Justification for psychiatric paternalism is most easily established where mental illness renders the person mentally incompetent, depriving him of the capacity for rational agency and for autonomy, hence undermining the basis for liberal rights against paternalism. But some philosophers, and no doubt some doctors, have been deeply concerned by the inadequacy of the concept of mental incompetence to encapsulate some apparently appealing cases for psychiatric paternalism. We ought to view mental incompetence as just one subset of a broader justification for (...) psychiatric paternalism. The very basis of liberal limitations on psychiatric paternalism, whether described in terms of rights to autonomy or as respect for differences in values and lifestyles, presupposes a sense of moral persistence, and hence some sufficiently persistent self. Paternalistic intervention is warranted when we are unable to govern our lives in a manner consistent with the goals and values that comprise that ‘self’. One way that can occur is when we lack the mental capacities required for autonomy, such that we are unable to interpret and interact with our environment in order to meaningfully pursue our goals, i.e. mental incompetence. But it can also occur when we are subject to impositions that alter our goals without altering our capacity to pursue them — i.e. when it is our ‘self’ that is impaired rather than our competence. (shrink)

How ought we respond to advance directives that appear to fly in the face of a severely mentally impaired patient's quality of life? An advance directive is a legal instrument wherein a person records instructions regarding the medical treatment that she is to receive in the event that she becomes persistently incapable of refusing or giving informed consent to treatment. Where these instructions are legally binding, they enable a person to exercise control over her future medical treatment. This has been (...) welcomed by some on the grounds that it increases patient autonomy, but there has also been concern that in cases in which a patient is left conscious but severely mentally impaired, the person's advance .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Changing Functions, Moral Responsibility, and Mental IllnessCraig Edwards (bio)Keywordsmental illness, responsibility, character, dysfunction, personhoodI thank both Wakefield and Tomasini for their illuminating comments. Both commentaries are thought provoking and warrant a full response. However, as always, space is limited and I must make the all-too-predictable apology for not addressing both commentaries in full. Wakefield's contribution more directly engages with, and challenges, my claims, and so I focus on addressing (...) his concerns.ClarificationsWakefield correctly notes that I am interested in how mental illness (and illness generally) operates to remove moral responsibility for one's actions. Despite this, it seems at several points that he and I are talking about two different, albeit related, concepts of mental illness. 'Mental illness' is used to both explain and excuse certain behaviors, but these two functions, explanatory and exculpable, do not always operate simultaneously. As we discover biological explanations for apparently immoral behaviors, the question arises as to whether the explanation should remove the immorality and liability for punishment. The 'sick role' can be divided into two aspects. One is the role of deserving and warranting medical treatment. The other is the negation of moral responsibility. Wakefield's own example, pedophilia, involves the first sense of the sick role but not the second. Wakefield's use of this example is unusual, because it deftly highlights the limitation of his HD account. Pedophilia is a mental disorder in the sense of warranting treatment, and is a mental illness under Wakefield's model, but it is not something that negates moral responsibility. There is a sense of the term 'mental illness'—an important and, as I argue, an objective sense—that is relevant to establishing one's moral responsibility for such behaviors.In addressing my account of mental illness as though it contained two distinct answers, 'mental illness as dysfunction of rational agency, or 'mental illness as moral judgment,' it is unclear whether Wakefield takes them to be conjunctive or alternative. Hence it is worth reiterating in point form the structure of my account:1. Illness involves dysfunction;2. The 'proper function' of a bodily or psychological mechanism is determined by the purpose that we impose upon that mechanism (within the constraints of our biological needs);3. Dysfunction of rational agency is necessary, but not sufficient, for 'mental illness' in the normative sense relevant to negating moral responsibility; and [End Page 105]4. The distinction between 'mental illness' (in the above sense) and the many dysfunctions of rational agency for which we are morally responsible, turns upon (objective) normative facts rather than features internal to the dysfunctions themselves.Functions and ValueWakefield misses the point when he criticizes my comment that, although bodily mechanisms are fairly uniformly valued, there is substantial historical and cross-cultural variation in the way people value personhood. He notes—accurately, but irrelevantly—that people almost always place great value on their capacity for rational agency, probably more so than many aspects of their physical health. My comment, taken in context, has nothing to do with how much people value personhood, but has everything to do with what kinds of purposes people want their mental and physical processes to achieve. A heart has the same function for a Londoner today as it did for a Japanese peasant a thousand years ago, and although it is possible for us to want it to achieve other purposes, any culture that seriously imputes a different set of vital functions on the heart is likely to be rather disappointed. By contrast, our species has experienced vast changes in the demands we make of our rational and intellectual capacities—dysfunctions like dyslexia and alcoholism were irrelevant before the availability of written communication and alcohol.Wakefield's HD account is unable to deal with the relevance of such change. The link between evolutionary function and illness is tenuous in any event. Evolutionary explanations of specific mechanisms are often untestable, simply positing some evolutionary purpose that happens to fit our understanding of what the mechanism does. If we were to discover that alcoholism evolved as a means of increasing birthrates, or (perhaps more plausibly) that anxiety disorders occur among those for whom... (shrink)

The most complete and up-to-date philosophy reference for a new generation, with entries ranging fromObjects to Wisdom, Socrates to Jean-Paul Sartre, Ancient Egyptian Philosophy to Yoruba Epistemology. The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes: * More than 2000 alphabetically arranged, accessible entries * Contributors from more than 1200 of the world's leading thinkers * Comprehensive coverage of the classic philosophical themes, such as Plato, Arguments for the Existence of God and Metaphysics * Up-to-date coverage of contemporary philosophers, ideas, schools and (...) recent developments, including Jacques Derrida, Poststructuralism and Ecological Philosophy * Unrivalled international and multicultural scope with entries such as Modern Islamic Philosophy, Marxist Thought in Latin America and Chinese Buddhist Thought * An exhaustive index for ease of use * Extensive cross-referencing * Suggestions for further reading at the end of each entry. (shrink)

The most complete and up-to-date philosophy reference for a new generation, with entries ranging fromObjects to Wisdom, Socrates to Jean-Paul Sartre, Ancient Egyptian Philosophy to Yoruba Epistemology. The _Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ includes: * More than 2000 alphabetically arranged, accessible entries * Contributors from more than 1200 of the world's leading thinkers * Comprehensive coverage of the classic philosophical themes, such as Plato, Arguments for the Existence of God and Metaphysics * Up-to-date coverage of contemporary philosophers, ideas, schools and (...) recent developments, including Jacques Derrida, Poststructuralism and Ecological Philosophy * Unrivalled international and multicultural scope with entries such as Modern Islamic Philosophy, Marxist Thought in Latin America and Chinese Buddhist Thought * An exhaustive index for ease of use * Extensive cross-referencing * Suggestions for further reading at the end of each entry. (shrink)

The standard philosophical project of analysing the concept of knowledge has radical defects in its arbitrary restriction of the subject matter, and its risky theoretical presuppositions. Edward Craig suggests a more illuminating approach, akin to the `state of nature' method found in political theory, which builds up the concept from a hypothesis about the social function of knowledge and the needs it fulfils. Light is thrown on much that philosophers have written about knowledge, about its analysis and the (...) obstacles to its analysis, and on the debate over scepticism. It becomes apparent why many languages not only have such constructions as `knows whether' and `knows that', but also have equivalents of `knows how to' and `know' followed by a direct object. Thus the inquiry is both broadened in scope and made theoretically less fragile. (shrink)

In this chapter, Craig shows how the Image of God doctrine works as an interpretative tool. Applied to the philosophy of Hume, it helps to illuminate textual detail that would otherwise not be fully intelligible, and it modifies, sometimes reverses, the received view of his philosophy. Craig argues that, in combining a sceptical epistemology with a thoroughgoing naturalism, Hume aimed at nothing less than the destruction of the doctrine of the image of God, and substituted for it an (...) anthropology which looked not to the divine but to the natural world for its methods and results. This claim is supported by detailed analyses of Hume’s epistemology, ontology, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The principal aim of this chapter is to document and describe the ‘dominant philosophy’ of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: the doctrine that man was made in the image of God. Examining writings by thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Newton, Clarke, and Berkeley, Craig finds that they were all committed to some version of the Similarity Thesis. Its cognitive branch, the ‘Insight Ideal’, manifests itself in the view that our logical and mathematical knowledge and (...) our knowledge of our own mental states possesses a certainty that even God cannot surpass, as well as in the, then widespread, view that we live in a world that is, in principle, fully intelligible to us. The link between the human and the divine mind is usually thought to be provided by the faculty of reason, but the Similarity Thesis has also taken the form that the human mind is in fact a part of the divine intellect. It connects with the prevalence of a contemplative or scientific ethic in which the pursuit of knowledge appears as a good in itself. Moreover, there is a version of the Image of God doctrine focusing on agency and finding expression in the view of, for example, Descartes that, at its best, the human will is as free as a will could possibly be. (shrink)

In this illuminating study Craig argues that the standard practice of analyzing the concept of knowledge has radical defects--arbitrary restriction of the subject matter and risky theoretical presuppositions. He proposes a new approach similar to the "state-of-nature" method found in political theory, building the concept up from a hypothesis about its social function and the needs it fulfills. Shedding light on much that philosophers have written about knowledge, its analysis and the obstacles to its analysis, and the debate over (...) skepticism, this compelling work will be of interest to students and scholars of epistemology and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Chapter 4 relates Hegel, the great spokesman and philosophical champion of the Weltbild of his literary contemporaries, to the two major themes of the book. On the one hand, it shows how he picked up the idea of the divinity of man, a prominent feature of the romantic Weltbild, and interpreted it in such a way as to keep contact with the Similarity Thesis. In Hegel’s philosophy, it is reason that constitutes the link between God, nature, and man. On the (...) other hand, the chapter shows how Hegel added impetus and theoretical weight to a style of thought that, by stressing human autonomy and creativity, turns the view away from the divine mind, and on to the works of man. At the textual level, a close reading of the famous chapter on Sense-Certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit reveals the centrality of the concept of activity: the reason why purely passive sense-certainty collapses is that its content turns out to be always universal, and so cannot be the product of mere passivity. (shrink)

The_ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ is the most ambitious international philosophy project in many years. Edited by Edward Craig and assisted by thirty specialist subject editors, the REP consists of ten volumes of the world's most eminent philosophers writing for the needs of students and teachers of philosophy internationally. The REP is a project on an unparalleled scale: Over 2000 entries ranging from 500 to 15,000 words in length - thematic, biographical and national 10 volumes consisting of over (...) 5 million words of text plus considerable bibliographic material A Chief Editor and thirty specialist Subject Editors from across the world Over 1200 authors from all over the world. The importance of the REP is not to be found just in the sheer size of the project but also in its breadth of subject matter. It covers: The core of most Anglo-American philosophy - the metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions The usual menu of ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy The philosophy of other cultures - from Chinese, Arabic and Jewish philosophy to the philosophy of Africa and Latin America The most impressive range of authors have been gathered together on this unique project: William Alston, Roderick Chisolm, Fred Dretske, Joel Feinberg, Sandra Harding, Larry Laudan, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Popkin, Richard Rorty, Alan Ryan, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Stich, Patrick Suppes and Bernard Williams, to name just a few. Also available online: www.rep.routledge.com. (shrink)

This chapter reviews epistemically private items (EPI). A highly influential tradition makes the meaning of a word depend on the nature of the 'idea' associated with it, whilst treating ideas as items before the consciousness of speakers and their hearers, hence as strong candidates for epistemic privacy. Michael Dummett has denied that EPI can play any role in the semantics of the public language. For this view he advances a group of three closely related arguments, which we may call respectively (...) the arguments from Communicability, from Acquisition, and from Manifestation. The immediately obvious candidates for EPI‐affected semantics are expressions which purport to describe sensations, and those standing for properties at least plausibly thought of as powers to produce sensations of certain kinds. Grasp of meaning, once any part is denied to EPI, must consist in the capacity for some kind of publicly accessible behavior. (shrink)

The standard philosophical project of analysing the concept of knowledge has radical defects in its arbitrary restriction of the subject matter, and its risky theoretical presuppositions. Edward Craig suggests a more illuminating approach, akin to the `state of nature' method found in political theory, which builds up the concept from a hypothesis about the social function of knowledge and the needs it fulfils. Light is thrown on much that philosophers have written about knowledge, about its analysis and the (...) obstacles to its analysis, and on the debate over scepticism. It becomes apparent why many languages not only have such constructions as `knows whether' and `knows that', but also have equivalents of `knows how to' and `know' followed by a direct object. Thus the inquiry is both broadened in scope and made theoretically less fragile. (shrink)

What is the connection between philosophy as studied in universities and those general views of man and reality which are commonly considered "philosophy"? Through his attempt to rediscover this connection, Craig offers a view of philosophy and its history since the early 17th century. Craig discusses the two contrary visions of man's essential nature that dominated this period--one portraying man as made in the image of God and required to resemble him as closely as possible, the other depicting (...) man as the autonomous creator of his own environment and values--and uses this context to clarify previously opaque textual detail. Illustrating how general concepts embodied by philosophical thought can be embodied in other media--especially literary--the author brings together disparate disciplines; he also reveals striking similarities between Anglo-American and certain 20th-century continental European lines of thought. (shrink)

Within a year of each other, three one-volume general dictionaries of philosophy have recently appeared; when our future colleagues in philosophy look back on the 1990s they may well think of it as the decade of reference works. But however productive these years may prove to be in this genre, clearly visible somewhere around the top of the heap will be this handy, useful, entertaining, and instructive contribution from Simon Blackburn. Its two immediate competitors are the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, (...) edited by Robert Audi, and the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich. No detailed comparison will be attempted here, but two points stand out as obviously giving Blackburn’s dictionary a rather different use and flavor from the others: while containing a closely comparable number of entries, it is distinctly shorter and handier in format; and it has all been written by a single author. (shrink)

Edward Craig; XII*—The Practical Explication of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 211–226, https://doi.

Seeking to rediscover the connection between philosophy as studied in universities and those general views of man and reality which are 'philosophy' to the educated layman, Edward Craig here offers a view of philosophy and its history since the early seventeenth century. He presents this period as concerned primarily with just two visions of the essential nature of man. One portrays human beings as made in the image of God, required to resemble him as far as lies in (...) our power; the other sees us as autonomous creators of our own environment and values. The author writes with a broad sweep not encouraged by recent fashion, yet shows how textual detail which previous commentators have found opaque becomes transparent when viewed against such a background. In the final chapter he treats passages from recent work in the same way. The general conceptions which philosophical thought embodies can equally well be embodied in other media, especially literary. The author illustrates this point with German and English examples and thereby draws together disciplines often felt to be far apart. He also reveals striking similarities between Anglo-American and certain twentieth-century continental European lines of thought. (shrink)

The concept of knowledge is a concept formed and operated by active beings who need to direct their activity. This, according to Craig, explains two features associated with the concept of knowledge: the fact that we want true beliefs, and the fact that we actively seek the truth and therefore try to ‘track’ it, rather than merely hoping to hit it.

‘Knows how to’ appears synonymous with ‘can’, and yet ‘can’ does not primarily tell us about someone's capacity as an informant, suggesting that the practical explication cannot provide an account of ‘knows how to’. Three responses are considered: the capacity sense exists only in some languages and therefore poses no problem; there is no irreducible capacity sense; the capacity sense is connected to the informational sense by the natural connection between agency and information. is favoured, on the grounds that the (...) needs of the inquirer and the apprentice, one who seeks an instructor from whom he may learn how, overlap in central cases. Craig concludes that the practical explication successfully explains both senses of ‘know’ in a unitary fashion. (shrink)

How should we live? What really exists? And how do we know for sure? In this lively and engaging study, Edward Craig argues that learning philosophy is merely a matter of broadening and deepening what most of us do already. But he also shows that philosophy is no mere intellectual pastime: thinkers such as Plato, the Buddhist sages, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Hegel, Darwin, Mill, and de Beauvoir responded to real needs and events—and many of their concerns shape our (...) daily lives. (shrink)

The practical explication is employed to explain why accidental fulfilment of the conditions for knowledge leads us to withhold the ascription of it, and what is meant by accidental in this context. The inquirer wants her informant to have some detectable property, X, possession of which correlates well with being right about p, and for this correlation to be law‐like, and for the continuation of the correlation in any given instance to be non‐accidental. At this point, a dilemma arises: either (...) X must entail that S is right about p, or X must give a high probability of being right as to p. This property of p, inherent in the explicated concept of knowledge, thus mirrors a feature which, to judge by the discussion of the Gettier problem, the analysed concept has too. (shrink)

Outlines the core of the author's theory, according to which the concept of knowledge arises because of our interest in having true beliefs about our environment and thus in evaluating sources of information, and is used to flag approved ones. The hypothesis is used to account for epistemologists’ disagreement over the precise nature of the belief condition for knowledge. Ground is conceded to those who play down the requirement, in so far as an informant's being confident that p is not (...) always taken as necessary for her to be a good informant. Equally, cases in which an informant is regarded as good, yet lacks belief entirely, are freakish and thus of little practical use, which explains both the attraction of the requirement and the feeling that there are genuine counter‐examples to it. (shrink)

Participates in the internalism–externalism debate and offers broad support to the latter. If we consider evaluating others as potential informants, externalism seems right, for the subject's awareness of her fulfilment of the third condition for knowledge is neither necessary for her to be a good informant nor for her to be regarded as an informant at all. If the inquirer judges her own trustworthiness as an informant, then she will be in that extra state, which internalism adds to the externalist (...) account. Yet the extra state need not be built into the concept of knowledge, for being a good informant does not require being aware of fulfilling the third condition; relatedly, one can know without knowing that one knows. (shrink)

The practical explication suggests that all attempts to state necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge will either produce a set of conditions that is insufficient, or will achieve sufficiency only by including conditions too strong to be necessary. This is illustrated with respect to the JTB analysis, reliabilism, the causal theory, and the NFL principle. For the first three, it is always possible to think of circumstances such that, even though the subject reached the belief p by the required means, (...) she was right against all the odds, given those further circumstances. And if justification is stipulated to entail the truth of p, then this imposes an impossibly strong condition or serves merely to reiterate the famous first condition for knowledge. As for NFL, this calls for a near‐omniscience on the inquirer's part, so that it is too strong to be a necessary condition for knowledge. (shrink)

Discusses what it is to know X rather than to know whether p. The early parts give reasons for assimilating ‘knows Fred’ to ‘knows whether p’, while giving methodological justification for not regarding this assimilation as hindered by the fact that some languages translate ‘know’ differently in the two cases. The claim that ‘knows X’ means, at core, being sensorily acquainted with X or being in the company of X, is rejected; possessing certain types of information about X is what (...) the core meaning consists in. Later parts relate ‘knows X’ to ‘knows how to’, suggesting that it implies a capacity. Clarification of the relationship between this assimilation and the earlier one is left to the next section. (shrink)

Considers the transmission of knowledge by testimony and the principle that if someone who knows that p tells me that p, I myself then know that p. When considered with the notion of the good informant in mind, the principle as it stands is false. The inquirer must in general, to gain knowledge in this way, acquire her information from a person who believes that p, and be disposed to tell others that p as a result of being told that (...) p by the informant, and have an indicator property that correlates well with having the right answer to whether p. Michael Wellbourne's claim that ‘believing the speaker’ is sufficient for knowledge transmission is criticized as being either straightforwardly false, or relatively unilluminating. (shrink)

Argues that the core of the concept of knowledge is true belief plus some property indicative of true belief and that there is no detailed answer to the query ‘and what property is that?’ The Nozick–Dretske counterfactual analysis, Alvin Goldman's causal theory, reliabilism, and the justified true belief account are all good approximations to the concept of knowledge, for, in each case, there is justification for the addition made to the minimal concept. This justification arises not so much from the (...) concept of knowledge itself as from certain very general beliefs we hold about the world. Thus, when the conditions laid down in the minimal concept are satisfied, it will almost always be believed that the conditions of the above theories are satisfied too. (shrink)

How ought we to live? What really exists? How do we know? This book introduces important themes in ethics, knowledge, and the self, via readings from Plato, Hume, Descartes, Hegel, Darwin, and Buddhist writers. It emphasizes throughout the point of doing philosophy, explains how different areas of philosophy are related, and explores the contexts in which philosophy was and is done.

Der Verfasser legt einen Kommentar vor, der allen Lesern von Humes erkenntnistheoretischen Schriften hilfreich sein wird; auch werden zentrale Aspekte seiner Moral- und Religionsphilosophie vorgefuhrt und diskutiert. Dabei wird ein Gesamtbild der Philosophie Humes entwickelt und in den Zusammenhang des zeitgenossischen europaischen Denkens gestellt. Hier bekampft der Verfasser die gelaufige Interpretation, derzufolge Hume als der konsequente Zerstorer des Empirismus gilt; Humes Ziel sei eher die Widerlegung einer Weltauffassung, die fast allen Philosophen seiner Epoche, Empiristen und Rationalisten, gemeinsam war. In einem (...) Anhang wird sein Verhaltnis zur kritischen Philosophie Kants eingehender behandelt. Auf diese Weise soll nicht nur Studenten eine Einfuhrung in die Philosophie Humes, sondern auch Spezialisten grundsatzlich neues Material geboten werden. (shrink)

Introduces the principle of objectivization, which explains how concepts interpreted subjectively in the early stages of the state of nature, concepts that answer to the relatively immediate needs of the isolated individual, become objectivized, i.e. refer to entities that fulfil more universal needs, as the individual both becomes more reflective and finds himself in a social setting. This principle is invoked by Craig in the context of admitting that someone may know without being a good informant, for the fully (...) objectivized concept of knowledge seems not to be identifiable with the concept of a good informant, but he insists that the point and nature of the former is still best understood in terms of the latter. (shrink)

Considers and rejects two common explanations of the roots of scepticism. The first, that finds them in a first‐person approach to epistemology that takes as its central question ‘what do I know?’, is rejected on the grounds that first‐personalism results from thinking about certain normally ignored possibilities and gives no explanation of why they are so ignored, and therefore no adequate explanation of scepticism. The second, that scepticism is the offspring of an ‘absolute’ conception of truth, is espoused by Bernard (...) Williams and Thomas Nagel. Craig argues that since no explanation is given of why it is impossible in principle to attain the absolute conception, the only way adhering to the idea of such a conception can lead to scepticism is if we raise independently the traditional sceptical possibilities. (shrink)

This chapter considers the philosophy of the years shortly before and shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in doing so illustrates the claim that the ‘dominant philosophy’ of an era can sometimes be found most clearly expressed in works of literature. The philosophy of the romantic era is characterised by one great metaphysical theme: unity, its loss and recovery. Schiller’s poem ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’, Goethe’s ballad ‘Der Fischer’, Kleist’s article ‘ Über das Marionettentheater’, and Hölderlin’s novel ‘Hyperion’, (...) Craig suggests, all illustrate a fundamental striving towards unity that is lost through knowledge and consciousness, and although they differ both in their assessment of the situation and in their reaction to it, they express a singular awareness of the deep dichotomies that characterise the intellectual climate of their time. At the most general level, the romantic vision was of the oneness of man and nature, the immanence of God in nature, and an element of divinity in man. Deeply indebted to the Image of God doctrine, yet also on the way to abandoning it, these themes inform, and in part anticipate, the systematic philosophy of Hegel. (shrink)

Chapter 5 aims to understand the contemporary philosophical climate in terms of a dominant philosophy, and argues that it is found in the ‘Agency Theory’, or ‘Practice Ideal’: the thesis that we are the creators of our own environment and values, that the realities which we meet with are the works of man. Craig argues that from about 1780, ‘activity’, ‘practice’ and similar concepts began to come to the fore, and provided new solutions of metaphysical and epistemological problems. The (...) idea was to some extent anticipated in writers of the eighteenth century: in Pascal’s famous wager on the existence of God the value of truth has receded, and considerations of what serves a certain purpose have come to regulate belief; Hume saw in our imagination, not in our reason, the governing, and essentially active, principle that supports our beliefs; finally Kant’s transcendental idealism not only provided the key concept of ‘the world as we experience it’ that incorporated both concepts and impressions, but amounted to the claim that the world of our experience is of our own making. But the real rise of the Agency Theory took place in the nineteenth century: Marx and Engels, rejecting both theistic and idealist metaphysics, set up a new ideal for man, who was to be the free architect and builder of his own social world, in virtue of his grasp of the laws governing society and the processes of social change; following Peirce, William James and other American Pragmatists argued that belief is primarily an instrument for the attainment of our goals, and that man is fully autonomous, his creations subject to no controls or standards other than those which he himself imposes; Nietzsche, the most vociferous champion of agency and creativity, affirmed the idea, and constructed his account of reality, truth, and knowledge, and his aspirations for man around it. (shrink)

The Shorter REP presents the very best of the acclaimed ten volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy in a single work. By selecting and presenting--in full--the most important entries for the beginning philosopher and truncating the rest of the entries to survey the breadth of the field, The Shorter REP will be the only desk reference on philosophy that anyone will need. Comprising over 900 entries and covering the major philosophers and philosophical topics, The Shorter REP includes the following special features: (...) *Over 130 comprehensive, in-depth entries as they appear in the ten volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy *Unrivalled coverage of major philosophers, themes, movements and periods making the volume indispensable for any student or general reader *Revised versions of many of the most important entries, including fresh suggestions for further reading *Over 20 brand new entries on important new topics *Entries by many leading philosopherssuch as Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Onora O'Neill, T.M.Scanlon and Anthony Appiah. (shrink)