Blackburn - The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

Philosophy is human thought become self-conscious. Its topics are life, the universe, and everything; it can include all the categories of religious, artistic, scientific, mathematical, and logical thought. This dictionary of philosophy is a record of some of the terms that excite such reflection, and some that have been found helpful in conducting it.

 

Johnson writes in the Preface to his great Dictionary of the English Language that:

 

when the nature of things is unknown, or the notion unsettled and indefinite, and various in various minds, the words by which such notions are conveyed, or such things denoted, will be ambiguous and perplexed.

 

Philosophy by its nature inhabits such areas of ambiguity and perplexity, places where, in Russell’s phrase, we meet only uncertain patches of meaning. Philosophers make their reputations by contesting meanings: success often consists in showing that predecessors misunderstood the categories of experience, reason, proof, perception, consciousness, virtue, or law. Such discussions are intricate and lengthy. Philosophies, like movements of thought in general, demand lengthy statement and resist swift definition. Thus the distinguished historian of ideas A. O. Lovejoy records that, in 1824, two citizens of the French village of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, MM. Dupuis and Cotonet, began the enterprise of discovering what Romanticism is, by collecting the definitions given by eminent authorities. The endeavour, they recorded, cost them twelve years of suffering and ended in disillusion.1 In the same paper, Lovejoy confidently tells us that over sixty senses of the word ‘nature’ can clearly be distinguished. With such dismal examples before us, brevity may seem impossible, and any attempt at an overview an insult to the abundant complexities.

 

No dictionary-sized explanation of these terms can substitute for the full explorations. A dictionary entry on virtue or quantum mechanics cannot substitute for an education in ethics or physics. What I have attempted to do is to indicate where the central explorations are headed, and the points of dispute that have attracted reflection. Naturally, this means that my own interests and assessments are not always disguised. Other topics are not themselves subject to such disputes. It is not, for example, seriously contested what Newcomb’s paradox is, or the axiom of choice. Here a more magisterial treatment is possible, and this I have given.

 

Any acquaintance with the history of philosophy shows how closely its concerns fuse with those of subjects that go under different academic headings: literature, physics, psychology, sociology, and theology. Indeed, the separation of philosophy as a discipline can seem to be an artefact of academic administration, rather than a reflection of a clear division between using a concept and thinking about it. I have therefore been free in introducing terminology from other sciences where such terminology is heavily embedded in philosophical discussion. For example, in the contemporary literature, someone thinking about the ethics of abortion may come across casual mention of zygotes and meiosis, just as surely as they may come across the doctrine of double effect or the acts/omissions doctrine. Someone interested in physical reality may need to know the content of Bell’s theorem or the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen thought experiment, and in such matters I have attempted to help. Similarly I have tried to be generous with thinkers from neighbouring subjects and traditions, although inevitably there is a certain amount of arbitrariness. Addison, Blake, and Pope were as probably as significant philosophical thinkers as many people included here, but they fell just outside the range; Carlyle, Coleridge, and Dante get in. I have been particularly concerned to include the great scientists whose work infused major changes in philosophy: Boyle and Faraday, as well as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein.

 

3rd Edition. – Oxford University Press, 2016. – 544 p.

ISBN 978-0198735304

 

Idea

 

(Greek, eidos, visible form) A notion stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in the mind, somehow thought of as representing something about the world, to the other pole, where it represents an eternal, timeless unchanging form or concept: the concept of the number series or of justice, for example, thought of as independent objects of enquiry and perhaps of knowledge. These two poles are not distinct meanings of the term, although they give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. On the one hand, ideas are that with which we think, or in *Locke ’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. On the other hand, ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. *Plato ’s theory of *forms is a celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and in his hands ideas are *reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notable in the Timaeus, opened the way for the *Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect, until after *Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.

 

Together with a general bias towards the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation of images, this was developed by *Locke, *Berkeley, and *Hume into a full-scale view of the understanding as the domain of images, although they were all aware of anomalies that were later regarded as fatal to this doctrine (see abstraction). The defects in the account were exposed by *Kant, who realized that the understanding needs to be thought of more in terms of rules and organizing principles than of any kind of copy of what is given in experience. Kant also recognized the danger of the opposite extreme (that of *Leibniz) of failing to connect the elements of understanding with those of experience at all (Critique of Pure Reason, A270).

 

It has become more common to think of ideas, or concepts, as dependent upon social and especially linguistic structures, rather than the self-standing creations of an individual mind, but the tension between the objective and the subjective aspect of the matter lingers on, for instance in debates about the possibility of objective knowledge, of *indeterminacy in translation, and of identity between the thoughts people entertain at one time and those that they entertain at another.