by Scott Soames
ROGER BACON (1212–1292) was a British monk with far-reaching interests in science, natural philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, in addition to theology. He wrote on light, eclipses, tides, the structure of the eye, vision, and scientific method.
GARY BECKER (1930–2014) was a Nobel Prize–winning economist whose work extended rational decision theory with agent-relative probabilities and utilities beyond economic behavior, measured in dollars and cents, to utility-maximizing behavior in broader settings.
GEORGE BERKELEY (1685–1753), a bishop in the Anglican Church, was an empiricist who pursued scientific interests and developed a theory of vision.
The scientist and natural philosopher ROBERT BOYLE (1627–1691) discovered Boyle’s law of gases. He was also John Locke’s scientific mentor at Oxford and a founding member of the Royal Society of London, which published Newton’s Principia.
Nobel laureate JAMES BUCHANAN (1919–2013) is widely known as the father of public choice theory, applying the principles of cost-benefit analysis and rational decision theory to governments and political institutions.
NOAM CHOMSKY (1928–) revolutionized linguistics, laying the groundwork for the scientific study of natural human languages, conceived of as integrated cognitive systems relating sound and meaning. This work, in turn, became a pillar modern cognitive science.
A leading philosopher, logician, and mathematician, ALONZO CHURCH (1903–1995) was, together with his Ph.D. student Alan Turing, responsible for important advances in philosophical logic and the mathematical theory of computation leading to the digital age.
NICOLAUS COPERNICUS (1473–1543) developed the first systematic geocentric conception of the solar system, showing how heretofore apparent “retrograde” movements of planets could be explained if the earth and other planets orbited the sun.
A world-renowned philosopher whose cogito ergo sum set the epistemological agenda for philosophy for centuries, RENÉ DESCARTES (1596–1650) also discovered the sine law of the refraction of light and laid the conceptual foundations for analytic geometry.
The special and general theories of relativity of the philosophically minded theoretical physicist ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955) transformed modern physics, making him the modern counterpart of Isaac Newton.
JERRY FODOR (1935–) is a leading philosopher of psychology who played a key role in moving psychology away from behaviorism and laying the foundations of the modern computational-representational concept of mind.
The philosopher-mathematician GOTTLOB FREGE (1848–1925) invented modern symbolic logic, advanced the philosophy of mathematics, and provided the conceptual basis for understanding linguistic meaning in both natural and mathematical languages.
GALILEO GALILEI (1564–1642) was a mathematician and natural philosopher, as well as one of the fathers of modern physics and the most advanced astronomer of his day. His observations provided conclusive proof of the geocentric conception of the solar system.
Arguably the leading philosopher of logic of all time, KURT GÖDEL (1906–1978) proved revolutionary theorems about the scope and limits of contemporary logical systems.
PAUL GRICE (1913–1988) demonstrated how rational communicative strategies combine with linguistic meanings to contribute information conveyed by uses of sentences, advancing linguistics and the philosophy of language.
H.L.A. HART (1907–1992) was the foremost philosopher of law of the twentieth century. His leading work, The Concept of Law, is widely taken to be the defining statement of the school of thought known as legal positivism.
A Nobel laureate in economics and defender of classical liberalism, FRIEDRICH HAYEK (1899–1992) stressed the role of political and economic liberty in generating the knowledge required for social and economic progress.
A precursor of Marx, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL (1770–1831) believed reality to be a single divine mind, evolving through internal conflict to unified self-consciousness. He saw human minds as evolving toward unification of individual interests in the general will represented by an authoritative governing state.
THOMAS HOBBES (1588–1679) was the first great political philosopher of the early modern era. His justification of government as arising from a hypothetical social contract rationally adopted in the state of nature became the starting point for subsequent views.
DAVID HUME (1711–1776) was a great British empiricist and a distinguished historian of England. His analyses of causation, associationist psychology, naturalistic morality, and incrementalist political and social philosophy were enormously influential.
The teacher of Adam Smith, FRANCIS HUTCHESON (1694–1745) was a Scottish “moral-sense” philosopher who influenced John Witherspoon and David Hume.
The German philosopher IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804) was among the most systematic thinkers of all time. In addition to transforming ethics, Kant developed theories of space, time, number, perception, and knowledge that set the agendas for later philosophers.
JOHANNES KEPLER (1571–1630) was the mathematician, natural philosopher, and astronomer who discovered the elliptical form of planetary orbits and the mathematical properties of gravity, illuminating its perplexing nature.
A child prodigy, SAUL KRIPKE (1941–) emerged as the greatest philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, transforming our philosophical understanding of necessity and possibility, and providing the mathematical structure to study them. His applications of these ideas to the study of language have proved particularly important.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ (1646–1716) was a mathematician whose invention of calculus was independent of Newton’s. He was also a philosophical logician, the author of an ingenious metaphysical system, and a critic of Newton’s conception of absolute space.
JOHN LOCKE (1632–1704) developed an empiricist psychology and theory of knowledge. His theory of limited, democratic government protecting natural rights was a major influence on the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States.
In addition to inventing calculus, ISAAC NEWTON (1642–1727) developed a model of the universe, based on his celebrated laws of motion, that explained a dazzling array of diverse empirical observations and dominated physics for nearly 200 years.
ROBERT NOZICK (1938–2002) defended limited government and argued that liberty subverts all redistributionist patterns. His work Anarchy, State, and Utopia became a libertarian classic.
WILLIAM OF OCKHAM (1287–1349) was a logician, philosopher, and critic of importing Greek metaphysics into Christian thought. Known for “Ockham’s Razor,” warning against positing hypothetical entities beyond those needed to explain evident truths, he was a leader in the growing scientific outlook of his time.
PLATO (427–347 BCE) was the father of western philosophy, the founder of the first European university (Plato’s Academy), the teacher of Aristotle, and the author whose Dialogues immortalized Socrates. His work transformed western culture.
Despite his early death, FRANK P. RAMSEY (1903–1930) made brilliant contributions to philosophy, mathematical logic, and economics, chief of which was his groundbreaking work on subjective probability and agent-relative utility theory.
Regarded by many as the leading political philosopher of the twentieth century, JOHN RAWLS (1921–2002) provided a widely influential justification of the liberal welfare state that revived normative theorizing in the analytic tradition.
BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970) was a leading philosophical logician and philosopher of language and mathematics. His distinction between logical and grammatical form and his conception of the role of logic in philosophy became cornerstones of the analytic tradition.
A critic of aspects of the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, JOHN DUNS SCOTUS (1266–1308) was one of the most important philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages.
ADAM SMITH (1723–1790) was a leading founder of modern economics. A close friend of David Hume, he succeeded his teacher, Francis Hutcheso
n, in the Chair in Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, where he wrote an important book on human nature as the source of morality.
GEORGE STIGLER (1911–1991) was a Nobel Prize–winning economist in the public choice school, which used rational choice theory to extend economic thinking to include public policy and public institutions in addition to traditional economic actors.
Along with Kurt Gödel and Alonzo Church, ALFRED TARSKI (1901–1983) established foundations of symbolic logic that transformed it into a mature discipline. He is best known for his theory of truth, on which the analysis of logical consequence is now based.
The father of digital computation, ALAN TURING (1912–1954) was a mathematician and logician whose work provided the theoretical foundation for modern computer science. In World War II he broke the German codes based on Germany’s famous Enigma machine.
JOHN WITHERSPOON (1723–1794) arrived in America in 1768 to become president of Princeton, and head of its departments of Philosophy, English, and History. A member of the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a devotee of the Scottish Philosophical Enlightenment, he was the revered teacher of scores of America’s founding fathers.
A leading figure in twentieth-century philosophy, LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889–1951) stressed the importance of understanding logic and language in the service of transforming philosophy and revealing the nature of representational thought.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In preparing this manuscript I profited greatly from the comments of two anonymous referees provided by Princeton University Press, as well as from friends and colleagues including Jing He, Ed McCann, Frank Price, Kevin Robb, Jake Ross, and Porter Williams. The perspective of my wife Martha, who read the entire manuscript and offered many insights and comments, was invaluable.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1. Metaphysics 980a21, tr. W. D. Ross. In Aristotle (1941).
2. The orality and limited literacy of Greek culture in the fifth century BCE (and beyond) is defended in Harris (1989) and Thomas (1992). An informative overview is given in the Introduction to Robb (1994). For further discussion, see Yunis (2003).
3. Burkert (1985), p. 120.
4. Havelock (1967), pp. 198–99.
5. Chapter 6 of Robb (1994) explicates Plato’s criticism, in the early dialogues Ion and Euthyphro, of the role of oral epic poetry in education and moral instruction, and his determination to replace it with rigorous, Socratic reasoning. Chapter 7 explains that the growing literacy of the aristocratic and business classes in late-fifth-century Athens preceded the union of literacy and formal education in the fourth century.
6. In chapter 1 of his book Reading Thucydides (2006), James V. Morrison divides the transition in ancient Greece from an oral to a literate alphabetic culture into three stages: (i) the era of primary orality between 1200 to 750 BCE, prior to the introduction of writing, (ii) the various stages of proto-literacy from 750 to 400 BCE, when the Greek alphabet was introduced and writing for special ceremonies and commerce coexisted with a culture in which the primary medium of education, politics, poetry, and the like was still the spoken word, and (iii) the period of alphabetic literacy, in which poets and thinkers produced works that were intended to be read by their audiences rather than heard.
7. See Havelock (1983), especially pages 29, 40–41, for relevant discussion of the transition from Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE) to Plato and Aristotle on motion and related concepts.
8. See pp. 130–33 of Heath (1981) for details.
9. Ibid., pp. 139–62.
10. Ibid., pp. 176–80.
11. Ibid., p. 202.
12. Ibid., pp. 162–65.
13. Ibid., p. 217.
14. Ibid., p. 284.
15. Ibid., p. 3.
16. An early pathbreaking article giving evidence that most Greeks prior to Socrates would not have thought of the soul as an autonomous personality, or a self-governing being, is Burnet (1916).
17. Havelock (1967), p. 197. The first post-Homeric uses of the word ‘psyche’ (roughly, soul) are found in Heraclitus. See Robb (1968), Furley (1956), Robinson (1968), Claus (1983), and Bremmer (1983).
18. Ibid., p. 30.
19. Aristotle’s school derived its name from the Greek word for walking, and in particular from an area of a temple to Apollo which housed the school, where Aristotle was in the habit of teaching philosophy while walking around a colonnaded space.
20. See the early works Eudemus and Protrepticus, cited on pp. 12, 13 of Copleston (1962a) and in The Encyclopedia Britannica at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristotle. In those works, Aristotle accepts Plato’s doctrine of recollection, in which the Ideas, or Forms, are apprehended before birth. He also argues for the immortality of the soul.
21. Perishable substances in the natural world, which are combinations of form and matter, are made to be what they are by their essential forms. Although these forms are immaterial, they have no existence apart from inhering in the perishable things of which they are forms. Thus, they are not independent and eternal. Aristotle does admit the existence of some nonperishable (eternal) things which, in the Categories, he calls secondary substances. This opens the door for some eternal forms, but not those that make up the natural world.
22. If Socrates were merely the combination of the form humanity (which is common to all humans) and a particular bit of prime matter pmS, then all differences between Socrates and every other human would have to be the result of the particular properties of pmS (which is not supposed to have any properties). Moreover, if (as it seems) it is necessarily true that Socrates ≠ Plato, then pmS could not have made up Plato, since if it had, then Socrates would have been Plato. In other words, it would have to be an essential property of pmS that it made up Socrates, if it made up anything. Although it is hard to read the full Aristotelian corpus as entirely consistent with any one interpretation, it is particularly hard to read it as supporting this view. Thus, it seems, we need to take the soul of Socrates to be an individuating form.
23. At one point in De Anima, Aristotle does say that rationality, the highest power of the human soul, is eternal. But it is unclear what he meant. For one thing, Socrates, who was a combination of matter and form, was not identical with his Aristotelian soul, still less with one of its several powers. For another, Aristotle says that all memory, all loving, and all hating perish with death, leaving only pure rationality. Finally, it seems possible that in saying that the rational power of the soul is eternal he was really stating in a somewhat misleading way that the rationality we exhibit is the essence of God, and so is eternal for that reason. For discussion see pp. 70–73 of Copleston (1962a).
24. Copleston (1962a), pp. 58–59.
25. Aristotle sketched two different forms of the good life, one of contemplation pursing theoretical knowledge for its own sake (the path of theoretical philosophy) and one a life of action in the world based on practical wisdom provided by practical philosophy (particularly ethics and political philosophy). See chapter 3 of Cooper (2012).
26. See Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo in Plato (1961).
27. See Cooper (2012), p. 146 (including fns. 2 and 4), also n. 19 on pp. 410–11, and sections 5–7 of chapter 5.
28. See chapter 4 of Cooper (2012) for a nuanced discussion of stoicism, and sections 2–4 of chapter 5 for a discussion of epicureanism.
CHAPTER 2
1. See chapter 1, section 2 of D’Arcy (1930).
2. Ibid.
3. Chapter 1, section 3 of D’Arcy (1930) discusses the fragmentary knowledge of Aristotle in Christian Europe up to the middle of the 12th century, as well as the more complete knowledge of Aristotle attained by Arabs and Jews in Syria, Egypt, and Spain during the period.
4. See chapters 30, 41, 42, and 51 of Copleston (1962b).
5. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
6. Ibid., p. 21.
7. Although Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” was called ‘God’, it bore little relation to the Christian god. “The First Mover’s … activity must be purely spiritual, and so intellectual.… Aristotle … defines God as ‘Thought of Thought.’ … God is subsistent thought, which eternally thinks itself.… God, therefore, knows only Himself.” Copleston (1962a), pp. 58–59.
8. In giving this brief summary of related arguments of the two philosophers, I set aside the interesting and complex historical and philosophical issues raised by them. For informed discussion, see Weisheipl (1965).
9. See Wippel (1981), Weisheipl (1983), and Dales (1990).
10. One might, of course, doubt the premises. Even if one grants them and accepts that each contingent thing or change depends on some necessary being or fact, one still hasn’t shown there is a unique such being or fact on which everything depends. Perhaps different contingent things or changes depend on different necessary beings or facts. Nor has one established the existence of any sort of god, let alone the Christian god. Finally, the retreat to necessity that is intended to stop the regress of explanations might, if not circumscribed, eliminate contingency altogether. If everything is as it is because of something that couldn’t have been otherwise, then it is hard to see how anything could have been otherwise. A key question for the Christian proponent of the argument is whether the necessary being, God, could have acted other than he did act. If necessarily he always acts for the best, one may wonder not only whether this is this the best of all possible worlds, but also whether it is the only one.