In response to this objection, higher-order theorists will join forces with first-order theorists and others in claiming that these objectors pitch the standards for explaining phenomenal consciousness too high. We will insist that a reductive explanation of something - and of phenomenal consciousness in particular - don't have to be such that we cannot conceive of the explanandum (that which is being explained) in the absence of the explanans (that which does the explaining). Rather, we just need to have good reason to think that the explained properties are constituted by the explaining ones, in such a way that nothing else needed to be added to the world once the explaining properties were present, in order for the world to contain the target phenomenon. But this is disputed territory. And it is on this ground that the battle for phenomenal consciousness may ultimately be won or lost


While orthodox medical research adheres to a linear, deterministic physical model, alternative therapist typically theorize upon that which is indeterminately nonphysical and nonlinear relationships are significant to outcome and patient satisfaction. The concept of nonlocal reality as nuocontinuum helps resolve the differences in therapeutic approach, and lets us frame a worldview that recognizes the great value of both reductive science and holistic integration. It helps distinguish the levels of description appropriate to the discussion of each, and helps in examining the relationships among consciousness, nonlocal reality, and healing.

Most recently addressed is to some informal discussion for which the problems of evaluating alternative therapies, but Dossey highlighted the stark philosophic division between orthodox and alternative health care models. While orthodox medical research adheres to a linear, deterministic physical model, alternative therapist typically postulates that indeterminate nonphysical and nonlinear relationships are significant to outcome and patient satisfaction. As Dossey summarizes that position, "Everything that counts cannot be counted."

The problems, of course, go beyond the research issues. The respective models bring different attitudes and approaches to the therapeutic encounter. Further, their different philosophic languages limit discussions among practitioners. Rapproachment becomes all the more unlikely when each camp considers the other, "wrong." It is believed to be helpful if we were to visualize the conflict as deriving from different frames of reference. Our collective task then becomes the finding of a common frame of reference a "cosmos in common," to echo Heraclitus sufficiently broad and deep to encompass both linear and nonlinear, local and nonlocal therapeutic points of view.

If we are to remain true to science, we must integrate the data that science provides us, and be willing to follow where the process leads. It is increasingly apparent that physics requires us to acknowledge meta considerations, that is, considerations that lie above and beyond physics. Those of us biomedical practitioners who base our work on physics cannot disparage as "merely metaphysics" a meta physics to which physics itself points.

As a point of departure, I would like to "frame" in general outlines a worldview that recognizes the great value of both reductive science and holistic integration, and which helps distinguish the levels of description appropriate to the discussion of each. In doing so, I will suggest a new and unweighted ecumenical term for discussing the relationships among consciousness, nonlocal reality, and healing.

The cosmos is the general descriptive term for all-that-is, which we have come to understand as an organic system of interrelated nested subsystems. Yet its most ancient representation in art is a circle. In our ordinary positivist view of things conditioned by science, the term denotes only the material nature of the universe, governed by the laws of physics. In the ordinary local cause-effect world, time-distance relationships apply, and the speed limit is that of light. Actions are mediated through a field, and forces are dissipated over distance.

However, Bell's Theorem in quantum physics establishes that "underneath" ordinary space-time phenomena there lies a deep nonlocal reality in which none of these limitations applies. To diagram cosmos one must find an appropriate way to divide the one circle. We might add an inner concentric circle, but the cosmos, as the term is currently used, would identify only the outer material "shell" of our experience of physical things. We have no agreed technical term for that which is "more" than matter, or beyond or outside it, or inside it. Syche has scientific validity as a psychological term. It denotes an inner personal dimension representing that aspect of experience that is normally unconscious to us, but which nevertheless influences individual human behaviour. However, in ordinary usage, the term psyche (soul, spirits) has no meaning apart from the individual human personality. To speak of the soul or spirit of matter (one hardly dare do so publicly) does not compute. Yet, now physics says there is a nonlocal more to the matter-work of the cosmos, and that domain is somehow related to the existence of consciousness.

But there needs to be still another inner concentric circle, or at least a centre-point. Cosmologists are beginning to speak more openly about a purposeful cosmos. For example, Hawking has asked, "Why does the universe go to the integral of the bother of existing?" If science is to ask "Why" as Hawking does, it must seek the "meaning" of matter. But Meaning ordinarily has no significance in science. To speak of meaning is to speak of significance or order beyond superficial appearances. To speak of meaning in relation to the cosmos is to speak of metaphysics, the realm of religion and philosophy.

Yet, such meaning is implicit in the anthropic principle of physics, and in the strange attractors by which order emerges from chaotic chemical and nonlinear mathematical systems. Though such meaning is an idea new to modern science, religion and philosophy have variously described it as logos, to Way, and Word. In that of residing in "lure" of an orienting change, as mentioned by Whitehead, and in the function of the radial energy of which Teilhard spoke.

Now, on scientific grounds alone, we must devise a "cosmorama" of at least three compartments, if it is to encompass the phenomena of the universe. Resolving and explaining these relationships may be quite complex; or it may be surprisingly simple. In any case, there are a number of questions to be answered, and a number of problems in physics and psychology that invite us to frame a unification theory.

One principal problems in quantum physics is the question of observer effect. What is the role of consciousness in resolving the uncertainties of actions at the quantum level? Before an observation, the question of whether a quantum event has occurred can be resolved only by calculating a probability. The unconscious reality of the event is that it is a mix of the probabilities that it has happened and that it has not. That "wave function" of probabilities is said to "collapse" only at the point of observation, that is, only in the interaction of unconsciousness with consciousness.

Schrödinger illustrated the problem by describing a thought experiment involving a cat in a sealed box: If the quantum event happened, the cat would be poisoned; if not, when the box was opened, the cat would be found alive. Until then, we could know the result only as a calculation of probabilities. Under the condition's Schrödinger described, we may think of the cat's condition only mathematically: the cat is both dead and alive, with equal probability. Only by the interaction of event with observer is the "wave function collapsed."

If a tree falls in the forest when there is no one present to hear it, has there been a sound? That question can be resolved by adjusting the definition of sound. In the question of the quantum "event in the box" we are dealing with something much more fundamental. Can creation occur without an observer? Without consciousness? Or without at least the prospect of consciousness emerging from the act of creation? That may be the most basic question that begs resolving.

Another of our unification problems is the virtual particle phenomenon. Some particles appear unpredictably, exist for extremely short periods of time, then disappear. Why does a particle appear in the force field suddenly, without apparent cause? What distinguishes stable particles from the temporary ones? Something in the force field? Something related to the act of observation?

Another major concern of physics is the unification of the elemental physical forces. Study of the "several" forces has progressively merged them. Electricity and magnetism came to be understood as one force, not two. More recently, effects associated with the weak nuclear force were reconciled with electromagnetism, so that now we recognize one electroweak force. Further, there have been mathematical demonstrations that unify the electroweak and the strong nuclear force.

If it could be demonstrated that the "electronuclear" force and the force of gravity are one super force (as has been widely expected), energy effects at the largest and the smallest scales of the universe would be explained. That unification process has led to a theory of a multidimensional universe, in which there are at least seven "extra" dimensions that account for the forces and the conservation laws (symmetries) of physics. They are not extra dimensions of space-time, for which one could devise bizarre travel itineraries, but abstract mathematical dimensions that in some sense constitute the nonlocal (non-space time) reality within which cosmos resides.

However, the search for a unified theory has led to an apparent impasse, for theories of unification seem also to require a continuing proliferation of particles. A new messenger particle (or class of particles) called the Higgs boson, seems to be needed to explain how particles acquire mass, and to avoid having infinity terms (the result of a division by zero) crop up in the formulas that unify the forces. Leon Lederman, experimental physicist and Nobelist, calls it "The God Particle." He writes, "The Higgs field, the standard model, and our picture of how God made the universe depend on finding the Higgs boson."

Still, major questions remain. To some others, particle physics has seemed to reach its limit, theoretically as well as experimentally. Oxford physicist Roger Penrose has written: If there is to be a final theory, it could only be a scheme of a very different nature. Rather than being a physical theory in the ordinary sense, it would have to remain a principle, as a mathematical principle of whose implementation might have itself involve nonmechanical subtlety.

Perhaps the time has come for us to accept that cosmos has "infinity terms" after all.

Psychology is conventionally defined as the study of behaviour, but for our purposes, it must be returned to the meaning implied in the roots of the word: the study of soul and spirit. Of course, the most obvious phenomenon of psychology is the emergence of consciousness. In the light of the anthropic principle of physics, we now must ask, as a distinctively psychological question, what purpose for the cosmos does consciousness serve?

Another question: Jung has presented the evidence for an archetypal collective unconscious that, on the basis of current understandings, must certainly be inherited as the base-content of human nature. Archetypal genetics has yet to be defined. Symbol processing certainly does have its "local" physical aspect, in the function of the brain and the whole-body physiology that supports it. Nonetheless, that there is a nonlocal reality undergirding psyche is readily evident.

The reality of the dream experience is nonlocal, unconfined by rules of time and space and normal effect. Further, it is nonlocal in that the reality extends beyond the individual, consistently following patterns evident throughout the recorded history of dream and myth. The psyche functions as though the brain, or at least its mechanisms of consciousness, is "observer" for the dream "event in the box" of an unconscious nonlocal collective reality. The archetypal unconscious suggests that there be a psychological substrate from which consciousness and its content have emerged.

In the emergence of consciousness primally, and in the extension of consciousness in modern people through the dreaming process, the collective unconscious (self) seems to serve a nonlocal integrating function, yielding images that the conscious (ego) must differentiate from its "local" observations of the external space-time world. Thus, is consciousness extended.

In that process, however, the ego must self-reflectively also "keep in mind" that our perception of the external physical world is not the reality of the physical world, but an interpretation of it; Nor is the external phenomenal world the only reality. To keep our interpretations of the physical world "honest," we must subject observation to tests of consistency and reason, but the calculus of consciousness is the calculus of whole process, both differential and integral. Consciousness cannot be extended, but is diminished, when it denies the reality of the unconscious.

Jung has also pointed to certain meaningful associations between events in psyche and events in the physical world, but which are not related causally. He called such an association a synchronicity, which he defines as "an accusal connecting principle." These are simultaneous or closely associated conversions that not have connected physically, in any ordinary cause-effect way. However, they are connected meaningfully, that is, psychically. They may have very powerful impact on a person's psychic state and on the subsequent unfolding of personality. Jung studied them with Wolfgang Pauli, a quantum physicists in whose life such phenomena were overly frequent.

A synchronicity seems to suggest that a nonlocal psychological reality either communicate with or is identical to the nonlocal reality known in physics. Since it is inconceivable to have two nonlocal realities coexisting separately from one, another, we can confidently assert that there is indeed, only one nonlocal reality.

Another set of phenomena inviting consideration is that which includes group hysteria and mob action. A classic example is that of a high school band on a bus trip, on which all members get "food poisoning" simultaneously before a big game. After exhaustive epidemiological work, no evidence of infection or toxins is found, and the "cause" is attributed to significant amounts where stress and the power of suggestion lay. The mechanisms are entirely unconscious to the band members; it is as though their psyches have "communicated" in a way that makes them act together. Similarly, in mob action, though the members may be conscious of the anger that moves them, generally the event seems to be loaded with an unconscious dynamic within the group that prepares the way for the event itself.

Physicist Paul Davy has written that one of the basic problems is constructing an adequate definition of the dimensionality. The ordinary dictionary definition describes a dimension in terms of magnitude or direction (height, depth, width), and we ordinarily think of the dimensions as perpendicular to each other. But that works only for the familiar spatial dimensions and the actions of ordinary objects. Imagine compressing all three-dimensional space toward a single point; As it comes close to a point, the concept of being perpendicular loses all meaning. Another problem is that it does not really make sense to think of time (which is a dimension, too) as perpendicular to anything.

A dimension is one of the domains of action permitted to or on an object. By domain I mean something like a field of influence or action. Verticality is not a thing that acts on an object, but is rather than which permits and influences a movement in space, and which influences our description of the movement. For example, verticality is one particular aspect of abstract reality that determines the behaviour of an object. But the abstract is real! Take verticality away from three-dimensional space, and an object is permitted to move only in a way that we can analyse as a mix of horizontal and forward-backward motions. Take the horizontal away, and the object may move only along a straight line (one-dimensional space). "String" theories, which approach a "Grand Unification" of all of the physical forces, posit dimensions beyond the four of the space-time. There is no theoretical limit to the number of dimensions, for external to space-time there is no concept of "container" or limit.

Since all of the non-space time dimensions, by definition, are not extended in space or time, we must conceive of them as represented by points. Since they act together of o space-time, they must "intersect" or somehow communicate with the primal space-time point. For that reason (and because in the absence of space-time no point can be offset from another), we must imagine the dimensions as many points superimposed into one. Let's call it the SuperPaint. We may in fact imagine as many superimposed points (dimensions) as past and future experiments might require to explain the phenomena of creation.

The initial conditions of our space-time universe are defined in that one SuperPaint; the Big Bang represents the explosive expansion of four of those dimensions, space-time. The creation-energy (super force) responsible for that expansion is concentrated in and at the multidimensional SuperPaint. Yet we must also think of other changes at the SuperPaint, for as energy levels dissipate immediately after the Big Bang, the super force quickly "evolves" into the four physical forces conventionally known.

We have said that only the space-time dimensions are expanding, because the force dimensions ("contained" in the SuperPaint) are not spatial. By definition, we may not imagine non-space time points as extended in space. However, all points in expanding space-time must still "communicate" with the force dimensions (and the symmetry dimensions, but we are neglecting them for the moment). All points in space-time must intersect the force dimensions.

It is as if the force dimensions too have been expanded to the size of space-time, for they are acting on each particle of energy/matter in the universe. One might imagine that one point has been stretched as a featureless elastic sheet, a continuum in which the point is everywhere the same.

However, quantum theory deals with these forces as discrete waves/particles. For example, the force of gravity is communicated by gravitons; The strong nuclear force by gluons is the electromagnetic force by photons. If we conceive the stretched points of the dimensions as "sheets," the sheets must have waves in them. These "stretched sheets" which constitute the field in which energy interacts with particles to sustain (and indeed, to continue the creation of) the universe. As I have expressed it in a poem, it is the field "where the forces play pinball / with gravitons and gluons / and modulate / the all."

Let us imagine again that space-time (four dimensions) is compressed toward a point. It is futile to ask what is outside that small pellet of space-time, for the concept of "outside ness" has no meaning but within space-time. As the pellet becomes smaller still, it shrinks toward nothingness, for a point is an abstract concept of zero dimensions, not extended in space or time, and thus it cannot "contain" anything. At that point, nothing exists except the thinker who is trying to imagine nothingness.

If we could model thought as only an epiphenomenon of matter, reached at a certain degree of complexity, it has no fundamental reality of its own. In that case, our thought experiment to shrink the cosmos reaches a point at which thought is extinguished, and the experiment must stop, if it is to follow the "rules" that it is modelling. However, by accepting that thought might have a reality of its own, and by considering the problem from a whole-system perspective, we were able to continue the thought experiment to the point at which only the thought remains. The epiphenomenon idea is not an adequate model of reality, since we can indeed continue the experiment under the conditions outlined.

This "negative proof" is indirect, serving only to eliminate the epiphenomenon model. It does not prove that there is an independent and fundamental reality beyond space-time and matter; the experiments supporting Bell's Theorem do that. This line of thinking, however, does lead us to suggest that thought be a primary aspect of reality. It seems that the cosmos itself is saying with Descartes, "I think, therefore I am."

Because of this inescapable "relativistic" connection between cosmos and thought, I cannot imagine creation ex nihilo (from nothing), for the concept of nothing always collides with the existence of the one who is the thinker. Nothing has any meaning apart from something. The dimension of thinking is required to imagine a zero-dimensional space-time.

The epiphenomenon model posits that nothing is defined as the absence of matter. If that is so, thought is nothing; However, if it were nothing, I could not be thinking that thought, so thought must be of something. There can be no nothingness, for even if all that exists is reduced to nothingness, a dimension of reality remains. Reality requires at least one dimension in addition to space-time and that reality seems inseparable from the dimension of thought.

What is missing from our existing scheme of dimensions is a description of that dimension that we could not eliminate by playing the videotape of creation in reverse: that reality at the SuperPaint from which the dimension of thought cannot be separated. That leads to a rather extravagant and intuitive proposal, following Anaxagoras: Thought is the missing particle, the missing dimension.

Quantum physics already acknowledges the importance of consciousness as "observer." Consciousness is the substrate of thought. Thought is consciousness dimensionally extended, whether in time or some other dimension. Thought is process. Any unification of the laws of physics must necessarily take into account the thought/consciousness dimension, and thus must unify physics with psyche as well.

In his book. The self-aware Universe, Admit Goswami uses the term consciousness to mean transcendental consciousness, which forms (or is) the nonlocal reality. Other physicists seem to define the term of cautiously, and one often wonders whether a given text about observer effect is referring to ordinary individual awareness, or to some more general property of psyche.

It is useful to preserve the important distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness. Psychologically, ordinary human consciousness is the realm of ego and the cognitive functions called mind. Neurologically it refers to a patient's observed state of awareness. The clinical unconscious is the realm of psyche, with both personal and collective aspects. Perhaps a better language will come along in time. Until then, let me suggest an interim language for discussing, and perhaps a framework for someday testing, the relationship between matter and psyche. Its proposal is that there is a unit of psyche, which I designate the neon, from the Greek word nous, for mind. Nuons represent the dimensions of thought that exist in (at, as) the SuperPaint defining the initial conditions of the Big Bang. As the domain of the force dimensions, those Nuons must be imagined to expand as a field or continuum (the nuocontinuum) as the space-time continuum expands, a "stretched sheet" with "waves" which are also Nuons. The Nuons of the SuperPaint are extended in space-time in a way conceptually analogous to the action of the forces.

Yet Nuons must also be construed as the domain of the symmetries, such as the principle of conservation of energy, which are nonlocal. That is, they are everywhere in effect, without being constrained by the speed-limit of light. The nuocontinuum thus represents a multidimensional bridge between forces, symmetries, and space-time. Nuons collectively contain all potentialities, but the collective (nuocontinuum) is the unit, itself the symmetry that unifies the forces and symmetries. The Nuons is the "infinity particle" which solves the formulas.

Does the nuocontinuum represent a fractal (fractional dimensions) such as those that give the mathematical order to the "chaos" images? Does it provide the prime tone of which the symmetries and the forces are harmonics? Whether construed mathematically or poetically, the nuocontinuum contains the information necessary to create a universe, but a universe that is organically creating itself.

Human awareness, which occurs at a level of extraordinary complexity in the organization of space-time particles, would involve, not a "creation" of consciousness as an epiphenomenon, but a sensing of a quality that is already there, as the reality dimension of the cosmos. The observer effect at the quantum level (and the health of Schr"dinger's cat) is then to be understood as an interaction, not with a particle of concrete matter, but with the reality substrate from which matter arises.

If we construe the whole nuocontinuum (rather than the experimenter) to be the "observer" of the quantum event in the box, we avoid much of the confusion and exasperation that Schroedinger's thought experiment evokes. Hawking wrote, "When I hear of Schroedinger's cat, and I reach for my gun." Even Einstein was repelled by quantum uncertainty. DeBroglie especially held out for an interpretation of quantum physics which supported concreteness. We rebel against the idea of a universe based on uncertainty, and we seek to assure ourselves that what we experience is a concrete reality.

However, if the nuocontinuum is the observer that resolves the quantum uncertainty, our own individual sense of uncertainty is also resolved. The collapse of the particle wave function (the coming into being of the particle at a particular point in space-time) would be a function of the nuocontinuum acting as a whole, rather than as a local observer. The nuocontinuum is the observer who actualized creation the cosmic event in the box prior to the development of human consciousness. It is that cosmic observer who unifies the quantum effects of the electronuclear forces and the cosmic effects of gravity.

The Nuocontinuum, then, designates an unlimited, infinite connecting principle that binds all that is. Because it accounts for the material characteristics of the cosmos, it is "Creator." Because it presents itself through the agency of human consciousness, it may be sensed as Person and named Holy Spirit or Great Mystery. It is the source of that compelling "passion" of which Teilhard spoke, "to become one with the world that envelops us." Thus, though well beyond the scope of this article, the concept has implications for depth psychology and for theology. It has potential to help humans globally recapture a sense of meaning to human life, and to understand the experiences of those whose terminologies differ. Unless we do so, or at least critical masses of us do, we remain at great risk for destroying ourselves.

But its implications for the healing arts are also profound, for it makes us look at familiar concepts in quite a different light. In its affirmation of meaningful order in the cosmos as a whole, the nuocontinuum concept gives further definition and import to homeostasis as a healing, balancing principle that has more than physiological significance. When we invoke the term "placebo effect" we (usually unwittingly) are invoking a principle of the connectedness between an intervention and an effect, which now can be named and conceptualized. "Spontaneous remissions" of disease would be seen as something less than miracles but clearly more than merely chemical. After all, if physics can reach a limit to its powers of description, so too must be psychoneuroimmunology.

Practitioners, have become aware of the connectedness principle, we will become more aware that our own attitudes and approaches are significant to treatment outcomes and patient satisfaction. We will then realize that even though an experiment may be "doubly-blind" to some experimenters and to some persons being tested, there may be other influences outside the cause-effect "loop" and connections of which other persons may be conscious. Further, we will better understand that there are different levels of connectivity at work in every action, which require different levels of description to explain. And we might become more sensitive to patient's hopes and expectations that so are often stated in religious terms.

At this point in our harvest of knowledge, this synthesis is quite intuitive and speculative. However, even highly abstract drawings are often helpful in organizing thought. I hope that through some such synthesis as this, couched in whatever language, we will be given that courage to which Dossey eludes, to enter the "doorway through which we may encounter a radically new understanding of the physical world and our place in it." And, ones hope, assure the continued development of our abilities, together, to offer help to all in need of healing.

We collectively glorify our ability to think as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity; we personally and mistakenly glorify our thoughts as the distinguishing pattern of whom we are. From the inner voice of thought-as-words to the wordless images within our minds, thoughts create and limit our personal world. Through thinking we abstract and define reality, reason about it, react to it, recall past events and plan for the future. Yet thinking remains both woefully underdeveloped in most of us, as well as grossly overvalued. We can best gain some perspective on thinking in terms of energies.

We are hanging in language. We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, Niels Bohr lamented in the 1920s when confronted with the paradoxes, absurdities, and seeming impossibilities encountered in the then newly discovered quantum domain. The problem, he insisted, was not the quantum wonderland itself, but our language, our ways of thinking and talking about it. His colleague, Werner Heisenberg, went a step further and proclaimed that events in the quantum wonderland are not only unspeakable, they are unimaginable.

The same situation confronts today us when we try to talk about consciousness and how it relates to matter-energy. Go fishing for consciousness using the net of language and it always, inevitably, slips through the holes in our net. The limits of language-and imagination in talk about consciousness have been recently underlined, yet again, by the exchanges between philosopher Mark Woodhouse and physician Larry Dossey in the pages of Network.

Essentially, both men take opposing positions regarding the appropriateness of "energy talk" as a way of describing or explaining consciousness or mental phenomena. Woodhouse defends the use of energy talk (and proposes what he seems to think is a novel solution); Dossey denies the appropriateness of talking about consciousness in terms of energy. In for Woodhouse, consciousness is energy ("each is the other"); for Dossey, consciousness is not energy. As a philosopher passionately committed to exploring the relationship between consciousness and matter, between mind and body, and, specifically, the question "Can we have a science of consciousness?" I think the dialogue between Woodhouse and Dossey opens up a crucially important issue for philosophy of mind and for a science of consciousness. I believe the "energy question" is central to any significant advance we may make into understanding consciousness and how it relates to the physical world.

This relationship, is nevertheless, accredited by a double-aspect perspective: "Energy is the 'outside' of consciousness and consciousness is the 'inside' of energy throughout the universe." But making or that we have fallen into a fundamental philosophical error. As of urging to entice us for which we hold to bind of a particularly atypical sensibility for engaging the encounter with the narratives that belong to some "energy talk" about consciousness. But this study as at times happens to be of something to mention as a double-prospective that foregoes the most important point, and thereby fails to acknowledge what it is of true philosophically and by virtue of its existing character whose value we model.

A major challenge facing philosophers and scientists of consciousness (and anybody else who wishes to talk about it) is finding appropriate concepts, words and metaphors. So much of our language is derived from our two most dominant senses: vision and touch. Vision feeds language with spatial metaphors, while touch-or rather, kinesthetics-feeds language with muscular push-pull metaphors. The visuo-muscular senses dominate our perception and interaction with the world, and consequently metaphors derived from these senses dominate our ways of conceiving and talking about the world. It is no accident that spatial and mechanical descriptions and explanations predominate in physics-the paradigm science (and our culture's paradigm for all knowledge). Given our evolutionary heritage, with its selective bias toward vision and kinesthetics, we live predominantly in a spatial-push-pull world-the world of classical mechanics, a "billiard-ball" universe of moving, colliding, and recoiling massive bodies. Ours is a world of matter in motion, of things in space acted on by physical forces.

It should not be surprising, then, that when we come to talk about consciousness, our grooves of thinking channels us toward physics-talk-expressed today as "energy talk." Forces are felt-experienced in the body and we are tempted to think that the experience of force is identical to the energy exchanges between bodies described by physics. But this is to confuse the feeler's feeling (the subject) with what is felt (the object). More on this later.

Previously mentioned, was that the Woodhouse-Dossey debate highlights yet again the limits of language when we try to talk about consciousness. This problem is at least as old as Descartes' mind-body dualism (though, as we will see, it is not confined to Cartesian dualism-it is there, too, in forms of idealism known as the "Perennial Philosophy"). When Descartes made his famous distinction between mind and matter, he found himself "suspended in the language" of physics. He could find no better way to define mind than negatively in the terminology of physics. He defined matter as that which occupies space"res' extensa," extended things. He defined the mental world as "res comitans," thinking things-and thinking things differ from physical things in that they do not occupy space. The problem was how could material, physical, things interact with nonphysical things? What conceivably could be the nature of their point of contact-material or mental? Centuries later, Freud, too, resorted to physics-energy talk when to specify the "mechanisms" and dynamics of the psyche-e.g. his concept of the libido. Today, the same tendency to use energy technologically to converse in talking, as Dossey points out, is rife in much new age talk about consciousness, soul, and spirit, exemplified in Woodhouse's article and his book Paradigm Wars.

Because of our reliance on the senses of vision and kinesthetics, we have an evolutionary predisposition, it seems, to talk in the language of physics or mechanics-and by that I mean "matter talk," or "energy talk." Yet all such talk seems to miss something essential when we come to speak of phenomena in the domain of the mind-for example, emotions, desires, beliefs, pains, and other felt qualities of consciousness. The inappropriate chunkiness of mechanistic metaphors borrowed from classical physics seems obvious enough. The mind just isn't at all like matter or machines, as Descartes was keenly aware. But then came Einstein's relativity, and the quantum revolution. First, Einstein's E = mc2 showed that matter was a form of energy, and so, with the advent of quantum theory, the material world began to dissolve into unimaginable, paradoxical bundles of energy or action. Matter itself was now understood to be a ghostly swirl of energy, and began to take on qualities formerly associated with mind. A great physicist, Sir James Jeans, even declared that "universe begins to look more like a great thought." Quantum events were so tiny, so undetermined, so un-mechanical in the classical sense, they seemed just the sort of thing that could respond to the influence of the mind.

The quantum-consciousness connection was boosted further by the need (at least in one interpretation of quantum theory) to include the observer (and his/her consciousness) in any complete description of the collapse of the quantum wave function. According to this view, the quantum system must include the consciousness of the observer. Ghostly energy fields from relativity and the quantum-consciousness connection triggered the imaginations of pop-science writers and dabblers in new age pseudo-science: Quantum theory, many believe, has finally opened the way for science to explore and talk about the mind. But the excitement was-and is-premature. It involves the linguistic and conceptual sleight-of-hand, whereas the clucky mechanical language that is in fact a matter that was obviously at best in metaphoric principles, just when applied to consciousness, it now seemed more reasonable to use the language of energy literally-particularly if cloaked in the "spooky" garb of quantum physics. But this shift from "metaphorical matter" to "literal energy" was unwarranted, unfounded, and deceptive.

Dissolving matter into energy makes neither of them are less conceptual. And the mark of the physical, as Descartes had pointed out, is that it is extended in space. Despite the insuperable problems with his dualism, Descartes' key insight remains valid: What distinguishes mind from matter is precisely that it does not occupy space. And this distinction holds just as fast between mind and energy-even so-called subtle energy (hypothetical "subtle energy" bodies are described as having extension, and other spatial attributes such as waves, vibrations, frequencies). Energy, even in the form of infinitesimal quanta or "subtle vibrations," still occupies space. And any theory of energy as a field clearly makes it spatial. Notions of "quantum consciousness" or "field consciousness"-and Woodhouse's "vibrations," "ripples," or "waves" of consciousness-therefore, are no more than vacuous jargon because they continue to fail to address the very distinction that Descartes formulated nearly four hundred years ago.

But that's not even the most troublesome deficiency of energy talk. It is equitably to suppose that physicists were proficient to show that quanta of energy did not occupy space; Suppose the behaviour of quanta was so bizarre that they could do all sorts of "non-physical" things-such as transcend space and time; Suppose that even if it could be shown that quanta were not "physical" in Descartes' sense . . . even supposing all of this, any proposed identity between energy and consciousness would still be invalid.

Energies talk fails to account for what is fundamentally most characteristic about consciousness, namely its subjectivity. No matter how fine-grained, or "subtle," energy could become, as an objective phenomenon it could never account for the fact of subjectivity-the "what-it-feels-like-from-within-experience." Ontologically, subjectivity cannot just emerge from wholly objective reality. Unless energy, at its ontologically most fundamental level, already came with some form of proto-consciousness, proto-experience, or proto-subjectivity, consciousness, experience, or subjectivity would never emerge or evolve in the universe.

Which brings us to Woodhouse's "energy monism" model, and the notion that "consciousness is the 'inside' of energy throughout the universe." Despite Dossey's criticism of this position, I think Woodhouse is here proposing a version of the only ontology that can account for a universe where both matter-energy and consciousness are real. He briefly summarizes why dualism, idealism, and materialism cannot adequately account for a universe consisting of both matter/energy and consciousness. (He adds "Epiphenomenalism" to these three as though it were distinctly ontological. It is not. Epiphenomenalism is a form of property dualism, which in turn is a form of materialism.) He then proceeds to outline a "fifth" alternative: "Energy monism." And although I believe his fundamental insight is correct, his discussion of this model in terms of double-aspectism falls victim to a common error in metaphysics: He confuses epistemology with ontology.

Woodhouse proposes that the weaknesses of the other ontologies-dualism, idealism, and materialism-can be avoided by adopting a "double-aspect theory that does not attempt to reduce either energy or consciousness to the other." And he goes on to build his alternative ontology on a double-aspect foundation. Now, I happen to be highly sympathetic with double-aspectism: It is a coherent and comprehensive (even "holistic") epistemology. As a way of knowing the world, double-aspectism opens up the possibility of a complementarity of subjective and objective perspectives.

But a perspective on the world yields epistemology-it reveals' something about how we know what we know about the world. It does not reveal the nature of the world, which is the aim of ontology. Woodhouse makes an illegitimate leap from epistemology to ontology when he says, "This [energy monism] is a dualism of perspective, not of fundamental stuff," and concludes that "each is the other." Given his epistemological double-aspectism, the best Woodhouse can claim to be an ontological agnostic (as, in fact, Dossey does). He can talk about viewing the world from two complementary perspectives, but he cannot talk about the nature of the world in itself. Certainly, he cannot legitimately conclude from talk about aspects or perspectives that the ultimate nature of the world is "energy monism" or that "consciousness is energy." Epistemology talk cannot yield ontology talk-as Kant, and later Bohr, were well aware. Kant said we cannot know the thing-in-itself. The best we can hope for is to know some details about the instrument of knowing. Bohr said that the task of quantum physics is not to describe reality as it is in itself, but to describe what we can say about reality.

The issue of whether energy talk is appropriate for consciousness is to resolve ontologically not epistemological ly. At issue is whether consciousness is or is not a form of energy-not whether it can be known from different perspectives. If it is a form of energy, then energy talk is legitimate. If not, energy talk is illegitimate. But the nature of consciousness is not to be "determined by perspective," as Woodhouse states: "insides and outsides are determined by perspectives." If "insides" (or "outsides") were merely a matter of perspective, then any ontology would do, as long as we allowed for epistemological dualism or complementarity (though, of course, the meaning of "inside" and "outside" would differ according to each ontology). What Woodhouse doesn't do (which he needs to do to make his epistemology grow ontological legs) has established an ontology compatible with his epistemology of "inside" and "outside." In short, he needs to establish an ontological distinction between consciousness and energy. But this is precisely what Woodhouse aim to avoid with his model of energy monism. Dossey is right, I think, to describe energy talk about consciousness as a legacy of Newtonian physics (i.e., of visuo-kinesthetic mechanics). This applies equally to "classical energy talk," "quantum-energy talk," "subtle-energy talk," and Woodhouse's "dual-aspect energy talk." In an effort to defend energy talk about consciousness, Woodhouse substitutes epistemology for ontology, and leaves the crucial issue unresolved.

Unless Woodhouse is willing to ground his double-aspect epistemology in an ontological complementarity that distinguishes mind from matter, but does not separate them, he runs the risk of unwittingly committing "reductionism all over again"-despite his best intentions. In fact, Woodhouse comes very close to proposing just the kind of complementary ontology his model needs: "Consciousness isn't just a different level or wave form of vibrating energy; it is the 'inside' of energy-the pole of interiority perfectly understandable to every person who has had a subjective experience of any kind" (emphasis added). This is ontology talk, not epistemology talk. Woodhouse's error is to claim that the distinction "inside" (consciousness) and "outside" (energy) is merely a matter of perspective.

In order to defend his thesis of "energy monism," Woodhouse seems to want it both ways. On the one hand, he talks of being conscious and energy being ontologically identical"each is the other"; on the other, he makes a distinction between consciousness and energy: Energy is the 'outside' of consciousness and consciousness is the 'inside' of energy. He attempts to avoid the looming contradiction of consciousness and energy being both "identical yet distinct" by claiming that the identity is ontological while the distinction is epistemological. But the distinction cannot be merely epistemological-otherwise, as already pointed out, any ontology would do. But this is clearly not Woodhouse's position. Energy monism, as proposed by Woodhouse, is an ontological claim. Woodhouse admits as much when he calls energy monism "a fifth alternative" to the ontologism of dualism, idealism, materialism (and Epiphenomenalism [sic]) which he previously dismissed.

Furthermore, Woodhouse "inside" and "outside" are not merely epistemological when he means them to be synonyms for "subjectivity" and "objectivity" respectively. Although subjectivity and objectivity are epistemological perspectives, they are not only that. Subjectivity and objectivity can have epistemological meaning only if they refer to some implications of a primary ontological distinction-between what Sartre (1956) called the "for-itself" and the "in-itself," between that which feels and that which is felt. Despite his claims to the contrary, Woodhouse's distinction between "inside" and "outside" is ontological-not mere epistemological. And as an ontological distinction between consciousness and energy, it is illegitimate to conclude from his double-aspect epistemology the identity claim that "consciousness is energy." Woodhouse's consciousness-energy monism confusion, it seems to me, is a result of: (1) a failure to distinguish between non-identity and separation, and (2) a desire to avoid the pitfalls of Cartesian dualism. The first is a mistake, the second is not-but he conflates the two. He seems to think that if he allows for a non-identity between consciousness and energy this is tantamount to their being ontologically separate (as in Cartesian dualism). But (1) does not encompass that of (2): Ontological distinction does not entail separation. It is possible to distinguish two phenomena (such as the form and substance of a thing), yet recognize them as inseparable elements of a unity. Unity does not mean identity, and distinction does not mean separation. (I will return to this point shortly.) This muddle between epistemology and ontology is my major criticism of Woodhouse's position. Though if he had the courage or foresight to follow through on his epistemological convictions, and recognize that his position is compatible with (and would be grounded by) an ontological complementarity of consciousness and energy.

The ontological level of understanding (though explicitly denied) in Woodhouse's double-aspect model-where consciousness ("inside") and energy ("outside") is actual throughout the universe is none other than panpsychism, or what has been variously called pan experientialism (Griffin, 1997) and radical materialism (de Quincey, 1997). It is the fourth alternative to the major ontologism of dualism, idealism, and materialism, and has a very long lineage in the Western philosophical tradition-going all the way back to Aristotle and beyond to the Presocratics. Woodhouse does not acknowledge any of this lineage, as if his double-aspect model was a novel contribution to the mind-matter debate. Besides Aristotle's hylemorphism, he could have referred to Leibniz' monads, Whitehead "actual occasion," and de Chardin's "tangential energy" and the "within" as precursors to the distinction he makes between "inside" and "outside." This oversight weakens the presentation of his case. Of course, to have introduced any or all of these mind-body theories would have made Woodhouse's ontological omission all the more noticeable.

One other weakness in Woodhouse's article is his reference to the Perennial Philosophy and the Great Chain of Being as supportive of energy talk that unites spiritual and physical realities. "The non-dual Source of some spiritual traditions . . . is said to express itself energetically (outwardly) on different levels in the Great Chain of Being (matter being the densest form of energy) . . ." Woodhouse is here referring to the many variations of idealist emanationism, where spirit is said to pour itself forth through a sequence of ontological levels and condense into matter. But just as I would say Woodhouse's energy monism unwittingly ultimately entails physicalist reductionism, my criticism of emanationism is that it, too, ultimately "physicalizes" spirit-which no idealist worth his or her salt would want to claim. Energy monism runs the same risk of "physicalizing" spirit as emanationism. So I see no support for Woodhouse's position as an alternative to dualism or materialism coming from the Perennial Philosophy. Both run the risk of covert dualism or covert materialism.

Dossey's critique of Woodhouse's energy monism and energy talk, particularly his caution not to assume that the "nonlocal" phenomena of quantum physics are related to the "nonlocal" phenomena of consciousness and distant healing other than a commonalty of terminology is sound. The caution is wise. However, his critique of Woodhouse's "inside" and "outside" fails to address Woodhouse's confusing epistemology and ontology. If Dossey saw that Woodhouse's intent was to confine the "inside/outside" distinction to epistemology, he might not have couched his critique in ontological terms. Dossey says, "By emphasizing inside and outside, interior and exterior, we merely create new boundaries and interfaces that require their own explanations." The "boundaries and interfaces" Dossey is talking about being ontological, not epistemological. And to this extent, Dossey's critique misses the fact that Woodhouse is explicitly engaged in epistemology talk. On the other hand, Dossey is correct to assume that Woodhouse's epistemological distinction between "inside and outside" necessarily implies an ontological distinction-between "inside" (consciousness) and "outside" energy.

Dossey's criticism of Woodhouse's energy monism, thus, rests on an ontological objection: Even if we do not yet have any idea of how to talk ontologically about consciousness, we at least know that (despite Woodhouse's contrary claim) consciousness and energy are not ontologically identical. There is an ontological distinction between "inside/consciousness" and "outside/energy." Thus, Dossey concludes, energy talk (which is ontological talk) is inappropriate for consciousness. On this, I agree with Dossey, and disagree with Woodhouse. However, Dossey goes on to take issue with Woodhouse's "inside/outside" distinction as a solution to the mind-body relation. If taken literally, Dossey's criticism is valid: "Instead of grappling with the nature of the connection between energy and consciousness, we are now obliged to clarify the nature of the boundary between 'inside' and 'outside' . . ." But I suspect that Woodhouse uses the spatial concepts "inside/outside" metaphorically because like the rest of us he finds our language short on nonphysical metaphors (though, as we will see, nonspatial metaphors are available).

It may be, of course, that Woodhouse has not carefully thought through the implications of this spatial metaphor, and how it leaves him open to just the sort of critique that Dossey levels. Dossey, I presume, is as much concerned with Woodhouse's claim that "consciousness is energy," meaning it is the "inside" of energy, as he is about the difficulties in taking the spatial metaphor of "inside/outside" literally. On the first point, I share Dossey's concern. I am less concerned about the second. As long as we remember that talk of "interiority" and "exteriority" are metaphors, I believe they can be very useful ways of pointing toward a crucial distinction between consciousness and energy.

The metaphor becomes a problem if we slip into thinking that it points to a literal distinction between two kinds of "stuff" (as Descartes did), or indeed to a distinction revealing two aspects of a single kind of "stuff." This latter slip seems to be precisely the mistake that Woodhouse makes with his energy monism. By claiming that consciousness is energy, Woodhouse in effect-despite his best intentions to the contrary-succeeds in equating (and this means "reducing") consciousness to physical "stuff." His mistake-and one that Dossey may be buying into-is to use "stuff-talk" for consciousness. It is a logical error to conclude from (1) there is only one kind of fundamental "stuff" (call it energy), and (2) this "stuff" has an interiority (call it consciousness), that (3) the interiority is also composed of that same "stuff" -, i.e., that consciousness is energy. It could be that "interiority/consciousness" is not "stuff" but something more collectively distinct ontologically-for examples, feeling or process-something which is intrinsic to, and therefore inseparable from, the "stuff." It could be that the world is made up of stuff that feels, where there is an ontological distinction between the feeling (subjectivity, experience, consciousness) and what is felt (objectivity, matter-energy).

Dossey's rejection of the "inside/outside" metaphor seems to presume (à la Woodhouse) that "inside" means the interior of some "stuff" and is that "stuff"-in this case, energy-stuff. But that is not the position of panpsychist and process philosophers from Leibniz down through Bergson, James, and Whitehead, to Hartshorns and Griffin. If we make the switch from a "stuff-oriented" to a process oriented ontology, then the kind of distinction between consciousness and energy dimly implicit in Woodhouse's model avoids the kind of criticism that Dossey levels at the "inside/outside" metaphor. Process philosophers prefer to use "time-talk" over "space-talk." Instead of talking about consciousness in terms of "insides," they talk about "moments of experience" or "duration." Thus, if we view the relationship between consciousness and energy in terms of temporal processes rather than spatial stuff, we can arrive at an ontology similar to Whiteheads relationship between consciousness and energy is understood as temporal. It is the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, where the subject is the present state of an experiential process, and the object is its prior state. Substitute "present" for "interior" and "past" or "prior" for "exterior" and we have a process ontology that avoids the "boundary" difficulties raised by Dossey. (There is no boundary between past and present-the one flows into the other; the present incorporates the past.) From the perspective of panpsychism or radical materialism, consciousness and energy, mind and matter, subject and object always go together. All matter-energy is intrinsically sentient and experiential. Sentience-consciousness and matter-energy are inseparable, but nevertheless distinct. On this view, consciousness is the process of matter-energy informing itself.

Although our language is biassed toward physics-energy talk, full of mechanistic metaphors, this is clearly not the whole story. The vernacular of the marketplace, as well as the language of science itself, is also rich with non-mechanistic metaphors, metaphors that flow direct from experience itself. Ironically, not only do we apply these consciousness metaphors to the mind and mental events, but also to the world of matter in our attempts to understand its deeper complexities and dynamics. For example, systems theory and evolutionary biology-even at the reductionist level of molecular genetics-are replete with words such as "codes," "information," "meaning," "self-organizing," and the p-word: "purpose." So we are not limited to mechanistic metaphors when describing either the world of matter or the world of mind. But-and this is the important point-because of our bias toward visuo-muscular images, we tend to forget that metaphors of the mind are sui generis, and, because of our scientific and philosophical bias in favour of a mechanism, we often attempt to reduce metaphors of the mind to metaphors of matter. My proposal for consciousness talk is this: Recognize the limitations of mechanistic metaphors, and the inappropriateness of literal energy talk, when discussing consciousness. Instead, acknowledge the richness and appropriateness of metaphors of meaning when talking about the mind. In short: Drop mechanistic metaphors (energy talk) and take up meaning metaphors (consciousness talk) when talking about consciousness.

One of the thorniest issues in "energy" and "consciousness" work is the tendency to confuse the two. Consciousness does not equal energy, yet the two are inseparable. Consciousness is the "witness" which experiences the flow of energy, but it is not the flow of energy. We might say consciousness is the felt interiority of energy/matter - but it is not energy.

If we say that consciousness is a form of energy, then we have two options. Either It is a physical form of energy (even if it is very subtle energy), or It is not a physical form of energy. If we say that consciousness is a form of energy that is physical, then we are reducing consciousness (and spirit) to physics. And few of us, unless we are materialists, want to do that. If we say that consciousness is a form of energy that is not physical, then we need to say in what way psychic energy differs from physical energy. If we cannot explain what we mean by "psychic energy" and how it is different from physical energy, in that then we should ask ourselves why use the term "energy" at all? Our third alternative is to say that consciousness is not a form of energy (physical or nonphysical). This is not to imply that consciousness has nothing to do with energy. In fact, the position I emphasize in my graduate classes is that consciousness and energy always go together. They cannot ever be separated. But this is not to say they are not distinct. They are distinct-energy is energy, consciousness is consciousness-but they are inseparable (like two sides of a coin, or, better, like the shape and substance of a tennis ball. You can't separate the shape from the substance of the ball, but shape and substance are definitely distinct).

So, for example, if someone has a kundalini experience, they may feel a rush of energy up the chakra system . . . but to say that the energy flow is consciousness is to mistake the object (energy flow) for the subject, for what perceives (consciousness) the object. Note the two importantly distinct words in the phrase "feel the rush of energy . . . " On the one hand there is the "feeling" (or the "feeler"), on the other, there is what is being felt or experienced (the energy). Even our way of talking about it reveals that we detect a distinction between feeling (consciousness) and what we feel (energy). Yes, the two go together, but they are not the same. Unity, or unification, or holism, does not equal identity. To say that one aspect of reality (say, consciousness) cannot be separated from another aspect of reality (say, matter-energy) is not to say both aspects of reality (consciousness and matter-energy) are identical.

Consciousness, is neither identical to energy (monism) nor it a separate substance or energy in addition to physical matter or energy (dualism)-it is the "interiority," the what-it-feels-like-from-within, the subjectivity that is intrinsic to the reality of all matter and energy (panpsychism or radical materialism). If you take a moment to pay attention to what's going on in your own body right now, you'll see-or feel-what I mean: The physical matter of your body, including the flow of whatever energies are pulsing through you, is the "stuff" of your organism. But there is also a part of you that is aware of, or feels, the pumping of your blood (and other energy streams). That aspect of you that feels the matter-energy in your body is your consciousness. We could express it this way: "Consciousness is the process of matter-energy informing itself." Consciousness is the ability that matter-energy has to feel, to know, and to direct itself. The universe could be (and probably is) full of energy flows, vortices, and vibrations, but without consciousness, all this activity would be completely unfelt and unknown. Only because there is consciousness can the flow of energy be felt, known, and purposefully directed.

Over the past three decades, philosophy of science has grown increasingly "local." Concerns have switched from general features of scientific practice to concepts, issues, and puzzles specific to particular disciplines. Philosophy of neuroscience is a natural result. This emerging area was also spurred by remarkable recent growth in the neuroscience. Cognitive and computational neuroscience continues to encroach upon issues traditionally addressed within the humanities, including the nature of consciousness, action, knowledge, and normativity. Empirical discoveries about brain structure and function suggest ways that "naturalistic" programs might develop in detail, beyond the abstract philosophical considerations in their favour

The literature distinguishes "philosophy of neuroscience" and "neurophilosophy." The former concern foundational issues within the neuroscience. The latter concerns application of neuroscientific concepts to traditional philosophical questions. Exploring various concepts of representation employed in neuroscientific theories is an example of the former. Examining implications of neurological syndromes for the concept of a unified self is an example of the latter. In this entry, we will assume this distinction and discuss examples of both.

Contrary to some opinion, actual neuroscientific discoveries have exerted little influence on the details of materialist philosophies of mind. The "neuroscientific milieu" of the past four decades has made it harder for philosophers to adopt dualism. But even the "type-type" or "central state" identity theories that rose to brief prominence in the late 1950s drew upon few actual details of the emerging neuroscience. Recall the favourite early example of a psychoneural identity claim: pain is identical to C-fibre firing. The "C fibres" turned out to be related to only a single aspect of pain transmission. Early identity theorists did not emphasize psychoneural identity hypotheses, admitting that their "neuro" terms were placeholder for concepts from future neuroscience. Their arguments and motivations were philosophical, even if the ultimate justification of the program was held to be empirical.

The apology for this lacuna by early identity theorists was that neuroscience at that time was too nascent to provide any plausible identities. But potential identities were afoot. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's (1962) electro physiological demonstrations of the receptive field properties of visual neurons had been reported with great fanfare. Using their techniques, neuro physiologists began discovering neurons throughout visual cortex responsive to increasingly abstract features of visual stimuli: from edges to motion direction to colours to properties of faces and hands. More notably, Donald Hebb had published The Organization of Behaviour (1949) a decade earlier. Therein he offered detailed explanations of psychological phenomena in terms of known neural mechanisms and anatomical circuits. His psychological explananda included features of perception, learning, memory, and even emotional disorders. He offered these explanations as potential identities. One philosopher did take note of some available neuroscientific detail was Barbara Von Eckardt-Klein (1975). She discussed the identity theory with respect to sensations of touch and pressure, and incorporated then-current hypotheses about neural coding of sensation modality, intensity, duration, and location as theorized by Mountcastle, Libet, and Jasper. Yet she was a glaring exception. Largely, available neuroscience at the time was ignored by both philosophical friends and foes of early identity theories.

Philosophical indifference to neuroscientific detail became "principled" with the rise and prominence of functionalism in the 1970s. The functionalists' favourite argument was based on multiple reliability: a given mental state or event can be realized in a wide variety of physical types (Putnam, 1967 and Fodor, 1974). So a detailed understanding of one type of realizing physical system (e.g., brains) will not shed light on the fundamental nature of mind. A psychological state-type is autonomous from any single type of its possible realizing physical mechanisms. Instead of neuroscience, scientifically-minded philosophers influenced by functionalism sought evidence and inspiration from cognitive psychology and "program-writing" artificial intelligence. These disciplines résumé being of themselves away from underlying physical mechanisms and emphasize the "information-bearing" properties and capacities of representations (Haugeland, 1985). At this same time neuroscience was delving directly into cognition, especially learning and memory. For example, Eric Kandel (1976) proposed parasynaptic mechanisms governing transmitter release rates as a cell-biological explanation of simple forms of associative learning. With Robert Hawkins (1984) he demonstrated how cognitivist aspects of associative learning (e.g., Forming, second-order conditioning, overshadowing) could be explained cell-biologically by sequences and combinations of these basic forms implemented in higher neural anatomies. Working on the postsynaptic side, neuroscientists began unravelling the cellular mechanisms of long term potentiation (LTP). Physiological psychologists quickly noted its explanatory potential for various forms of learning and memory. Yet few "materialist" philosophers paid any attention. Why should they? Most were convinced functionalists, who believed that the "engineering level" details might be important to the clinician, but were irrelevant to the theorist of mind.

A major turning point in philosophers' interest in neuroscience came with the publication of Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy (1986). The Churchlands (Pat and husband Paul) were already notorious for advocating eliminative materialism. In her (1986) book, Churchland distilled eliminativist arguments of the past decade, unified the pieces of the philosophy of science underlying them, and sandwiched the philosophy between a five-chapter introduction and neuroscience and a 70-page chapter on three then-current theories of brain function. She was unapologetic about her intent. She was introducing philosophy of science to neuroscientists and neuroscience to philosophers. Nothing could be more obvious, she insisted, than the relevance of empirical facts about how the brain works to concerns in the philosophy of mind. Her term for this interdisciplinary method was "co-evolution" (borrowed from biology). This method seeks resources and ideas from anywhere on the theory hierarchy above or below the question at issue. Standing on the shoulders of philosophers like Quine and Sellars, Churchland insisted that specifying some point where neuroscience ends and philosophy of science begins is hopeless because the boundaries are poorly defined. neuro philosophers would carefully choose resources from both disciplines as they saw fit.

Three themes predominate Churchlands philosophical discussion: Developing an alternative to the logical empiricist theory of intertheoretic cause to be connected to property-dualistic arguments based on subjectivity and sensory qualia, and responding to anti-reductionist multiple reliability arguments. These projects have remained central to neurophilosophy over the past decade. John Bickle (1998) extends the principal insight of Clifford Hooker's (1981) post-empiricist theory of intertheoretic reduction. He quantifies key notions using a model-theoretic account of theory structure adapted from the structuralist program in philosophy of science. He also makes explicit the form of argument scientist's employ to draw ontological conclusions (cross-theoretic identities, revisions, or eliminations) based on the nature of the intertheoretic reduction relations obtaining in specific cases. For example, physicists concluded that visible light, a theoretical posit of optics, is electromagnetic radiation within specified wavelengths, a theoretical posit of electromagnetism: a cross-theoretic ontological identity. In another case, however, chemists concluded that phlogiston did not exist: an elimination of a kind from our scientific ontology. Bickle explicates the nature of the reduction relation in a specific case using a semi-formal account of ‘an interior theoretic approximation' inspired by structuralist results. Paul Churchland (1996) has carried on the attack on property-dualistic arguments for the ir reducibility of conscious experience and sensory qualia. He argues that acquiring some knowledge of existing sensory neuroscience increases one's ability to ‘imagine' or ‘conceive of' a comprehensive neurobiological explanation of consciousness. He defends this conclusion using a thought-experiment based on the history of optics and electromagnetism. Finally, the literature critical of the multiple reliability argument has begun to flourish. Although the multiple reliability argument remains influential among nonreductive physicalists, it no longer commanded the universal acceptance it once did. Replies to the multiple reliability argument based on neuroscientific details have appeared. For example, William Bechtel and Jennifer Mundale (1997, in press) argue that neuroscientists use psychological criteria in brain mapping studies. This fact undercuts the likelihood that psychological kinds are multiplying realized.

Eliminative materialism (EM) is the conjunction of two claims. First, our common sense ‘belief-desire' conception of mental events and processes, our ‘folk psychology,' is a false and misleading account of the causes of human behaviour. Second, like other false conceptual frameworks from both folk theory and the history of science, it will be replaced by, rather than smoothly reduced or incorporated into, a future neuroscience. Folk psychology is the collection of common homilies about the causes of human behaviour. You ask me why Marica is not accompanying me this evening. I reply that her grant deadline is looming. You nod sympathetically. You understand my explanation because you share with me a generalization that relates beliefs about looming deadlines, desires about meeting professionally and financially significant ones, and ensuing free-time behaviour. It is the collection of these kinds of homilies that EM claims to be flawed beyond significant revision. Although this example involves only beliefs and desires, folk psychology contains an extensive repertoire of propositional attitudes in its explanatory nexus: hopes, intentions, fears, imaginings, and more. To the extent that scientific psychology (and neuroscience) retains folk concepts, EM applies to it as well.

EM is physicalist in the classical sense, postulating some future brain science as the ultimately correct account of (human) behaviour. It is eliminative in predicting the future removal of folk psychological kinds from our post-neuroscientific ontology. EM proponents often employ scientific analogies. Oxidative reactions as characterized within elemental chemistry bear no resemblance to phlogiston release. Even the "direction" of the two processes differ. Oxygen is gained when an object burns (or rusts), phlogiston was said to be lost. The result of this theoretical change was the elimination of phlogiston from our scientific ontology. There is no such thing. For the same reasons, according to EM, continuing development in neuroscience will reveal that there are no such things as beliefs and desires as characterized by common sense.

Here we focus only on the way that neuroscientific results have shaped the arguments for EM. Surprisingly, only one argument has been strongly influenced. (Most arguments for EM stress the failures of folk psychology as an explanatory theory of behaviour.) This argument is based on a development in cognitive and computational neuroscience that might provide a genuine alternative to the representations and computations implicit in folk psychological generalizations. Many eliminative materialists assume that folk psychology is committed to propositional representations and computations over their contents that mimic logical inferences. Even though discovering such an alternative has been an eliminativist goal for some time, neuroscience only began delivering on this goal over the past fifteen years. Points in and trajectories through vector spaces, as an interpretation of synaptic events and neural activity patterns in biological neural networks are key feature of this development. This argument for EM hinges on the differences between these notions of cognitive representation and the propositional attitudes of folk psychology (Churchland, 1987). However, this argument will be opaque to those with no background in contemporary cognitive and computational neuroscience, so we need to present a few scientific details. With these details in place, we will return to this argument for EM.

At one level of analysis the basic computational element of a neural network (biological or artificial) is the neuron. This analysis treats neurons as simple computational devices, transforming inputs into output. Both neuronal inputs and outputs reflect biological variables. For the remainder of this discussion, we will assume that neuronal inputs are frequencies of action potentials (neuronal "spikes") in the axons whose terminal branches synapse onto the neuron in question. Neuronal output is the frequency of action potentials in the axon of the neuron in question. A neuron computes its total input (usually treated mathematically as the sum of the products of the signal strength along each input line times the synaptic weight on that line). It then computes a new activation state based on its total input and current activation state, and a new output state based on its new activation value. The neuron's output state is transmitted as a signal strength to whatever neurons on which its axon synapses. The output state reflects systematically the neuron's new activation state.

Analysed at this level, both biological and artificial neural networks are interpreted naturally as vector-to-vector transformers. The input vector consists of values reflecting activity patterns in axons synapsing on the network's neurons from outside (e.g., from sensory transducers or other neural networks). The output vector consists of values reflecting the activity patterns generated in the network's neurons that project beyond the net (e.g., to motor effectors or other neural networks). Given that neurons' activity depends partly upon their total input, and total input depends partly on synaptic weights (e.g., parasynaptic neurotransmitter release rate, number and efficacy of postsynaptic receptors, availability of enzymes in synaptic cleft), the capacity of biological networks to change their synaptic pressures to initiate a plastic vector-to-vector transformer. In principle, a biological network with plastic synapses can come to implement any vector-to-vector transformation that its composition permits (number of input units, output units, processing layers, recurrence, cross-connections, etc.)

The anatomical organization of the cerebellum provides a clear example of a network amendable to this computational interpretation. The cerebellum is the bulbous convoluted structure dorsal to the brainstem. A variety of studies (behavioural, neuropsychological, single-cell electros), implicate this structure in motor integration and fine motor coordination. Mossy fibres (axons) from neurons outside the cerebellum synapse on cerebellular granule cells, which in turn project to parallel fibres. Activity patterns' across the collection of mossy fibres (frequency of action potentials per time unit in each fibre projecting into the cerebellum) provide values for the input vector. Parallel fibres make multiple synapses on the dendritic trees and cell bodies of cerebellular Purkinje neurons. Each Purkinje neuron "sums" its post-synaptic potentials (PSPs) and emits a train of action potentials down its axon based (partly) on its total input and previous activation state. Purkinje axons project outside the cerebellum. The network's output vectors is thus the ordered values representing the pattern of activity generated in each Purkinje axon. Changes to the efficacy of individual synapses on the parallel fibres and the Purkinje neurons alter the resulting PSPs in Purkinje axons, generating different axonal spiking frequencies. Computationally, this amounts to a different output vector to the same input activity pattern (plasticity).

This interpretation puts the useful mathematical resources of dynamical systems into the hands of computational neuroscientists. Vector spaces are an example. For example, learning can be characterized fruitfully in terms of changes in synaptic weights in the network and subsequent reduction of error in network output. (This approach goes back to Hebb, 1949, although within the vector-space interpretation that follows.) A useful representation of this account is on a synaptic weight-error space, where one dimension represents the global error in the network's output to a given task, and all other dimensions represent the weight values of individual synapses in the network. Points in this multidimensional state space represent the global performance error correlated with each possible collection of synaptic weights in the network. As the weights change with each performance (in accordance with a biologically-implemented learning algorithm), the global error of network performance continually decreases. Learning is represented as synaptic weight changes correlated with a descent along the error dimension in the space (Churchland and Sejnowski, 1992). Representations (concepts) can be portrayed as partitions in multidimensional vector spaces. An example is a neuron activation vector space. A graph of such a space contains one dimension for the activation value of each neuron in the network (or some subset). A point in this space represents one possible pattern of activity in all neurons in the network. Activity patterns generated by input vectors that the network has learned to group together will cluster around a (hyper-) point or sub volume in the activity vector space. Any input pattern sufficiently similar to this group will produce an activity pattern lying in geometrical proximity to this point or sub volume. Paul Churchland (1989) has argued that this interpretation of network activity provides a quantitative, neurally-inspired basis for prototype theories of concepts developed recently in cognitive psychology.

Using this theoretical development, has offered a novel argument for EM. According to this approach, activity vectors are the central kind of representation and vector-to-vector transformations are the central kind of computation in the brain. This contrasts sharply with the propositional representations and logical/semantic computations postulated by folk psychology. Vectorial content is unfamiliar and alien to common sense. This cross-theoretic difference is at least as great as that between oxidative and phlogiston concepts, or kinetic-corpuscular and caloric fluid heat concepts. Phlogiston and caloric fluid are two "parade" examples of kinds eliminated from our scientific ontology due to the nature of the intertheoretic relation obtaining between the theories with which they are affiliated and the theories that replaced these. The structural and dynamic differences between the folk psychological and emerging cognitive neuroscientific kinds suggest that the theories affiliated with the latter will also correct significantly the theory affiliated with the former. This is the key premise of an eliminativist argument based on predicted intertheoretic relations. And these intertheoretic contrasts are no longer just an eliminativist's goal. Computational and cognitive neuroscience has begun to deliver an alternative kinematics for cognition, one that provides no structural analogue for the propositional attitudes.

Certainly the replacement of propositional contents by vectorial alternatives implies significant correction to folk psychology. But does it justifies EM? Even though this central feature of folk-psychologically posits in the finding of no analogues in one hot theoretical development in recent cognitive and computational neuroscience, there might be other aspects of cognition that folk psychology gets right. Within neurophilosophy, concluding that a cross-theoretic identity claim is true (e.g., folk psychological state F is identical to neural state N) or that an eliminativist claim is true (there is no such thing as folk psychological state F) depends on the nature of the intertheoretic reduction obtaining between the theories affiliated with the posits in question. But the underlying account of intertheoretic reduction recognizes a spectrum of possible reductions, ranging from relatively "smooth" through "significantly revisionary" to "extremely bumpy." Might the reduction of folk psychology and a "vectorial" neurobiology occupy the middle ground between "smooth" and "bumpy" intertheoretic reductions, and hence suggest a "revisionary" conclusion? The reduction of classical equilibrium thermodynamics to statistical mechanics to microphysics provides a potential analogy. John Bickle argues on empirical grounds that such a outcome is likely. He specifies conditions on "revisionary" reductions from historical examples and suggests that these conditions are obtaining between folk psychology and cognitive neuroscience as the latter develops. In particular, folk psychology appears to have gotten right the grossly-specified functional profile of many cognitive states, especially those closely related to sensory input and behavioural output. It also appears to get right the "intentionality" of many cognitive states - the object that the state is of or about - even though cognitive neuroscience eschews its implicit linguistic explanation of this feature. Revisionary physicalism predicts significant conceptual change to folk psychological concepts, but denies total elimination of the caloric fluid-phlogiston variety.

The philosophy of science is another area where vector space interpretations of neural network activity patterns have impacted philosophy. In the Introduction to his (1989) book, Paul Churchland asserts that it will soon be impossible to do serious work in the philosophy of science without drawing on empirical work in the brain and behavioural sciences. To justify this claim, he suggests neurocomputational reformulation of key concepts from this area. At the heart is a neurocomputational account of the structure of scientific theories. Problems with the orthodox "sets-of-sentences" view have been known for more than three decades. Churchland advocates replacing the orthodox view with one inspired by the "vectorial" interpretation of neural network activity. Representations implemented in neural networks (as discussed above) compose a system that corresponds to important distinctions in the external environment, are not explicitly represented as such within the input corpus, and allow the trained network to respond to inputs in a fashion that continually reduces error. These are exactly the functions of theories. Churchland is bold in his assertion: an individual's theory-of-the-world is a specific point in that individual's error-synaptic weight vector space. It is a configuration of synaptic weights that partitions the individual's activation vector space into subdivisions that reduce future error messages to both familiar and novel inputs.

This reformulation invites an objection, however. Churchland boasts that his theory of theories is preferable to existing alternatives to the orthodox "sets-of-sentences" account - for example, the semantic view (Suppe, 1974; van Fraassen, 1980) - because his is closer to the "buzzing brains" that use theories. But as Bickle notes, neurocomputational models based on the mathematical resources described above are a long way into the realm of abstractia. Even now, they remain little more than novel (and suggestive) applications of the mathematics of quasi-linear dynamical system to simplified schemata of brain circuitries. neuro philosophers owe some account of identifications across ontological categories before the philosophy of science community will accept the claim that theories are points in high-dimensional state spaces implemented in biological neural networks. (There is an important methodological assumption lurking in this objection.

Churchlands neurocomputational reformulation of scientific and epistemological concepts build on this account of theories. He sketches "neutralized" accounts of the theory-ladenness of perception, the nature of concept unification, the virtues of theoretical simplicity, the nature of Kuhnian paradigms, the kinematics of conceptual change, the character of abduction, the nature of explanation, and even moral knowledge and epistemological normativity. Conceptual redeployment, for example, is the activation of an already-existing prototype representation - a counterpoint or region of a partition of a high-dimensional vector space in a trained neural network - a novel type of input pattern. Obviously, we can't here do justice to Churchlands various attempts at reformulation. We urge the intrigued reader to examine his suggestions in their original form. But a word about philosophical methodology is in order. Churchland is not attempting "conceptual analysis" in anything resembling its traditional philosophical sense and neither, typically, are neuro philosophers. (This is why a discussion of neuro philosophical reformulation fits with a discussion of EM.) There are philosophers who take the discipline's ideal to be a relatively simple set of necessary and sufficient conditions, expressed in non-technical natural language, governing the application of important concepts (like justice, knowledge, theory, or explanation). These analyses should square, to the extent possible, with pre-theoretical usage. Ideally, they should preserve synonymy. Other philosophers view this ideal as sterile, misguided, and perhaps deeply mistaken about the underlying structure of human knowledge. neuro philosophers tend to reside in the latter camp. Those who dislike philosophical speculation about the promise and potential of nascent science in an effort to reformulate ("reform-ulate") traditional philosophical concepts have probably already discovered that neurophilosophy is not for them. But the charge that neurocomputational reformulation of the sort Churchland attempts are "philosophically uninteresting" or "irrelevant" because they fail to provide "adequate analyses" of theory, explanation, and the like will get ignored among many contemporary philosophers, as well as their cognitive-scientific and neuroscientific friends. Before we leave the neuro philosophical applications of this theoretical development from recent cognitive/computational neuroscience, one more point of scientific detail is in order. The popularity of treating the neuron as the basic computational unit among neural modelers, as opposed to cognitive modelers, is declining rapidly. Compartmental modelling enables computational neuroscientists to mimic activity in and interactions between patches of neuronal membrane. This endorses modelers to control and manipulate a variety of subcellular factors that determine action potentials per time unit (including the topology of membrane structure in individual neurons, variations in ion channels across membrane patches, field properties of post-synaptic potentials depending on the location of the synapse on the dendrite or soma). Modelers can "custom-build" the neurons in their target circuitry without sacrificing the ability to study circuit properties of networks. For these reasons, few serious computational neuroscientists continue to work at a level that treats neurons as unstructured computational devices. But the above interpretative points still stand. With compartmental modelling, not only are simulated neural networks interpretable as vector-to-vector transformers. The neurons composing them are, too.

The Philosophy of science, and scientific epistemology are not the only area where philosophers have lately urged the relevance of neuroscientific discoveries. Kathleen Akins argues that a "traditional" view of the senses underlies the variety of sophisticated "naturalistic" programs about intentionality. Current neuroscientific understanding of the mechanisms and coding strategies implemented by sensory receptors shows that this traditional view is mistaken. The traditional view holds that sensory systems are "veridical" in at least three ways. (1) Each signal in the system correlates with a small range of properties in the external (to the body) environment. (2) The structure in the relevant relations between the external properties the receptors are sensitive to is preserved in the structure of the relations between the resulting sensory states. And (3) the sensory system reconstructively in faithfully, without fictive additions or embellishments, the external events. Using recent neurobiological discoveries about response properties of thermal receptors in the skin as an illustration, Akins shows that sensory systems are "narcissistic" rather than "veridical." All three traditional assumptions are violated. These neurobiological details and their philosophical implications open novel questions for the philosophy of perception and for the appropriate foundations for naturalistic projects about intentionality. Armed with the known neurophysiology of sensory receptors, for example, our "philosophy of perception" or of "perceptual intentionality" will no longer focus on the search for correlations between states of sensory systems and "veridically detected" external properties. This traditional philosophical (and scientific) project rests upon a mistaken "veridical" view of the senses. Neuroscientific knowledge of sensory receptor activity also shows that sensory experience does not serve the naturalist well as a "simple paradigm case" of an intentional relation between representation and world. Once again, available scientific detail shows the naivety of some traditional philosophical projects.

Focussing on the anatomy and physiology of the pain transmission system, Valerie Hardcastle (1997) urges a similar negative implication for a popular methodological assumption. Pain experiences have long been philosophers' favourite cases for analysis and theorizing about conscious experience generally. Nevertheless, every position about pain experiences has been defended recently: eliminativist, a variety of objectivists view, relational views, and subjectivist views. Why so little agreement, despite agreement that pain experience is the place to start an analysis or theory of consciousness? Hardcastle urges two answers. First, philosophers tend to be uninformed about the neuronal complexity of our pain transmission systems, and build their analyses or theories on the outcome of a single component of a multi-component system. Second, even those who understand some of the underlying neurobiology of pain tends to advocate gate-control theories. But the best existing gate-control theories are vague about the neural mechanisms of the gates. Hardcastle instead proposes a dissociable dual system of pain transmission, consisting of a pain sensory system closely analogous in its neurobiological implementation to other sensory systems, and a descending pain inhibitory system. She argues that this dual system is consistent with recent neuroscientific discoveries and accounts for all the pain phenomena that have tempted philosophers toward particular (but limited) theories of pain experience. The neurobiological uniqueness of the pain inhibitory system, contrasted with the mechanisms of other sensory modalities, renders pain processing atypical. In particular, the pain inhibitory system dissociates pains sensation from stimulation of nociceptors (pain receptors). Hardcastle concludes from the neurobiological uniqueness of pain transmission that pain experiences are atypical conscious events, and hence not a good place to start theorizing about or analysing the general type.

Developing and defending theories of content is a central topic in current philosophy of mind. A common desideratum in this debate is a theory of cognitive representation consistent with a physical or naturalistic ontology. We'll here describe a few contributions neuro philosophers have made to this literature.

When one perceives or remembers that he is out of coffee, his brain state possesses intentionality or "aboutness." The percept or memory is about one's being out of coffee, and it represents one for being out of coffee. The representational state has content. A psychosemantics seeks to explain what it is for a representational state to be about something: to provide an account of how states and events can have specific representational content. A physicalist psychosemantics seeks to do this using resources of the physical sciences exclusively. neuro philosophers have contributed to two types of physicalist psychosemantics: the Functional Role approach and the Informational approach.

The core claim of functional roles of semantics holds that a representation has its content in virtue of relations it bears to other representations. Its paradigm application is to concepts of truth-functional logic, like the conjunctive ‘and' or disjunctive ‘or.' A physical event instantiates the ‘and' function just in case it maps two true inputs onto a single true output. Thus an expression bears the relations to others that give it the semantic content of ‘and.' Proponents of functional role semantics propose similar analyses for the content of all representations (Form 1986). A physical event represents birds, for example, if it bears the right relations to events representing feathers and others representing beaks. By contrast, informational semantics associates content to a state depending upon the causal relations obtaining between the state and the object it represents. A physical state represents birds, for example, just in case an appropriate causal relation obtains between it and birds. At the heart of informational semantics is a causal account of information. Red spots on a face carry the information that one has measles because the red spots are caused by the measles virus. A common criticism of informational semantics holds that mere causal covariation is insufficient for representation, since information (in the causal sense) is by definition, always veridical while representations can misrepresent. A popular solution to this challenge invokes a teleological analysis of ‘function.' A brain state represents X by virtue of having the function of carrying information about being caused by X (Dretske 1988). These two approaches do not exhaust the popular options for a psychosemantics, but are the ones to which neuro philosophers have contributed.

Paul Churchlands allegiance to functional role semantics goes back to his earliest views about the semantics of terms in a language. In his (1979) book, he insists that the semantic identity (content) of a term derive from its place in the network of sentences of the entire language. The functional economies envisioned by early functional role semanticists were networks with nodes corresponding to the objects and properties denoted by expressions in a language. Thus one node, appropriately connected, might represent birds, another feathers, and another beaks. Activation of one of these would tend to spread to the others. As ‘connectionist' network modelling developed, alternatives arose to this one-representation-per-node ‘localist' approach. By the time Churchland provided a neuroscientific elaboration of functional role semantics for cognitive representations generally, he too had abandoned the ‘localist' interpretation. Instead, he offered a ‘state-space semantics'.

We saw in the section just above how (vector) state spaces provide a natural interpretation for activity patterns in neural networks (biological and artificial). A state-space semantics for cognitive representations is a species of functional role semantics because the individuation of a particular state depends upon the relations obtaining between it and other states. A representation is a point in an appropriate state space, and points (or sub volumes) in a space are individuated by their relations to other points (locations, geometrical proximity). Churchland illustrates a state-space semantics for neural states by appealing to sensory systems. One popular theory in sensory neuroscience of how the brain codes for sensory qualities (like Collor) are the opponent process account. Churchland describes a three-dimensional activation vector state-space in which all Collor perceivable by humans is represented as a point (or sub value). Each dimension corresponds to activity rates in one of three classes of photoreceptors present in the human retina and their efferent paths: The red-green opponent pathway, yellow-blue opponent pathway, and black-white (contrast) opponent pathway. Photons striking the retina are transduced by the receptors, producing an activity rate in each of the segregated pathways. The characterized Cellos have a triplet of activation frequency rates. Each dimension in that three-dimensional space will represent average frequency of action potentials in the axons of one class of ganglion cells projecting out of the retina. Face-to-face, the Collor perceivable by humans will be a region of that space. For example, an orange stimulus produces a relatively low level of activity in both the red-green and yellow-blue opponent pathways (x-axis and y-axis, respectively), and middle-range activity in the black-white (contrast) opponent pathways (z-axis). Pink stimuli, on the other hand, produce low activity in the red-green opponent pathway, middle-range activity in the yellow-blue opponent pathway, and high activity in the black-white (contrast) an opponent pathway. The location of each colour in the space generates a ‘colour solid.' Location on the solid and geometrical proximity between regions reflect structural similarities between the perceived colours. Human gustatory representations are points in a four-dimensional state space, with each dimension coding for activity rates generated by gustatory stimuli in each type of taste receptor (sweet, salty, sour, bitter) and their segregated efferent pathways. When implemented in a neural network with structural and hence computational resources as vast as the human brain, the state space approach to psychosemantics generates a theory of content for a huge number of cognitive states.

Jerry Fodor and Ernest LePore raise an important challenge to Churchlands psychosemantics. Location in a state space alone seems insufficient to fix a state's representational content. Churchland never explains why a point in a three-dimensional state space represents the Collor, as opposed to any other quality, object, or event that varies along three dimensions. Churchlands account achieves its explanatory power by the interpretation imposed on the dimensions. Fodor and LePore allege that Churchland never specifies how a dimension comes to represent, e.g., degree of saltiness, as opposed to yellow-blue wavelength opposition. One obvious answer appeals to the stimuli that form the ‘external' inputs to the neural network in question. Then, for example, the individuating conditions on neural representations of colours are that opponent processing neurons receive input from a specific class of photoreceptors. The latter in turn have electromagnetic radiation (of a specific portion of the visible spectrum) as their activating stimuli. However, this appeal to ‘external' stimuli as the ultimate individuating conditions for representational content makes the resulting approach a version of informational semantics. Is this approach consonant with other neurobiological details?

The neurobiological paradigm for informational semantics is the feature detector: One or more neurons that are (i) maximally responsive to a particular type of stimulus, and (ii) have the function of indicating the presence of that stimulus type. Examples of such stimulus-types for visual feature detectors include high-contrast edges, motion direction, and colours. A favourite feature detector among philosophers is the alleged fly detector in the frog. Lettvin et al. (1959) identified cells in the frog retina that responded maximally to small shapes moving across the visual field. The idea that these cells' activity functioned to detect flies rested upon knowledge of the frogs' diet. Using experimental techniques ranging from single-cell recording to sophisticated functional imaging, neuroscientists have recently discovered a host of neurons that are maximally responsive to a variety of stimuli. However, establishing condition (ii) on a feature detector is much more difficult. Even some paradigm examples have been called into question. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's (1962) Nobel Prize winning work establishing the receptive fields of neurons in striate cortices are often interpreted as revealing cells whose function is edge detection. However, Lehky and Sejnowski (1988) have challenged this interpretation. They trained an artificial neural network to distinguish the three-dimensional shape and orientation of an object from its two-dimensional shading pattern. Their network incorporates many features of visual neurophysiology. Nodes in the trained network turned out to be maximally responsive to edge contrasts, but did not appear to have the function of edge detection.

Kathleen Akins (1996) offers a different neuro philosophical challenge to informational semantics and its affiliated feature-detection view of sensory representation. We saw in the previous section how Akins argues that the physiology of thermoreceptor violates three necessary conditions on ‘veridical' representation. From this fact she draws doubts about looking for feature detecting neurons to ground a psychosemantics generally, including thought contents. Human thoughts about flies, for example, are sensitive to numerical distinctions between particular flies and the particular locations they can occupy. But the ends of frog nutrition are well served without a representational system sensitive to such ontological refinements. Whether a fly seen now is numerically identical to one seen a moment ago, need not, and perhaps cannot, figure into the frog's feature detection repertoire. Akins' critique casts doubt on whether details of sensory transduction will scale up to encompass of some adequately unified psychosemantics. It also raises new questions for human intentionality. How do we get from activity patterns in "narcissistic" sensory receptors, keyed not to "objective" environmental features but rather only to effects of the stimuli on the patch of tissue innervated, to the human ontology replete with enduring objects with stable configurations of properties and relations, types and their tokens (as the "fly-thought" example presented above reveals), and the rest? And how did the development of a stable, and rich ontology confer survival advantages to human ancestors?

Consciousness has reemerged as a topic in philosophy of mind and the cognitive and brain sciences over the past three decades. Instead of ignoring it, many physicalists now seek to explain it (Dennett, 1991). Here we focus exclusively on ways those neuroscientific discoveries have impacted philosophical debates about the nature of consciousness and its relation to physical mechanisms. Thomas Nagel argues that conscious experience is subjective, and thus permanently recalcitrant to objective scientific understanding. He invites us to ponder ‘what it is like to be a bat' and urges the intuition that no amount of physical-scientific knowledge (including neuroscientific) supplies a complete answer. Nagel's intuition pump has generated extensive philosophical discussion. At least two well-known replies make direct appeal to neurophysiology. John Biro suggests that part of the intuition pumped by Nagel, that bat experience is substantially different from human experience, presupposes systematic relations between physiology and phenomenology. Kathleen Akins (1993a) delves deeper into existing knowledge of bat physiology and reports much that is pertinent to Nagel's question. She argues that many of the questions about bat subjectivity that we still consider open hinge on questions that remain unanswered about neuroscientific details. One example of the latter is the function of various cortical activity profiles in the active bat.

More recently philosopher David Chalmers (1996) has argued that any possible brain-process account of consciousness will leave open an ‘explanatory gap' between the brain process and properties of the conscious experience. This is because no brain-process theory can answer the "hard" question: Why should that particular brain process give rise to conscious experience? We can always imagine ("conceive of") a universe populated by creatures having those brain processes but completely lacking conscious experience. A theory of consciousness requires an explanation of how and why some brain process causes consciousness replete with all the features we commonly experience. The fact that the hard question remains unanswered shows that we will probably never get a complete explanation of consciousness at the level of neural mechanisms. Paul and Patricia Churchland have recently offered the following diagnosis and reply. Chalmers offer a conceptual argument, based on our ability to imagine creatures possessing brains like ours but wholly lacking in conscious experience. But the more one learns about how the brain produces conscious experience-and literature is beginning to emerge (e.g., Gazzaniga, 1995) - the harder it becomes to imagine a universe consisting of creatures with brain processes like ours but lacking consciousness. This is not just to bare assertions. The Churchlands appeal to some neurobiological detail. For example, Paul Churchland (1995) develops a neuroscientific account of consciousness based on recurrent connections between thalamic nuclei (particularly "diffusely projecting" nuclei like the intralaminar nuclei) and the cortex. Churchland argues that the thalamocortical recurrency accounts for the selective features of consciousness, for the effects of short-term memory on conscious experience, for vivid dreaming during REM. (rapid-eye movement) sleep, and other "core" features of conscious experience. In other words, the Churchlands are claiming that when one learns about activity patterns in these recurrent circuits, one can't "imagine" or "conceive of" this activity occurring without these core features of conscious experience. (Other than just mouthing the words, "I am now imagining activity in these circuits without selective attention/the effects of short-term memory/vivid dreaming . . . ")

A second focus of sceptical arguments about a complete neuroscientific explanation of consciousness is sensory qualia: the introspectable qualitative aspects of sensory experience, the features by which subjects discern similarities and differences among their experiences. The colours of visual sensations are a philosopher's favourite example. One famous puzzle about colour qualia is the alleged conceivability of spectral inversions. Many philosophers claim that it is conceptually possible (if perhaps physically impossible) for two humans not to differ neurophysiological, while the Collor that fire engines and tomatoes appear to have to one subject is the Collor that grass and frogs appear to have to the other (and vice versa). A large amount of neuroscientifically-informed philosophy has addressed this question. A related area where neurophilosophical considerations have emerged concerns the metaphysics of colours themselves (rather than Collor experiences). A longstanding philosophical dispute is whether colours are objective property's Existing external to perceiver or rather identifiable as or dependent upon minds or nervous systems. Some recent work on this problem begins with characteristics of Collor experiences: For example that Collor similarity judgments produce Collor orderings that align on a circle. With this resource, one can seek mappings of phenomenology onto environmental or physiological regularities. Identifying colours with particular frequencies of electromagnetic radiation does not preserve the structure of the hue circle, whereas identifying colours with activity in opponent processing neurons does. Such a tidbit is not decisive for the Collor objectivist-subjectivist debate, but it does convey the type of neurophilosophical work being done on traditional metaphysical issues beyond the philosophy of mind.

We saw in the discussion of Hardcastle (1997) two sections above that Neurophilosophers have entered disputes about the nature and methodological import of pain experiences. Two decades earlier, Dan Dennett (1978) took up the question of whether it is possible to build a computer that feels pain. He compares and notes pressure between neurophysiological discoveries and common sense intuitions about pain experience. He suspects that the incommensurability between scientific and common sense views is due to incoherence in the latter. His attitude is wait-and-see. But foreshadowing Churchland's reply to Chalmers, Dennett favours scientific investigations over conceivability-based philosophical arguments.

Neurological deficits have attracted philosophical interest. For thirty years philosophers have found implications for the unity of the self in experiments with commissurotomy patients. In carefully controlled experiments, commissurotomy patients display two dissociable seats of consciousness. Patricia Churchland scouts philosophical implications of a variety of neurological deficits. One deficit is blind-sight. Some patients with lesions to primary visual cortex report being unable to see items in regions of their visual fields, yet perform far better than chance in forced guess trials about stimuli in those regions. A variety of scientific and philosophical interpretations have been offered. Ned Form (1988) worries that many of these conflate distinct notions of consciousness. He labels these notions ‘phenomenal consciousness' (‘P-consciousness') and ‘access consciousness' (‘A-consciousness'). The former is that which, ‘what it is like-ness of experience. The latter is the availability of representational content to self-initiated action and speech. Form argues that P-consciousness is not always representational whereas A-consciousness is. Dennett and Michael Tye are sceptical of non-representational analyses of consciousness in general. They provide accounts of blind-sight that do not depend on Form's distinction.

Many other topics are worth neurophilosophical pursuit. We mentioned commissurotomy and the unity of consciousness and the self, which continues to generate discussion. Qualia beyond those of Collor and pain have begun to attract neurophilosophical attention has self-consciousness. The first issues to arise in the ‘philosophy of neuroscience' (before there was a recognized area) was the localization of cognitive functions to specific neural regions. Although the ‘localization' approach had dubious origins in the phrenology of Gall and Spurzheim, and was challenged severely by Flourens throughout the early nineteenth century, it reemerged in the study of aphasia by Bouillaud, Auburtin, Broca, and Wernicke. These neurologists made careful studies (where possible) of linguistic deficits in their aphasic patients followed by brain autopsies postmortem. Broca's initial study of twenty-two patients in the mid-nineteenth century confirmed that damage to the left cortical hemisphere was predominant, and that damage to the second and third frontal convolutions was necessary to produce speech production deficits. Although the anatomical coordinates' Broca postulates for the ‘speech production centres do not correlate exactly with damage producing production deficits, both are that in this area of frontal cortex and speech production deficits still bear his name (‘Broca's area' and ‘Broca's aphasia'). Less than two decades later Carl Wernicke published evidence for a second language centre. This area is anatomically distinct from Broca's area, and damage to it produced a very different set of aphasic symptoms. The cortical area that still bears his name (‘Wernicke's area') is located around the first and second convolutions in temporal cortex, and the aphasia that bears his name (‘Wernicke's aphasia') involves deficits in language comprehension. Wernicke's method, like Broca's, was based on lesion studies: a careful evaluation of the behavioural deficits followed by post mortem examination to find the sites of tissue damage and atrophy. Lesion studies suggesting more precise localization of specific linguistic functions remain a cornerstone to this day in aphasic research

Lesion studies have also produced evidence for the localization of other cognitive functions: for example, sensory processing and certain types of learning and memory. However, localization arguments for these other functions invariably include studies using animal models. With an animal model, one can perform careful behavioural measures in highly controlled settings, then ablate specific areas of neural tissue (or use a variety of other techniques to Form or enhance activity in these areas) and remeasure performance on the same behavioural tests. But since we lack an animal model for (human) language production and comprehension, this additional evidence isn't available to the neurologist or neurolinguist. This fact makes the study of language a paradigm case for evaluating the logic of the lesion/deficit method of inferring functional localization. Philosopher Barbara Von Eckardt (1978) attempts to make explicit the steps of reasoning involved in this common and historically important method. Her analysis begins with Robert Cummins' early analysis of functional explanation, but she extends it into a notion of structurally adequate functional analysis. These analyses break down a complex capacity C into its constituent capacity's c1, c2, . . . cn, where the constituent capacities are consistent with the underlying structural details of the system. For example, human speech production (complex capacity C) results from formulating a speech intention, then selecting appropriate linguistic representations to capture the content of the speech intention, then formulating the motor commands to produce the appropriate sounds, then communicating these motor commands to the appropriate motor pathways (constituent capacity's c1, c2, . . . , cn). A functional-localization hypothesis has the form: Brain structure S in an organism (type) O has constituent capacity ci, where ci is a function of some part of O. An example, Brains Broca's area (S) in humans (O) formulates motor commands to produce the appropriate sounds (one of the constituent capacities ci). Such hypotheses specify aspects of the structural realization of a functional-component model. They are part of the theory of the neural realization of the functional model.

Armed with these characterizations, Von Eckardt argues that inference to a functional-localization hypothesis proceeds in two steps. First, a functional deficit in a patient is hypothesized based on the abnormal behaviour the patient exhibits. Second, localization of function in normal brains is inferred on the basis of the functional deficit hypothesis plus the evidence about the site of brain damage. The structurally-adequate functional analysis of the capacity connects the pathological behaviour to the hypothesized functional deficit. This connection suggests four adequacy conditions on a functional deficit hypothesis. First, the pathological behaviour P (e.g., the speech deficits characteristic of Broca's aphasia) must result from failing to exercise some complex capacity C (human speech production). Second, there must be a structurally-adequate functional analysis of how people exercise capacity C that involves some constituent capacity ci (formulating motor commands to produce the appropriate sounds). Third, the operation of the steps described by the structurally-adequate functional analysis minus the operation of the component performing ci (Broca's area) must result in pathological behaviour P. Fourth, there must not be a better available explanation for why the patient does P. Arguments to a functional deficit hypothesis on the basis of pathological behaviour is thus an instance of argument to the best available explanation. When postulating a deficit in a normal functional component provides the best available explanation of the pathological data, we are justified in drawing the inference.

Von Eckardt applies this analysis to a neurological case study involving a controversial reinterpretation of agnosia. Her philosophical explication of this important neurological method reveals that most challenges to localization arguments of whether to argue only against the localization of a particular type of functional capacity or against generalizing from localization of function in one individual to all normal individuals. (She presents examples of each from the neurological literature.) Such challenges do not impugn the validity of standard arguments for functional localization from deficits. It does not follow that such arguments are unproblematic. But they face difficult factual and methodological problems, not logical ones. Furthermore, the analysis of these arguments as involving a type of functional analysis and inference to the best available explanation carries an important implication for the biological study of cognitive function. Functional analyses require functional theories, and structurally adequate functional analyses require checks imposed by the lower level sciences investigating the underlying physical mechanisms. Arguments to best available explanation are often hampered by a lack of theoretical imagination: the available explanations are often severely limited. We must seek theoretical inspiration from any level of theory and explanation. Hence making explicit the ‘logic' of this common and historically important form of neurological explanation reveals the necessity of joint participation from all scientific levels, from cognitive psychology down to molecular neuroscience. Von Eckardt anticipated what came to be heralded as the ‘co-evolutionary research methodology,' which remains a centerpiece of neurophilosophy to the present day.

Over the last two decades, evidence for localization of cognitive function has come increasingly from a new source: the development and refinement of neuroimaging techniques. The form of localization-of-function argument appears not to have changed from that employing lesion studies (as analysed by Von Eckardt). Instead, these imaging technologies resolve some of the methodological problems that plage lesion studies. For example, researchers do not need to wait until the patient dies, and in the meantime probably acquires additional brain damage, to find the lesion sites. Two functional imaging techniques are prominent: Positron emission tomography, or PET, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. Although these measure different biological markers of functional activity, both now have a resolution down to around 1mm. As these techniques increase spatial and temporal resolution of functional markers and continue to be used with sophisticated behavioural methodologies, the possibility of localizing specific psychological functions to increasingly specific neural regions continues to grow

What we now know about the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neural conductance and transmission is spectacular. The same evaluation holds for all levels of explanation and theory about the mind/brain: maps, networks, systems, and behaviour. This is a natural outcome of increasing scientific specialization. We develop the technology, the experimental techniques, and the theoretical frameworks within specific disciplines to push forward our understanding. Still, a crucial aspect of the total picture gets neglected: the relationship between the levels, the ‘glue' that binds knowledge of neuron activity to subcellular and molecular mechanisms, network activity patterns to the activity of and connectivity between single neurons, and behaviour to network activity. This problem is especially glaring when we focus on the relationship between ‘cognitivist' psychological theories, postulating information-bearing representations and processes operating over their contents, and the activity patterns in networks of neurons. Co-evolution between explanatory levels still seems more like a distant dream rather than an operative methodology.

It is here that some neuroscientists appeal to ‘computational' methods. If we examine the way that computational models function in more developed sciences (like physics), we find the resources of dynamical systems constantly employed. Global effects (such as large-scale meteorological patterns) are explained in terms of the interaction of ‘local' lower-level physical phenomena, but only by dynamical, nonlinear, and often chaotic sequences and combinations. Addressing the interlocking levels of theory and explanation in the mind/brain using computational resources that have worked to bridge levels in more mature sciences might yield comparable results. This methodology is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on resources and researchers from a variety of levels, including higher levels like experimental psychology, ‘program-writing' and ‘connectionist' artificial intelligence, and philosophy of science.

However, the use of computational methods in neuroscience is not new. Hodgkin, Huxley, and Katz incorporated values of voltage-dependent potassium conductance they had measured experimentally in the squid giant axon into an equation from physics describing the time evolution of a first-order kinetic process. This equation enabled them to calculate best-fit curves for modelled conductance versus time data that reproduced the S-shaped (sigmoidal) function suggested by their experimental data. Using equations borrowed from physics, Rall (1959) developed the cable model of dendrites. This theory provided an account of how the various inputs from across the dendritic tree interact temporally and spatially to determine the input-output properties of single neurons. It remains influential today, and has been incorporated into the genesis software for programming neurally realistic networks. More recently, David Sparks and his colleagues have shown that a vector-averaging model of activity in neurons of superior colliculi correctly predicts experimental results about the amplitude and direction of saccadic eye movements. Working with a more sophisticated mathematical model, Apostolos Georgopoulos and his colleagues have predicted direction and amplitude of hand and arm movements based on averaged activity of 224 cells in motor cortices. Their predictions have borne out under a variety of experimental tests. We mention these particular studies only because we are familiar with them. We could multiply examples of the fruitful interaction of computational and experimental methods in neuroscience easily by one-hundred-fold. Many of these extend back before ‘computational neuroscience' was a recognized research endeavour.

We've already seen one example, the vector transformation account, of neural representation and computation, under active development in cognitive neuroscience. Other approaches using ‘cognitivist' resources are also being pursued. Many of these projects draw upon ‘cognitivist' characterizations of the phenomena to be explained. Many exploit ‘cognitivist' experimental techniques and methodologies. Some even attempt to derive ‘cognitivist' explanations from cell-biological processes (e.g., Hawkins and Kandel 1984). As Stephen Kosslyn puts it, cognitive neuroscientists employ the ‘information processing' view of the mind characteristic of cognitivism without trying to separate it from theories of brain mechanisms. Such an endeavour calls for an interdisciplinary community willing to communicate the relevant portions of the mountain of detail gathered in individual disciplines with interested nonspecialists: not just people willing to confer with those working at related levels, but researchers trained in the methods and factual details of a variety of levels. This is a daunting requirement, but it does offer some hope for philosophers wishing to contribute to future neuroscience. Thinkers trained in both the ‘synoptic vision' afforded by philosophy and the factual and experimental basis of genuine graduate-level science would be ideally equipped for this task. Recognition of this potential niche has been slow among graduate programs in philosophy, but there is some hope that a few programs are taking steps to fill it.

In the final analysis there will be philosophers unprepared to accept that, if a given cognitive capacity is psychologically real, then there must be an explanation of how it is possible for an individual in the course of human development to acquire that cognitive capacity, or anything like it, can have a role to play in philosophical accounts of concepts and conceptual abilities. The most obvious basis for such a view would be a Frégean distrust of "psychology" that leads to a rigid division of labour between philosophy and psychology. The operative thought is that the task of a philosophical theory of concepts is to explain what a given concept is or what a given conceptual ability consist in. This, it is frequently maintained, is something that can be done in complete independence of explaining how such a concept or ability might be acquired. The underlying distinction is one between philosophical questions centring around concept possession and psychological questions centring around concept possibilities for an individual to acquire that ability, then it cannot be psychologically real. Nevertheless, this distinction is, however, strictly one does adhere to the distinction, it provides no support for a rejection of any given cognitive capacity for which is psychologically real. The neo-Frégean distinction is directly against the view that facts about how concepts are acquired have a role to play in explaining and individualizing concepts. But this view does not have to be disputed by a supporter as such, nonetheless, all that the supporter is to commit is that the principle that no satisfactory account of what a concept is should make it impossible to provide explanation of how that concept can be acquired. That is, that this principle has nothing to say about the further question of whether the psychological explanation has a role to play in a constitutive explanation of the concept, and hence is not in conflict with the neo-Frégean distinction.

A full account of the structure of consciousness, will need to illustrate those higher, conceptual forms of consciousness to which little attention on such an account will take and about how it might emerge from given points of value, is the thought that an explanation of everything that is distinctive about consciousness will emerge out of an account of what it is for a subject to be capable of thinking about himself. But, to a proper understanding of the complex phenomenon of consciousness. There are no facts about linguistic mastery that will determine or explain what might be termed the cognitive dynamics that are individual processes that have found their way forward for a theory of consciousness, it sees, to chart the characteristic features individualizing the various distinct conceptual forms of consciousness in a way that will provide a taxonomy of unconsciousness and they, to show how these manifest the characterlogical functions a can to determine at the level of content. What is hoped is now clear is that these forms of higher forms of consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of non-conceptual representations of thought, which can only expose and clarify their conviction that these forms of conscious thought hold the key, not just to an eventful account of how mastery of the conscious paradigms, but to a proper understanding of the plexuity of self-consciousness and/or the overall conjecture of consciousness that stands alone as to an everlasting vanquishment into the ever unchangeless state of unconsciousness, and its abysses are only held by incestuousness.

The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes's merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.

Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes' compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternities' are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will' of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.

The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism', which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter. In that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason, causally by the traditional Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.

The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau's attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Goethe and Friedrich Schelling proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion', as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Schelling, in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and ‘undivided wholeness'.

The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the ‘incommunicable powers' of the ‘immortal sea' empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.

The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.

Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics' that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.

More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual

A particular yet peculiar presence is awaiting to the future and has framed its proposed new understanding of relationships between mind and world, within the larger context of the history of mathematical physics, the origin and extensions of the classical view of the fundamentals of scientific knowledge, and the various ways that physicists have attempted to prevent previous challenges to the efficacy of classical epistemology.

There is no basis in contemporary physics or biology for believing in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have moderately described as ‘the disease of the Western mind'. The dialectic orchestrations will serve as background for understanding a new relationship between parts and wholes in physics, with a similar view of that relationship that has emerged in the co-called ‘new biology' and in recent studies of the evolution of a scientific understanding to a more conceptualized representation of ideas, and includes its allied ‘content'.

Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Plotonic and Whitehead connect upon the issue of the creation of the sensible world may by looking at actual entities as aspects of nature's contemplation. The contemplation of nature is obviously an immensely intricate affair, involving a myriad of possibilities, therefore one can look at actual entities as, in some sense, the basic elements of a vast and expansive process.

We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas with the aid of precise deduction, as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality out in three-dimensional co-ordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica" in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modeling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.

The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes's merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.

Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes' compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that "Liberty, Equality, Fraternities" are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will' of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.

The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism', which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter. In that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason, causally by the traditional Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.

The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau's attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Goethe and Friedrich Schelling proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion', as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Schelling, in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and ‘undivided wholeness'.

The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the "incommunicable powers" of the "immortal sea" empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.

The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.

Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics' that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.

More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.

The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will', did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence' of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will' and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth'. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche's earlier versions to the ‘will to truth', disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will'.

In Nietzsche's view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he deuced that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language'. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space' where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature' and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will'.

Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists' ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favors reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.

Nietzsche's emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.

The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.

Nietzsche's emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.

The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.

The mechanistic paradigm of the late n nineteenth century was the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach's critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, "relativistic" notions.

Two theories unveiled and unfolding as their phenomenal yield held by Albert Einstein, attributively appreciated that the special theory of relativity ( 1905 ) and, also the tangling and calculably arranging affordance, as drawn upon the gratifying nature whom by encouraging the finding resolutions upon which the realms of its secreted reservoir in continuous phenomenons, in additional the continuatives as afforded by the efforts by the imagination were made discretely available to any the unsurmountable achievements, as remain obtainably afforded through the excavations underlying the artifactual circumstances that govern all principle ‘forms' or ‘types' in the involving evolutionary principles of the general theory of relativity ( 1915 ). Where the special theory gives a unified account of the laws of mechanics and of electromagnetism, including optics. Before 1905 the purely relative nature of uniform motion had in part been recognized in mechanics, although Newton had considered time to be absolute and postulated absolute space.

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to a higher level of complexity, and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a singular point of significance as a whole that evinces of the ‘progressive principal order' of complementary relations its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain, like all physical phenomena can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.

But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe be a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, If one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific descriptions of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, which can be dismissed, undermined or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.

Uncertain issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning ‘scepticism'. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best methods in some area seems to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the result that questions of truth become undefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.

As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issue undecidable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension or some katalepsis). As a result the sceptics concludes eposhé, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief.

Fixed by its will for and of itself, the mere mitigated scepticism which accepts everyday or commonsense belief, is that, not s the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit. Nonetheless, it is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason to give us much more. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus. Despite the fact that the phrase ‘Cartesian scepticism' is sometimes used. Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the ‘method of doubt' uses a sceptical scenario in order to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of ‘clear and distinct' ideas, not far removed from the phantasiá kataleptikê of the Stoics.

For many sceptics have traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, artistry. And, of course, they claim that certain knowledge is not possible. In part, nonetheless, of the principle that every effect it's a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true it is not necessary for an effect to be predictable as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, in order to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty. Except for alleged cases of things that are evident for one just by being true. It has often been thought, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well as being true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by ‘deduction' or ‘induction', there will be criteria specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principle specifying the sort of considerations that will make such standard in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree.

Besides, there is another view - the absolute globular view that we do not have any knowledge whatsoever. In whatever manner,

it is doubtful that any philosopher seriously entertains of an absolute scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonist sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any non-evident standards that no such hesitancy about asserting to ‘the evident', the non-evident is any belief that requires evidences because it is warranted.

René Descartes (1596-1650), in his sceptical guise, never doubted the content of his own ideas. Its challenging logic, inasmuch as of whether they ‘corresponded' to anything beyond ideas.

All the same, Pyrrhonism and Cartesian form of a virtual globular scepticism, in having been held and defended, that of assuming that knowledge is some form of true, sufficiently warranted belief, it is the warranted condition that provides the truth or belief conditions, in that of providing the grist for the sceptic's mill about. The Pyrrhonist will suggest that no non-evident, empirically deferring the sufficiency of giving in but warranted. Whereas, a Cartesian sceptic will agree that no empirical standards about anything other than one's own mind and its contents is sufficiently warranted, because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it. Whereby, the essential difference between the two views concerns the stringency of the requirements for a belief being sufficiently warranted to take account of as knowledge.

A Cartesian requires certainty, but a Pyrrhonist merely requires that the standards in case are more warranted then its negation.

Cartesian scepticism was unduly an in fluence with which Descartes agues for scepticism, than his reply holds, in that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical standards, in that of anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason is roughly in the position that there is a legitimate doubt about all such standards, only because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some sense, for which it is radically different from the objects which we normally think, in whatever manner they affect our senses. Therefrom, if the Pyrrhonist are the agnostics, the Cartesian sceptic is the atheist.

Because the Pyrrhonist require much less of a belief in order for it to be confirmed as knowledge than do the Cartesian, the argument for Pyrrhonism are much more difficult to construct. A Pyrrhonist must show that there is no better set of reasons for believing to any standards, of which are in case that any knowledge learnt of the mind is understood by some of its forms, that has to require certainty.

The underlying latencies that are given among the many derivative contributions as awaiting their presence to the future, that of specifying to the theory of knowledge, is, but, nonetheless, the possibility to identify a set of shared doctrines, however, identity to discern two broad styles of instances to discern, in like manner, these two styles of pragmatism, clarify the innovation that a Cartesian approval is fundamentally flawed, nonetheless, of responding very differently but not fordone.

Repudiating the requirements of absolute certainty or knowledge, insisting on the connection of knowledge with activity, as, too, of pragmatism of a reformist distributing knowledge upon the legitimacy of traditional questions about the truth-unconductiveness of our cognitive practices, and sustain a conception of truth objectives, enough to give those questions that undergo of a gathering in their own purposive latencies, yet we are given to the spoken word for which a dialectic awareness sparks the fame from the ambers of fire.

Pragmatism of a determinant revolution, by contrast, relinquishing the objectivity of youth, acknowledges no legitimate epistemological questions over and above those that are naturally kindred of our current cognitive conviction.

It seems clear that certainty is a property that can be assembled to either a person or a belief. We can say that a person, ‘S' is certain, or we can say that its descendable alinement are aligned as of ‘p', is certain. The two uses can be connected by saying that ‘S' has the right to be certain just in case the value of ‘p' is sufficiently verified.

In defining certainty, it is crucial to note that the term has both an absolute and relative sense. More or less, we take a proposition to be certain when we have no doubt about its truth.. We may do this in error or unreasonably, but objectively a proposition is certain when such absence of doubt is justifiable. The sceptical tradition in philosophy denies that objective certainty is often possible, or ever possible, either for any proposition at all, or for any proposition at all, or for any proposition from some suspect family (ethics, theory, memory, empirical judgement etc.) a major sceptical weapon is the possibility of upsetting events that Can cast doubt back onto what were hitherto taken to be certainties. Others include reminders of the divergence of human opinion, and the fallible source of our confidence. Fundamentalist approaches to knowledge look for a basis of certainty, upon which the structure of our system is built. Others reject the metaphor, looking for mutual support and coherence, without foundation.

However, in moral theory, the view that there are inviolable moral standards or absolute variable human desires or policies or prescriptions.

In spite of the notorious difficulty of reading Kantian ethics, a hypothetical imperative embeds a command which is in place only given some antecedent desire or project: ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet'. The injunction to stay quiet only applies to those with the antecedent desire or inclination. If one has no desire to look wise the injunction cannot be so avoided: It is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination. It could be represented as, for example, ‘tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)'. The distinction is not always signalled by presence or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, don't become a bartender' may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in case of those with the stated desire.

In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed five forms of the categorical imperative: (1) the formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same times will that it should become universal law: (2) the formula of the law of nature: ‘act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature': (3) the formula of the end-in-itself: ‘act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end': (4) the formula of autonomy, or considering ‘the will of every rational being as a will which makes universal law': (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for the systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.

Even so, a proposition that is not a conditional ‘p'. Moreover, the affirmative and negative, modern opinion is wary of this distinction, since what appears categorical may vary notation. Apparently, categorical propositions may also turn out to be disguised conditionals: ‘X' is intelligent (categorical?) = if ‘X' is given a range of tasks she performs them better than many people (conditional?) The problem. Nonetheless, is not merely one of classification, since deep metaphysical questions arise when facts that seem to be categorical and therefore solid, come to seem by contrast conditional, or purely hypothetical or potential.

A limited area of knowledge or endeavour to which pursuits, activities and interests are a central representation held to a concept of physical theory. In this way, a field is defined by the distribution of a physical quantity, such as temperature, mass density, or potential energy y, at different points in space. In the particularly important example of force fields, such ad gravitational, electrical, and magnetic fields, the field value at a point is the force which a test particle would experience if it were located at that point. The philosophical problem is whether a force field is to be thought of as purely potential, so the presence of a field merely describes the propensity of masses to move relative to each other, or whether it should be thought of in terms of the physically real modifications of a medium, whose properties result in such powers that is, are force fields purely potential, fully characterized by dispositional statements or conditionals, or are they categorical or actual? The former option seems to require within ungrounded dispositions, or regions of space hat differ only in what happens if an object is placed there. The law-like shape of these dispositions, apparent for example in the curved lines of force of the magnetic field, may then seem quite inexplicable. To atomists, such as Newton it would represent a return to Aristotelian entelechies, or quasi-psychological affinities between things, which are responsible for their motions. The latter option requires understanding of how forces of attraction and repulsion can be ‘grounded' in the properties of the medium.

The basic idea of a field is arguably present in Leibniz, who was certainly hostile to Newtonian atomism. Although his equal hostility to ‘action at a distance' muddies the water. It is usually credited to the Jesuit mathematician and scientist Joseph Boscovich (1711-87) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), both of whom influenced the scientist Faraday, with whose work the physical notion became established. In his paper ‘On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force' (1852). Faraday was to suggest several criteria for assessing the physical reality of lines of force, such as whether they are affected by an intervening material medium, whether the motion depends on the nature of what is placed at the receiving end. As far as electromagnetic fields go, Faraday himself inclined to the view that the mathematical similarity between heat flow, currents, and electro-magnetic lines of force was evidence for the physical reality of the intervening medium.

Once, again, our mentioning recognition for which its case value, whereby its view is especially associated the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), that the truth of a statement can be defined in terms of a ‘utility' of accepting it. Communicated, so much as a dispiriting position for which its place of valuation may be viewed as an objection. Since there are things that are false, as it may be useful to accept, and conversely there are things that are true and that it may be damaging to accept. Nevertheless, there are deep connections between the idea that a representation system is accorded, and the likely success of the projects in progressive formality, by its possession. The evolution of a system of representation either perceptual or linguistic, seems bounded to connect successes with everything adapting or with utility in the modest sense. The Wittgenstein doctrine stipulates the meaning of use that upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion and the idea that belief in the truth on one hand, the action of the other. One way of binding with cement, wherefore the connection is found in the idea that natural selection becomes much as much in adapting us to the cognitive creatures, because beliefs have effects, they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant's doctrine, and continues to play an influencing role in the theory of meaning and truth.

James, (1842-1910), although with characteristic generosity exaggerated in his debt to Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), he charted that the method of doubt encouraged people to pretend to doubt what they did not doubt in their hearts, and criticize its individualists insistence, that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individuals personalized consciousness.

From his earliest writings, James understood cognitive processes in teleological terms. Thought, he held, assists us in the satisfactory interests. His will to Believe doctrine, the view that we are sometimes justified in believing beyond the evidential relics upon the notion that a belief's benefits are relevant to its justification. His pragmatic method of analysing philosophical problems, for which requires that we find the meaning of terms by examining their application to objects in experimental situations, similarly reflects the teleological approach in its attention to consequences.

Such an approach, however, set's James' theory of meaning apart from verification, dismissive of metaphysics. Unlike the verificationalist, who takes cognitive meaning to be a matter only of consequences in sensory experience. James' took pragmatic meaning to include emotional and matter responses. Moreover, his ,metaphysical standard of value, not a way of dismissing them as meaningless. It should also be noted that in a greater extent, circumspective moments James did not hold that even his broad set of consequences were exhaustive of a terms meaning. ‘Theism', for example, he took to have antecedent, definitional meaning, in addition to its varying degree of importance and chance upon an important pragmatic meaning.

James' theory of truth reflects upon his teleological conception of cognition, by considering a true belief to be one which is compatible with our existing system of beliefs, and leads us to satisfactory interaction with the world.

However, Peirce's famous pragmatist principle is a rule of logic employed in clarifying our concepts and ideas. Consider the claim the liquid in a flask is an acid, if, we believe this, we except that it would turn red: We except an action of ours to have certain experimental results. The pragmatic principle holds that listing the conditional expectations of this kind, in that we associate such immediacy with applications of a conceptual representation that provides a complete and orderly sets clarification of the concept. This is relevant ti the logic of abduction: Clarificationists using the pragmatic principle provides all the information about the content of a hypothesis that is relevantly to decide whether it is worth testing.

To a greater extent, and most importantly, is the famed apprehension of the pragmatic principle, in so that, Pierces's account of reality: When we take something to be rea, that by this single case, we think it is ‘fated to be agreed upon by all who investigate' the matter to which it stand, in other words, if I believe that it is really the case that ‘P', then I except that if anyone were to inquire depthfully into the finding its measure into whether ‘p', they would arrive at the belief that ‘p'. It is not part of the theory that the experimental consequences of our actions should be specified by a warranted empiricist vocabulary - Peirce insisted that perceptual theories are abounding in latency. Even so, nor is it his view that the collected conditionals do or not clarify a concept as all analytic. In addition, in later writings, he argues that the pragmatic principle could only be made plausible to someone who accepted its metaphysical realism: It requires that ‘would-bees' are objective and, of course, real.

If realism itself can be given a fairly quick clarification, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of supposition, for they seem legendary. Other opponents deny that the entitles posited by the relevant discourse that exist or at least exists: The standard example is ‘idealism', that reality id somehow mind-curative or mind-co-ordinated - that real object comprising the ‘external world' are not independently of eloping minds, but only exist as in some way correlative to the mental operations. The doctrine assembled of ‘idealism' enters on the conceptual note that reality as we understand this as meaningful and reflects the working of mindful purposes. And it construes this as meaning that the inquiring mind itself makes of a formative constellation and not of any mere understanding of the nature of the ‘real' bit even the resulting charger we attribute to it.

Wherefore, the term ids most straightforwardly used when qualifying another linguistic form of grammatik: a real ‘x' may be contrasted with a fake, a failed ‘x', a near ‘x', and so on. To trat something as real, without qualification, is to suppose it to be part of the actualized world. To reify something is to suppose that we have committed by some indoctrinated treatise, as that of a theory. The central error in thinking of reality and the totality of existence is to think of the ‘unreal' as a separate domain of things, perhaps, unfairly to that of the benefits of existence.

Such that non-existence of all things, as the product of logical confusion of treating the term ‘nothing' as itself a referring expression instead of a ‘quantifier'. (Stating informally as a quantifier is an expression that reports of a quantity of times that a predicate is satisfied in some class of things, i.e., in a domain.) This confusion leads the unsuspecting to think that a sentence such as ‘Nothing is all around us' talks of a special kind of ting that is all around us, when in fact it merely denies that the predicate ‘is all around us' has appreciations. The feelings that lad some philosophers and theologians, notably Heidegger, to talk of the experience of Nothing, is not properly the experience of nothing, but rather the failure of a hope or expectations that there would be something of some kind at some point. This may arise in quite everyday cases, as when one finds that the article of functions one expected to see as usual, in the corner has disappeared. The difference between ‘existentialist'' and ‘analytic philosophy', on the point of what, whereas the former is afraid of nothing, and the latter thinks that there is nothing to be afraid of.

A rather different set of concerns arise when actions are specified in terms of doing nothing, saying nothing may be an admission of guilt, and doing nothing in some circumstances may be tantamount to murder. Still, other substitutional problems arise over conceptualizing empty space and time.

Whereas, the standard opposition between those who affirm and those who deny, the real existence of some kind of thing or some kind of fact or state of affairs. Almost any area of discourse may be the focus of tis dispute: The external world, the past and future, other minds, mathematical objects, possibilities, universals, moral or aesthetic properties are examples. There be to one influential suggestion, as associated with the British philosopher of logic and language, and the most determinative of philosophers centres round Anthony Dummett (1925), to which is borrowed from the ‘intuitionistic' critique of classical mathematics, and suggested that the unrestricted use of the ‘principle of bivalence' is the trademark of ‘realism'. However, this ha to overcome counter-examples both ways: Although Aquinas wads a moral ‘realist', he held that moral really was not sufficiently structured to make true or false every moral claim. Unlike Kant who believed that he could use the law of bivalence happily in mathematics, precisely because it wad only our own construction. Realism can itself be subdivided: Kant, for example, combines empirical realism (within the phenomenal world the realist says the right things - surrounding objects really exist and independent of us and our mental stares) with transcendental idealism (the phenomenal world asa whole reflects the structures imposed on it by the activity of our minds as they render it intelligible to us). In modern philosophy the orthodox oppositions to realism has been from philosopher such as Goodman, who, impressed by the extent to which we perceive the world through conceptual and linguistic lenses of our own making.

Assigned to the modern treatment of existence in the theory of ‘quantification' is sometimes put by saying that existence is not a predicate. The idea is that the existential quantifies itself ads an operator on a predicate, indicating that the property it expresses has instances. Existence is therefore treated as a second-order property, or a property of properties. It is fitting to say, that in this it is like number, for when we say that these things of a kind, we do not describe the thing (ad we would if we said there are red things of the kind), but instead attribute a property to the kind itself. The parallelled numbers are exploited by the German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics Gottlob Frége in the dictum that affirmation of existence is merely denied of the number nought. A problem, nevertheless, proves accountable for its crated by sentences like ‘This exists', where some particular thing is undirected, such that a sentence seems to express a contingent truth (for this insight has not existed), yet no other predicate is involved. ‘This exists' is, therefore unlike ‘Tamed tigers exist', where a property is said to have an instance, for the word ‘this' and does not locate a property, but only an individual.

Possible worlds seem able to differ from each other purely in the presence or absence of individuals, and not merely in th distribution of exemplification of properties.

The philosophical ponderance over which to set upon the unreal, as belonging to the domain of Being. Nonetheless, there is little for us that can be said with the philosopher's study. So it is not apparent that there can be such a subject as Being by itself. Nevertheless, the concept had a central place in philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger. The essential question of ‘why is there something and not of nothing'? Prompting over logical reflection on what it is for a universal to have an instance, nd as long history of attempts to explain contingent existence, by which id to reference and a necessary ground.

In the transition, ever since Plato, this ground becomes a self-sufficient, perfect, unchanging, and external something, identified with the Good or God, but whose relation with the everyday world remains obscure. The celebrated argument for the existence of God first propounded by Anselm in his Proslogin. The argument by defining God as ‘something than which nothing greater can be conceived'. God then exists in the understanding since we understand this concept. However, if He only existed in the understanding something greater could be conceived, for a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists in the understanding. Bu then, we can conceive of something greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived, which is contradictory. Therefore, God cannot exist on the understanding, but exists in reality.

An influential argument (or family of arguments) for the existence of God, finding its premisses are that all natural things are dependent for their existence on something else. The totality of dependent brings must then itself depend upon a non-dependent, or necessarily existent bring of which is God. Like the argument to design, the cosmological argument was attacked by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76) and Immanuel Kant.

Its main problem, nonetheless, is that it requires us to make sense of the notion of necessary existence. For if the answer to the question of why anything exists is that some other tings of a similar kind exists, the question merely arises gain. So the ‘God' that ends the question must exist necessarily: It must not be an entity of which the same kinds of questions can be raised. The other problem with the argument is attributing concern and care to the deity, not for connecting the necessarily existent being it derives with human values and aspirations.

The ontological argument has been treated by modern theologians such as Barth, following Hegel, not so much as a proof with which to confront the unconverted, but as an explanation of the deep meaning of religious belief. Collingwood, regards the argument s proving not that because our idea of God is that of id quo maius cogitare viequit, therefore God exists, but proving that because this is our idea of God, we stand committed to belief in its existence. Its existence is a metaphysical point or absolute pre-supposition of certain forms of thought.

In the 20th century, modal versions of the ontological argument have been propounded by the American philosophers Charles Hertshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinge. One version is to define something as unsurpassably great, if it exists and is perfect in every ‘possible world'. Then, to allow that it is at least possible that an unsurpassable great being exists. This means that there is a possible world in which such a being exists. However, if it exists in one world, it exists in all (for the fact that such a being exists in a world that entails, in at least, it exists and is perfect in every world), so, it exists necessarily. The correct response to this argument is to disallow the apparently reasonable concession that it is possible that such a being exists. This concession is much more dangerous than it looks, since in the modal logic, involved from possibly necessarily ‘p', we can device necessarily ‘p'. A symmetrical proof starting from the assumption that it is possible that such a being not exist would derive that it is impossible that it exists.

The doctrine that it makes an ethical difference of whether an agent actively intervenes to bring about a result, or omits to act in circumstances in which it is foreseen, that as a result of the omission the same result occurs. Thus, suppose that I wish you dead. If I act to bring about your death, I am a murderer, however, if I happily discover you in danger of death, and fail to act to save you, I am not acting, and therefore, according to the doctrine of acts and omissions not a murderer. Critics implore that omissions can be as deliberate and immoral as I am responsible for your food and fact to feed you. Only omission is surely a killing, ‘Doing nothing' can be a way of doing something, or in other worlds, absence of bodily movement can also constitute acting negligently, or deliberately, and defending on the context ,may be a way of deceiving, betraying, or killing. Nonetheless, criminal law offers to find its conveniences, from which to distinguish discontinuous intervention, for which is permissible, from bringing about result, which may not be, if, for instance, the result is death of a patient. The question is whether the difference, if there is one, is, between acting and omitting to act be discernibly or defined in a way that bars a general moral might.

The double effect of a principle attempting to define when an action that had both good and bad results is morally permissible. I one formation such an action is permissible if (1) The action is not wrong in itself, (2) the bad consequences is not that which is intended (3) the good is not itself a result of the bad consequences, and (4) the two consequential affects are commensurate. Thus, for instance, I might justifiably bomb an enemy factory, foreseeing but intending that the death of nearby civilians, whereas bombing the death of nearby civilians intentionally would be disallowed. The principle has its roots in Thomist moral philosophy, accordingly. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), held that it is meaningless to ask whether a human being is two tings (soul and body) or, only just as it is meaningless to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one: On this analogy the sound is ye form of the body. Life after death is possible only because a form itself doe not perish (pricking is a loss of form).

And is, therefore, in some sense available to reactivate a new body., therefore, not I who survives body death, but I ma y be resurrected in the same personalized bod y that becomes reanimated by the same form, that which Aquinas's account, as a person has no privileged self-understanding, we understand ourselves as we do everything else, by way of sense experience and abstraction, and knowing the principle of our own lives is an achievement, not as a given. Difficultly at this point led the logical positivist to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation altogether, and to flirt with the coherence theory of truth, it is widely accepted that trying to make the connection between thought and experience through basic sentence s depends on an untenable ‘myth of the given

The special way that we each have of knowing our own thoughts, intentions, and sensationalist have brought in the many philosophical ‘behaviourist and functionalist tendencies, that have found it important to deny that there is such a special way , arguing the way that I know of my own mind inasmuch as the way that I know of yours, e.g., by seeing what I say when asked. Others, however, point out that the behaviour of reporting the result of introspection in a particular and legitimate kind of behavioural access that deserves notice in any account of historically human psychology. The historical philosophy of reflection upon the astute of history, or of historical, thinking, finds the term was used in the 18th century, e.g., by Volante was to mean critical historical thinking as opposed to the mere collection and repetition of stories about the past. In Hegelian, particularly by conflicting elements within his own system, however, it came to man universal or world history. The Enlightenment confidence was being replaced by science, reason, and understanding that gave history a progressive moral thread, and under the influence of the German philosopher, whom is in spreading Romanticism, came Gottfried Herder (1744-1803),and, Immanuel Kant, this idea took it further to hold, so that philosophy of history cannot be the detecting of a grand system, the unfolding of the evolution of human nature as attested by its successive sages (the progress of rationality or of Spirit). This essential speculative philosophy of history is given a extra Kantian twist in the German idealist Johann Fichte, in whom the extra association of temporal succession with logical implication introduces the idea that concepts themselves are the dynamic engine of historical change. The idea is readily intelligible in that there world of nature and of thought become identified. The work of Herder, Kant, Flichte and Schelling is synthesized by Hegel: History has a plot, as too, this to the moral development of man, equates with freedom within the state, this in turn is the development of thought, or a logical development in which various necessary moment in the life of the concept are successively achieved and improved upon. Hegel's method is at its most successful, when the object is the history of ideas, and the evolution of thinking may march in steps with logical oppositions and their resolution encounters red by various systems of thought.

Within the revolutionary communism, Karl Marx (1818-83) and the German social philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820-95), there emerges a rather different kind of story, based upon Hefl's progressive structure not laying the achievement of the goal of history to a future in which the political condition for freedom comes to exist, so that economic and political fears than ‘reason' is in the engine room. Although, itself is such that speculations upon the history may that it be continued to be written, notably: late examples, by the late 19th century large-scale speculation of tis kind with the nature of historical understanding, and in particular with a comparison between the ,methos of natural science and with the historians. For writers such as the German neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband and the German philosopher and literary critic and historian Wilhelm Dilthey, it is important to show that the human sciences such. as history are objective and legitimate, nonetheless they are in some way deferent from the enquiry of the scientist. Since the subjective-matter is the past thought and actions of human brings, what is needed and actions of human beings, past thought and actions of human beings, what is needed is an ability to re-live that past thought, knowing the deliberations of past agents, as if they were the historian's own.. The most influential British writer on this theme was the philosopher and historian George Collingwood (1889-1943) whose, The Idea of History (1946), contains an extensive defence of the verstehe approach, but it is nonetheless, the explanation from there actions, however, by re-living the situation as our understanding that understanding others is not gained by the tactic use of a ‘theory', enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentionality experienced, again, the matter to which the subjective-matters of past thoughts and actions , as I have a human ability of knowing the deliberations of past agents as if they were the historian's own. The immediate question of the form of historical explanation, and the fact that general laws have other than no place or any apprentices in the order of a minor place in the human sciences, it is also prominent in thoughts about distinctiveness as to regain their actions, but by re-living the situation

in or thereby an understanding of what they experience and thought.

The view that everyday attributions of intention, belief and meaning to other persons proceeded via tacit use of a theory that enables ne to construct these interpretations as explanations of their doings. The view is commonly hld along with functionalism, according to which psychological states theoretical entities, identified by the network of their causes and effects. The theory-theory had different implications, depending on which feature of theories is being stressed. Theories may be though of as capable of formalization, as yielding predications and explanations, as achieved by a process of theorizing, as achieved by predictions and explanations, as achieved by a process of theorizing, as answering to empirical evince that is in principle describable without them, as liable to be overturned by newer and better theories, and o on. The main problem with seeing our understanding of others as the outcome of a piece of theorizing is the non-existence of a medium in which this theory can be couched, as the child learns simultaneously he minds of others and the meaning of terms in its native language.

Our understanding of others is not gained by the tacit use of a ‘theory'. Enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentions explain their actions, however, by re-living the situation ‘in their moccasins', or from their point of view, and thereby understanding what hey experienced and thought, and therefore expressed. Understanding others is achieved when we can ourselves deliberate as they did, and hear their words as if they are our own. The suggestion is a modern development of the ‘Verstehen' tradition associated with Dilthey, Weber and Collngweood.

Much as much, it is therefore, in some sense available to reactivate a new body, however, not that I, who survives bodily death, but I may be resurrected in the same body that becomes reanimated by the same form, in that of Aquinas's account, a person has no privileged self-understanding. We understand ourselves, just as we do everything else, that through the sense experience, in that of an abstraction, may justly be of knowing the principle of our own lives, is to obtainably achieve, and not as a given. In the theory of knowledge that knowing Aquinas holds the Aristotelian doctrine that knowing entails some similarities between the Knower and what there is to be known: A human's corporal nature, therefore, requires that knowledge start with sense perception. As yet, the same limitations that do not apply of bringing further he levelling stabilities that are contained within the hierarchical mosaic, such as the celestial heavens that open in bringing forth to angles.

In the domain of theology Aquinas deploys the distraction emphasized by Eringena, between the existence of God in understanding the significance; of five arguments: The are (1) Motion is only explicable if there exists an unmoved, a first mover (2) the chain of efficient causes demands a first cause (3) the contingent character of existing things in the wold demands a different order of existence, or in other words as something that has a necessary existence (4) the gradation of value in things in the world require the existence of something that is most valuable, or perfect, and (5) the orderly character of events points to a final cause, or end t which all things are directed, and the existence of this end demands a being that ordained it. All the arguments are physico-theological arguments, in that between reason and faith, Aquinas lays out proofs of the existence of God.

He readily recognizes that there are doctrines such that are the Incarnation and the nature of the Trinity, know only through revelations, and whose acceptance is more a matter of moral will. God's essence is identified with his existence, as pure activity. God is simple, containing no potential. No matter how, we cannot obtain knowledge of what God is (his quiddity), perhaps, doing the same work as the principle of charity, but suggesting that we regulate our procedures of interpretation by maximizing the extent to which we see the subject s humanly reasonable, than the extent to which we see the subject as right about things. Whereby remaining content with descriptions that apply to him partly by way of analog y , God reveals of himself is not himself.

The immediate problem availed of ethics is posed b y the English philosopher Phillippa Foot, in her ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect' (1967). A runaway train or trolley comes to a section in the track that is under construction and impassable. One person is working on one part and five on the other, and the trolley will put an end to anyone working on the branch it enters. Clearly, to most minds, the driver should steer for the fewest populated branch. But now suppose that, left to itself, it will enter the branch with its five employs that are there, and you as a bystander can intervene, altering the points so that it veers through the other. Is it right or obligors, or even permissible for you to do this, thereby, apparently involving yourself in ways that responsibility ends in a death of one person? After all, whom have you wronged if you leave it to go its own way? The situation is similarly standardized of others in which utilitarian reasoning seems to lead to one course of action, but a person's integrity or principles may oppose it.

Describing events that haphazardly happen does not of itself permit us to talk of rationality and intention, which are the categories we may apply if we conceive of them as action. We think of ourselves not only passively, as creatures that make things happen. Understanding this distinction gives forth of its many major problems concerning the nature of an agency for the causation of bodily events by mental events, and of understanding the ‘will' and ‘free will'. Other problems in the theory of action include drawing the distinction between an action and its consequence, and describing the structure involved when we do one thing ‘by;' dong another thing. Even the planning and dating where someone shoots someone on one day and in one place, whereby the victim then dies on another day and in another place. Where and when did the murderous act take place?

Causation, least of mention, is not clear that only events are created by and for itself. Kant cites the example o a cannonball at rest and stationed upon a cushion, but causing the cushion to be the shape that it is, and thus to suggest that the causal states of affairs or objects or facts may also be casually related. All of which, the central problem is to understand the elements of necessitation or determinacy of the future. Events, Hume thought, are in themselves ‘loose and separate': How then are we to conceive of others? The relationship seems not to perceptible, for all that perception gives us (Hume argues) is knowledge of the patterns that events do, actually falling into than any acquaintance with the connections determining the pattern. It is, however, clear that our conception of everyday objects ids largely determined by their casual powers, and all our action is based on the belief that these causal powers are stable and reliable. Although scientific investigation can give us wider and deeper dependable patterns, it seems incapable of bringing us any nearer to the ‘must' of causal necessitation. Particular examples o f puzzles with causalities are quite apart from general problems of forming any conception of what it is: How are we to understand the casual interaction between mind and body? How can the present, which exists, or its existence to a past that no longer exists? How is the stability of the casual order to be understood? Is backward causality possible? Is causation a concept needed in science, or dispensable?

The news concerning free-will, is nonetheless, a problem for which is to reconcile our everyday consciousness of ourselves as agent, with the best view of what science tells us that we are. Determinism is one part of the problem. It may be defined as the doctrine that every event has a cause. More precisely, for any event ‘C', there will be one antecedent states of nature ‘N', and a law of nature ‘L', such that given L, N will be followed by ‘C'. But if this is true of every event, it is true of events such as my doing something or choosing to do something. So my choosing or doing something is fixed by some antecedent state ‘N' an d the laws. Since determinism is universal these in turn are fixed, and so backwards to events for which I am clearly not responsible (events before my birth, for example). So, no events can be voluntary or free, where that means that they come about purely because of my willing them I could have done otherwise. If determinism is true, then there will be antecedent states and laws already determining such events: How then can I truly be said to be their author, or be responsible for them?

Reactions to this problem are commonly classified as: (1) Hard determinism. This accepts the conflict and denies that you have real freedom or responsibility (2) Soft determinism or compatibility, whereby reactions in this family assert that everything you should ant from a notion of freedom is quite compatible with determinism. In particular, if your actions are caused, it can often be true of you that you could have done otherwise if you had chosen, and this may be enough to render you liable to be held unacceptable (the fact that previous events will have caused you to choose as you did is deemed irrelevant on this option). (3) Libertarianism, as this is the view that while compatibilism is only an evasion, there is a more substantiative, real notion of freedom that can yet be preserved in the face of determinism (or, of indeterminism). In Kant, while the empirical or phenomenal self is determined and not free, whereas the noumenal or rational self is capable of being rational, free action. However, the noumeal self exists outside the categorical priorities of space and time, as this freedom seems to be of a doubtful value as other libertarian avenues do include of suggesting that the problem is badly framed, for instance, because the definition of determinism breaks down, or postulates by its suggesting that there are two independent but consistent ways of looking at an agent, the scientific and the humanistic, wherefore it ids only through confusing them that the problem seems urgent. Nevertheless, these avenues have gained general popularity, as an error to confuse determinism and fatalism.

The dilemma for which determinism is for itself often supposes of an action that seems as the end of a causal chain, or, perhaps, by some hieratical set of suppositional actions that would stretch back in time to events for which an agent has no conceivable responsibility, then the agent is not responsible for the action.

Once, again, the dilemma adds that if an action is not the end of such a chain, then either to or one of its causes occurs at random, in that no antecedent events brought it about, and in that case nobody is responsible for its ever to occur. So, whether or not determinism is true, responsibility is shown to be illusory.

Still, there is to say, to have a will is to be able to desire an outcome and to purpose to bring it about. Strength of will, or firmness of purpose, is supposed to be good and weakness of will or akrasia bad.

A mental act of willing or trying whose presence is sometimes supposed to make the difference between intentional or voluntary action, as well of mere behaviour. The theory that there are such acts is problematic, and the idea that they make the required difference is a case of explaining a phenomenon by citing another that raises exactly the same problem, since the intentional or voluntary nature of the set of volition now needs explanation. For determinism to act in accordance with the law of autonomy or freedom, is that in ascendance with universal moral law and regardless of selfish advantage.

A categorical notion in the work as contrasted in Kantian ethics show of a hypothetical imperative that embeds of a commentary which is in place only given some antecedent desire or project. ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet'. The injunction to stay quiet only applies to those with the antecedent desire or inclination: If one has no desire to look wise the injunction or advice lapses. A categorical imperative cannot be so avoided, it is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination,. It could be repressed as, for example, ‘Tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)'. The distinction is not always mistakably presumed or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, don't become a bartender' may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in the case of those with the stated desire.

In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed some of the given forms of categorical imperatives, such that of (1) The formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law', (2) the formula of the law of nature: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature', (3) the formula of the end-in-itself, ‘Act in such a way that you always trat humanity of whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as an end, but always at the same time as an end', (4) the formula of autonomy, or consideration; 'the will' of every rational being a will which makes universal law', and (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.

A central object in the study of Kant's ethics is to understand the expressions of the inescapable, binding requirements of their categorical importance, and to understand whether they are equivalent at some deep level. Kant's own application of the notions are always convincing: One cause of confusion is relating Kant's ethical values to theories such as ;expressionism' in that it is easy but imperatively must that it cannot be the expression of a sentiment, yet, it must derive from something ‘unconditional' or necessary' such as the voice of reason. The standard mood of sentences used to issue request and commands are their imperative needs to issue as basic the need to communicate information, and as such to animals signalling systems may as often be interpreted either way, and understanding the relationship between commands and other action-guiding uses of language, such as ethical discourse. The ethical theory of ‘prescriptivism' in fact equates the two functions. A further question is whether there is an imperative logic. ‘Hump that bale' seems to follow from ‘Tote that barge and hump that bale', follows from ‘Its windy and its raining':.But it is harder to say how to include other forms, does ‘Shut the door or shut the window' follow from ‘Shut the window', for example? The usual way to develop an imperative logic is to work in terms of the possibility of satisfying the other one command without satisfying the other, thereby turning it into a variation of ordinary deductive logic.

Despite the fact that the morality of people and their ethics amount to the same thing, there is a usage in that morality as such has that of Kantian base, that on given notions as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning as based on the valuing notions that are characterized by their particular virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of ‘moral' considerations from other practical considerations. The scholarly issues are complicated and complex, with some writers seeing Kant as more Aristotelian,. And Aristotle as more involved with a separate sphere of responsibility and duty, than the simple contrast suggests.

The Cartesian doubt is the method of investigating how much knowledge and its basis in reason or experience as used by Descartes in the first two Medications. It attempted to put knowledge upon secure foundation by first inviting us to suspend judgements on any proportion whose truth can be doubted, even as a bare possibility. The standards of acceptance are gradually raised as we are asked to doubt the deliverance of memory, the senses, and eve n reason, all of which are in principle capable of letting us down. This is eventually found in the celebrated "Cogito ergo sum": I think, therefore I am. By locating the point of certainty in my awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of a various counter-attack on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this priority are the Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes a "clear and distinct perception" of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: A Hume drily puts it, "to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit."

By dissimilarity, Descartes's notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration of dissimulation. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax, surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature.

Although the structure of Descartes's epistemology, theory of mind and theory of matter have been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity and even their initial plausibility, all contrives to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.

The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense it may be instinctive in human beings to be social, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds.

It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the "otherness" of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger indivisible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.

Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.

The subjectivity of our mind affects our perceptions of the world that is held to be objective by natural science. Create both aspects of mind and matter as individualized forms that belong to the same underlying reality.

Our everyday experience confirms the apparent fact that there is a dual-valued world as subject and objects. We as having consciousness, as personality and as experiencing beings are the subjects, whereas for everything for which we can come up with a name or designation, seems to be the object, that which is opposed to us as a subject. Physical objects are only part of the object-world. There are also mental objects, objects of our emotions, abstract objects, religious objects etc. language objectifies our experience. Experiences per se are purely sensational experienced that do not make a distinction between object and subject. Only verbalized thought reifies the sensations by conceptualizing them and pigeonholing them into the given entities of language.

Some thinkers maintain, that subject and object are only different aspects of experience. I can experience myself as subject, and in the act of self-reflection. The fallacy of this argument is obvious: Being a subject implies having an object. We cannot experience something consciously without the mediation of understanding and mind. Our experience is already conceptualized at the time it comes into our consciousness. Our experience is negative insofar as it destroys the original pure experience. In a dialectical process of synthesis, the original pure experience becomes an object for us. The common state of our mind is only capable of apperceiving objects. Objects are reified negative experience. The same is true for the objective aspect of this theory: by objectifying myself I do not dispense with the subject, but the subject is causally and apodeictically linked to the object. As soon as I make an object of anything, I have to realize, that it is the subject, which objectifies something. It is only the subject who can do that. Without the subject there are no objects, and without objects there is no subject. This interdependence, however, is not to be understood in terms of a dualism, so that the object and the subject are really independent substances. Since the object is only created by the activity of the subject, and the subject is not a physical entity, but a mental one, we have to conclude then, that the subject-object dualism is purely mentalistic.

The Cartesian dualism posits the subject and the object as separate, independent and real substances, both of which have their ground and origin in the highest substance of God. Cartesian dualism, however, contradicts itself: The very fact, which Descartes posits the "I," that is the subject, as the only certainty, he defied materialism, and thus the concept of some "res extensa." The physical thing is only probable in its existence, whereas the mental thing is absolutely and necessarily certain. The subject is superior to the object. The object is only derived, but the subject is the original. This makes the object not only inferior in its substantive quality and in its essence, but relegates it to a level of dependence on the subject. The subject recognizes that the object is a "res extensa" and this means, that the object cannot have essence or existence without the acknowledgment through the subject. The subject posits the world in the first place and the subject is posited by God. Apart from the problem of interaction between these two different substances, Cartesian dualism is not eligible for explaining and understanding the subject-object relation.

By denying Cartesian dualism and resorting to monistic theories such as extreme idealism, materialism or positivism, the problem is not resolved either. What the positivists did, was just verbalizing the subject-object relation by linguistic forms. It was no longer a metaphysical problem, but only a linguistic problem. Our language has formed this object-subject dualism. These thinkers are very superficial and shallow thinkers, because they do not see that in the very act of their analysis they inevitably think in the mind-set of subject and object. By relativizing the object and subject in terms of language and analytical philosophy, they avoid the elusive and problematical aporia of subject-object, which has been the fundamental question in philosophy ever since. Shunning these metaphysical questions is no solution. Excluding something, by reducing it to a more material and verifiable level, is not only pseudo-philosophy but actually a depreciation and decadence of the great philosophical ideas of mankind.

Therefore, we have to come to grips with idea of subject-object in a new manner. We experience this dualism as a fact in our everyday lives. Every experience is subject to this dualistic pattern. The question, however, is, whether this underlying pattern of subject-object dualism is real or only mental. Science assumes it to be real. This assumption does not prove the reality of our experience, but only that with this method science is most successful in explaining our empirical facts. Mysticism, on the other hand, believes that there is an original unity of subject and objects. To attain this unity is the goal of religion and mysticism. Man has fallen from this unity by disgrace and by sinful behaviour. Now the task of man is to get back on track again and strive toward this highest fulfilment. Again, are we not, on the conclusion made above, forced to admit, that also the mystic way of thinking is only a pattern of the mind and, as the scientists, that they have their own frame of reference and methodology to explain the supra-sensible facts most successfully?

If we assume mind to be the originator of the subject-object dualism, then we cannot confer more reality on the physical or the mental aspect, as well as we cannot deny the one in terms of the other.

The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.

The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.

Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. And it is now clear that language processing is not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.

While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.

Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.

If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.

If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.

Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.

If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that a phenomenon can be assumed to be "real" only when it is "observed" phenomenon, we are led to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence is inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principle is itself the subject of scientific investigation. There is a simple reason why this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when the predictions of a physical theory are validated by experiment. Since the indivisible whole cannot be measured or observed, we confront as the "event horizon" or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that an undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or "actualized" in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the "indivisible" whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. But it cannot in principle disclose or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.

The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts (qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.

All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear fairly self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. And it is also not necessary to attribute any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be "proven" in scientific terms and what can be reasonably "inferred" in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.

Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally had expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many of the potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason - the implications of the amazing new fact of nature called non-locality cannot be properly understood without some familiarity wit the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what is most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, the fewer amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. But this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions in an effort to close the circle, resolves the equations of eternity and complete the universe to obtainably gain in its unification of which that holds within.

A major topic of philosophical inquiry, especially in Aristotle, and subsequently since the 17th and 18th centuries, when the ‘science of man' began to probe into human motivation and emotion. For such as these, the French moralistes, or Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Kant, a prime task as to delineate the variety of human reactions and motivations. Such an inquiry would locate our propensity for moral thinking among other faculties, such as perception and reason, and other tendencies as empathy, sympathy or self-interest. The task continues especially in the light of a post-Darwinian understanding of ourselves.

In some moral systems, notably that of Immanuel Kant, real moral worth comes only with interactivity, justly because it is right. However, if you do what is purposely becoming, equitable, but from some other equitable motive, such as the fear or prudence, no moral merit accrues to you. Yet, that in turn seems to discount other admirable motivations, as acting from main-sheet benevolence, or ‘sympathy'. The question is how to balance these opposing ideas and how to understand acting from a sense of obligation without duty or rightness , through which their beginning to seem a kind of fetish. It thus stands opposed to ethics and relying on highly general and abstractive principles, particularly those associated with the Kantian categorical imperatives. The view may go as far back as to say that taken in its own, no consideration point, for that which of any particular way of life, that, least of mention, the contributing steps so taken as forwarded by reason or be to an understanding estimate that can only proceed by identifying salient features of a situation that weigh on one's side or another.

As random moral dilemmas set out with intense concern, inasmuch as philosophical matters that exert a profound but influential defence of common sense. Situations in which each possible course of action breeches some otherwise binding moral principle, are, nonetheless, serious dilemmas making the stuff of many tragedies. The conflict can be described in different was. One suggestion is that whichever action the subject undertakes, that he or she does something wrong. Another is that his is not so, for the dilemma means that in the circumstances for what she or he did was right as any alternate. It is important to the phenomenology of these cases that action leaves a residue of guilt and remorse, even though it had proved it was not the subject's fault that she or he were considering the dilemma, that the rationality of emotions can be contested. Any normality with more than one fundamental principle seems capable of generating dilemmas, however, dilemmas exist, such as where a mother must decide which of two children to sacrifice, least of mention, no principles are pitted against each other, only if we accept that dilemmas from principles are real and important, this fact can then be used to approach in themselves, such as of ‘utilitarianism', to espouse various kinds may, perhaps, be centred upon the possibility of relating to independent feelings, liken to recognize only one sovereign principle. Alternatively, of regretting the existence of dilemmas and the unordered jumble of furthering principles, in that of creating several of them, a theorist may use their occurrences to encounter upon that which it is to argue for the desirability of locating and promoting a single sovereign principle.

Nevertheless, some theories into ethics see the subject in terms of a number of laws (as in the Ten Commandments). Th status of these laws may be that they are the edicts of a divine lawmaker, or that they are truths of reason, given to its situational ethics, virtue ethics, regarding them as at best rules-of-thumb, and, frequently disguising the great complexity of practical representations that for reason has placed the Kantian notions of their moral law.

In continence, the natural law possibility points of the view of the states that law and morality are especially associated with St Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), such that his synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian doctrine was eventually to provide the main philosophical underpinning of th Catholic church. Nevertheless, to a greater extent of any attempt to cement the moral and legal order and together within the nature of the cosmos or the nature of human beings, in which sense it found in some Protestant writings, under which had arguably derived functions. From a Platonic view of ethics and its agedly implicit advance of Stoicism. Its law stands above and apart from the activities of human lawmakers: It constitutes an objective set of principles that can be seen as in and for themselves by means of ‘natural usages' or by reason itself, additionally, (in religious verses of them), that express of God's will for creation. Non-religious versions of the theory substitute objective conditions for humans flourishing as the source of constraints, upon permissible actions and social arrangements within the natural law tradition. Different views have been held about the relationship between the rule of the law and God's will. Grothius, for instance, sides with the view that the content of natural law is independent of any will, including that of God.

While the German natural theorist and historian Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94) takes the opposite view. His great work was the De Jure Naturae et Gentium, 1672, and its English translation is ‘Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 1710. Pufendorf was influenced by Descartes, Hobbes and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, his ambition was to introduce a newly scientific ‘mathematical' treatment on ethics and law, free from the tainted Aristotelian underpinning of ‘scholasticism'. Like that of his contemporary - Locke. His conception of natural laws include rational and religious principles, making it only a partial forerunner of more resolutely empiricist and political treatment in the Enlightenment.

Pufendorf launched his explorations in Plato's dialogue ‘Euthyphro', with whom the pious things are pious because the gods love them, or do the gods love them because they are pious? The dilemma poses the question of whether value can be conceived as the upshot o the choice of any mind, even a divine one. On the fist option the choice of the gods crates goodness and value. Even if this is intelligible it seems to make it impossible to praise the gods, for it is then vacuously true that they choose the good. On the second option we have to understand a source of value lying behind or beyond the will even of the gods, and by which they can be evaluated. The elegant solution of Aquinas is and is therefore distinct from is will, but not distinct from him.

The dilemma arises whatever the source of authority is supposed to be. Do we care about the good because it is good, or do we just call good those things that we care about? It also generalizes to affect our understanding of the authority of other things: Mathematics, or necessary truth, for example, are truths necessary because we deem them to be so, or do we deem them to be so because they are necessary?

The natural aw tradition may either assume a stranger form, in which it is claimed that various facts entails of primary and secondary qualities, any of which is claimed that various facts entail values, reason by itself is capable of discerning moral requirements. As in the ethics of Knt, these requirements are supposed binding on all human beings, regardless of their desires.

The supposed natural or innate abilities of the mind to know the first principle of ethics and moral reasoning, wherein, those expressions are assigned and related to those that distinctions are which make in terms contribution to the function of the whole, as completed definitions of them, their phraseological impression is termed ‘synderesis' (or, syntetesis) although traced to Aristotle, the phrase came to the modern era through St Jerome, whose scintilla conscientiae (gleam of conscience) wads a popular concept in early scholasticism. Nonetheless, it is mainly associated in Aquinas as an infallible natural, simple and immediate grasp of first moral principles. Conscience, by contrast, is ,more concerned with particular instances of right and wrong, and can be in error, under which the assertion that is taken as fundamental, at least for the purposes of the branch of enquiry in hand.

It is, nevertheless, the view interpreted within he particular states of law and morality especially associated with Aquinas and the subsequent scholastic tradition, showing for itself the enthusiasm for reform for its own sake. Or for ‘rational' schemes thought up by managers and theorists, is therefore entirely misplaced. Major o exponent s of this theme include the British absolute idealist Herbert Francis Bradley (1846-1924) and Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. The notably the idealism of Bradley, there ids the same doctrine that change is contradictory and consequently unreal: The Absolute is changeless. A way of sympathizing a little with his idea is to reflect that any scientific explanation of change will proceed by finding an unchanging law operating, or an unchanging quantity conserved in the change, so that explanation of change always proceeds by finding that which is unchanged. The metaphysical problem of change is to shake off the idea that each moment is created afresh, and to obtain a conception of events or processes as having a genuinely historical reality, Really extended and unfolding in time, as opposed to being composites of discrete temporal atoms. A step towards this end may be to see time itself not as an infinite container within which discrete events are located, bu as a kind of logical construction from the flux of events. This relational view of time was advocated by Leibniz and a subject of the debate between him and Newton's Absolutist pupil, Clarke.

Generally, nature is an indefinitely mutable term, changing as our scientific conception of the world changes, and often best seen as signifying a contrast with something considered not part of nature. The term applies both to individual species (it is the nature of gold to be dense or of dogs to be friendly), and also to the natural world as a whole. The sense in which it applies to species quickly links up with ethical and aesthetic ideals: A thing ought to realize its nature, what is natural is what it is good for a thing to become, it is natural for humans to be healthy or two-legged, and departure from this is a misfortune or deformity,. The associations of what is natural with what it is good to become is visible in Plato, and is the central idea of Aristotle's philosophy of nature. Unfortunately, the pinnacle of nature in this sense is the mature adult male citizen, with he rest of hat we would call the natural world, including women, slaves, children and other species, not quite making it.

Nature in general can, however, function as a foil to any idea inasmuch as a source of ideals: In this sense fallen nature is contrasted with a supposed celestial realization of the ‘forms'. The theory of ‘forms' is probably the most characteristic, and most contested of the doctrines of Plato. In the background ie the Pythagorean conception of form as the key to physical nature, bu also the sceptical doctrine associated with the Greek philosopher Cratylus, and is sometimes thought to have been a teacher of Plato before Socrates. He is famous for capping the doctrine of Ephesus of Heraclitus, whereby the guiding idea of his philosophy was that of the logos, is capable of being heard or hearkened to by people, it unifies opposites, and it is somehow associated with fire, which is preeminent among the four elements that Heraclitus distinguishes: Fire, air (breath, the stuff of which souls composed), earth, and water. Although he is principally remember for the doctrine of the ‘flux' of all things, and the famous statement that you cannot step into the same river twice, for new waters are ever flowing in upon you. The more extreme implication of the doctrine of flux, e.g., the impossibility of categorizing things truly, do not seem consistent with his general epistemology and views of meaning, and were to his follower Cratylus, although the proper conclusion of his views was that the flux cannot be captured in words. According to Aristotle, he eventually held that since ‘regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing nothing ids just to stay silent and wag one's finger. Plato ‘s theory of forms can be seen in part as an action against the impasse to which Cratylus was driven.

The Galilean world view might have been expected to drain nature of its ethical content, however, the term seldom loses its normative force, and the belief in universal natural laws provided its own set of ideals. In the 18th century for example, a painter or writer could be praised as natural, where the qualities expected would include normal (universal) topics treated with simplicity, economy , regularity and harmony. Later on, nature becomes an equally potent emblem of irregularity, wildness, and fertile diversity, but also associated with progress of human history, its incurring definition that has been taken to fit many things as well as transformation, including ordinary human self-consciousness. Nature, being in contrast with in integrated phenomenon may include (1) that which is deformed or grotesque or fails to achieve its proper form or function or just the statistically uncommon or unfamiliar, (2) the supernatural, or the world of gods and invisible agencies, (3) the world of rationality and unintelligence, conceived of as distinct from the biological and physical order, or the product of human intervention, and (5) related to that, the world of convention and artifice.

Different conceptualized traits as grounded within the nature's continuous overtures that play ethically, for example, the conception of ‘nature red in tooth and claw' often provides a justification for aggressive personal and political relations, or the idea that it is women's nature to be one thing or another is taken to be a justification for differential social expectations. The term functions as a fig-leaf for a particular set of stereotypes, and is a proper target of much feminist writings. Feminist epistemology has asked whether different ways of knowing for instance with different criteria of justification, and different emphases on logic and imagination, characterize male and female attempts to understand the world. Such concerns include awareness of the ‘masculine' self-image, itself a socially variable and potentially distorting picture of what thought and action should be. Again, there is a spectrum of concerns from the highly theoretical to he relatively practical. In this latter area particular attention is given to the institutional biases that stand in the way of equal opportunities in science and other academic pursuits, or the ideologies that stand in the way of women seeing themselves as leading contributors to various disciplines. However, to more radical feminists such concerns merely exhibit women wanting for themselves the same power and rights over others that men have claimed, and failing to confront the real problem, which is how to live without such symmetrical powers and rights.

In biological determinism, not only influences but constraints and makes inevitable our development as persons with a variety of traits. At its silliest the view postulates such entities as a gene predisposing people to poverty, and it is the particular enemy of thinkers stressing the parental, social, and political determinants of the way we are.

The philosophy of social science is more heavily intertwined with actual social science than in the case of other subjects such as physics or mathematics, since its question is centrally whether there can be such a thing as sociology. The idea of a ‘science of man', devoted to uncovering scientific laws determining the basic dynamic s of human interactions was a cherished ideal of the Enlightenment and reached its heyday with the positivism of writers such as the French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte (1798-1957), and the historical materialism of Marx and his followers. Sceptics point out that what happens in society is determined by peoples' own ideas of what should happen, and like fashions those ideas change in unpredictable ways as self-consciousness is susceptible to change by any number of external event s: Unlike the solar system of celestial mechanics a society is not at all a closed system evolving in accordance with a purely internal dynamic, but constantly responsive to shocks from outside.

The sociological approach to human behaviour is based on the premise that all social behaviour has a biological basis, and seeks to understand that basis in terms of genetic encoding for features that are then selected for through evolutionary history. The philosophical problem is essentially one of methodology: Of finding criteria for identifying features that can usefully be explained in this way, and for finding criteria for assessing various genetic stories that might provide useful explanations.

Among the features that are proposed for this kind o f explanation are such things as male dominance, male promiscuity versus female fidelity, propensities to sympathy and other emotions, and the limited altruism characteristic of human beings. The strategy has proved unnecessarily controversial, with proponents accused of ignoring the influence of environmental and social factors in moulding people's characteristics, e.g., at the limit of silliness, by postulating a ‘gene for poverty', however, there is no need for the approach to commit such errors, since the feature explained sociobiological may be indexed to environment: For instance, it ma y be a propensity to develop some feature in some other environments (for even a propensity to develop propensities . . .) The main problem is to separate genuine explanation from speculative, just so stories which may or may not identify as really selective mechanisms.

Subsequently, in the 19th century attempts were made to base ethical reasoning on the presumed facts about evolution. The movement is particularly associated with the English philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer (1820-1903),. His first major work was the book Social Statics (1851), which advocated an extreme political libertarianism. The Principles of Psychology was published in 1855, and his very influential Education advocating natural development of intelligence, the creation of pleasurable interest, and the importance of science in the curriculum, appeared in 1861. His First Principles (1862) was followed over the succeeding years by volumes on the Principles of biology and psychology, sociology and ethics. Although he attracted a large public following and attained the stature of a sage, his speculative work has not lasted well, and in his own time there was dissident voices. T.H. Huxley said that Spencer's definition of a tragedy was a deduction killed by a fact. Writer and social prophet Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) called him a perfect vacuum, and the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) wondered why half of England wanted to bury him in Westminister Abbey, and talked of the ‘hurdy-gurdy' monotony of him, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock.

The premises regarded by a later elements in an evolutionary path are better than earlier ones, the application of this principle then requires seeing western society, laissez-faire capitalism, or some other object of approval, as more evolved than more ‘primitive' social forms. Neither the principle nor the applications command much respect. The version of evolutionary ethics called ‘social Darwinism' emphasizes the struggle for natural selection, and drawn the conclusion that we should glorify such struggle, usually by enhancing competitive and aggressive relations between people in society or between societies themselves. More recently the relation between evolution and ethics has been re-thought in the light of biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection.

In that, the study of the say in which a variety of higher mental function may be adaptions applicable of a psychology of evolution, a formed in response to selection pressures on human populations through evolutionary time. Candidates for such theorizing include material and paternal motivations, capabilities for love and friendship, the development of language as a signalling system, cooperative and aggressive tendencies, our emotional repertoires, our moral reaction, including the disposition to direct and punish those who cheat on a

agreement or who free-ride on the work of others, our cognitive structure and many others. Evolutionary psychology goes hand-in-hand with neurophysiological evidence about the underlying circuitry in the brain which subserves the psychological mechanisms it claims to identify.

For all that, an essential part of the British absolute idealist Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) was largely on the ground s that the self-sufficiency individualized through community and one's self is to contribute to social and other ideals. However, truth as formulated in language is always partial, and dependent upon categories that themselves are inadequate to the harmonious whole. Nevertheless, these self-contradictory elements somehow contribute to the harmonious whole, or Absolute, lying beyond categorization. Although absolute idealism maintains few adherents today, Bradley's general dissent from empiricism, his holism, and the brilliance and style of his writing continue to make him the most interesting of the late 19th century writers influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

Understandably, something less than the fragmented division that belonging of Bradley's case has a preference, voiced much earlier by the German philosopher, mathematician and polymath was Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), for categorical monadic properties over relations. He was particularly troubled by the relation between that which ids known and the more that knows it. In philosophy, the Romantics took from the German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) both the emphasis on free-will and the doctrine that reality is ultimately spiritual, with nature itself a mirror of the human soul. To fix upon one among alternatives as the one to be taken, Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) foregathers nature of becoming a creative spirit whose aspiration is ever further and more to completed self-realization. Although a movement of more general to naturalized imperative. Romanticism drew on the same intellectual and emotional resources as German idealism was increasingly culminating in the philosophy of Hegal (1770-1831) and of absolute idealism.

Being such in comparison with nature may include (1) that which is deformed or grotesque, or fails to achieve its proper form or function, or just the statistically uncommon or unfamiliar, (2) the supernatural, or th world of gods and invisible agencies, (3) the world of rationality and intelligence, conceived of as distinct from the biological and physical order, (4) that which is manufactured and artefactual, or the product of human invention, and (5) related to it, the world of convention and artifice.

Different conceptions of nature continue to have ethical overtones, for example, the conception of ‘nature red in tooth and claw' often provide a justification for aggressive personal and political relations, or the idea that it is a women's nature to be one thing or another, as taken to be a justification for differential social expectations. The term functions as a fig-leaf for a particular set of stereotype, and is a proper target of much ‘feminist' writing.

This brings to question, that most of all ethics are contributively distributed as an understanding for which a dynamic function in and among the problems that are affiliated with human desire and needs the achievements of happiness, or the distribution of goods. The central problem specific to thinking about the environment is the independent value to place on ‘such-things' as preservation of species, or protection of the wilderness. Such protection can be supported as a mans to ordinary human ends, for instance, when animals are regarded as future sources of medicines or other benefits. Nonetheless, many would want to claim a non-utilitarian, absolute value for the existence of wild things and wild places. It is in their value that thing consist. They put u in our proper place, and failure to appreciate this value is not only an aesthetic failure but one of due humility and reverence, a moral disability. The problem is one of expressing this value, and mobilizing it against utilitarian agents for developing natural areas and exterminating species, more or less at will.

Many concerns and disputed cluster around the idea associated with the term ‘substance'. The substance of a thin may be considered in: (1) Its essence, or that which makes it what it is. This will ensure that the substance of a thing is that which remains through change in properties. Again, in Aristotle, this essence becomes more than just the matter, but a unity of matter and form. (2) That which can exist by itself, or does not need a subject for existence, in the way that properties need objects, hence (3) that which bears properties, as a substance is then the subject of predication, that about which things are said as opposed to the things said about it. Substance in the last two senses stands opposed to modifications such as quantity, quality, relations, etc. it is hard to keep this set of ideas distinct from the doubtful notion of a substratum, something distinct from any of its properties, and hence, as an incapable characterization. The notion of substances tend to disappear in empiricist thought in fewer of the sensible questions of things with the notion of that in which they infer of giving way to an empirical notion of their regular occurrence. However, this is in turn is problematic, since it only makes sense to talk of the occurrence of instance of qualities, not of quantities themselves. So the problem of what it is for a value quality to be the instance that remains.

Metaphysics inspired by modern science tends to reject the concept of substance in favour of concepts such as that of a field or a process, each of which may seem to provide a better example of a fundamental physical category.

It must be spoken of a concept that is deeply embedded in 18th century aesthetics, but deriving from the 1st century rhetorical treatise On the Sublime, by Longinus. The sublime is great, fearful, noble, calculated to arouse sentiments of pride and majesty, as well as awe and sometimes terror. According to Alexander Gerard's writing in 1759, ‘When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that objects, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep silent wonder, and administration': It finds such a difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of its object, as enliven and invigorates which this occasions, it sometimes images itself present in every part of the sense which it contemplates, and from the sense of this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity.

In Kant's aesthetic theory the sublime ‘raises the soul above the height of vulgar complacency'. We experience the vast spectacles of nature as ‘absolutely great' and of irresistible might and power. This perception is fearful, but by conquering this fear, and by regarding as small ‘those things of which we are wont to be solicitous' we quicken our sense of moral freedom. So we turn the experience of frailty and impotence into one of our true, inward moral freedom as the mind triumphs over nature, and it is this triumph of reason that is truly sublime. Kant thus paradoxically places our sense of the sublime in an awareness of ourselves as transcending nature, than in an awareness of ourselves as a frail and insignificant part of it.

Nevertheless, the doctrine that all relations are internal was a cardinal thesis of absolute idealism, and a central point of attack by the British philosophers George Edward Moore (1873-1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). It is a kind of ‘essentialism', stating that if two things stand in some relationship, then they could not be what they are, did they not do so, if, for instance, I am wearing a hat mow, then when we imagine a possible situation that we would be got to describe as my not wearing the hat now, we would strictly not be imaging as one and the hat, but only some different individual.

The countering partitions a doctrine that bears some resemblance to the metaphysically based view of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), that if a person had any other attributes that the ones he has, he would not have been the same person. Leibniz thought that when asked hat would have happened if Peter had not denied Christ. That being that if I am asking what would have happened if Peter had not been Peter, denying Christ is contained in the complete notion of Peter. But he allowed that by the name ‘Peter' might be understood as ‘what is involved in those attributes [of Peter] from which the denial does not follow'. In order that we are held accountable to allow of external relations, in that these being relations which individuals could have or not depending upon contingent circumstances. The relations of ideas is used by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) in the First Enquiry of Theoretical Knowledge. All the objects of human reason or enquiring naturally, be divided into two kinds: To unit all the , ‘relations of ideas' and ‘matter of fact ‘ (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) the terms reflect the belief that any thing that can be known dependently must be internal to the mind, and hence transparent to us.

In Hume, objects of knowledge are divided into matter of fact (roughly empirical things known by means of impressions) and the relation of ideas. The contrast, also called "Hume's Fork', is a version of the speculative deductivity distinction, but reflects the 17th and early 18th centauries behind that the deductivity is established by chains of infinite certainty as comparable to ideas. It is extremely important that in the period between Descartes and J.S. Mill that a demonstration is not, but only a chain of ‘intuitive' comparable ideas, whereby a principle or maxim can be established by reason alone. It ids in this sense that the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who believed that theological and moral principles are capable of demonstration, and Hume denies that they are, and also denies that scientific enquiries proceed in demonstrating its results.

A mathematical proof is formally inferred as to an argument that is used to show the truth of a mathematical assertion. In modern mathematics, a proof begins with one or more statements called premises and demonstrates, using the rules of logic, that if the premises are true then a particular conclusion must also be true.

The accepted methods and strategies used to construct a convincing mathematical argument have evolved since ancient times and continue to change. Consider the Pythagorean theorem, named after the 5th century Bc Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, which states that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Many early civilizations considered this theorem true because it agreed with their observations in practical situations. But the early Greeks, among others, realized that observation and commonly held opinion do not guarantee mathematical truth. For example, before the 5th century Bc it was widely believed that all lengths could be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. But an unknown Greek mathematician proved that this was not true by showing that the length of the diagonal of a square with an area of 1 is the irrational number Ã.

The Greek mathematician Euclid laid down some of the conventions central to modern mathematical proofs. His book The Elements, written about 300 Bc, contains many proofs in the fields of geometry and algebra. This book illustrates the Greek practice of writing mathematical proofs by first clearly identifying the initial assumptions and then reasoning from them in a logical way in order to obtain a desired conclusion. As part of such an argument, Euclid used results that had already been shown to be true, called theorems, or statements that were explicitly acknowledged to be self-evident, called axioms; this practice continues today.

In the 20th century, proofs have been written that are so complex that no one person understands every argument used in them. In 1976, a computer was used to complete the proof of the four-colour theorem. This theorem states that four colours are sufficient to colour any map in such a way that regions with a common boundary line have different colours. The use of a computer in this proof inspired considerable debate in the mathematical community. At issue was whether a theorem can be considered proven if human beings have not actually checked every detail of the proof.

The study of the relations of deductibility among sentences in a logical calculus which benefits the prof theory. Deductibility is defined purely syntactically, that is, without reference to the intended interpretation of the calculus. The subject was founded by the mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) in the hope that strictly finitary methods would provide a way of proving the consistency of classical mathematics, but the ambition was torpedoed by Gödel's second incompleteness theorem.

What is more, the use of a model to test for consistencies in an ‘axiomatized system' which is older than modern logic. Descartes' algebraic interpretation of Euclidean geometry provides a way of showing that if the theory of real numbers is consistent, so is the geometry. Similar representation had been used by mathematicians in the 19th century, for example to show that if Euclidean geometry is consistent, so are various non-Euclidean geometries. Model theory is the general study of this kind of procedure: The ‘proof theory' studies relations of deductibility between formulae of a system, but once the notion of an interpretation is in place we can ask whether a formal system meets certain conditions. In particular, can it lead us from sentences that are true under some interpretation? And if a sentence is true under all interpretations, is it also a theorem of the system? We can define a notion of validity (a formula is valid if it is true in all interpret rations) and semantic consequence (a formula ‘B' is a semantic consequence of a set of formulae, written {A1 . . . An} B, if it is true in all interpretations in which they are true) Then the central questions for a calculus will be whether all and only its theorems are valid, and whether {A1 . . . An} B if and only if {A1 . . . An} B. There are the questions of the soundness and completeness of a formal system. For the propositional calculus this turns into the question of whether the proof theory delivers as theorems all and only ‘tautologies'. There are many axiomatizations of the propositional calculus that are consistent and complete. The mathematical logician Kurt Gödel (1906-78) proved in 1929 that the first-order predicate under every interpretation is a theorem of the calculus.

The Euclidean geometry is the greatest example of the pure ‘axiomatic method', and as such had incalculable philosophical influence as a paradigm of rational certainty. It had no competition until the 19th century when it was realized that the fifth axiom of his system (parallel lines never meet) could be denied without inconsistency, leading to Riemannian spherical geometry. The significance of Riemannian geometry lies in its use and extension of both Euclidean geometry and the geometry of surfaces, leading to a number of generalized differential geometries. Its most important effect was that it made a geometrical application possible for some major abstractions of tensor analysis, leading to the pattern and concepts for general relativity later used by Albert Einstein in developing his theory of relativity. Riemannian geometry is also necessary for treating electricity and magnetism in the framework of general relativity. The fifth chapter of Euclid's Elements, is attributed to the mathematician Eudoxus, and contains a precise development of the real number, work which remained unappreciated until rediscovered in the 19th century.

The Axiom, in logic and mathematics, is a basic principle that is assumed to be true without proof. The use of axioms in mathematics stems from the ancient Greeks, most probably during the 5th century Bc, and represents the beginnings of pure mathematics as it is known today. Examples of axioms are the following: 'No sentence can be true and false at the same time' (the principle of contradiction); 'If equals are added to equals, the sums are equal'. 'The whole is greater than any of its parts'. Logic and pure mathematics begin with such unproved assumptions from which other propositions (theorems) are derived. This procedure is necessary to avoid circularity, or an infinite regression in reasoning. The axioms of any system must be consistent with one another, that is, they should not lead to contradictions. They should be independent in the sense that they cannot be derived from one another. They should also be few in number. Axioms have sometimes been interpreted as self-evident truths. The present tendency is to avoid this claim and simply to assert that an axiom is assumed to be true without proof in the system of which it is a part.

The terms 'axiom' and 'postulate' are often used synonymously. Sometimes the word axiom is used to refer to basic principles that are assumed by every deductive system, and the term postulate is used to refer to first principles peculiar to a particular system, such as Euclidean geometry. Infrequently, the word axiom is used to refer to first principles in logic, and the term postulate is used to refer to first principles in mathematics.

The applications of game theory are wide-ranging and account for steadily growing interest in the subject. Von Neumann and Morgenstern indicated the immediate utility of their work on mathematical game theory by linking it with economic behaviour. Models can be developed, in fact, for markets of various commodities with differing numbers of buyers and sellers, fluctuating values of supply and demand, and seasonal and cyclical variations, as well as significant structural differences in the economies concerned. Here game theory is especially relevant to the analysis of conflicts of interest in maximizing profits and promoting the widest distribution of goods and services. Equitable division of property and of inheritance is another area of legal and economic concern that can be studied with the techniques of game theory.

In the social sciences, n-person game theory has interesting uses in studying, for example, the distribution of power in legislative procedures. This problem can be interpreted as a three-person game at the congressional level involving vetoes of the president and votes of representatives and senators, analysed in terms of successful or failed coalitions to pass a given bill. Problems of majority rule and individual decision making are also amenable to such study.

Sociologists have developed an entire branch of game theory devoted to the study of issues involving group decision making. Epidemiologists also make use of game theory, especially with respect to immunization procedures and methods of testing a vaccine or other medication. Military strategists turn to game theory to study conflicts of interest resolved through 'battles' where the outcome or payoff of a given war game is either victory or defeat. Usually, such games are not examples of zero-sum games, for what one player loses in terms of lives and injuries is not won by the victor. Some uses of game theory in analyses of political and military events have been criticized as a dehumanizing and potentially dangerous oversimplification of necessarily complicating factors. Analysis of economic situations is also usually more complicated than zero-sum games because of the production of goods and services within the play of a given 'game'.

All is the same in the classical theory of the syllogism, a term in a categorical proposition is distributed if the proposition entails any proposition obtained from it by substituting a term denoted by the original. For example, in ‘all dogs bark' the term ‘dogs' is distributed, since it entails ‘all terriers bark', which is obtained from it by a substitution. In ‘Not all dogs bark', the same term is not distributed, since it may be true while ‘not all terriers bark' is false.

When a representation of one system by another is usually more familiar, in and for itself, that those extended in representation that their workings are supposed analogous to that of the first. This one might model the behaviour of a sound wave upon that of waves in water, or the behaviour of a gas upon that to a volume containing moving billiard balls. While nobody doubts that models have a useful ‘heuristic' role in science, there has been intense debate over whether a good model, or whether an organized structure of laws from which it can be deduced and suffices for scientific explanation. As such, the debate of topic was inaugurated by the French physicist Pierre Marie Maurice Duhem (1861-1916), in ‘The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory' (1954) by which Duhem's conception of science is that it is simply a device for calculating as science provides deductive system that is systematic, economical, and predictive, but not that represents the deep underlying nature of reality. Steadfast and holding of its contributive thesis that in isolation, and since other auxiliary hypotheses will always be needed to draw empirical consequences from it. The Duhem thesis implies that refutation is a more complex matter than might appear. It is sometimes framed as the view that a single hypothesis may be retained in the face of any adverse empirical evidence, if we prepared to make modifications elsewhere in our system, although strictly speaking this is a stronger thesis, since it may be psychologically impossible to make consistent revisions in a belief system to accommodate, say, the hypothesis that there is a hippopotamus in the room when visibly there is not.

Primary and secondary qualities are the division associated with the 17th-century rise of modern science, wit h its recognition that the fundamental explanatory properties of things that are not the qualities that perception most immediately concerns. There latter are the secondary qualities, or immediate sensory qualities, including colour, taste, smell, felt warmth or texture, and sound. The primary properties are less tied to there deliverance of one particular sense, and include the size, shape, and motion of objects. In Robert Boyle (1627-92) and John Locke (1632-1704) the primary qualities are scientifically tractable, objective qualities essential to anything material, are of a minimal listing of size, shape, and mobility, i.e., the state of being at rest or moving. Locke sometimes adds number, solidity, texture (where this is thought of as the structure of a substance, or way in which it is made out of atoms). The secondary qualities are the powers to excite particular sensory modifications in observers. Once, again, that Locke himself thought in terms of identifying these powers with the texture of objects that, according to corpuscularian science of the time, were the basis of an object's causal capacities. The ideas of secondary qualities are sharply different from these powers, and afford us no accurate impression of them. For Renè Descartes (1596-1650), this is the basis for rejecting any attempt to think of knowledge of external objects as provided by the senses. But in Locke our ideas of primary qualities do afford us an accurate notion of what shape, size,. And mobility are. In English-speaking philosophy the first major discontent with the division was voiced by the Irish idealist George Berkeley (1685-1753), who probably took for a basis of his attack from Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), who in turn cites the French critic Simon Foucher (1644-96). Modern thought continues to wrestle with the difficulties of thinking of colour, taste, smell, warmth, and sound as real or objective properties to things independent of us.

Continuing as such, is the doctrine advocated by the American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), in that different possible worlds are to be thought of as existing exactly as this one does. Thinking in terms of possibilities is thinking of real worlds where things are different. The view has been charged with making it impossible to see why it is good to save the child from drowning, since there is still a possible world in which she (or her counterpart) drowned, and from the standpoint of the universe it should make no difference which world is actual. Critics also charge either that the notion fails to fit with a coherent theory lf how we know about possible worlds, or with a coherent theory of why we are interested in them, but Lewis denied that any other way of interpreting modal statements is tenable.

The proposal set forth that characterizes the ‘modality' of a proposition as the notion for which it is true or false. The most important division is between propositions true of necessity, and those true as things are: Necessary as opposed to contingent propositions. Other qualifiers sometimes called ‘modal' include the tense indicators, ‘it will be the case that ‘p', or ‘it was the case that ‘p', and there are affinities between the ‘deontic' indicators, ‘it ought to be the case that ‘p', or ‘it is permissible that ‘p', and the of necessity and possibility.

The aim of a logic is to make explicit the rules by which inferences may be drawn, than to study the actual reasoning processes that people use, which may or may not conform to those rules. In the case of deductive logic, if we ask why we need to obey the rules, the most general form of answer is that if we do not we contradict ourselves(or, strictly speaking, we stand ready to contradict ourselves. Someone failing to draw a conclusion that follows from a set of premises need not be contradicting him or herself, but only failing to notice something. However, he or she is not defended against adding the contradictory conclusion to his or fer set of beliefs.) There is no equally simple answer in the case of inductive logic, which is in general a less robust subject, but the aim will be to find reasoning such hat anyone failing to conform to it will have improbable beliefs. Traditional logic dominated the subject until the 19th century., and has become increasingly recognized in the 20th century, in that finer work that were done within that tradition, but syllogistic reasoning is now generally regarded as a limited special case of the form of reasoning that can be reprehend within the promotion and predated values, these form the heart of modern logic, as their central notions or qualifiers, variables, and functions were the creation of the German mathematician Gottlob Frége, who is recognized as the father of modern logic, although his treatment of a logical system as an abreact mathematical structure, or algebraic, has been heralded by the English mathematician and logician George Boole (1815-64), his pamphlet The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) pioneered the algebra of classes. The work was made of in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854). Boole also published many works in our mathematics, and on the theory of probability. His name is remembered in the title of Boolean algebra, and the algebraic operations he investigated are denoted by Boolean operations.

The syllogistic, or categorical syllogism is the inference of one proposition from two premises. For example is, ‘all horses have tails, and things with tails are four legged, so all horses are four legged. Each premise has one term in common with the other premises. The term that ds not occur in the conclusion is called the middle term. The major premise of the syllogism is the premise containing the predicate of the contraction (the major term). And the minor premise contains its subject (the minor term). So the first premise of the example in the minor premise the second the major term. So the first premise of the example is the minor premise, the second the major premise and ‘having a tail' is the middle term. This enable syllogisms that there of a classification, that according to the form of the premises and the conclusions. The other classification is by figure, or way in which the middle term is placed or way in within the middle term is placed in the premise.

Although the theory of the syllogism dominated logic until the 19th century, it remained a piecemeal affair, able to deal with only relations valid forms of valid forms of argument. There have subsequently been reargued actions attempting, but in general it has been eclipsed by the modern theory of quantification, the predicate calculus is the heart of modern logic, having proved capable of formalizing the calculus rationing processes of modern mathematics and science. In a first-order predicate calculus the variables range over objects: In a higher-order calculus the may range over predicate and functions themselves. The fist-order predicated calculus with identity includes ‘=' as primitive (undefined) expression: In a higher-order calculus I t may be defined by law that = y iff ( F)(F Fy), which gives grater expressive power for less complexity.

Modal logic was of great importance historically, particularly in the light of the deity, but was not a central topic of modern logic in its gold period as the beginning of the 20th century. It was, however, revived by the American logician and philosopher Irving Lewis (1883-1964), although he wrote extensively on most central philosophical topis, he is remembered principally as a critic of the intentional nature of modern logic, and as the founding father of modal logic. His two independent proofs showing that from a contradiction anything follows a relevance logic, using a notion of entailment stronger than that of strict implication.

The imparting information has been conduced or carried out of the prescribed procedures, as impeding of something that tajes place in the chancing encounter out to be to enter ons's mind may from time to time occasion of various doctrines concerning th necessary properties, ;east of mention, by adding to a prepositional or predicated calculus two operator, and (sometimes written ‘N' and ‘M'),meaning necessarily and possible, respectfully. These like ‘p p and p p will be wanted. Controversial these include p p (if a proposition is necessary,. It its necessarily, characteristic of a system known as S4) and p p (if as preposition is possible, it its necessarily possible, characteristic of the system known as S5). The classical modal theory for modal logic, due to the American logician and philosopher (1940-) and the Swedish logician Sig Kanger, involves valuing prepositions not true or false simpiciter, but as true or false at possible worlds with necessity then corresponding to truth in all worlds, and possibility to truth in some world. Various different systems of modal logic result from adjusting the accessibility relation between worlds.

In Saul Kripke, gives the classical modern treatment of the topic of reference, both clarifying the distinction between names and definite description, and opening te door to many subsequent attempts to understand the notion of reference in terms of a causal link between the use of a term and an original episode of attaching a name to the subject.

One of the three branches into which ‘semiotic' is usually divided, the study of semantical meaning of words, and the relation of signs to the degree to which the designs are applicable. In that, in formal studies, a semantics is provided for a formal language when an interpretation of ‘model' is specified. However, a natural language comes ready interpreted, and the semantic problem is not that of specification but of understanding the relationship between terms of various categories (names, descriptions, predicate, adverbs . . . ) and their meaning. An influential proposal by attempting to provide a truth definition for the language, which will involve giving a full structure of different kinds have on the truth conditions of sentences containing them.

Holding that the basic casse of reference is the relation between a name and the persons or object which it names. The philosophical problems include trying to elucidate that relation, to understand whether other semantic relations, such s that between a predicate and the property it expresses, or that between a description an what it describes, or that between myself or the word ‘I', are examples of the same relation or of very different ones. A great deal of modern work on this was stimulated by the American logician Saul Kripke's, Naming and Necessity (1970). It would also be desirable to know whether we can refer to such things as objects and how to conduct the debate about each and issue. A popular approach, following Gottlob Frége, is to argue that the fundamental unit of analysis should be the whole sentence. The reference of a term becomes a derivative notion it is whatever it is that defines the term's contribution to the trued condition of the whole sentence. There need be nothing further to say about it, given that we have a way of understanding the attribution of meaning or truth-condition to sentences. Other approach, searching for a more substantive possibly that causality or psychological or social constituents are pronounced between words and things.

However, following Ramsey and the Italian mathematician G. Peano (1858-1932), it has been customary to distinguish logical paradoxes that depend upon a notion of reference or truth (semantic notions) such as those of the ‘Liar family,, Berry, Richard, etc. form the purely logical paradoxes in which no such notions are involved, such as Russell's paradox, or those of Canto and Burali-Forti. Paradoxes of the fist type sem to depend upon an element of self-reference, in which a sentence is about itself, or in which a phrase refers to something about itself, or in which a phrase refers to something defined by a set of phrases of which it is itself one. It is to feel that this element is responsible for the contradictions, although self-reference itself is often benign (for instance, the sentence ‘All English sentences should have a verb', includes itself happily in the domain of sentences it is talking about), so the difficulty lies in forming a condition that existence only pathological self-reference. Paradoxes of the second kind then need a different treatment. Whilst the distinction is convenient. In allowing set theory to proceed by circumventing the latter paradoxes by technical mans, even when there is no solution to the semantic paradoxes, it may be a way of ignoring the similarities between the two families. There is still th possibility that while there is no agreed solution to the semantic paradoxes, our understand of Russell's paradox may be imperfect as well.

Truth and falsity are two classical truth-values that a statement, proposition or sentence can take, as it is supposed in classical (two-valued) logic, that each statement has one of these values, and non has both. A statement is then false if and only if it is not true. The basis of this scheme is that to each statement there corresponds a determinate truth condition, or way the world must be for it to be true: If this condition obtains the statement is true, and otherwise false. Statements may indeed be felicitous or infelicitous in other dimensions (polite, misleading, apposite, witty, etc.) but truth is the central normative notion governing assertion. Considerations o vagueness may introduce greys into this black-and-white scheme. For the issue to be true, any suppressed premise or background framework of thought necessary make an agreement valid, or a position tenable, a proposition whose truth is necessary for either the truth or the falsity of another statement. Thus if ‘p' presupposes ‘q', ‘q' must be true for ‘p' to be either true or false. In the theory of knowledge, the English philologer and historian George Collingwood (1889-1943), announces hat any proposition capable of truth or falsity stand on bed of ‘absolute presuppositions' which are not properly capable of truth or falsity, since a system of thought will contain no way of approaching such a question (a similar idea later voiced by Wittgenstein in his work On Certainty). The introduction of presupposition therefore mans that either another of a truth value is fond, ‘intermediate' between truth and falsity, or the classical logic is preserved, but it is impossible to tell whether a particular sentence empresses a preposition that is a candidate for truth and falsity, without knowing more than the formation rules of the language. Each suggestion carries coss, and there is some consensus that at least who where definite descriptions are involved, examples equally given by regarding the overall sentence as false as the existence claim fails, and explaining the data that the English philosopher Frederick Strawson (1919-) relied upon as the effects of ‘implicature'.

Views about the meaning of terms will often depend on classifying the implicature of sayings involving the terms as implicatures or as genuine logical implications of what is said. Implicatures may be divided into two kinds: Conversational implicatures of the two kinds and the more subtle category of conventional implicatures. A term may as a matter of convention carry an implicature, thus one of the relations between ‘he is poor and honest' and ‘he is poor but honest' is that they have the same content (are true in just the same conditional) but the second has implicatures (that the combination is surprising or significant) that the first lacks.

It is, nonetheless, that we find in classical logic a proposition that may be true or false,. In that, if the former, it is said to take the truth-value true, and if the latter the truth-value false. The idea behind the terminological phrases is the analogues between assigning a propositional variable one or other of these values, as is done in providing an interpretation for a formula of the propositional calculus, and assigning an object as the value of any other variable. Logics with intermediate value are called ‘many-valued logics'.

Nevertheless, an existing definition of the predicate' . . . is true' for a language that satisfies convention ‘T', the material adequately condition laid down by Alfred Tarski, born Alfred Teitelbaum (1901-83), whereby his methods of ‘recursive' definition, enabling us to say for each sentence what it is that its truth consists in, but giving no verbal definition of truth itself. The recursive definition or the truth predicate of a language is always provided in a ‘metalanguage', Tarski is thus committed to a hierarchy of languages, each with its associated, but different truth-predicate. Whist this enables the approach to avoid the contradictions of paradoxical contemplations, it conflicts with the idea that a language should be able to say everything that there is be said, and other approaches have become increasingly important.

So, that the truth condition of a statement is the condition for which the world must meet if the statement is to be true. To know this condition is equivalent to knowing the meaning of the statement. Although this sounds as if it gives a solid anchorage for meaning, some of the securities disappear when it turns out that the truth condition can only be defined by repeating the very same statement: The truth condition of ‘now is white' is that ‘snow is white', the truth condition of ‘Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded', is that ‘Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded'. It is disputed whether this element of running-on-the-spot disqualifies truth conditions from playing the central role in a substantives theory of meaning. Truth-conditional theories of meaning are sometimes opposed by the view that to know the meaning of a statement is to be able to use it in a network of inferences.

Taken to be the view, inferential semantics take on the role of sentence in inference give a more important key to their meaning than this ‘external' relations to things in the world. The meaning of a sentence becomes its place in a network of inferences that it legitimates. Also known as functional role semantics, procedural semantics, or conception to the coherence theory of truth, and suffers from the same suspicion that it divorces meaning from any clar association with things in the world.

Moreover, a theory of semantic truth be that of the view if language is provided with a truth definition, there is a sufficient characterization of its concept of truth, as there is no further philosophical chapter to write about truth: There is no further philosophical chapter to write about truth itself or truth as shared across different languages. The view is similar to the disquotational theory.

The redundancy theory, or also known as the ‘deflationary view of truth' fathered by Gottlob Frége and the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903-30), who showed how the distinction between the semantic paradoses, such as that of the Liar, and Russell's paradox, made unnecessary the ramified type theory of Principia Mathematica, and the resulting axiom of reducibility. By taking all the sentences affirmed in a scientific theory that use some terms e.g., quark, and to a considerable degree of replacing the term by a variable instead of saying that quarks have such-and-such properties, the Ramsey sentence says that there is something that has those properties. If the process is repeated for all of a group of the theoretical terms, the sentence gives ‘topic-neutral' structure of the theory, but removes any implication that we know what the terms so treated denote. It leaves open the possibility of identifying the theoretical item with whatever it is that best fits the description provided. However, it was pointed out by the Cambridge mathematician Newman, that if the process is carried out for all except the logical bones of a theory, then by the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, the result will be interpretable, and the content of the theory may reasonably be felt to have been lost.

All the while, both Frége and Ramsey are agreed that the essential claim is that the predicate' . . . is true' does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophical enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the points (1) that ‘it is true that ‘p' says no more nor less than ‘p' (hence, redundancy): (2) that in less direct contexts, such as ‘everything he said was true', or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions are true', the predicate functions as a device enabling us to generalize than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true preposition. For example, the second ma y translate as ‘( p, q)(p & p q q)' where there is no use of a notion of truth.

There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, nevertheless, they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as ‘science aims at the truth', or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse'. Postmodern writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms. Along with a discredited ‘objective' conception of truth. Perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed without mention of truth: Science wants it to be so that whatever science holds that ‘p', then ‘p'. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p', when ‘not-p'.

Something that tends of something in addition of content, or coming by way to justify such a position can very well be more that in addition to several reasons, as to bring in or join of something might that there be more so as to a larger combination for us to consider the simplest formulation , is that the claim that expression of the form ‘S is true' mean the same as expression of the form ‘S'. Some philosophers dislike the ideas of sameness of meaning, and if this I disallowed, then the claim is that the two forms are equivalent in any sense of equivalence that matters. This is, it makes no difference whether people say ‘Dogs bark' id Tue, or whether they say, ‘dogs bark'. In the former representation of what they say of the sentence ‘Dogs bark' is mentioned, but in the later it appears to be used, of the claim that the two are equivalent and needs careful formulation and defence. On the face of it someone might know that ‘Dogs bark' is true without knowing what it means (for instance, if he kids in a list of acknowledged truths, although he does not understand English), and tis is different from knowing that dogs bark. Disquotational theories are usually presented as versions of the ‘redundancy theory of truth'.

The relationship between a set of premises and a conclusion when the conclusion follows from the premise,. Many philosophers identify this with it being logically impossible that the premises should all be true, yet the conclusion false. Others are sufficiently impressed by the paradoxes of strict implication to look for a stranger relation, which would distinguish between valid and invalid arguments within the sphere of necessary propositions. The seraph for a strange notion is the field of relevance logic.

From a systematic theoretical point of view, we may imagine the process of evolution of an empirical science to be a continuous process of induction. Theories are evolved and are expressed in short compass as statements of as large number of individual observations in the form of empirical laws, from which the general laws can be ascertained by comparison. Regarded in this way, the development of a science bears some resemblance to the compilation of a classified catalogue. It is , a it were, a purely empirical enterprise.

But this point of view by no means embraces the whole of the actual process, for it slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science. As soon as a science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigators rather develops a system of thought which, in general, it is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a ‘theory'. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and is just here that the ‘truth' of the theory lies.

Corresponding to the same complex of empirical data, there may be several theories, which differ from one another to a considerable extent. But as regards the deductions from the theories which are capable of being tested, the agreement between the theories may be so complete, that it becomes difficult to find any deductions in which the theories differ from each other. As an example, a case of general interest is available in the province of biology, in the Darwinian theory of the development of species by selection in the struggle for existence, and in the theory of development which is based on the hypophysis of the hereditary transmission of acquired characters. THE Origin of Species was principally successful in marshalling the evidence for evolution, than providing a convincing mechanisms for genetic change. And Darwin himself remained open to the search for additional mechanisms, while also remaining convinced that natural selection was at the hart of it. It was only with the later discovery of the gene as the unit of inheritance that the synthesis known as ‘neo-Darwinism' became the orthodox theory of evolution in the life sciences.

In the 19th century the attempt to base ethical reasoning o the presumed facts about evolution, the movement is particularly associated with the English philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). The premise is that later elements in an evolutionary path are better than earlier ones: The application of this principle then requires seeing western society, laissez-faire capitalism, or some other object of approval, as more evolved than more ‘primitive' social forms. Neither the principle nor the applications command much respect. The version of evolutionary ethics called ‘social Darwinism' emphasises the struggle for natural selection, and draws the conclusion that we should glorify and assist such struggle, usually by enhancing competition and aggressive relations between people in society or between evolution and ethics has been re-thought in the light of biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection.

Once again, the psychology proven attempts are founded to evolutionary principles, in which a variety of higher mental functions may be adaptations, forced in response to selection pressures on the human populations through evolutionary time. Candidates for such theorizing include material and paternal motivations, capacities for love and friendship, the development of language as a signalling system cooperative and aggressive , our emotional repertoire, our moral and reactions, including the disposition to detect and punish those who cheat on agreements or who ‘free-ride' on =the work of others, our cognitive structures, nd many others. Evolutionary psychology goes hand-in-hand with neurophysiological evidence about the underlying circuitry in the brain which subserves the psychological mechanisms it claims to identify. The approach was foreshadowed by Darwin himself, and William James, as well as the sociology of E.O. Wilson. The term of use are applied, more or less aggressively, especially to explanations offered in Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

Another assumption that is frequently used to legitimate the real existence of forces associated with the invisible hand in neoclassical economics derives from Darwin's view of natural selection as a war-like competing between atomized organisms in the struggle for survival. In natural selection as we now understand it, cooperation appears to exist in complementary relation to competition. It is complementary relationships between such results that are emergent self-regulating properties that are greater than the sum of parts and that serve to perpetuate the existence of the whole.

According to E.O Wilson, the ‘human mind evolved to believe in the gods' and people ‘need a sacred narrative' to have a sense of higher purpose. Yet it id also clear that the ‘gods' in his view are merely human constructs and, therefore, there is no basis for dialogue between the world-view of science and religion. ‘Science for its part', said Wilson, ‘will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition and in time uncover the bedrock of the moral an religious sentiments. The eventual result of the competition between each of the other, will be the secularization of the human epic and of religion itself.

Man has come to the threshold of a state of consciousness, regarding his nature and his relationship to te Cosmos, in terms that reflect ‘reality'. By using the processes of nature as metaphor, to describe the forces by which it operates upon and within Man, we come as close to describing ‘reality' as we can within the limits of our comprehension. Men will be very uneven in their capacity for such understanding, which, naturally, differs for different ages and cultures, and develops and changes over the course of time. For these reasons it will always be necessary to use metaphor and myth to provide ‘comprehensible' guides to living. In thus way. Man's imagination and intellect play vital roles on his survival and evolution.

Since so much of life both inside and outside the study is concerned with finding explanations of things, it would be desirable to have a concept of what counts as a good explanation from bad. Under the influence of ‘logical positivist' approaches to the structure of science, it was felt that the criterion ought to be found in a definite logical relationship between the ‘exlanans' (that which does the explaining) and the explanandum (that which is to be explained). The approach culminated in the covering law model of explanation, or the view that an event is explained when it is subsumed under a law of nature, that is, its occurrence is deducible from the law plus a set of initial conditions. A law would itself be explained by being deduced from a higher-order or covering law, in the way that Johannes Kepler(or Keppler, 1571-1630), was by way of planetary motion that the laws were deducible from Newton's laws of motion. The covering law model may be adapted to include explanation by showing that something is probable, given a statistical law. Questions for the covering law model include querying for the covering law are necessary to explanation (we explain whether everyday events without overtly citing laws): Querying whether they are sufficient (it ma y not explain an event just to say that it is an example of the kind of thing that always happens). And querying whether a purely logical relationship is adapted to capturing the requirements we make of explanations. These may include, for instance, that we have a ‘feel' for what is happening, or that the explanation proceeds in terms of things that are familiar to us or unsurprising, or that we can give a model of what is going on, and none of these notions is captured in a purely logical approach. Recent work, therefore, has tended to stress the contextual and pragmatic elements in requirements for explanation, so that what counts as good explanation given one set of concerns may not do so given another.

The argument to the best explanation is the view that once we can select the best of any in something in explanations of an event, then we are justified in accepting it, or even believing it. The principle needs qualification, since something it is unwise to ignore the antecedent improbability of a hypothesis which would explain the data better than others, e.g., the best explanation of a coin falling heads 530 times in 1,000 tosses might be that it is biassed to give a probability of heads of 0.53 but it might be more sensible to suppose that it is fair, or to suspend judgement.

In a philosophy of language is considered as the general attempt to understand the components of a working language, the relationship th understanding speaker has to its elements, and the relationship they bear to the world. The subject therefore embraces the traditional division of semiotic into syntax, semantics, an d pragmatics. The philosophy of language thus mingles with the philosophy of mind, since it needs an account of what it is in our understanding that enables us to use language. It so mingles with the metaphysics of truth and the relationship between sign and object. Much as much is that the philosophy in the 20th century, has been informed by the belief that philosophy of language is the fundamental basis of all philosophical problems, in that language is the distinctive exercise of mind, and the distinctive way in which we give shape to metaphysical beliefs. Particular topics will include the problems of logical form,. And the basis of the division between syntax and semantics, as well as problems of understanding the number and nature of specifically semantic relationships such as meaning, reference, predication, and quantification. Pragmatics include that of speech acts, while problems of rule following and the indeterminacy of translation infect philosophies of both pragmatics and semantics.

On this conception, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions, and, yet, in a distinctive way the conception has remained central that those who offer opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it. The Concepcion of meaning s truth-conditions need not and should not be advanced as being in itself as complete account of meaning. For instance, one who understands a language must have some idea of the range of speech acts contextually performed by the various types of sentence in the language, and must have some idea of the insufficiencies of various kinds of speech act. The claim of the theorist of truth-conditions should rather be targeted on the notion of content: If indicative sentence differ in what they strictly and literally say, then this difference is fully accounted for by the difference in the truth-conditions.

The meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituent. This is just as a sentence of what it is for an expression to be semantically complex. It is one of th initial attractions of the conception of meaning truth-conditions tat it permits a smooth and satisfying account of th way in which the meaning of s complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituents. On the truth-conditional conception, to give the meaning of an expression is to state the contribution it makes to the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs. For singular terms - proper names, indexical, and certain pronouns - this is done by stating the reference of the terms in question. For predicates, it is done either by stating the conditions under which the predicate is true of arbitrary objects, or by stating th conditions under which arbitrary atomic sentences containing it are true. The meaning of a sentence-forming operator is given by stating its contribution to the truth-conditions of as complex sentence, as a function of he semantic values of the sentences on which it operates.

The theorist of truth conditions should insist that not every true statement about the reference of an expression is fit to be an axiom in a meaning-giving theory of truth for a language, such is the axiom: ‘London' refers to the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666, is a true statement about the reference of ‘London'. It is a consequent of a theory which substitutes this axiom for no different a term than of our simple truth theory that ‘London is beautiful' is true if and only if the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666 is beautiful. Since a subject can understand the name ‘London' without knowing that last-mentioned truth condition, this replacement axiom is not fit to be an axiom in a meaning-specifying truth theory. It is, of course, incumbent on a theorised meaning of truth conditions, to state in a way which does not presuppose any previous, non-truth conditional conception of meaning

Among the many challenges facing the theorist of truth conditions, two are particularly salient and fundamental. First, the theorist has to answer the charge of triviality or vacuity, second, the theorist must offer an account of what it is for a person's language to be truly describable by as semantic theory containing a given semantic axiom.

Since the content of a claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful' is true amounts to no more than the claim that Paris is beautiful, we can trivially describers understanding a sentence, if we wish, as knowing its truth-conditions, but this gives us no substantive account of understanding whatsoever. Something other than grasp of truth conditions must provide the substantive account. The charge rests upon what has been called the redundancy theory of truth, the theory which, somewhat more discriminatingly. Horwich calls the minimal theory of truth. Its conceptual representation that the concept of truth is exhausted by the fact that it conforms to the equivalence principle, the principle that for any proposition ‘p', it is true that ‘p' if and only if ‘p'. Many different philosophical theories of truth will, with suitable qualifications, accept that equivalence principle. The distinguishing feature of the minimal theory is its claim that the equivalence principle exhausts the notion of truth. It is now widely accepted, both by opponents and supporters of truth conditional theories of meaning, that it is inconsistent to accept both minimal theory of ruth and a truth conditional account of meaning. If the claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful' is true is exhausted by its equivalence to the claim that Paris is beautiful, it is circular to try of its truth conditions. The minimal theory of truth has been endorsed by the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Plumpton Ramsey (1903-30), and the English philosopher Jules Ayer, the later Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson. Horwich and - confusing and inconsistently if this article is correct - Frége himself. but is the minimal theory correct?

The minimal theory treats instances of the equivalence principle as definitional of truth for a given sentence, but in fact, it seems that each instance of the equivalence principle can itself be explained. The truths from which such an instance as: ‘London is beautiful' is true if and only if London is beautiful. This would be a pseudo-explanation if the fact that ‘London' refers to London consists in part in the fact that ‘London is beautiful' has the truth-condition it does. But it is very implausible, it is, after all, possible to understand the name ‘London' without understanding the predicate ‘is beautiful'.

Sometimes, however, the counterfactual conditional is known as subjunctive conditionals, insofar as a counterfactual conditional is a conditional of the form ‘if p were to happen q would', or ‘if p were to have happened q would have happened', where the supposition of ‘p' is contrary to the known fact that ‘not-p'. Such assertions are nevertheless, use=ful ‘if you broken the bone, the X-ray would have looked different', or ‘if the reactor were to fail, this mechanism wold click in' are important truths, even when we know that the bone is not broken or are certain that the reactor will not fail. It is arguably distinctive of laws of nature that yield counterfactuals (‘if the metal were to be heated, it would expand'), whereas accidentally true generalizations may not. It is clear that counterfactuals cannot be represented by the material implication of the propositional calculus, since that conditionals comes out true whenever ‘p' is false, so there would be no division between true and false counterfactuals.

Although the subjunctive form indicates a counterfactual, in many contexts it does not seem to matter whether we use a subjunctive form, or a simple conditional form: ‘If you run out of water, you will be in trouble' seems equivalent to ‘if you were to run out of water, you would be in trouble', in other contexts there is a big difference: ‘If Oswald did not kill Kennedy, someone else did' is clearly true, whereas ‘if Oswald had not killed Kennedy, someone would have' is most probably false.

The best-known modern treatment of counterfactuals is that of David Lewis, which evaluates them as true or false according to whether ‘q' is true in the ‘most similar' possible worlds to ours in which ‘p' is true. The similarity-ranking this approach needs has proved controversial, particularly since it may need to presuppose some notion of the same laws of nature, whereas art of the interest in counterfactuals is that they promise to illuminate that notion. There is a growing awareness tat the classification of conditionals is an extremely tricky business, and categorizing them as counterfactuals or not be of limited use.

The pronouncing of any conditional; preposition of the form ‘if p then q'. The condition hypothesizes, ‘p'. Its called the antecedent of the conditional, and ‘q' the consequent. Various kinds of conditional have been distinguished. The weaken in that of material implication, merely telling us that with not-p. or q. stronger conditionals include elements of modality, corresponding to the thought that ‘if p is true then q must be true'. Ordinary language is very flexible in its use of the conditional form, and there is controversy whether, yielding different kinds of conditionals with different meanings, or pragmatically, in which case there should be one basic meaning which case there should be one basic meaning, with surface differences arising from other implicatures.

Passively, there are many forms of Reliabilism. Just as there are many forms of ‘Foundationalism' and ‘coherence'. How is reliabilism related to these other two theories of justification? We usually regard it as a rival, and this is aptly so, in as far as Foundationalism and Coherentism traditionally focussed on purely evidential relations than psychological processes, but we might also offer Reliabilism as a deeper-level theory, subsuming some precepts of either Foundationalism or Coherentism. Foundationalism says that there are ‘basic' beliefs, which acquire justification without dependence on inference, Reliabilism might rationalize this indicating that reliable non-inferential processes have formed the basic beliefs. Coherence stresses the primary of systematicity in all doxastic decision-making. Reliabilism might rationalize this by pointing to increases in reliability that accrue from systematicity consequently, Reliabilism could complement Foundationalism and coherence than completed with them.

These examples make it seem likely that, if there is a criterion for what makes an alternate situation relevant that will save Goldman's claim about local reliability and knowledge. Will did not be simple. The interesting thesis that counts as a causal theory of justification, in the making of ‘causal theory' intended for the belief as it is justified in case it was produced by a type of process that is ‘globally' reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs that can be defined, to an acceptable approximation, as the proportion of the beliefs it produces, or would produce where it used as much as opportunity allows, that is true is sufficiently relializable. We have advanced variations of this view for both knowledge and justified belief, its first formulation of a reliability account of knowing appeared in the notation from F.P.Ramsey (1903-30). The theory of probability, he was the first to show how a ‘personalists theory' could be developed, based on a precise behavioural notion of preference and expectation. In the philosophy of language. Much of Ramsey's work was directed at saving classical mathematics from ‘intuitionism', or what he called the ‘Bolshevik menace of Brouwer and Weyl. In the theory of probability he was the first to show how we could develop some personalists theory, based on precise behavioural notation of preference and expectation. In the philosophy of language, Ramsey was one of the first thankers, which he combined with radical views of the function of many kinds of a proposition. Neither generalizations, nor causal propositions, nor those treating probability or ethics, describe facts, but each has a different specific function in our intellectual economy. Ramsey was one of the earliest commentators on the early work of Wittgenstein, and his continuing friendship that led to Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge and to philosophy in 1929.

Ramsey's sentence theory is the sentence generated by taking all the sentences affirmed in a scientific theory that use some term, e.g., ‘quark'. Replacing the term by a variable, and existentially quantifying into the result. Instead of saying that quarks have such-and-such properties, the Ramsey sentence says that there is something that has those properties. If we repeat the process for all of a group of the theoretical terms, the sentence gives the ‘topic-neutral' structure of the theory, but removes any implication that we know what the term so treated prove competent. It leaves open the possibility of identifying the theoretical item with whatever, but it is that best fits the description provided. Virtually, all theories of knowledge. Of course, share an externalist component in requiring truth as a condition for known in. Reliabilism goes further, however, in trying to capture additional conditions for knowledge by ways of a nomic, counterfactual or similar ‘external' relations between belief and truth. Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account of knowledge, primarily due to Dretshe (1971, 1981), A. I. Goldman (1976, 1986) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of this approach is that X's belief that ‘p' qualifies as knowledge just in case ‘X' believes ‘p', because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p's' being true, or because of a process or method that would not yield belief in ‘p' if ‘p' were not true. An enemy example, ‘X' would not have its current reasons for believing there is a telephone before it. Or would not come to believe this in the ways it does, thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantor of the belief's bing true. Determined to and the facts of counterfactual approach say that ‘X' knows that ‘p' only if there is no ‘relevant alternative' situation in which ‘p' is false but ‘X' would still believe that a proposition ‘p'; must be sufficient to eliminate all the alternatives too ‘p' where an alternative to a proposition ‘p' is a proposition incompatible with ‘p?'. That I, one's justification or evidence for ‘p' must be sufficient for one to know that every alternative too ‘p' is false. This element of our evolving thinking, sceptical arguments have exploited about which knowledge. These arguments call our attentions to alternatives that our evidence sustains itself with no elimination. The sceptic inquires to how we know that we are not seeing a cleverly disguised mule. While we do have some evidence against the likelihood of such as deception, intuitively knowing that we are not so deceived is not strong enough for ‘us'. By pointing out alternate but hidden points of nature, in that we cannot eliminate, and others with more general application, as dreams, hallucinations, etc. , The sceptic appears to show that every alternative is seldom. If ever, satisfied.

All the same, and without a problem, is noted by the distinction between the ‘in itself' and the; for itself' originated in the Kantian logical and epistemological distinction between a thing as it is in itself, and that thing as an appearance, or as it is for us. For Kant, the thing in itself is the thing as it is intrinsically, that is, the character of the thing apart from any relations in which it happens to stand. The thing for which, or as an appearance, is the thing in so far as it stands in relation to our cognitive faculties and other objects. ‘Now a thing in itself cannot be known through mere relations: and we may therefore conclude that since outer sense gives us nothing but mere relations, this sense can contain in its representation only the relation of an object to the subject, and not the inner properties of the object in itself'. Kant applies this same distinction to the subject's cognition of itself. Since the subject can know itself only in so far as it can intuit itself, and it can intuit itself only in terms of temporal relations, and thus as it is related to its' own self, it represents itself ‘as it appears to itself, not as it is'. Thus, the distinction between what the subject is in itself and hat it is for itself arises in Kant in so far as the distinction between what an object is in itself and what it is for a Knower is applied to the subject's own knowledge of itself.

Hegel (1770-1831) begins the transition of the epistemological distinct ion between what the subject is in itself and what it is for itself into an ontological distinction. Since, for Hegel, what is, s it is in fact ir in itself, necessarily involves relation, the Kantian distinction must be transformed. Taking his cue from the fact that, even for Kant, what the subject is in fact ir in itself involves a relation to itself, or seif-consciousness. Hegel suggests that the cognition of an entity in terms of such relations or self-relations do not preclude knowledge of the thing itself. Rather, what an entity is intrinsically, or in itself, is best understood in terms of the potentiality of that thing to enter specific explicit relations with itself. And, just as for consciousness to be explicitly itself is for it to be for itself by being in relation to itself, i.e., to be explicitly self-conscious, for-itself of any entity is that entity in so far as it is actually related to itself. The distinction between the entity in itself and the entity for itself is thus taken t o apply to every entity, and not only to the subject. For example, the seed of a plant is that plant in itself or implicitly, while the mature plant which involves actual relation among the plant's various organs is the plant ‘for itself'. In Hegel, then, the in itself/for itself distinction becomes universalized, in is applied to all entities, and not merely to conscious entities. In addition, the distinction takes on an ontological dimension. While the seed and the mature plant are one and the same entity, being in itself of the plan, or the plant as potential adult, in that an ontologically distinct commonality is in for itself on the plant, or the actually existing mature organism. At the same time, the distinction retains an epistemological dimension in Hegel, although its import is quite different from that of the Kantian distinction. To know a thing it is necessary to know both the actual, explicit self-relations which mark the thing (the being for itself of the thing) and the inherent simpler principle of these relations, or the being in itself of the thing. Real knowledge, for Hegel, thus consists in a knowledge of the thing as it is in and for itself.

Sartre's distinction between being in itself and being for itself, which is an entirely ontological distinction with minimal epistemological import, is descended from the Hegelian distinction. Sartre distinguishes between what it is for consciousness to be, i.e., being for itself, and the being of the transcendent being which is intended by consciousness, i.e., being in itself. What is it for consciousness to be, being for itself, is marked by self relation? Sartre posits a ‘pre-reflective Cogito', such that every consciousness of ‘ ' necessarily involves a ‘non-positional' consciousness of the consciousness of . While in Kant every subject is both in itself, i.e., as it is apart from its relations, and for itself in so far as it is related to itself, and for itself in so far as it is related to itself by appearing to itself, and in Hegel every entity can be considered as it is both in itself and for itself, in Sartre, to be self related or for itself is the distinctive ontological mark of consciousness, while to lack relations or to be in itself is the distinctive e ontological mark of non-conscious entities.

This conclusion conflicts with another strand in our thinking about knowledge, in that we know many things. Thus, there is a tension in our ordinary thinking about knowledge ~. We believe that knowledge is, in the sense indicated, an absolute concept and yet, we also believe that there are many instances of that concept.

If one finds absoluteness to be too central a component of our concept of knowledge to be relinquished, one could argue from the absolute character of knowledge to a sceptical conclusion (Unger, 1975). Most philosophers, however, have taken the other course, choosing to respond to the conflict by giving up, perhaps reluctantly, the absolute criterion. This latter response holds as sacrosanct our commonsense belief that we know many things (Pollock, 1979 and Chisholm, 1977). Each approach is subject to the criticism that it preserves one aspect of our ordinary thinking about knowledge at the expense of denying another. We can view the theory of relevant alternatives as an attempt to provide a more satisfactory response to this tension in our thinking about knowledge. It attempts to characterize knowledge in a way that preserves both our belief that knowledge is an absolute concept and our belief that we have knowledge.

Having to its recourse of knowledge, its cental questions include the origin of knowledge, the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so, the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error, the possibility of universal scepticism, and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from new conceptualizations of the world. All these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the natures of experience and meaning. Seeing epistemology is possible as dominated by two rival metaphors. One is that of a building or pyramid, built on foundations. In this conception it is the job of the philosopher to describe especially secure foundations, and to identify secure modes of construction, s that the resulting edifice can be shown to be sound. This metaphor of knowledge, and of a rationally defensible theory of confirmation and inference as a method of construction, as that knowledge must be regarded as a structure risen upon secure, certain foundations. These are found in some formidable combinations of experience and reason, with different schools (empiricism, rationalism) emphasizing the role of one over that of the others. Foundationalism was associated with the ancient Stoics, and in the modern era with Descartes (1596-1650). Who discovered his foundations in the ‘clear and distinct' ideas of reason? Its main opponent is Coherentism, or the view that a body of propositions mas be known without a foundation in certainty, but by their interlocking strength, than as a crossword puzzle may be known to have been solved correctly even if each answer, taken individually, admits of uncertainty. Difficulties at this point led the logical passivists to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation, and justly philander with the coherence theory of truth. It is widely accepted that trying to make the connection between thought and experience through basic sentences depends on an untenable ‘myth of the given'.

Still, of the other metaphor, is that of a boat or fuselage, that has no foundation but owes its strength to the stability given by its interlocking parts. This rejects the idea of a basis in the ‘given', favours ideas of coherence and holism, but finds it harder to ward off scepticism. In spite of these concerns, the problem, least of mention, is of defining knowledge in terms of true beliefs plus some favoured relations between the believer and the facts that began with Plato's view in the "Theaetetus" that knowledge is true belief, and some logos.` Due of its natural epistemology, the enterprising of studying the actual formation of knowledge by human beings, without aspiring to make evidently those processes as rational, or proof against ‘scepticism' or even apt to yield the truth. Natural epistemology would therefore blend into the psychology of learning and the study of episodes in the history of science. The scope for ‘external' or philosophical reflection of the kind that might result in scepticism or its refutation is markedly diminished. Nonetheless, the terms are modern, they however distinguish exponents of the approach that include Aristotle, Hume, and J. S. Mills.

The task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and to unmask counterfeits. Although this belief lay behind much positivist philosophy of science, few philosophers at present, subscribe to it. It places too well a confidence in the possibility of a purely a prior ‘first philosophy', or standpoint beyond that of the working practitioners, from which they can measure their best efforts as good or bad. This point of view now seems that many philosophers are acquainted with the affordance of fantasy. The more modest of tasks that we actually adopt at various historical stages of investigation into different areas with the aim not so much of criticizing but more of systematization, in the presuppositions of a particular field at a particular tie. There is still a role for local methodological disputes within the community investigators of some phenomenon, with one approach charging that another is unsound or unscientific, but logic and philosophy will not, on the modern view, provide an independent arsenal of weapons for such battles, which indeed often come to seem more like political bids for ascendancy within a discipline.

This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connection between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge processed through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwin's theory of biological natural selection. There is a widespread misconception that evolution proceeds according to some plan or direct, put it has neither, and the role of chance ensures that its future course will be unpredictable. Random variations in individual organisms create tiny differences in their Darwinian fitness. Some individuals have more offsprings than others, and the characteristics that increased their fitness thereby become more prevalent in future generations. Once upon a time, at least a mutation occurred in a human population in tropical Africa that changed the haemoglobin molecule in a way that provided resistance to malaria. This enormous advantage caused the new gene to spread, with the unfortunate consequence that sickle-cell anaemia came to exist.

Chance can influence the outcome at each stage: First, in the creation of genetic mutation, second, in whether the bearer lives long enough to show its effects, thirdly, in chance events that influence the individual's actual reproductive success, and fourth, in wether a gene even if favoured in one generation, is, happenstance, eliminated in the next, and finally in the many unpredictable environmental changes that will undoubtedly occur in the history of any group of organisms. As Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has so vividly expressed that process over again, the outcome would surely be different. Not only might there not be humans, there might not even be anything like mammals.

We will often emphasis the elegance of traits shaped by natural selection, but the common idea that nature creates perfection needs to be analysed carefully. The extent to which evolution achieves perfection depends on exactly what you mean. If you mean "Does natural selections always take the best path for the long-term welfare of a species?" The answer is no. That would require adaption by group selection, and this is, unlikely. If you mean "Does natural selection creates every adaption that would be valuable?" The answer again, is no. For instance, some kinds of South American monkeys can grasp branches with their tails. The trick would surely also be useful to some African species, but, simply because of bad luck, none have it. Some combination of circumstances started some ancestral South American monkeys using their tails in ways that ultimately led to an ability to grab onto branches, while no such development took place in Africa. Mere usefulness of a trait does not necessitate it mean that will evolve.

This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connection between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge proceeds through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwin's theory of biological natural selection. The three major components of the model of natural selection are variation selection and retention. According to Darwin's theory of natural selection, variations are not pre-designed to perform certain functions. Rather, these variations that perform useful functions are selected. While those that suffice on doing nothing are not selected as such the selection is responsible for the appearance that specific variations built upon intentionally do really occur. In the modern theory of evolution, genetic mutations provide the blind variations ( blind in the sense that variations are not influenced by the effects they would have, - the likelihood of a mutation is not correlated with the benefits or liabilities that mutation would confer on the organism), the environment provides the filter of selection, and reproduction provides the retention. It is achieved because those organisms with features that make them less adapted for survival do not survive about other organisms in the environment that have features that are better adapted. Evolutionary epistemology applies this blind variation and selective retention model to the growth of scientific knowledge and to human thought processes in general.

The parallel between biological evolution and conceptual or we can see ‘epistemic' evolution as either literal or analogical. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology effects biological evolution as the main cause of the growth of knowledge. On this view, called the ‘evolution of cognitive mechanic programs', by Bradie (1986) and the ‘Darwinian approach to epistemology' by Ruse (1986), that growth of knowledge occurs through blind variation and selective retention because biological natural selection itself is the cause of epistemic variation and selection. The most plausible version of the literal view does not hold that all human beliefs are innate but rather than the mental mechanisms that guide the acquisition of non-innate beliefs are themselves innately and the result of biological natural selection. Ruses ( 1986) repossess on the demands of an interlingual rendition of literal evolutionary epistemology that he links to sociology (Rescher, 1990).

Determining the value upon innate ideas can take the path to consider as these have been variously defined by philosophers either as ideas consciously present to the mind priori to sense experience (the non-dispositional sense), or as ideas which we have an innate disposition to form (though we need to be actually aware of them at a particular r time, e.g., as babies - the dispositional sense. Understood in either way they were invoked to account for our recognition of certain verification, such as those of mathematics, or to justify certain moral and religious clams which were held to b capable of being know by introspection of our innate ideas. Examples of such supposed truths might include ‘murder is wrong' or ‘God exists'.

One difficulty with the doctrine is that it is sometimes formulated as one about concepts or ideas which are held to be innate and at other times one about a source of propositional knowledge, in so far as concepts are taken to be innate the doctrine reflates primarily to claims about meaning: our idea of God, for example, is taken as a source for the meaning of the word God. When innate ideas are understood prepositionally, their supposed innateness is taken an evidence for the truth. This latter thesis clearly rests on the assumption that innate propositions have an unimpeachable source, usually taken to be God, but then any appeal to innate ideas to justify the existence of God is circular. Despite such difficulties the doctrine of innate ideas had a long and influential history until the eighteenth century and the concept has in recent decades been revitalized through its employment in Noam Chomsky's influential account of the mind's linguistic capacities.

The attraction of the theory has been felt strongly by those philosophers who had been unable to give an alternative account of our capacity to recognize that some propositions are certainly true where that recognition cannot be justified solely o the basis of an appeal to sense experiences. Thus Plato argued that, for example, recognition of mathematical truths could only be explained on the assumption of some form of recollection, in Plato, the recollection of knowledge, possibly obtained in a previous stat e of existence e draws its topic as most famously broached in the dialogue Meno, and the doctrine is one attempt oi account for the ‘innate' unlearned character of knowledge of first principles. Since there was no plausible post-natal source the recollection must refer to a pre-natal acquisition of knowledge. Thus understood, the doctrine of innate ideas supported the views that there were importantly gradatorially innate in human beings and it was the sense which hindered their proper apprehension.

The ascetic implications of the doctrine were important in Christian philosophy throughout the Middle Ages and scholastic teaching until its displacement by Locke' philosophy in the eighteenth century. It had in the meantime acquired modern expression in the philosophy of Descartes who argued that we can come to know certain important truths before we have any empirical knowledge at all. Our idea of God must necessarily exist, is Descartes held, logically independent of sense experience. In England the Cambridge Plantonists such as Henry Moore and Ralph Cudworth added considerable support.

Locke's rejection of innate ideas and his alternative empiricist account was powerful enough to displace the doctrine from philosophy almost totally. Leibniz, in his critique of Locke, attempted to defend it with a sophisticated disposition version of theory, but it attracted few followers.

The empiricist alternative to innate ideas as an explanation of the certainty of propositions in the direction of construing with necessary truths as analytic. Kant's refinement of the classification of propositions with the fourfold distentions Analytic/synthetic and deductive/inductive did nothing to encourage a return to their innate idea's doctrine, which slipped from view. The doctrine may fruitfully be understood as the genesis of confusion between explaining the genesis of ideas or concepts and the basis for regarding some propositions as necessarily true.

Chomsky's revival of the term in connection with his account of the spoken exchange acquisition has once more made the issue topical. He claims that the principles of language and ‘natural logic' are known unconsciously and are a precondition for language acquisition. But for his purposes innate ideas must be taken in a strong dispositional sense - so strong that it is far from clear that Chomsky's claims are as in conflict with empiricists accounts as some (including Chomsky) have supposed. Quine, for example, sees no clash with his own version of empirical behaviourism, in which old talk of ideas is eschewing in favour of dispositions to observable behaviour.

Locke' accounts of analytic propositions was, that everything that a succinct account of analyticity should be (Locke, 1924). He distinguishes two kinds of analytic propositions, identity propositions in which ‘we affirm the said term of itself', e.g., ‘Roses are roses' and predicative propositions in which ‘a part of the complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole', e.g., ‘Roses are flowers'. Locke calls such sentences ‘trifling' because a speaker who uses them ‘trifling with words'. A synthetic sentence, in contrast, such as a mathematical theorem, states ‘a real truth and conveys, and with it parallels really instructive knowledge', and correspondingly, Locke distinguishes two kinds of ‘necessary consequences', analytic entailments where validity depends on the literal containment of the conclusion in the premiss and synthetic entailment where it does not. (Locke did not originate this concept-containment notion of analyticity. It is discussed by Arnaud and Nicole, and it is safe to say that it has been around for a very long time (Arnaud, 1964).

All the same, the analogical version of evolutionary epistemology, called the ‘evolution of theory's program', by Bradie (1986). The ‘Spenserians approach' (after the nineteenth century philosopher Herbert Spencer) by Ruse (1986), a process analogous to biological natural selection has governed the development of human knowledge, rather than by an instance of the mechanism itself. This version of evolutionary epistemology, introduced and elaborated by Donald Campbell (1974) and Karl Popper, sees the [partial] fit between theories and the world as explained by a mental process of trial and error known as epistemic natural selection.

We have usually taken both versions of evolutionary epistemology to be types of naturalized epistemology, because both take some empirical facts as a starting point for their epistemological project. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology begins by accepting evolutionary theory and a materialist approach to the mind and, from these, constructs an account of knowledge and its developments. In contrast, the analogical; the version does not require the truth of biological evolution: It simply draws on biological evolution as a source for the model of natural selection. For this version of evolutionary epistemology to be true, the model of natural selection need only apply to the growth of knowledge, not to the origin and development of species. Savagery put, evolutionary epistemology of the analogical sort could still be true even if creationism is the correct theory of the origin of species.

Although they do not begin by assuming evolutionary theory, most analogical evolutionary epistemologists are naturalized epistemologists as well, their empirical assumptions, least of mention, implicitly come from psychology and cognitive science, not evolutionary theory. Sometimes, however, evolutionary epistemology is characterized in a seemingly non-naturalistic fashion. (Campbell 1974) says that ‘if one is expanding knowledge beyond what one knows, one has no choice but to explore without the benefit of wisdom', i.e., blindly. This, Campbell admits, makes evolutionary epistemology close to being a tautology (and so not naturalistic). Evolutionary epistemology does assert the analytic claim that when expanding one's knowledge beyond what one knows, one must precessed to something that is already known, but, more interestingly, it also makes the synthetic claim that when expanding one's knowledge beyond what one knows, one must proceed by blind variation and selective retention. This claim is synthetic because we can empirically falsify it. The central claim of evolutionary epistemology is synthetic, not analytic. If the central contradictory, which they are not. Campbell is right that evolutionary epistemology does have the analytic feature he mentions, but he is wrong to think that this is a distinguishing feature, since any plausible epistemology has the same analytic feature (Skagestad, 1978).

Two extra-ordinary issues lie to awaken the literature that involves questions about ‘realism', i.e., What metaphysical commitment does an evolutionary epistemologist have to make? . (Progress, i.e., according to evolutionary epistemology, does knowledge develop toward a goal?) With respect to realism, many evolutionary epistemologists endorse that is called ‘hypothetical realism', a view that combines a version of epistemological ‘scepticism' and tentative acceptance of metaphysical realism. With respect to progress, the problem is that biological evolution is not goal-directed, but the growth of human knowledge is. Campbell (1974) worries about the potential dis-analogy here but is willing to bite the stone of conscience and admit that epistemic evolution progress toward a goal (truth) while biological evolution does not. Some have argued that evolutionary epistemologists must give up the ‘truth-topic' sense of progress because a natural selection model is in non-teleological in essence alternatively, following Kuhn (1970), and embraced along with evolutionary epistemology.

Among the most frequent and serious criticisms levelled against evolutionary epistemology is that the analogical version of the view is false because epistemic variation is not blind (Skagestad, 1978 and Ruse, 1986), Stein and Lipton (1990) have argued, however, that this objection fails because, while epistemic variation is not random, its constraints come from heuristics that, for the most part, are selective retention. Further, Stein and Lipton argue that lunatics are analogous to biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary pre-biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary cursors, such as a half-wing, a precursor to a wing, which have some function other than the function of their descendable structures: The function of descentable structures, the function of their descendable character embodied to its structural foundations, is that of the guidelines of epistemic variation is, on this view, not the source of disanalogy, but the source of a more articulated account of the analogy.

Many evolutionary epistemologists try to combine the literal and the analogical versions (Bradie, 1986, and Stein and Lipton, 1990), saying that those beliefs and cognitive mechanisms, which are innate results from natural selection of the biological sort and those that are innate results from natural selection of the epistemic sort. This is reasonable as long as the two parts of this hybrid view are kept distinct. An analogical version of evolutionary epistemology with biological variation as its only source of blindeness would be a null theory: This would be the case if all our beliefs are innate or if our non-innate beliefs are not the result of blind variation. An appeal to the legitimate way to produce a hybrid version of evolutionary epistemology since doing so trivializes the theory. For similar reasons, such an appeal will not save an analogical version of evolutionary epistemology from arguments to the effect that epistemic variation is blind (Stein and Lipton, 1990).

Although it is a new approach to theory of knowledge, evolutionary epistemology has attracted much attention, primarily because it represents a serious attempt to flesh out a naturalized epistemology by drawing on several disciplines. In science is used for understanding the nature and development of knowledge, then evolutionary theory is among the disciplines worth a look. Insofar as evolutionary epistemology looks there, it is an interesting and potentially fruitful epistemological programme.

What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? Thinking that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals is natural depends on what caused such subjectivity to have the belief. In recent decades many epistemologists have pursued this plausible idea with a variety of specific proposals. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that ‘p' is knowledge just in case it has the right causal connection to the fact that ‘p'. They can apply such a criterion only to cases where the fact that ‘p' is a sort that can enter inti causal relations, as this seems to exclude mathematically and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization, and proponents of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual representations where knowledge of particular facts about subjects' environments.

For example, Armstrong (1973) proposed that a belief of the form ‘This [perceived] object is F' is [non-inferential] knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is ‘F', that is, the fact that the object is ‘F' contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictated that, for any subject ‘ ' and perceived object ‘y', if ‘ ' has those properties and believed that ‘y' is ‘F', then ‘y' is ‘F'. (Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the belief's being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is ‘F'.

This sort of condition fails, however, to be sufficiently for non-inferential perceptivity, for knowledge is accountable for its compatibility with the belief's being unjustified, and an unjustified belief cannot be knowledge. For example, suppose that your organism for sensory data of colour as perceived, is working well, but you have been given good reason to think otherwise, to think, say, that the sensory data of things look chartreuse to say, that chartreuse things look magenta, if you fail to heed these reasons you have for thinking that your colour perception is awry and believe of a thing that looks magenta to you that it is magenta, your belief will fail top be justified and will therefore fail to be knowledge, although it is caused by the thing's being withing the grasp of sensory perceptivity, in a way that is a completely reliable sign, or to carry the information that the thing is sufficiently to organize all sensory data as perceived in and of the World, or Holistic view.

The view that a belief acquires favourable epistemic status by having some kind of reliable linkage to the truth. Variations of this view have been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulation of a reliable account of knowing notably appeared as marked and noted and accredited to F. P. Ramsey (1903-30), whereby much of Ramsey's work was directed at saving classical mathematics from ‘intuitionism', or what he called the ‘Bolshevik menace of Brouwer and Weyl'. In the theory of probability he was the first to develop, based on precise behavioural nations of preference and expectation. In the philosophy of language, Ramsey was one of the first thinkers to accept a ‘redundancy theory of truth', which he combined with radical views of the function of many kinds of propositions. Neither generalizations, nor causal positions, nor those treating probability or ethics, described facts, but each has a different specific function in our intellectual economy. Additionally, Ramsey, who said that an impression of belief was knowledge if it were true, certain and obtained by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S' knows that ‘p' just in case it is of at all accidental that ‘S' is right about its being the case that D.M. Armstrong (1973) drew an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicates the temperature and a belief interaction of reliability that indicates the truth. Armstrong said that a non-inferential belief qualified as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nominally sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth via laws of nature.

Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account of knowledge, primarily due to F.I. Dretske (1971, 1981), A.I. Goldman (1976, 1986) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of this approach is that ‘S's' belief that ‘p' qualifies as knowledge just in case ‘S' believes ‘p' because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p's' being true, or because of a process or method that would not yield belief in ‘p' if ‘p' were not true. For example, ‘S' would not have his current reasons for believing there is a telephone before him, or would not come to believe this in the way he does, unless there was a telephone before him. Thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantee of the belief's being true. A variant of the counterfactual approach says that ‘S' knows that ‘p' only if there is no ‘relevant alternative' situation in which ‘p' is false but ‘S' would still believe that ‘p' must be sufficient to eliminate all the other situational alternatives of ‘p', where an alternative to a proposition ‘p' is a proposition incompatible with ‘p', that is, one's justification or evidence fort ‘p' must be sufficient for one to know that every subsidiary situation is ‘p' is false.

They standardly classify Reliabilism as an ‘externaturalist' theory because it invokes some truth-linked factor, and truth is ‘eternal' to the believer the main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically, from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexicals, etc., that motivate the views that have come to be known as direct reference' theories. Such phenomena seem, at least to show that the belief or thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment, i.e., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatory criteria employed by the experts in his social group, etc. ~. Not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain (Putnam, 175 and Burge, 1979.) Virtually all theories of knowledge, of course, share an externalist component in requiring truth as a condition for knowing. Reliabilism goes further, however, in trying to capture additional conditions for knowledge by means of a nomic, counterfactual or other such ‘external' relations between ‘belief' and ‘truth'.

The most influential counterexample to Reliabilism is the demon-world and the clairvoyance examples. The demon-world example challenges the necessity of the reliability requirement, in that a possible world in which an evil demon creates deceptive visual experience, the process of vision is not reliable. Still, the visually formed beliefs in this world are intuitively justified. The clairvoyance example challenges the sufficiency of reliability. Suppose a cognitive agent possesses a reliable clairvoyance power, but has no evidence for or against his possessing such a power. Intuitively, his clairvoyantly formed beliefs are unjustifiably unreasoned, but Reliabilism declares them justified.

Another form of Reliabilism, ‘normal worlds', Reliabilism (Goldman, 1986), answers the range problem differently, and treats the demon-world problem in the same stroke. Permit a ‘normal world' be one that is consistent with our general beliefs about the actual world. Normal-worlds Reliabilism says that a belief, in any possible world is justified just in case its generating processes have high truth ratios in normal worlds. This resolves the demon-world problem because the relevant truth ratio of the visual process is not its truth ratio in the demon world itself, but its ratio in normal worlds. Since this ratio is presumably high, visually formed beliefs in the demon world turn out to be justified.

Yet, a different version of Reliabilism attempts to meet the demon-world and clairvoyance problems without recourse to the questionable notion of ‘normal worlds'. Consider Sosa's (1992) suggestion that justified beliefs is belief acquired through ‘intellectual virtues', and not through intellectual ‘vices', whereby virtues are reliable cognitive faculties or processes. The task is to explain how epistemic evaluators have used the notion of indelible virtues, and vices, to arrive at their judgements, especially in the problematic cases. Goldman (1992) proposes a two-stage reconstruction of an evaluator's activity. The first stage is a reliability-based acquisition of a ‘list' of virtues and vices. The second stage is application of this list to queried cases. Determining has executed the second stage whether processes in the queried cases resemble virtues or vices. We have classified visual beliefs in the demon world as justified because visual belief formation is one of the virtues. Clairvoyance formed, beliefs are classified as unjustified because clairvoyance resembles scientifically suspect processes that the evaluator represents as vices, e.g., mental telepathy, ESP, and so forth

We now turn to a philosophy of meaning and truth, for which it is especially associated with the American philosopher of science and of language (1839-1914), and the American psychologist philosopher William James (1842-1910), wherefore the study in Pragmatism is given to various formulations by both writers, but the core is the belief that the meaning of a doctrine is the same as the practical effects of adapting it. Peirce interpreted of theocratical sentence ids only that of a corresponding practical maxim (telling us what to do in some circumstance). In James the position issues in a theory of truth, notoriously allowing that belief, including for example, belief in God, are the widest sense of the works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word. On James's view almost any belief might be respectable, and even rue, provided it works (but working is no s simple matter for James). The apparently subjectivist consequences of tis were wildly assailed by Russell (1872-1970), Moore (1873-1958), and others in the early years of the 20 century. This led to a division within pragmatism between those such as the American educator John Dewey (1859-1952), whose humanistic conception of practice remains inspired by science, and the more idealistic route that especially by the English writer F.C.S. Schiller (1864-1937), embracing the doctrine that our cognitive efforts and human needs actually transform the reality that we seek to describe. James often writes as if he sympathizes with this development. For instance, in The Meaning of Truth (1909), he considers the hypothesis that other people have no minds (dramatized in the sexist idea of an ‘automatic sweetheart' or female zombie) and remarks hat the hypothesis would not work because it would not satisfy our egoistic craving for the recognition and admiration of others. The implication that this is what makes it true that the other persons have minds in the disturbing part.

Modern pragmatists such as the American philosopher and critic Richard Rorty (1931-) and some writings of the philosopher Hilary Putnam (1925-) who have usually tried to dispense with an account of truth and concentrate, as perhaps James should have done, upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion, and need. The driving motivation of pragmatism is the idea that belief in the truth on te one hand must have a close connection with success in action on the other. One way of cementing the connection is found in the idea that natural selection must have adapted us to be cognitive creatures because belief have effects, as they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant's doctrine of the primary of practical over pure reason, and continues to play an influential role in the theory of meaning and of truth.

In case of fact, the philosophy of mind is the modern successor to behaviourism, as do the functionalism that its early advocates were Putnam (1926-) and Sellars (1912-89), and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations they have on other mental stares, what effects they have on behaviour. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if w could write down the totality of axioms, or postdates, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things of other mental states, and our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example), a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what effects it is likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all tat is needed to make the state a proper theoretical notion. It could be implicitly defied by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlaying hardware or ‘realization' of the program the machine is running. The principle advantage of functionalism include its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others, which is via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items tat do not bear mental states might nevertheless, imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too paradoxical, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretations enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to different from our own, it may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be ‘variably realized' causal architecture, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological states.

The philosophical movement of Pragmatism had a major impact on American culture from the late 19th century to the present. Pragmatism calls for ideas and theories to be tested in practice, by assessing whether acting upon the idea or theory produces desirable or undesirable results. According to pragmatists, all claims about truth, knowledge, morality, and politics must be tested in this way. Pragmatism has been critical of traditional Western philosophy, especially the notion that there are absolute truths and absolute values. Although pragmatism was popular for a time in France, England, and Italy, most observers believe that it encapsulates an American faith in know-how and practicality and an equally American distrust of abstract theories and ideologies.

In mentioning the American psychologist and philosopher we find William James, who helped to popularize the philosophy of pragmatism with his book Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Influenced by a theory of meaning and verification developed for scientific hypotheses by American philosopher C.S. Peirce, James held that truth is what works, or has good experimental results. In a related theory, James argued the existence of God is partly verifiable because many people derive benefits from believing.

Pragmatists regard all theories and institutions as tentative hypotheses and solutions. For this reason they believed that efforts to improve society, through such means as education or politics, must be geared toward problem solving and must be ongoing. Through their emphasis on connecting theory to practice, pragmatist thinkers attempted to transform all areas of philosophy, from metaphysics to ethics and political philosophy.

Pragmatism sought a middle ground between traditional ideas about the nature of reality and radical theories of nihilism and irrationalism, which had become popular in Europe in the late 19th century. Traditional metaphysics assumed that the world has a fixed, intelligible structure and that human beings can know absolute or objective truths about the world and about what constitutes moral behaviour. Nihilism and irrationalism, on the other hand, denied those very assumptions and their certitude. Pragmatists today still try to steer a middle course between contemporary offshoots of these two extremes.

The ideas of the pragmatists were considered revolutionary when they first appeared. To some critics, pragmatism's refusal to affirm any absolutes carried negative implications for society. For example, pragmatists do not believe that a single absolute idea of goodness or justice exists, but rather that these concepts are changeable and depend on the context in which they are being discussed. The absence of these absolutes, critics feared, could result in a decline in moral standards. The pragmatists' denial of absolutes, moreover, challenged the foundations of religion, government, and schools of thought. As a result, pragmatism influenced developments in psychology, sociology, education, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and scientific method, as well as philosophy, cultural criticism, and social reform movements. Various political groups have also drawn on the assumptions of pragmatism, from the progressive movements of the early 20th century to later experiments in social reform.

Pragmatism is best understood in its historical and cultural context. It arose during the late 19th century, a period of rapid scientific advancement typified by the theories of British biologist Charles Darwin, whose theories suggested to many thinkers that humanity and society are in a perpetual state of progress. During this same period a decline in traditional religious beliefs and values accompanied the industrialization and material progress of the time. In consequence it became necessary to rethink fundamental ideas about values, religion, science, community, and individuality.

The three most important pragmatists are American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Peirce was primarily interested in scientific method and mathematics; his objective was to infuse scientific thinking into philosophy and society, and he believed that human comprehension of reality was becoming ever greater and that human communities were becoming increasingly progressive. Peirce developed pragmatism as a theory of meaning - in particular, the meaning of concepts used in science. The meaning of the concept 'brittle', for example, is given by the observed consequences or properties that objects called 'brittle' exhibit. For Peirce, the only rational way to increase knowledge was to form mental habits that would test ideas through observation, experimentation, or what he called inquiry. Many philosophers known as logical positivists, a group of philosophers who have been influenced by Peirce, believed that our evolving species was fated to get ever closer to Truth. Logical positivists emphasize the importance of scientific verification, rejecting the assertion of positivism that personal experience is the basis of true knowledge.

James moved pragmatism in directions that Peirce strongly disliked. He generalized Peirce's doctrines to encompass all concepts, beliefs, and actions; he also applied pragmatist ideas to truth as well as to meaning. James was primarily interested in showing how systems of morality, religion, and faith could be defended in a scientific civilization. He argued that sentiment, as well as logic, is crucial to rationality and that the great issues of life - morality and religious belief, for example - are leaps of faith. As such, they depend upon what he called 'the will to believe' and not merely on scientific evidence, which can never tell us what to do or what is worthwhile. Critics charged James with relativism (the belief that values depend on specific situations) and with crass expediency for proposing that if an idea or action works the way one intends, it must be right. But James can more accurately be described as a pluralist - someone who believes the world to be far too complex for any one philosophy to explain everything.

Dewey's philosophy can be described as a version of philosophical naturalism, which regards human experience, intelligence, and communities as ever-evolving mechanisms. Using their experience and intelligence, Dewey believed, human beings can solve problems, including social problems, through inquiry. For Dewey, naturalism led to the idea of a democratic society that allows all members to acquire social intelligence and progress both as individuals and as communities. Dewey held that traditional ideas about knowledge, truth, and values, in which absolutes are assumed, are incompatible with a broadly Darwinian world-view in which individuals and society are progressing. In consequence, he felt that these traditional ideas must be discarded or revised. Indeed, for pragmatists, everything people know and do depends on a historical context and is thus tentative rather than absolute.

Many followers and critics of Dewey believe he advocated elitism and social engineering in his philosophical stance. Others think of him as a kind of romantic humanist. Both tendencies are evident in Dewey's writings, although he aspired to synthesize the two realms.

The pragmatist tradition was revitalized in the 1980s by American philosopher Richard Rorty, who has faced similar charges of elitism for his belief in the relativism of values and his emphasis on the role of the individual in attaining knowledge. Interest has renewed in the classic pragmatists - Pierce, James, and Dewey - have an alternative to Rorty's interpretation of the tradition.

One of the earliest versions of a correspondence theory was put forward in the 4th century Bc Greek philosopher Plato, who sought to understand the meaning of knowledge and how it is acquired. Plato wished to distinguish between true belief and false belief. He proposed a theory based on intuitive recognition that true statements correspond to the facts - that is, agree with reality - while false statements do not. In Plato's example, the sentence "Theaetetus flies" can be true only if the world contains the fact that Theaetetus flies. However, Plato—and much later, 20th-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell—recognized this theory as unsatisfactory because it did not allow for false belief. Both Plato and Russell reasoned that if a belief is false because there is no fact to which it corresponds, it would then be a belief about nothing and so not a belief at all. Each then speculated that the grammar of a sentence could offer a way around this problem. A sentence can be about something (the person Theaetetus), yet false (flying is not true of Theaetetus). But how, they asked, are the parts of a sentence related to reality? One suggestion, proposed by 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is that the parts of a sentence relate to the objects they describe in much the same way that the parts of a picture relate to the objects pictured. Once again, however, false sentences pose a problem: If a false sentence pictures nothing, there can be no meaning in the sentence.

In the late 19th-century American philosopher Charles S. Peirce offered another answer to the question "What is truth?" He asserted that truth is that which experts will agree upon when their investigations are final. Many pragmatists such as Peirce claim that the truth of our ideas must be tested through practice. Some pragmatists have gone so far as to question the usefulness of the idea of truth, arguing that in evaluating our beliefs we should rather pay attention to the consequences that our beliefs may have. However, critics of the pragmatic theory are concerned that we would have no knowledge because we do not know which set of beliefs will ultimately be agreed upon; nor are there sets of beliefs that are useful in every context.

A third theory of truth, the coherence theory, also concerns the meaning of knowledge. Coherence theorists have claimed that a set of beliefs is true if the beliefs are comprehensive - that is, they cover everything - and do not contradict each other.

Other philosophers dismiss the question "What is truth?" with the observation that attaching the claim "it is true that" to a sentence adds no meaning. However, these theorists, who have proposed what are known as deflationary theories of truth, do not dismiss such talk about truth as useless. They agree that there are contexts in which a sentence such as "it is true that the book is blue" can have a different impact than the shorter statement "the book is blue." More importantly, use of the word true is essential when making a general claim about everything, nothing, or something, as in the statement "most of what he says is true."

Nevertheless, in the study of neuroscience it reveals that the human brain is a massively parallel system in which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchical organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. Stand-alone or unitary modules have clearly not accomplished language processing that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually incorporated systematically upon some neural communications channel board.

Similarly, we have continued individual linguistic symbols as given to clusters of distributed brain areas and are not in a particular area. We may produce the specific sound patterns of words in dedicated regions. We have generated all the same, the symbolic and referential relationships between words through a convergence of neural codes from different and independent brain regions. The processes of words comprehension and retrieval result from combinations simpler associative processes in several separate brain fields of forces that command stimulation from other regions. The symbolic meaning of words, like the grammar that is essential for the construction of meaningful relationships between stings of words, is an emergent property from the complex interaction of several brain parts.

While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, we cannot simply explain the most critical precondition for the evolution of brain in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered condition for survival in a ne ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressure in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic commonisation. Nevertheless, as this communication resulted in increasingly more complex behaviour evolution began to take precedence of physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.

Although male and female hominids favoured pair bonding and created more complex social organizations in the interests of survival, the interplay between social evolution and biological evolution changed the terms of survival radically. The enhanced ability to use symbolic communication to construct of social interaction eventually made this communication the largest determinant of survival. Since this communication was based on a symbolic vocalization that requires the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species, this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate nd distinct from the external material realm.

Nonetheless, if we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the active experience of the world symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, we require both to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.

Most experts agree that our ancestries became knowledgeably articulated in the spoken exchange as based on complex grammar and syntax between two hundred thousand and some hundred thousand years ago. The mechanisms in the human brain that allowed for this great achievement clearly evolved, however, over great spans of time. In biology textbooks, the lists of prior adaptations that enhanced the ability of our ancestors to use communication normally include those that are inclining to inclinations to increase intelligence. As to approach a significant alteration of oral and auditory abilities, in that the separation or localization of functional representations is found on two sides of the brain. The evolution of some innate or hard wired grammar, however, when we look at how our ability to use language could have really evolved over the entire course of hominid evolution. The process seems more basic and more counterintuitive than we had previously imagined.

Although we share some aspects of vocalization with our primate cousins, the mechanisms of human vocalization are quite different and have evolved over great spans of time. Incremental increases in hominid brain size over the last 2.5 million years enhanced cortical control over the larynx, which originally evolved to prevent food and other particles from entering the windpipe or trachea; This eventually contributed to the use of vocal symbolization. Humans have more voluntary motor control over sound produced in the larynx than any other vocal species, and this control are associated with higher brain systems involved in skeletal muscle control as opposed to just visceral control. As a result, humans have direct cortical motor control over phonation and oral movement while chimps do not.

We position the larynx in modern humans in a comparatively low position to the throat and significantly increase the range and flexibility of sound production. The low position of the larynx allows greater changes in the volume to the resonant chamber formed by the mouth and pharynx and makes it easier to shift sounds to the mouth and away from the nasal cavity. Formidable conclusions are those of the sounds that comprise vowel components of speeches that become much more variable, including extremes in resonance combinations such as the "ee" sound in "tree" and the "aw" sound in "flaw." Equally important, the repositioning of the larynx dramatically increases the ability of the mouth and tongue to modify vocal sounds. This shift in the larynx also makes it more likely that food and water passing over the larynx will enter the trachea, and this explains why humans are more inclined to experience choking. Yet this disadvantage, which could have caused the shift to e selected against, was clearly out-weighed by the advantage of being able to produce all the sounds used in modern language systems.

Some have argued that this removal of constraints on vocalization suggests that spoken language based on complex symbol systems emerged quite suddenly in modern humans only about one hundred thousand years ago. It is, however, far more likely that language use began with very primitive symbolic systems and evolved over time to increasingly complex systems. The first symbolic systems were not full-blown language systems, and they were probably not as flexible and complex as the vocal calls and gestural displays of modern primates. The first users of primitive symbolic systems probably coordinated most of their social comminations with call and display behavioural attitudes alike those of the modern ape and monkeys.

Critically important to the evolution of enhanced language skills are that behavioural adaptive adjustments that serve to precede and situate biological changes. This represents a reversal of the usual course of evolution where biological change precedes behavioural adaption. When the first hominids began to use stone tools, they probably rendered of a very haphazard fashion, by drawing on their flexible ape-like learning abilities. Still, the use of this technology over time opened a new ecological niche where selective pressures occasioned new adaptions. A tool use became more indispensable for obtaining food and organized social behaviours, mutations that enhanced the use of tools probably functioned as a principal source of selection for both bodied and brains.

The first stone choppers appear in the fossil remnant fragments remaining about 2.5 million years ago, and they appear to have been fabricated with a few sharp blows of stone on stone. If these primitive tools are reasonable, which were hand-held and probably used to cut flesh and to chip bone to expose the marrow, were created by Homo habilis - the first large-brained hominid. Stone making is obviously a skill passed on from one generation to the next by learning as opposed to a physical trait passed on genetically. After these tools became critical to survival, this introduced selection for learning abilities that did not exist for other species. Although the early tool maskers may have had brains roughly comparable to those of modern apes, they were already confronting the processes for being adapted for symbol learning.

The first symbolic representations were probably associated with social adaptations that were quite fragile, and any support that could reinforce these adaptions in the interest of survival would have been favoured by evolution. The expansion of the forebrain in Homo habilis, particularly the prefrontal cortex, was on of the core adaptations. Increased connectivity enhanced this adaption over time to brain regions involved in language processing.

Imagining why incremental improvements in symbolic representations provided a selective advantage is easy. Symbolic communication probably enhanced cooperation in the relationship of mothers to infants, allowed forgoing techniques to be more easily learned, served as the basis for better coordinating scavenging and hunting activities, and generally improved the prospect of attracting a mate. As the list of domains in which symbolic communication was introduced became longer over time, this probably resulted in new selective pressures that served to make this communication more elaborate. After more functions became dependent on this communication, those who failed in symbol learning or could only use symbols awkwardly were less likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations.

We must have considerably gestured the crude language of the earliest users of symbolics and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-anecdotical symbolic forms. We reflect this in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.

The encompassing intentionality to its thought is mightily effective, least of mention, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the essentially stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where what he can perceive gives it apart.

Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. Stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules have clearly not accomplished language processing that were incorporated on some neutral circuit board.

While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, he realized that the different chances of survival of different endowed offsprings could account for the natural evolution of species. Nature "selects" those members of some spacies best adapted to the environment in which they are themselves, just as human animal breeders may select for desirable traits for their livestock, and by that control the evolution of the kind of animal they wish. In the phase of Spencer, nature guarantees the "survival of the fittest." The Origin of Species was principally successful in marshalling the evidence for evolution, than providing a convincing mechanism for genetic change, and Darwin himself remained open to the search for additional mechanisms, also reaming convinced that natural selection was at the heat of it. It was only with the later discovery of the "gene" as the unit of inheritance that the syntheses known as "neo-Darwinism" became the orthodox theory of evolution.

The solutions to the mysterious evolution by natural selection can shape sophisticated mechanisms are to found in the working of natural section, in that for the sake of some purpose, namely, some action, the body as a whole must evidently exist for the sake of some complex action: Have simplistically actualized the cognitive process through fundamentals in proceeding as made simple just as natural selection occurs whenever genetically influence's variation among individual effects their survival and reproduction? If a gene codes for characteristics that result in fewer viable offspring in future generations, governing evolutionary principles have gradually eliminated that gene. For instance, genetic mutation that an increase vulnerability to infection, or cause foolish risk taking or lack of interest in sex, will never become common. On the other hand, genes that cause resistance that causes infection, appropriate risk taking and success in choosing fertile mates are likely to spread in the gene pool even if they have substantial costs.

A classical example is the spread of a gene for dark wing colour in a British moth population living downward form major source of air pollution. Pale moths were conspicuous on smoke-darkened trees and easily caught by birds, while a rare mutant form of a moth whose colour closely matched that of the bark escaped the predator beaks. As the tree trucks became darkened, the mutant gene spread rapidly and largely displaced the gene for pale wing colour. That is all on that point to say is that natural selection insole no plan, no goal, and no direction - just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with these genes have, compared with order individuals, greater of lesser reproductive success.

Many misconceptions have obscured the simplicity of natural selection. For instance, they have widely thought Herbert Spencer's nineteenth-century catch phrase "survival of the fittest" to summarize the process, but an abstractive actuality openly provides a given forwarding to several misunderstandings. First, survival is of no consequence by itself. This is why natural selection has created some organisms, such as salmon and annual plants, that reproduces only once, the die. Survival increases fitness only as far as it increases later reproduction. Genes that increase lifetime reproduction will be selected for even if they result in a reduced longevity. Conversely, a gene that deceases selection will obviously eliminate total lifetime reproduction even if it increases an individual's survival.

Considerable confusion arises from the ambiguous meaning of "fittest." The fittest individuals in the biological scene, is not necessarily the healthiest, stronger, or fastest. In today's world, and many of those of the past, individuals of outstanding athletic accomplishment need not be the ones who produce the most grandchildren, a measure that should be roughly correlated with fattiness. To someone who understands natural selection, it is no surprise that the parents who are not concerned about their children;'s reproduction.

We cannot call a gene or an individual "fit" in isolation but only concerning some particular spacies in a particular environment. Even in a single environment, every gene involves compromise. Consider a gene that makes rabbits more fearful and thereby helps to keep then from the jaws of foxes. Imagine that half the rabbits in a field have this gene. Because they do more hiding and less eating, these timid rabbits might be, on average, some bitless well fed than their bolder companions. Of, a hundred down-bounded in the March swamps awaiting for spring, two thirds of them starve to death while this is the fate of only one-third of the rabbits who lack the gene for fearfulness, it has been selected against. It might be nearly eliminated by a few harsh winters. Milder winters or an increased number of foxes could have the opposite effect, but it all depends on the current environment.

The version of an evolutionary ethic called "social Darwinism" emphasizes the struggle for natural selection, and draws the conclusion that we should glorify the assists each struggle, usually by enhancing competitive and aggressive relations between people in society, or better societies themselves. More recently we have re-thought the reaction between evolution and ethics in the light of biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection.

We cannot simply explain the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.

Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.

If they cannot reduce to, or entirely explain the emergent reality in this mental realm as for, the sum of its parts, concluding that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts seems reasonable. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. No scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.

If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, they require both to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.

Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. Seemingly, that our visionary skills could view the emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. Even so, it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.

If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that in belief alone one can assume that a phenomenon was "real" only when it is "observed" phenomenon, have sparked advance the given processes for us to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence we have inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principal is itself the subject of scientific investigation. In that respect, no simple reason of why this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when experiment has validated the predictions of a physical theory. Since, invisualizability has restricted our view we cannot measure or observe the indivisible whole, we encounter by engaging the "eventful horizon" or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or "actualized" in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the "indivisible" whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. Nevertheless, it cannot in principal impart or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.

The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts ( in that, to know what it is like to have an experience is to know its qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.

All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. Attributing any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand is also not necessary and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be "proven" in scientific terms and what can with reason be realized and "inferred" as a philosophical basis through which grounds can be assimilated as some indirect scientific evidence.

Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet are those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally have expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason - the implications of the amazing new fact of nature named for by non-locality, and cannot be properly understood without some familiarity with the actual history of scientific thought. The less resultant quantity is to suggest that what be most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, fewer resultant quantities by which measure has substantiated the strengthening back-ground implications with that should feel free to ignore it. Yet this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions as addressed to the relinquishing clasp of closure, and unswervingly close of its circle, resolve in the equations of eternity and complete of the universe of its obtainable gains for which its unification holds all that should be.

Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in understanding the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.

In a thought experiment, instead of bringing a course of events, as in a normal experiment, we are invited to imagine one. We may tenably be able to "see" that some result's following, or that by some description is appropriate, or our inability to describe the situation may itself have some consequential consequence. Thought experiments played a major role in the development of physics: For example, Galileo probably never dropped two balls of unequal weight from the leaning Tower of Pisa, to refute the Aristotelean view that a heavy body falls faster than a lighter one. He merely asked used to imagine a heavy body made into the shape of a dumbbell, and then connecting rod gradually thinner, until it is finally severed. The thing is one heavy body until the last moment and he n two light ones, but it is incredible that this final snip alters the velocity dramatically. Other famous examples include the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment. In the philosophy of personal identity, our apparent capacity to imagine ourselves surviving drastic changes of body, brain, and mind is a permanent source of difficulty. On that point, no consensus on the legitimate place of thought experiments, to substitute either for real experiment, or as a reliable device for discerning possibilities. Though experiments with and one dislike is sometimes called intuition pumps.

For overfamiliar reasons, of hypothesizing that people are characterized by their rationality is common, and the most evident display of our rationality is our capacity to think. This is the rehearsal in the mind of what to say, or what to do. Not all thinking is verbal, since chess players, composers and painters all think, and in that respect no deductive reason that their deliberations should take any more verbal a form than this action. It is permanently tempting to conceive of this activity as for the presence inbounded in the mind of elements of some language, or other medium that represents aspects of the world. In whatever manner, the model has been attacked, notably by Wittgenstein, as insufficient, since no such presence could carry a guarantee that the right use would be made of it. Such that of an inner present seems unnecessary, since an intelligent outcome might arouse of some principal measure from it.

In the philosophy of mind and ethics the treatment of animals exposes major problems if other animals differ from human beings, how is the difference to be characterized: Do animals think and reason, or have thoughts and beliefs? In philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant the possession of reason separates humans from animals, and alone allows entry to the moral community.

For Descartes, animals are mere machines and ee lack consciousness or feelings. In the ancient world the rationality of animals is defended with the example of Chrysippus' dog. This animal, tracking prey, comes to a cross-roads with three exits, and without pausing to pick-up the scent, reasoning, according to Sextus Empiricus. The animal went either by this road, or by this road, or by that, or by the other. However, it did not go by this or that. Therefore, he went the other way. The ‘syllogism of the dog' was discussed by many writers, since in Stoic cosmology animals should occupy a place on the great chain of being to an exceeding degree below human beings, the only terrestrial rational agents: Philo Judaeus wrote a dialogue attempting to show again Alexander of Aphrodisias that the dog's behaviour does no t exhibit rationality, but simply shows it following the scent, by way of response Alexander has the animal jump down a shaft (where the scent would not have lingered). Plutah sides with Philo, Aquinas discusses the dog and scholastic thought in general was quite favourable to brute intelligence (being made to stand trail for various offences in medieval times was common for animals). In the modern era Montaigne uses the dog to remind us of the frailties of human reason: Rorarious undertook to show not only that beasts are rational, but that they make better use of reason than people do. James, the first of England defends the syllogising dog, and Henry More and Gassendi both takes issue with Descartes on that matter. Hume is an outspoken defender of animal cognition, but with their use of the view that language is the essential manifestation of mentality, animals' silence began to count heavily against them, and they are completely denied thoughts by, for instance Davidson.

Dogs are frequently shown in pictures of philosophers, as their assiduity and fidelity are some symbols

It is, nonetheless, that Decanters's first work, the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (1628/9), was never complected, yet in Holland between 1628 and 1649, Descartes first wrote, and then cautiously suppressed, Le Monde (1934), and in 1637 produced the Discours de la méthode as a preface to the treatise on mathematics and physics in which he introduced the notion of Cartesian co-ordinates. His best-known philosophical work, the Meditationes de Prima Philosophiia (Meditations on First Philosophy), together with objections by distinguished contemporaries and replies by Descartes (The Objections and Replies), appeared in 1641. The authors of the Objections were First set, for which is Hobbes, fourth set. Arnauld, fifth set, Gassendi and the sixth set, Mersenne. The second edition (1642) of the Meditations included a seventh se t by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin. Descartes's penultimate work, the Principia Pilosophiae (Principles of the Soul), published in 1644 was designed partly for use as a theological textbook. His last work was Les Passions de l´ame (The Passions of the Soul) published in 1649. When in Sweden, where he contracted pneumonia, allegedly through being required to break his normal habit of late rising in order to give lessons at 5:00 a.m. His last words are supposed to have been "Ça, mon âme, il faut partir" (so, my soul, it is time to part).

All the same, Descartes's theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation on the bassi alone of which progress is possible.

The Cartesian doubt is the method of investigating how much knowledge and its basis in reason or experience as used by Descartes in the first two Medications. It attempted to put knowledge upon secure foundation by first inviting us to suspend judgements on any proportion whose truth can be doubted, even as a bare possibility. The standards of acceptance are gradually raised as we are asked to doubt the deliverance of memory, the senses, and eve n reason, all of which are principally capable of letting us down. This is eventually found in the celebrated "Cogito ergo sum": I think, therefore I am. By locating the point of certainty in my awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of a various counter-attack on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this priority are the Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly to ascertain that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes a "clear and distinct perception" of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: A Hume drily puts it, "to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit."

By dissimilarity, Descartes's notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration of dissimulation. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax, surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature.

Although the structure of Descartes's epistemology, theory of mind and theory of matter have been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity and even their initial plausibility, all contrives to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.

The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense that being social may be instinctive in human beings, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, our real or actualized self is clearly not imprisoned in our minds.

It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the "otherness" of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger indivisible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.

Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.

The subjectivity of our mind affects our perceptions of the world held to be objective by natural science. Create both aspects of mind and matter as individualized forms that belong to the same underlying reality.

Our everyday experience confirms the apparent fact that there is a dual-valued world as subject and objects. We as having consciousness, as personality and as experiencing beings are the subjects, whereas for everything for which we can come up with a name or designation, seems to be the object, that which is opposed to us as a subject. Physical objects are only part of the object-world. In that respect are mental objects, objects of our emotions, abstract objects, religious objects etc. language objectifies our experience. Experiences per se are purely sensational experienced that do not make a distinction between object and subject. Only verbalized thought reifies the sensations by conceptualizing them and pigeonholing them into the given entities of language.

Some thinkers maintain, that subject and object are only different aspects of experience. I can experience myself as subject, and in the act of self-reflection. The fallacy of this argument is obvious: Being a subject implies having an object. We cannot experience something consciously without the mediation of understanding and mind. Our experience is already conceptualized at the time it comes into our consciousness. Our experience is negative insofar as it destroys the original pure experience. In a dialectical process of synthesis, the original pure experience becomes an object for us. The common state of our mind is only capable of apperceiving objects. Objects are reified negative experience. The same is true for the objective aspect of this theory: by objectifying myself I do not dispense with the subject, but the subject is causally and apodeictically linked to the object. When I make an object of anything, I have to realize, that it is the subject, which objectifies something. It is only the subject who can do that. Without the subject at that place are no objects, and without objects there is no subject. This interdependence, however, is not to be understood for a dualism, so that the object and the subject are really independent substances. Since the object is only created by the activity of the subject, and the subject is not a physical entity, but a mental one, we have to conclude then, that the subject-object dualism is purely mentalistic.

The Cartesian dualism posits the subject and the object as separate, independent and real substances, both of which have their ground and origin in the highest substance of God. Cartesian dualism, however, contradicts itself: The very fact, which Descartes posits the "I," that is the subject, as the only certainty, he defied materialism, and thus the concept of some "res extensa." The physical thing is only probable in its existence, whereas the mental thing is absolutely and necessarily certain. The subject is superior to the object. The object is only derived, but the subject is the original. This makes the object not only inferior in its substantive quality and in its essence, but relegates it to a level of dependence on the subject. The subject recognizes that the object is a "res' extensa" and this means, that the object cannot have essence or existence without the acknowledgment through the subject. The subject posits the world in the first place and the subject is posited by God. Apart from the problem of interaction between these two different substances, Cartesian dualism is not eligible for explaining and understanding the subject-object relation.

By denying Cartesian dualism and resorting to monistic theories such as extreme idealism, materialism or positivism, the problem is not resolved either. What the positivists did, was just verbalizing the subject-object relation by linguistic forms. It was no longer a metaphysical problem, but only a linguistic problem. Our language has formed this object-subject dualism. These thinkers are very superficial and shallow thinkers, because they do not see that in the very act of their analysis they inevitably think in the mind-set of subject and object. By relativizing the object and subject for language and analytical philosophy, they avoid the elusive and problematical oppure of subject-object, since which has been the fundamental question in philosophy ever. Shunning these metaphysical questions is no solution. Excluding something, by reducing it to a more material and verifiable level, is not only pseudo-philosophy but a depreciation and decadence of the great philosophical ideas of mankind.

Therefore, we have to come to grips with idea of subject-object in a new manner. We experience this dualism as a fact in our everyday lives. Every experience is subject to this dualistic pattern. The question, however, is, whether this underlying pattern of subject-object dualism is real or only mental. Science assumes it to be real. This assumption does not prove the reality of our experience, but only that with this method science is most successful in explaining our empirical facts. Mysticism, on the other hand, believes that on that point is an original unity of subject and objects. To attain this unity is the goal of religion and mysticism. Man has fallen from this unity by disgrace and by sinful behaviour. Now the task of man is to get back on track again and strive toward this highest fulfilment. Again, are we not, on the conclusion made above, forced to admit, that also the mystic way of thinking is only a pattern of the mind and, as the scientists, that they have their own frame of reference and methodology to explain the supra-sensible facts most successfully?

If we assume mind to be the originator of the subject-object dualism, then we cannot confer more reality on the physical or the mental aspect, and we cannot deny the one as to the other.

Fortunately or not, history has made its play, and, in so doing, we must have considerably gestured the crude language of the earliest users of symbolics and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. The earliest of Jutes, Saxons and Jesuits have reflected this in the modern mixtures of the English-speaking language. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.

Language involves specialized cortical regions in a complex interaction that allows the brain to comprehend and communicate abstract ideas. The motor cortex initiates impulses that travel through the brain stem to produce audible sounds. Neighboring regions of motor cortex, called the supplemental motor cortex, are involved in sequencing and coordinating sounds. Broca's area of the frontal lobe is responsible for the sequencing of language elements for output. The comprehension of language is dependent upon Wernicke's area of the temporal lobe. Other cortical circuits connect these areas.

Memory is usually considered a diffusely stored associative process—that is, it puts together information from many different sources. Although research has failed to identify specific sites in the brain as locations of individual memories, certain brain areas are critical for memory to function. Immediate recall—the ability to repeat short series of words or numbers immediately after hearing them—is thought to be located in the auditory associative cortex. Short-term memory—the ability to retain a limited amount of information for up to an hour—is located in the deep temporal lobe. Long-term memory probably involves exchanges between the medial temporal lobe, various cortical regions, and the midbrain.

The autonomic nervous system regulates the life support systems of the body reflexively—that is, without conscious direction. It automatically controls the muscles of the heart, digestive system, and lungs; certain glands; and homeostasis—that is, the equilibrium of the internal environment of the body. The autonomic nervous system itself is controlled by nerve centres in the spinal cord and brain stem and is fine-tuned by regions higher in the brain, such as the midbrain and cortex. Reactions such as blushing indicate that cognitive, or thinking, centres of the brain are also involved in autonomic responses.

The brain is guarded by several highly developed protective mechanisms. The bony cranium, the surrounding meninges, and the cerebrospinal fluid all contribute to the mechanical protection of the brain. In addition, a filtration system called the blood-brain barrier protects the brain from exposure to potentially harmful substances carried in the bloodstream. Brain disorders have a wide range of causes, including head injury, stroke, bacterial diseases, complex chemical imbalances, and changes associated with aging.

Head injury can initiate a cascade of damaging events. After a blow to the head, a person may be stunned or may become unconscious for a moment. This injury, called a concussion, usually leaves no permanent damage. If the blow is more severe and hemorrhage (excessive bleeding) and swelling occur, however, severe headache, dizziness, paralysis, a convulsion, or temporary blindness may result, depending on the area of the brain affected. Damage to the cerebrum can also result in profound personality changes.

Damage to Broca's area in the frontal lobe causes difficulty in speaking and writing, a problem known as Broca's aphasia. Injury to Wernicke's area in the left temporal lobe results in an inability to comprehend spoken language, called Wernicke's aphasia.

An injury or disturbance to a part of the hypothalamus may cause a variety of different symptoms, such as loss of appetite with an extreme drop in body weight; increase in appetite leading to obesity; extraordinary thirst with excessive urination (diabetes insipidus); failure in body-temperature control, resulting in either low temperature (hypothermia) or high temperature (fever); excessive emotionality; and uncontrolled anger or aggression. If the relationship between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland is damaged, other vital bodily functions may be disturbed, such as sexual function, metabolism, and cardiovascular activity.

Injury to the brain stem is even more serious because it houses the nerve centres that control breathing and heart action. Damage to the medulla oblongata usually results in immediate death.

To the brain due to an interruption in blood flow. The interruption may be caused by a blood clot: constriction of a blood vessel, or rupture of a vessel accompanied by bleeding. A pouch-like expansion of the wall of a blood vessel, called an aneurysm, may weaken and burst, for example, because of high blood pressure.

Sufficient quantities of glucose and oxygen, transported through the bloodstream, are needed to keep nerve cells alive. When the blood supply to a small part of the brain is interrupted, the cells in that area die and the function of the area is lost. A massive stroke can cause a one-sided paralysis (hemiplegia) and sensory loss on the side of the body opposite the hemisphere damaged by the stroke.

Epilepsy is a broad term for a variety of brain disorders characterized by seizures, or convulsions. Epilepsy can result from a direct injury to the brain at birth or from a metabolic disturbance in the brain at any time later in life.

Some brain diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson disease, are progressive, becoming worse over time. Multiple sclerosis damages the myelin sheath around axons in the brain and spinal cord. As a result, the affected axons cannot transmit nerve impulses properly. Parkinson disease destroys the cells of the substantia nigra in the midbrain, resulting in a deficiency in the neurotransmitter dopamine that affects motor functions.

Cerebral palsy is a broad term for brain damage sustained close to birth that permanently affects motor function. The damage may take place either in the developing fetus, during birth, or just after birth and is the result of the faulty development or breaking down of motor pathways. Cerebral palsy is nonprogressive—that is, it does not worsen with time.

A bacterial infection in the cerebrum or in the coverings of the brain swelling of the brain, or an abnormal growth of healthy brain tissue can all cause an increase in intracranial pressure and result in serious damage to the brain.

Scientists are finding that certain brain chemical imbalances are associated with mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. Such findings have changed scientific understanding of mental health and have resulted in new treatments that chemically correct these imbalances.

During childhood development, the brain is particularly susceptible to damage because of the rapid growth and reorganization of nerve connections. Problems that originate in the immature brain can appear as epilepsy or other brain-function problems in adulthood.

Several neurological problems are common in aging. Alzheimer's disease damages many areas of the brain, including the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. The brain tissue of people with Alzheimer's disease shows characteristic patterns of damaged neurons, known as plaques and tangles. Alzheimer's disease produces a progressive dementia, characterized by symptoms such as failing attention and memory, loss of mathematical ability, irritability, and poor orientation in space and time.

Several commonly used diagnostic methods give images of the brain without invading the skull. Some portray anatomy - that is, the structure of the brain—whereas others measure brain function. Two or more methods may be used to complement each other, together providing a more complete picture than would be possible by one method alone.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), introduced in the early 1980s, beams high-frequency radio waves into the brain in a highly magnetized field that causes the protons that form the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the brain to re-emit the radio waves. The re-emitted radio waves are analysed by computer to create thin cross-sectional images of the brain. MRI provides the most detailed images of the brain and is safer than imaging methods that use X rays. However, MRI is a lengthy process and also cannot be used with people who have pacemakers or metal implants, both of which are adversely affected by the magnetic field.

Computed tomography (CT), also known as CT scans, developed in the early 1970s. This imaging method X-rays the brain from many different angles, feeding the information into a computer that produces a series of cross-sectional images. CT is particularly useful for diagnosing blood clots and brain tumours. It is a much quicker process than magnetic resonance imaging and is therefore advantageous in certain situations—for example, with people who are extremely ill.

Changes in brain function due to brain disorders can be visualized in several ways. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy measures the concentration of specific chemical compounds in the brain that may change during specific behaviour. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) maps changes in oxygen concentration that correspond to nerve cell activity.

Positron emission tomography (PET), developed in the mid-1970s, uses computed tomography to visualize radioactive tracers radioactive substances introduced into the brain intravenously or by inhalation. PET can measure such brain functions as cerebral metabolism, blood flow and volume, oxygen use, and the formation of neurotransmitters. Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), developed in the 1950s and 1960s, uses radioactive tracers to visualize the circulation and volume of blood in the brain.

Brain-imaging studies have provided new insights into sensory, motor, language, and memory processes, as well as brain disorders such as epilepsy cerebrovascular disease; Alzheimer's, Parkinson, and Huntington's diseases: And nd various mental disorders, such as schizophrenia.

In lower vertebrates, such as fish and reptiles, the brain is often tubular and bears a striking resemblance to the early embryonic stages of the brains of more highly evolved animals. In all vertebrates, the brain is divided into three regions: the forebrain (prosencephalon), the midbrain (mesencephalon), and the hindbrain (rhombencephalon). These three regions further subdivide into different structures, systems, nuclei, and layers.

The more highly evolved the animal, the more complex is the brain structure. Human beings have the most complex brains of all animals. Evolutionary forces have also resulted in a progressive increase in the size of the brain. In vertebrates lower than mammals, the brain is small. In meat-eating animals, particularly primates, the brain increases dramatically in size.

The cerebrum and cerebellum of higher mammals are highly convoluted in order to fit the most gray matter surface within the confines of the cranium. Such highly convoluted brains are called gyrencephalic. Many lower mammals have a smooth, or lissencephalic ("smooth head"), cortical surface.

There is also evidence of evolutionary adaption of the brain. For example, many birds depend on an advanced visual system to identify food at great distances while in flight. Consequently, their optic lobes and cerebellum are well developed, giving them keen sight and outstanding motor coordination in flight. Rodents, on the other hand, as nocturnal animals, do not have a well-developed visual system. Instead, they rely more heavily on other sensory systems, such as a highly developed sense of smell and facial whiskers.

Recent research in brain function suggests that there may be sexual differences in both brain anatomy and brain function. One study indicated that men nd women may use their brains differently while thinking. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe which parts of the brain were activated as groups of men and women tried to determine whether sets of nonsense words rhymed. Men used only Broca's area in this task, whereas women used Broca's area plus an area on the right side of the brain.

Both Analytic and Linguistic philosophy, are 20th-century philosophical movements, and dominated most of Britain and the United States since World War II, that aims to clarify language and analyze the concepts expressed in it. The movement has been given a variety of designations, including linguistic analysis, logical empiricism, logical positivism, Cambridge analysis, and "Oxford philosophy." The last two labels are derived from the universities in England where this philosophical method has been particularly influential. Although no specific doctrines or tenets are accepted by the movement as a whole, analytic and linguistic philosophers agree that the proper activity of philosophy is clarifying language, or, as some prefer, clarifying concepts. The aim of this activity is to settle philosophical disputes and resolve philosophical problems, which, it is argued, originate in linguistic confusion.

A considerable diversity of views exists among analytic and linguistic philosophers regarding the nature of conceptual or linguistic analysis. Some have been primarily concerned with clarifying the meaning of specific words or phrases as an essential step in making philosophical assertions clear and unambiguous. Others have been more concerned with determining the general conditions that must be met for any linguistic utterance to be meaningful; their intent is to establish a criterion that will distinguish between meaningful and nonsensical sentences. Still other analysts have been interested in creating formal, symbolic languages that are mathematical in nature. Their claim is that philosophical problems can be more effectively dealt with once they are formulated in a rigorous logical language.

By contrast, many philosophers associated with the movement have focussed on the analysis of ordinary, or natural, language. Difficulties arise when concepts such as time and freedom, for example, are considered apart from the linguistic context in which they normally appear. Attention to language as it is ordinarily used is the key, it is argued, to resolving many philosophical puzzles.

Many experts believe that philosophy as an intellectual discipline originated with the work of Plato, one of the most celebrated philosophers in history. The Greek thinker had an immeasurable influence on Western thought. However, Plato's expression of ideas in the form of dialogues—the dialectical method, used most famously by his teacher Socrates—has led to difficulties in interpreting some of the finer points of his thoughts. The issue of what exactly Plato meant to say is addressed in the following excerpt by author R. M. Hare.

Linguistic analysis as a method of philosophy is as old as the Greeks. Several of the dialogues of Plato, for example, are specifically concerned with clarifying terms and concepts. Nevertheless, this style of philosophizing has received dramatically renewed emphasis in the 20th century. Influenced by the earlier British empirical tradition of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill and by the writings of the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frége, the 20th-century English philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell became the founders of this contemporary analytic and linguistic trend. As students together at the University of Cambridge, Moore and Russell rejected Hegelian idealism, particularly as it was reflected in the work of the English metaphysician F. H. Bradley, who held that nothing is completely real except the Absolute. In their opposition to idealism and in their commitment to the view that careful attention to language is crucial in philosophical inquiry, they set the mood and style of philosophizing for much of the 20th century English-speaking world.

For Moore, philosophy was first and foremost analysis. The philosophical task involves clarifying puzzling propositions or concepts by indicating less puzzling propositions or concepts to which the originals are held to be logically equivalent. Once this task has been completed, the truth or falsity of problematic philosophical assertions can be determined more adequately. Moore was noted for his careful analyses of such puzzling philosophical claims as 'time is unreal', analyses that then aided in determining the truth of such assertions.

Russell, strongly influenced by the precision of mathematics, was concerned with developing an ideal logical language that would accurately reflect the nature of the world. Complex propositions, Russell maintained, can be resolved into their simplest components, which he called atomic propositions. These propositions refer to atomic facts, the ultimate constituents of the universe. The metaphysical view based on this logical analysis of language and the insistence that meaningful propositions must correspond to facts constitute what Russell called logical atomism. His interest in the structure of language also led him to distinguish between the grammatical form of a proposition and its logical form. The statements "John is good" and "John is tall" have the same grammatical form but different logical forms. Failure to recognize this would lead one to treat the property "goodness" as if it were a characteristic of John in the same way that the property "tallness" is a characteristic of John. Such failure results in philosophical confusion.

Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. With his fundamental work, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, published in 1921, he became a central figure in the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy.

Russell's work in mathematics attracted to Cambridge the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became a central figure in the analytic and linguistic movement. In his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921; trans. 1922), in which he first presented his theory of language, Wittgenstein argued that "all philosophy is a ‘critique of language'" and that "philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts." The results of Wittgenstein's analysis resembled Russell's logical atomism. The world, he argued, is ultimately composed of simple facts, which it is the purpose of language to picture. To be meaningful, statements about the world must be reducible to linguistic utterances that have a structure similar to the simple facts pictured. In this early Wittgensteinian analysis, only propositions that picture facts—the propositions of science - are considered factually meaningful. Metaphysical, theological, and ethical sentences were judged to be factually meaningless.

Influenced by Russell, Wittgenstein, Ernst Mach, and others, a group of philosophers and mathematicians in Vienna in the 1920s initiated the movement known as logical positivism: Led by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, the Vienna Circle initiated one of the most important chapters in the history of analytic and linguistic philosophy. According to the positivists, the task of philosophy is the clarification of meaning, not the discovery of new facts (the job of the scientists) or the construction of comprehensive accounts of reality (the misguided pursuit of traditional metaphysics).

The positivists divided all meaningful assertions into two classes: analytic propositions and empirically verifiable ones. Analytic propositions, which include the propositions of logic and mathematics, are statements the truth or falsity of which depend altogether on the meanings of the terms constituting the statement. An example would be the proposition "two plus two equals four." The second class of meaningful propositions includes all statements about the world that can be verified, at least in principle, by sense experience. Indeed, the meaning of such propositions is identified with the empirical method of their verification. This verifiability theory of meaning, the positivists concluded, would demonstrate that scientific statements are legitimate factual claims and that metaphysical, religious, and ethical sentences are factually empty. The ideas of logical positivism were made popular in England by the publication of A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic in 1936.

The positivists' verifiability theory of meaning came under intense criticism by philosophers such as the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. Eventually this narrow theory of meaning yielded to a broader understanding of the nature of language. Again, an influential figure was Wittgenstein. Repudiating many of his earlier conclusions in the Tractatus, he initiated a new line of thought culminating in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953; trans. 1953). In this work, Wittgenstein argued that once attention is directed to the way language is actually used in ordinary discourse, the variety and flexibility of language become clear. Propositions do much more than simply picture facts.

This recognition led to Wittgenstein's influential concept of language games. The scientist, the poet, and the theologian, for example, are involved in different language games. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood in its context, that is, in terms of the rules of the language game of which that proposition is a part. Philosophy, concluded Wittgenstein, is an attempt to resolve problems that arise as the result of linguistic confusion, and the key to the resolution of such problems is ordinary language analysis and the proper use of language.

Additional contributions within the analytic and linguistic movement include the work of the British philosophers Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, and P. F. Strawson and the American philosopher W. V. Quine. According to Ryle, the task of philosophy is to restate "systematically misleading expressions" in forms that are logically more accurate. He was particularly concerned with statements the grammatical form of which suggests the existence of nonexistent objects. For example, Ryle is best known for his analysis of mentalistic language, language that misleadingly suggests that the mind is an entity in the same way as the body.

Austin maintained that one of the most fruitful starting points for philosophical inquiry is attention to the extremely fine distinctions drawn in ordinary language. His analysis of language eventually led to a general theory of speech acts, that is, to a description of the variety of activities that an individual may be performing when something is uttered.

Strawson is known for his analysis of the relationship between formal logic and ordinary language. The complexity of the latter, he argued, is inadequately represented by formal logic. A variety of analytic tools, therefore, is needed in addition to logic in analysing ordinary language.

Quine discussed the relationship between language and ontology. He argued that language systems tend to commit their users to the existence of certain things. For Quine, the justification for speaking one way rather than another is a thoroughly pragmatic one.

The commitment to language analysis as a way of pursuing philosophy has continued as a significant contemporary dimension in philosophy. A division also continues to exist between those who prefer to work with the precision and rigour of symbolic logical systems and those who prefer to analyze ordinary language. Although few contemporary philosophers maintain that all philosophical problems are linguistic, the view continues to be widely held that attention to the logical structure of language and to how language is used in everyday discourse can often aid in resolving philosophical problems.

A loose title for various philosophies that emphasize certain common themes, the individual, the experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe, with a consequent dread or sense of ‘absurdity i9n human life' however, existentialism is a philosophical movement or tendency, emphasizing individual existence, freedom, and choice, that influenced many diverse writers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Because of the diversity of positions associated with existentialism, the term is impossible to define precisely. Certain themes common to virtually all existentialist writers can, however, be identified. The term itself suggests one major theme: the stress on concrete individual existence and, consequently, on subjectivity, individual freedom, and choice.

Most philosophers since Plato have held that the highest ethical good is the same for everyone; insofar as one approaches moral perfection, one resembles other morally perfect individuals. The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who was the first writer to call himself existential, reacted against this tradition by insisting that the highest good for the individual is to find his or her own unique vocation. As he wrote in his journal, "I must find a truth that is true for me . . . the idea for which I can live or die." Other existentialist writers have echoed Kierkegaard's belief that one must choose one's own way without the aid of universal, objective standards. Against the traditional view that moral choice involves an objective judgment of right and wrong, existentialists have argued that no objective, rational basis can be found for moral decisions. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche further contended that the individual must decide which situations are to count as moral situations.

All existentialists have followed Kierkegaard in stressing the importance of passionate individual action in deciding questions of both morality and truth. They have insisted, accordingly, that personal experience and acting on one's own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth. Thus, the understanding of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached, objective observer. This emphasis on the perspective of the individual agent has also made existentialists suspicious of systematic reasoning. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and other existentialist writers have been deliberately unsystematic in the exposition of their philosophies, preferring to express themselves in aphorisms, dialogues, parables, and other literary forms. Despite their antirationalist position, however, most existentialists cannot be said to be irrationalists in the sense of denying all validity to rational thought. They have held that rational clarity is desirable wherever possible, but that the most important questions in life are not accessible to reason or science. Furthermore, they have argued that even science is not as rational as is commonly supposed. Nietzsche, for instance, asserted that the scientific assumption of an orderly universe is for the most part a useful fiction.

Perhaps the most prominent theme in existentialist writing is that of choice. Humanity's primary distinction, in the view of most existentialists, is the freedom to choose. Existentialists have held that human beings do not have a fixed nature, or essence, as other animals and plants do; each human being makes choices that create his or her own nature. In the formulation of the 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, existence precedes essence. Choice is therefore central to human existence, and it is inescapable; even the refusal to choose is a choice. Freedom of choice entails commitment and responsibility. Because individuals are free to choose their own path, existentialists have argued, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment wherever it leads.

Kierkegaard held that it is spiritually crucial to recognize that one experiences not only a fear of specific objects but also a feeling of general apprehension, which he called dread. He interpreted it as God's way of calling each individual to make a commitment to a personally valid way of life. The word anxiety (German Angst) has a similarly crucial role in the work of the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger; anxiety leads to the individual's confrontation with nothingness and with the impossibility of finding ultimate justification for the choices he or she must make. In the philosophy of Sartre, the word nausea is used for the individual's recognition of the pure contingency of the universe, and the word anguish is used for the recognition of the total freedom of choice that confronts the individual at every moment.

Existentialism as a distinct philosophical and literary movement belongs to the 19th and 20th centuries, but elements of existentialism can be found in the thought (and life) of Socrates, in the Bible, and in the work of many premodern philosophers and writers.

The first to anticipate the major concerns of modern existentialism was the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. Pascal rejected the rigorous rationalism of his contemporary René Descartes, asserting, in his Pensées (1670), that a systematic philosophy that presumes to explain God and humanity is a form of pride. Like later existentialist writers, he saw human life in terms of paradoxes: The human self, which combines mind and body, is itself a paradox and contradiction.

Kierkegaard, generally regarded as the founder of modern existentialism, reacted against the systematic absolute idealism of the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who claimed to have worked out a total rational understanding of humanity and history. Kierkegaard, on the contrary, stressed the ambiguity and absurdity of the human situation. The individual's response to this situation must be to live a totally committed life, and this commitment can only be understood by the individual who has made it. The individual therefore must always be prepared to defy the norms of society for the sake of the higher authority of a personally valid way of life. Kierkegaard ultimately advocated a "leap of faith" into a Christian way of life, which, although incomprehensible and full of risk, was the only commitment he believed could save the individual from despair.

Danish religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard rejected the all-encompassing, analytical philosophical systems of such 19th-century thinkers as German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Instead, Kierkegaard focussed on the choices the individual must make in all aspects of his or her life, especially the choice to maintain religious faith. In Fear and Trembling (1846; trans. 1941), Kierkegaard explored the concept of faith through an examination of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God demanded that Abraham demonstrate his faith by sacrificing his son.

One of the most controversial works of 19th-century philosophy, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) articulated German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of the Übermensch, a term translated as "Superman" or "Overman." The Superman was an individual who overcame what Nietzsche termed the "slave morality" of traditional values, and lived according to his own morality. Nietzsche also advanced his idea that "God is dead," or that traditional morality was no longer relevant in people's lives. In this passage, the sage Zarathustra came down from the mountain where he had spent the last ten years alone to preach to the people.

Nietzsche, who was not acquainted with the work of Kierkegaard, influenced subsequent existentialist thought through his criticism of traditional metaphysical and moral assumptions and through his espousal of tragic pessimism and the life-affirming individual will that opposes itself to the moral conformity of the majority. In contrast to Kierkegaard, whose attack on conventional morality led him to advocate a radically individualistic Christianity, Nietzsche proclaimed the "death of God" and went on to reject the entire Judeo-Christian moral tradition in favor of a heroic pagan ideal.

The modern philosophy movements of phenomenology and existentialism have been greatly influenced by the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. According to Heidegger, humankind has fallen into a crisis by taking a narrow, technological approach to the world and by ignoring the larger question of existence. People, if they wish to live authentically, must broaden their perspectives. Instead of taking their existence for granted, people should view themselves as part of Being (Heidegger's term for that which underlies all existence).

Heidegger, like Pascal and Kierkegaard, reacted against an attempt to put philosophy on a conclusive rationalistic basis—in this case the phenomenology of the 20th-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Heidegger argued that humanity finds itself in an incomprehensible, indifferent world. Human beings can never hope to understand why they are here; instead, each individual must choose a goal and follow it with passionate conviction, aware of the certainty of death and the ultimate meaninglessness of one's life. Heidegger contributed to existentialist thought an original emphasis on being and ontology (see Metaphysics) as well as on language.

Twentieth-century French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre helped to develop existential philosophy through his writings, novels, and plays. Much of Sartre's work focuses on the dilemma of choice faced by free individuals and on the challenge of creating meaning by acting responsibly in an indifferent world. In stating that "man is condemned to be free," Sartre reminds us of the responsibility that accompanies human decisions.

Sartre first gave the term existentialism general currency by using it for his own philosophy and by becoming the leading figure of a distinct movement in France that became internationally influential after World War II. Sartre's philosophy is explicitly atheistic and pessimistic; he declared that human beings require a rational basis for their lives but are unable to achieve one, and thus human life is a "futile passion." Sartre nevertheless insisted that his existentialism is a form of humanism, and he strongly emphasized human freedom, choice, and responsibility. He eventually tried to reconcile these existentialist concepts with a Marxist analysis of society and history.

Although existentialist thought encompasses the uncompromising atheism of Nietzsche and Sartre and the agnosticism of Heidegger, its origin in the intensely religious philosophies of Pascal and Kierkegaard foreshadowed its profound influence on 20th-century theology. The 20th-century German philosopher Karl Jaspers, although he rejected explicit religious doctrines, influenced contemporary theology through his preoccupation with transcendence and the limits of human experience. The German Protestant theologians Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, the French Roman Catholic theologian Gabriel Marcel, the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev, and the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber inherited many of Kierkegaard's concerns, especially that a personal sense of authenticity and commitment is essential to religious faith.

Renowned as one of the most important writers in world history, 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote psychologically intense novels which probed the motivations and moral justifications for his characters' actions. Dostoyevsky commonly addressed themes such as the struggle between good and evil within the human soul and the idea of salvation through suffering. The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), generally considered Dostoyevsky's best work, interlaces religious exploration with the story of a family's violent quarrels over a woman and a disputed inheritance.

A number of existentialist philosophers used literary forms to convey their thought, and existentialism has been as vital and as extensive a movement in literature as in philosophy. The 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky is probably the greatest existentialist literary figure. In Notes from the Underground (1864), the alienated antihero rages against the optimistic assumptions of rationalist humanism. The view of human nature that emerges in this and other novels of Dostoyevsky is that it is unpredictable and perversely self-destructive; only Christian love can save humanity from itself, but such love cannot be understood philosophically. As the character Alyosha says in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), "We must love life more than the meaning of it."

The opening lines of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (1864)—"I am a sick man.… I am a spiteful man"—are among the most famous in 19th-century literature. Published five years after his release from prison and involuntary military service in Siberia, Notes from Underground is a sign of Dostoyevsky's rejection of the radical social thinking he had embraced in his youth. The unnamed narrator is antagonistic in tone, questioning the reader's sense of morality as well as the foundations of rational thinking. In this excerpt from the beginning of the novel, the narrator describes himself, derisively referring to himself as an "overly conscious" intellectual.

In the 20th century, the novels of the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Kafka, such as The Trial (1925; trans. 1937) and The Castle (1926; trans. 1930), present isolated men confronting vast, elusive, menacing bureaucracies; Kafka's themes of anxiety, guilt, and solitude reflect the influence of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. The influence of Nietzsche is also discernible in the novels of the French writers André Malraux and in the plays of Sartre. The work of the French writer Albert Camus is usually associated with existentialism because of the prominence in it of such themes as the apparent absurdity and futility of life, the indifference of the universe, and the necessity of engagement in a just cause. Existentialist themes are also reflected in the theatre of the absurd, notably in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. In the United States, the influence of existentialism on literature has been more indirect and diffuse, but traces of Kierkegaard's thought can be found in the novels of Walker Percy and John Updike, and various existentialist themes are apparent in the work of such diverse writers as Norman Mailer, John Barth, and Arthur

The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts began with Plato's view in the Theaetetus, that knowledge is true belief plus a logos, an epistemology is to begin of holding the foundations of knowledge, a special branch of philosophy that addresses the philosophical problems surrounding the theory of knowledge. Epistemology is concerned with the definition of knowledge and related concepts, the sources and criteria of knowledge, the kinds of knowledge possible and the degree to which each is certain, and the exact relation between the one who knows and the object known.

Thirteenth-century Italian philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas attempted to synthesize Christian belief with a broad range of human knowledge, embracing diverse sources such as Greek philosopher Aristotle and Islamic and Jewish scholars. His thought exerted lasting influence on the development of Christian theology and Western philosophy. Author Anthony Kenny examines the complexities of Aquinas's concepts of substance and accident.

In the 5th century Bc, the Greek Sophists questioned the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge. Thus, a leading Sophist, Gorgias, argued that nothing really exists, that if anything did exist it could not be known, and that if knowledge were possible, it could not be communicated. Another prominent Sophist, Protagoras, maintained that no person's opinions can be said to be more correct than another's, because each is the sole judge of his or her own experience. Plato, following his illustrious teacher Socrates, tried to answer the Sophists by postulating the existence of a world of unchanging and invisible forms, or ideas, about which it is possible to have exact and certain knowledge. The things one sees and touches, they maintained, are imperfect copies of the pure forms studied in mathematics and philosophy. Accordingly, only the abstract reasoning of these disciplines yields genuine knowledge, whereas reliance on sense perception produces vague and inconsistent opinions. They concluded that philosophical contemplation of the unseen world of forms is the highest goal of human life.

Aristotle followed Plato in regarding abstract knowledge as superior to any other, but disagreed with him as to the proper method of achieving it. Aristotle maintained that almost all knowledge is derived from experience. Knowledge is gained either directly, by abstracting the defining traits of a species, or indirectly, by deducing new facts from those already known, in accordance with the rules of logic. Careful observation and strict adherence to the rules of logic, which were first set down in systematic form by Aristotle, would help guard against the pitfalls the Sophists had exposed. The Stoic and Epicurean schools agreed with Aristotle that knowledge originates in sense perception, but against both Aristotle and Plato they maintained that philosophy is to be valued as a practical guide to life, rather than as an end in itself.

After many centuries of declining interest in rational and scientific knowledge, the Scholastic philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers of the Middle Ages helped to restore confidence in reason and experience, blending rational methods with faith into a unified system of beliefs. Aquinas followed Aristotle in regarding perception as the starting point and logic as the intellectual procedure for arriving at reliable knowledge of nature, but he considered faith in scriptural authority as the main source of religious belief.

From the 17th to the late 19th century, the main issue in epistemology was reasoning versus sense perception in acquiring knowledge. For the rationalists, of whom the French philosopher René Descartes, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were the leaders, the main source and final test of knowledge was deductive reasoning based on self-evident principles, or axioms. For the empiricists, beginning with the English philosophers Francis Bacon and John Locke, the main source and final test of knowledge was sense perception.

Bacon inaugurated the new era of modern science by criticizing the medieval reliance on tradition and authority and also by setting down new rules of scientific method, including the first set of rules of inductive logic ever formulated. Locke attacked the rationalist belief that the principles of knowledge are intuitively self-evident, arguing that all knowledge is derived from experience, either from experience of the external world, which stamps sensations on the mind, or from internal experience, in which the mind reflects on its own activities. Human knowledge of external physical objects, he claimed, is always subject to the errors of the senses, and he concluded that one cannot have absolutely certain knowledge of the physical world.

Irish-born philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley (1685-1753) argued that everything that human beings conceive of exists as an idea in a mind, a philosophical focus which is known as idealism. Berkeley reasoned that because one cannot control one's thoughts, they must come directly from a larger mind: that of God. In this excerpt from his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, written in 1710, Berkeley explained why he believed that it is "impossible … that there should be any such thing as an outward object."

The Irish philosopher George Berkeley agreed with Locke that knowledge comes through ideas, but he denied Locke's belief that a distinction can be made between ideas and objects. The British philosopher David Hume continued the empiricist tradition, but he did not accept Berkeley's conclusion that knowledge was of ideas only. He divided all knowledge into two kinds: knowledge of relations of ideas—that is, the knowledge found in mathematics and logic, which is exact and certain but provides no information about the world; and knowledge of matters of fact - that is, the knowledge derived from sense perception. Hume argued that most knowledge of matters of fact depends upon cause and effect, and since no logical connection exists between any given cause and its effect, one cannot hope to know any future matter of fact with certainty. Thus, the most reliable laws of science might not remain true—a conclusion that had a revolutionary impact on philosophy.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to solve the crisis precipitated by Locke and brought to a climax by Hume; his proposed solution combined elements of rationalism with elements of empiricism. He agreed with the rationalists that one can have exact and certain knowledge, but he followed the empiricists in holding that such knowledge is more informative about the structure of thought than about the world outside of thought. He distinguished three kinds of knowledge: analytical a priori, which is exact and certain but uninformative, because it makes clear only what is contained in definitions; synthetic a posteriori, which conveys information about the world learned from experience, but is subject to the errors of the senses; and synthetic a priori, which is discovered by pure intuition and is both exact and certain, for it expresses the necessary conditions that the mind imposes on all objects of experience. Mathematics and philosophy, according to Kant, provide this last. Since the time of Kant, one of the most frequently argued questions in philosophy has been whether or not such a thing as synthetic a priori knowledge really exists.

During the 19th century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel revived the rationalist claim that absolutely certain knowledge of reality can be obtained by equating the processes of thought, of nature, and of history. Hegel inspired an interest in history and a historical approach to knowledge that was further emphasized by Herbert Spencer in Britain and by the German school of historicism. Spencer and the French philosopher Auguste Comte brought attention to the importance of sociology as a branch of knowledge, and both extended the principles of empiricism to the study of society.

The American school of pragmatism, founded by the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey at the turn of this century, carried empiricism further by maintaining that knowledge is an instrument of action and that all beliefs should be judged by their usefulness as rules for predicting experiences.

In the early 20th century, epistemological problems were discussed thoroughly, and subtle shades of difference grew into rival schools of thought. Special attention was given to the relation between the act of perceiving something, the object directly perceived, and the thing that can be said to be known as a result of the perception. The phenomenalists contended that the objects of knowledge are the same as the objects perceived. The neorealist argued that one has direct perceptions of physical objects or parts of physical objects, rather than of one's own mental states. The critical realists took a middle position, holding that although one perceives only sensory data such as colours and sounds, these stand for physical objects and provide knowledge thereof.

A method for dealing with the problem of clarifying the relation between the act of knowing and the object known was developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. He outlined an elaborate procedure that he called phenomenology, by which one is said to be able to distinguish the way things appear to be from the way one thinks they really are, thus gaining a more precise understanding of the conceptual foundations of knowledge.

During the second quarter of the 20th century, two schools of thought emerged, each indebted to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first of these schools, logical empiricism, or logical positivism, had its origins in Vienna, Austria, but it soon spread to England and the United States. The logical empiricists insisted that there is only one kind of knowledge: scientific knowledge; that any valid knowledge claim must be verifiable in experience; and hence that much that had passed for philosophy was neither true nor false but literally meaningless. Finally, following Hume and Kant, a clear distinction must be maintained between analytic and synthetic statements. The so-called verifiability criterion of meaning has undergone changes as a result of discussions among the logical empiricists themselves, as well as their critics, but has not been discarded. More recently, the sharp distinction between the analytic and the synthetic has been attacked by a number of philosophers, chiefly by American philosopher W.V.O. Quine, whose overall approach is in the pragmatic tradition.

The latter of these recent schools of thought, generally referred to as linguistic analysis, or ordinary language philosophy, seems to break with traditional epistemology. The linguistic analysts undertake to examine the actual way key epistemological terms are used—terms such as knowledge, perception, and probability—and to formulate definitive rules for their use in order to avoid verbal confusion. British philosopher John Langshaw Austin argued, for example, that to say a statement was true added nothing to the statement except a promise by the speaker or writer. Austin does not consider truth a quality or property attaching to statements or utterances. However, the ruling thought is that it is only through a correct appreciation of the role and point of this language that we can come to a better conception of what the language is about, and avoid the oversimplifications and distortion we are apt to bring to its subject matter.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It encompasses the description of languages, the study of their origin, and the analysis of how children acquire language and how people learn languages other than their own. Linguistics is also concerned with relationships between languages and with the ways languages change over time. Linguists may study language as a thought process and seek a theory that accounts for the universal human capacity to produce and understand language. Some linguists examine language within a cultural context. By observing talk, they try to determine what a person needs to know in order to speak appropriately in different settings, such as the workplace, among friends, or among family. Other linguists focus on what happens when speakers from different language and cultural backgrounds interact. Linguists may also concentrate on how to help people learn another language, using what they know about the learner's first language and about the language being acquired.

Although there are many ways of studying language, most approaches belong to one of the two main branches of linguistics: descriptive linguistics and comparative linguistics.

Descriptive linguistics is the study and analysis of spoken language. The techniques of descriptive linguistics were devised by German American anthropologist Franz Boas and American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir in the early 1900s to record and analyze Native American languages. Descriptive linguistics begins with what a linguist hears native speakers say. By listening to native speakers, the linguist gathers a body of data and analyses it in order to identify distinctive sounds, called phonemes. Individual phonemes, such as /p/ and /b/, are established on the grounds that substitution of one for the other changes the meaning of a word. After identifying the entire inventory of sounds in a language, the linguist looks at how these sounds combine to create morphemes, or units of sound that carry meaning, such as the words push and bush. Morphemes may be individual words such as push; root words, such as berry in blueberry; or prefixes (pre- in preview) and suffixes (-ness in openness).

The linguist's next step is to see how morphemes combine into sentences, obeying both the dictionary meaning of the morpheme and the grammatical rules of the sentence. In the sentence "She pushed the bush," the morpheme she, a pronoun, is the subject; push, a transitive verb, is the verb; the, a definite article, is the determiner; and bush, a noun, is the object. Knowing the function of the morphemes in the sentence enables the linguist to describe the grammar of the language. The scientific procedures of phonemics (finding phonemes), morphology (discovering morphemes), and syntax (describing the order of morphemes and their function) provide descriptive linguists with a way to write down grammars of languages never before written down or analysed. In this way they can begin to study and understand these languages.

Comparative linguistics is the study and analysis, by means of written records, of the origins and relatedness of different languages. In 1786 Sir William Jones, a British scholar, asserted that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were related to one another and had descended from a common source. He based this assertion on observations of similarities in sounds and meanings among the three languages. For example, the Sanskrit word bhratar for "brother" resembles the Latin word frater, the Greek word phrater, (and the English word brother).

Other scholars went on to compare Icelandic with Scandinavian languages, and Germanic languages with Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. The correspondences among languages, known as genetic relationships, came to be represented on what comparative linguists refer to as family trees. Family trees established by comparative linguists include the Indo-European, relating Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, English, and other Asian and European languages; the Algonquian, relating Fox, Cree, Menomini, Ojibwa, and other Native North American languages; and the Bantu, relating Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu, Kikuyu, and other African languages.

Comparative linguists also look for similarities in the way words are formed in different languages. Latin and English, for example, change the form of a word to express different meanings, as when the English verb go changes to went and gone to express a past action. Chinese, on the other hand, has no such inflected forms; the verb remains the same while other words indicate the time (as in "go store tomorrow"). In Swahili, prefixes, suffixes, and infixes (additions in the body of the word) combine with a root word to change its meaning. For example, a single word might express when something was done, by whom, to whom, and in what manner.

Some comparative linguists reconstruct hypothetical ancestral languages known as proto-languages, which they use to demonstrate relatedness among contemporary languages. A proto-language is not intended to depict a real language, however, and does not represent the speech of ancestors of people speaking modern languages. Unfortunately, some groups have mistakenly used such reconstructions in efforts to demonstrate the ancestral homeland of a people.

Comparative linguists have suggested that certain basic words in a language do not change over time, because people are reluctant to introduce new words for such constants as arm, eye, or mother. These words are termed culture free. By comparing lists of culture-free words in languages within a family, linguists can derive the percentage of related words and use a formula to figure out when the languages separated from one another.

By the 1960s comparativists were no longer satisfied with focussing on origins, migrations, and the family tree method. They challenged as unrealistic the notion that an earlier language could remain sufficiently isolated for other languages to be derived exclusively from it over a period of time. Today comparativists seek to understand the more complicated reality of language history, taking language contact into account. They are concerned with universal characteristics of language and with comparisons of grammars and structures.

The field of linguistics both borrows from and lends its own theories and methods to other disciplines. The many subfields of linguistics have expanded our understanding of languages. Linguistic theories and methods are also used in other fields of study. These overlapping interests have led to the creation of several cross-disciplinary fields.

Socio linguistics is the study of patterns and variations in language within a society or community. It focuses on the way people use language to express social class, group status, gender, or ethnicity, and it looks at how they make choices about the form of language they use. It also examines the way people use language to negotiate their role in society and to achieve positions of power. For example, sociolinguistic studies have found that the way a New Yorker pronounces the phoneme /r/ in an expression such as "fourth floor" can indicate the person's social class. According to one study, people aspiring to move from the lower middle class to the upper middle class attach prestige to pronouncing the /r/. Sometimes they even overcorrect their speech, pronouncing an /r/ where those whom they wish to copy may not.

Some sociolinguists believe that analysing such variables as the use of a particular phoneme can predict the direction of language change. Change, they say, moves toward the variable associated with power, prestige, or other quality having high social value. Other sociolinguists focus on what happens when speakers of different languages interact. This approach to language change emphasizes the way languages mix rather than the direction of change within a community. The goal of Socio linguistics is to understand communicative competence—what people need to know to use the appropriate language for a given social setting.

Psycholinguistics merges the fields of psychology and linguistics to study how people process language and how language use is related to underlying mental processes. Studies of children's language acquisition and of second-language acquisition are psycholinguistic in nature. Psycholinguists work to develop models for how language is processed and understood, using evidence from studies of what happens when these processes go awry. They also study language disorders such as aphasia (impairment of the ability to use or comprehend words) and dyslexia (impairment of the ability to make out written language).

Computational linguistics involves the use of computers to compile linguistic data, analyze languages, translate from one language to another, and develop and test models of language processing. Linguists use computers and large samples of actual language to analyze the relatedness and the structure of languages and to look for patterns and similarities. Computers also aid in stylistic studies, information retrieval, various forms of textual analysis, and the construction of dictionaries and concordances. Applying computers to language studies has resulted in machine translation systems and machines that recognize and produce speech and text. Such machines facilitate communication with humans, including those who are perceptually or linguistically impaired.

Applied linguistics employs linguistic theory and methods in teaching and in research on learning a second language. Linguists look at the errors people make as they learn another language and at their strategies for communicating in the new language at different degrees of competence. In seeking to understand what happens in the mind of the learner, applied linguists recognize that motivation, attitude, learning style, and personality affect how well a person learns another language.

Anthropological linguistics, also known as linguistic anthropology, uses linguistic approaches to analyze culture. Anthropological linguists examine the relationship between a culture and its language, the way cultures and languages have changed over time, and how different cultures and languages are related to one another. For example, the present English use of family and given names arose in the late 13th and early 14th centuries when the laws concerning registration, tenure, and inheritance of property were changed.

Philosophical linguistics examines the philosophy of language. Philosophers of language search for the grammatical principles and tendencies that all human languages share. Among the concerns of linguistic philosophers is the range of possible word order combinations throughout the world. One finding is that 95 percent of the world's languages use a subject-verb-object (SVO) order as English does ("She pushed the bush."). Only 5 percent use a subject-object-verb (SOV) order or verb-subject-object (VSO) order.

Neurolinguistics is the study of how language is processed and represented in the brain. Neurolinguists seek to identify the parts of the brain involved with the production and understanding of language and to determine where the components of language (phonemes, morphemes, and structure or syntax) are stored. In doing so, they make use of techniques for analysing the structure of the brain and the effects of brain damage on language.

Speculation about language goes back thousands of years. Ancient Greek philosophers speculated on the origins of language and the relationship between objects and their names. They also discussed the rules that govern language, or grammar, and by the 3rd century Bc they had begun grouping words into parts of speech and devising names for different forms of verbs and nouns.

In India religion provided the motivation for the study of language nearly 2500 years ago. Hindu priests noted that the language they spoke had changed since the compilation of their ancient sacred texts, the Vedas, starting about 1000 Bc. They believed that for certain religious ceremonies based upon the Vedas to succeed, they needed to reproduce the language of the Vedas precisely. Panini, an Indian grammarian who lived about 400 Bc, produced the earliest work describing the rules of Sanskrit, the ancient language of India.

The Romans used Greek grammars as models for their own, adding commentary on Latin style and usage. Statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote on rhetoric and style in the 1st century Bc. Later grammarians Aelius Donatus (4th century ad) and Priscian (6th century ad) produced detailed Latin grammars. Roman works served as textbooks and standards for the study of language for more than 1000 years.

It was not until the end of the 18th century that language was researched and studied in a scientific way. During the 17th and 18th centuries, modern languages, such as French and English, replaced Latin as the means of universal communication in the West. This occurrence, along with developments in printing, meant that many more texts became available. At about this time, the study of phonetics, or the sounds of a language, began. Such investigations led to comparisons of sounds in different languages; in the late 18th century the observation of correspondences among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek gave birth to the field of Indo-European linguistics.

During the 19th century, European linguists focussed on philology, or the historical analysis and comparison of languages. They studied written texts and looked for changes over time or for relationships between one language and another.

American linguist, writer, teacher, and political activist Noam Chomsky is considered the founder of transformational-generative linguistic analysis, which revolutionized the field of linguistics. This system of linguistics treats grammar as a theory of language—that is, Chomsky believes that in addition to the rules of grammar specific to individual languages, there are universal rules common to all languages that indicate that the ability to form and understand language is innate to all human beings. Chomsky also is well known for his political activism—he opposed United States involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and has written various books and articles and delivered many lectures in an attempt to educate and empower people on various political and social issues.

In the early 20th century, linguistics expanded to include the study of unwritten languages. In the United States linguists and anthropologists began to study the rapidly disappearing spoken languages of Native North Americans. Because many of these languages were unwritten, researchers could not use historical analysis in their studies. In their pioneering research on these languages, anthropologists Franz Boas and Edward Sapir developed the techniques of descriptive linguistics and theorized on the ways in which language shapes our perceptions of the world.

An important outgrowth of descriptive linguistics is a theory known as structuralism, which assumes that language is a system with a highly organized structure. Structuralism began with publication of the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Course in General Linguistics, 1959). This work, compiled by Saussure's students after his death, is considered the foundation of the modern field of linguistics. Saussure made a distinction between actual speech, or spoken language, and the knowledge underlying speech that speakers share about what is grammatical. Speech, he said, represents instances of grammar, and the linguist's task is to find the underlying rules of a particular language from examples found in speech. To the structuralist, grammar is a set of relationships that account for speech, rather than a set of instances of speech, as it is to the descriptivist.

Once linguists began to study language as a set of abstract rules that somehow account for speech, other scholars began to take an interest in the field. They drew analogies between language and other forms of human behaviour, based on the belief that a shared structure underlies many aspects of a culture. Anthropologists, for example, became interested in a structuralist approach to the interpretation of kinship systems and analysis of myth and religion. American linguist Leonard Bloomfield promoted structuralism in the United States.

Saussure's ideas also influenced European linguistics, most notably in France and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). In 1926 Czech linguist Vilem Mathesius founded the Linguistic Circle of Prague, a group that expanded the focus of the field to include the context of language use. The Prague circle developed the field of phonology, or the study of sounds, and demonstrated that universal features of sounds in the languages of the world interrelate in a systematic way. Linguistic analysis, they said, should focus on the distinctiveness of sounds rather than on the ways they combine. Where descriptivists tried to locate and describe individual phonemes, such as /b/ and /p/, the Prague linguists stressed the features of these phonemes and their interrelationships in different languages. In English, for example, the voice distinguishes between the similar sounds of /b/ and /p/, but these are not distinct phonemes in a number of other languages. An Arabic speaker might pronounce the cities Pompei and Bombay the same way.

As linguistics developed in the 20th century, the notion became prevalent that language is more than speech—specifically, that it is an abstract system of interrelationships shared by members of a speech community. Structural linguistics led linguists to look at the rules and the patterns of behaviour shared by such communities. Whereas structural linguists saw the basis of language in the social structure, other linguists looked at language as a mental process.

The 1957 publication of Syntactic Structures by American linguist Noam Chomsky initiated what many view as a scientific revolution in linguistics. Chomsky sought a theory that would account for both linguistic structure and for the creativity of language—the fact that we can create entirely original sentences and understand sentences never before uttered. He proposed that all people have an innate ability to acquire language. The task of the linguist, he claimed, is to describe this universal human ability, known as language competence, with a grammar from which the grammars of all languages could be derived. The linguist would develop this grammar by looking at the rules children use in hearing and speaking their first language. He termed the resulting model, or grammar, a transformational-generative grammar, referring to the transformations (or rules) that generate (or account for) language. Certain rules, Chomsky asserted, are shared by all languages and form part of a universal grammar, while others are language specific and associated with particular speech communities. Since the 1960s much of the development in the field of linguistics has been a reaction to or against Chomsky's theories.

At the end of the 20th century, linguists used the term grammar primarily to refer to a subconscious linguistic system that enables people to produce and comprehend an unlimited number of utterances. Grammar thus accounts for our linguistic competence. Observations about the actual language we use, or language performance, are used to theorize about this invisible mechanism known as grammar.

The orientation toward the scientific study of language led by Chomsky has had an impact on nongenerative linguists as well. Comparative and historically oriented linguists are looking for the various ways linguistic universals show up in individual languages. Psycholinguists, interested in language acquisition, are investigating the notion that an ideal speaker-hearer is the origin of the acquisition process. Sociolinguists are examining the rules that underlie the choice of language variants, or codes, and allow for switching from one code to another. Some linguists are studying language performance-the way people use language-to see how it reveals a cognitive ability shared by all human beings. Others seek to understand animal communication within such a framework. What mental processes enable chimpanzees to make signs and communicate with one another and how do these processes differ from those of humans?

An written bibliographic note in gratification to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), an Austrian-British philosopher, who was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, particularly noted for his contribution to the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy.

Born in Vienna on April 26, 1889, Wittgenstein was raised in a wealthy and cultured family. After attending schools in Linz and Berlin, he went to England to study engineering at the University of Manchester. His interest in pure mathematics led him to Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study with Bertrand Russell. There he turned his attention to philosophy. By 1918 Wittgenstein had completed his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921; trans. 1922), a work he then believed provided the "final solution" to philosophical problems. Subsequently, he turned from philosophy and for several years taught elementary school in an Austrian village. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge to resume his work in philosophy and was appointed to the faculty of Trinity College. Soon he began to reject certain conclusions of the Tractatus and to develop the position reflected in his Philosophical Investigations (pub. posthumously 1953; trans. 1953). Wittgenstein retired in 1947; he died in Cambridge on April 29, 1951. A sensitive, intense man who often sought solitude and was frequently depressed, Wittgenstein abhorred pretense and was noted for his simple style of life and dress. The philosopher was forceful and confident in personality, however, and he exerted considerable influence on those with whom he came in contact.

Wittgenstein's philosophical life may be divided into two distinct phases: an early period, represented by the Tractatus, and a later period, represented by the Philosophical Investigations. Throughout most of his life, however, Wittgenstein consistently viewed philosophy as linguistic or conceptual analysis. In the Tractatus he argued that "philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts." In the Philosophical Investigations, however, he maintained that "philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Language, Wittgenstein argued in the Tractatus, is composed of complex propositions that can be analysed into less complex propositions until one arrives at simple or elementary propositions. Correspondingly, the world is composed of complex facts that can be analysed into less complex facts until one arrives at simple, or atomic, facts. The world is the totality of these facts. According to Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning, it is the nature of elementary propositions logically to picture atomic facts, or "states of affairs." He claimed that the nature of language required elementary propositions, and his theory of meaning required that there be atomic facts pictured by the elementary propositions. On this analysis, only propositions that picture facts—the propositions of science—are considered cognitively meaningful. Metaphysical and ethical statements are not meaningful assertions. The logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle were greatly influenced by this conclusion (see Positivism).

Wittgenstein came to believe, however, that the narrow view of language reflected in the Tractatus was mistaken. In the Philosophical Investigations he argued that if one actually looks to see how language is used, the variety of linguistic usage becomes clear. Words are like tools, and just as tools serve different functions, so linguistic expressions serve many functions. Although some propositions are used to picture facts, others are used to command, question, pray, thank, curse, and so on. This recognition of linguistic flexibility and variety led to Wittgenstein's concept of a language game and to the conclusion that people play different language games. The scientist, for example, is involved in a different language game than the theologian. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood in terms of its context, that is, in terms of the rules of the game of which that proposition is a part. The key to the resolution of philosophical puzzles is the therapeutic process of examining and describing language in use.

Analytic and Linguistic Philosophy, is a product out of the 20th-century philosophical movement, and dominant in Britain and the United States since World War II, that aims to clarify language and analyze the concepts expressed in it. The movement has been given a variety of designations, including linguistic analysis, logical empiricism, logical positivism, Cambridge analysis, and ‘Oxford philosophy'. The last two labels are derived from the universities in England where this philosophical method has been particularly influential. Although no specific doctrines or tenets are accepted by the movement as a whole, analytic and linguistic philosophers agree that the proper activity of philosophy is clarifying language, or, as some prefer, clarifying concepts. The aim of this activity is to settle philosophical disputes and resolve philosophical problems, which, it is argued, originate in linguistic confusion.

A considerable diversity of views exists among analytic and linguistic philosophers regarding the nature of conceptual or linguistic analysis. Some have been primarily concerned with clarifying the meaning of specific words or phrases as an essential step in making philosophical assertions clear and unambiguous. Others have been more concerned with determining the general conditions that must be met for any linguistic utterance to be meaningful; their intent is to establish a criterion that will distinguish between meaningful and nonsensical sentences. Still other analysts have been interested in creating formal, symbolic languages that are mathematical in nature. Their claim is that philosophical problems can be more effectively dealt with once they are formulated in a rigorous logical language.

By contrast, many philosophers associated with the movement have focussed on the analysis of ordinary, or natural, language. Difficulties arise when concepts such as time and freedom, for example, are considered apart from the linguistic context in which they normally appear. Attention to language as it is ordinarily used is the key, it is argued, to resolving many philosophical puzzles.

Linguistic analysis as a method of philosophy is as old as the Greeks. Several of the dialogues of Plato, for example, are specifically concerned with clarifying terms and concepts. Nevertheless, this style of philosophizing has received dramatically renewed emphasis in the 20th century. Influenced by the earlier British empirical tradition of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill and by the writings of the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frége, the 20th-century English philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell became the founders of this contemporary analytic and linguistic trend. As students together at the University of Cambridge, Moore and Russell rejected Hegelian idealism, particularly as it was reflected in the work of the English metaphysician F. H. Bradley, who held that nothing is completely real except the Absolute. In their opposition to idealism and in their commitment to the view that careful attention to language is crucial in philosophical inquiry, they set the mood and style of philosophizing for much of the 20th century English-speaking world.

For Moore, philosophy was first and foremost analysis. The philosophical task involves clarifying puzzling propositions or concepts by indicating less puzzling propositions or concepts to which the originals are held to be logically equivalent. Once this task has been completed, the truth or falsity of problematic philosophical assertions can be determined more adequately. Moore was noted for his careful analyses of such puzzling philosophical claims as "time is unreal," analyses that then aided in determining the truth of such assertions.

Russell, strongly influenced by the precision of mathematics, was concerned with developing an ideal logical language that would accurately reflect the nature of the world. Complex propositions, Russell maintained, can be resolved into their simplest components, which he called atomic propositions. These propositions refer to atomic facts, the ultimate constituents of the universe. The metaphysical view based on this logical analysis of language and the insistence that meaningful propositions must correspond to facts constitute what Russell called logical atomism. His interest in the structure of language also led him to distinguish between the grammatical form of a proposition and its logical form. The statements ‘John is good' and ‘John is tall' have the same grammatical form but different logical forms. Failure to recognize this would lead one to treat the property ‘goodness' as if it were a characteristic of John in the same way that the property ‘tallness' is a characteristic of John. Such failure results in philosophical confusion.

Russell's work in mathematics attracted to Cambridge the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became a central figure in the analytic and linguistic movement. In his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921; trans. 1922), in which he first presented his theory of language, Wittgenstein argued that ‘all philosophy is a ‘critique of language' and that ‘philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts'. The results of Wittgenstein's analysis resembled Russell's logical atomism. The world, he argued, is ultimately composed of simple facts, which it is the purpose of language to picture. To be meaningful, statements about the world must be reducible to linguistic utterances that have a structure similar to the simple facts pictured. In this early Wittgensteinian analysis, only propositions that picture facts - the propositions of science - are considered factually meaningful. Metaphysical, theological, and ethical sentences were judged to be factually meaningless.

Influenced by Russell, Wittgenstein, Ernst Mach, and others, a group of philosophers and mathematicians in Vienna in the 1920s initiated the movement known as logical positivism. Led by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, the Vienna Circle initiated one of the most important chapters in the history of analytic and linguistic philosophy. According to the positivists, the task of philosophy is the clarification of meaning, not the discovery of new facts (the job of the scientists) or the construction of comprehensive accounts of reality (the misguided pursuit of traditional metaphysics).

The positivists divided all meaningful assertions into two classes: analytic propositions and empirically verifiable ones. Analytic propositions, which include the propositions of logic and mathematics, are statements the truth or falsity of which depend altogether on the meanings of the terms constituting the statement. An example would be the proposition "two plus two equals four." The second class of meaningful propositions includes all statements about the world that can be verified, at least in principle, by sense experience. Indeed, the meaning of such propositions is identified with the empirical method of their verification. This verifiability theory of meaning, the positivists concluded, would demonstrate that scientific statements are legitimate factual claims and that metaphysical, religious, and ethical sentences are factually empty. The ideas of logical positivism were made popular in England by the publication of

A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic in 1936.

The positivists' verifiability theory of meaning came under intense criticism by philosophers such as the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. Eventually this narrow theory of meaning yielded to a broader understanding of the nature of language. Again, an influential figure was Wittgenstein. Repudiating many of his earlier conclusions in the Tractatus, he initiated a new line of thought culminating in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953; trans. 1953). In this work, Wittgenstein argued that once attention is directed to the way language is actually used in ordinary discourse, the variety and flexibility of language become clear. Propositions do much more than simply picture facts.

This recognition led to Wittgenstein's influential concept of language games. The scientist, the poet, and the theologian, for example, are involved in different language games. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood in its context, that is, in terms of the rules of the language game of which that proposition is a part. Philosophy, concluded Wittgenstein, is an attempt to resolve problems that arise as the result of linguistic confusion, and the key to the resolution of such problems is ordinary language analysis and the proper use of language.

Additional contributions within the analytic and linguistic movement include the work of the British philosophers Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, and P. F. Strawson and the American philosopher W. V. Quine. According to Ryle, the task of philosophy is to restate ‘systematically misleading expressions' in forms that are logically more accurate. He was particularly concerned with statements the grammatical form of which suggests the existence of nonexistent objects. For example, Ryle is best known for his analysis of mentalistic language, language that misleadingly suggests that the mind is an entity in the same way as the body.

Austin maintained that one of the most fruitful starting points for philosophical inquiry is attention to the extremely fine distinctions drawn in ordinary language. His analysis of language eventually led to a general theory of speech acts, that is, to a description of the variety of activities that an individual may be performing when something is uttered.

Strawson is known for his analysis of the relationship between formal logic and ordinary language. The complexity of the latter, he argued, is inadequately represented by formal logic. A variety of analytic tools, therefore, is needed in addition to logic in analysing ordinary language.

Quine discussed the relationship between language and ontology. He argued that language systems tend to commit their users to the existence of certain things. For Quine, the justification for speaking one way rather than another is a thoroughly pragmatic one.

The commitment to language analysis as a way of pursuing philosophy has continued as a significant contemporary dimension in philosophy. A division also continues to exist between those who prefer to work with the precision and rigour of symbolic logical systems and those who prefer to analyze ordinary language. Although few contemporary philosophers maintain that all philosophical problems are linguistic, the view continues to be widely held that attention to the logical structure of language and to how language is used in everyday discourse can often aid in resolving philosophical problems

Is term of logical calculus is also called a formal language, and a logical system. A system in which explicit rules are provided to determining (1) which are the expressions of the system (2) which sequence of expressions count as well formed (well-forced formulae) (3) which sequence would count ss proofs. A system may include axioms for which leaves terminate a proof, however, it shows of the prepositional calculus and the predicated calculus.

Its most immediate of issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning ‘scepticism'. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best methods in some area seems to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the result that questions of truth become undefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.

As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issue undesirable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension or some katalepsis). As a result the sceptics concludes eposhé, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief.

Fixed by its will for and of itself, the mere mitigated scepticism which accepts everyday or commonsense belief, is that, not the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit. Nonetheless, it is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason to give us much more. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus. Despite the fact that the phrase ‘Cartesian scepticism' is sometimes used. Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the ‘method of doubt' uses a sceptical scenario in order to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of ‘clear and distinct' ideas, not far removed from the phantasiá kataleptikê of the Stoics.

For many sceptics had traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, artistry. And, of course, they claim that certain knowledge is not possible. In part, nonetheless, of the principle that every effect it's a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true it is not necessary for an effect to be predictable as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, in order to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty. Except for alleged cases of things that are evident for one just by being true. It has often been thought, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well as being true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by ‘deduction' or ‘induction', there will be criteria specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principle specifying the sort of considerations that will make such standards in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree.

Besides, there is another view - the absolute globular view that we do not have any knowledge whatsoever. In whatever manner,

it is doubtful that any philosopher seriously entertains of an absolute scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonist sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any non-evident standards that no such hesitancy about asserting to ‘the evident', the non-evident is any belief that requires evidences because it is warranted.

René Descartes (1596-1650), in his sceptical guise, never doubted the content of his own ideas. Its challenging logic, inasmuch as of whether they ‘corresponded' to anything beyond ideas.

All the same, Pyrrhonism and Cartesian form of a virtual globular scepticism, in having been held and defended, that of assuming that knowledge is some form of true, sufficiently warranted belief, it is the warranted condition that provides the truth or belief conditions, in that of providing the grist for the sceptic's mill about. The Pyrrhonist will suggest that no non-evident, empirically deferring the sufficiency of giving in but warranted. Whereas, a Cartesian sceptic will agree that no empirical standard about anything other than one's own mind and its contents is sufficiently warranted, because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it. Whereby, the essential difference between the two views concerns the stringency of the requirements for a belief being sufficiently warranted to take account of as knowledge.

A Cartesian requires certainty. A Pyrrhonist merely requires that the standards in case are more warranted then its negation.

Cartesian scepticism was by an unduly influence with which Descartes agues for scepticism, than his reply holds, in that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical standards, in that of anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason is roughly in the position that there is a legitimate doubt about all such standards, only because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some sense, for which it is radically different from the objects which we normally think, in whatever manner they affect our senses. Therefrom, if the Pyrrhonist are the agnostics, the Cartesian sceptic is the atheist.

Because the Pyrrhonist require much less of a belief in order for it to be confirmed as knowledge than do the Cartesian, the argument for Pyrrhonism are much more difficult to construct. A Pyrrhonist must show that there is no better set of reasons for believing to any standards, of which are in case that any knowledge learnt of the mind is understood by some of its forms, that has to require certainty.

The underlying latencies that are given among the many derivative contributions as awaiting their presence to the future, that of specifying to the theory of knowledge, is, but, nonetheless, the possibility to identify a set of shared doctrines, however, identity to discern two broad styles of instances to discern, in like manner, these two styles of pragmatism, clarify the innovation that a Cartesian approval is fundamentally flawed, nonetheless, of responding very differently but not fordone.

Repudiating the requirements of absolute certainty or knowledge, insisting on the connection of knowledge with activity, as, too, of pragmatism of a reformist distributing knowledge upon the legitimacy of traditional questions about the truth-unconductiveness of our cognitive practices, and sustain a conception of truth objectives, enough to give those questions that undergo of a gathering in their own purposive latencies, yet we are given to the spoken word for which a dialectic awareness sparks the flame from the ambers of fire.

Pragmatism of a determinant revolution, by contrast, relinquishing the objectivity of youth, acknowledges no legitimate epistemological questions over and above those that are naturally kindred of our current cognitive conviction.

It seems clear that certainty is a property that can be assembled to either a person or a belief. We can say that a person, ‘S' is certain, or we can say that its descendable alinement are aligned as of ‘p', is certain. The two uses can be connected by saying that ‘S' has the right to be certain just in case the value of ‘p' is sufficiently verified.

In defining certainty, it is crucial to note that the term has both an absolute and relative sense. More or less, we take a proposition to be certain when we have no doubt about its truth.. We may do this in error or unreasonably, but objectively a proposition is certain when such absence of doubt is justifiable. The sceptical tradition in philosophy denies that objective certainty is often possible, or ever possible, either for any proposition at all, or for any proposition from some suspect family (ethics, theory, memory, empirical judgement etc.) a major sceptical weapon is the possibility of upsetting events that Can cast doubt back onto what were hitherto taken to be certainties. Others include reminders of the divergence of human opinion, and the fallible source of our confidence. Fundamentalist approaches to knowledge look for a basis of certainty, upon which the structure of our system is built. Others reject the metaphor, looking for mutual support and coherence, without foundation.

However, in moral theory, the view that there are inviolable moral standards or absolute variable human desires or policies or prescriptions.

In spite of the notorious difficulty of reading Kantian ethics, a hypothetical imperative embeds a command which is in place only given some antecedent desire or project: ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet'. The injunction to stay quiet only applies to those with the antecedent desire or inclination. If one has no desire to look wise the injunction cannot be so avoided: It is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination. It could be represented as, for example, ‘tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)'. The distinction is not always signalled by presence or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, don't become a bartender' may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in case of those with the stated desire.

In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed five forms of the categorical imperative: (1) the formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same times will that it should become universal law: (2) the formula of the law of nature: ‘act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature': (3) the formula of the end-in-itself: ‘act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end': (4) the formula of autonomy, or considering ‘the will of every rational being as a will which makes universal law': (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for the systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.

Even so, a proposition that is not a conditional ‘p'. Moreover, the affirmative and negative, modern opinion is wary of this distinction, since what appears categorical may vary notation. Apparently, categorical propositions may also turn out to be disguised conditionals: ‘X' is intelligent (categorical?) = if ‘X' is given a range of tasks she performs them better than many people (conditional?) The problem. Nonetheless, is not merely one of classification, since deep metaphysical questions arise when facts that seem to be categorical and therefore solid, come to seem by contrast conditional, or purely hypothetical or potential.

A limited area of knowledge or endeavour to which pursuits, activities and interests are a central representation held to a concept of physical theory. In this way, a field is defined by the distribution of a physical quantity, such as temperature, mass density, or potential energy y, at different points in space. In the particularly important example of force fields, such ad gravitational, electrical, and magnetic fields, the field value at a point is the force which a test particle would experience if it were located at that point. The philosophical problem is whether a force field is to be thought of as purely potential, so the presence of a field merely describes the propensity of masses to move relative to each other, or whether it should be thought of in terms of the physically real modifications of a medium, whose properties result in such powers that is, are force fields purely potential, fully characterized by dispositional statements or conditionals, or are they categorical or actual? The former option seems to require within ungrounded dispositions, or regions of space hat differ only in what happens if an object is placed there. The law-like shape of these dispositions, apparent for example in the curved lines of force of the magnetic field, may then seem quite inexplicable. To atomists, such as Newton it would represent a return to Aristotelian entelechies, or quasi-psychological affinities between things, which are responsible for their motions. The latter option requires understanding of how forces of attraction and repulsion can be ‘grounded' in the properties of the medium.

The basic idea of a field is arguably present in Leibniz, who was certainly hostile to Newtonian atomism. Although his equal hostility to ‘action at a distance' muddies the water. It is usually credited to the Jesuit mathematician and scientist Joseph Boscovich (1711-87) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), both of whom influenced the scientist Faraday, with whose work the physical notion became established. In his paper ‘On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force' (1852). Faraday was to suggest several criteria for assessing the physical reality of lines of force, such as whether they are affected by an intervening material medium, whether the motion depends on the nature of what is placed at the receiving end. As far as electromagnetic fields go, Faraday himself inclined to the view that the mathematical similarity between heat flow, currents, and electro-magnetic lines of force was evidence for the physical reality of the intervening medium.

Once, again, our mentioning recognition for which its case value, whereby its view is especially associated the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), that the truth of a statement can be defined in terms of a ‘utility' of accepting it. Communicated, so much as a dispiriting position for which its place of valuation may be viewed as an objection. Since there are things that are false, as it may be useful to accept, and conversely there are things that are true and that it may be damaging to accept. Nevertheless, there are deep connections between the idea that a representation system is accorded, and the likely success of the projects in progressive formality, by its possession. The evolution of a system of representation either perceptual or linguistic, seems bounded to connect successes with everything adapting or with utility in the modest sense. The Wittgenstein doctrine stipulates the meaning of use that upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion and the idea that belief in the truth on one hand, the action of the other. One way of binding with cement, wherefore the connection is found in the idea that natural selection becomes much as much in adapting us to the cognitive creatures, because beliefs have effects, they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant's doctrine, and continues to play an influencing role in the theory of meaning and truth.

James, (1842-1910), although with characteristic generosity exaggerated in his debt to Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), he charted that the method of doubt encouraged people to pretend to doubt what they did not doubt in their hearts, and criticize its individualists insistence, that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individuals personalized consciousness.

From his earliest writings, James understood cognitive processes in teleological terms. Thought, he held, assists us in the satisfactory interests. His will to Believe doctrine, the view that we are sometimes justified in believing beyond the evidential relics upon the notion that a belief's benefits are relevant to its justification. His pragmatic method of analysing philosophical problems, for which requires that we find the meaning of terms by examining their application to objects in experimental situations, similarly reflects the teleological approach in its attention to consequences.

Such an approach, however, set's James' theory of meaning apart from verification, dismissive of metaphysics. Unlike the verificationalist, who takes cognitive meaning to be a matter only of consequences in sensory experience. James' took pragmatic meaning to include emotional and matter responses. Moreover, his ,metaphysical standard of value, not a way of dismissing them as meaningless. It should also be noted that in a greater extent, circumspective moments James did not hold that even his broad set of consequences were exhaustive of a terms meaning. ‘Theism', for example, he took to have antecedent, definitional meaning, in addition to its varying degree of importance and chance upon an important pragmatic meaning.

James' theory of truth reflects upon his teleological conception of cognition, by considering a true belief to be one which is compatible with our existing system of beliefs, and leads us to satisfactory interaction with the world.

However, Peirce's famous pragmatist principle is a rule of logic employed in clarifying our concepts and ideas. Consider the claim the liquid in a flask is an acid, if, we believe this, we except that it would turn red: We except an action of ours to have certain experimental results. The pragmatic principle holds that listing the conditional expectations of this kind, in that we associate such immediacy with applications of a conceptual representation that provides a complete and orderly sets clarification of the concept. This is relevant ti the logic of abduction: Clarificationists using the pragmatic principle provides all the information about the content of a hypothesis that is relevantly to decide whether it is worth testing.

To a greater extent, and most importantly, is the famed apprehension of the pragmatic principle, in so that, Pierces's account of reality: When we take something to be rea, that by this single case, we think it is ‘fated to be agreed upon by all who investigate' the matter to which it stand, in other words, if I believe that it is really the case that ‘P', then I except that if anyone were to inquire depthfully into the finding its measure into whether ‘p', they would arrive at the belief that ‘p'. It is not part of the theory that the experimental consequences of our actions should be specified by a warranted empiricist vocabulary - Peirce insisted that perceptual theories are abounding in latency. Even so, nor is it his view that the collected conditionals do or not clarify a concept as all analytic. In addition, in later writings, he argues that the pragmatic principle could only be made plausible to someone who accepted its metaphysical realism: It requires that ‘would-bees' are objective and, of course, real.

If realism itself can be given a fairly quick clarification, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of supposition, for they seem legendary. Other opponents deny that the entitles posited by the relevant discourse that exist or at least exists: The standard example is ‘idealism', that reality id somehow mind-curative or mind-co-ordinated - that real object comprising the ‘external world' are not independently of eloping minds, but only exist as in some way correlative to the mental operations. The doctrine assembled of ‘idealism' enters on the conceptual note that reality as we understand this as meaningful and reflects the working of mindful purposes. And it construes this as meaning that the inquiring mind itself makes of a formative constellation and not of any mere understanding of the nature of the ‘real' bit even the resulting charger we attribute to it.

Wherefore, the term ids most straightforwardly used when qualifying another linguistic form of grammatik: a real ‘x' may be contrasted with a fake, a failed ‘x', a near ‘x', and so on. To trat something as real, without qualification, is to suppose it to be part of the actualized world. To reify something is to suppose that we have committed by some indoctrinated treatise, as that of a theory. The central error in thinking of reality and the totality of existence is to think of the ‘unreal' as a separate domain of things, perhaps, unfairly to that of the benefits of existence.

Such that non-existence of all things, as the product of logical confusion of treating the term ‘nothing' as itself a referring expression instead of a ‘quantifier'. (Stating informally as a quantifier is an expression that reports of a quantity of times that a predicate is satisfied in some class of things, i.e., in a domain.) This confusion leads the unsuspecting to think that a sentence such as ‘Nothing is all around us' talks of a special kind of ting that is all around us, when in fact it merely denies that the predicate ‘is all around us' has appreciations. The feelings that lad some philosophers and theologians, notably Heidegger, to talk of the experience of Nothing, is not properly the experience of nothing, but rather the failure of a hope or expectations that there would be something of some kind at some point. This may arise in quite everyday cases, as when one finds that the article of functions one expected to see as usual, in the corner has disappeared. The difference between ‘existentialist'' and ‘analytic philosophy', on the point of what, whereas the former is afraid of nothing, and the latter thinks that there is nothing to be afraid of.

A rather different set of concerns arise when actions are specified in terms of doing nothing, saying nothing may be an admission of guilt, and doing nothing in some circumstances may be tantamount to murder. Still, other substitutional problems arise over conceptualizing empty space and time.

Whereas, the standard opposition between those who affirm and those who deny, the real existence of some kind of thing or some kind of fact or state of affairs. Almost any area of discourse may be the focus of tis dispute: The external world, the past and future, other minds, mathematical objects, possibilities, universals, moral or aesthetic properties are examples. There be to one influential suggestion, as associated with the British philosopher of logic and language, and the most determinative of philosophers centres round Anthony Dummett (1925), to which is borrowed from the ‘intuitionistic' critique of classical mathematics, and suggested that the unrestricted use of the ‘principle of bivalence' is the trademark of ‘realism'. However, this ha to overcome counter-examples both ways: Although Aquinas wads a moral ‘realist', he held that moral really was not sufficiently structured to make true or false every moral claim. Unlike Kant who believed that he could use the law of bivalence happily in mathematics, precisely because it wad only our own construction. Realism can itself be subdivided: Kant, for example, combines empirical realism (within the phenomenal world the realist says the right things - surrounding objects really exist and independent of us and our mental stares) with transcendental idealism (the phenomenal world asa whole reflects the structures imposed on it by the activity of our minds as they render it intelligible to us). In modern philosophy the orthodox oppositions to realism has been from philosopher such as Goodman, who, impressed by the extent to which we perceive the world through conceptual and linguistic lenses of our own making.

Assigned to the modern treatment of existence in the theory of ‘quantification' is sometimes put by saying that existence is not a predicate. The idea is that the existential quantifies itself ads an operator on a predicate, indicating that the property it expresses has instances. Existence is therefore treated as a second-order property, or a property of properties. It is fitting to say, that in this it is like number, for when we say that these things of a kind, we do not describe the thing (ad we would if we said there are red things of the kind), but instead attribute a property to the kind itself. The parallelled numbers are exploited by the German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics Gottlob Frége in the dictum that affirmation of existence is merely denied of the number nought. A problem, nevertheless, proves accountable for its crated by sentences like ‘This exists', where some particular thing is undirected, such that a sentence seems to express a contingent truth (for this insight has not existed), yet no other predicate is involved. ‘This exists' is, therefore unlike ‘Tamed tigers exist', where a property is said to have an instance, for the word ‘this' and does not locate a property, but only an individual.

Possible worlds seem able to differ from each other purely in the presence or absence of individuals, and not merely in th distribution of exemplification of properties.

The philosophical ponderance over which to set upon the unreal, as belonging to the domain of Being. Nonetheless, there is little for us that can be said with the philosopher's study. So it is not apparent that there can be such a subject as Being by itself. Nevertheless, the concept had a central place in philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger. The essential question of ‘why is there something and not of nothing'? Prompting over logical reflection on what it is for a universal to have an instance, nd as long history of attempts to explain contingent existence, by which id to reference and a necessary ground.

In the transition, ever since Plato, this ground becomes a self-sufficient, perfect, unchanging, and external something, identified with the Good or God, but whose relation with the everyday world remains obscure. The celebrated argument for the existence of God first propounded by Anselm in his Proslogin. The argument by defining God as ‘something than which nothing greater can be conceived'. God then exists in the understanding since we understand this concept. However, if He only existed in the understanding something greater could be conceived, for a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists in the understanding. Bu then, we can conceive of something greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived, which is contradictory. Therefore, God cannot exist on the understanding, but exists in reality.

An influential argument (or family of arguments) for the existence of God, finding its premisses are that all natural things are dependent for their existence on something else. The totality of dependent brings must then itself depend upon a non-dependent, or necessarily existent bring of which is God. Like the argument to design, the cosmological argument was attacked by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76) and Immanuel Kant.

Its main problem, nonetheless, is that it requires us to make sense of the notion of necessary existence. For if the answer to the question of why anything exists is that some other tings of a similar kind exists, the question merely arises gain. So the ‘God' that ends the question must exist necessarily: It must not be an entity of which the same kinds of questions can be raised. The other problem with the argument is attributing concern and care to the deity, not for connecting the necessarily existent being it derives with human values and aspirations.

The ontological argument has been treated by modern theologians such as Barth, following Hegel, not so much as a proof with which to confront the unconverted, but as an explanation of the deep meaning of religious belief. Collingwood, regards the argument s proving not that because our idea of God is that of id quo maius cogitare viequit, therefore God exists, but proving that because this is our idea of God, we stand committed to belief in its existence. Its existence is a metaphysical point or absolute pre-supposition of certain forms of thought.

In the 20th century, modal versions of the ontological argument have been propounded by the American philosophers Charles Hertshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinge. One version is to define something as unsurpassably great, if it exists and is perfect in every ‘possible world'. Then, to allow that it is at least possible that an unsurpassable great being exists. This means that there is a possible world in which such a being exists. However, if it exists in one world, it exists in all (for the fact that such a being exists in a world that entails, in at least, it exists and is perfect in every world), so, it exists necessarily. The correct response to this argument is to disallow the apparently reasonable concession that it is possible that such a being exists. This concession is much more dangerous than it looks, since in the modal logic, involved from possibly necessarily ‘p', we can device necessarily ‘p'. A symmetrical proof starting from the assumption that it is possible that such a being not exist would derive that it is impossible that it exists.

The doctrine that it makes an ethical difference of whether an agent actively intervenes to bring about a result, or omits to act in circumstances in which it is foreseen, that as a result of the omission the same result occurs. Thus, suppose that I wish you dead. If I act to bring about your death, I am a murderer, however, if I happily discover you in danger of death, and fail to act to save you, I am not acting, and therefore, according to the doctrine of acts and omissions not a murderer. Critics implore that omissions can be as deliberate and immoral as I am responsible for your food and fact to feed you. Only omission is surely a killing, ‘Doing nothing' can be a way of doing something, or in other worlds, absence of bodily movement can also constitute acting negligently, or deliberately, and defending on the context ,may be a way of deceiving, betraying, or killing. Nonetheless, criminal law offers to find its conveniences, from which to distinguish discontinuous intervention, for which is permissible, from bringing about result, which may not be, if, for instance, the result is death of a patient. The question is whether the difference, if there is one, is, between acting and omitting to act be discernibly or defined in a way that bars a general moral might.

The double effect of a principle attempting to define when an action that had both good and bad results is morally permissible. I one formation such an action is permissible if (1) The action is not wrong in itself, (2) the bad consequences is not that which is intended (3) the good is not itself a result of the bad consequences, and (4) the two consequential affects are commensurate. Thus, for instance, I might justifiably bomb an enemy factory, foreseeing but intending that the death of nearby civilians, whereas bombing the death of nearby civilians intentionally would be disallowed. The principle has its roots in Thomist moral philosophy, accordingly. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), held that it is meaningless to ask whether a human being is two tings (soul and body) or, only just as it is meaningless to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one: On this analogy the sound is ye form of the body. Life after death is possible only because a form itself doe not perish (pricking is a loss of form).

And is, therefore, in some sense available to reactivate a new body., therefore, not I who survives body death, but I ma y be resurrected in the same personalized bod y that becomes reanimated by the same form, that which Aquinas's account, as a person has no privileged self-understanding, we understand ourselves as we do everything else, by way of sense experience and abstraction, and knowing the principle of our own lives is an achievement, not as a given. Difficultly at this point led the logical positivist to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation altogether, and to flirt with the coherence theory of truth, it is widely accepted that trying to make the connection between thought and experience through basic sentence s depends on an untenable ‘myth of the given

The special way that we each have of knowing our own thoughts, intentions, and sensationalist have brought in the many philosophical ‘behaviourist and functionalist tendencies, that have found it important to deny that there is such a special way , arguing the way that I know of my own mind inasmuch as the way that I know of yours, e.g., by seeing what I say when asked. Others, however, point out that the behaviour of reporting the result of introspection in a particular and legitimate kind of behavioural access that deserves notice in any account of historically human psychology. The historical philosophy of reflection upon the astute of history, or of historical, thinking, finds the term was used in the 18th century, e.g., by Volante was to mean critical historical thinking as opposed to the mere collection and repetition of stories about the past. In Hegelian, particularly by conflicting elements within his own system, however, it came to man universal or world history. The Enlightenment confidence was being replaced by science, reason, and understanding that gave history a progressive moral thread, and under the influence of the German philosopher, whom is in spreading Romanticism, came Gottfried Herder (1744-1803),and, Immanuel Kant, this idea took it further to hold, so that philosophy of history cannot be the detecting of a grand system, the unfolding of the evolution of human nature as witnessed in successive sages (the progress of rationality or of Spirit). This essential speculative philosophy of history is given a extra Kantian twist in the German idealist Johann Fichte, in whom the extra association of temporal succession with logical implication introduces the idea that concepts themselves are the dynamic engine of historical change. The idea is readily intelligible in that there world of nature and of thought become identified. The work of Herder, Kant, Flichte and Schelling is synthesized by Hegel: History has a plot, as too, this to the moral development of man, equates with freedom within the state, this in turn is the development of thought, or a logical development in which various necessary moment in the life of the concept are successively achieved and improved upon. Hegel's method is at its most successful, when the object is the history of ideas, and the evolution of thinking may march in steps with logical oppositions and their resolution encounters red by various systems of thought.

Within the revolutionary communism, Karl Marx (1818-83) and the German social philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820-95), there emerges a rather different kind of story, based upon Hefl's progressive structure not laying the achievement of the goal of history to a future in which the political condition for freedom comes to exist, so that economic and political fears than ‘reason' is in the engine room. Although, itself is such that speculations upon the history may that it be continued to be written, notably: late examples, by the late 19th century large-scale speculation of tis kind with the nature of historical understanding, and in particular with a comparison between the ,methos of natural science and with the historians. For writers such as the German neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband and the German philosopher and literary critic and historian Wilhelm Dilthey, it is important to show that the human sciences such. as history are objective and legitimate, nonetheless they are in some way deferent from the enquiry of the scientist. Since the subjective-matter is the past thought and actions of human brings, what is needed and actions of human beings, past thought and actions of human beings, what is needed is an ability to re-live that past thought, knowing the deliberations of past agents, as if they were the historian's own.. The most influential British writer on this theme was the philosopher and historian George Collingwood (1889-1943) whose, The Idea of History (1946), contains an extensive defence of the verstehe approach, but it is nonetheless, the explanation from there actions, however, by re-living the situation as our understanding that understanding others is not gained by the tactic use of a ‘theory', enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentionality experienced, again, the matter to which the subjective-matters of past thoughts and actions , as I have a human ability of knowing the deliberations of past agents as if they were the historian's own. The immediate question of the form of historical explanation, and the fact that general laws have other than no place or any apprentices in the order of a minor place in the human sciences, it is also prominent in thoughts about distinctiveness as to regain their actions, but by re-living the situation

in or thereby an understanding of what they experience and thought.

The view that everyday attributions of intention, belief and meaning to other persons proceeded via tacit use of a theory that enables ne to construct these interpretations as explanations of their doings. The view is commonly hld along with functionalism, according to which psychological states theoretical entities, identified by the network of their causes and effects. The theory-theory had different implications, depending on which feature of theories is being stressed. Theories may be though of as capable of formalization, as yielding predications and explanations, as achieved by a process of theorizing, as achieved by predictions and explanations, as achieved by a process of theorizing, as answering to empirical evince that is in principle describable without them, as liable to be overturned by newer and better theories, and o on. The main problem with seeing our understanding of others as the outcome of a piece of theorizing is the non-existence of a medium in which this theory can be couched, as the child learns simultaneously he minds of others and the meaning of terms in its native language.

Our understanding of others is not gained by the tacit use of a ‘theory'. Enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentions explain their actions, however, by re-living the situation ‘in their moccasins', or from their point of view, and thereby understanding what hey experienced and thought, and therefore expressed. Understanding others is achieved when we can ourselves deliberate as they did, and hear their words as if they are our own. The suggestion is a modern development of the ‘Verstehen' tradition associated with Dilthey, Weber and Collngwood.

Much as much, it is therefore, in some sense available to reactivate a new body, however, not that I, who survives bodily death, but I may be resurrected in the same body that becomes reanimated by the same form, in that of Aquinas's account, a person has no privileged self-understanding. We understand ourselves, just as we do everything else, that through the sense experience, in that of an abstraction, may justly be of knowing the principle of our own lives, is to obtainably achieve, and not as a given. In the theory of knowledge that knowing Aquinas holds the Aristotelian doctrine that knowing entails some similarities between the Knower and what there is to be known: A human's corporal nature, therefore, requires that knowledge start with sense perception. As yet, the same limitations that do not apply of bringing further he levelling stabilities that are contained within the hierarchical mosaic, such as the celestial heavens that open in bringing forth to angles.

In the domain of theology Aquinas deploys the distraction emphasized by Eringena, between the existence of God in understanding the significance; of five arguments: The are (1) Motion is only explicable if there exists an unmoved, a first mover (2) the chain of efficient causes demands a first cause (3) the contingent character of existing things in the wold demands a different order of existence, or in other words as something that has a necessary existence (4) the gradation of value in things in the world require the existence of something that is most valuable, or perfect, and (5) the orderly character of events points to a final cause, or end t which all things are directed, and the existence of this end demands a being that ordained it. All the arguments are physico-theological arguments, in that between reason and faith, Aquinas lays out proofs of the existence of God.

He readily recognizes that there are doctrines such that are the Incarnation and the nature of the Trinity, know only through revelations, and whose acceptance is more a matter of moral will. God's essence is identified with his existence, as pure activity. God is simple, containing no potential. No matter how, we cannot obtain knowledge of what God is (his quiddity), perhaps, doing the same work as the principle of charity, but suggesting that we regulate our procedures of interpretation by maximizing the extent to which we see the subject s humanly reasonable, than the extent to which we see the subject as right about things. Whereby remaining content with descriptions that apply to him partly by way of analog y , God reveals of himself is not himself.

The immediate problem availed of ethics is posed b y the English philosopher Phillippa Foot, in her ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect' (1967). A runaway train or trolley comes to a section in the track that is under construction and impassable. One person is working on one part and five on the other, and the trolley will put an end to anyone working on the branch it enters. Clearly, to most minds, the driver should steer for the fewest populated branch. But now suppose that, left to itself, it will enter the branch with its five employs that are there, and you as a bystander can intervene, altering the points so that it veers through the other. Is it right or obligors, or even permissible for you to do this, thereby, apparently involving yourself in ways that responsibility ends in a death of one person? After all, whom have you wronged if you leave it to go its own way? The situation is similarly standardized of others in which utilitarian reasoning seems to lead to one course of action, but a person's integrity or principles may oppose it.

Describing events that haphazardly happen does not of itself permit us to talk of rationality and intention, which are the categories we may apply if we conceive of them as action. We think of ourselves not only passively, as creatures that make things happen. Understanding this distinction gives forth of its many major problems concerning the nature of an agency for the causation of bodily events by mental events, and of understanding the ‘will' and ‘free will'. Other problems in the theory of action include drawing the distinction between an action and its consequence, and describing the structure involved when we do one thing ‘by;' dong another thing. Even the planning and dating where someone shoots someone on one day and in one place, whereby the victim then dies on another day and in another place. Where and when did the murderous act take place?

Causation, least of mention, is not clear that only events are created by and for itself. Kant cites the example o a cannonball at rest and stationed upon a cushion, but causing the cushion to be the shape that it is, and thus to suggest that the causal states of affairs or objects or facts may also be casually related. All of which, the central problem is to understand the elements of necessitation or determinacy of the future. Events, Hume thought, are in themselves ‘loose and separate': How then are we to conceive of others? The relationship seems not to perceptible, for all that perception gives us (Hume argues) is knowledge of the patterns that events do, actually falling into than any acquaintance with the connections determining the pattern. It is, however, clear that our conception of everyday objects ids largely determined by their casual powers, and all our action is based on the belief that these causal powers are stable and reliable. Although scientific investigation can give us wider and deeper dependable patterns, it seems incapable of bringing us any nearer to the ‘must' of causal necessitation. Particular examples o f puzzles with causalities are quite apart from general problems of forming any conception of what it is: How are we to understand the casual interaction between mind and body? How can the present, which exists, or its existence to a past that no longer exists? How is the stability of the casual order to be understood? Is backward causality possible? Is causation a concept needed in science, or dispensable?

The news concerning free-will, is nonetheless, a problem for which is to reconcile our everyday consciousness of ourselves as agent, with the best view of what science tells us that we are. Determinism is one part of the problem. It may be defined as the doctrine that every event has a cause. More precisely, for any event ‘C', there will be one antecedent states of nature ‘N', and a law of nature ‘L', such that given L, N will be followed by ‘C'. But if this is true of every event, it is true of events such as my doing something or choosing to do something. So my choosing or doing something is fixed by some antecedent state ‘N' an d the laws. Since determinism is universal these in turn are fixed, and so backwards to events for which I am clearly not responsible (events before my birth, for example). So, no events can be voluntary or free, where that means that they come about purely because of my willing them I could have done otherwise. If determinism is true, then there will be antecedent states and laws already determining such events: How then can I truly be said to be their author, or be responsible for them?

Reactions to this problem are commonly classified as: (1) Hard determinism. This accepts the conflict and denies that you have real freedom or responsibility (2) Soft determinism or compatibility, whereby reactions in this family assert that everything you should ant from a notion of freedom is quite compatible with determinism. In particular, if your actions are caused, it can often be true of you that you could have done otherwise if you had chosen, and this may be enough to render you liable to be held unacceptable (the fact that previous events will have caused you to choose as you did is deemed irrelevant on this option). (3) Libertarianism, as this is the view that while compatibilism is only an evasion, there is a more substantiative, real notion of freedom that can yet be preserved in the face of determinism (or, of indeterminism). In Kant, while the empirical or phenomenal self is determined and not free, whereas the noumenal or rational self is capable of being rational, free action. However, the noumeal self exists outside the categorical priorities of space and time, as this freedom seems to be of a doubtful value as other libertarian avenues do include of suggesting that the problem is badly framed, for instance, because the definition of determinism breaks down, or postulates by its suggesting that there are two independent but consistent ways of looking at an agent, the scientific and the humanistic, wherefore it ids only through confusing them that the problem seems urgent. Nevertheless, these avenues have gained general popularity, as an error to confuse determinism and fatalism.

The dilemma for which determinism is for itself often supposes of an action that seems as the end of a causal chain, or, perhaps, by some hieratical set of suppositional actions that would stretch back in time to events for which an agent has no conceivable responsibility, then the agent is not responsible for the action.

Once, again, the dilemma adds that if an action is not the end of such a chain, then either to or one of its causes occurs at random, in that no antecedent events brought it about, and in that case nobody is responsible for its ever to occur. So, whether or not determinism is true, responsibility is shown to be illusory.

Still, there is to say, to have a will is to be able to desire an outcome and to purpose to bring it about. Strength of will, or firmness of purpose, is supposed to be good and weakness of will or akrasia bad.

A mental act of willing or trying whose presence is sometimes supposed to make the difference between intentional or voluntary action, as well of mere behaviour. The theory that there are such acts is problematic, and the idea that they make the required difference is a case of explaining a phenomenon by citing another that raises exactly the same problem, since the intentional or voluntary nature of the set of volition now needs explanation. For determinism to act in accordance with the law of autonomy or freedom, is that in ascendance with universal moral law and regardless of selfish advantage.

A categorical notion in the work as contrasted in Kantian ethics show of a hypothetical imperative that embeds of a commentary which is in place only given some antecedent desire or project. ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet'. The injunction to stay quiet only applies to those with the antecedent desire or inclination: If one has no desire to look wise the injunction or advice lapses. A categorical imperative cannot be so avoided, it is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination,. It could be repressed as, for example, ‘Tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)'. The distinction is not always mistakably presumed or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, don't become a bartender' may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in the case of those with the stated desire.

In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed some of the given forms of categorical imperatives, such that of (1) The formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law', (2) the formula of the law of nature: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature', (3) the formula of the end-in-itself, ‘Act in such a way that you always trat humanity of whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as an end, but always at the same time as an end', (4) the formula of autonomy, or consideration; 'the will' of every rational being a will which makes universal law', and (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.

A central object in the study of Kant's ethics is to understand the expressions of the inescapable, binding requirements of their categorical importance, and to understand whether they are equivalent at some deep level. Kant's own application of the notions are always convincing: One cause of confusion is relating Kant's ethical values to theories such as ;expressionism' in that it is easy but imperatively must that it cannot be the expression of a sentiment, yet, it must derive from something ‘unconditional' or necessary' such as the voice of reason. The standard mood of sentences used to issue request and commands are their imperative needs to issue as basic the need to communicate information, and as such to animals signalling systems may as often be interpreted either way, and understanding the relationship between commands and other action-guiding uses of language, such as ethical discourse. The ethical theory of ‘prescriptivism' in fact equates the two functions. A further question is whether there is an imperative logic. ‘Hump that bale' seems to follow from ‘Tote that barge and hump that bale', follows from ‘Its windy and its raining':.But it is harder to say how to include other forms, does ‘Shut the door or shut the window' follow from ‘Shut the window', for example? The usual way to develop an imperative logic is to work in terms of the possibility of satisfying the other one command without satisfying the other, thereby turning it into a variation of ordinary deductive logic.

Despite the fact that the morality of people and their ethics amount to the same thing, there is a usage that I restart morality to systems such as that of Kant, based on notions given as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning as based on the valuing notions that are characterized by their particular virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of ‘moral' considerations from other practical considerations. The scholarly issues are complicated and complex, with some writers seeing Kant as more Aristotelian,. And Aristotle as more involved with a separate sphere of responsibility and duty, than the simple contrast suggests.

A major topic of philosophical inquiry, especially in Aristotle, and subsequently since the 17th and 18th centuries, when the ‘science of man' began to probe into human motivation and emotion. For such as these, the French moralist, or Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Kant, a prime task as to delineate the variety of human reactions and motivations. Such an inquiry would locate our propensity for moral thinking among other faculties, such as perception and reason, and other tendencies as empathy, sympathy or self-interest. The task continues especially in the light of a post-Darwinian understanding of ourselves.

In some moral systems, notably that of Immanuel Kant, real moral worth comes only with interactivity, justly because it is right. However, if you do what is purposely becoming, equitable, but from some other equitable motive, such as the fear or prudence, no moral merit accrues to you. Yet, that in turn seems to discount other admirable motivations, as acting from main-sheet benevolence, or ‘sympathy'. The question is how to balance these opposing ideas and how to understand acting from a sense of obligation without duty or rightness , through which their beginning to seem a kind of fetish. It thus stands opposed to ethics and relying on highly general and abstractive principles, particularly those associated with the Kantian categorical imperatives. The view may go as far back as to say that taken in its own, no consideration point, for that which of any particular way of life, that, least of mention, the contributing steps so taken as forwarded by reason or be to an understanding estimate that can only proceed by identifying salient features of a situation that weigh on one's side or another.

As random moral dilemmas set out with intense concern, inasmuch as philosophical matters that exert a profound but influential defence of common sense. Situations in which each possible course of action breeches some otherwise binding moral principle, are, nonetheless, serious dilemmas making the stuff of many tragedies. The conflict can be described in different was. One suggestion is that whichever action the subject undertakes, that he or she does something wrong. Another is that his is not so, for the dilemma means that in the circumstances for what she or he did was right as any alternate. It is important to the phenomenology of these cases that action leaves a residue of guilt and remorse, even though it had proved it was not the subject's fault that she or he were considering the dilemma, that the rationality of emotions can be contested. Any normality with more than one fundamental principle seems capable of generating dilemmas, however, dilemmas exist, such as where a mother must decide which of two children to sacrifice, least of mention, no principles are pitted against each other, only if we accept that dilemmas from principles are real and important, this fact can then be used to approach in themselves, such as of ‘utilitarianism', to espouse various kinds may, perhaps, be centred upon the possibility of relating to independent feelings, liken to recognize only one sovereign principle. Alternatively, of regretting the existence of dilemmas and the unordered jumble of furthering principles, in that of creating several of them, a theorist may use their occurrences to encounter upon that which it is to argue for the desirability of locating and promoting a single sovereign principle.

Nevertheless, some theories into ethics see the subject in terms of a number of laws (as in the Ten Commandments). Th status of these laws may be that they are the edicts of a divine lawmaker, or that they are truths of reason, given to its situational ethics, virtue ethics, regarding them as at best rules-of-thumb, and, frequently disguising the great complexity of practical representations that for reason has placed the Kantian notions of their moral law.

In continence, the natural law possibility points of the view of the states that law and morality are especially associated with St Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), such that his synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian doctrine was eventually to provide the main philosophical underpinning of th Catholic church. Nevertheless, to a greater extent of any attempt to cement the moral and legal order and together within the nature of the cosmos or the nature of human beings, in which sense it found in some Protestant writings, under which had arguably derived functions. From a Platonic view of ethics and its agedly implicit advance of Stoicism. Its law stands above and apart from the activities of human lawmakers: It constitutes an objective set of principles that can be seen as in and for themselves by means of ‘natural usages' or by reason itself, additionally, (in religious verses of them), that express of God's will for creation. Non-religious versions of the theory substitute objective conditions for humans flourishing as the source of constraints, upon permissible actions and social arrangements within the natural law tradition. Different views have been held about the relationship between the rule of the law and God's will. Grothius, for instance, sides with the view that the content of natural law is independent of any will, including that of God.

While the German natural theorist and historian Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94) takes the opposite view. His great work was the De Jure Naturae et Gentium, 1672, and its English translation is ‘Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 1710. Pufendorf was influenced by Descartes, Hobbes and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, his ambition was to introduce a newly scientific ‘mathematical' treatment on ethics and law, free from the tainted Aristotelian underpinning of ‘scholasticism'. Like that of his contemporary - Locke. His conception of natural laws include rational and religious principles, making it only a partial forerunner of more resolutely empiricist and political treatment in the Enlightenment.

Pufendorf launched his explorations in Plato's dialogue ‘Euthyphro', with whom the pious things are pious because the gods love them, or do the gods love them because they are pious? The dilemma poses the question of whether value can be conceived as the upshot o the choice of any mind, even a divine one. On the fist option the choice of the gods crates goodness and value. Even if this is intelligible it seems to make it impossible to praise the gods, for it is then vacuously true that they choose the good. On the second option we have to understand a source of value lying behind or beyond the will even of the gods, and by which they can be evaluated. The elegant solution of Aquinas is and is therefore distinct from is will, but not distinct from him.

The dilemma arises whatever the source of authority is supposed to be. Do we care about the good because it is good, or do we just call good those things that we care about? It also generalizes to affect our understanding of the authority of other things: Mathematics, or necessary truth, for example, are truths necessary because we deem them to be so, or do we deem them to be so because they are necessary?

The natural aw tradition may either assume a stranger form, in which it is claimed that various facts entails of primary and secondary qualities, any of which is claimed that various facts entail values, reason by itself is capable of discerning moral requirements. As in the ethics of Knt, these requirements are supposed binding on all human beings, regardless of their desires.

The supposed natural or innate abilities of the mind to know the first principle of ethics and moral reasoning, wherein, those expressions are assigned and related to those that distinctions are which make in terms contribution to the function of the whole, as completed definitions of them, their phraseological impression is termed ‘synderesis' (or, syntetesis) although traced to Aristotle, the phrase came to the modern era through St Jerome, whose scintilla conscientiae (gleam of conscience) wads a popular concept in early scholasticism. Nonetheless, it is mainly associated in Aquinas as an infallible natural, simple and immediate grasp of first moral principles. Conscience, by contrast, is ,more concerned with particular instances of right and wrong, and can be in error, under which the assertion that is taken as fundamental, at least for the purposes of the branch of enquiry in hand.

It is, nevertheless, the view interpreted within he particular states of law and morality especially associated with Aquinas and the subsequent scholastic tradition, showing for itself the enthusiasm for reform for its own sake. Or for ‘rational' schemes thought up by managers and theorists, is therefore entirely misplaced. Major o exponent s of this theme include the British absolute idealist Herbert Francis Bradley (1846-1924) and Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. The notably the idealism of Bradley, there ids the same doctrine that change is contradictory and consequently unreal: The Absolute is changeless. A way of sympathizing a little with his idea is to reflect that any scientific explanation of change will proceed by finding an unchanging law operating, or an unchanging quantity conserved in the change, so that explanation of change always proceeds by finding that which is unchanged. The metaphysical problem of change is to shake off the idea that each moment is created afresh, and to obtain a conception of events or processes as having a genuinely historical reality, Really extended and unfolding in time, as opposed to being composites of discrete temporal atoms. A step towards this end may be to see time itself not as an infinite container within which discrete events are located, bu as a kind of logical construction from the flux of events. This relational view of time was advocated by Leibniz and a subject of the debate between him and Newton's Absolutist pupil, Clarke.

Generally, nature is an indefinitely mutable term, changing as our scientific conception of the world changes, and often best seen as signifying a contrast with something considered not part of nature. The term applies both to individual species (it is the nature of gold to be dense or of dogs to be friendly), and also to the natural world as a whole. The sense in which it applies to species quickly links up with ethical and aesthetic ideals: A thing ought to realize its nature, what is natural is what it is good for a thing to become, it is natural for humans to be healthy or two-legged, and departure from this is a misfortune or deformity,. The associations of what is natural with what it is good to become is visible in Plato, and is the central idea of Aristotle's philosophy of nature. Unfortunately, the pinnacle of nature in this sense is the mature adult male citizen, with he rest of hat we would call the natural world, including women, slaves, children and other species, not quite making it.

Nature in general can, however, function as a foil to any idea inasmuch as a source of ideals: In this sense fallen nature is contrasted with a supposed celestial realization of the ‘forms'. The theory of ‘forms' is probably the most characteristic, and most contested of the doctrines of Plato. In the background ie the Pythagorean conception of form as the key to physical nature, bu also the sceptical doctrine associated with the Greek philosopher Cratylus, and is sometimes thought to have been a teacher of Plato before Socrates. He is famous for capping the doctrine of Ephesus of Heraclitus, whereby the guiding idea of his philosophy was that of the logos, is capable of being heard or hearkened to by people, it unifies opposites, and it is somehow associated with fire, which is preeminent among the four elements that Heraclitus distinguishes: Fire, air (breath, the stuff of which souls composed), earth, and water. Although he is principally remember for the doctrine of the ‘flux' of all things, and the famous statement that you cannot step into the same river twice, for new waters are ever flowing in upon you. The more extreme implication of the doctrine of flux, e.g., the impossibility of categorizing things truly, do not seem consistent with his general epistemology and views of meaning, and were to his follower Cratylus, although the proper conclusion of his views was that the flux cannot be captured in words. According to Aristotle, he eventually held that since ‘regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing nothing ids just to stay silent and wag one's finger. Plato ‘s theory of forms can be seen in part as an action against the impasse to which Cratylus was driven.

The Galilean world view might have been expected to drain nature of its ethical content, however, the term seldom loses its normative force, and the belief in universal natural laws provided its own set of ideals. In the 18th century for example, a painter or writer could be praised as natural, where the qualities expected would include normal (universal) topics treated with simplicity, economy , regularity and harmony. Later on, nature becomes an equally potent emblem of irregularity, wildness, and fertile diversity, but also associated with progress of human history, its incurring definition that has been taken to fit many things as well as transformation, including ordinary human self-consciousness. Nature, being in contrast with in integrated phenomenon may include (1) that which is deformed or grotesque or fails to achieve its proper form or function or just the statistically uncommon or unfamiliar, (2) the supernatural, or the world of gods and invisible agencies, (3) the world of rationality and unintelligence, conceived of as distinct from the biological and physical order, or the product of human intervention, and (5) related to that, the world of convention and artifice.

Different conceptions of nature continue to have ethical overtones, foe example, the conception of ‘nature red in tooth and claw' often provides a justification for aggressive personal and political relations, or the idea that it is women's nature to be one thing or another is taken to be a justification for differential social expectations. The term functions as a fig-leaf for a particular set of stereotypes, and is a proper target of much feminist writings. Feminist epistemology has asked whether different ways of knowing for instance with different criteria of justification, and different emphases on logic and imagination, characterize male and female attempts to understand the world. Such concerns include awareness of the ‘masculine' self-image, itself a socially variable and potentially distorting picture of what thought and action should be. Again, there is a spectrum of concerns from the highly theoretical to he relatively practical. In this latter area particular attention is given to the institutional biases that stand in the way of equal opportunities in science and other academic pursuits, or the ideologies that stand in the way of women seeing themselves as leading contributors to various disciplines. However, to more radical feminists such concerns merely exhibit women wanting for themselves the same power and rights over others that men have claimed, and failing to confront the real problem, which is how to live without such symmetrical powers and rights.

In biological determinism, not only influences but constraints and makes inevitable our development as persons with a variety of traits. At its silliest the view postulates such entities as a gene predisposing people to poverty, and it is the particular enemy of thinkers stressing the parental, social, and political determinants of the way we are.

The philosophy of social science is more heavily intertwined with actual social science than in the case of other subjects such as physics or mathematics, since its question is centrally whether there can be such a thing as sociology. The idea of a ‘science of man', devoted to uncovering scientific laws determining the basic dynamic s of human interactions was a cherished ideal of the Enlightenment and reached its heyday with the positivism of writers such as the French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte (1798-1957), and the historical materialism of Marx and his followers. Sceptics point out that what happens in society is determined by peoples' own ideas of what should happen, and like fashions those ideas change in unpredictable ways as self-consciousness is susceptible to change by any number of external event s: Unlike the solar system of celestial mechanics a society is not at all a closed system evolving in accordance with a purely internal dynamic, but constantly responsive to shocks from outside.

The sociological approach to human behaviour is based on the premise that all social behaviour has a biological basis, and seeks to understand that basis in terms of genetic encoding for features that are then selected for through evolutionary history. The philosophical problem is essentially one of methodology: Of finding criteria for identifying features that can usefully be explained in this way, and for finding criteria for assessing various genetic stories that might provide useful explanations.

Among the features that are proposed for this kind o f explanation are such things as male dominance, male promiscuity versus female fidelity, propensities to sympathy and other emotions, and the limited altruism characteristic of human beings. The strategy has proved unnecessarily controversial, with proponents accused of ignoring the influence of environmental and social factors in moulding people's characteristics, e.g., at the limit of silliness, by postulating a ‘gene for poverty', however, there is no need for the approach to commit such errors, since the feature explained sociobiological may be indexed to environment: For instance, it ma y be a propensity to develop some feature in some other environments (for even a propensity to develop propensities . . .) The main problem is to separate genuine explanation from speculative, just so stories which may or may not identify as really selective mechanisms.

In philosophy, the ideas with which we approach the world are in themselves the topic of enquiry. As philosophy is a discipline such as history, physics, or law that seeks not too much to solve historical, physical or legal questions, as to study the conceptual representations that are fundamental structure such thinking, in this sense philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes dialectically self-conscious. The borderline between such ‘second-order' reflection, and ways of practicing the first-order discipline itself, as not always clear: the advance may tame philosophical problems of a discipline, and the conduct of a discipline may be swayed by philosophical reflection, in meaning that the kinds of self-conscious reflection making up philosophy to occur only when a way of life is sufficiently mature to be already passing, but neglects the fact that self-consciousness and reflection co-exist with activity, e.g., an active social and political movement will co-exist with reflection on the categories within which it frames its position.

At different times that have been more or less optimistic about the possibility of a pure ‘first philosophy', taking a deductive assertion as given to a standpoint of perspective from which other intellectual practices can be impartially assessed and subjected to logical evaluation and correction. This standpoint now seems that for some imaginary views have entwined too many philosophers by the mention of imaginary views based upon ill-exaggerated allusory. The contemporary spirit of the subject is hostile to such possibilities, and prefers to see philosophical reflection as continuos with the best practice if any field of intellectual enquiry.

The principles that lie at the basis of an enquiry are representations that inaugurate the first principles of one phase of enquiry only to employ the gainful habit of being rejected at other stages. For example, the philosophy of mind seeks to answer such questions as: Is mind distinct from matter? Can we give on principal reasons for deciding whether other creatures are conscious, or whether machines can be made in so that they are conscious? What is thinking, feeling, experiences, remembering? Is it useful to divide the function of the mind up, separating memory from intelligence, or rationally from sentiment, or do mental functions from an ingoted whole? The dominated philosophies of mind in the current western tradition include that a variety of physicalism and tradition include various fields of physicalism and functionalism. For particular topics are directorially favorable as set by inclinations implicated throughout the spoken exchange.

Once, in the philosophy of language, was the general attempt to understand the general components of a working language, this relationship that an understanding speaker has to its elemental relationship they bear attestation to the world: Such that the subject therefore embraces the traditional division of ‘semantic' into ‘syntax', ‘semantic', and ‘pragmatics'. The philosophy of mind, since it needs an account of what it is in our understanding that enable us to use language. It also mingles with the metaphysics of truth and the relationship between sign and object. The belief that a philosophy of language is the fundamental basis of all philosophical problems in that language has informed such a philosophy, especially in the 20th century, is the philological problem of mind, and the distinctive way in which we give shape to metaphysical beliefs of logical form, and the basis of the division between syntax and semantics, as well some problems of understanding the number and nature of specifically semantic relationships such as ‘meaning', ‘reference, ‘predication', and ‘quantification'. Pragmatics includes the theory of speech acts, while problems of rule following and the indeterminacy of translation infect philosophies of both pragmatics and semantics.

A formal system for which a theory whose sentences are well-formed formula's, as connectively gather through alogical calculus and for whose axioms or rules constructed of particular terms, as correspondingly concurring to the principles of the theory being formalized. That theory is intended to be couched or framed in the language of a calculus, e.g., fist-order predicates calculus. Set theory, mathematics, mechanics, and several other axiomatically developed nonobjectivities by that, of making possible the logical analysis for such matters as the independence of various axioms, and the relations between one theory and that of another.

Still, issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning ‘scepticism'. Although Greek scepticism was centered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs forward from the observations that are at best the methods of those implied by specific areas but seem to fall short in giving us a full-measure of rewarding proofs as contractually represented by truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, so that questions of truth become undefinable. In classic thought we systemized the various examples of this conflict in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.

As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issue undecidable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension or some katalepsis). As a result the sceptics conclude eposhé, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief

Fixed for, in and of itself, the mere mitigated scepticism which accepts every day or commonsense belief, is that, not s the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit. Nonetheless, giving us much more is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus. Although the phrase, Cartesian scepticism' is sometimes used. Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the ‘method of doubt' uses a skeptical scenario to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of ‘clear and distinct' ideas, not far removed from the phantasiá kataleptikê of the Stoics.

For many sceptics have traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, artistry. Of course, they claim that the lore abstractive and precise knowledge is not possible. In part, nonetheless, of the principle that every effect it's a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true being predictable is not necessary for an effect as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty. Except for so-called cases of things that are self-evident, but only if they were justifiably correct in giving of one's self-verifiability for being true. It has often been thought, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well for being true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by ‘deduction' or ‘induction', criteria will be specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principal specifying the sort of consideration that will make such standard in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree.

Besides, there is another view - the absolute globular view that we do not have any knowledge whatsoever. In whatever manner, it is doubtful that any philosopher seriously entertains absolute scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonist sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any non-evident standards that no such hesitancy about asserting to ‘the evident', the non-evident are any belief that requires evidences because it is warranted.

René Descartes (1596-1650)in his skeptical guise, never doubted the content of his own ideas. It's challenging logic, inasmuch as of whether they corresponded' to anything beyond ideas.

Given that Descartes disgusted the information from the senses to the point of doubling the perceptive results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith, God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds are capable of uncovering, in their pristine essence the truths of classical physics Descartes viewed them were quite literally ‘revealed' truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became the history of science for what we term the ‘hidden ontology of classical epistemology?'

While classical epistemology would serve the progress of science very well, it also presented us with a terrible dilemma about the relationships between mind and world. If there is a real or necessary correspondence between mathematical ideas in subject reality and external physical reality, how do we know that the world in which we have life, breath. love and die, actually exists? Descartes's resolution of the dilemma took the form of an exercise. He asked us to direct our attention inward and to divest our consciousness of all awareness of external physical reality. If we do so, he concluded, the real existence of human subjective reality could be confirmed.

As it turned out, this resolution was considerably more problematic and oppressive than Descartes could have imagined, ‘I think, therefore I am, may be a marginally persuasive way of confirming the real existence of the thinking self. But the understanding of physical reality that obliged Descartes and others to doubt the existence of the self-clearly implies that the separation between the subjective world and the world of life, and the real world of physical objectivity was absolute.'

Unfortunate, the inclined to error plummets suddenly and involuntary, their prevailing odds or probabilities of chance aggress of standards that seem less than are fewer than some, in its gross effect, the fallen succumb moderately, but are described as ‘the disease of the Western mind.' Dialectic conduction services' as the background edge horizon as portrayed in the knowledge for understanding, is that of a new anatomical relationship between parts and wholes in physics. With a similar view, which of for something that provides a reason for something else, perhaps, by unforeseen persuadable partiality, or perhaps, by some unduly powers exerted over the minds or behaviour of others, giving cause to some entangled assimilation as ‘x' imparts the passing directions into some dissimulated diminution. Relationships that emerge of the co-called, the new biology, and in recent studies thereof, finding that evolution directed toward a scientific understanding proved uncommonly exhaustive, in that to a greater or higher degree, that usually for reason-sensitivities that posit themselves for perceptual notions as might they be deemed existent or, perhaps, of dealing with what exists only in the mind, therefore the ideational conceptual representation to ideas, and includes the parallelisms, showing, of course, as lacking nothing that properly belongs to it, that is actualized along with content.'

Descartes, the foundational architect of modern philosophy, was able to respond without delay or any assumed hesitation or indicative to such ability, and spotted the trouble too quickly realized that there appears of nothing in viewing nature that implicates the crystalline possibilities of reestablishing beyond the reach of the average reconciliation, for being between a full-fledged comparative being such in comparison with an expressed or implied standard or the conferment of situational absolutes, yet the inclinations do incline of talking freely and sometimes indiscretely, if not, only not an idea upon expressing deficient in originality or freshness, belonging in community with or in participation, that the diagonal line has been worn between Plotinus and Whiteheads view for which finds non-locality stationed within a particular point as occupied in space-time, only to its peculiarity is founded the apparent edge horizon of our concerns, That the comparability with which the state or facts of having independent reality, its regulatory customs that have recently come into evidence, is actualized by the existent idea of 'God' especially. Still and all, the primordial nature of God, with which is eternal, a consequent of nature, which is in a flow of compliance, insofar as differentiation occurs in that which can be known as having existence in space or time. The significant relevance is cognitional thought, is noticeably to exclude the use of examples in order to clarify that through the explicated theses as based upon interpolating relationships that are sequentially successive of cause and orderly disposition, as the individual may or may not be of their approval is found to bear the settlements with the quantum theory,

As the quality or state of being ready or skilled that in dexterity brings forward for consideration the adequacy that is to make known the inclinations expounding the actual notion that being exactly as appears or simply charmed with undoubted representation of an actualized entity as it is supposed of a self-realization that blends upon or within the harmonious processes of self-creation. Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Plotonic and Whitehead connect upon the same issue of the creation, that the sensible world may by looking at actual entities as aspects of nature's contemplation, that these formidable contemplations of nature are obviously an immensely intricate affair, whereby, involving a myriad of possibilities, and, therefore one can look upon the actualized entities as, in the sense of obtainability, that the basic elements are viewed into the vast and expansive array of processes.

We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas aligned with the aid of precise deduction, just as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality within a three-dimensional arena whereto, its fixed sides are equaled to it's co-ordinated system. Following the publication of Isaac Newtons, ‘Principia Mathematica' in 1687, reductionism and mathematical medaling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principles of scientific knowledge.

The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes, served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes's merging division between mind and matter became the most central characterization of Western intellectual life.

All the same, Pyrrhonism and Cartesian forms of virtually globular scepticism, has held and defended, for we are to assume that knowledge is some form of true, because of our sufficiently warranting belief. It is a warranted condition, as, perhaps, that provides the truth or belief conditions, in that of providing the grist for the sceptic's mill about. The Pyrrhonist will suggest that no more than a non-evident, empirically deferent may have of any sufficiency of giving in, but warrantied. Whereas, a Cartesian sceptic will agree that no empirical standards about anything other than one's own mind and its contents are sufficiently warranted, because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it. In that, the essential difference between the two views concerns the stringency of the requirements for a belief being sufficiently warranted to take account of as knowledge.

A Cartesian requires certainty. A Pyrrhonist merely requires that the standards in case are more warranted then its negation.

Cartesian scepticism was unduly an in fluence with which Descartes agues for scepticism, than his reply holds, in that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical standards, in that of anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason is roughly in the position that there is a legitimate doubt about all such standards, only because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some sense, for which it is radically different from the objects which we normally think, in whatever manner they affect our senses. Therefrom, if the Pyrrhonist is the agnostic, the Cartesian sceptic is the atheist.

Because the Pyrrhonist requires much less of a belief in order for it to be confirmed as knowledge than do the Cartesian, the argument for Pyrrhonism are much more difficult to construct. A Pyrrhonist must show that there is no better set of reasons for believing to any standards, of which are in case that any knowledge learnt of the mind is understood by some of its forms, that has to require certainty.

The underlying latencies given among the many derivative contributions as awaiting their presence to the future that of specifying to the theory of knowledge, is, but, nonetheless, the possibility to identify a set of shared doctrines, however, identity to discern two broad styles of instances to discern, in like manners, these two styles of pragmatism, clarify the innovation that a Cartesian approval is fundamentally flawed, nonetheless, of responding very differently but not fordone.

Repudiating the requirements of absolute certainty or knowledge, insisting on the connection of knowledge with activity, as, too, of pragmatism of a reformist distributing knowledge upon the legitimacy of traditional questions about the truth-conditionals employed through and by our cognitive practices, and sustain a conception of truth objectivity, enough to give those questions that undergo of gathering in their own purposive latencies, yet we are given to the spoken word for which a dialectic awareness sparks the fame from the ambers of fire.

Pragmatism of a determinant revolution, by contrast, relinquishing the objectivity of youth, acknowledges no legitimate epistemological questions besides those that are naturally kindred of our current cognitive conviction.

It seems clear that certainty is a property that can be assembled to either a person or a belief. We can say that a person, ‘S' are certain, or we can say that its descendable alignments are alined alongside ‘p', are certain. The two uses can be connected by saying that ‘S' has the right to be certain just in case the value of ‘p' is sufficiently verified.

In defining certainty, it is crucial to note that the term has both an absolute and relative sense. More or less, we take a proposition to be certain when we have no doubt about its truth. We may do this in error or unreasonably, but objectively a proposition is certain when such absence of doubt is justifiable. The skeptical tradition in philosophy denies that objective certainty is often possible, or ever possible, either for any proposition at all, or for any proposition at all, or for any proposition from some suspect family (ethics, theory, memory, empirical judgement etc.) a major skeptical weapon is the possibility of upsetting events that can cast doubt back onto what were hitherto taken to be certainties. Others include reminders of the divergence of human opinion, and the fallible source of our confidence. Fundamentalist approaches to knowledge look for a basis of certainty, upon which the structure of our system is built. Others reject the metaphor, looking for mutual support and coherence, without foundation. However, in moral theory, the views are that there is inviolable moral standards or absolute variability in human desire or policies or prescriptive actions.

In spite of the notorious difficulty of reading Kantian ethics, a hypothetical imperative embeds a command which is in place only minded by some antecedent desire or delimited projective: ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet'. The injunction to stay quiet only applies to those with the antecedent desire or inclination. If one has no desire to look wise, the injunction cannot be so avoided: It is a requirement that binds anybody, whatever their inclination. It could be represented as, for example, ‘tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)'. The distinction is not always signaled by it's very presence or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, don't become a bartender' may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in case of those with the stated desire.

In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed five forms of the categorical imperative: (1) the formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same times will that it should become universal law: (2) the formula of the law of nature: ‘act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature': (3) the formula of the end-in-itself: ‘act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end': (4) the formula of autonomy, or considering ‘the will of every rational being as a will which makes universal law': (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for the systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.

Even so, a proposition that is not a conditional ‘p,' is moreover, the affirmative and negative, modern opinion is wary of this distinction, since what appears categorical may vary notation. Apparently, categorical propositions may also turn out to be disguised conditionals: ‘X' is intelligent (categorical?) = if ‘X' is given a range of tasks she performs them better than many people (conditional?) The problem. Nonetheless, is not merely one of classification, since deep metaphysical questions arise when facts that might be categorical and therefore solid, come to seem by contrast conditional, or purely hypothetical or potential.

A limited area of knowledge or endeavors for which we give pursuit, activities and interests are a central representation held to a concept of physical theory. In this way, a field is defined by the distribution of a physical quantity, such as temperature, mass density, or potential energy y, at different points in space. In the particularly important example of force fields, such as gravitational, electrical, and magnetic fields, the field value at a point is the force which a test particle would experience if it were located at that point. The philosophical problem is whether a force field is to be thought of as purely potential, so the presence of a field merely describes the propensity of masses to move relative to each other, or whether it should be thought of in terms of the physically real modifications of a medium, whose properties result in such powers that are, is force fields pure potential, fully characterized by dispositional statements or conditionals, or are they categorical or actual? The former option seems to require within ungrounded dispositions, or regions of space that differ only in what happens if an object is placed there. The law-like shape of these dispositions, apparent for example in the curved lines of force of the magnetic field, may then seem quite inexplicable. To atomists, such as Newton it would represent a return to Aristotelian entelechies, or quasi-psychological affinities between things, which are responsible for their motions. The latter option requires understanding of how forces of attraction and repulsion can be ‘grounded' in the properties of the medium.

The basic idea of a field is arguably present in Leibniz, who was certainly hostile to Newtonian atomism. Despite the fact that his equal hostility to ‘action at a distance' muddies the water, which it is usually credited to the Jesuit mathematician and scientist Joseph Boscovich (1711-87) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), both of whom influenced the scientist Faraday, with whose work the physical notion became established. In his paper ‘On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force' (1852), Faraday was to suggest several criteria for assessing the physical reality of lines of force, such as whether they are affected by an intervening material medium, whether the motion depends on the nature of what is placed at the receiving end. As far as electromagnetic fields go, Faraday himself inclined to the view that the mathematical similarity between heat flow, currents, and electro-magnetic lines of force was evidence for the physical reality of the intervening medium.

Once, again, our mentioning recognition for which its case value, whereby its view is especially associated the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), that the truth of a statement can be defined in terms of a ‘utility' of accepting it. Communications, however, were so much as to dispirit the position for which its place of valuation may be viewed as an objection. Since there are things that are false, as it may be useful to accept, and conversely there are things that are true and that it may be damaging to accept. Nevertheless, there are deep connections between the idea that a representation system is accorded, and the likely success of the projects in progressive formality, by its possession. The evolution of a system of representation either perceptual or linguistic, seems bounded to connect successes with everything adapting or with utility in the modest sense. The Wittgenstein doctrine stipulates the meaning of use that upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion and the idea that belief in the truth on one hand, the action of the other. One way of binding with cement, wherefore the connection is found in the idea that natural selection becomes much as much in adapting us to the cognitive creatures, because beliefs have effects, they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant's doctrine, and continued to play an influencing role in the theory of meaning and truth.

James, (1842-1910), although with characteristic generosity exaggerated in his debt to Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), he charted that the method of doubt encouraged people to pretend to doubt what they did not doubt in their hearts, and criticize its individualist's insistence, that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individuals personalized consciousness.

From his earliest writings, James understood cognitive processes in teleological terms. Theory, he held, assists us in the satisfactory interests. His will to Believe doctrine, the view that we are sometimes justified in believing beyond the evidential relics upon the notion that a belief's benefits are relevant to its justification. His pragmatic method of analyzing philosophical problems, for which requires that we find the meaning of terms by examining their application to objects in experimental situations, similarly reflects the teleological approach in its attention to consequences.

So much as to an approach to categorical sets' James' theory of meaning, apart from verification, was dismissive of the metaphysics, yet, unlike the verificationalist, who takes cognitive meaning to be a matter only of consequences in sensory experience. James' took pragmatic meaning to include emotional and matter responses. Moreover, his, metaphysical standard of value, lay not but a way of dismissing them as meaningless, however, it should also be noted that in a greater extent, circumspective moments' James did not hold that even his broad sets of consequences were exhaustive of their terms meaning. ‘Theism', for example, he took to have antecedently, definitional meaning, in addition to its varying degree of importance and chance upon an important pragmatic meaning.

James' theory of truth reflects upon his teleological conception of cognition, by considering a true belief to be one which is compatible with our existing system of beliefs, and leads us to satisfactory interaction with the world.

However, Peirce's famous pragmatist principle is a rule of logic employed in clarifying our concepts and ideas. Consider the claim the liquid in a flask is an acid, if, we believe this, we except that it would turn red: We accept an action of ours to have certain experimental results. The pragmatic principle holds that listing the conditional expectations of this kind, in that we associate such immediacy with applications of a conceptual representation that provides a complete and orderly sets clarification of the concept. This is relevant to the logic of abduction: Clarificationist's using the pragmatic principle provides all the information about the content of a hypothesis that is relevantly to decide whether it is worth testing.

To a greater extent, and what is most important, is the famed apprehension of the pragmatic principle, in so that, Pierces account of reality: When we take something to be real that by this single case, we think it is ‘fated to be agreed upon by all who investigate' the matter to which it stand, in other words, if I believe that it is really the case that ‘P', then I except that if anyone were to inquire depthfully into the finding its measure into whether ‘p', they would arrive at the belief that ‘p'. It is not part of the theory that the experimental consequences of our actions should be specified by a warranted empiricist vocabulary - Peirce insisted that perceptual theories are abounding in latency. Even so, nor is it his view that the collected conditionals do or not clarify a concept as all analytic. In addition, in later writings, he argues that the pragmatic principle could only be made plausible to someone who accepted its metaphysical realism: It requires that ‘would-bees' are objective and, of course, real.

If realism itself can be given a fairly quick clarification, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of supposition, for they seem legendary. Other opponents deny that entities posited by the relevant discourse that exists or at least exists: The standard example is ‘idealism', which reality is somehow mind-curative or mind-co-ordinated - that real objects comprising the ‘external world' is dependently of eloping minds, but only exists as in some way correlative to the mental operations. The doctrine assembled of ‘idealism' enters on the conceptual note that reality as we understand this as meaningful and reflects the working of mindful purposes. And it construes this as meaning that the inquiring mind itself makes of some formative constellations and not of any mere understanding of the nature of the ‘real' bit even the resulting charger we attribute to it.

Wherefore, the term is most straightforwardly used when qualifying another linguistic form of Grammatik: a real ‘x' may be contrasted with a fake, a failed ‘x', a near ‘x', and so on. To trat something as real, without qualification, is to suppose it to be part of the actualized world. To reify something is to suppose that we have committed by some indoctrinated treatise, as that of a theory. The central error in thinking of reality and the totality of existence is to think of the ‘unreal' as a separate domain of things, perhaps, unfairly to that of the benefits of existence.

Such that the nonexistence of all things, as the product of logical confusion of treating the term ‘nothing' as itself, is a referring expression instead of a ‘quantifier'. (Stating informally as a quantifier is an expression that reports of a quantity of times that a predicate is satisfied in some class of things, i.e., in a domain.) This confusion leads the unsuspecting to think that a sentence such as ‘Nothing is all around us' talks of a special kind of thing that is all around us, when in fact it merely denies that the predicate ‘is all around us' have appreciations. The feelings that lad some philosophers and theologians, notably Heidegger, to talk of the experience of Nothingness, is not properly the experience of anything, but rather the failure of hope or the expectations that there would be something of some kind at some point. This may arise in quite everyday cases, as when one finds that the article of functions one expected to see as usual, in the corner has disappeared. The difference between ‘existentialist'‘ and ‘analytic philosophy', on the point of what, whereas the former is afraid of nothing, and the latter think that there is nothing to be afraid of.

A rather different set of concerns arises when actions are specified in terms of doing nothing, saying nothing may be an admission of guilt, and doing nothing in some circumstances may be tantamount to murder. Still, other substitutional problems arise over conceptualizing empty space and time.

Whereas, the standard opposition between those who affirm and those who deny, the real existence of some kind of thing or some kind of fact or state of affairs, of almost any area of discourse may be the focus of this challenge: The external world, the past and future, other minds, mathematical objects, possibilities, universals, moral or aesthetic properties are examples. There be to one influential suggestion, as associated with the British philosopher of logic and language, and the most determinative of philosophers centered round Anthony Dummett (1925), to which is borrowed from the ‘intuitionistic' critique of classical mathematics, and suggested that the unrestricted use of the ‘principle of bivalence' is the trademark of ‘realism'. However, this has to overcome counter-examples both ways: Although Aquinas wads a moral ‘realist', he held that moral really was not sufficiently structured to make true or false every moral claim. Unlike Kant, who believed that he could use the law of bivalence care-freed in mathematics, precisely because it deals only of our own immediate constructions. Realism can itself be subdivided: Kant, for example, combines empirical realism (within the phenomenal world the realist says the right things - surrounding objects really exist and independent of us and our mental states) with transcendental idealism (the phenomenal world as a whole reflects the structures imposed on it by the activity of our minds as they render it intelligible to us). In modern philosophy the orthodox resistivity to realism has been from philosophers such as Goodman, who, impressed by the extent to which we perceive the world through conceptual and linguistic lenses of our own making.

Assigned to the modern treatment of existence in the theory of ‘quantification' is sometimes put by saying that existence is not a predicate. The idea is that the existential use of a quantifier merges an unbinding of self, then adding an operator on a predicate, indicating that the property it expresses has instances. Existence is therefore treated as a second-order property, or a property of properties. It is fitting to say, that in this it is like number, for when we say that these things of a kind, we do not describe the thing (ad we would if we said there are red things of the kind), but instead attribute a property to the kind itself. The parallelistic numbers are exploited by the German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics Gottlob Frége in the dictum that affirmation of existence is merely denied of the number nought. A problem, nevertheless, proves accountable for it's crated by sentences like ‘This exists', where some particular thing is undirected, such that a sentence seems to express a contingent truth (for this insight has not existed), yet no other predicate is involved. ‘This exists,' is therefore unlike ‘Tamed tigers exist', where a property is said to have an instance, for the word ‘this' and does not locate a property, but one and only of an individual.

Possible worlds seem able to differ from each other purely in the presence or absence of individuals, and not merely in the distribution of exemplification of properties.

A philosophical ponderance through which to set-class pending upon the unreal things that belong within the intuitive stem that prays within the domain of Being to existence, but, nonetheless, the realm as founded to the paradigms that have little for us that can be said with the philosopher's subject surface ads expounded by the world, and hie inherent perception of its being in and for itself. Nevertheless, the concept had a central place in philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger. The essential question of ‘why is there something and not of nothing'? Prompting over logical reflection on what it is for a universal to have an instance, and as long history of attempts to explain contingent existence, by which id to reference and a necessary ground.

In the transition, ever since Plato, this ground becomes a self-sufficient, perfect, unchanging, and external something, identified with the Good or God, but whose relation with the everyday work remains unsettling. The celebrated argument for the existence of God first propounded by Anselm in his Proslogin. The argument by defining God as ‘something than which nothing graveled can be conceived'. God then exists in the understanding since we understand this concept. However, if He only existed in the understanding something greater could be conceived, for a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists in the understanding. But then, we can conceive of something greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived, which is contradictory. Therefore, God cannot exist on the understanding, but exists in reality.

An influential argument (or family of arguments) for the existence of God, finding its premisses are that all natural things are dependent for their existence on something else. The totality of dependent brings must then it depends upon a non-dependent, or necessarily existent bring of which is God. Like the argument to design, the cosmological argument was attacked by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76) and Immanuel Kant.

Its main problem, nonetheless, is that it requires us to make sense of the notion of necessary existence. For if the answer to the question of why anything exists is that some other tings of a similar kind exists, the question merely arises gain. So, that ‘God' or ‘The Law Maker' Himself, enforces an end of substance for which of every question must exist as a natural consequence: It must not be an entity of which the same kinds of questions can be raised. The other problem with the argument is attributing concern and care to the deity, not for connecting the necessarily existent being it derives with human values and aspirations.

The ontological argument has been treated by modern theologians such as Barth, following Hegel, not so much as a proof with which to confront the unconverted, but as an explanation of the deep meaning of religious belief. Collingwood, regards the argument s proving not that because our idea of God is that of an id quo maius cogitare viequit, therefore God exists, but proving that because this is our idea of God, we stand committed to belief in its existence. Its existence is a metaphysical point or absolute pre-supposition of certain forms of thought.

In the 20th century, modal versions of the ontological argument have been propounded by the American philosophers Charles Hertshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinge. One version is to define something as greatly unsurpassably, if it exists within the arena of prefectural possibilities, but, comes into view of every ‘possible world'. That being so, to allow that it is at least possible that a great unforgivable being exists, somewhat of an ontological cause to spread for which abounding in meaning could calculably reinforce those needed too verifiably the astronomical changes through which are evolved of possible worlds, that, only if in which such a being exists. However, if it exists in one world, it exists in all, for such factors for being to exist in a world that entails, in at least, their existent leveled perfections as do they substantially inhabit in every possible world, so, it exists essentially within the realms of continuative phenomenons. The correct response to this argument is to disallow the apparently reasonable concession that it is possible that such a being exists. This concession is much more dangerous than it looks, since in the modal logic, involved from possibilities arisen by necessities of ‘p', we can device the necessities that welcome of ‘p'. A symmetrical proof starting from the assumption that it is possibly that such a being does not exist would derive that it is impossible that it exists.

The doctrine that makes an ethical difference of whether an agent actively intervenes to bring about a result, or omits to act in circumstances in which it is foreseen, that as a result of the omission the same result occurs. Thus, suppose that I wish you dead. If I act to bring about your death, I am a murderer, however, if I happily discover you in danger of death, and fail to act to save you, I am not acting, and therefore, according to the doctrine of acts and omissions not a murderer. Critics implore that omissions can be as deliberate and immoral as I am responsible for your food and fact to feed you. Only omission is surely a killing, ‘Doing nothing' can be a way of doing something, or in other worlds, absence of bodily movement can also constitute acting negligently, or deliberately, and defending on the context, may be a way of deceiving, betraying, or killing. Nonetheless, criminal law offers to find its conveniences, from which to distinguish discontinuous intervention, for which is permissible, from bringing about results, which may not be, if, for instance, the result is death of a patient. The question is whether the difference, if there is one, is, between acting and omitting to act be discernibly or defined in a way that bars a general moral might.

The double effect of a principle attempting to define when an action that had both good and bad results are morally permissible. I one formation such an action is permissible if (1) The action is not wrong in itself, (2) the bad consequences are not that which is intended (3) the good is not itself a result of the bad consequences, and (4) the two consequential effects are commensurate. Thus, for instance, I might justifiably bomb an enemy factory, foreseeing but intending that the death of nearby civilians, whereas bombing the death of nearby civilians intentionally would be disallowed. The principle has its roots in Thomist moral philosophy, accordingly. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), held that it is meaningless to ask whether a human being is two tings (soul and body) or, only just as it is meaningless to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one: On this analogy the sound is yet form of the body. Life after death is possible only because a form itself does not perish (pricking is a loss of form).

And therefore, in some sense are and availably to reactivate a new body, . . . therefore, no in who survives b may be resurrected in the same personalized body that becomes reanimated by the same form, that which Aquinas's account, as a person has no privileged self-understanding, we understand ourselves as we do everything else, by way of sense experience and abstraction, and knowing the principle of our own lives is an achievement, not as a given. Difficultly as this point led the logical positivist to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation altogether, and to flirt with the coherence theory of truth, it is widely accepted that trying to make the connection between thought and experience through basic sentence s depends on an untenable ‘myth of the given.

The special way that we each have of knowing our own thoughts, intentions, and sensationalist have brought in the many philosophical ‘behaviourist and functionalist tendencies, that have found it important to deny that there is such a special way, arguing the way that I know of my own mind inasmuch as the way that I know of yours, e.g., by seeing what I say when asked. Others, however, point out that the behaviour of reporting the result of introspection in a particular and legitimate kind of behavioural access that deserves notice in any account of historically human psychology. The historical philosophy of reflection upon the astute of history, or of historical, thinking, finds the term was used in the 18th century, e.g., by Volante was to mean critical historical thinking as opposed to the mere collection and repetition of stories about the past. In Hegelian, particularly by conflicting elements within his own system, however, it came to man universal or world history. The Enlightenment confidence was being replaced by science, reason, and understanding that gave history a progressive moral thread, and under the influence of the German philosopher, whom is in spreading Romanticism, came Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and, Immanuel Kant, this idea took it further to hold, so that philosophy of history cannot be the detecting of a grand system, the unfolding of the evolution of human nature as witnessed in successive sages (the progress of rationality or of Spirit). This essential speculative philosophy of history is given an extra Kantian twist in the German idealist Johann Fichte, in whom the extra association of temporal succession with logical implication introduces the idea that concepts themselves are the dynamic engine of historical change. The idea is readily intelligible in that their world of nature and of thought become identified. The work of Herder, Kant, Flichte and Schelling is synthesized by Hegel: History has a plot, as too, this to the moral development of man, equates with freedom within the state, this in turn is the development of thought, or a logical development in which various necessary moment in the life of the concept are successively achieved and improved upon. Hegel's method is successfully met, when the object is the history of ideas, and the evolution of thinking may march in steps with logical oppositions and their resolution encounters red by various systems of thought.

Within the revolutionary communism, Karl Marx (1818-83) and the German social philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820-95), there emerges a rather different kind of story, based upon Hefl's progressive structure not laying the achievement of the goal of history to a future in which the political condition for freedom comes to exist, so that economic and political fears than ‘reason' is in the engine room. Although, it is such that speculations upon the history may that it is continued to be written, notably: late examples, by the late 19th century large-scale speculation of this kind with the nature of historical understanding, and in particular with a comparison between the methods of natural science and with the historians. For writers such as the German neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband and the German philosopher and literary critic and historian Wilhelm Dilthey, it is important to show that the human sciences, such that each has a history and are objective and legitimate, but, nonetheless they are in some way deferent from the enquiry of the scientists. Since the subjective-matter is the past thought and actions of human brings, what is needed and actions of human beings, past thought and actions of human beings, what is needed is an ability to re-live that past thought, knowing the deliberations of past agents, as if they were the historian's own. The most influential British writer on this theme was the philosopher and historian George Collingwood (1889-1943) whose, The Idea of History (1946), contains an extensive defence of the Verstehe approach, but it is nonetheless, the explanation from their actions, however, by re-living the situation as our understanding that understanding others is not gained by the tactic use of a ‘theory', enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentionality experienced, again, the matter to which the subjective-matters of past thoughts and actions, as I have a human ability of knowing the deliberations of past agents as if they were the historian's own. The immediate question of the form of historical explanation, and the fact that general laws have other than no place or any apprentices in the order of a minor place in the human sciences, it is also prominent in thoughts about distinctiveness as to regain their actions, but by re-living the situation in or thereby an understanding of what they experience and thought.

The view that everyday attributions of intention, belief and meaning among other people proceeded via tacit use of a theory that enables newly and appointed constructs referenced through these interpretations, perhaps, as attemptive explanations within some suitable purpose. The view is commonly hld along with functionalism, according to which psychological states theoretical entities, identified by the network of their causes and effects. The theory-theory had different implications, depending on which feature of theories is being stressed. Theories may be though of as capable of formalization, as yielding predications and explanations, as achieved by a process of theorizing, as achieved by predictions and explanations, as accomplished by a process of theorizing, and answering to empirical evidence, that is, in principled describabilities that are without them, as liable to be overturned by newer and better theories, and so on. The main problem with seeing our understanding of others as the outcome of a piece of theorizing is the non-existence of a medium in which this theory can be couched, as the child learns simultaneously he minds of others and the meaning of terms in its native language.

Our understanding of others is not gained by the tacit use of a ‘theory'. Enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentions explain their actions, however, by re-living the situation ‘in their moccasins', or from their point of view, and thereby understanding what hey experienced and thought, and therefore expressed. Understanding others is achieved when we can ourselves deliberate as they did, and hear their words as if they are our own. The suggestion is a modern development of the ‘Verstehen' tradition associated with Dilthey, Weber and Collngwood.

Much as much, it is therefore, in some sense available to reactivate a new body, however, not that I, who survives bodily death, but I may be resurrected in the same body that becomes reanimated by the same form, in that of Aquinas's account, a person having no privileges finds of or in himself a concerned understanding. We understand ourselves, just as we do everything else, that through the sense experience, in that of an abstraction, may justly be of knowing the principle of our own lives, is to obtainably achieve, and not as a given. In the theory of knowledge that knowing Aquinas holds the Aristotelian doctrine that knowing entails some similarities between the Knower and what there is to be known: A human's corporal nature, therefore, requires that knowledge start with sense perception. As perhaps, the same restrictive limitations that do not apply in bringing to a considerable degree the leveling stability that is contained within the hierarchical mosaic for such sustains in having the celestial heavens that open of bringing forth to angles.

In the domain of theology Aquinas deploys the distraction emphasized by Eringena, between the existence of God in understanding the significance of five arguments: They are (1) Motion is only explicable if there exists an unmoved, a first mover (2) the chain of efficient causes demands a first cause (3) the contingent character of existing things in the wold demands a different order of existence, or in other words as something that has a necessary existence (4) the gradations of value in things in the world require the existence of something that is most valuable, or perfect, and (5) the orderly character of events points to a final cause, or end t which all things are directed, and the existence of this end demands a being that ordained it. All the arguments are physico-theological arguments, in that between reason and faith, Aquinas lays out proofs of the existence of God.

He readily recognizes that there are doctrines such that are the Incarnation and the nature of the Trinity, know only through revelations, and whose acceptance is more a matter of moral will. God's essence is identified with his existence, as pure activity. God is simple, containing no potential. No matter how, we cannot obtain knowledge of what God is (his quiddity), perhaps, doing the same work as the principle of charity, but suggesting that we regulate our procedures of interpretation by maximizing the extent to which we see the subject s humanly reasonable, than the extent to which we see the subject as right about things. Whereby remaining content with descriptions that apply to him partly by way of analogy, God reveals of himself is to accede that it is not himself. The immediate problem availed of ethics is posed by the English philosopher Phillippa Foot, in her ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect' (1967). Explaining, for instance, that a runaway train or trolley-way streetcar, that comes to a section in the track that is under construction and sternfully impassable. One person is working on one part of the track, while five on the other track, such that the runaway trolley will put an end to anyone working on the branch it enters. Clearly, to most minds, the driver should steer for the fewest populated sector. But now suppose that, left to itself, it will enter the branch with its five employs that are there, and you as a bystander can intervene, altering the points so that if to veer through into the other side, is it your right or obligation, or, even so, is it permissible for you to do this, thereby, apparently involving yourself in ways that responsibility ends in a death of one person? After all, who have you wronged if you leave it to go its own way? The situation is similarly standardized of others in which utilitarian reasoning seems to lead to one course of action, but a person's integrity or principles may oppose it.

Describing events that haphazardly happen does not of itself legitimate us to talk of rationality and intention, which are the categories we may apply if we conceive of them as action. We think of ourselves not only passively, as creatures that make things happen. Understanding this distinction gives forth of its many major problems concerning the nature of an agency for the causation of bodily events by mental events, and of understanding the ‘will' and ‘free will'. Other problems in the theory of action include drawing the distinction between an action and its consequence, and describing the structure involved when we do one thing ‘by' doing another thing in apprehension of, even the planning and dating where someone shoots someone on one day and in one place, whereby the victim then dies on another day and in another place. Where did the murderous act take place?

Causation, least of mention, is not clear that only events are created by and for itself. Kant cites the example o a cannonball at rest and stationed upon a cushion, but causing the cushion to be the shape that it is, and thus to suggest that the causal states of affairs or objects or facts may also be casually related, that all for which, the central problem is to understand the elements of necessitation or determinacy of the future. Events, Hume thought, are in themselves ‘loose and separate': How then are we to conceive of others? The relationship seems not too perceptible, for all that perception gives us (Hume argues) is knowledge of the patterns that events do, actually falling into than any acquaintance with the connections determining the pattern. It is, however, clear that our conception of everyday objects is largely determined by their casual powers, and all our action is based on the belief that these causal powers are stable and reliable. Although scientific investigation can give us wider and deeper dependable patterns, it seems incapable of bringing us any nearer to the ‘must' of causal necessitation. Particular examples o f puzzles with causalities are quite apart from general problems of forming any conception of what it is: How are we to understand the casual interaction between mind and body? How can the present, which exists, or its existence to a past that no longer exists? How is the stability of the casual order to be understood? Is backward causality possible? Is causation a concept needed in science, or dispensable?

The news concerning free-will, is nonetheless, a problem for which is to reconcile our everyday consciousness of ourselves as agent, with the best view of what science tells us that we are. Determinism is one part of the problem. It may be defined as the doctrine that every event has a cause. More precisely, for any event ‘C', there will be one antecedent states of nature ‘N', and a law of nature ‘L', such that given ‘L', ‘N' will be followed by ‘C'. But if this is true of every event, it is true of events such as my doing something or choosing to do something. So my choosing or doing something is fixed by some antecedent state ‘N' an d the laws. Since determinism is universal these in turn are fixed, and so backwards to events for which I am clearly not responsible (events before my birth, for example). So, no events can be voluntary or free, where that means that they come about purely because of my willing them I could have done otherwise. If determinism is true, then there will be antecedent states and laws already determining such events: How then can I truly be said to be their author, or be responsible for them?

Reactions to this problem are commonly classified as: (1) Hard determinism. This accepts the conflict and denies that you have real freedom or responsibility (2) Soft determinism or compatibility, whereby reactions in this family assert that everything you should ant from a notion of freedom is quite compatible with determinism. In particular, if your actions are caused, it can often be true of you that you could have done otherwise if you had chosen, and this may be enough to render you liable to be held unacceptable (the fact that previous events will have caused you to choose as you did is deemed irrelevant on this option). (3) Libertarianism, as this is the view that while compatibilism is only an evasion, there is a more substantiative, real notion of freedom that can yet be preserved in the face of determinism (or, of indeterminism). In Kant, while the empirical or phenomenal self is determined and not free, whereas the noumenal or rational self is capable of being rational, free action. However, the noumeal self exists outside the categorical priorities of space and time, as this freedom seems to be of a doubtful value as other libertarian avenues do include of suggesting that the problem is badly framed, for instance, because the definition of determinism breaks down, or postulates by its suggesting that there are two independent but consistent ways of looking at an agent, the scientific and the humanistic, wherefore it is only through confusing them that the problem seems urgent. Nevertheless, these avenues have gained general popularity, as an error to confuse determinism and fatalism.

The dilemma for which determinism is for itself often supposes of an action that seems as the end of a causal chain, or, perhaps, by some hieratical set of suppositional actions that would stretch back in time to events for which an agent has no conceivable responsibility, then the agent is not responsible for the action.

Once, again, the dilemma adds that if an action is not the end of such a chain, then either to or one of its causes occurs at random, in that no antecedent events brought it about, and in that case nobody is responsible for its ever to occur. So, whether or not determinism is true, responsibility is shown to be illusory.

Still, there is to say, to have a will is to be able to desire an outcome and to purpose to bring it about. Strength of will, or firmness of purpose, is supposed to be good and weakness of will or akrasia bad.

A mental act of willing or trying whose presence is sometimes supposed to make the difference between intentional or voluntary action, as well of mere behaviour. The theory that there are such acts is problematic, and the idea that they make the required difference is a case of explaining a phenomenon by citing another that raises exactly the same problem, since the intentional or voluntary nature of the set of volition now needs explanation. For determinism to act in accordance with the law of autonomy or freedom, is that in ascendance with universal moral law and regardless of selfish advantage.

A categorical notion in the work as contrasted in Kantian ethics show of a hypothetical imperative that embeds of a commentary which is in place only given some antecedent desire or project. ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet'. The injunction to stay quiet only applies to those with the antecedent desire or inclination: If one has no desire to look wise the injunction or advice lapses. A categorical imperative cannot be so avoided, it is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination,. It could be repressed as, for example, ‘Tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)'. The distinction is not always mistakably presumed or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, don't become a bartender' may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in the case of those with the stated desire.

In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed some of the given forms of categorical imperatives, such that of (1) The formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law', (2) the formula of the law of nature: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature', (3) the formula of the end-in-itself, ‘Act in such a way that you always trat humanity of whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as an end, but always at the same time as an end', (4) the formula of autonomy, or consideration; ‘the will' of every rational being a will which makes universal law', and (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.

A central object in the study of Kant's ethics is to understand the expressions of the inescapable, binding requirements of their categorical importance, and to understand whether they are equivalent at some deep level. Kant's own application of the notions are always convincing: One cause of confusion is relating Kant's ethical values to theories such as ;expressionism' in that it is easy but imperatively must that it cannot be the expression of a sentiment, yet, it must derive from something ‘unconditional' or necessary' such as the voice of reason. The standard mood of sentences used to issue request and commands are their imperative needs to issue as basic the need to communicate information, and as such to animals signaling systems may as often be interpreted either way, and understanding the relationship between commands and other action-guiding uses of language, such as ethical discourse. The ethical theory of ‘prescriptivism' in fact equates the two functions. A further question is whether there is an imperative logic. ‘Hump that bale' seems to follow from ‘Tote that barge and hump that bale', follows from ‘Its windy and its raining':.But it is harder to say how to include other forms, does ‘Shut the door or shut the window' follow from ‘Shut the window', for example? The usual way to develop an imperative logic is to work in terms of the possibility of satisfying the other one command without satisfying the other, thereby turning it into a variation of ordinary deductive logic.

Despite the fact that the morality of people and their ethics amount to the same thing, there is a usage that I restart morality to systems such as that of Kant, based on notions given as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning as based on the valuing notions that are characterized by their particular virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of ‘moral' considerations from other practical considerations. The scholarly issues are complicated and complex, with some writers seeing Kant as more Aristotelian,. And Aristotle as more involved with a separate sphere of responsibility and duty, than the simple contrast suggests.