THEOLOGY, EXISTENTIALIST

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1 & Page (An account of Tetens relation to Thomas Reid, James Oswald and James Beattie.) GÜNTER ZÖLLER THALES (fl. c.585 BC) Known as the first Greek philosopher, Thales initiated a way of understanding the world that was based on reason and nature rather than tradition and mythology. He held that water is in some sense the basic material, that all things are full of gods and (purportedly) that all things possess soul. He predicted an eclipse of the sun and was considered the founder of Greek astronomy and mathematics. See also: DOXOGRAPHY; HESIOD McKirahan, R.D. (1994) Philosophy before Socrates, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Translation and discussion of source materials; chapter 4 covers Thales.) RICHARD MCKIRAHAN THEMISTIUS (c. AD 317 c. AD 388) As a pagan philosopher and adviser to Christian Roman emperors, Themistius aimed at making the celebrated writings of his heroes Plato and Aristotle more accessible through explanatory paraphrase. An apostle of cultural Hellenism to his contemporaries, in the Middle Ages he was widely known as an important epitomizer of Aristotle. He taught classical philosophy in Constantinople, and also served in the city s administration. See also: ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS; PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Schroeder, F.M. and Todd, R.B. (1990) Two Greek Aristotelian Commentators on the Intellect: The De Intellectu Attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius Paraphrase of Aristotle De Anima, 3.4 8, Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. (Introduction, translation and commentary.) JOHN BUSSANICH THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES The three theological virtues of faith, hope and love, referred to frequently by the apostle Paul in his letters, play an indispensable role in Christian theorizing about a person s duties with respect to God. Thomas Aquinas is responsible for the most thorough and influential philosophical theory of the theological virtues. According to him, faith, hope and love are virtues because they are dispositions whose possession enables a person to act well to achieve a good thing in this case, the ultimate good of salvation and beatitude. Without them, people would have neither the awareness of nor the will to strive for salvation. Despite the fact that they are infused in persons by God s grace, one can wilfully and culpably fail to let them develop. Faith for Aquinas is the voluntary assent to propositions about God that cannot be known by the evidence available to the natural capacities of humans. Other theologians, such as Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard, deny the assumption that faith is primarily cognitive or propositional in nature, insisting instead that it is trust in God. Kierkegaard even challenges the presupposition that faith is logically continuous with natural knowledge. There has been much debate in the second half of the twentieth century as to whether it is ever rationally permissible to believe something on the basis of insufficient evidence. According to Aquinas, hope for one s salvation requires that one already have faith. Hope requires that one remain steadfast in the face of despair on the one hand and presumption on the other. Aquinas models the virtue of love on one strand of Aristotle s notion of friendship. Love of God entails desiring the good that God has to offer, seeking to advance God s goals, and communicating one s love to God. Love for others follows from the realization that they are also created with good natures by God. See also: FAITH; VIRTUES AND VICES Augustine (c.423) Faith, Hope and Charity, trans. and with introduction by B.M. Peebles, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 2, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1947, (Often referred to as the Enchiridion, this is perhaps the first sustained treatise on the theological virtues.) Pieper, J. (1986) On Hope, trans.m.f. McCarthy, San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. (An elementary presentation of Aquinas views.) WILLIAM E. MANN THEOLOGY, EXISTENTIALIST see EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY THEOLOGY, ISLAMIC see ISLAMIC THEOLOGY

2 & Page 33 of the heavenly bodies and their motions, and of meteorological and other natural phenomena. Kahn, C.H. (1960) Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, New York: Columbia University Press; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, (The best book on the Milesians, including Anaximenes.) RICHARD MCKIRAHAN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY The philosophy of the Greco Roman world from the sixth century BC to the sixth century AD laid the foundations for all subsequent Western philosophy. Its greatest figures are Socrates (fifth century BC) and Plato and Aristotle (fourth century BC). But the enormously diverse range of further important thinkers who populated the period includes the Presocratics and Sophists of the sixth and fifth centuries BC; the Stoics, Epicureans and sceptics of the Hellenistic age; and the many Aristotelian and (especially) Platonist philosophers who wrote under the Roman Empire, including the great Neoplatonist Plotinus. Ancient philosophy was principally pagan, and was finally eclipsed by Christianity in the sixth century AD, but it was so comprehensively annexed by its conqueror that it came, through Christianity, to dominate medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This eventual symbiosis between ancient philosophy and Christianity may reflect the fact that philosophical creeds in late antiquity fulfilled much the same role as religious movements, with which they shared many of their aims and practices. Only a small fraction of ancient philosophical writings have come down to us intact. The remainder can be recovered, to a greater or lesser extent, by piecing together fragmentary evidence from sources which refer to them. 1 Main features Ancient philosophy is that of classical antiquity, which not only inaugurated the entire European philosophical tradition but has exercised an unparalleled influence on its style and content. It is conventionally considered to start with THALES in the mid sixth century BC, although the Greeks themselves frequently made HOMER (c.700 BC) its true originator. Officially it is often regarded as ending in 529 AD, when the Christian emperor Justinian is believed to have banned the teaching of pagan philosophy at Athens. However, this was no abrupt termination, and the work of Platonist philosophers continued for some time in self imposed exile (see ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS; NEOPLATONISM; SIMPLICIUS). Down to and including Plato (in the first half of the fourth century BC), philosophy did not develop a significant technical terminology of its own unlike such contemporary disciplines as mathematics and medicine. It was Plato s pupil Aristotle, and after him the Stoics (see STOICISM), who made truly decisive contributions to the philosophical vocabulary of the ancient world. Ancient philosophy was above all a product of Greece and the Greek speaking parts of the Mediterranean, which came to include southern Italy, Sicily, western Asia, and large parts of North Africa, notably Egypt. From the first century BC, a number of Romans became actively engaged in one or other of the Greek philosophical systems, and some of them wrote their own works in Latin (see Lucretius; CICERO; SENECA; APULEIUS). But Greek remained the lingua franca of philosophy. Although much modern philosophical terminology derives from Latinized versions of Greek technical concepts, most of these stem from the Latin vocabulary of medieval Aristotelianism, not directly from ancient Roman philosophical writers. 2 The sixth and fifth centuries BC The first phase, occupying most of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, is generally known as Presocratic philosophy (see PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY). Its earliest practitioners (THALES; ANAXIMANDER; ANAXIMENES) came from Miletus, on the west coast of modern Turkey. The dominant concern of the Presocratic thinkers was to explain the origin and regularities of the physical world and the place of the human soul within it (see especially PYTHAGOREANISM; HERACLITUS; ANAXAGORAS; EMPEDOCLES; DEMOCRITUS), although the period also produced such rebels as the Eleatic philosophers (Parmenides; Zeno of Elea; Melissus), whose radical monism sought to undermine the very basis of cosmology by reliance on a priori reasoning. The label Presocratic acknowledges the traditional view that SOCRATES ( BC) was the first philosopher to shift the focus away from the natural world to human values. In fact, however, this shift to a large extent coincides with the concerns of his contemporaries the Sophists, who professed to teach the fundamentals of political and social success and

3 Page 34 & consequently were also much concerned with moral issues (see SOPHISTS). But the persona of Socrates became, and has remained ever since, so powerful an icon for the life of moral scrutiny that it is his name that is used to mark this watershed in the history of philosophy. In the century or so following his death, many schools looked back to him as the living embodiment of philosophy and sought the principles of his life and thought in philosophical theory (see especially SOCRATIC SCHOOLS). 3 The fourth century BC Socrates and the Sophists helped to make Athens the philosophical centre of the Greek world, and it was there, in the fourth century, that the two greatest philosophers of antiquity lived and taught, namely Plato and Aristotle. PLATO, Socrates pupil, set up his school the Academy in Athens (see ACADEMY). Plato s published dialogues are literary masterpieces as well as philosophical classics, and develop, albeit unsystematically, a global philosophy which embraces ethics, politics, physics, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics and psychology. The Academy s most eminent alumnus was ARISTOTLE, whose own school the Lyceum came for a time to rival its importance as an educational centre. Aristotle s highly technical but also often provisional and exploratory school treatises may not have been intended for publication; at all events, they did not become widely disseminated and discussed until the late first century BC. The main philosophical treatises (leaving aside his important zoological works) include seminal studies in all the areas covered by Plato, plus logic, a branch of philosophy which Aristotle pioneered. These treatises are, like Plato s, among the leading classics of Western philosophy. Platonism and Aristotelianism were to become the dominant philosophies of the Western tradition from the second century AD at least until the end of the Renaissance, and the legacy of both remains central to Western philosophy today. 4 Hellenistic philosophy Down to the late fourth century BC, philosophy was widely seen as a search for universal understanding, so that in the major schools its activities could comfortably include, for example, biological and historical research. In the ensuing era of Hellenistic philosophy, however, a geographical split helped to demarcate philosophy more sharply as a self contained discipline (see HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY). Alexandria, with its magnificent library and royal patronage, became the new centre of scientific, literary and historical research, while the philosophical schools at Athens concentrated on those areas which correspond more closely to philosophy as it has since come to be understood. The following features were to characterize philosophy not only in the Hellenistic age but also for the remainder of antiquity. The three main parts of philosophy were most commonly labelled physics (a primarily speculative discipline, concerned with such concepts as causation, change, god and matter, and virtually devoid of empirical research), logic (which sometimes included epistemology), and ethics. Ethics was agreed to be the ultimate focus of philosophy, which was thus in essence a systematized route to personal virtue (see ARETĒ) and happiness (see EUDIAMONIA).There was also a strong spiritual dimension. One s religious beliefs that is, the way one rationalized and elaborated one s own (normally pagan) beliefs and practices concerning the divine were themselves an integral part of both physics and ethics, never a mere adjunct of philosophy. The dominant philosophical creeds of the Hellenistic age (officially BC) were Stoicism (founded by ZENO OF CITIUM) and Epicureanism (founded by EPICURCUS) (see STOICISM; EPICUREANISM). Scepticism was also a powerful force, largely through the Academy (see ARCESILAUS; CARNEADES), which in this period functioned as a critical rather than a doctrinal school, and also, starting from the last decades of the era, through Pyrrhonism (see PYRRHONISM) 5 The imperial era The crucial watershed belongs, however, not at the very end of the Hellenistic age (31 BC, when the Roman empire officially begins), but half a century earlier in the 80s BC. Political and military upheavals at Athens drove most of the philosophers out of the city, to cultural havens such as Alexandria and Rome. The philosophical institutions of Athens never fully recovered, so that this decentralization amounted to a permanent redrawing of philosophical map. (The chairs of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism which the philosopher emperor MARCUS AURELIUS established at Athens in AD 176 were a significant gesture, but did not fully restore Athens former philosophical pre eminence.) Philosophy was no longer, for most of its adherents, a living activity within the Athenian school founded by Plato, Aristotle, Zeno or Epicurus. Instead it was a subject

4 Page 35 & pursued in small study groups led by professional teachers all over the Greco Roman world. To a large extent, it was felt that the history of philosophy had now come to an end, and that the job was to seek the correct interpretation of the ancients by close study of their texts. One symptom of this feeling is that doxography the systematic cataloguing of philosophical and scientific opinions (see DOXOGRAPHY) concentrated largely on the period down to about 80 BC, as did the biographical history of philosophy written circa AD 300 by DIOGENES LAERTIUS. Another such symptom is that a huge part of the philosophical activity of late antiquity went into the composition of commentaries on classic philosophical texts. In this final phase of ancient philosophy, conveniently called imperial because it more or less coincides with the era of the Roman empire, the Hellenistic creeds were gradually eclipsed by the revival of doctrinal Platonism, based on the close study of Plato s texts, out of which it developed a massively elaborate metaphysical scheme. Aristotle was usually regarded as an ally by these Platonists, and became therefore himself the focus of many commentaries (see PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE; PERIPATETICS; NEOPLATONISM; ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS). Despite its formal concern with recovering the wisdom of the ancients, however, this age produced many powerfully original thinkers, of whom the greatest is PLOLTINUS. 6 Schools and movements The early Pythagoreans constituted the first philosophical group that can be called even approximately a school. They acquired a reputation for secrecy, as well as for virtually religious devotion to the word of their founder PYTHAGORAS. He himself said it (best known in its Latin form ipse dixit ) was alleged to be their watchword. In some ways it is more accurate to consider them a sect than a school, and their beliefs and practices were certainly intimately bound up in religious teachings about the soul s purification. It is no longer accepted, as it long was, that the Athenian philosophical schools had the status of formal religious institutions for the worship of the muses. Their legal and institutional standing is in fact quite obscure. Both the Academy and the Lyceum were so named after public groves just outside the walls of Athens, in which their public activities were held. The Stoics too got their name from the public portico, or stoa, in which they met, alongside the Athenian agora. Although these schools undoubtedly also conducted classes and discussions on private premises too, it was their public profile that was crucial to their identity as schools. In the last four centuries BC, prospective philosophy students flocked to Athens from all over the Greek world, and the high public visibility of the schools there was undoubtedly cultivated partly with an eye to recruitment. Only the Epicurean school kept its activities out of the public gaze, in line with Epicurus policy of minimal civic involvement. A school normally started as an informal grouping of philosophers with a shared set of interests and commitments, under the nominal leadership of some individual, but without a strong party line to which all members owed unquestioning allegiance. In the first generation of the Academy, for example, many of Plato s own leading colleagues dissented from his views on central issues. The same openness is discernible in the first generations of the other schools, even (if to a much lesser extent) the Epicurean. However, after the death of the founder the picture usually changed. His word thereafter became largely beyond challenge, and further progress was presented as the supplementation or reinterpretation of the founder s pronouncements, rather than as their replacement. To this extent, the allegiance which in the long term bound a school together usually depended on a virtually religious reverence for the movement s foundational texts, which provided the framework within which its discussions were conducted. The resemblance to the structure of religious sects is no accident. In later antiquity, philosophical and religious movements constituted in effect a single cultural phenomenon, and competed for the same spiritual and intellectual high ground. This includes Christianity, which became a serious rival to pagan philosophy (primarily Platonism) from the third century onwards, and eventually triumphed over it. In seeking to understand such spiritual movements of late antiquity as Hermetism, Gnosticism, Neo Pythagoreanism, Cynicism and even Neoplatonism itself, and their concern with such values as asceticism, self purificaton and self divinization, it is inappropriate to insist on a sharp division between philosophy and religion (see HERMETISM; GNOSTICISM; NEO PYTHAGOREANISM; CYNICS; NEOPLATONISM). Ancient philosophy is traditionally understood as pagan and distinguished from the Christian Patristic philosophy of late antiquity

5 Page 658 & PARMENIDES (early to mid 5th century BC) Parmenides of Elea, a revolutionary and enigmatic Greek philosophical poet, was the earliest defender of Eleatic metaphysics. He argued for the essential homogeneity and changelessness of being, rejecting as spurious the world s apparent variation over space and time. His one poem, whose first half largely survives, opens with the allegory of an intellectual journey by which Parmenides has succeeded in standing back from the empirical world. He learns, from the mouth of an unnamed goddess, a dramatically new perspective on being. The goddess s disquisition, which fills the remainder of the poem, is divided into two parts; the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming. The Way of Truth is the earliest known passage of sustained argument in Western philosophy. First a purportedly exhaustive choice is offered between two paths that of being, and that of not being. Next the not being path is closed off: the predicate expression... is not could never be supplied with a subject, since only thatwhich is can be spoken of and thought of. Nor, on pain of self contradiction, can a third path be entertained, one which would conflate being with not being despite the fact that just such a path is implicit in the ordinary human acceptance of an empirical world bearing a variety of shifting predicates. All references, open or covert, to not being must be outlawed. Only... is (or perhaps... is... ) can be coherently said of anything. The next move is to seek the characteristics of that which is. The total exclusion of not being leaves us with something radically unlike the empirical world. It must lack generation, destruction, change, distinct parts, movement and an asymmetric shape, all of which would require some not being to occur. That which is must, in short, be a changeless and undifferentiated sphere. In the second part of the poem the goddess offers a cosmology a physical explanation of the very world which the first half of the poem has banished as incoherent. This is based on a pair of ultimate principles or elements, the one light and fiery, the other heavy and dark. It is presented as conveying the opinions of mortals. It is deceitful, but the goddess nevertheless recommends learning it, so that no opinion of mortals may outstrip you. The motive for the radical split between the two halves of the poem has been much debated in modern times. In antiquity the Way of Truth was taken by some as a challenge to the notion of change, which physics must answer, by others as the statement of a profound metaphysical truth, while the Way of Seeming was widely treated as in some sense Parmenides own bona fide physical system. Gallop, D. (1984) Parmenides of Elea, Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (Contains text, translation and notes; a basic and clear exposition.) Stokes, M.C. (1971) One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy, Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. (Locates Parmenides in a historical context.) DAVID SEDLEY PARTICULARS Particulars are to be understood by contrasting them with universals, that term being used to comprise both properties and relations. Often the term individuals is used interchangeably with particulars, though some restrict the term individuals to those particulars whose existence has more than momentary duration. It is sometimes taken as a distinctive feature of particulars that they cannot be in more than one place at a time, whereas universals are capable of being wholly present in more than one place at a given time: if you have a white thing here and a white thing there, then you have two particulars but only one property. This way of distinguishing between particulars and universals may help us to focus on apt paradigm cases of each, but arguably this does not get us to the heart of the matter. On the one hand, some think it is possible, at least in principle, for a magician, or Pythagoras, or a time traveller, or a subatomic particle to be in two places at once, even though each is a particular. On the other hand, some think that there are properties which could not possibly be manifested in two different places at the same time, and yet which nonetheless are universals: think, for instance, of the divine property of absolute perfection, or of the conjunction of all intrinsic properties of a Leibnizian monad (or possible world); or of Judas property of simply being Judas. Particulars are things which have properties and which stand in relations particulars instantiate properties and relations. By itself, however, this does not distinguish particulars from universals since universals, too, are

6 & Page 346 was composed of an actual infinity of indivisibles, by which it was properly measured. His position came under powerful mathematical attack. Murdoch, J.E. (1982) Infinity and Continuity, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (eds) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (Valuable for placing Henry s views on the subject in their historical context.) GEORGE MOLLAND HERACLIDES OF PONTUS (4TH century BC) Heraclides, a pupil of Plato, was roughly contemporaneous with Aristotle. Best known in antiquity as a writer of dialogues on moral and religious themes, he also held interesting views about cosmology and the structure of matter. Only fragments of his works survive. Gottschalk, H.B. (1980) Heraclides of Pontus, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Includes English translations of most of the important fragments and a full bibliography; in the appendices some new texts are added and others are shown to be spurious.) H.B. GOTTSCHALK HERACLITUS (c.540 c.480 BC) No Greek philosopher born before Socrates was more creative and influential than Heraclitus of Ephesus. Around the beginning of the fifth century BC, in a prose that made him proverbial for obscurity, he criticized conventional opinions about the way things are and attacked the authority of poets and others reputed to be wise. His surviving work consists of more than 100 epigrammatic sentences, complete in themselves and often comparable to the proverbs characteristic of wisdom literature. Notwithstanding their sporadic presentation and transmission, Heraclitus sentences comprise a philosophy that is clearly focused upon a determinate set of interlocking ideas. As interpreted by the later Greek philosophical tradition, Heraclitus stands primarily for the radical thesis that Everything is in flux, like the constant flow of a river. Although it is likely that he took this thesis to be true, universal flux is too simple a phrase to identify his philosophy. His focus shifts continually between two perspectives the objective and everlasting processes of nature on the one hand and ordinary human beliefs and values on the other. He challenges people to come to terms, theoretically and practically, with the fact that they are living in a world that no god or human has made, a world he describes as an ever living fire kindling in measures and going out in measures (fr. 30). His great truth is that All things are one, but this unity, far from excluding difference, opposition and change, actually depends on them, since the universe is in a continuous state of dynamic equilibrium. Day and night, up and down, living and dying, heating and cooling such pairings of apparent opposites all conform to the everlastingly rational formula (logos) that unity consists of opposites; remove day, and night goes too, just as a river will lose its identity if it ceases to flow. Heraclitus requires his audience to try to think away their purely personal concerns and view the world from this more detached perspective. By the use of telling examples he highlights the relativity of value judgments. The implication is that unless people reflect on their experience and examine themselves, they are condemned to live a dream like existence and to remain out of touch with the formula that governs and explains the nature of things. This formula is connected (symbolically and literally) with ever living fire, whose incessant transformations are not only the basic operation of the universe but also essential to the cycle of life and death. Fire constitutes and symbolizes both the processes of nature in general and also the light of intelligence. As the source of life and thought, a fiery soul equips people to look into themselves, to discover the formula of nature and to live accordingly. The influence of Heraclitus ideas on other philosophers was extensive. His reputed flux doctrine, as disseminated by his follower Cratylus, helped to shape Plato s cosmology and its changeless metaphysical foundations. The Stoics looked back to Heraclitus as the inspiration for their own conception of divine fire, identifying this with the logos that he specifies as the world s explanatory principle. Later still, the neo Pyhrronist Aenesidemus invoked Heraclitus as a partial precursor of scepticism. Kahn, C. (1979) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Text, translation and commentary; a

7 Page 32 & mind excited but disappointed Socrates, and exercised a profound influence on Plato s cosmology and Aristotle s psychology. Aristotle was also fascinated by the complexities of the remarkable theory of everything in everything. Anaxagoras philosophy was never subsequently revived, but he was remembered as the mentor of the statesman Pericles and the poet Euripides. His reputation as a rationalist critic of religion persisted throughout antiquity. Schofield, M. (1980) An Essay on Anaxagoras, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A monograph on Anaxagoras theories of mind and matter based on detailed study of the principal fragments.) Sider, D. (1981) The Fragments of Anaxagoras, Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain. (A useful edition of the Greek text of the fragments, with translation and commentary.) MALCOLM SCHOFIELD ANAXARCHUS (c.380 c.330 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus of Abdera was a friend of Alexander the Great, teacher and friend of Pyrrho, and heroic victim of a tyrant. More a court philosopher than a school one, and an ambiguous personality, he seems to have mixed a highly original philosophical cocktail: a primarily ethical, cynically inclined outlook, combined with certain elements of Democritean ethics, epistemology and physics. His only attested work was a treatise On Kingship, his dominant interest perhaps being the theory and practice of relations between intellectual and ruler. Diogenes Laertius (c. early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols. (Book IX, is a life of Anaxarchus.) JACQUES BRUNSCHWIG ANAXIMANDER (c.610 after 546 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus followed Thales in his philosophical and scientific interests. He wrote a book, of which one fragment survives, and is the first Presocratic philosopher about whom we have enough information to reconstruct his theories in any detail. He was principally concerned with the origin, structure and workings of the world, and attempted to account for them consistently, through a small number of principles and mechanisms. Like other thinkers of his tradition, he gave the Olympian gods no role in creating the world or controlling events. Instead, he held that the world originated from a vast, eternal, moving material of no definite nature, which he called apeiron ( boundless or unlimited ). From this, through obscure processes including one called separation off, arose the world as we know it. Anaximander described the kosmos (world) and stated the distances of the celestial bodies from the earth. He accounted for the origin of animal life and explained how humans first emerged. He pictured the world as a battleground in which opposite natures, such as hot and cold, constantly encroach upon one another, and described this process as taking place with order and regularity. Kahn, C.H. (1960) Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, New York: Columbia University Press; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, (The best book on the Milesians, including Anaximander.) RICHARD MCKIRAHAN ANAXIMENES (6th century BC) The Greek philosopher Anaximenes of Miletus followed Anaximander in his philosophical and scientific interests. Only a few words survive from his book, but there is enough other information to give us a picture of his most important theories. Like the other early Presocratic philosophers he was interested in the origin, structure and composition of the universe, as well as the principles on which it operates. Anaximenes held that the primary substance both the source of everything else and the material out of which it is made is air. When rarefied and condensed it becomes other materials, such as fire, water and earth. The primordial air is infinite in extent and without beginning or end. It is in motion and divine. Air generated the universe through its motion, and continues to govern it. The human soul is composed of air and it is likely that Anaximenes believed the entire kosmos (world) to be alive, with air functioning as its soul. Like other Presocratics, he proposed theories of the nature

8 & Page 850 universal mission, defined as the unification of the Christian Churches and the establishment of a theocratic Kingdom of God on earth. In the early 1890s Solov ëv abandoned this utopian vision and concentrated on working out an autonomous ethic and a liberal philosophy of law. This reflected his optimistic faith in liberal progress and his confidence that even the secularization of ethics was essentially a part of the divine human process of salvation. In the last year of his life, however, historiosophical optimism gave way to a pessimistic apocalypticism, as expressed in his philosophical dialogue Tri razgovora (Three Conversations) (1900), and especially the Tale of the Antichrist appended to it. See also: SLAVOPHILISM Solov ëv, V.S. ( ) Chteniia o bogochelovechestve; trans. P. Zouboff, Lectures on Godmanhood, London: Dennis Dobson, Stremoukhoff, D. (1979) Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic work, Belmont: Nordland. (Translated from the French edition of 1935, this is the most comprehensive monograph in English.) ANDRZEJ WALICKI SOPHISTS The Sophists were itinerant educators, the first professors of higher learning, who appeared in Greece in the middle and later fifth century BC. The earliest seems to have been Protagoras, who was personally associated with the statesman Pericles. The next most eminent was Gorgias, an influential author and prose stylist. The Sophists succeeded in earning very large sums for their instruction. They lectured on many subjects, including the new natural philosophy, but their most important teaching was in rhetoric, the art of influencing political assemblies and law courts by persuasive speech. In conservative circles their great influence was regarded with hostility, as corrupting the young. See also: DISSOI LOGOI Guthrie, W.K.C. (1969) A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; part of vol. 3 repr. as The Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (A full, scholarly account.) Sprague, R.K. (ed.) (1972) The Older Sophists, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. (Full English translation of the fragments and testimonia.) CHARLES H. KAHN SOREL, GEORGES ( ) The French social theorist Georges Sorel is best known for his controversial work Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence), first published in He here argued that the world could be saved from barbarism through acts of proletarian violence, most notably the general strike. This, he believed, would not only establish an ethic of the producers but would also serve to secure the economic foundations of socialism. Moreover the inspiration for these heroic deeds would be derived from a series of myths that encapsulated the highest aspirations of the working class. More broadly Sorel should be seen as an innovator in Marxist theory and the methodology of the social sciences. See also: REVOLUTION; SOCIALISM Sorel, G. (1976) From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, ed. J.L. Stanley, New York: Oxford University Press. (An excellent selection of Sorel s writings.) JEREMY JENNINGS SÔSAN HYUJÔNG ( ) Sôsan was a Korean Sôn Buddhist monk who sought to establish the equality of various ideas and systems. His philosophical perspective conferred equality on Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism alike, and within Buddhism he denied there was any inherent conflict between the Kyo and Sôn schools. However, he viewed Sôn (meditation) as being the most advanced form of practice. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Han guk pulgyo chônsô (The Collected Works of Korean Buddhism), Seoul: Dongguk University press, 1979, vol. 7, ; trans. in P.H. Lee (ed.) Source Book of Korean Civilization, vol. 1, From Early Times to the Sixteenth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, (Lee s translation is not entirely complete, but does include all the important intellectual works; a well written, comprehensive anthology of Korean civilization.) SUNG BAE PARK

9 & Page 721 semantics of propositional attitudes, focused on the Russellian view.) PASCAL ENGEL PROTAGORAS (c.490 c.420 BC) Protagoras was the first and most eminent of the Greek Sophists. Active in Athens, he pioneered the role of professional educator, training ambitious young men for a public career and popularizing the new rationalist worldview that was introduced from Ionian natural philosophy. But unlike his contemporary Anaxagoras, Protagoras was sceptical of the dogmatic claims of the new science. His famous formula Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not (fr. 1) makes him the father of relativism and even, on some interpretations, of subjectivism. He was also considered the first theological agnostic: Concerning the gods, I am unable to know either that they exist or that they do not exist or what form they have (fr.4). He was sometimes associated with the claim to make the weaker argument (logos) the stronger. See also: SOPHISTS Guthrie, W.K.C. (1969) A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; part of vol. 3 repr. as The Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (Full scholarly account.) CHARLES H. KAHN PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH ( ) Pierre Joseph Proudhon was a French social theorist, political activist and journalist. Claiming to be the first person to adopt the label anarchist, he developed a vision of a cooperative society conducting its affairs by just exchanges and without political authority. In his lifetime he exercised considerable influence over both militants and theorists of the European left, and he is remembered today as one of the greatest exponents of libertarian socialism. His last writings, though still strongly libertarian, advocated a federal state with minimal functions. See also: ANARCHISM; SOCIALISM Proudhon, P.J. (1840) Qu est ce que la propriété? ou Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement, Paris: Brocard; trans. B. Tucker, What is Property?, New York: Dover, (The most accessible statement of his basic position.) Woodcock, G. (1956) Pierre Joseph Proudhon: His Life and Work, New York: Schocken. (The standard English language biography. Contains a bibliography.) RICHARD VERNON PROVABILITY LOGIC Central to Gödel s second incompleteness theorem is his discovery that, in a sense, a formal system can talk about itself. Provability logic is a branch of modal logic specifically directed at exploring this phenomenon. Consider a sufficiently rich formal theory T. By Gödel s methods we can construct a predicate in the language of T representing the predicate is formally provable in T. It turns out that T is able to prove statements of the form 1. If A is provable in T, then it is provable in T that A is provable in T. In modal logic, predicates such as it is unavoidable that or I know that are considered as modal operators, that is, as non truthfunctional propositional connectives. In provability logic, is provable in T is similarly treated. We write A for A is provable in T. This enables us to rephrase (1) as follows: (1 ) A A. This is a well known modal principle amenable to study by the methods of modal logic. Provability logic produces manageable systems of modal logic precisely describing all modal principles for A that T itself can prove. The language of the modal system will be different from the language of the system T under study. Thus the provability logic of T (that is, the insights T has about its own provability predicate as far as visible in the modal language) is decidable and can be studied by finitistic methods. T, in contrast, is highly undecidable. The advantages of provability logic are: (1) it yields a very perspicuous representation of certain arguments in a formal theory T about provability in T; (2) it gives us a great deal of control of the principles for provability in so far as these can be formulated in the modal language at all; (3) it gives us a direct way to compare notions such as knowledge with the notion of formal provability; and (4) it is a fully worked out syntactic approach to necessity in the sense of Quine.