fact, is Dumont’s title). Bentham’s claim is that language which looks as if it is describing what rights there actually are is in fact suggesting what rights there ought to be. That is, instead of citing existing rights, the French Declaration is giving reasons why there ought to be rights. As Ben- tham puts it in Anarchical Fallacies, ‘a reason for wishing that a certain right were established, is not that right; want is not supply; hunger is not bread’. So to suppose that such rights actually exist is nonsense. Even worse is to suppose that we can be sure that the correct rights have been found for all time. For Bentham is a promoter of experimenta- tion. We have to keep seeing what utility is actually pro- duced by particular systems of rights. Hence it is an additional mistake to think that any rights are unalterable (indefeasible, imprescriptible). This mistake was also made by the French. Hence the famous slogan. The com- plete remark from which it comes is ‘natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts’. Natural rights was one attempted answer to the ques- tion of the source of obedience to the state and the condi- tions for legitimate revolution. Another attempted answer also popular in Bentham’s day was the original or social contract. This device, founding obedience on agree- ment, was used by the leading contemporary defender of British law William Blackstone. Bentham ridicules such a defence in his Fragment on Government. For Bentham, justi- fication of obedience to government depends upon utility, that is upon calculation of whether the ‘probable mis- chiefs of obedience are less than the probable mischiefs of resistance’. A contract will not work here for Bentham because, just like rights, all real contracts are legal contracts. Hence they are produced by law and government; and cannot there- fore be used to provide a foundation for law and govern- ment. Even if its force is not supposed to be the force of a proper contract but merely that of a promise, or agree- ment, this again will not help to provide justification. For whether someone (government or people) should keep their agreements has, again, for Bentham to be tested by the calculation of utility. Yet if utility is to be the ultimate justification of promise-keeping, it would have been bet- ter to have started there in the first place, rather than (like Blackstone) traversing a tortuous path through contracts, original contracts, and largely fictional agreements. Again Bentham designates the supposed alternative source of justification to be merely a fiction and, as he puts it in the Fragment, ‘the indestructible prerogatives of mankind have no need to be supported upon the sandy foundation of a fiction’. Although all justification comes from utility, this does not mean that Bentham can not support secondary ends; that is, things which, if promoted, will normally tend to increase utility. He lays down four such intermediate ends which should be promoted by the right system of law and government: subsistence, abundance, security, equality. These form two pairs so that subsistence (the securing to people of the means to life) takes precedence over abun- dance; and securing people’s expectations takes precedence over equality. The utilitarian argument for this depends upon the psychological claim that deprivation of the former member of each pair causes more pain than the latter. Psychological assumptions also lie behind Bentham’s promotion of *equality. He claims that (in general) equal increments of a good will not produce equal increments of utility. (That is, he claims that there is diminishing mar- ginal utility.) Therefore, in general, provision of a particu- lar good will provide more utility for those who already have less than those who already have more; hence a gen- eral tendency towards providing goods for the less well- off; or equality. Bentham’s is a consequentialist ethic. It looks towards actual and possible future states of affairs for justification of right action, not to what happened in the past. (For example, punishment is not retribution for past action, but prevention of future harms; obedience to the state is not because of some past promise, but to prevent future harms.) This is for Bentham the right, indeed the only pos- sible, way of thinking correctly about these matters. It explains his central stance with regard to reform of the law. The law he found was common law, made by judges, based on precedent and custom. It came from history. For this he wanted to substitute statute law, made by demo- cratic parliaments, and founded on reason. These reasons would be independent of history and would be in terms of future benefit. r.h. *consequentialism; utilitarianism. J. Dinwiddy, Bentham (Oxford, 1989). Ross Harrison, Bentham (London, 1983). H. L. A. Hart, Essays on Bentham (Oxford, 1982). David Lyons, In the Interest of the Governed (Oxford, 1991). Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford, 1989). Frederick Rosen, Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy (Oxford, 1983). bent stick in water: see oar in water. Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1874–1948). Influen- tial Russian religious philosopher who, after a youthful flirtation with Marxism of neo-Kantian persuasion, developed a form of Russian idealism sometimes called ‘Christian existentialism’. According to Berdyaev, what truly exists is spirit, conceived as a creative process: every existent, including God, is a self-determining subjectivity engaged in the realization of value. Human beings attain personhood only if they realize their creative essence, which they may do in a society which embodies true com- munity (sobornost') and which aspires to identity of pur- pose with God. Berdyaev opposed his vision of ‘personal socialism’ to both bourgeois individualism and any collect- ivism that subordinates the individual to the community. A perceptive critic of totalitarianism, he was expelled from the USSR in 1922 and settled in Paris. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Berdyaev’s writings have enjoyed renewed popularity in Russia. d.bak. 90 Bentham, Jeremy N. A. Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, tr. D. Attwater (London, 1933). —— Solitude and Society, tr. G. Reavey (London, 1938). —— Dream and Reality, tr. K. Lampert (London, 1950). Bergmann, Gustav (1906–87). Austrian-born American philosopher, who taught at the University of Iowa for forty years, Bergmann disdained all versions of *material- ism, though he did defend methodological *behav- iourism. A member of the Vienna Circle and influenced by Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein, Bergmann wrote extensively on individuation, universals, and intentional- ity, often setting out his views by contrasting them with those of others: Meinong, Brentano, Husserl, Quine, Strawson, and so on. As an ideal-language philosopher, Bergmann tried to design a formalism which allows for the analytic–synthetic distinction and the syntactical fea- tures of which point to solutions to the ontological prob- lems. Bergmann’s most striking contribution emerges in his attempt to show that the truth-bearers of thoughts are mental states which, though simple, have truth-makers that are are complex. e.b.a. *materialism. Gustav Bergmann, Logic and Reality (Madison, Wis., 1964). Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859–1941). French philosopher of Anglo-Polish extraction who worked mainly at the Collège de France in Paris. Bergson is famous for two main doc- trines, those of duration and the élan vital. In a letter written in 1915 he speaks of ‘the intuition of duration’ as ‘the core of the doctrine’ which any summary of his views must start from and constantly return to. Duration is time at its most timelike, as we might put it. For the scientist time is a homogeneous medium which can be divided into periods of equal length, and treated for the purposes of the calculus as analysable at the limit into an infinity of instants with no length. None of this holds for duration, which is heteroge- neous, ever-changing without repeating itself, and cannot be divided into instants (though one interpretation sees Bergson as led to duration by reflecting on the calculus in terms of Newton’s doctrine of ‘fluxions’). Duration is *time as experienced by consciousness, and perhaps Berg- son’s most important insight is that we do not experience the world moment by moment but in a fashion essentially continuous, illustrated by the way we hear a melody, which cannot consist simply in hearing a succession of dis- jointed notes. Past, present, and future cannot be so sep- arated that it becomes impossible for us to know of the past because only the present is ever present to experience. It is perhaps rather strange that of the two main philosophers of time of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies, Bergson and McTaggart, neither seems to have paid any attention to the other. Bergson wrote his main rele- vant works before McTaggart’s famous 1908 article, but he never overtly reacted to it and shows no signs of being influenced by it in his later writings (despite being fluent in English and having lectured in England). Born in the year of The Origin of Species Bergson was familiar enough with the conflict between evolutionism and religion. His book Creative Evolution, introducing the élan vital as a sort of life force, probably owed its popular- ity partly to his attempt, backed by scientific as well as philosophical arguments, to develop a non-Darwinian evolutionism that made room for religion, albeit not for orthodox Christianity. He envisaged a process of constant change and development, irreversible and unrepeatable (so that biology is a fundamentally different science from physics), and governed by the élan, which uses effort and subtlety to overcome the resistance of matter (an echo of the divine Craftsman in Plato’s Timaeus?), but is not drawn by some pre-envisaged end, for that would be a mere ‘inverted mechanism’. Later in life Bergson turned his attention to morality. Just as duration could never be generated from time considered as isolated moments (an argument he also used against Zeno’s paradoxes of motion), so, he claimed, universal benevolence could never be achieved by starting with group loyalties and making the groups ever wider. Group loyalty always required a contrasting out-group, and could be transcended only by a qualitative leap of the sort taken by mystics in their love of all mankind. Another application Bergson makes of his general phil- osophy comes in his treatment of *laughter in the short book of that name. Man is a spiritual outgrowth in a world which works, along with his body, on mechanical prin- ciples, and laughter arises when he is seen as reverting to the mechanical level, primitively when he slips on a banana skin, sophisticatedly when his conscious actions unconsciously mimic the mechanical. a.r.l. *evolution. H L. Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York, 1946; French origi- nal 1934). Good starting-point. L. Kolakowski, Bergson (London, 1985). Brief introduction. A. R. Lacey, Bergson (London, 1989). General critique of Berg- son’s philosophy. Berkeley, George (1685–1753). Berkeley is a most striking and even unique phenomenon in the history of philoso- phy. There have been many philosophers who have constructed bold and sweeping, often strange and aston- ishing, metaphysical systems. Some, particularly in the English tradition—for example, Thomas Reid in the eight- eenth century or G. E. Moore in the twentieth—have been devoted to the clarification and defence of ‘common sense’. And some have made it their chief concern to defend religious faith and doctrine against their perceived enemies. It is the peculiar achievement of Berkeley that, with high virtuosity and skill, he contrived to present him- self in all these roles at once. His readers have differed in their assessments of the relative weights to be accorded to these not clearly compatible concerns. It is easy to read him as primarily a fantastic metaphysician—a line taken, to his baffled chagrin, by almost all his own contempor- aries. More recently some, by reaction against this, have perhaps tended to overstress his credentials as the Berkeley, George 91 champion of *common sense. His religious apologetics, if scarcely his dominant interest, were unquestionably sin- cere. But mainly one should try to see how, not merely temperamentally but as a lucid theorist, he really did con- trive to make a coherent whole of his diverse concerns. The works on which Berkeley’s fame securely rests were written when he was a very young man. Born and educated in Ireland, he first visited England in 1713, when he was 28, and his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philo- nous was published in that year. But he had by then already published his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and his major work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). His later philosophical writings do little more than defend, amplify, and in one or two respects amend the comprehensive views thus early arrived at. It is, in fact, evident from his correspondence that in his later years concern with philosophical issues was for long periods wholly displaced by other interests. In this respect he differs markedly from John Locke—the chief target of his criticism—whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), long meditated and much revised, did not appear till its author was nearly 60. The young Berkeley was apt to commend Locke’s thoughts, not without irony, as quite creditable for one so far advanced in years. A major motive of Locke’s philosophy—with which Berkeley was well acquainted in his student days—was to work out the implications of the great achievements of seventeenth-century science. It had been established beyond all question, he took it, that the material universe was really, essentially a system of bodies mechanically interacting in space—bodies ‘made’, so to speak, of mat- ter, and really possessing just those qualities (*primary qualities) required for their mechanical mode of oper- ation—‘solidity, figure, extension, motion or rest, and number’. This was the bedrock of Locke’s position. These bodies operate on, among other things, the sense-organs of human beings—either through actual contact with the ‘external object’ or, as in vision, by ‘insensible particles’ emitted or reflected from it. This mechanical stimulation in due course reaches the brain, and thereupon causes *‘ideas’ to arise in the mind; and these are the items of which the observer is really aware. In some respects these ideas faithfully represent to the mind the actual character of the ‘external world’—bodies really do have ‘solidity’, etc.—but in others not; ideas of, for instance, sound, colour, and smell have no real counterparts in physical reality, but are merely modes in which a suitably consti- tuted observer is affected by the appropriate mechanical stimuli. Berkeley came very early to regard this picture of the world as at once absurd, dangerous, and repulsive. It was absurd, he argued, because it implied a fantastic *scepti- cism, plainly intolerable to good common sense. For how could an observer, aware only of his own ideas, know anything of Locke’s ‘external world’? Locke himself had insisted that colour, for example, is only an apparent, not a real, feature of that world; but how, in fact, could he know that our ideas correctly represent to us, in any respect, the world’s actual character? A sceptic has only to suggest that our ideas perhaps mislead us not merely in some ways, but in every way, and it is evident that Locke is left helpless before that suggestion—unable, indeed, even to assure himself that any ‘external’ world actually exists. That is surely, for any person of good sense, an intolerable position. But it is also dangerous, Berkeley holds. For—besides this general leaning towards an absurd scepticism—the *‘scientism’, as one may perhaps call it, of Locke’s doc- trine seemed to lead naturally towards materialism and, by way of universal causal determinism, to atheism also, and therefore, in Berkeley’s view, to the subversion of all morality. God is brought in by Locke as the designer, cre- ator, and starter of the great Machine; but could he show that matter itself was not eternal, with no beginning and no creator? Might God turn out to be superfluous? Again, though Locke himself had made the supposition that minds are ‘immaterial substances’ and no doubt hoped to sustain a Christian view of the soul, he had confessed that he could not disprove the counter-suggestion that con- sciousness might be merely one of the properties of mat- ter, and so wholly dependent on the maintenance of certain purely physical conditions. Thus Locke’s theories at best permit, at worst positively encourage, denial of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality; with that denial religion falls and, in Berkeley’s view, drags morality after it. Finally, it is clear from, though less explicit in, Berke- ley’s words that he was simply oppressed and repelled by the notion of the universe as a vast machine. Locke loved mechanisms. He delighted in metaphors of *clocks and engines, springs, levers, and wheels, and indeed took mechanics to be the paradigm of satisfactory intelligibil- ity. All this Berkeley detested. God’s creation, he was sure, could not really be like that—particularly if, in order to maintain that it is, we have to assert that its actual appear- ance is delusive, that ‘the visible beauty of creation’ is to be regarded as nothing but ‘a false imaginary glare’. Why, to embrace such a nightmare, should we deny the evidence of our senses? What then was to be done? Berkeley thought that the solution of all these perplexities was obvious, luminously simple, and ready to hand. As he wrote in his notebook, ‘I wonder not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious though amazing truth, I rather wonder at my stupid inad- vertency in not finding it out before.’ The solution was to deny the existence of *matter. First, Berkeley insists, this odd-looking denial is wholly supportive of common sense. On Locke’s own admission we are never actually aware of anything but our own ideas; to deny the existence, then, of his ‘external objects’, material bodies, is not to take away anything that has ever entered into our experience. But not only so; it must also put an end to all sceptical questioning. For Locke was obliged to concede to the sceptic that our ideas might mis- lead us about the real character of things, precisely 92 Berkeley, George because he had regarded things as something other than, merely ‘represented’ by, our ideas. But if, eliminating the supposed material body, we adopt the view that the ordin- ary objects of experience simply are ‘collections of ideas’, it will be plainly impossible to suggest that things may not be as they appear to us—even more so, to suggest that their very existence might be doubted. If an apple is not an ‘external’ material body, but a collection of ideas, then I may be entirely certain—as of course, Berkeley says, any person of good sense actually is—both that it exists, and that it really has the colour, taste, texture, and aroma that I find in it. Doubt on so simple a matter could only seem to arise as a result of the quite needless assertion that things exist, distinct from and in superfluous addition to the ideas we have. But surely, it may be objected, our ideas have causes. We do not generate our own ideas just as we please; they plainly come to us from some independent source; and what could this be, if not the ‘external world’? But this point redounds wholly, Berkeley claims, to his own advantage. For to cause is to act; and nothing is genuinely active but the will of an intelligent being. Locke’s inani- mate material bodies, therefore, could not be true causes of anything; that ideas occur in our minds as they do, with such admirable order, coherence, and regularity, must be by the will of an intelligent being. And of course we know that there is such a Being—God, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, ‘in whom we live, and move, and have our being’, ‘who works all in all, and by whom all things con- sist’. Berkeley wonders at the ‘stupidity and inattention’ of men who, though every moment ‘surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light’ (Principles, para. 149). Finally—and certainly, for Berkeley, most satisfactor- ily—he finds himself in a position to put the physical sci- entist firmly in his place. For if there is no matter, no material bodies, there are no ‘corpuscles’, no ‘insensible particles’; that whole corpus of mechanistic physical the- orizing in which Locke delighted cannot possibly be true, for there is simply nothing for it to be true of. At first, in his early (though major) work the Principles, Berkeley embraced this position in the most unqualified form. There is a modest role for the scientist, he there argued, in observation and description of the objects of experience, in the search for true generalizations about the course of our ideas, that is, of natural phenomena; but all reference to items supposedly ‘underlying’—supposedly explana- tory of, and according to Locke more ‘real’ than—human experience, must be dismissed as moonshine, the product of mere confusion. But later—regarding, perhaps, as over- drastic this wholesale dismissal of not only Locke but also, for example, Gassendi, Newton, and Boyle—he devised a strikingly ingenious variant position in which, though running hopelessly against the main tendency of his age, he foreshadowed the ideas of many contemporary philosophers of science. In his pamphlet De Motu of 1721, he still maintained that corpuscular theories of matter, for example, or the particle theory of light could not be true; but they may nevertheless be allowed, not indeed as truths, but as useful fictions. The ‘theory’ of the corpuscu- lar structure of matter makes possible the exact mathe- matical expression of formulae, by which we can make very valuable calculations and predictions; but there is no need to make the supposition that the corpuscles and par- ticles of that theory actually exist. So long as it is useful to us to speak and to calculate as if they exist, let us so speak and calculate. Such intellectual dodges ‘serve the purpose of mechanical science and reckoning; but to be of service to reckoning and mathematical demonstrations is one thing, to set forth the nature of things is another’. It is Locke’s concession, one might say, to the physical scien- tist of metaphysical authority that Berkeley, at every stage, implacably opposes. Two of Berkeley’s later works may be mentioned briefly. His Alciphron (1732) is a long work in dialogue form, in which the tenets of Anglican orthodoxy are defended against various types of ‘free-thinking’ and *deism. Though able enough, it suffers from the artificial- ity of the convention, and has limited interest now that the controversies which prompted it are moribund. His last work was Siris (1744), a very strange, even baffling pro- duction, in which a most uncharacteristically rambling, ponderous, and speculative statement of some part of his earlier opinions leads on to an inquiry into the virtues of *tar-water, a medicine which Berkeley made popular, and for the promotion of which he worked in his later years with surprising zeal. Berkeley’s main work was slow to exert any influence on philosophy, though his limited early Essay on vision became fairly well known. His criticism of Locke, though not always ideally fair, was for the most part powerful and well taken; and the transition to his own remarkable doc- trine of a wholly non-material, theocentric universe, whose esse was percipi, and in which human ‘spirits’ were conceived of as conversing directly with the mind of God, was at least a feat of dazzling ingenuity. But this doctrine was too extraordinary to be taken quite seriously. The fact that, so far as the course of actual experience went, he could insist that it coincided with the customary views of ordinary life was felt, rightly, to be not enough to make it actually the same—he was far indeed from being accepted as the friend of common sense. His strikingly original phil- osophy of science—really the fundamental area in which he dissented from Locke—was also much less persuasive then than it would be if it were propounded today. In the early eighteenth century it was still possible, even natural, to regard physical theory as merely a kind of extension of ordinary observation, offering—or at any rate aiming at— literal truths of just the same kind, and couched in much the same terms, as those of everyday experience. Today the sophistication of physical theory has made this difficult, or indeed impossible, to believe; but to deny it then was prob- aby felt not only to be perverse and unnecessary, but also— entirely rightly, in Berkeley’s case—to constitute an attempt to undermine the physicist’s prestige. It was his Berkeley, George 93 misfortune that he opposed, even hated, the ‘scientific world-view’ at a time when that view was in the first flush of its general ascendancy. Berkeley was born near Kilkenny, and educated at Kilkenny College and, from 1700, at Trinity College, Dublin. He was a Fellow of that college—though often absent—from 1707 to 1724. Ordained in 1709, he was appointed Dean of Derry in 1724, and Bishop of Cloyne in 1734. He married in 1728, and died at his lodgings in Holy- well Street, Oxford, in 1753, while overseeing the intro- duction of his son George to Christ Church. Berkeley’s life, apart from his philosophical writings, is remarkable chiefly for his curious attempt in middle life to establish a college in Bermuda. The purpose of this project was mainly missionary. Berkeley’s hope was to attract to his college both the colonial settlers of America and the indigenous American Indians, so that they would in due course return to their communities as ministers of religion and purveyors of enlightenment. As Dean of Derry he devoted to this scheme his considerable energies, powers of persuasion, and personal charm, and at first succeeded in securing for it both private and official backing. He was granted a charter, raised substantial funds by private sub- scription, and was even promised an ample parliamentary grant. But the scheme was really impracticable, and was in the end recognized to be so. Bermuda—as he was perhaps not clearly aware—is far too distant from the American mainland to have been an attractive location for his insti- tution. Berkeley himself set out boldly for America in 1728, but in his absence doubts and hesitations began to prevail in London. He waited nearly three years for his promised grant to be paid over, but in 1731 the Prime Min- ister, Walpole, discreetly indicated that there was no prospect that his hopes would be gratified. The house at Newport, Rhode Island, which Berkeley built and inhabited is still preserved. g.j.w. *empiricism; Irish philosophy; esse est percipi. George Berkeley, Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London, 1949–57). J. Foster and H. Robinson (eds.), Essays on Berkeley (Oxford, 1985). G. W. Pitcher, Berkeley (London, 1977). I. C. Tipton, The Philosophy of Immaterialism (London, 1974). G. J. Warnock, Berkeley (London, 1953; reissued Oxford, 1982). K. Winkler, Berkeley: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1989). Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97). Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, into a Jewish family that migrated to England in 1919 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. He studied at Oxford and taught philosophy there in the 1930s, becoming a sig- nificant part of the movement that developed into ‘ordin- ary language’ philosophy, and publishing influential papers on the logic of counterfactual conditionals. He wrote his first book in 1939, on Karl Marx. During the war, he had diplomatic postings in Washington and, briefly, Moscow (‘one week’s work in an embassy—that is my experience—is less of a strain than one day’s teaching at Oxford’) and met outstanding Russian writers such as Pasternak and Akhmatova. Back in Oxford, Berlin’s inter- ests shifted more to the history of ideas with particular ref- erence to political thought, and in 1957 he was knighted and appointed to the Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He was the first President of Wolfson College, Oxford (1966–75), and President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. Berlin was rare amongst historians of thought and phil- osophy in being himself a substantial philosopher, and it is this, plus considerable powers of empathy and a wide range of learning, that gives his explorations of the work and impact of thinkers as diverse as Vico and de Maistre, Machiavelli and Herder, such power and fascination. A lifelong secular liberal, Berlin’s writings on liberal theory have had a lasting impression on contemporary political philosophy, his discussions of the concepts of negative and positive liberty being his best-known contribution. Equally significant, however, has been his passionate advocacy of the view that the ends of life cannot form a unified whole. Although his concerns and heroes were eclectically European, Berlin’s method and intellectual temper were rooted in English philosophical tradition with its stress on clarity, argument, and vigorous debate. c.a.j.c. *liberty. I. Berlin, Against the Current (New York, 1980). —— Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), reissued with a fifth essay as Liberty (Oxford, 2002). Bernoulli’s theorem. The theorem is named after the Swiss mathematician who first proved it, Jakob Bernoulli. It is also known as the ‘weak law of large numbers’, and was historically the first of a cluster of famous limit the- orems of mathematical *probability. It states that if succes- sive outcomes, A and not-A, of a sequence of n trials are independent, and the probability of A at each trial is p, then the probability that the relative frequency of As in the n trials differs from p by more than an arbitrarily small number tends to 0 as n increases. The relation between probabilities and frequencies established by the theorem led many people, including Bernoulli, to believe that prob- abilities could be inferred from observed frequencies. Whether such an inference is possible is still unresolved. c.h. W. Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications (New York, 1950). Berry’s paradox is credited to G. G. Berry by Bertrand Russell. The phrase ‘the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables’ consists of eighteen sylla- bles. Thus the assumption that there is an ‘integer not nameable . . . ’ etc., and that the phrase names it, is contra- dictory. Russell claimed that the phrase ‘denotes’ 111,777, thus involving himself in the contradiction. The truth is that 111,777 can be named such things as ‘Russell’s Berry example number’ or even ‘Joe’. (Nameability in zero syl- lables raises some interesting questions which, fortunately, needn’t be discussed to justify dismissing Berry’s puzzle as 94 Berkeley, George not deeply paradoxical.) Both the assumptions leading to the *paradox are false. Read aloud, ‘111,777’ has nineteen syllables, but being named in some way must not be con- fused with being nameable. j.c. Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge, 1961), 61. Bertrand’s paradox, due to Joseph Bertrand, brings out an inconsistency in certain *a priori ways of calculating *probability. What is the probability that the length k of a ‘randomly selected’ chord to a given circle is less than the length l of a side of an equilateral triangle inscribed in the circle? Viewing the chord as determined by a line through a point p on the circumference, k <lif and only if the angle between the chord and a tangent at p is either < 60° or > 120°. This is ⅔ the possible angles, which suggests that the probability that (k<l )=⅔. But one of many other pos- sibilities is to view the chord as determined by a perpen- dicular to a radius. k < l if and only if the perpendicular intersects the radius over half-way between the mid-point of the circle and the circumference, suggesting the prob- ability that (k < l )=½. The ‘a priorist’ technique of finding a ‘random’ method to generate the chord and then dividing the possibilities for that method to get the prob- ability thus seems to lead to inconsistency, unless some method can be shown to be the ‘right’ one. j.c. Joseph Bertrand, Calcul des probabilités (1889), 4–5; cited by William Kneale, Probability and Induction (Oxford, 1952). Bhagavadgı¯ta¯ . ‘Song of God’, a part of the ancient (fifth to second century bc) epic Maha¯bha¯rata. In the Bhagavadgı¯ta¯ a brave but conscientious prince weakens and turns paci- fist in the wake of a fratricidal civil war. A philosophical dis- course by Krishna, who is the Hindu God-in-human form, is designed to goad him back to his soldierly duty and to his ‘own nature’. It runs to 650 Sanskrit verses, commented upon for over 1,000 years by Indian philosophers of vari- ous persuasions. It is famous for metaphysical arguments for the immortality of the soul, the doctrine of a Supreme Person (God), transcending but ontologically supporting both individual consciousness and matter, and a subtle moral psychology of action vis-à-vis inaction. It teaches spiritual detachment even in the midst of constant com- mitment to the most violent of professions. Synthesizing work, worship, and wisdom, the ensuing ethics of moder- ation, desirelessness, and equality have a Kantian deonto- logical ring. There is the overarching theme of a blissful liberation from the cycle of rebirths. a.c. *Veda¯nta; deontological ethics; Hindu philosophy; Indian philosophy. S ´ ri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gı¯ta¯ (Pondicherry, 1987). biconditional. A conditional proposition is of the form: If P then Q. The conditional which is its converse is of the form: If Q then P. A biconditional, P if and only if Q, is equivalent to the conjunction of a conditional and its converse. In notations of the propositional calculus a biconditional is represented as P ≡ Q or often P ↔ Q. In the standard propositional calculus (the system of mater- ial implication) P ≡ Q holds where P and Q have the same truth value. Where P ≡ Q is a *tautology, PandQ are taken to be logically equivalent. r.b.m. *equivalence, logical. B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972). bioethics is the study of the moral and social implications of developments in the biological sciences and the related technology. This entails considering the value that is or should be accorded to various forms of life. Are human beings morally entitled to use other living things, plants or animals, in any way that they choose? Is there a special ‘sacredness’ or ‘dignity’ attached to human life? If so, does the stage of development that a human life has reached nevertheless make a difference to the morality of des- troying it? Such questions as these are the concern of bioethics. It is a subject that grew enormously in the late twentieth century, and most universities now have professional bioethicists among their members, whether interested in broadly environmental and ecological issues or in medical applications of the new technologies. Bioethics is concerned, for example, with the rights and wrongs of the genetic manipulation of crops and animals, including human animals (and at this point there is an overlap between bioethics and Green political theory). How are possible advantages to impoverished countries of genetically modified crops, designed to resist drought or flooding, to be weighed against the possible exploit- ation of the poor by chemical or pharmaceutical com- panies? Is there, in any case, something inherently wrong with the genetic modification of crops or cattle, different in kind from the taking of cuttings or the selective breed- ing that has been part of horticulture and agriculture for ages past? Is the manipulation of human genes to prevent a child’s being born with a devastating monogenetic dis- ease, such as Tay-Sachs’s disease or Duchenne’s Muscular Distrophy, different in kind from surgical intervention, or intervention by drugs, which doctors have always prac- tised in pursuit of their professional goal to alleviate suf- fering? Some regard genetic intervention as uniquely sinister; it is thought to contravene the laws of nature by artificially speeding up the kinds of changes properly brought about by the slow processes of evolution and nat- ural selection. Debate about what is or is not ‘natural’ is curiously emotive. Part of the work of bioethics is to analyse and evaluate such appeals to Nature. Of particular importance at the beginning of the twenty-first century have been the questions raised about embryonic stem cell research, or therapeutic cloning. This is a process by which embryos are produced, not by nor- mal conception, the fertilization of female eggs by male sperm, but by cell nuclear transfer, where the nucleus of an egg is removed and replaced by that of another; after the application of an electric current, the egg with its new nucleus can develop into an embryo. This is the first part bioethics 95 of the process of cloning a whole animal, or reproductive cloning. If a whole animal is to be reproduced, the newly formed embryo is placed in the uterus of a surrogate ani- mal and brought to term. Thus Dolly the sheep was cloned at the end of the twentieth century. But the pur- pose of therapeutic cloning would be frustrated if an embryo were allowed to develop beyond its very first stages. For at the beginning of its life the cells of the embryo are ‘totipotent’; that is, each may develop in any direction, to become any of the 120 or so types of cell that make up the body, or indeed may become part not of the embryo itself, but of the placenta or umbilical cord. The purpose of the research is to discover how to direct these cells (embryonic stem cells) to develop in specific ways, to become, let us say, cells belonging to the spinal cord, or the brain, or the skin. The ultimate aim is to produce banks of cells of particular types that may be used for cell transplant rather than whole organ transplant. This would have enormous advantages, in that parts of the body, including the brain, could receive transplants, and dam- aged cells would renew themselves permanently. All this is far in the future; but the possible ethical objections to such procedures, especially centred on the fact that embryos would be created and then destroyed when their use was over, are already among the issues to be argued by bioethicists. In fact, at the core of much of their philosophical con- cern is the status that should be accorded to the human embryo. In the UK human embryos may be used for research up to fourteen days after their creation (whether by fertilization etc. or by nuclear transfer). The Human Fertilization and Embryology Act (1990) enshrined that principle in law. At that time, embryos might be used only for research into issues concerned with fertility, infertility, and contraception. Later, regulations were introduced through Parliament which permitted their use in research into therapeutic cloning, but the fourteen-day limit remained. The reason for this cut-off point was physio- logical. Until fourteen or fifteen days from the beginning of its life, the embryo, however it was brought into being, has no vestige of a central nervous system, and therefore can have no conscious experiences of any kind. It is impossible to cause such an embryo pain. Though its genetic identity has been fixed, it cannot be regarded as an individual person; indeed, it may yet divide and become twins or quadruplets. Using it for research is therefore more akin to using human tissue than using a child or an adult experimentally. Such considerations fell, and still fall, to be considered by bioethicists. For despite the largely evidence-based arguments of those who supported the 1990 law, there are many people who dispute the moral acceptability of the law, and would like to see it changed so that from the moment it comes into existence an embryo is protected from being used for research and then destroyed. These people uphold the principle of the sanctity of human life, at all its stages. This principle is strongly supported by most members of the Roman Catholic Church, and this partly explains the difference, on bioethical issues, between different countries, within Europe and beyond. There was a period when the Roman Catholic Church, following Thomas Aquinas (himself following Aristotle), held that a human foetus becomes a full human being, acquiring a soul, at about forty or ninety days from conception, depending on its gender. However, in the nineteenth century the Church decided, rightly, that there could be no certainty about when the soul entered the body, and that therefore even the earliest embryo should be given the benefit of the doubt. It was therefore deemed that immediately after conception the embryo had, or probably had, a soul, and was effectively a human person, so that to destroy it was murder. Against this there is the argument put forward by, among others, John Habgood, an eminent bioethicist, a biologist turned churchman who became archbishop of York, which holds that we must, as post-Darwinians, take a developmental view of the human embryo, as we do of the human race itself. There is no one moment when the human person springs into existence. The further the col- lection of cells which forms the human embryo develops, the more we are properly inclined to accord it the status of a person, and the higher the value we attach to its life and life-chances. It was such arguments as these that prevailed in the UK in 1990. But the arguments continue, and the issue still dominates bioethics in at least one of its branches. Questions raised by the new techniques do not depend on wholly new moral principles. But they involve apply- ing moral principles to sometimes wholly new possibil- ities; and this in turn involves taking a newly long-term view of possible consequences for society. How would it be if people could choose the sex of their babies, or, more startling, choose to alter their genetic make-up before birth? Could society tolerate a world in which the mixture of genes a child was born with was no longer a matter of chance but could be ‘designed’ deliberately? What, if any, is the fundamental moral objection to the cloning of human beings, supposing such a thing were ever to become safe enough to try? Such questions, which used to be strictly a matter of science fiction, now seem nearer to reality, and it is the fear of such a reality that causes bioethicists to be in increasing demand. Their task is to help people to think clearly about how, in the light of our new knowledge, we value, or ought to value, life in all its form, and at all stages of development. m.warn. John C. Avise, The Genetic Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). John Habgood, Being a Person (London, 1998). Arlene Klotzko (ed.), The Cloning Sourcebook (Oxford, 2001). Onora O’Neill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (Cambridge, 2002). Steven Rose, Lifelines (Harmondsworth, 1998). Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans (London, 2002). Mary Warnock, Making Babies (Oxford, 2002). biological naturalism. The view that mental phenomena such as *consciousness and *intentionality are natural bio- 96 bioethics logical phenomena on a par with growth, digestion, or photosynthesis. Biological naturalism is defined by two main theses: (1) all mental phenomena from pains, tickles, and itches to the most abstruse thoughts are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain; (2) mental phenomena are higher-level features of the brain. Mental phenomena are thus ‘emergent’ in the sense that they are causally explained by the behaviour of lower- level elements which do not in themselves individually have these features. Thus, according to biological natural- ism, the brain is conscious and consciousness is caused by the behaviour of lower-level elements such as neurons even though no single neuron is conscious. Formally speaking, relations of this sort are common and unmysterious in nature. For example, a whole system can be in a liquid state, and the liquid behaviour can be caused by the behaviour of the molecules even though no single molecule is liquid. Biological naturalism does not deny that alternative forms of chemistry might be able to cause consciousness but insists that since mental phenomena are in fact caused by brain processes any other system that caused mental phenomena would have to have causal powers equivalent to brains. j.r.s. *anomalous monism; cloning; mind; mind–body problem. John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, 1983). —— Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). —— The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). biology, philosophical problems of. The most distinct- ive feature of biology, from a philosophical point of view, is its characteristic use of functional or *teleological explan- ations. These are explanations in which some biological trait is explained by showing how it is useful for the organ- ism in question. For example, the function of the polar bear’s white fur is to camouflage it; the function of human sweating is to lower body temperature; and so on. The philosophically interesting aspect of these explanations is their apparent commitment to teleology: they seem to explain items (the whiteness, the sweating) in terms of their consequences (the camouflage, the cooling). By con- trast, normal causal explanations run in the other direc- tion, and account for consequences in terms of their causes. Until fairly recently most philosophers of biology took these explanations at face value, and argued that the parts of integrated systems, like biological organisms, can legit- imately be explained in terms of their contribution to the well-being of the whole. In particular, Carl Hempel argued that such explanations were a subspecies of cover- ing-law explanations. This approach is now widely rejected, however. Most contemporary philosophers of biology now hold that functional explanations in biology are in fact disguised causal explanations, which explain biological traits not by looking forward to future beneficial results, but by looking backwards to the past evolutionary his-tories in which such results led to the natural selection of the traits in question. Thus the functional explanation of the polar bear’s whiteness does not refer to the future camouflaging of the bears, but to the fact that their past camouflaging led to the natural selection of their whiteness. The centrality of the Darwinian theory of *evolution by natural selection to biological thinking raises a number of further philosophical issues. An initial question is whether the theory has any real predictive content, or whether the thesis of ‘the survival of the fittest’ simply collapses into the empty truism that ‘whatever survives, survives’. However, there are ways of formulating the theory so that ‘fit’ acquires a meaning which is independent of survival. A related charge is ‘adaptationism’: does not the theory of evolution by natural selection simply invent evolution- ary ‘just so stories’ in order to portray all biological traits as having some selective benefit? In response, supporters of the theory will admit that some biological traits are acci- dents that serve no function, but will insist that there is genuine evidence to show that many other traits have been selected because of their effects, and that this process of selection has been crucial to the evolution of species. At a more detailed level, there is controversy about which ‘units of selection’ are involved in Darwinian processes. Should we think of natural selection as operat- ing primarily on groups, or individuals, or genes? Some progress with this knotty issue has been made by distin- guishing ‘replicators’, in the form of the genes which embody the lasting effects of selection, from ‘vehicles’, such as individuals and groups, whose survival is usually the prerequisite for gene survival. Work on the logic of natural selection has led to the development of sociobiology, which seeks to understand animal social behaviour as the genetically based product of natural selection. Critics of sociobiology object that much behaviour is non-genetic, especially in higher ani- mals and humans. Some sociobiologists deny this claim. Others respond that, even if environmental influences on behaviour are also important, it is still valuable to under- stand the evolutionary pressures on those genes which do affect behaviour. Biology, along with other special sciences like psychol- ogy, geology, meteorology, and so on, raises the issue of *reductionism. Most contemporary philosophers of biol- ogy are reductionists at least to the extent of denying ‘vital spirits’ or other emergent biological substances, and accepting the *supervenience of biological properties on physical properties. Far fewer, however, are reductionists in the stricter sense of believing that all biological laws can be explained by physical laws. Instead they hold that there are sui generis biological laws, patterns which are common to biological systems with different physical make-ups, and which therefore cannot be explained in terms of physical law alone. d.p. *causality. D. Hull and M. Ruse (eds.), Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 1998). P. Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). biology, philosophical problems of 97 A. Rosenberg, The Structure of Biological Science (Cambridge, 1985). E. Sober, The Nature of Selection (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). K. Sterelny and P. Griffiths, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Phil- osophy of Biology (Chicago, 1999). bivalence. Semantic principle to the effect that every statement is either true or false. Intuitionists refuse to affirm this, since for them it would amount to affirming that every statement can either be proved or disproved, which no one believes. Three familiar putative counter- examples are: (1) *vagueness: perhaps ‘This is red’ is nei- ther true nor false of a borderline case; (2) the *liar paradox sentence: ‘This sentence is not true’; (3) *reference failure: if there is no elephant present ‘That elephant has a lean and hungry look’ is arguably neither true nor false. Defenders of bivalence tend to urge that putative counter- examples are not genuine statements. r.m.s. *intuitionism. W. Kneale and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962). Black, Max (1909–88). Influential for contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and science, philosophy of art, conceptual analysis, and inter- pretative studies of figures such as Wittgenstein and Frege. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, he was educated in England and emigrated to the United States in 1940. In 1977 he retired as professor at Cornell University but continued in the programme on science, technology, and society. There are over 200 items in Black’s bibliography. His first book critically explores the formalist, logicist, and intuitionist accounts of mathematics. It remains a staple. Black was no system-builder. His preoccupation was with conceptual clarity and sound argument directed toward well-delineated questions or puzzles concerning, inter alia, meaning, rules, vagueness, choice, and metaphor. Throughout his work he showed an uncommon appreci- ation of common language and common sense. r.b.m. Max Black, Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1949). —— Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY, 1962). —— The Nature of Mathematics (London, 1933). —— The Prevalence of Humbug (Ithaca, NY, 1983). black box. A black box is a system whose internal work- ings are unknown or irrelevant to current purposes. The computer model of the mind treats the mind as a system that itself is composed of interacting systems, which themselves may be composed of further interacting sys- tems, and so on. The bottom-level primitive processors, the black boxes that cognitive science leaves unopened, are understood behaviouristically: what they do (their input–output function) is in the domain of cognitive sci- ence, but how they do it is not. (How they do it is in the domain of electronics or neurophysiology, etc.) Via the hierarchy of systems, cognitive science explains intelli- gence, by reducing the capacities of an intelligent system to the interactions among the capacities of unintelligent systems, grounded in the bottom-level black boxes. But the model does not explain *intentionality in this way since the bottom-level black boxes are themselves inten- tional systems. n.b. N. Block, ‘The Computer Model of the Mind’, in D. Osherson and E. Smith (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, iii: Thinking (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Blackburn, Simon (1944– ). Professor at Cambridge, for- merly at Oxford and North Carolina, known for his defence of *quasi-realism about items whose reality has been much disputed—e.g. values, causes, numbers. As to values, he argues that the impact of the perceived world on the mind, together with the beliefs formed thereby, generate habits, emotions, sentiments, and attitudes which come to be projected on to the world and to be regarded as real properties of that world; so commitments of approval or disapproval become judgements with truth-values. And rightly so, for values supervene on nat- ural properties. Thus, such judgements are neither mere expressions of subjective sentiments nor truths which obtain independently of human attitudes. And we should be neither anti-realist nor realist about values; the right stance is quasi-realism. Blackburn has also published a suc- cessful popular introduction to philosophy, Think (1999). o.r.j. *language, history of the philosophy of; language, problems of the philosophy of; realism and anti- realism; philosophy of language. Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford, 1984). —— Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford, 1993). —— Ruling Passions (Oxford, 1999). black philosophy today takes two principal forms. In one form, it is a hermeneutic enterprise, offering explications, interpretations, and exploitations of the traditional wis- dom of African societies through the concepts and termi- nology of contemporary Western philosophy. The topics typically include the general nature of being, the numin- ous, the nature of human society and the place of human beings in it, causality and agency, and action. An offshoot of this instead exploits insights and nuances available in African languages to enrich philosophical analyses of con- cepts dealt with in Western philosophy. In its other form, black philosophy employs the analytical tools of contem- porary philosophizing in order to characterize the social history and problems of peoples of African descent to the extent that these are either peculiar to their experience or peculiarly exacerbated in their experience. The first form is enmeshed in a vigorous debate about the proper classification of the material, and in conse- quence its possible usefulness. One camp proposes to treat it as no more than ethnographic material, invaluable in clarifying self-concepts of Africans. This camp, notwith- standing the practice of elders gathering in conversation, regards the material a priori as lacking in individual 98 biology, philosophical problems of contributions or modifications and critical debate, prin- cipally because it was originally unscripted; for this camp proposes scripted authorship and critical debate as sine qua non tests for the rubric of philosophy. It describes the hermeneutic account as ethnophilosophy. A second camp postulates that the tradition is an evolv- ing result of the collaboration of individual elders whose discussions and debates are submerged, by the nature of the case, in the tenets of the oral tradition. It is noted that, even in the case of the literate early Pythagoreans, critical debate does not appear to have been permitted, and it remains a highly speculative thing to impute a specific view to any of them. Indeed, all their accepted views seem to have been ascribed to Pythagoras himself, even well after his death, irrespective of their actual source. In fact, the idea of philosophy, like that of any discipline, is quite variable, and there is hardly ever a single overrid- ing paradigm sufficiently protean to fit philosophy or any other discipline at every stage in its history. For example, much of what is admired today as ancient Greek philoso- phy does not satisfy contemporary notions of philosophy, and some did not satisfy even Aristotle’s! It would be equally pointless to try to bring the diversity of today’s philosophical practices under a single paradigm. A broader view can discern philosophy at different points in its evolutionary tree, and can penetrate the den- sity of the idiom of African philosophy and recognize the philosophical aspects of its preoccupation and content, and thereby avoid the superficiality of an inflexible equa- tion of idiom with myth. It thus becomes clear, for example, that of two West African peoples, the Diola proposed corporeally expressed force as a cosmological principle, denied it a temporal beginning, and made it inexhaustible, indestructible, and all-encompassing. General quantitative variations in it were taken to express its creative energy, and the actualizations of these variations constitute the diversity of natural forms. Different orders of being come about through a progressive lessening in its expressive- ness. By contrast, the celebrated Dogon people postulated an extremely dense body for their cosmological principle, and, by appeal to concepts of prefiguration and specific motions, sought to explain principal and determinative categories of nature, the four elemental natural masses of air, fire, water, and earth, as well as consciousness and human society, etc. Data like the above enjoy a cultural and historical centrality, but their hermeneutic explica- tion and its tools are transcultural and transhistorical. In its variety of versions, the above kind of black philosophy (or African philosophy) is today supported by a rapidly grow- ing literature. The other form of black philosophy is an independent movement and not a direct development from African philosophy. It is the more vigorous, the more fully estab- lished, and the clearer in its aims and methods. It is centred in the United States. Avoiding metaphysical issues, it con- centrates on the development of normative concepts of the identity and emancipation beyond sheer liberty of the black peoples of the Americas and on strategies for their application towards social reconstruction of American societies. Issues of race and moral attitudes and actions become dominant in it. The discussion of race, however, is, only now overcoming a remarkable denial of the reality of race which merely confused the factitious with the ficti- tious. This form of black philosophy uses techniques of analytical philosophy to re-cluster and redefine concepts relating to issues of social identity, social and economic emancipation and justice, and relations between cultures. It uses the re-clustered and redefined concepts to direct the critique of phenomena relating to them. It calls to its aid the categories and syntheses of the European contin- ental tradition in philosophy in the endeavour to develop and illuminate strategies for the existential grounding of historical readings and the elimination of reifying processes and bad faith in the continuance of racist displays. It has reinvigorated its topics by making the black experience salient as a modifier of the intuitions, ideals, common sense, and persuasiveness of argumentation in the social and normative domain. In this way, it has shed considerable light on its topics, especially those of social discrimination, affirmative action, and the underclass. Its intention, however, is not the mere clarification of con- cepts, but the promotion of emancipation beyond liberty. w.e.a. *negritude. Gordon R. Lewis (ed.), Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York, 1997). Henry O. Oruka, ‘Sage Philosophy’, in R. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux (eds.), The African Philosophy Reader (London, 1998). Kwasi Wiredu, ‘How not to Compare African Thought with Western Thought’, in R. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction (Washington, DC, 1979). George Yancy (ed.), ‘Lewis R. Gordon’, in African- American Philosophers (New York, 1998). bladders of philosophy Reason, an Ignis fatuus, in the Mind, Which leaving light of Nature, sense behind; Pathless and dang’rous wandring ways it takes, Through errors Fenny—Boggs, and Thorny Brakes; Whilst the misguided follower, climbs with pain, Mountains of Whimseys, heap’d in his own Brain: Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down, Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown, Books bear him up awhile, and make him try, To swim with Bladders of Philosophy . . . ( John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘Satyr on Mankind’, lines 12 –21) Rochester derides the tendency of philosophers and others to elevate ‘Reason, which Fifty times for one does err’ over ‘certain instinct’. He declares *reason a ‘cheat’, because it first ‘frames deep Mysteries, then finds them out’. The doubts it stirs up make ‘Cloysterd Coxcombs’ follow formulas, not appetites, and drove Diogenes to abandon the world for a tub. As Rochester implies, when the reasoning mind is made indubitable bladders of philosophy 99 . explanation of the polar bear’s whiteness does not refer to the future camouflaging of the bears, but to the fact that their past camouflaging led to the natural selection of their whiteness. The centrality. content, or whether the thesis of the survival of the fittest’ simply collapses into the empty truism that ‘whatever survives, survives’. However, there are ways of formulating the theory so that ‘fit’. phenomena relating to them. It calls to its aid the categories and syntheses of the European contin- ental tradition in philosophy in the endeavour to develop and illuminate strategies for the existential