truth and falsity of propositions is determined by logical coherence with a system. Philosophers today grapple with the problem of trying to show how value judgements can be taken as true and Spinoza would have predicted that this is a waste of time.

Nor is it problematic that Spinoza gives no guidance as to how we might distinguish similar concepts, such as elegant and beautiful. We use each concept when a different impact has been made upon us and this doesn't admit of an explanation. On Spinoza's view there is no explanation of "inadequate ideas". Explanations are deductive. The philosophies of aesthetics and ethics are devoted to attempts to find definitions and explanations, without much success — as Spinoza would have predicted.

Because we use value concepts when there is an impact upon us from the outside world, it follows from Spinoza's metaphysics that there are attributes of things and events in the world which cause us to respond in a certain way. It is our body, which belongs to the causal chain of nature, which is affected. Because the mind is passive in respect to external events there is no logic in the mind to account for why we use "elegant" rather than "beautiful". When we use these terms we are caused to do so by the object. Furthermore, we do not even use a common term. Each person is affected by external causes differently: this brings problems for moral and aesthetic agreement, but allows for argument, of which there is more!

Rachel Browne

Charlotte asked:

What is the definition of a subjective motivational set? What role does this play in how we act? and can you please give me some help on Hume's view of whether we only do what we want to do, and names of any philosophers who may disagree with him.

In Notes From Underground Dostoevsky writes:

a man...likes to act as he chooses and not at all according to the dictates of reason...it is possible and sometimes positively imperative to act contrary to one's own best interests"

Hume's subjectivist account of ethics starts by looking at how we are motivated to act; we can reason that to do a is better than b, he says, but then act in a completely different way. The idea is that reason has no claim on telling us what to do unless we actually want it to, and there is no requirement of practical reason to act on the conclusion one arrives at. In other words, we need the presence of desires when we are motivated to act. A possible anti-Humean argument from theoretical reason might be this:

1. It is true that P
2. If P then Q
3. Therefore Q

It seems wrong to invoke desires here; we do not conclude Q because we want to believe the logical consequence of our beliefs. It feels as though we are rationally constrained to conclude Q given the rule plus the truth of P. If this works theoretically, why not on the practical side? Hume is skeptical for the reason that ethical propositions are not like mathematical ones. The action guiding nature of morality is explained by the presence of attitude or feeling, itself constitutive of moral judgement. This is bedrock when we are subjectively motivated to act. The relevant passages are Hume's Treatise Book 2, part III, para 1 — 3 and Book 3, Part I, Part II, para 1 &2.

There are really two theses at work there: an argument that concludes that moral grounds are not sufficient to explain moral action, and that a desire is needed (where he finishes by saying that 'reason is the slave of the passions') The second thesis is that the basic source of action lies in the presence of an unmotivated desire or conative attitude; the answer to "why did you do that" boils down to "I wanted to...or...I felt like it". This argument concludes that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of your finger.

Phillipa Foot has put forward an argument against Thesis 1 (in 'Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake' Oxford Journal of Legal Studies Vol.15): she claims that for the just person, certain considerations count as reasons for action; if one understands moral grounds/ reasons, nothing further is required to explain moral action. Foot thinks this can account for the action guiding nature of morality without invoking desires in Hume's fashion. Her move against Thesis 2 is to claim that recognising a reason gives us rational goals and this recognition is not based on some prior feeling or desire. You simply recognise the truth of the claim (e.g. it is a good idea to co-operate) and this is sufficient to explain why you do in fact co-operate.

A second move against Hume's theory of subjective desire-based motivation comes from Warren Quinn in 'Putting Rationality in Its Place". He thinks that if we regard our motives only as desires we happen to have, these do not give reasons for action. Reasons of the kind we want are not the same as rational ones to make sense of our actions. We can always ask whether acting on these desires is actually good; and we need an affirmative answer it the desires are to provide us with a reason for action. Desires, in other words, do not show us what we should do. This move tries to block the Humean starting point.

This is a little more moderate than the Kantian response, but is along the same lines (see my response to Sergey for an interpretation of Kant — I wanted to concentrate on contemporary responses here). Contemporary moral philosophers do not think, in general, that we can abstract completely from the partial point of view. For moral agency we need compassion and sympathy and so on; equally we fail to capture something important about morality if we simply accept the desires we happen to have as the real starting point.

My view is that it is a questionable proposition that the understanding (having reasons) is completely sufficient to account for all moral action; there is a real Dostoyevskean sense that one can understand the right thing to do and then act against it out of spite. Foot's essential move against the 'akratic' — the individual who succumbs to 'weakness of will' — is to say that such a person just doesn't understand the reasons properly if he then acts against them. This knotty problem is something you might like to consider further; I often wonder whether introspection is satisfactory in coming up with an answer to that question, however.

Adam Gatward

Rute asked:

Is idealism the same as anti-realism? If not, What is the difference?

and Alan asked:

I have a question: do you think it is right to try and link realism/ anti-realism about truth to the philosophy of language and theories of meaning? I have been pondering this one for a while. I agree that when you say something is true, you can only mean that words have been used correctly or not. Is this subjectivism or is truth something else?

Paula asked:

Is it possible for God to give certain benefits without the existence of evil being inevitable?

It is often assumed that a good God and evil can — indeed must — logically exist together. Valuable sentiments like compassion and tolerance can only exist in the face of evil events (whether natural evils or moral evils). So for some benefits to exist, there has to be evil.

A tradition that can be traced at least as far as St Augustine has denied that evil has an ontological status: evil is just the absence of goodness. For example, the world and man were created good. As Aquinas interprets Aristotle, doing evil actions is falling short of what one is supposed to be; so evil is just an absence of the good that God intended.

The logical issue can be captured in four simple propositions:

1. God can do away with evil but won't
2. God cannot do away with evil but would
3. God can do away with evil and does
4. God cannot do away with evil and wouldn't

The issue here is: How do we find a balance between defending God's omnipotence and defending his goodness in a way that is logically satisfactory? In the first case God is not good but is omnipotent, in the second he is good but not omnipotent...and so on.

If God omnipotently made us free he cannot make us always choose the good, so theists often argue. If freedom is the privilege that Christianity believes it is, then it is a benefit that does make evil inevitable. Logically, if you are free to choose good, you have to be able to choose the opposite — choose the non-good. The good cannot be forced. So evil is inevitable if we are to be free to fulfill God's plans. The assumption that freedom is the highest good for man is one that you might want to question (see 'The Grand Inquisitor' chapter from Dostoevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov).

If you believe we have libertarian free will you might think that God could never be responsible for the actions we choose since he has given us power to act in ways that cannot be controlled. Unfortunately this does not help, as if we really were free in this way it would no longer be possible to know for sure that the freedom really does outweigh the evils which are inevitable. God certainly couldn't control the actions to ensure that the freedom really was worth it. So God would have made a mistake. If you believe instead that we are free to act in accordance with our natures (i.e. assume a kind of causal determinism or liberty of indifference) then God can be held responsible for our natures and these natures he could change. The existence of evil would thus not be logically inevitable, whatever the metaphysical value of freedom.

The question as to why God could not create us free and such that we always choose the good is usually answered by saying that doing logical contradictions is something God cannot do, and that this does not constrain his omnipotence. If you go along with Descartes and think that an omnipotent being cannot be constrained by logic however, then the answer to your question would have to be 'yes' and we would have to wonder why God does not remove evil and maintain the benefit of freedom. It is fairly clear that God does not do this in our world, unless you constrain human understanding intolerably.

As J.L Mackie has argued in The Miracle of Theism, if I can choose the good today, then it must be logically possible for me to choose the good every day; the fact that I do not choose good every day implies that God is responsible for not bringing it about such that I always freely choose the good. So at the very least, God's goodness is open to question. These kinds of logical issues cause severe difficulties for a convincing defence of traditional theism in my opinion.

Adam Gatward

Steven asked:

On the assumption that:

1. God does exist.
2. The universe did have a beginning.
3. God created the universe

Why did God create the universe?

It is hard to think of a reason why God created the universe without making some suppositions about the character of God, his motivations, reasons and the like, which usually we only get through His revelation to us, which then gets us into religious metaphysical systems. Whatever reason God had for creating the universe would only make sense given some larger religious interpretation of the world, its purpose and our role in it.

Some religious groups claim that God created the universe as a reflection of his power and glory and created and created intelligent beings in order to appreciate and worship His greatness.

The problem with these religious pictures however is that they are at rock bottom egocentric. They explain very well why we are here and what role we have in the greater scheme of things, but they give us very little insight into the motivations of the Big Man, appealing to the old 'God works in mysterious ways' line.

We could give a non-religious reason, perhaps after an eternity of sitting around doing nothing God got bored and needed something to entertain him for a few trillion years. Or perhaps one day he was in the grip of existential doubt about the meaning of his own existence and decided to create the universe to give his life a purpose. But here again we are transferring human motivations on to God and we don't really get any answer to the question, just a trivial comedy sketch.

We can however approach the question more philosophically to try and get at the very heart of the nature of God. The religious answers are based on the assumption that God had a reason to create the universe. Well, this assumption may be wrong. Perhaps God didn't have a reason, perhaps he didn't even have a choice. Here's why:

The fact that God is a being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good means that He could not fail to create the universe, because if he did not create it he would not be God. God, being omniscient knows that it is a better state of affairs that the universe exists than its not existing. Being omnipotent He can create the universe. And being wholly good he would do whatever was the best thing possible. Therefore, because of His very nature He had to create the universe. Of course this argument rests on the premise that it is better for the universe to exist than for it not to exist. If we forget about God for a minute, this premise would be open to debate, because if God does not exist then the existence of the universe would be a value-neutral fact. The universe would just be there, the result of physical processes without any moral reason for it being here rather than it not being there. Without God, the claim that it is better that the universe exists is a moral claim about what we think and some people may disagree with us.

But because God is wholly good, morality already has a foot hold in an explanation of the world. So for God to fail to create the universe would mean he does not do something which was the best thing to do.

This however only explains why God created something rather than nothing. There is a related and equally important question why God created this something, this universe rather than some other world — assuming of course that He could have created a different world. Again perhaps because of His nature he could not have created a world different from this one, perhaps to use Leibniz's term this is the 'best of all possible worlds'.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield

Stephen asked:

What is the purpose of life and why are we here?

Most analytic philosophers would approach this question by turning it round, and asking, What right do you have to assume that life has a purpose, or that there is any reason why we are here other than blind chance?

That assumes, wrongly in my view, that on a question as important as this one can be satisfied with a purely negative answer. If you can't say beforehand what the purpose of life is, then you can't prove that life has a purpose. If you don't know the reason why we are here, then you can't argue that there must still be reason. However, these sceptical moves do nothing to address the problem. One feels these questions as an urgent demand. To ask, 'What right have I to feel this way?' does nothing to lessen that feeling.

However, there is a more radical way of approaching this question, which we can illustrate with the aid of a thought experiment.

Suppose that there was an answer to the question of the purpose of life and why we are here, and it was in a book in front of you. This is, of course, just what some people believe. The book in which the answer is to be found is the Holy Bible. Or it might be the Koran, or some other sacred text. The trouble with the Bible, or the Koran is that the answer is there only for those who have faith, those who already know the answer, or feel that they do. I am supposing that the answer in our imaginary book is as clear as day. Anyone who reads the words will be instantly convinced, This is why we are here.

I want to suggest two reasons for doubt, which I find troubling.

We are to assume that life has a definite purpose. Human beings are here for a reason, and you are here for that same reason, or as part of that reason. Moreover, having read the book you now know what that reason is. As I said, it is as clear as day. This is a purpose, a reason, that you must acknowledge irrespective of your own prior interests and projects. The story of the Old Testament prophets, or of Jesus' disciples are vivid illustrations of just what this means in practice.

We see our own projects, the purposes we invent for ourselves, to be limited, we see through them. They don't answer the big question. All that is true. Yet I would argue that the belief that you were chosen to be part of some project that is bigger than you are, a project that doesn't end in the grave as your personal projects will, is not enough to answer that question either, if you are honest about it.

The reason is this. If you knew that someone had a plan for you, it would still be up to you to decide whether or not to go along with that plan. Even if that someone is God. For it surely could not be part of that plan to deny human beings freedom of choice and turn them into puppets. The decision is yours, it must be. With all that you know now, having read the book from cover to cover, the question of the purpose of your life is still a question, your question. And no book, no recipe, however clearly laid out can supply the answer.

That's one reason for doubt. And here's the other:

I have argued that you still have a decision to make. No factual knowledge about the ultimate purpose of life or why we are here can make that decision for you. But could there be such knowledge?

Your question is not simply why we are here but why I am here. When I ask this question myself, I have to consider, not just the possibility of a universe where we didn't exist, but a universe where I didn't exist. To consider this is not just to consider a universe where someone exactly like me didn't exist. In the imaginary book there is a master plan, and someone fitting my exact description is part of that plan. But there is still one fact which that book cannot explain, namely, why I am here. Anything that can be communicated in a book is just words, and all words can speak of is someone like me, someone fitting my exact description. There therefore cannot be a factual answer to the question, Why am I here?

— This might be considered one way of putting the case for an Existentialist response to your question.

Geoffrey Klempner

Katsu asked:

I don't understand Hobbes's answer to the following questions: What is war, why does it exist, and why do we need the state?

Hobbes thought that without some form of government humans would live in a 'state of nature'. Because of his views about human nature, Hobbes thought that this would be a terrifying, harmful, ugly, and dangerous existence for most people. Because in a world of finite and possibly scarce resources each person would strive as hard as they could to protect what they had and to gain more in order to provide for the future.

Inevitably in such a state conflict would arise. Each person would try to get what the other has, either to reduce the risk of the other taking their possessions, or. to ensure that they, themselves have enough to survive. This would be a state of war, what Hobbes called a 'war of all against all'. Hobbes did not mean that such a war would be a state of constant fighting and conflict, but rather the war would be one of constant readiness to fight, an ever vigilant existence one with not a moment's peace, always the possibility of death.

Now certainly individuals could form alliances in order to protect themselves against stronger aggressors. But what guarantee is there that they will not be betrayed for a stronger alliance with someone else? (this is a form of the prisoners dilemma). Trust could never be generated, any alliance would crumble and we would go back to killing each other.

So according to Hobbes, as long as there are individuals each competing against one another for their own benefit there will be war, and conflict and death. it is primarily the universal fear of death that leads to the formation of the state. But for Hobbes this cannot be just any kind of state, it must be one where individuals give up their freedom to do what they want (this is what causes the war in the first place) for the sake of self-preservation. Hobbes imagines the best state to be a commonwealth, headed by a supreme sovereign, who has the power and authority over all, because all have agreed to his being in control.

The war of all against all is over. Survival and the elimination of the prospect of death are guaranteed in the state. But only when individuals give up their freedom to a ruler who has the power to install the fear of death in everyone. The fear of death is still there, but at least in the state we know that death is not looming over our shoulders ready to strike at any time, only the sovereign has the power of death over us, and this is the only way, Hobbes thought, to ensure that stability and our survival could be preserved.

Now it may be objected that Hobbes is wrong in his account of human nature. People may not be intrinsically selfish and egocentric, but are rather socially amenable and co-operative. Locke and Rousseau have different conceptions of human nature, but all share the idea of individuals coming together to from a society. Hobbes may also be wrong about the need for a society. What if people do not have a fear of death, or are strong enough to protect themselves from any aggressor? (Hobbes does have answers to these objections, they centre around his notion of 'felicity', but that's probably another question!)

Another objection is that Hobbes misses out an essential part of human life, namely morality. Hobbes, it could be argued, is only concerned with prudence, not ethics.

However, Hobbes does talk about 'Laws of Nature' which have the air of morality about them, but which Hobbes thinks we only have a duty to obey if everyone else obeys them. That is when a state is established. In the state of nature we desire that everyone obeys the Laws of Nature, but because mutual obedience can never be guaranteed, actual obedience is so rare that we might as well say that morality per se is not achievable in the state of nature, but only once the commonwealth has been established.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield

Stephen asked:

I am interested in the theory of reincarnation and would like to find some info that is not sensationalized. Being a Christian (although not the televangelist fundamentalist type) I am at odds with my fellow believers on this subject. Is there any truth that reincarnation was a biblical teaching or at least hinted at before the Councils of Nicea etc, removed it?

Joanna asked:

What is anti-realism?

First we have to get an idea of what realism is. Broadly, it is the view that reality is mind-independent. That the world is found rather than created. Anti-realism is the opposite view, that the world is created rather than found.

Now the problems come, when we try to say what it is that reality consists of, what are the things that exist independently of our (or any intelligent mind) thinking about them? Not everyone agrees about what things are actually in the world. For example, common sense tells us that physical objects are real. Tables and chairs would continue to exist independently of what we think about them, but what about abstract objects like numbers or Plato's Forms? Or what about pains? They are real, but are they mind-independent? What does realism about pains require? Is it that pains exist because I am aware of them, or am I aware of them because they are painful?

Or what about values, moral and aesthetic. Would the works of Dali be masterpieces if no one was around to look at them?

So we can be realist about many different kinds of things. The issue gets even more complicated because we can be realists about one aspect of reality and anti-realists about others. For example we can be realists about physical objects whilst being anti-realists about properties and relations. So if we did not exist there would be objects but perhaps there would be no colours or distances or causal relations between these objects.

And perhaps we can be realist about physical stuff, but anti-realists about tables and chairs. For if we did not exist would it even make sense to talk about tables and chairs? If there was nobody around to use these things there wouldn't be anything that would qualify as a table. Because a table is a social construct. There would be no such things as tables if people didn't use them.

The problem here is where to draw the line. if we are anti-realists about tables and chairs, why not be anti-realists about electrons, magnetism, elephants, or sunsets. 1 do not the answer, it is a problem that has been bothering me a long time: How much of the world is created by us and the way we think? Is the world found ready made, split into easy to use natural kinds of things that our ideas and languages simple refer to? Or is it the other way around, does our use of language mould the world into the ways we want it?

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield

Rafael asked:

What's the most important matter: love, good, truth, happiness? And, what is happiness? And love?

I think love is the most important thing that we should want because it lies deeply at the source of human need.

The importance of love can be seen in the following excerpts from Rollo May's book Love and Will:

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is...being uninvolved, detached, unrelated to significant events...The interrelation of love and will inheres in the fact that both terms describe a person in the process of reaching out, moving toward the world, seeking to affect others...and opening himself to be affected; molding, relating to the world or requiring that it relate to him...Apathy is a gradual letting go of involvement until one finds that life itself has gone by.

If it is true that the opposite of love is apathy, then without love there can be no happiness or interest in good and truth.

Love as a form of being able to engage deeply with others is necessary to happiness. Rollo May says that most of his patients in analysis have not found love and the consequent emptiness they feel means that they become unable to love. They enter analysis in search of another source of happiness.

Plato's Symposium is devoted to the subject of love. Socrates asks "What is Love?" and quotes Diotima:

He is neither mortal no immortal, but mean between the two...He is a great spirit and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal...He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides men and gods, and therefore in him all in bound together.

There have been answers on happiness in these pages before which you can look at. I think that it is the ability to feel joy.

Rachel Browne

Elizabeth asked:

What does the concept of original sin have to do with the distinction between body and soul? Does it have some connection to humans' dominion over animals?

In the Old and New Testaments of the Bible there is no distinction between body and soul as we usually understand it. The writers of the books of the bible — the Israelites — never saw the soul as distinct from the body, but rather the two were seen as a unified whole, a totality. The soul was the animated living body, the 'breath of life' and not an eternal, spiritual substance. This idea of the soul was adopted by the Christian world from the Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and found full treatment in the works of St. Augustine. This is also where the doctrine of Original Sin finds it's proper formulation.

Augustine thought that all humans, after Adam and Eve were born 'soiled by sin' and that this sin was passed along biologically via male semen. Some have taken this starting point and gone on to say that it is our physical bodies that are corrupted, that the result of Adam's sin was to introduce death into the world. Some even go so far as to say that matter, our physical bodies are inherently evil.

Others have, from the same starting point claimed that each person's soul (this time the eternal spiritual Soul) is stained by sin and that unless we seek forgiveness or have faith in the sacrifice of Jesus we will be condemned by God. Christians, specifically Catholics believe that via the sacrament of baptism the original stain of sin can be washed away, and then whatever we do after the baptism is our own responsibility and we can be judged by our own merits. St. Anselm who held this view also thought that God would condemn to hell all infants and babies who died before being baptised! Because they carried with them the stain of original sin. Even though the idea of Original sin is objectionable, morally and historically, and logically, perhaps the best way to focus all this is to say that when Adam sinned human nature was soiled. Before that humans were perfect, but after Adam sinned humans became imperfect, we were mortal and were condemned to death.

Now human nature, that which we all have in common, is where Adam's sin takes effect and these effects are both physical and spiritual. Physical in that we die, spiritual in that we are no longer perfect. The point is that we do not have to think in terms of an eternal soul that carries the sin, in order to make sense of the idea of original sin. (Although with, or without a soul the idea of original sin is difficult to make sense of anyway.) On the point about humans' dominion over animals, I do not think that it is connected to Original sin, because in the Genesis story of the Fall God gave Adam control over the land and the animals before he sinned, and 1 do not think it says anywhere that God revoked such an arrangement because of Adam's sinning.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield

John asked:

Why have there been no female philosophers? I was surprised to find no similar question in your archives. I do have a couple of theories: 1. Women have just recently been able to change their roles and were, unfortunately, not encouraged to pursue such activities/careers. 2. The all-male society of philosophers fails to recognize women such as Ayn Rand as philosophers. (She most certainly considered herself as such).

It isn't true that the 'society of philosophers' is all-male; there are plenty of women working in philosophy who have produced work every bit as important as male philosophers. Simone de Beauvoir, Suzanne Langer, Martha Nussbaum, Phillipa Foot and a number of others spring to mind immediately. There are fewer women working in philosophy, but I should think that this true of most academic subjects. This might well be reasonably put down to changes in attitude towards women in the last century, and we should hope that attitudes to women will continue to become more liberal in all areas of life.

Ayn Rand is not recognised as a philosopher by other philosophers not because she was a woman in a male-dominated subject but because, in their view, she was just bad at philosophy. The first page of Ayn Rand's book on Epistemology is enough to show that she was not a philosopher. I think that the female philosophers I mentioned above would certainly agree with that estimation.