The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy Encyclopedias and philosophers are rarely concise. This classic encyclopedia, now updated, combines philosophers and conciseness in a manner perfectly suited to students and other non-specialists. Readers will enjoy philosophy in action here. Paul Moser, Loyola University of Chicago Ever since its first appearance in 1960, this Concise Encyclopedia has been recognised as a classic, providing not only a guide to philosophy at its best, but some remarkable samples of it too. It is a treasury of brilliant philosophical writing: A. J. Ayer on Russell, Michael Dummett on Frege, R. M. Hare on Ethics, Gilbert Ryle on Categories, P. F. Strawson on Metaphysics and Bernard Williams on Descartes, not to mention Dorothy Emmet, J. N. Findlay, H. L. A. Hart, Walter Kaufmann, G. S. Kirk, Alasdair MacIntyre, P. H. Nowell-Smith, R. S. Peters, Richard Robinson, J. O. Urmson, G. J. Warnock and many others. This new edition builds on the strengths of the first and brings it completely up to date, with entries on newly emerging philosophers and on themes as diverse as aesthetics, ‘African philosophy’, gender, translation and philosophy of mind. The Concise Encyclopedia offers a lively, readable, comprehensive and authoritative treatment of Western philosophy as a whole, incorporating scintillating articles by many leading philosophical authors. It serves not only as a convenient reference work, but also as an engaging introduction to philosophy. Jonathan Rée is a freelance historian, journalist and philosopher. His books include Descartes, Philosophy and its Past, Proletarian Philosophers, Philosophical Tales, Heidegger and I See a Voice. J. O. Urmson, who edited the first edition, is author of Philosophical Analysis, The Emotive Theory of Ethics and The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary. He is Emeritus Professor at Stanford and Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy Edited by Jonathan Rée and J. O. Urmson Third Edition First published 1960 by Unwin Hyman Ltd Second edition 1975 Third edition published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1960 George Rainbird Ltd © 1989, 2005 Jonathan Rée All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The concise encyclopedia of western philosophy/ edited by J. O. Urmson and Jonathan Rée.—3rd ed. p. cm. 1. Philosophy – Encyclopedias. 2. Philosophers – Biography – Encyclopedias. I. Rée, Jonathan, 1948– II. Urmson, J. O. B41.C66 2004 190Ј.3–dc22 2004004479 ISBN 0-203-64177-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-67251-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32923–X (hbk) ISBN 0–415–32924–8 (pbk) Contributors to the original edition (1960) J. L. Ackrill Stefan Körner H. B. Acton J. D. Mabbott A. Hilary Armstrong Alasdair MacIntyre A. J. Ayer D. M. Mackinnon Errol Bedford D. O. C. MacNabb Karl Britton Philip Merlan Joseph G. Dawson Ernest Nagel M. A. E. Dummett P. H. Nowell-Smith Dorothy M. Emmet James O’Connell A. C. Ewing D. J. O’Connor Marvin Farber R. S. Peters J. N. Findlay Anthony Quinton Thomas Gilby Richard Robinson Roland Hall Erwin I. J. Rosenthal R. M. Hare Gilbert Ryle Rom Harré Ruth Lydia Saw H. L. A. Hart P. F. Strawson D. J. B. Hawkins F. A. Taylor P. L. Heath Ivo Thomas Ronald W. Hepburn J. O. Urmson Edmund Hill James Ward Smith Walter Kaufmann G. J. Warnock I. G. Kidd Alan R. White G. S. Kirk Bernard A. O. Williams Additional contributors to the second edition (1989) Christopher J. Arthur Genevieve Lloyd Ted Benton David Macey Robert L. Bernasconi Michael Macnamara Jay M. Bernstein Rudolf A. Makkreel Stephen R. L. Clark David Papineau Peter Dews Nicholas Phillipson Colin Gordon Jonathan Powers Ian Hacking Jonathan Rée Alastair Hannay David-Hillel Ruben Ross Harrison Peter Singer Paulin Hountondji Kate Soper Richard Kearney Charles Taylor Douglas M. Kellner Mary Tiles David Farrell Krell Jeremy Waldron Peter Lamarque Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Jean-Jacques Lecercle Additional contributors to the third edition (2005) David Archard Matthew Nudds Bruce Kuklick Jonathan Rée Peter Lamarque Introduction to the second edition The very idea of an encyclopedia of philosophy is a bit embarrassing. Some people may fancy, from time to time, that they have achieved an encyclopedic grasp of the problems of philosophy. But all you ever get from an actual encyclopedia is a little knowledge about the personalities and problems which make up the HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. And this little knowledge will be enough to convince most people of one thing: that philoso- phy is such a jumbled and controversial subject that encyclopedic philosophical ambi- tions are symptoms of megalomania rather than expressions of wisdom. The first edition of this Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers came out in 1960, and it soon won itself the status of a minor classic. Part of its attraction was that none of its large team of contributors disguised their indi- vidual voices for the sake of encyclopedic unison. Nevertheless, the majority of these forty-nine authors had a common philosophical allegiance: like their editor, J. O. Urmson, they were participants in what many would regard as the Golden Age of twentieth-century English philosophy – the ‘linguistic’ movement centred in Oxford in the 1950s, which was inspired by the later Wittgenstein, and advocated by Austin, Hare, Strawson and above all Ryle (see also ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY). The main thing that united the Oxford philosophers was their ambivalence about the project of philosophical ANALYSIS, particularly as interpreted by LOGICAL POSITIVISM and its English advocate, A. J. Ayer. They admired its intellectual unsentimentality and its terse, hard-edged prose; but they rejected its cut-and-dried scientism and its faith in technicalities and formal logic, and they felt uneasy about its condescension towards the classics of philosophy. As one observer of Oxford in the 1950s put it, philosophy was ‘the subject which now spends its time debating whether it was once correct to describe it as Logical Positivism’. Whatever else one may think of this episode in the history of English philosophy, it was a good moment for compiling an encyclopedia. Urmson’s editorial policy, as explained in his Introduction to the first edition, was based on the assumption that ‘there are no authorities in philosophy’, and that ‘there is no set of agreed results’. So he made his Encyclopedia into an incitement to thinking as well as a store of informa- tion. Readers could consult the articles on rationalism and empiricism, for example, to get a straightforward guide to two schools whose disagreement is supposed to structure the whole field of philosophical debate; but if they turned to the magisterial article on epistemology they would be told that ‘their tug-of-war lacks a rope’. With the second printing (1967), moreover, readers found initials at the end of each article identifying its author: in the case of Epistemology and several others, it was Ryle himself. Hare wrote on ETHICS; Strawson on METAPHYSICS; Ayer on Russell; Dummett on Frege; Introduction to the second edition vii Williams on Descartes – to cite only a few examples. And Urmson had extracted perfect miniature samples of their work from his celebrated authors: the result was a remark- able philosophical anthology, as well as an Encyclopedia. Teachers also found that it served well as a textbook for introducing new students to philosophy. Another of Urmson’s objectives was to ‘range beyond the confines of British and American philosophical fashions’. Here too, he had some notable successes: Kaufmann’s articles on Hegel and Nietzsche are classic sources for his famous if ten- dentious interpretations; in his article on Husserl, Findlay was able to air his views about ‘the strange drop from Phenomenology to Existentialism’, and Farber gave a characteristically eccentric interpretation of PHENOMENOLOGY. This new edition reproduces most of Urmson’s Encyclopedia, edited and updated where necessary. I have removed about one-tenth of the original articles, either because they are obsolete, or because they are preposterous (like Kaufmann’s notorious piece on Heidegger, which concluded, without argument, that ‘there are probably few philoso- phers to whose vogue Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s Clothes is more applicable’). This venerable material from the original edition is now supplemented with 80 new articles* from 31 authors. Some of the additions concern things that have happened in philosophy in the past thirty years; others take account of new ideas about old topics; several deal with political or literary aspects of philosophy which might have seemed to the first editor to be of little importance; but most of them have to do with PSYCHO- ANALYSIS, Marxism and traditions in European continental philosophy which would not have been regarded as intellectually legitimate by English philosophers in the 1950s. The initials at the end of each article can be decoded by reference to the lists of con- tributors on p. v. Initials enclosed in round brackets indicate that the article is a survivor from the first edition; those in square brackets indicate that it is new.