The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy (Bloomsbury Companions) [Annotated] 9781474236492, 9781441126283, 9781474236478, 9781474236485, 1474236499

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy

Bloomsbury Companions The Bloomsbury Companions series is a major series of single-volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars, and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions, and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources. Titles currently available in the series: Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro Aristotle, edited by Claudia Baracchi Continental Philosophy, edited by John Mullarkey and Beth Lord Epistemology, edited by Andrew Cullison Ethics, edited by Christian Miller Existentialism, edited by Jack Reynolds, Felicity Joseph and Ashley Woodward Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards Heidegger, edited by Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson Hobbes, edited by S. A. Lloyd Hume, edited by Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien Kant, edited by Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting and Nigel Hems Leibniz, edited by Brendan Look Locke, edited by S.-J. Savonious-Wroth, Paul Schuurman and Jonathan Walmsley Metaphysics, edited by Neil A. Manson and Robert W. Barnard Philosophy of Language, edited by Manuel García-Carpintero and Max Kölbel Philosophy of Mind, edited by James Garvey Philosophy of Science, edited by Steven French and Juha Saatsi Plato, edited by Gerald A. Press Pragmatism, edited by Sami Pihlström Socrates, edited by John Bussanich and Nicholas D. Smith Spinoza, edited by Wiep van Bunge

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy Edited by

Barry Dainton and

Howard Robinson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 First published in paperback 2015 © Barry Dainton, Howard Robinson and Contributors, 2014, 2015 Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: PB: 978-1-4742-3649-2     HB: 978-1-4411-2628-3 ePDF: 978-1-4742-3647-8 ePub: 978-1-4742-3648-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

Overview

ix

Preface

x

Contributors Part I: History, Methods, and Problems

xvi 1

1

A Different World Barry Dainton

3

2

From Idealism to a Realistic (Platonic) Pluralism Barry Dainton

8

3

Principia Ethica Barry Dainton

14

4

Principles and Paradox Barry Dainton

18

5

Frege Barry Dainton

25

6

On Denoting, Acquaintance, and Construction Barry Dainton

31

7

Wittgenstein and the Tractatus Barry Dainton

39

8

The Vienna Circle and its “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung” Barry Dainton

50

9

Later Wittgenstein Barry Dainton

61

Quine Barry Dainton

71

10

v

Contents

11

Oxford and Ordinary Language Barry Dainton

83

12

Developments in Ethics Barry Dainton

99

13

Davidson Barry Dainton

108

14

Kripke and Putnam Barry Dainton

118

15

Analytic Philosophy of Mind Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson

128



Appendix: A Simple Introduction to Tarski’s Theory of Truth Barry Dainton

138



Notes

148

Part II: Current Research and Issues

161



Introduction to Part II Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson

163

16

Mathematics and Logic Mary Leng

172

17

Philosophy and Language Barry C. Smith

201

18

Meaning, Normativity, and Naturalism Richard Gaskin

230

19

Philosophy of Science James Ladyman

255

20

Philosophy of Physics Barry Loewer

285

21

Causation Helen Beebee

312

22

Metaphysics E. J. Lowe

336

23

Philosophy of Mind: Consciousness, Intentionality and Ignorance Daniel Stoljar

355

24

Personal Identity: Are We Ontological Trash? Mark Johnston

378

vi

Contents

25

Free Will Ferenc Huoranszki

415

26

Knowledge Bryan Frances and Allan Hazlett

432

27

The Philosophy of Perception: An Introduction Paul Snowdon

453

28

Practical Reasons: The Problem of Gridlock Ruth Chang

474

29 Moral Demands and Ethical Theory: The Case of Consequentialism Attila Tanyi

500

30

528

Political Obligation, and the Site and Scope of Justice Andres Moles

Part III: New Directions in Analytic Philosophy Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson

551

31

Coda A: What is Analytic Philosophy? Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson

569

32

Coda B: Analytic versus Continental Howard Robinson

575



Notes

579

Chronology

582

Timeline of Individual Philosophers

586

A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts

589

Resources

628

Annotated Bibliography

631

Bibliography

647

Author Index

659

Subject Index

668

vii

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank everyone who helped with the project. Particular thanks to Richard Gaskin for his detailed comments on Part I, and Bloomsbury editors Sarah Campbell and Rachel Eisenhauer, for their advice, and for their patience.

viii

Overview

In this Companion we provide a guide to analytic philosophy’s past, present, and future; we also attempt to specify what—if anything—is genuinely distinctive about it. In Part I we provide an historical introduction to the movement, one that takes in Russell and Moore’s rejection of absolute idealism at the turn of the twentieth century, Frege’s contributions to logic and the foundations of mathematics, some of Russell’s subsequent work—including his influential theory of descriptions—Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophies, logical positivism, and the “ordinary language” period of Oxford philosophy. We also introduce some of the more influential doctrines of four important American philosophers—Quine, Davidson, Putnam, and Kripke—along with more general developments in analytic ethics, and the philosophy of mind. The historical survey ends with the early 1980s. Although it makes no pretense at being exhaustive, the survey does cover the main episodes in the development of the movement in a manner that—we hope—helps bring what is truly distinctive about analytic philosophy into clear view. Part II aims to present the state-of-the-art in the major areas of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy is a specific movement in philosophy, with a distinct history, but the main burden of the articles is not historical: they exhibit current analytic philosophy in action. The historical material in Part I will lead the reader to the point from which the articles take off. In Part III we turn to more recent developments, and venture some speculations as to what the near future may hold. Drawing on the earlier historical survey, we also broach the controversial question of what analytical philosophy is, and, in particular how it differs from its foil—so-called Continental Philosophy. As further aids to the reader we have included an extensive glossary of key terms and concepts, an annotated bibliography, timelines of major events and publications, and a guide to further resources.

ix

Preface

In his 1931 essay “The Future of Philosophy,” Moritz Schlick—logical positivist and founding member of the Vienna Circle—observed that the history of philosophy hitherto had been one of profound and irreconcilable disagreement. The doctrines of Plato are radically different from those of Aristotle, likewise the metaphysical systems of Leibniz and Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. This undeniable historical fact might naturally lead one to doubt whether any real progress had been made in Western philosophy in the two millennia of its history; indeed, it might lead one to doubt whether genuine progress in philosophy—the sort of progress that the natural sciences have been enjoying since the seventeenth century—was even possible. Schlick goes on to pose these questions: Will this chaos that has existed so far continue to exist in the future? Will philosophers go on contradicting each other, ridiculing each other’s opinions, or will there finally be some kind of universal agreement, a unity of philosophical belief in the world? (1931) He goes on to note that there is a further consideration that might incline one to pessimism on this score: the fact that many of the competing schools have each had their own different and distinctive methods for arriving at philosophical truths. Descartes’ method of doubt is very different from Spinoza’s axiomatic approach, Kant’s Copernican Revolution takes us in a different direction entirely, as does Hegel’s dialectic—and similarly for Heidegger’s proposal that we return to the “question of Being” and attempt to hear its call. Despite all this, Schlick suggests there are reasons for being optimistic that the long reign of chaos will soon be brought to a close: philosophers will soon stop ridiculing each other’s opinions. Why? Because an entirely new philosophical methodology has appeared on the scene. Thanks to this new approach the centuries-long impasse will be ended. What is this revolutionary new method? Instead of attempting to uncover distinctively philosophical

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Preface

truths about the nature of reality, philosophers will instead devote their attention to analyzing propositions, with a view to clarifying their true meaning. Schlick continues: The view which I am advocating has at the present time been most clearly expressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein; he states his point in these sentences: “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. The result of philosophy is not a number of ‘philosophical propositions’, but to make propositions clear.”1 This Wittgensteinian doctrine is one important strand of a more general movement or tradition, that of analytic philosophy. This movement is usually seen as having originated in the early years of the twentieth century with the work of the Cambridge philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and (a few years later) Ludwig Wittgenstein. Over the course of the twentieth century a variety of doctrines and approaches were espoused by analytic philosophers—the doctrines of the “early” and “later” Wittgenstein are notoriously divergent; Russell’s views were continually evolving. Even so, the analytic movement is associated with some characteristic features: (a) the placement of the analysis of language (or concepts) at the very center of the philosophical stage, (b) exploiting whenever possible the major breakthroughs in symbolic logic made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Frege, Peano, Russell, and others, (c) a passionate commitment to clarity of exposition, care in drawing distinctions, rigor in argument, and (d) the fostering of communal self-criticism. As we will see subsequently, (c) and (d) are more or less ubiquitous, (a) and (b) are not. During the short history of analytic philosophy doctrinal evolution has gone hand-in-hand with geographical diffusion: first to the Vienna of the 1930s (where Schlick’s “Circle” met), then to the Oxford of the 1940s and 1950s, where the “ordinary language” movement flourished, but also (and importantly) to the United States—where most of the Vienna Circle moved, when its members sought to refuge from the rise of Nazism in the European continent in the 1930s. By the 1950s the analytic movement had come to dominate the entirety of the English-speaking world—including Australia, which has long been an influential center in its own right—and it has retained this dominant position to the present day. Indeed, its influence is now rapidly expanding beyond its Anglo-Saxon homelands. Since the 1990s there has been a rapid expansion of interest in the analytic brand of philosophy in other (nonAnglophone) parts of the world, which has led in turn to an explosion of organizations devoted to its promulgation, both in Continental Europe—much of

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which was long regarded as hopelessly hostile territory. The manifesto of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (ESAP) runs thus: However convenient the opposition between “Analytic” and “Continental” philosophy may be, it is inadequate, for there are analytic philosophers on the Continent, and the values and aspirations of analytic philosophers are (meant to be) universal. Analytic philosophy is characterized above all by the goal of clarity, the insistence on explicit argumentation in philosophy, and the demand that any view expressed be exposed to the rigours of critical evaluation and discussion by peers. The universality of these values is one of the reasons for the current revival of analytic philosophy in continental Europe after the long interruption due to the Second World War and the North American exile of many European philosophers.2 It does not stop in Europe: analytic philosophy has also taken root in Latin America and Asia. Surveying the penetration of analytic philosophy in Latin America, Perez and Ortiz-Milan conclude: “.  .  . a huge amount of analytic philosophy has been produced [in Latin America] in the last fifteen years or so . . . Analytic philosophy has a promising future in Latin America: no doubt it will keep growing in the years to come” (2010, p.  211). In their survey of analytic philosophy in China, Jiang and Bai summarize thus: “Although its influence on Chinese intellectuals is not as strong as that of continental philosophy (for example, phenomenology), analytic philosophy has been one of the main influential Western philosophies in China since the beginning of the twentieth century.” While Schlick would no doubt have been pleased by the persistence and flourishing of the analytic movement of which he was an early and prominent proponent, he would surely be disappointed by the continuing disagreements that mark the contemporary philosophical scene.3 Some of these disagreements separate the analytic philosophers from their “continental” opponents. But other disputes—many scarcely less profound—divide analytic philosophers themselves. The current analytic scene contains those who believe that the philosophy of mind is prior to the philosophy of language (contrary to the analytic orthodoxy) and those who believe the opposite. There are also those who hold the mental to be reducible to the physical and those who reject this; there are “theories of meaning” of radically different kinds; those who favor standard two-valued logic are numerous, but so too are those who favor one or other brand of “deviant logic.” Some believe that ethical values are objective, but there are also many who hold that values are subjective or culturally relative; there are many who regard philosophy as being continuous with the natural sciences, and there are also many who believe that philosophy has a xii

Preface

legitimate sphere of its own that is distinct from that of the natural sciences— the list of significant divergences on key issues goes on (and on). Evidently, the “chaos” that Schlick bemoaned has continued; the analytic movement has not (yet) delivered the sort of progress its early pioneers hoped for: progress that is slow, steady, and incremental, but also irreversible and indisputable. Interestingly—and perhaps importantly—this failure has not, on the whole, led analytic philosophers seriously to doubt that their movement is a special and distinctive one, perhaps even a revolutionary one. Here is Peter Hacker (arguably the preeminent contemporary follower and interpreter of Wittgenstein) assessing the achievements of analytic philosophy: From the beginning of the century and for the next seventy-five years, it was, in all its various transformations, the most distinctive style of philosophical thought of our times. To the extent that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be characterized as above all the age of reason and enlightenment in philosophy, and the nineteenth as the age of historicism and historical self-consciousness, then to that extent the twentieth century can be said to have been the age of language and logic. The task of exploring the philosophical consequences of the thought that man is above all a language-using creature fell to analytic philosophy. So too did that of clarifying the significance of the unprecedentedly powerful formal logic invented at the turn of the century, and of elucidating the relations between logical calculi, language and thought. (Hacker 1996, p. ix) John Searle, a leading philosopher of language and mind, goes even further: Given [analytic philosophy’s] constant demand for rationality, intelligence, clarity, rigour and self-criticism, it is unlikely that it can succeed indefinitely, simply because these demands are too great a cost for many people to pay. The urge to treat philosophy as a discipline that satisfies emotional rather than intellectual needs is always a threat to the insistence on rationality and intelligence. However, in the history of philosophy, I do not believe we have seen anything to equal the history of analytic philosophy for its rigour, clarity, intelligence and, above all, its intellectual content. There is a sense in which it seems to me that we have been living through one of the great eras in philosophy. (2003, p. 21) Searle’s contention that the analytic school has produced intellectual content of an unprecedented quality is without question one with which the vast bulk of contemporary analytic philosophers would concur, despite their other disagreements. xiii

Preface

But have the good times come to an end? Has analytic philosophy attained something approaching world-dominance just as the movement has ceased to be a movement at all, in any meaningful sense? In the eyes of some—in both analytic and continental circles—this is indeed the case. When Hacker writes that analytic philosophy was the most distinctive mode of philosophical thought “from the beginning of the century and for the next seventy-five years” he is clearly implying that this situation did not extend beyond the mid 1970s. Elsewhere he is more explicit: “Analytic philosophy flourished in various forms from the 1910s until the 1970s. In the last quarter of a century, however, it has lost its distinctive profile” (1998, p. 3). Brian Leiter, in the introduction to his recent anthology The Future for Philosophy is more blunt in his assessment: Philosophy today—especially, though not only, in the English-speaking countries—is not a monolith, but a pluralism of methods and topics. “Analytic” philosophy, for example, the target of many polemics by those with little knowledge of the discipline, is defunct. (2004, p. 1) Half a decade earlier, in summarizing the state of play in their The Story of Analytic Philosophy, Biletzki and Matar venture a verdict that is only slightly less pessimistic: It seems beyond question that analytic philosophy has been, for some time now, in a state of crisis—dealing with its self-image, its relationships with philosophical alternatives, its fruitfulness and even its legitimacy in the general philosophical community. (1998, p. xi) Of course, enduring a “crisis” is not quite so serious as dying, but neither is it the same as enjoying a state of blooming health. Searle offers a more optimistic diagnosis: . . . it has passed from being a revolutionary minority point of view held in the face of traditionalist objections to becoming itself the conventional, establishment point of view. Analytic philosophy has become not only dominant but intellectually respectable, and like all successful revolutionary movements, it has lost some of its vitality in virtue of its very success. (ibid., p. 21) So for Searle at least, pronouncements of the death of analytic philosophy are premature; the movement has merely reached maturity, and suffered the inevitable consequences; loss of youthful élan is entirely compatible with enjoying a long and vigorous middle-life, or so many of us hope. xiv

Preface

As to which of these verdicts on the current state of health of analytic ­ hilosophy is the closer to the truth, we will not venture an opinion here— p though we will comment further in Part III. However one thing is already entirely clear. For those with an interest in matters philosophical, the fate and condition of analytic philosophy is an issue of very considerable significance.

xv

Contributors

Helen Beebee is Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Much of her research has been concerned with “Humean” themes, and she has published articles on the laws of nature, natural necessity, inductive skepticism, free will, and the observability of causation. On Hume himself she has written Hume on Causation (Routledge, 2006), and she has coedited (along with P. Menzies and C. Hitchcock) The Oxford Handbook of Causation (OUP 2009). Ruth Chang is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Before receiving her doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, she gained a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School and she has taught in both philosophy and law departments. She is author of Making Comparisons Count (Routledge, 2001)  and editor of Incommensurability, Incomparabilty, and Practical Reason (Harvard University Press, 1997). Bryan Frances has been a Professor at Fordham, and prior to that a lecturer at Leeds University. He received an MA in physics, before doing his PhD in philosophy at the University of Minnesota. His main publications are in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and he is author of Scepticism Comes Alive (OUP, 2005). Richard Gaskin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and has held visiting fellowships at the universities of Edinburgh, Bonn, and Mainz. He has published extensively in the areas of philosophy of language, history of philosophy, philosophy of literature, and the classical tradition. His most recent books are Experience and the World’s Own Language: a Critique of John McDowell’s Empiricism (OUP, 2006); The Unity of the Proposition (OUP, 2008), Language, Truth, and Literature: a Defence of Literary Humanism (OUP, 2013), and Horace and Housman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Allan Hazlett is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, having previously taught at Texas Tech and Fordham University. He received his PhD from Brown University and his main interests are in epistemology, ethics,

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Contributors

metaphysics, and aesthetics. He is part of a research project entitled Intellectual virtue and the good life: Ethical and epistemic values. Ferenc Huoranszki is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of the Central European University. His interests include metaphysics and the philosophy of action, particularly the questions of free will, causation, modality, and eighteenth-century metaphysics and ethics. He is author of Freedom of the Will: A Conditional Analysis (Routledge, 2011). Mark Johnston is the Walter Cerf Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author of Saving God (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2010). Two volumes of his collected papers, Human Beings and The Obscure Object of Hallucination, will soon be forthcoming with Princeton Press. James Ladyman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. His work has primarily been in the philosophy of science, where the topics he has written on include scientific realism, constructive empiricism, structural realism, and the relationship between special sciences and physics. His books include Understanding Philosophy of Science (Routledge, 2002), and Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (OUP, 2007) with D. Ross, D. Spurrett, and J. Collier. Mary Leng is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. She has published on many topics in the philosophy of mathematics—including fictionalism, structuralism, creation and discovery in mathematics, Platonism and Anti-Platonism, and “algebraic” approaches to mathematical ­explanation. With M. Potter and A. Paseau she coedited Mathematical Knowledge (OUP, 2007). Her Mathematics and Reality (OUP, 2010) is a defence of mathematical fictionalism. Jonathan Lowe was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham. He published over 200 articles on metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and action, the philosophy of logic and language, and early modern philosophy. His recent books include A Survey of Metaphysics (OUP, 2002), Locke (Routledge, 2005), The Four-Category Ontology (OUP, 2006), Personal Agency (OUP, 2008), and More Kinds of Being (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Barry Loewer is Professor and Director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. He has published in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of language. He is particularly known for his work on mental causation and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. He is currently writing a book on Laws, Chances, Causation and Conditionals, and coprincipal investigator (with David Albert) of a large-scale project on the Philosophy of Cosmology.

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Contributors

Andres Moles is Assistant Professor in both the Political Science and the Philosophy Departments at Central European University. He read Philosophy at the National University of Mexico, and received an MA in Philosophy and Social Theory (2003) and a PhD in Politics (2007) both at the University of Warwick. His research mainly concerns liberal and democratic thought, and issues concerning social and distributive justice. Barry C. Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute of Philosophy in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Most of his writing has focused on issues in the philosophy of mind and language. He coedited The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (OUP, 2006) with Ernest Lepore. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Paul Snowdon is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University College, London. He was previously a tutorial fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. His research and publications relate to three main areas: the problem of personal identity (on which he is completing a book manuscript), the philosophy of perception, and the mind-body problem. He is a distinguished defender of disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception. Daniel Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS) at the Australian National University. He is author of two books, Ignorance and Imagination: the Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness (OUP, 2006) and Physicalism (Routledge, 2010). He received his doctorate from MIT and has been a visiting professor at Harvard. Attila Tanyi holds a PhD (Central European University, Hungary) and is ­currently a lecturer in ethics and applied ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He specializes in moral and political philosophy but his work stretches over disciplinary boundaries, and he regularly collaborates with philosophers whose specializations are very different from his own, as well as with non-philosophers with an interest in philosophical problems. He has a particular interest in experimental philosophy, and recently led the DFG (German Science Foundation) funded research group Consequentialism and Its Demands.

xviii

Part I History, Methods, and Problems

1

A Different World Barry Dainton

For anyone who has spent time immersed in, or who is a product of, the Anglophone-analytic philosophical tradition that has held sway in recent decades, since the war of 1939–45 say, the philosophical world in which Russell and Moore found themselves in the 1890s would very likely seem a very unfamiliar place. The overall tenor of recent analytical philosophy has been profoundly naturalistic and physicalistic. On this view, the fundaments of the world are the elementary particles and fields posited by physics, which are all, without exception, entirely nonmental in nature. The dominant and most dynamic movement in mid-to-late nineteenth-century British philosophy was neo-Hegelian idealism. On this view, the world in its entirety is mental through and through. The intellectual world Russell and Moore rebelled against—the philosophical tradition to whose downfall they contributed significantly—could scarcely be more different from the one their rebellion would help to create. The leading figures in the movement that came to be labeled “British Idealism” included Thomas Green (1836–82), Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), Harold Joachim (1868–1938), Francis Bradley (1846–1924), and John McTaggart (1866–1925). Although these men are often depicted as fusty reactionaries, this view of them is quite wrong: in their own day they were widely credited with revitalizing British philosophy by opening it up to important but hitherto ignored developments in the (post-Kantian) Continental tradition; the idealists viewed themselves—and were viewed by others—as something not far short of revolutionaries in their own right. McTaggart taught in Cambridge, where Moore and Russell were both instructed—and initially inspired—by him.1 Bradley studied and had a nonteaching fellowship at Oxford, and in the 1890s he was generally acknowledged to be the leading philosopher of his generation.2 McTaggart told Moore that he believed Bradley to be the greatest living philosopher, and recalled that whenever Bradley came in “he felt as if a Platonic Idea had entered the room” (Levy 1981, p. 109). Philosophy being what it is, there were significant divergences of doctrine between the leading idealists. Green believed that God, in the form of a timeless consciousness, was immanent in us all, and that “the 3

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy

unfolding of the eternal consciousness is the increasing manifestation of God in the world.” McTaggart was a pluralist, and argued that reality, at bottom, is composed of interrelated immaterial selves. Doctrinal differences aside, the idealists agreed that Kant had definitively demonstrated that empiricism and related philosophies were utterly hopeless, but they also agreed with Hegel that central elements of Kant’s own metaphysical system were problematic. Particularly problematic was the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal world of appearances, and the “noumenal” (unknowable) reality-as-it-is-initself. Hegel argued that the latter should be dispensed with, and his British followers tended to agree. Since all that remains is the phenomenal world, the world-as-experienced, it seems clear that reality itself is must be experiential in nature. Having established this conclusion the foundations of idealism are secure, and all that remains is to determine the precise character of this wholly mental reality, and here there are plenty of options. For our purposes, a brief overview of some of the main elements of Bradley’s metaphysics will suffice. As the acknowledged leader of the Idealist movement, Bradley was the single most important figure during the period in question, and elements of his position were directly targeted by the rebels—by Russell in particular. Bradley was a monistic “absolute” (or “objective”) idealist who upheld the doctrine that reality consists of a single unified thing—the Absolute—and that this one thing is wholly experiential in nature. His metaphysic is also holistic: all the parts of the Absolute are mutually interdependent; they are such that the character of each impinges, even if only slightly, on all the rest. He also held that the Absolute was beyond our comprehension: any attempt fully to characterize it conceptually inevitably falls short, to some degree. The best we can hope to achieve are approximations. For Bradley both truth and reality always come in degrees. Naturally, he believed his own metaphysic possessed a greater degree of truth than rival systems. Bradley arrived at this view via a combination of reason and experience. In his metaphysics he aimed to start with as few preconceptions as possible, and arrive at a conception of reality that was maximally satisfying to the intellect.3 His major metaphysical work Appearance and Reality (1893) falls into two parts. The first (shorter) part is destructive: Bradley argues here that our ordinary ways of thinking about the world (both the naive and the more philosophically sophisticated) turn out to conceal contradictions when subjected to close scrutiny: “the world, as so understood, contradicts itself; and is therefore appearance, and not reality” (1893, p. 11). In the longer second part he expounds his mentalistic account of the general nature of reality. His targets in the initial destructive phase of operations include the self, space, time, motion, things, activity, and the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. The Kantian doctrine of unknowable things-in-themselves he rejects as an absurdity: “The Unknowable must, of course, be prepared either to deserve 4

A Different World

its name, or not. But if it actually were not knowable, we could not know that such a thing even existed . . . And this seems inconsistent” (ibid., p. 129). As for the doctrine that reality might contain components that are nonmental, Bradley found this wanting: . . . I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning . . . I cannot try to think of it without realizing either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced . . . The fact that falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. (ibid., p. 128) There are obvious similarities here to an famous antimaterialist argument of Berkeley’s. The most original and important parts of the destructive phase of Bradley’s argument are his attacks on predication and relations, and it is the elimination of the latter that opens the way to his monism. Consider a simple thing, such as a lump of sugar. We have here an object (the lump) and its various properties (its size, shape, whiteness, etc.). The object and its properties obviously form a single whole—the propertied object—that possesses a genuine unity. But how, precisely, are we to make sense of this most familiar of situations? How do the properties and object manage to combine into a genuine whole? One option is to construe the object itself as something entirely distinct from its properties, a “bare particular,” as such things are sometimes known. But these are obscure and dubious entities—it is not obvious that something entirely lacking in properties could exist—and we are still faced with the problem of how the object, construed thus, is related to its various properties. Another option is to hold that the object is nothing more than a bundle of properties. This has its merits, but it raises another issue: what is it that connects the properties to one another when they constitute an object? Once again we are confronted with the task of understanding relations, this time between properties themselves. The importance of relations extends well beyond the metaphysics of individual objects. The entire universe, as usually conceived, consists of a vast multiplicity of objects, and these objects are all related to one another, in multiple ways. Some are attracting others (e.g. via electrical or gravitational forces), some are impacting on others (e.g. in collisions), and more generally all the (nonabstract) objects in our universe are related to one another spatially or temporally—if they were not, they could not be said to exist in the same universe at all. In chapter III of Appearance and Reality Bradley unleashes a dense barrage of arguments, the target of which is none other than relations in general, the glue that (we normally assume) holds the world together. His aim: to demonstrate that it is simply incoherent to think that the world could be composed 5

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy

of objects or properties (“qualities” in his terminology) standing in relations to one another. There are, of course, different ways of conceiving of relations. Here, and in subsequent writings, Bradley argued that every way of conceiving of relations was deeply problematic. One of his arguments—often referred to simply as Bradley’s Regress—has acquired particular renown. One way of construing relations, in some respects a natural one, is as entities of a distinctive kind, which can exist independently of any particular objects they happen to relate. If relations are truly distinct from their relata, then if relation R holds between objects O1 and O2, say, we need a (metaphysical) account as to how and why this is so, and the only obvious way forward is to introduce further relations RA and RB, which connect R to O1 and O2. Since the same question now arises with respect to the connecting of RA and RB to their relata, we are embarked on an infinite explanatory regress, and Bradley—somewhat controversially—took this to mean that relations could not be real. Now, we already know that, for Bradley, reality is experiential in nature. If all relations are unreal, then reality cannot consist of a plurality of distinct but related things, hence Bradley’s conclusion: “. . . the Absolute is one system, and . . . its contents are nothing but sentient experience. It will hence be a single and allinclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For it cannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, of any kind, can fall outside its limits” (1893, p. 147). Although Bradley held that anything approaching a full appreciation of the nature of the Absolute was beyond us, he also maintained that our own experience provides us with some important, even if partial, insights into its real nature. More specifically, the unity we find in our own experience is a guide to the nonrelational nature of the Absolute itself: “That on which my view rests is the immediate unity which comes in feeling” (1914, pp. 230–1). To appreciate something of what Bradley had in mind, reflect for a moment on the sort of experience one has when lying in a grassy field, looking up at the sky. One’s overall state of consciousness includes bodily feelings (the warmth of the sun on one’s skin, the tickling of the grass), together with the contents of one’s conscious thoughts (“It really is warm today” and so forth), the sound of birdsong, and the sight of the surrounding trees. These various experiences are very different in character, but they are all experienced together, as part of a single unified episode of consciousness.4 But although one’s visual and auditory experiences are unified—this much is undeniable—the unity seems to be primitive and unmediated: one is aware of the auditory and visual contents together, but one is not aware of any form of connecting or connective element that comes between and binds the contents. If there is a relation between these contents, it is not something that possesses any discernible experiential features it can call its own. According to Bradley at least, it is nonrelational in a further respect: we can recognize distinctions between the various parts or 6

A Different World

aspects of our overall states of consciousness, but these parts are not objects that are capable of a separate or independent existence: “the unity of feelings contains no individual terms with relations between them, while without these no experience can be really relational” (1935, p. 642). If the universe is a single entity, then some form of holism is difficult to avoid. If seemingly distinct objects (e.g. this table, that chair) are in reality merely aspects of one thing, then they are clearly not independent of one another in the way we commonly suppose. Bradley argued for a stronger form of holism, according to which the character of the whole impacts on the nature of the parts.5 One part of his case for this derives his logical doctrines. Bradley defended the view that all judgments—even categorical ones—are in fact abbreviated inferences. So to determine whether a judgment is true or false requires us to assess the truth of the premises of the relevant inference, and since these premises will themselves be condensed inferences—and so on ad infinitum—the truth of any one claim depends on indefinitely many more.6 But there was also an experiential (or empirical) underpinning to Bradley’s holism. For as we have just seen, in Bradley’s view the constituents of our total states of experience are not separable and distinct parts, and what goes for our experience also holds of the Absolute, which is itself a unified consciousness.

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From Idealism to a Realistic (Platonic) Pluralism Barry Dainton

Russell once observed that thinkers tend to fall into one of two categories. On the one hand there are those who view the universe as being akin to a bowl of jelly: a single, unified whole that is such that if any part of it is touched the whole quivers. On the other there are those who view the world as similar to a bucket of shot: a system that is composed of independent atoms, interrelated but capable of independent existence. Russell goes on to suggest that the most important shift in his own philosophy occurred when he rejected the holistic “jelly” view in favor of the atomistic “bucket of shot” metaphysic.1 Russell also gave credit to Moore for opening his eyes to the failings of idealism in the 1890s and hence to the possibility of an atomistic realism. The “common sense” approach to philosophy for which Moore would become known is perhaps most famously manifest in one of his later papers, “Proof of an External World” (1939), where he establishes the existence of mind-independent material objects thus: It seems to me that, so far from its being true, as Kant declares to be his opinion, that there is only one possible proof of the existence of things outside of us, namely the one which he has given, I can now give a large number of different proofs, each of which is a perfectly rigorous proof; and that at many other times I have been in a position to give many others. I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, “Here is one hand,” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, “and here is another”. . . . it is perhaps impossible to give a better or more rigorous proof of anything whatsoever. (Baldwin 1993, pp. 165–6) For Moore, none of the complexities of Kant’s proof are needed. To prove the existence of the external world it suffices to hold up one’s hand and simply acknowledge what one is seeing. For Russell, being able to accept that there was a mind-independent reality—and that this reality is much as 8

From Idealism to a Realistic (Platonic) Pluralism

it seems to be—was a hugely welcome liberation from the mental confines of idealism: It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps. I think the first published account of the new philosophy was Moore’s article in Mind on “The Nature of Judgement”. . . . Although we were in agreement, I think that we differed as to what most interested us in our new philosophy. I think that Moore was most concerned with the rejection of idealism, while I was most interested in the rejection of monism. . . . They were connected through the doctrine as to relations, which Bradley had distilled out of the philosophy of Hegel . . . But it was not only these rather dry, logical doctrines that made me rejoice in the new philosophy. I felt it, in fact, as a great liberation, as if I had escaped from the hot-house on to a wind-swept headland. I hated the stuffiness involved in supposing that space and time were only in my mind. I liked the starry heavens even better than the moral law, and could not bear Kant’s view that the one I liked best was only a subjective figment. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naïve realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass is really green, in spite of the adverse opinion of all philosophers from Locke onwards. I have not been able to retain this pleasing faith in its pristine vigour, but I have never again shut myself up in a subjective prison. (1959, pp. 54–62) However, the conception of the world to which Moore was drawn in the initial phase of the rebellion against idealism—a conception enthusiastically shared by Russell at this time—was some distance from anything that could be described as mere “common sense.” In 1897–8 Moore wrote a fellowship dissertation “The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics” in which he argues that the Kantian conception of practical reason erroneously blurs the important distinction between our psychological faculty for making judgments and inferences, and that which is “true and objective.” Moore now insists on making the sharpest of distinctions between what is mental or psychological—and this includes our judgments along with all other forms of mental representation—and the “objects of thought,” the propositions themselves. Propositions may be possible objects of thought—we enter into cognitive relationships with them—but as Moore puts it in his paper “The Nature of Judgment”2 this does not imply that they are themselves mental entities: A proposition is composed not of words, nor yet of thoughts, but of concepts. Concepts are possible objects of thought; but that is no 9

The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy

definition of them. It merely states that they may come into relation with a thinker; and in order that they may do anything, they must already be something. It is indifferent to their nature whether anybody thinks them or not. (1899, p. 179) So judgment involves a subject (or mind) taking up an attitude to a proposition, where the existence of the latter does not depend in any way on the apprehending mind. As for concepts, they are simply the constituents of propositions, and can be simple or complex in nature. Any complex proposition can be analyzed in terms of the simple (and not further analyzable) concepts that constitute it. Russell referred to the constituents of Moorean propositions as “terms,” and was careful to make explicit the very broad range of entities they could include: “A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimaera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term; and to deny that such and such a thing is a term must always be false” (1903, §47). Since we have terms that refer to nonexistent things, these too must be real. Importantly, relations are now also recognized, contra Bradley, as fully real ingredients of reality. If objects a and b are related to one another by virtue of (say) being a certain distance from one another, this fact obtains by virtue of a and b, but also the relationship of spatial distance that holds between them— relational states of affairs such as these cannot be reduced to the properties of a and b taken individually. Russell diagnosed the rejection of relations in idealists such as Bradley and Leibniz as stemming from a commitment to the view that all propositions are of subject-predicate form, a view Russell now firmly rejects. Moreover, and again contra Bradley, the relations Russell introduced into his ontology are “external” rather than “internal,” that is, they do not invariably affect the natures of the items they connect. The pair of objects a and b may be spatially related, but their being so does not influence the intrinsic character of either object; if a were at a different distance from b—or even at no distance from it, as would be the case if b did not exist—its nature would be precisely the same. And the same holds for b, and most other relations. This rejection of the doctrine of internal relations opened the door to the rejection of Bradleyean monism in favor of a (Platonistic) atomism; it was now an option to regard reality as being composed of interrelated but essentially independent things.3 Moore goes on to develop his Platonistic conception of propositions in a very distinctive direction. Propositions are not merely things we can think about (or with), it turns out that they—or at least the basic, atomic propositions—are the basic building blocks of the entire universe: “All that exists is . . . composed of concepts necessarily related to one another in specific manners” (1899, p. 181). For readily comprehensible reasons, this position has been dubbed “Platonic 10

From Idealism to a Realistic (Platonic) Pluralism

Atomism” (by Hylton 1990). The notion that concepts constitute the very fabric of reality is a striking one, but Moore sees no alternative: It seems necessary then to regard the world as formed of concepts. These are the only objects of knowledge; . . . A thing becomes intelligible first when it is analysed into its constituent concepts. The opposition of concepts to existents disappears, since an existent is seen to be nothing but a concept or complex of concepts standing in a unique relation to the concept of existence. (1899, pp. 182–3) Of course, for an idealist, the claim that reality is composed of concepts is by no means unusual, since concepts are often construed as mental items. So one might be led to suppose that here Moore is still adhering to a form of idealism. But this would be a mistake; do not forget that by this time Moore does not think that concepts are mental entities: they are all, without exception, objective and mind-independent—though as concepts they are all also graspable by minds, and so in this sense at least they are not wholly mind-independent. Moore registers a second deviation from idealism in the passage just cited. According to Bradley and the other followers of Hegel, decompositional analysis was impossible or unilluminating; if we want to understand a thing better it is no use focusing on the smaller or more basic things of which it is composed, we need to discover how it is related to other things—and ultimately the entire universe. Moore and Russell now reject this. For as we have just seen, according to the tenets of Platonic Atomism the relationships a thing has to other things do not automatically and invariably influence its real nature; in contrast, light is shed on the nature of complex things by discovering the nature and identity of their more basic constituents. The rejection of internal relations means that analysis does not necessary falsify or distort, as Bradley argued, and for this reason it can be reinstated as a viable method in philosophy. Platonic Atomism also has consequences for the nature of truth. Whereas Bradley held that both truth and reality could come in different degrees, Moore—here too followed by Russell—maintained that there were no degrees of reality or truth. A proposition is either true, or it is false, and there are no intermediary alternatives; truth and falsity are now absolutes. As we shall see shortly, this doctrinal shift would have profound implications for the philosophy of mathematics that Russell would soon develop. This point aside, it is natural (and common) to understand truth in terms of correspondence. After all, what distinguishes true propositions from false propositions is that the truths correspond with reality whereas the falsehoods do not—or so it can seem plausible to suppose. However, it is also natural to take truths themselves to be propositions. What is a truth if not a proposition 11

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that is true? But if propositions are also the basic constituents of the world, it is difficult to see how truth can be a matter of correspondence. For a proposition to correspond with what is the case—the facts, as we might say—there must be a distinction between proposition and fact. But for the Platonic Atomists, there is no such distinction: propositions and what makes propositions true coincide. The true propositions simply are the facts. One might conclude that Russell and Moore at this stage subscribed to an identity theory of truth: the doctrine that a proposition is true in virtue of being identical with the fact that makes it true.4 But this (to some) appealing path was blocked. The claim that “Socrates taught Plato” expresses a proposition (whose constituents include Socrates, the relation of teaching, and Plato), but so too does the claim that “Socrates is a talking cat” (one whose constituents include Socrates, and the properties of being a cat and talking). For Russell and Moore, both true and false propositions consist of complexes of objects and properties. If a proposition is true merely by virtue of being identical with the fact (or complex of objects and properties) that it constitutes, then “Socrates is a talking cat” will itself be true, since it is evidently identical with the fact it constitutes. Combining the Platonic Atomist conception of propositions with the identity theory of truth yields the absurd result that there are no false propositions at all. To avoid this, Russell and Moore eschewed the identity theory in favor of a “primitivist” account of truth; they held that truth is a basic, unanalyzable property that some propositions possess—and can be discerned to possess—but others lack. This doctrine may not have all the virtues of the identity theory, but it comes close: for it remains the case that in apprehending a proposition, we are apprehending nothing other than what the proposition states to be the case. Or as McDowell puts it: . . . there is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean . . . or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case (as [Wittgenstein] once wrote) there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world. Of course thought can be distanced from the world by being false, but there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought. (McDowell 1994, p. 27) Some of the views adopted by Russell and Moore during the first phase of their rebellion against idealism can easily seem highly peculiar, but it is also easy to see why they found them attractive. Recalling these early days, Russell later wrote of “an intense excitement, after having supposed the sensible world unreal, to be able to believe again that there are such things as tables and chairs” (2009, p. 125). If one is taking this sort of delight in ordinary material objects, it would be unappealing to place barriers or intermediaries between 12

From Idealism to a Realistic (Platonic) Pluralism

oneself and the world; what will appeal is a way of thinking that renders the world—the ordinary world—as accessible and intelligible. Russell made this clear in a letter to Frege in 1904: I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition [Satz] “Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high.” We do not assert the thought [Gedanke], for this is a private psychological matter; we assert the object of the thought, and this is, to my mind, a certain complex (an objective proposition, one might say) in which Mont Blanc is itself a component part. If we do not admit this, then we get to the conclusion that we know nothing at all about Mont Blanc itself.5 If the “theoretical want” driving one’s philosophy is the desire to explain how it is possible for us to have the direct access to the material world that we seem to have in our day to day dealings, then the position adopted by Moore and Russell will produce more intellectual satisfaction than most. Taking a step back, although, historically, idealism succumbed to the attacks of the early analysts, it should be noted that many of the issues between them remain open or unclear to this day. Although many would argue that Bradley’s formal argument against relations, namely that they inevitably involve a vicious regress, simply refuses to acknowledge what a relation is, there is also a growing recognition that Bradley was correct in believing that there are deep and difficult metaphysical issues here—issues that are not dispelled simply by introducing predicates with two argument places into one’s logical system.6 It is also true that predicate logic is atomistic and extensional, in the sense that each sentence of the form Fa (which asserts that the object a has property F) is dubbed “atomic,” and the truth value of complex sentences such as “Fa & Gb” is a simple computation from its atomic components. But does this feature of Russell’s logic—even if it captures the nature of natural language, which is controversial—show that reality itself is atomic? After all, each number has a separate name, but no one thinks that numbers themselves are independent of each other, and the same applies for the names of the colors. The images of the world as a jelly or a bowl of shot are just images. There are many degrees in which things can be interdependent and yet distinct, and it seems likely that philosophical discussion has yet to reach the heart of this matter.

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Principia Ethica Barry Dainton

Moore’s first book was Principia Ethica, published in 1903, and a development of ideas he had outlined in his 1897 dissertation “The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics.” The doctrines expounded in Principia would be a major influence on ethical thinking in analytic philosophy in the decades to come. Comparatively little of Principia is devoted to setting out Moore’s views on what we should or should not do, or how we should lead our lives, or treat others. This is because his main aim is more general: “. . . I have endeavored to discover what are the fundamental principles of ethical reasoning; and the establishment of these principles, rather than any conclusions which may be attained by their use, may be regarded as my main object” (1903, p. ix). In more recent parlance, Moore’s primary concern is metaethical: he wants to discover the true nature of ethics, and hence shed light on the proper way of conducting ethical reasoning and argument. The conclusions to which properly conducted ethical reasoning might lead are not his primary ­concern—not in this work, at least, though he does have something to say about them. In the very first lines of the book the importance of clarification and analysis are emphasized: It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due t