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哲學 -- 開欄文
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杜蘭的《西洋哲學史話》不是我讀的第一本哲學書，記得在它之前我就讀過《老子》。但它是對我影響最大的幾本書之一。主要的原因是：
a. 它引起我對哲學的興趣；
b. 它奠定了我對哲學一知半解的基礎；以及
c. 整體來說，它堅定了我追求知識的決心(該欄開欄文第3節)。
順帶說一句：我不敢以「知識份子」自居，但頗以身為「讀書人」自豪(該欄開欄文及《目的、行動、和方法》一文)；也就對兩者都有所期許(該文第4節)。
我不是哲學系出身；但因為對「人應該如何自處」以及「人應該如何待人接物」這兩個問題很有興趣，免不了接觸到一些探討「基本問題」的書籍(請見本欄第二篇文章)。現在垂垂老矣，不再有讀書的腦力；只能把過去的心得做個整理，算是收收網吧。
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亞里斯多德：生平與思想 ---- FactVerse Media
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原文部份段落字數冗長，讀起來吃力；我根據「一段一個主題」原則把它們個別再分成幾個小段。此外，補增各節序號(含子標題)；以便指涉。
Aristotle: The Man Who Taught the World How to Think
FactVerse Media, 07/27/26
0. 前言
More than 2,300 years after his death, Aristotle remains one of the most influential people who ever lived.
He was a philosopher, scientist, teacher, researcher, and polymath whose ideas stretched across almost every field of knowledge known in the ancient world. He studied logic, biology, physics, mathematics, ethics, politics, psychology, medicine, astronomy, poetry, theatre, and countless other subjects.
His work was so extensive that he has been called the father of logic, biology, political science, zoology, embryology, natural law, the scientific method, rhetoric, psychology, realism, criticism, individualism, teleology, and meteorology.
1. 生平簡介
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, a city in Chalcidice in northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician of King Amyntas of Macedon, and his mother, Phaestis, came from Chalcis. Both of Aristotle’s parents died while he was still young, and he was raised by a guardian named Proxenus of Atarneus.
His father’s profession may have influenced Aristotle’s lifelong interest in biology and medicine. Ancient traditions even claimed that his family was connected to Asclepius, the legendary physician associated with medicine in Greek mythology.
At around seventeen or eighteen years old, Aristotle travelled to Athens and joined Plato’s Academy, one of the greatest centres of learning in the ancient world. He remained there for nearly twenty years.
Aristotle eventually became one of the Academy’s most distinguished thinkers. His intelligence was so impressive that Plato reportedly referred to him as the "mind of the school."
Yet Aristotle was not simply a follower of Plato. While Plato believed that universal Forms existed separately from the physical world, Aristotle developed a different understanding of reality. He believed that universals existed within particular things rather than in a separate world of Forms.
This disagreement would become one of the most important philosophical differences in the history of Western thought.
After Plato died around 347 BC, Aristotle eventually left Athens. He travelled to Asia Minor, where he continued his research alongside other scholars, including Theophrastus. There, Aristotle studied plants, animals, and marine life. His work was not limited to abstract philosophy. He carefully observed the natural world and attempted to understand how living things functioned.
During this period, he married Pythias, the adoptive daughter and niece of Hermias of Atarneus. They had a daughter who was also named Pythias.
In 343 or 342 BC, Aristotle received an invitation that would connect him permanently with one of history’s most famous conquerors. King Philip II of Macedon asked him to become the tutor of his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander.
That boy would later become known as Alexander the Great.
Aristotle taught Alexander at Mieza, a royal estate near Pella. His lessons likely included ethics, politics, literature, and philosophy. Alexander was also exposed to the works of Homer and Euripides.
Aristotle is believed to have influenced Alexander’s thinking deeply, although the relationship between the two men eventually became complicated. They developed different views on the administration of conquered territories, the treatment of conquered peoples, and the relationship between Greeks and other civilizations.
Aristotle’s own views about the world beyond Greece were shaped by the attitudes of his time. He encouraged Alexander to lead the Greeks while ruling non-Greek peoples as a conqueror. Yet Alexander’s empire would eventually become one of the most culturally diverse in the ancient world.
Aristotle is also said to have given Alexander an annotated copy of Homer’s Iliad, which reportedly became one of the young ruler’s most treasured possessions.
After the death of Philip II in 336 BC, Aristotle eventually returned to Athens. Because he was a foreigner, he could not own property in the city, so he rented a building near a sacred grove dedicated to Apollo Lykeios. There, he established his own school, which became known as the Lyceum.
2. 研究領域
Aristotle and his students conducted research, held lectures, collected manuscripts, studied maps, and gathered objects connected to the natural world. The school became an important centre of learning, and Aristotle’s students helped him build a large library.
It was during his years at the Lyceum that Aristotle produced many of the works that would shape human thought for centuries.
His writings covered an extraordinary range of subjects. In logic, he developed the earliest systematic study of reasoning. His work on syllogisms became the dominant form of Western logic for nearly two thousand years. His logical writings were later collected into a group of six books known as the Organon.
Aristotle also wrote extensively about metaphysics, the study of existence and reality. He examined the nature of substance, matter, form, potentiality, and actuality. His ideas attempted to explain how things change and how something can develop from what it potentially is into what it actually becomes.
His philosophy also explored the relationship between matter and form. For example, the material used to build a house has the potential to become a house, while the completed structure represents the actual realization of that potential.
Aristotle’s influence was not limited to philosophy.
He was one of the earliest thinkers to systematically study animals and the natural world. He observed and classified different species, examined their structures, and recorded details about their behaviour and reproduction. Some of his observations were incorrect, often because he relied on limited evidence or reports from others. However, modern research has also confirmed several observations that ancient critics once considered unbelievable.
His work in biology was so important that Charles Darwin regarded Aristotle as one of the greatest contributors to the subject. Aristotle has since been described as the father of biology and, more specifically, one of the founders of marine biology.
He also developed theories about physics and motion. Some of these theories were later proven wrong. Aristotle believed, for example, that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. His ideas about motion remained influential for centuries until later scientists, including Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, developed new theories based more heavily on observation, experiment, and mathematics.
Yet even where Aristotle was wrong, his questions continued to influence the development of science.
His writings also covered ethics and politics. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he explored the nature of happiness, virtue, character, and the good life. He argued that human beings should develop virtues through habit and practice rather than simply possessing knowledge of what is right.
School of Aristotle in Mieza, Macedonia, Greece 照片
His political writings examined different forms of government and the nature of the state. He believed that human beings were naturally social and political creatures. His famous description of humans as "political animals" would influence political philosophy for centuries.
Aristotle also wrote about poetry, theatre, psychology, economics, rhetoric, medicine, agriculture, and the human soul.
The sheer range of subjects he studied is one of the reasons his influence is so difficult to measure. He did not merely contribute to existing fields of knowledge. In many cases, he helped create the foundations of new ones.
After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, anti-Macedonian feelings returned to Athens. Aristotle was accused of impiety, reportedly because of his connections with the Macedonian royal family and his philosophical views.
Rather than face the fate of Socrates, who had been tried and executed by Athens centuries earlier, Aristotle fled to his mother’s family estate in Chalcis on the island of Euboea.
According to ancient tradition, he explained his decision by saying, "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy."
Aristotle died in Chalcis in 322 BC at the age of sixty-two. He reportedly named his student Antipater as his chief executor and asked to be buried beside his wife.
3. 學術貢獻
Before his death, Aristotle left his works to his student Theophrastus, who succeeded him as head of the Lyceum. His writings were later passed down through different hands, and some of them were hidden for protection before eventually being rediscovered and circulated.
Only about one-third of Aristotle’s original writings are believed to have survived. Many of the surviving works were not written for mass publication but were likely lecture notes or materials used for teaching. His original writings included dialogues and other works that have since been lost.
Despite this, the surviving works were enough to transform the intellectual history of the world.
For centuries, Aristotle's ideas influenced scholars across different civilizations. During the medieval period, his works were translated into Arabic and studied extensively by Muslim philosophers and scientists. Thinkers such as Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes engaged deeply with his philosophy, sometimes defending his ideas and sometimes challenging them.
Medieval Muslim scholars referred to Aristotle as "The First Teacher."
His ideas also influenced Jewish philosophy, particularly the work of Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest intellectual figures of medieval Judaism.
In Western Europe, Aristotle’s works were largely unknown for several centuries before his philosophy experienced a major revival. His writings returned through translations from Arabic and Greek, and Christian scholars began studying his ideas intensively.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential Christian philosophers in history, regarded Aristotle as "The Philosopher." Aristotle’s ideas became deeply connected with medieval Christian theology and shaped European scholarship for centuries.
His influence extended into the Renaissance and the early modern period. Scientists such as Galileo Galilei challenged many of his theories about physics, while later thinkers developed new approaches based on observation and experimentation.
Even in the modern age, Aristotle’s influence has not disappeared.
His logic remained dominant until the development of mathematical logic in the nineteenth century. George Boole later expanded the study of logic by giving it a mathematical foundation.
His ideas about biology continued to influence scientists. Modern researchers have even returned to his writings to examine his observations about animals, behaviour, classification, and biological development.
The evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi reconstructed Aristotle’s biological research, while modern studies of animal behaviour continue to use ideas that can be traced back to questions Aristotle asked more than two thousand years ago.
His influence has been so enormous that philosopher Bertrand Russell once argued that almost every major intellectual advance had to begin by challenging some Aristotelian idea.
That statement reveals both the strength and the weakness of Aristotle’s legacy. Some of his theories were eventually proven wrong, but his questions were so powerful that even those who rejected his conclusions were often responding to ideas he had already placed at the centre of intellectual debate.
Aristotle was not always correct. He lived in a world without modern laboratories, microscopes, telescopes, advanced mathematics, or modern scientific instruments. Some of his conclusions were based on limited observation, and some of his beliefs reflected the cultural assumptions of ancient Greece.
But his achievement remains extraordinary. He attempted to understand almost everything. He asked
what reality was,
how the universe worked,
how animals lived,
how governments should function,
what made people happy,
how humans should behave,
how arguments should be constructed,
how knowledge could be acquired, and
what it meant for something to exist.
More than 2,300 years after his death, the questions Aristotle asked continue to shape philosophy, science, politics, biology, ethics, and education.
He did not discover every answer. But he helped teach humanity how to keep asking the questions.
And perhaps that is why, after more than two millennia, Aristotle remains one of the most influential minds the world has ever known. What do you think: was Aristotle the greatest thinker in history, or has his influence been exaggerated by the centuries of scholars who came after him ?
Written by FactVerse Media
Verified news. Real history. Inspiring biographies. One hub for facts, stories, and legacies.
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柏拉圖：生平與思想 -------- FactVerse Media
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請參考：
Theory of Forms：通譯為：(柏拉圖的「理念論」、「理型論」)；我的翻譯：「本相論」
原文某些段落字數冗長，讀起來吃力；我根據「一段一個主題」原則把它們個別再分成幾個小段。此外，補增各節序號(含子標題)；以便指涉。
Plato The Philosopher Whose Ideas Have Shaped the World for 2,400 Years.
FactVerse Media, 07/24/26
0. 前言
Plato was one of the devoted young followers of Socrates, whose bust is pictured above. (蘇格拉底雕像照片)
More than 2,400 years after his death, Plato remains one of the most influential thinkers in human history. His ideas shaped philosophy, politics, mathematics, science, religion, education, and the way people think about knowledge and reality. Alongside his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle, Plato stands at the centre of the history of Western philosophy.
Born in Athens sometime between 428 and 423 BC, Plato came from an aristocratic and influential family. Through his mother, Perictione, he was believed to be descended from Solon, the famous Athenian statesman often associated with the foundations of Athenian democracy. Plato had two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who later appeared as characters in his famous work The Republic, as well as a sister named Potone and a half-brother named Antiphon.
His early life unfolded during a turbulent period in Greek history. Athens was engaged in the devastating Peloponnesian War against Sparta, a conflict that would eventually lead to the collapse of Athenian power. As a young man, Plato received the traditional education of an Athenian citizen, studying physical training, music, and other subjects expected of members of the city’s upper class.
According to ancient traditions, Plato was initially interested in poetry. He reportedly wrote poems, lyric poetry, and tragedies. However, his life changed when he encountered Socrates.
1. 蘇格拉底
Socrates became Plato’s teacher, greatest intellectual influence, and one of the most important figures in his life. Socrates did not teach philosophy through formal books or lectures. Instead, he questioned people about justice, virtue, knowledge, politics, and morality, forcing them to examine whether they truly understood the beliefs they claimed to hold.
Plato was deeply influenced by this method of questioning. Almost all of Plato’s philosophical works were written in the form of dialogues, conversations between different characters in which philosophical ideas are examined and challenged. In most of these dialogues, Socrates is the central speaker.
However, one of the mysteries surrounding Plato’s writings is that he almost never speaks directly in his own voice. Instead, he allows his characters especially Socrates to present different arguments. Because of this, scholars have debated for centuries which ideas truly belonged to Plato and which were meant to represent the historical Socrates.
2. 社會環境
Plato’s relationship with politics was also shaped by the troubled history of Athens. After Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War, a brutal government known as the Thirty Tyrants came to power. Two of Plato’s relatives were associated with this regime. Plato was reportedly invited to participate in the government but became disillusioned by its violent actions.
When democracy was restored, Plato's hopes of entering public life were further damaged by the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BC. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth and failing to respect the city's gods. He was sentenced to death and forced to drink poison.
The execution had a profound effect on Plato. The death of his teacher convinced him that political power without wisdom and justice could be extremely dangerous. It also influenced many of his later ideas about government, leadership, and the ideal society.
3. 理論與學說
After the death of Socrates, Plato travelled and studied with several philosophical schools and thinkers.
He encountered ideas associated with Heraclitus, who believed that everything was constantly changing, as well as
Parmenides, who argued for a reality that was eternal and unchanging.
He also studied mathematics and was strongly influenced by the Pythagorean tradition, which emphasized the importance of numbers and mathematical order in understanding the universe.
3.1 形式論
These influences helped shape one of Plato's most famous philosophical ideas: the Theory of Forms.
Plato argued that the physical world we experience through our senses is constantly changing and imperfect. A beautiful object can become ugly. A just society can become corrupt. A physical circle can never be perfectly circular. Yet human beings are able to recognize ideas such as beauty, justice, equality, and perfection.
Plato believed that behind the changing physical world existed a higher and unchanging reality made up of what he called Forms or Ideas. The things we see around us are imperfect copies or reflections of these eternal Forms.
For example, beautiful objects may come and go, but Plato believed that Beauty itself exists as a perfect and unchanging reality. Individual acts may be considered just or unjust, but behind them exists the perfect Form of Justice.
This idea became one of the foundations of Platonism and influenced philosophical and religious thought for centuries.
Plato's most famous illustration of his ideas is the Allegory of the Cave, found in The Republic. In the story, people are chained inside a dark cave and can see only shadows projected onto a wall. Because they have never seen anything else, they believe the shadows are reality.
One prisoner eventually escapes and discovers the world outside the cave. At first, the sunlight blinds him, but gradually he begins to understand the greater reality beyond the shadows. When he returns to the cave to tell the others what he has discovered, they do not believe him.
The allegory represents Plato’s belief that human beings can mistake appearances for reality. Education and philosophy, he believed, could help people move from ignorance toward knowledge and understanding.
3.2 認識論
Plato's ideas about knowledge were closely connected to his ideas about reality. He questioned whether what people believe they know is actually knowledge or merely opinion. The world perceived through the senses is constantly changing, so Plato believed that true knowledge must be connected to something stable and unchanging.
His philosophical works explored questions that remain important today. What is justice? What is knowledge? What makes a person good? What is the ideal government? What is reality? What is the nature of the human soul?
3.3 政治學
In The Republic, Plato explored the idea of justice in both individuals and societies. He compared the human soul to a society divided into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. He then compared these parts to three groups within an ideal state.
The productive class would include farmers, merchants, craftsmen, and other workers. The guardians or warriors would protect the state. The rulers would be those who possessed the greatest wisdom and understanding.
Plato believed that the ideal rulers should be philosophers. This led to his famous idea of the philosopher-king: a wise ruler who governs not for personal wealth or power but for the good of society.
However, Plato's political ideas were complex and sometimes controversial. In The Republic, he was deeply critical of democracy as it existed in ancient Athens, believing that ordinary citizens could be manipulated by ambitious leaders who lacked wisdom. He imagined political systems rising and falling from aristocracy to timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and eventually tyranny.
What is justice? forms one of the core quandaries of the Republic.
His political writings have influenced both supporters and critics of democracy for centuries.
4. 個人小傳
Around 383 BC, Plato founded the Academy in Athens, one of the earliest institutions in history dedicated to advanced philosophical and scientific study. The Academy became a centre for mathematics, philosophy, politics, and intellectual research.
One of the most famous students to study there was Aristotle, who joined the Academy around 367 BC. Aristotle would eventually become one of the greatest philosophers in history, but his ideas often differed significantly from those of his teacher.
Plato's Academy continued to exist for centuries after his death and became an important symbol of organized philosophical education.
Plato also became involved in the politics of Syracuse, a powerful Greek city in Sicily. He travelled there several times and attempted to influence its rulers. He hoped that philosophical education could transform political leadership, but his efforts were unsuccessful and sometimes placed him in dangerous situations.
His relationship with Dionysius II, the ruler of Syracuse, became particularly difficult. Plato hoped to guide the young ruler toward philosophy and wise leadership, but political suspicion and conflict eventually destroyed the relationship.
These experiences may have reinforced Plato's belief that transforming politics was far more difficult than simply imagining an ideal government.
5. 對後世影響
Plato wrote about almost every major philosophical question of his time. His works explored ethics, politics, knowledge, reality, the soul, education, mathematics, art, poetry, rhetoric, and the nature of the universe.
He also used myths and stories to communicate philosophical ideas. The Allegory of the Cave is one example. Another is the story of Atlantis, which became one of the most famous legends in history. Through these stories, Plato was able to explore complicated philosophical ideas in ways that could be understood beyond technical arguments.
Plato's writings were also unusual because almost all of his major works survived. Unlike many ancient Greek thinkers whose writings were lost, Plato's dialogues continued to be copied and studied throughout history.
His influence spread far beyond ancient Greece. During the Middle Ages, his ideas influenced Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophers. Neoplatonism, a philosophical tradition that developed from Plato's ideas, became especially influential.
Muslim philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna studied and developed ideas connected to the Platonic tradition. Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides were also influenced by ancient Greek philosophy. Later, Plato's ideas reached medieval Christian thinkers and became part of the intellectual tradition that shaped European philosophy.
The mathematical and mystical teachings of the followers of Pythagoras, pictured above, exerted a strong influence on Plato. 畫像
For a time during the early Middle Ages, Aristotle’s philosophy was more widely known in Western Europe than Plato’s. But Plato’s works eventually returned to greater prominence, especially during the Renaissance, when European scholars rediscovered many ancient Greek texts.
His influence continued into the modern era. Philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, political thinkers, and religious scholars continued to debate his ideas.
Even scientists who rejected many of Plato's conclusions were influenced by the questions he raised. His ideas about mathematics, abstract reality, knowledge, and the relationship between the physical world and deeper principles continued to influence philosophical discussions about science and reality.
Plato’s influence is so extensive that the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously described the history of European philosophy as a series of “footnotes to Plato.” Although the statement is often debated, it reflects the extraordinary reach of Plato’s ideas.
6. 結論
Plato died in Athens around 348 or 347 BC and was buried near the Academy he founded. His nephew Speusippus succeeded him as its leader.
More than two thousand years later, Plato’s questions remain alive. People still debate what justice means, whether democracy is the best form of government, what true knowledge is, whether reality is what we see, and whether education can truly transform society.
Perhaps that is Plato's greatest legacy. He did not simply provide answers. He taught generations of human beings to question the answers they had already accepted.
And if a man who lived more than 2,400 years ago can still influence how the modern world thinks about truth, justice, politics, education, and reality, then the question remains how many of the ideas we consider our own today were first planted in the mind of Plato?
Written by FactVerse Media
Verified news. Real history. Inspiring biographies. One hub for facts, stories, and legacies.
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生物「主動性」的正、反意見 - Philip Ball
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索引：
agency：
* 哲學：主動性，行為能力，能動性(中文版《維基百科》)；
* 社會學：主動性，行動能力，行動力，能動性；
* 生物學：主動性
Baldwin effect：
phenotype：可觀察到的特徵或特性，外顯型(特徵或特性)
proximal：醫學：「近端的」；此處：當下的，眼前的，立馬的
博爾博士的本行是化學；他是《自然》雜誌的編輯和一位普及科學作家。就下文討論的議題而言，我傾向狄弗瑞斯科教授的觀點；相對來說，博爾博士的立場可能有認知偏執之嫌。
下文屬於「生物學基礎論」領域，可和此欄2026/07/11貼文參看。不過，其論述模式的「思辨性」(或「主觀性」)過高；故置於此欄。
Is Life Just Different?
Philip Ball, 07/08/26
The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?
In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft(opens a new tab), which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter.
So great is the transformative power of life that its presence can be detected just from the light and radio waves our planet emits or reflects into space. Today we scan the cosmos for some of these telltale signatures light-years away.
Life leaves a mark, yet even now there’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic substances like the rocks, gases, and oceans that are the sole components of dead worlds.
Many scientists cite properties such as replication or metabolism.
Others speak in more abstract terms about the way life is out of thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings.
But some give another kind of answer. Living organisms are different because they do stuff for reasons.
It’s not enough to say that life is a nonequilibrium organized state through which there’s a constant flux of matter and energy. That description applies to hurricanes, too. But hurricanes just are. Only living entities have goals: to find food, to reproduce, to survive, sometimes simply to experience good things. (Dog owners will recognize that this is not just a human attribute.)
One way to express this idea is to say that living organisms have “agency.” It’s a hotly contested term. Some biologists reject it outright, at least for any organisms except humans, because we decide on our actions with conscious deliberation. (Whether we’re truly the only species to do so is another issue.)
Others think that agency is a fundamental attribute of all life. Since there’s no agreed-upon definition of the term, to some extent it can mean whatever you want it to mean.
But the debate about biological agency touches on fundamental issues in our understanding of what it means to be alive, because agency evokes a notion that biologists and philosophers have always wrestled with: teleology, the apparent purposiveness of life.
If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning? Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?
To me, the notion of agency indeed speaks to our intuitive sense of what makes living things so special: not mere machines pushed around by environment and circumstance. I suspect that aversion to agency betrays a queasiness about confronting life as something more than some kind of genetic program.
But there’s danger in the idea, too: It could so easily derail the work of studying the mechanistic explanations of how life works. I’m not looking to either bury or praise agency, but to explore whether it can be a scientifically productive idea.
To say that living things are goal-directed isn’t really a controversial statement. Biologists ranging from the evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to the pioneer of molecular biology Jacques Monod have acknowledged that. Whether it’s a bird building a nest or a white blood cell chasing a bacterium, we can’t watch life at work without supposing that these entities are trying to accomplish something.
The agency arguments are about what that means. In one view, apparent goal-directedness is just the result of genetic instructions playing themselves out. Organisms are automata directed by their genes, and natural selection favors gene variants that make the organisms behave one way and not another. In this mechanistic, gene-centered view of life, apparent agency is merely the performance of automated routines refined over many generations.
Is that really all there is to life? It’s far from clear that all organismal behavior can be attributed to particular genes. Think of a hare fleeing from a fox. Sure, its genes are involved in the formation of networks of neurons that enable behaviors that contribute to a state of not being eaten. But are genes responsible somehow for the decision to dart to the left or right, to hide or to run, or even to stand and fight?
Genetics might impose behavioral biases (say, making a hare generally risk-averse), but organisms make decisions by integrating a wealth of contextual and contingent information on the fly, including learned experience.
In one view, agency is neither more nor less than this ability to set proximal goals — not “Shall I reproduce some day?” but rather, “What action shall I take right now?” — and then act upon oneself and one’s environment to attain them.
“I understand agency to be the capacity of an entity to act in the world, for reasons [of its own],” said the neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell(opens a new tab) of Trinity College Dublin, whose 2023 book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will(opens a new tab) presented an argument for how this capacity developed through evolution.
“I think all living organisms can act as causal entities,” he said — not as mere vehicles steered by genetic prompts, but as agents that can be meaningfully said to be a genuine cause of change in the world. We wouldn’t say it was your atoms that caused your coffee to get made this morning, nor was it really your genes. It was you, a decision-making agent, who made that happen.
Mitchell is wary of rigid definitions, however. “People often take [such definitions] as a fixed set of criteria that they then use for demarcating a phenomenon in an all-or-none fashion,” he said — either it is an agent or it isn’t. “I don’t think that’s helpful or appropriate because I don’t think agency is that kind of phenomenon. But if you approach behavior in a more holistic, systems-oriented, ecologically contextualized view, you’ll be investigating agency by default.”
Samir Okasha(opens a new tab), a philosopher of biology at the University of Bristol, is hesitant to invoke this sort of agency. He said that it’s important to distinguish between two ideas:
that organisms are real agents, or that
they merely act as if they are.
“Very often,” he said, “agency seems no more than a fancy synonym for phenotypic or behavioral plasticity” — the ability of organisms to show different responses to a given stimulus. “But then the claim that organisms exhibit agency is really just a gloss on something that science has always known, and doesn’t represent a deep philosophical insight.”
Even the most gene-centric evolutionary biologist recognizes that many organisms can adapt their behavior to present circumstances and can often be considered to make choices. But without an ability to self-consciously reflect on the options and the likely outcomes of actions, does that rise to the level of true agency?
James DiFrisco(opens a new tab), a philosopher of theoretical biology at the Francis Crick Institute in London, thinks not. Agency, he said, is a psychological concept traditionally used to talk about human behavior. Importing it into biology as a whole risks imputing a kind of cryptic self-awareness to all life.
“Agency is a term whose meaning comes from human interpersonal discourse, which takes place in the vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, freedom, deliberation, and personhood,” he said. It’s not clear how to transfer that word to situations where those concepts simply don’t apply.
But what about the goal-directedness of organisms? This, DiFrisco said, is “something that evolved by natural selection and is therefore a state of adaptation.” In other words, organisms are adapted — genetically predisposed — to achieve things by various means, and the goal is the aspect of fitness the behavior serves.
But to say that they themselves devise their goals, he said, is untestable and nonexplanatory, “unless we’re dealing with cognitive subjects that can report on their own mental states.”
In 2025, DiFrisco and his colleague Richard Gawne published a critique in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology(opens a new tab) arguing that biological agency is therefore “a concept without a research program.” Either it’s invoking something already familiar in biological science, or it’s conjuring up some almost mystical force that makes organisms do things.
This force, they said, is resistant to explanation in terms of causal mechanisms: a vague kind of “holistic power” that doesn’t really explain anything, much as the 18th-century notion of a “vital force” animating living things was really just an empty explanation. Some people, DiFrisco suggested, “are playing on the ambiguity of ‘agency’ to support the idea that biology shows the need for some quasi-spiritual reality.”
The biologist Sonia Sultan(opens a new tab) of Wesleyan University, whose collaborative work on agency is among that critiqued by DiFrisco and Gawne, argues that they misunderstood what was being proposed.
“There is nothing supra-materialistic or otherwise spooky in a perspective that takes into account the empirically verifiable developmental and evolutionary agency of organisms, explicitly understood as the physical outcomes of natural processes expressing neither conscious desire nor intentionality,” she said. In other words, she separates biological agency from complex psychology and believes the widespread existence of agency to be a testable hypothesis.
In 2022 Sultan, along with the biologist Armin Moczek(opens a new tab) and the philosopher Denis Walsh(opens a new tab), argued(opens a new tab) that agency can fill in some “explanatory gaps left by prevailing gene-focused approaches in our understanding of phenotype determination, inheritance, and the origin of novel traits.” In particular, they said that it takes into account how organisms interact with their environment and demands a wider view of inheritance beyond genes.
Biological agency, the researchers continued, is thus “the capacity of a [living] system to participate in its own persistence, maintenance, and function by regulating its own structures and activities in response to the conditions it encounters.”
In support of this perspective, the philosopher Álvaro Moreno(opens a new tab) of the University of the Basque Country in Spain said that organisms don’t just detect and respond to changes in their environment but “possess the capacity to modify them.” Even Charles Darwin recognized this, which is why admitting agency into the living world isn’t some kind of mystical challenge to Darwinism.
The 18th-century French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck went further. He believed, in the words of the Stanford University historian Jessica Riskin(opens a new tab), his latest biographer(opens a new tab), that “life at its essence is creative agency” — in contrast to the view then prevailing that the only real agency in the natural world was of divine origin.
While Darwin differed from Lamarck about the source of evolutionary change, both placed the ability of organisms to act for themselves at the center of their theories.
These choices made by the organism can feed back into their own evolution. The decision to change diet or move to a new habitat, simply because of an impulse to explore options, can alter the selective pressures a population experiences and thus its evolutionary trajectory.
Crucially, for example, no gene is telling the organism, “Go and eat that new plant.” The organism itself takes the initiative. In this sense agency is already invoked in conventional evolutionary theory: It is called “behavioral drive,” whereby new adaptive traits emerge just because a group of organisms chose to do something new.
This phenomenon is akin to the so-called Baldwin effect, first identified as “a new factor in evolution” by the 19th-century psychologist Mark Baldwin, in which non-innate behavioral choices, perhaps ones that are socially learned, themselves create new selective pressures that lead to those choices becoming genetically fixed in the population. In other words, if you want to exclude agency from evolution, it’s too late.
But why do we have to call it that? The behaviors of organisms are already studied and understood from a variety of perspectives.
* Neuroscientists, for example, look at the decision-making circuits of brains,
* biophysicists look at the molecular pathways that govern the responses of bacteria to environmental signals such as nutrient concentration or heat,
* animal behavioralists think about cognitive mechanisms, and so on.
Why complicate that research with a fancy label that just muddies the waters?
“A lot of work on agency is playing on the ambiguity of the term, which is suggestive that there are higher cognitive processes than we’d expect in simple organisms,” DiFrisco said.
When Sultan and colleagues say that agency — the capacity to act in a way that is conducive to an organism’s goal — can be used to predict and explain behavior, DiFrisco and Gawne charge that this makes it circular. The idea that an organism did something “because of its agency,” they argue, resists any further analysis.
But Sultan and colleagues disagree with this characterization of how their notion of agency should be applied.
This aspect of the debate hinges on how we attribute the causes of actions. Is agency itself a causal factor, or is it a higher-level umbrella term for a host of specific and particular reasons that things happen? To put it another way: Agents make decisions — that’s what agency means — but do organisms?
For DiFrisco, speaking of organismal decisions “is just a convenient and compact way of referring to the operation of a (multiscale) mechanism” that determines behavior — a mechanism that is perfectly capable of incorporating context and conflicting signals.
But for me, the key point here is that the actions can be governed by reasons and goals. The hare is genuinely trying to escape the fox; it doesn’t merely look that way. And the hare did not have that specific goal before the fox appeared. Perhaps it had been trying to forage and to look out for predators. Such “trying to” is the fundamental nature of organisms: Evolution builds entities that try to do things.
Maybe we can focus this debate by asking what the concept of agency buys us that can’t be obtained without it. “This is a really key question,” Mitchell said. If agency is going to be more than a philosophical stance — if it’s going to be useful for doing science — then first it needs to be “naturalized,” as Mitchell and his colleague Henry Potter have put it: We need a proper theory of agency, of a sort that can indeed furnish some sort of research program.
At present, nothing like that really exists, but it’s possible to set out some of the issues it would need to confront. For example:
* How exactly do organisms determine their goals?
* How are those aims represented (if at all) in the molecular or neural mechanics of the organism?
* How do organisms integrate information (including information about their own internal state) to come up with a decision about how to act?
* Can we measure how much agency an entity has — or what kind of agency?
“I think developing empirical indicators for measuring different dimensions of agency would be the primary way to go for turning agency into a scientific concept,” Potter said.
Some researchers have asserted that agents need particular kinds of internal architectures to govern the relationships between senses, cognitive processes, actions, and needs.
Moreno, for example, has argued that this organization involves feedback loops that don’t just enable adaptation to the environment but let the system alter that environment — for example, simply by moving from one location to another with a different set of conditions.
The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman(opens a new tab) has argued that properties like this depend on what he calls “organizational closure,” in which the parts are collectively self-maintaining, each of them supporting the functions of the others. This property, Kauffman says, gives the whole system “causal power” — Mitchell’s ability for an agent to act on its own behalf rather than just being a passive vehicle for lower-level causes.
Meanwhile, the neuroscientist Karl Friston(opens a new tab) has argued that agency arises in entities that can make predictions(opens a new tab) about the outcomes of behaviors and then compare those with what actually transpires, and seek to minimize the disparity between the two (none of which demands an ability to reflect on that comparison with conscious self-awareness).
At this level it can all sound a bit abstract and remote from actual biology. But I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects of uniting such theoretical ideas with biological mechanisms.
It seems unlikely to be coincidental, for example, that organisms that seem to show more agency also have molecular pathways that permit more openness to the influence of context and external information.
If we can get a clearer idea of what makes an agent, this could help us to understand how collective goals arise — as they did when multicellular organisms first arose long ago — and how they can break down, as in cancer.
What’s more, a proper theory of agency might give us a clearer idea of what’s needed to make genuine artificial agents, not just computers and machines programmed with our own goals, but ones that can formulate their own.
We might then also get a clearer idea of the potential benefits and dangers such truly agential machines might bring. But perhaps the most compelling argument for recognizing agency is that it might help us understand what makes life so different — not just humans, but life — that it is able to shape an entire planet in a manner visible from outer space.
Philip Bal Contributing Writer
部落格簡介
In philosophy, “qualia” refers to the subjective qualities of our experience: what it’s like for Alice to see blue or for Bob to feel delighted. Qualia are “the ways things seem to us,” as the late philosopher Daniel Dennett put it. In these essays, our columnists follow their curiosity, and explore important but not necessarily answerable scientific questions.
相關閱讀
1. Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare
2. Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals
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現實論與真理 – Outis
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Realism and Truth
In Defense of Scientific Realism
Outis, 06/30/26
Michael Devitt’s Realism and Truth, particularly in its second edition published by Princeton University Press in 1997, stands as a landmark defense of a robust metaphysical realism combined with a correspondence theory of truth.
The book systematically argues for the mind-independent existence of both common-sense observable entities and the unobservables posited by mature scientific theories. Devitt’s approach is characteristically direct, naturalistic, and anti-mysterian, insisting that realism is first and foremost a metaphysical doctrine that should not be entangled with semantic or epistemological commitments from the outset.
This separation allows for a clear defense of scientific realism against various forms of anti-realism while integrating insights from naturalized epistemology. His work has profoundly influenced contemporary discussions by reasserting the priority of ontology over semantics and epistemology.
Argument for realism about the external world and unobservables
Devitt articulates realism through two core dimensions: an existence claim and an independence claim.
Common-sense realism holds that most observable physical entities of everyday experience and science exist mind-independently. Scientific realism extends this to most of the essential unobservables posited by well-established current scientific theories, such as electrons, genes, or gravitational fields.
These entities exist independently of human minds, languages, or conceptual schemes and possess their natures largely independently of how we think about them.
The primary argument for this position relies on inference to the best explanation, often called the success argument or no-miracles argument. The extraordinary predictive and explanatory success of science would be miraculous if its theories were not approximately true and its central theoretical terms not genuinely referential.
Devitt emphasizes that this is an abductive inference, a form of reasoning integral to scientific practice itself. By treating philosophy as continuous with science, he argues that we have strong empirical grounds for believing in both observables and unobservables.
Realism is thus presented as a cautious generalization from the commitments of our best scientific theories rather than a dogmatic a priori stance.
Critique of verificationism, instrumentalism, and anti-realism (e.g., van Fraassen)
Devitt mounts sustained criticisms against verificationist, instrumentalist, and constructive empiricist positions.
Verificationism, associated with logical positivism and later thinkers like Michael Dummett, ties truth or meaningfulness to verifiability or assertibility conditions, often leading to anti-realism about unobservables or even distant observables.
Devitt argues that such views conflate epistemological issues with metaphysical ones and fail to account for the literal success of scientific theories.
Instrumentalism treats theoretical statements as mere instruments for prediction without committing to the reality of unobservables, which Devitt sees as inadequate to explain why these instruments work so well.
A central target is Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism in The Scientific Image (1980). Van Fraassen accepts the empirical adequacy of theories — claiming that they correctly describe observables — but remains agnostic about unobservables.
Devitt contends that this position cannot adequately explain the success of science without smuggling in realist assumptions or resorting to implausible Darwinian selection accounts of theory survival that fail to explain why particular theories succeed in their predictions. Furthermore, the observable/unobservable distinction is vague and theory-relative, undermining the stability of van Fraassen’s empiricism.
Devitt insists that once we accept the legitimacy of abduction in everyday and scientific reasoning, there is no principled epistemic barrier to belief in unobservables.
Distinction between metaphysical realism and semantic realism
One of Devitt’s most influential contributions is his insistence on distinguishing metaphysical realism from semantic realism.
Metaphysical realism is the doctrine about the mind-independent existence and nature of entities.
Semantic realism, by contrast, concerns the interpretation of language or thought, often involving claims about bivalence, correspondence, or determinate reference.
Devitt argues forcefully that the metaphysical question is prior to and independent of semantic questions. Many anti-realists, including Dummett and Putnam, err by starting from semantic or epistemological premises and drawing metaphysical conclusions, a methodological inversion that Devitt labels an “aberration” of the realism debate.
By separating these issues, Devitt allows realists to remain flexible on semantics while maintaining a firm ontological commitment. Realism does not stand or fall with any particular theory of truth or reference, though Devitt himself favors a correspondence view.
Correspondence theory of truth defended against deflationism
Devitt defends a correspondence theory of truth, according to which truth consists in a relation between truth-bearers (sentences or propositions) and reality. Truth is not merely disquotational or redundant, as deflationists claim, but involves substantial worldly relations.
While acknowledging the appeal of deflationary theories for their lightness, Devitt argues that they lack the explanatory resources needed for a full account of linguistic and mental representation.
Correspondence truth fits naturally with a causal theory of reference and supports the explanatory role of truth in success arguments for realism.
He distinguishes between the metaphysical component of correspondence (involving relations to facts or worldly entities) and more linguistic aspects. Against deflationism, Devitt maintains that truth plays a genuine explanatory role in semantics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science that cannot be fully captured by minimalist schemas alone.
Naturalistic epistemology and the role of abduction
Devitt’s defense draws heavily on a Quinean naturalized epistemology. Epistemological questions about justification for realism should be addressed using the methods of science itself rather than a priori philosophy. Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is central here: it is the very method that underwrites scientific progress and applies equally to the philosophical defense of realism.
Rejecting abduction, as van Fraassen does, would undermine not only scientific realism but large parts of scientific practice. Devitt’s naturalism thus integrates metaphysics with a scientifically informed epistemology, avoiding skeptical or foundationalist pitfalls.
Response to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument and internal realism
Hilary Putnam’s model-theoretic argument poses a challenge to metaphysical realism by suggesting that, given the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem and other model-theoretic results, there are too many ways to interpret our theories as true, undermining determinate reference to an independent world.
Devitt responds by arguing that the argument illicitly assumes an internalist or verificationist conception of reference and truth. Once we adopt a causal-historical theory of reference grounded in worldly relations, the model-theoretic permutations lose their force because not all models correspond to actual causal connections.
Putnam’s shift to internal realism, which makes truth epistemic or idealized rational acceptability, is rejected as collapsing the distinction between truth and justification and failing to explain the success of science.
Devitt maintains that reference is determined by external causal chains rather than by the theory itself, thus blocking the argument at its premise.
Influence on contemporary scientific realism
Devitt’s work has significantly shaped the landscape of scientific realism. It has inspired defenses such as Stathis Psillos’s Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (1999), which develops explanationist arguments in a similar naturalistic spirit.
Devitt’s emphasis on the independence of metaphysics has clarified debates, encouraging realists to avoid semantic entanglements and focus on ontological commitments.
His ideas continue to inform responses to structural realism, new forms of empiricism, and debates in philosophy of science about underdetermination and theory change.
In broader metaphysics and epistemology, his naturalist and correspondence-oriented approach remains a touchstone for anti-deflationary and anti-anti-realist positions.
Devitt’s Realism and Truth provides a comprehensive, philosophically rigorous framework that prioritizes metaphysical questions while drawing on empirical science. It defends a thoroughgoing realism that respects both common sense and the full ontological commitments of mature science, offering powerful rejoinders to anti-realist challenges and setting the stage for ongoing naturalistic inquiry in philosophy.
Further Readings
* Devitt, Michael. Realism and Truth, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1997.
* Devitt, Michael. “Scientific Realism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, edited by Paul Humphreys. Oxford University Press, 2016.
* Psillos, Stathis. Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. Routledge, 1999.
* van Fraassen, Bas C. The Scientific Image. Oxford University Press, 1980.
* Brock, Stuart, and Edwin Mares. Realism and Anti-Realism. Acumen, 2007.
* Devitt, Michael. “Aberrations of the Realism Debate.” Philosophical Studies, 1991.
* Devitt, Michael. Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology. Oxford University Press, 2010.
* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Scientific Realism.”
* Additional essays in collections on realism, including responses to Devitt in various festschrifts and journals.
* Psillos, Stathis, and others. Works on explanationism and no-miracles argument building on Devitt’s framework.
Written by Outis
linktr.ee/supportlicentiapoetica
Published in LICENTIA POETICA
Unveiling the Soul of Expression. Delve into profound exploration of liberated discourse. Explore the interplay of emotions and ideas, as this publication navigates the intricate realms of philosophy.
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席爾的「意向性」與心靈哲學 - Outis
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我20多年前曾寫過一篇文章，比較「意向性」和「應無所住而生其心」兩者的意旨，請見此欄2026/02/21(2003)和2005/09/09；看到下文標題不免有似曾相識之感。
我雖然不熟悉席爾的理論，但對他並不陌生。除了手頭有一本他的著作外，他跟德希達的論戰讓我印象深刻；德希達的「尖刻」文風間接影響我偶而使用「鬥倒鬥臭」的論述策略(得理不饒人？)。
我頗贊同席爾根據生物學為論述基礎的「自然本源論」。
原文各段字數冗長，讀起來吃力；我根據「一段一個主題」原則把它們分為幾個小段落。
Intentionality and Philosophy of Mind
The Biological Basis of Mental States
Outis, 06/17/26
Intentionality stands as a central concept in John Searle’s philosophy of mind, referring to the directedness or aboutness of mental states. Mental states such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and perceptions are not merely internal occurrences but are characteristically directed toward objects, states of affairs, or propositions in the world.
A belief is always a belief that something is the case, a desire is a desire for something, and a perception is a perception of something. Searle emphasizes that this directedness is an intrinsic feature of certain biological processes, particularly those occurring in the brain.
Unlike purely syntactic or formal systems, intentional mental states possess conditions of satisfaction that determine whether they succeed or fail in representing the world accurately.
This understanding of intentionality serves as the foundation for Searle’s broader critique of dominant views in cognitive science and his positive account of the mind as a biological phenomenon.
Definition of intentionality: directedness of mental states
Searle defines intentionality as the property of mental states by which they are directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world.
Drawing from the phenomenological tradition while grounding it in analytic philosophy, he argues that intentional states have representational content with specific conditions of satisfaction.
For instance, a belief that it is raining has the condition of satisfaction that it must actually be raining for the belief to be true. Similarly, a desire to drink water is satisfied only if the agent drinks water.
Searle distinguishes intentionality from consciousness, though he maintains a close connection through his Connection Principle, which holds that genuine mental states must be in principle accessible to consciousness. This directedness is not derived from external interpretation but is an inherent causal feature of brain processes, making intentionality a natural biological phenomenon rather than a mysterious or supernatural property.
Critique of computational functionalism and strong AI
Searle mounts a sustained critique against computational functionalism, the view that mental states are defined by their functional or computational roles independent of the physical medium realizing them.
He particularly targets strong AI, the claim that an appropriately programmed digital computer literally has a mind and can understand or possess cognitive states simply by running the right program.
According to Searle, functionalism and strong AI mistakenly treat the mind as software running on hardware, ignoring the specific causal powers of biological brains. Programs operate purely syntactically, manipulating symbols according to formal rules without regard to meaning or semantic content.
Since syntax alone cannot produce semantics, no amount of computational sophistication can generate genuine intentionality or understanding. This critique undermines the idea that the Turing Test or behavioral equivalence suffices for mentality, insisting instead that the right kind of causal biology is essential.
Chinese Room Argument (1980)
The Chinese Room Argument, first presented in Searle’s 1980 paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” remains one of the most influential thought experiments in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence.
Imagine a person who does not understand Chinese locked in a room with a set of rules in English for manipulating Chinese symbols. When Chinese speakers outside the room pass in questions written in Chinese, the person inside follows the rules to produce appropriate Chinese responses, creating the appearance of understanding.
From the outside, the room behaves as if it understands Chinese, yet the person inside has no understanding whatsoever. Searle argues that this scenario parallels what a digital computer does when executing a program: it manipulates formal symbols according to syntactic rules without any semantic comprehension.
Therefore, computation by itself cannot produce intentionality or genuine understanding, refuting strong AI. The argument highlights that while computers may simulate intelligence, they lack the intrinsic causal powers necessary for real. mental states
Distinction between intrinsic and derived intentionality
Searle draws a fundamental distinction between intrinsic (or original) intentionality and derived intentionality. Intrinsic intentionality is the genuine, underived aboutness possessed by mental states, caused by and realized in biological brains.
Human beliefs, desires, and perceptions have this intrinsic directedness independently of any external observer. Derived intentionality, by contrast, is attributed to artifacts or symbols by human interpreters.
A book, a computer program, or a map has meaning only because humans assign interpretations to it; the intentionality is not inherent but borrowed. Computers and other syntactic systems possess only derived intentionality, dependent on the minds that design and use them.
This distinction reinforces Searle’s rejection of computationalism, as it shows that no program can bootstrap itself into possessing intrinsic intentionality. Only systems with the right biological causal powers, like brains, can have original intentionality.
Biological naturalism: consciousness as a biological phenomenon
Searle’s positive theory, known as biological naturalism, posits that consciousness and intentionality are natural biological phenomena caused by and realized in the neurophysiological processes of the brain. Just as digestion is a biological process caused by the stomach and digestive organs, mental states are higher-level features caused by lower-level neuronal activity.
Consciousness is not an extra, non-physical substance but an emergent yet causally efficacious feature of certain biological systems.
Searle rejects both dualism, which treats the mind as separate from the body, and eliminative materialism or strict reductionism, which denies the reality of subjective experience. Instead, he advocates a thoroughgoing naturalism that accepts the first-person ontology of consciousness — its subjective, qualitative character — while insisting it is part of the physical world.
Brains cause minds, and specific biochemical processes are crucial; other materials might conceivably produce consciousness if they duplicate the relevant causal powers, but abstract programs cannot.
Relation to perception, belief, desire, and action
In Searle’s framework, intentionality unifies various mental phenomena through their conditions of satisfaction and directions of fit. Perception involves causal self-referentiality, where the experience represents its own causes. Beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit, aiming to match the world as it is. Desires and intentions have a world-to-mind direction of fit, seeking to change the world to match their content.
Actions arise from intentions that cause behavior in the right way, often involving a Background of non-intentional capacities and practices that enable intentional states to function. The Network of interconnected intentional states provides context, while the Background supplies the pre-intentional skills and assumptions necessary for meaning and action.
This integrated view explains how perception leads to belief, belief informs desire, and desire motivates action within a biologically grounded system.
Influence on debates about qualia, reductionism, and the mind-body problem
Searle’s work has significantly influenced contemporary debates on qualia — the subjective, qualitative feels of experience — by insisting that consciousness is irreducibly subjective yet fully natural. He critiques reductive explanations that attempt to eliminate or explain away first-person ontology in third-person terms, arguing that such approaches commit the fallacy of denying evident features of reality.
On the mind-body problem, biological naturalism offers a middle path: it avoids Cartesian dualism by affirming causal closure of the physical while rejecting materialist reductionism that ignores subjectivity. His views have sparked extensive discussion in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and consciousness studies, challenging functionalists, representationalists, and panpsychists alike.
While critics accuse him of property dualism or inconsistency, Searle maintains that his position respects both scientific realism and the manifest reality of conscious experience.
Searle’s contributions to intentionality and the philosophy of mind provide a coherent, biologically grounded alternative to prevailing computational and reductionist paradigms. By emphasizing the intrinsic, causal, and subjective nature of mental states, his work continues to shape discussions on the nature of mind, the limits of artificial intelligence, and the place of consciousness in the natural world.
His insistence on clarity, argumentation, and respect for everyday experience offers a robust framework for addressing enduring philosophical puzzles.
Further Readings
* John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983).
* John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (1980) — Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Chinese Room).
* John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992).
* John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004) — accessible summary.
* John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (1997).
* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “The Chinese Room Argument” by David Cole (2004, with updates).
* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Intentionality” by Pierre Jacob (2003, revised 2023).
* John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) — detailed defense of biological naturalism.
* Various responses in John Searle and His Critics, ed. Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick (1991).
* Daniel Dennett and John Searle exchanges on consciousness and intentionality in multiple journals.
Written by Outis
Published in LICENTIA POETICA
Unveiling the Soul of Expression. Delve into profound exploration of liberated discourse. Explore the interplay of emotions and ideas, as this publication navigates the intricate realms of philosophy.
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笛卡爾思想被誤解為唯我論 -- Jovit Paul Magadan
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下文作者大概對心理學種種「認知偏差」的概念毫無所知；或者，他對他所謂的「真理」有其獨門「定義」。轉載此文純屬提供「負面教材」而非「平衡意見」。「唯我論」也可以譯為「個人中心論」。
What Is Cartesian Individualism? The Dangerous Idea That Changed How We Think Forever
Jovit Paul Magadan, 05/17/26
I thought relying on myself for truth was just common sense. Then I realized it was one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history.
René Descartes — the philosopher who shifted the foundation of truth from tradition and external authority to the individual thinking self, permanently changing how modern humans understand consciousness, reason, and identity.
While revisiting a course on modern and postmodern philosophy taught by Michael S. Roth, I encountered René Descartes again.
At first, I thought I was merely reviewing old philosophical concepts such as “I think, therefore I am”, rationalism, doubt and the Enlightenment.
But then something unexpectedly unsettling happened.
I realized that the way I naturally think about truth which is the assumption that I should rely on my own mind, my own reasoning, my own judgment is not timeless human common sense.
It is historical. Constructed. Inherited.
And once I saw it, I could not unsee it.
The modern individual who believes truth should come from the self did not simply “exist naturally.” That kind of consciousness had to emerge historically through philosophy, science, religion, politics, and social change.
In other words:
what feels obvious to me today would not have felt obvious to many humans centuries ago.
That realization hit me harder than I expected. Because suddenly I was not just studying philosophy anymore.
I was studying the invisible architecture of my own mind.
What Is Cartesian Individualism?
Cartesian individualism refers to the philosophical shift associated with Descartes, where certainty and truth begin with the individual thinking self.
Before Descartes, truth in Europe was largely grounded in external structures through religion, tradition, scripture, cosmic order, institutions and inherited authority.
The individual was usually seen as part of a larger meaningful order created by God and maintained by society.
But Descartes did something radical.
Instead of beginning with the external world, he began with inner consciousness.
He doubted everything from the senses, traditions, authorities and even reality itself.
Until he arrived at the famous conclusion:
“Cogito, ergo sum.”
“I think, therefore I am.”
Even if everything else could be doubted, the act of doubting itself proved that a thinking self existed.
This changed philosophy forever.
Because from that moment onward, the individual mind became the starting point of certainty.
What sounds ordinary to us now was once intellectually explosive.
Why This Idea Was So Dangerous
Today we celebrate independent thinking.
We tell people to think for yourself, question authority, find your truth and trust your judgment.
But in Descartes’ time, this kind of thinking was destabilizing.
Europe was already in chaos from religious wars, scientific revolutions, collapsing authorities and political upheaval.
And now philosophers were suggesting that inherited truths themselves could be questioned.
This was dangerous because once individuals begin grounding truth in their own reasoning, traditional structures weaken.
If the individual mind becomes central then churches lose monopoly over truth, kings lose divine certainty, traditions become debatable and society becomes intellectually fluid.
Modern freedom quietly begins here.
But so does modern anxiety.
Because freedom and isolation were born together.
My Personal Realization While Reading Descartes
The unsettling part was realizing how deeply modern my own consciousness already is.
I always assumed that relying on oneself for truth was natural.
Of course individuals should think independently.
Of course skepticism is healthy.
Of course authority should be questioned.
But while studying Descartes and the Enlightenment, I began asking a disturbing question:
What if these assumptions are not universal human instincts, but products of modernity itself?
That changed the way I saw everything.
I realized that many people before modernity did not experience themselves primarily as isolated individuals constructing personal truth.
Their identities were embedded within family, religion, community, ritual and cosmic order.
Truth was not mainly:
“What do I personally conclude?”
It was “What larger reality do I belong to?”
Modern consciousness reversed that orientation.
And suddenly I realized something even more uncomfortable:
I was not standing outside history objectively analyzing it.
History was already inside me.
My assumptions about freedom, individuality, success, identity, selfhood and authenticity were themselves inherited products of centuries of intellectual transformation.
What I thought was simply “human nature” was partly modern conditioning.
Why We Cannot Go Back
This is the part that fascinates me most.
Even if we criticize modernity, it feels almost impossible to fully return to older ways of thinking.
Why?
Because once humans become historically self-aware, innocence disappears.
Once we realize that beliefs are shaped by culture, identities are historically constructed, truth claims can be questioned and consciousness filters reality then we cannot unknow these things.
Modernity permanently altered human self-awareness.
Science changed how we see nature.
Capitalism changed how we experience value.
Individualism changed how we experience identity.
Technology changed how we experience attention itself.
Even institutions that originally resisted modernity eventually absorbed parts of it.
Religious institutions adopted scientific thinking.
Traditional societies adopted modern education.
Cultures opposing individualism still speak the language of individual rights.
The modern mind spread everywhere.
We can criticize modern consciousness.
But we cannot fully return to a premodern consciousness that no longer exists psychologically for us.
Why Humans Are So Vulnerable to Powerful Ideas
The deeper realization for me was understanding how ideas become embedded so deeply that they eventually feel biological.
Materialism. Capitalism. Prestige. Money. Power. Status. These things often feel “natural.” But modern systems amplify ancient survival instincts already present in the human brain.
For most of human history status improved survival, social approval increased protection, resources meant safety, and reputation affected belonging.
The brain evolved to care deeply about these signals.
Modern society did not invent these drives.
It industrialized them.
Social media turned status into visible metrics.
Capitalism transformed desire into endless consumption.
Modern culture transformed identity into performance.
And because these systems constantly surround us, they begin to feel inevitable.
But they are not inevitable.
They are historically reinforced psychological environments.
That realization changed how I look at modern life itself.
The Modern Human Dilemma
Modernity gave humanity extraordinary power from science, democracy, technology, human rights and freedom of thought.
But it also produced a new kind of psychological burden.
The modern individual is expected to construct meaning. define identity. choose values, create purpose and justify beliefs.
Premodern humans often inherited meaning.
Modern humans must assemble it.
That freedom can become exhausting.
We want autonomy, but also belonging.
We want skepticism, but also certainty.
We want individuality, but also connection.
We want freedom, but also meaning.
This tension defines modern existence.
And perhaps that is why philosophers from, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault became obsessed with alienation, nihilism, power, identity, and meaning.
They understood that the modern self is both liberated and burdened.
So What Shall We Do Now?
I do not think the answer is blindly rejecting modernity.
Nor do I think we can romantically return to the old world.
The goal, perhaps, is awareness.
To recognize that many of our deepest assumptions: about success, identity, truth, individuality and freedom are historically shaped rather than purely natural.
And maybe wisdom begins when we stop unconsciously inheriting ideas and start consciously examining them.
Not to destroy meaning.
Not to become cynical.
Not to reject modern life entirely.
But to become more awake inside it.
Perhaps the challenge of modernity is this:
To remain human while knowing that even our most “obvious” ways of seeing the world were historically constructed.
Written by Jovit Paul Magadan
I write for your curious 2AM thoughts.
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格林教授的「物質基礎論」 -- Paul Austin Murphy
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下文一個特色是大量引用學者們本人的論述，然後加上作者說明和解讀。至於莫菲先生是否掌握到這些學者思想的重點，有請看官們自行定奪。
我接受「唯物論」，自然也是「化約論」和「物質基礎論」的「同路人」(1)。另一方面，針對「意識」議題，我目前(和可見的未來)並沒有任何具體的「答案」，或值得一提的「想法」。但是，區區、老夫、在下、我，認為：「浮現論」、「資訊處理論」、或「量子意識論」這些試圖解釋它的努力，都是在「病急亂抓藥」。
附註：
1. 「化約論」 -- reductionism；「物質基礎論」 -- physicalism，記得我曾將此詞譯為「物性主義」或「物質主義」。
索引：
Greene, Brian：美國理論物理學家
physicalism：「物質基礎論」
reductionism：「化約論」
Physicist Brian Greene’s Apologetic, Yet Strong, Physicalism
Paul Austin Murphy, 05/17/26
The theoretical physicist Brian Greene upholds a very strong physicalism, as well as a “deep-seated reductionist commitment” too.
Religious People and Anti-Materialists
It’s the case that many religious people, anti-materialists, spiritual idealists, romantics, etc. aren’t against reductionism and “materialism” in the abstract: they’re against such isms only when they trespass on the sacred realm of human persons, as well as on the related notion of human consciousness.
This essay keeps away from the subject of consciousness because that’s a can of worms to be tackled separately. However, Brian Greene himself tackles it in detail. In terms of physicalism and consciousness, this is how he sums up this subject:
“We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles.”
In any case, Greene is extremely upfront about his physicalism, even if, at the very same time, he’s seemingly at pains to justify himself to religious people, anti-materialists, romantics, etc.
Greene is upfront about being a reductionist too. For example, he says that he has a
“deep-seated reductionist commitment, which holds the view that by fully grasping the behaviour of the universe’s fundamental ingredients we tell a rigorous and self-contained story of reality”.
Note Greene’s words “self-contained story of reality”. That isn’t the same as claiming reductionism tells the only true story of reality. However, it is a vital and important story. This is a theme that Greene often comes back to. As seen, he uses the word “story” in exactly the same way in which another American theoretical physicist, writing about the same subjects, does. That physicist is Sean Carroll. (See my ‘The Physicist Sean Carroll on (Scientific) Emergence’ and the next essay.)
In another passage, Greene states both his reductionism and his physicalism. He tells his readers that he
“can envision a future when scientists will be able to provide a mathematically complete articulation of the fundamental microphysical processes underlying anything that happens, anywhere and anywhen”.
Surely that statement must apply to all the big subjects and issues, such as consciousness, free will, war, love, hate, etc. Or does it? Note that Greene uses the word “underlying” (as in “underlying anything that happens”). This is an important caveat. Why? It’s because saying that X underlies (or underpins) Y isn’t the same as saying X “is identical to” Y, or that X can “tell us everything” about Y. In fact, if those two interpretations were true, then the word “underlying” simply wouldn’t be accurate. All this makes a big difference, despite the endless conflations uttered by some religious people and nearly all anti-materialists.
Greene goes on to tell his readers more about what his word “underlying” means, and he does so through the example of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. He quotes Democritus stating the following:
“‘Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.’”
Greene says that Democritus’s point is that
“everything emerges from the same collection of ingredients governed by the same physical principles”.
What’s more,
“those principles, as attested to by a few hundred years of observation, experimentation, and theorizing, will likely be expressed by a handful of symbols arranged in a small collection of mathematical equations”.
At first, Greene stated that “fundamental microphysical processes underlie[] anything that happens, anywhere and anywhen”. Then, through the voice of Democritus, he states that “everything emerges from the same collection of ingredients”. These two expressions more or less state the same thing, if from two different angles. In other words, X can underlie Y, and Y can emerge from X. Neither formulation implies or entails that X is Y. Of course, the concepts of underlying and emergence need to be explained and justified too.
Greene on Human Persons
Greene himself does trespass on the sacred realm of human persons mentioned earlier. He writes:
“Yet, maintaining our physicalist stance, you and I are nothing but constellations of particles whose behavior is fully governed by physical law.”
Oh yes!
Greene uses those terrible two words: “nothing but”! This, of course, echoes the very often-quoted passage from Francis Crick. Here it is again! —
“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
This all hinges on what the words “nothing but” really mean. In a past essay (2019), ‘Francis Crick’s Deliberately Provocative Reductionism’, I argued that Crick was being provocative when he used these words. Moreover, it’s hard to know what they could even mean when taken literally.
Just to take one example. If you and I were nothing but constellations of particles, then we would be indistinguishable from other constellations of particles, such as heaps of shit or rocks. So Greene is being poetic and provocative too, just like Crick. That’s because he’s already told us what he really means: particles, fields, laws, etc. underlie/underpin you and I. Alternatively, you and I emerge from particles, fields, laws, etc.
Greene on Reduction, Emergence and New Laws
Greene mentions emergence, at least indirectly, when he writes the following:
“Although voluminous data confirm that we have a deep understanding of the laws governing individual particles (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, and so on), perhaps when a hundred billion billion billion particles are arranged into a human body and brain, they are no longer governed, or at least not fully governed, by the fundamental laws of the microworld.”
This means that Greene fully acknowledges the possibility of new laws. He may even do more than merely acknowledge it.
It’s worth asking here where that (to use Greene’s own phrase) “line in the sand” is when we see a miraculous move from old laws to (possible) new ones. Greene writes:
“It’s not as though the universe comes equipped with a line in the sand separating things that are properly described by quantum mechanics from things properly described by general relativity. Dividing the universe into two separate realms seems both artificial and clumsy.”
In crude terms, why does the change need to come when we reach a hundred billion billion billion particles and not a hundred billion particles? What about a billion particles? Why not a million or even ten particles? We’d need to explain how and why higher numbers alone bring about new laws.
Greene, like many other physicists, basically states tha Laplace’s Demon doesn’t actually exist. He happily concedes that "admittedly, no one has ever carried out the mathematical analysis required to make predictions for the lawful progression of particles” when it comes to large objects and systems. What’s more,
“[e]ven predicting the motion of a far simpler object like a pool ball can elude us because small inaccuracies in determining the ball’s initial speed and direction can be exponentially amplified as the ball ricochets off the banks of the table”.
All that doesn’t really concern Greene, at least not in this context. He concludes:
“So my focus here is not on predicting your next move. My focus is on the existence of laws that govern your next move.”
Greene isn’t concerned with “unexpected and impressive phenomena” (such as “typhoons and tigers”) here either. He believes that it’s still the case that
“all evidence suggests that were we able to work out the math for such large groups of interacting particles, we would be able to predict their collective behaviors”.
In a sentence. The issue here isn’t prediction: it’s the emergence of new laws.
So Greene is well aware of the limitations of reductionism. For example, he says that he
“would be stymied, of course, in trying to explain many other things in staunchly reductionist terms, from Pacific typhoons to raging volcanoes”.
However:
“But the challenge presented by these happenings, and a world chock-full of examples like them, is solely that of describing the complex dynamics of a fantastically large number of particles.”
Finally: “If we could surmount that technical hurdle, we would be done.”
On the surface, Greene seems to be ruling out emergence here, or at least ruling out strong emergence. After all, isn’t the argument from emergentists that new laws and features emerge at “higher levels”? Even so, such higher-level laws and features would still be underpinned by particles. Alternatively, they would still emerge from particles. Still, Greene doesn’t mention this. Instead, he boils the problem down to “complex dynamics” and “a fantastically large number of particles”.
If new laws and features do truly emerge, then surely this means that Greene’s ideal prediction, or ideal reduction, would still be impossible… Unless these two things can exist together. In other words, can we have an ideal prediction, or an ideal reduction, even if new laws and features do occur at higher levels?
Greene on Information
I wonder if the ideal reduction, or ideal prediction, is affected by the introduction of information into this story, as Greene does. In the following passage, we see Greene stating his reductionist and physicalist position again. Yet, this time, with the added ingredient of information:
“To describe the state of the world now, I provide information that specifies the configuration of all the dancing particles and undulating fields permeating space. The laws of physics take that information as input and yield as output information that delineates the state of the world later on. Physics, according to this framing, is in the business of information processing."
It’s worth noting that in this specific context Greene brought up information and processing in response to the position of the philosopher David Chalmers on consciousness and “inner experience”. However, it’s clear that he adopts an informationalist position generally. (Basically, one that’s in tune with the ideas of John Archibald Wheeler.)
What work is the word “information” doing in the quoted passage above? That can be asked because often when I read people talk about information, it seems to have little purpose: it’s a needless addition. Or worse, such people are referring to information as if it’s a… well, physical thing.
Take the words of the physicist Christopher Fuchs:
“‘It is amazing how many people talk about information as if it is simply some new kind of objective quantity in physics, like energy, but measured in bits instead of ergs. You’ll often hear information spoken of as if it’s a new fluid that physics has only recently taken note of.’”
Of course, in an everyday sense, physicists have always dealt with information, just as Tom, Dick and Harry have. However, information in these contexts means much more than that.
Written by Paul Austin Murphy
MY PHILOSOPHY: https://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/ My Flickr Account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193304911@N06/
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波德雅、尼切、弗洛伊德的「表相論」 -- Rodeux
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下文從視覺藝術的「錯覺手法」做為切入點，討論「實相」、「表相」、和「幻相」之間關係的哲學議題。我沒讀懂；轉載於此，留待解人或有緣人。
或許因為我沒什麼慧根；在我讀來，下文作者的觀點基於文學家的自由聯想多過愛智者的邏輯推論。
我不熟悉波德雅的學說；有興趣的網友請點擊以下參考條目：
* 此欄2026/04/01貼文
* Baudrillard Notes: Seduction contra Eros
* Seduction and Reversibility: Baudrillard’s Symbolic Challenge to Modernity
索引：
Seduction：For French theorist Jean Baudrillard, seduction is not about sexual desire, coercion, or romance. Instead, it is a playful, strategic manipulation of appearances, artifice, and signs.(AI摘要)
Trompe l’oeil：錯覺法
Uncanny：奇妙的，神秘的，難以(或無法)解釋的
Enchanted Simulation: Baudrillard, Nietzsche, Freud and the Uncanny Force of Illusion
Rodeux, 03/19/26
Thesis
Trompe l’oeil reveals a central tension in Baudrillard’s thought: although simulation seeks to make the world fully visible and operational, seduction reintroduces illusion from within. Far from being the opposite of reality, illusion is one of its conditions. Nietzsche helps clarify this by showing that life depends on appearance and artistic force, while Freud helps explain why hyper-real images become uncanny precisely when they seem too real.
Introduction
In a culture saturated with images, reality seems increasingly transparent. Everything appears available to view, record, and reproduce. Yet certain images still fascinate us in a different way: they do not merely show the world, but unsettle our confidence in it. This is the paradox at the heart of Jean Baudrillard’s reflections on simulation and seduction. If simulation seeks to make everything visible and operational, seduction reintroduces ambiguity, appearance, and illusion. The result is not a simple return to unreality, but a challenge to reality itself.
Baudrillard’s account of trompe l’oeil painting gives this problem a striking visual form. These paintings seem intensely realistic, yet their very precision makes them strange. They do not simply imitate the real; they make us wonder what the real is. Read alongside Nietzsche and Freud, Baudrillard’s point becomes sharper: illusion is not merely opposed to reality. It is one of the conditions through which reality is sustained, experienced, and, at times, disturbed.
Simulation, Seduction, and the Return of Illusion
For Baudrillard, simulation does not just represent the world. It produces a world that is fully legible, fully available, and increasingly stripped of uncertainty. In such a regime, the real is overexposed. It no longer hides behind appearances but is generated through signs, models, and endless visibility.
Seduction moves in the opposite direction. Baudrillard describes it as neither pure appearance nor pure absence, but “the eclipse of a presence” (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 85). Its power lies in flicker, withdrawal, and ambivalence. Rather than adding more meaning, it interrupts the drive to make everything transparent. Seduction fascinates because it withholds as much as it reveals.
This is why illusion cannot simply be expelled from the simulated world. It reappears from within the very field of signs that seeks to master reality. Seduction is thus not external to simulation, but its internal disturbance.
Trompe l’oeil Against Linear Perspective
Baudrillard turns to trompe l’oeil to show how this disturbance works. Unlike Renaissance linear perspective, which organizes the visible world into ordered depth and harmonious space, trompe l’oeil unsettles that order. Its objects do not invite the eye gently inward; they seem to press forward, toward the viewer, as if crossing the boundary between image and thing.
John Haberle’s A Bachelor’s Drawer exemplifies this effect. Its coins, cards, stamps, pipe, and scraps of paper are painted with such exactness that they appear almost tangible. Yet this exactness does not secure reality. It destabilizes it. The objects feel both present and oddly displaced, so faithful to the visible world that they begin to seem unreal. Baudrillard writes that trompe l’oeil, “by mimicking the third dimension, questions the reality of this dimension” (1990, p. 63). The painting does not simply deceive the eye; it tests the viewer’s belief in reality itself.
This is what makes trompe l’oeil an “enchanted simulation.” It openly presents itself as artifice, yet by exceeding the effects of the real, it throws the reality principle into doubt.
Nietzsche and the Force of Appearance
Nietzsche helps clarify why this challenge matters. He does not treat appearance as a superficial veil over truth, but as one of the forces through which life becomes bearable and intelligible. “We have art in order not to perish from the truth” (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 40). Art, in this sense, is not decoration. It is a necessary mediation.
This brings Nietzsche close to Baudrillard’s idea of vital illusion. Both reject the assumption that truth alone grounds reality. Human beings live through forms, appearances, and interpretive constructions. Seduction, understood in this light, resembles a force rather than a concept: it acts before stable meaning is secured, disrupting the fantasy of a fully transparent world.
One need not identify seduction directly with the Dionysian to see the kinship. In both cases, a deeper instability unsettles the calm surface of rational order. What appears most solid is sustained by forces it cannot fully control.
The Uncanny Precision of the Hyper-Real
Freud provides the affective register of this experience. The uncanny arises when something is both familiar and strange at once, when what should remain secure in perception begins to waver. As Freud puts it, the uncanny belongs to what is “long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud, 2003, p. 124).
That is precisely the effect of trompe l’oeil. In A Bachelor’s Drawer, the objects are ordinary and recognizable, yet their hyper-real exactness makes them unsettling. Perfection removes the small irregularities that usually anchor perception in the everyday. The result is not simple illusion, but hyper-illusion: an excess of realism that makes reality suspicious. The viewer hesitates, caught between recognition and doubt.
Freud thus helps explain why these paintings fascinate. Their power lies not in trickery alone, but in the way they make the familiar world feel subtly wrong.
Vital Illusion and the Fragility of the Real
At its deepest point, Baudrillard’s argument is not that illusion replaces reality, but that illusion helps make reality possible. This is where Nietzsche and Baudrillard converge most strongly. If truth were immediate and naked, it would be unlivable; if reality were stripped of all appearance, it would lose the very conditions that make it intelligible. Illusion is therefore not a flaw in the system. It is one of its supports.
Freud complicates this insight by showing that what sustains reality can also unsettle it. Because the real depends on structures of familiarity and appearance, it is never fully secure. It can always begin to flicker.
Conclusion
Trompe l’oeil matters because it makes this flicker visible. In A Bachelor’s Drawer, reality is not simply copied but placed under pressure. Baudrillard sees in such images a form of seduction that resists the totalizing logic of simulation. Nietzsche helps explain why illusion is indispensable to life, while Freud shows why such illusion can become uncanny when it grows too exact.
Taken together, these thinkers suggest that the real is neither self-grounded nor immune to appearance. It depends on illusions it cannot entirely master. That is why certain images continue to fascinate us: they do not merely represent the world, but reveal how fragile our sense of reality has always been.
References
Baudrillard, J. (1990). Seduction (B. Singer, Trans.). New World Perspectives.
Freud, S. (2003). The uncanny (D. McLintock, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1919)
Hegarty, P. (2004). Jean Baudrillard: Live theory. Continuum.
Nietzsche, F. (2003). The birth of tragedy (R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1872)
Written by Rodeux
I’m passionate about languages as intricate systems that shape human experience. Guided by inspiring mentors, I explore their complexity, diversity, and meaning.
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《19世紀最危險的哲學觀念》讀後
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我退休之前忙於生計，沒有那個美國時間去考慮生死、人生意義這類重大，但不能改善生活物質條件的問題。70歲以前還能看書、寫寫文章，也就不怎麼在它們上面下功夫。70歲以後幹不了正經事；剛好在《傳媒》上看到很多這方面的文章，也就偶而跟著湊湊熱鬧。
該文作者還是位大學生(本欄上一篇)，他很可能還沒修「邏輯101」課程；如果修過，大概被「當」掉不只一次。
活著並不是個容易的「活」；它需要一定份量的「客觀資源」，和某種程度的「主觀意願」。如果一個人真的接受梅蘭德的看法，他/她未必會「自殺」；但對「活下去」不置可否的人，肯定活不久。此所以沒有一個活著的人(不論他/她是不是哲學家)會宣揚：「活著是個錯誤」。
釋迦牟尼以後，大概沒有人比他把「人生是苦」的來龍去脈講得更透徹；「死」是一種「解脫」，則眾人皆知。問題的重點在於：選擇「最終的『解脫』」需要的不是「睿智」，而是「有『種』」。
該文提到叔本華，請參考：Schopenhauer, Arthur。另請參考：《時也，命也！》(作者Michelle No)
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19世紀最危險的哲學觀點 ---- Major Moss
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The Most Dangerous Idea in 19th-Century Philosophy
Major Moss, 02/05/26
Supposing that existence itself is a mistake — what then?
Most philosophers, I suspect, however much they may flirt with pessimism, never quite allow this idea to be entertained. Many will concede that suffering, illusion, and futility are unavoidable aspects of any life, yet will still hold the stance that, for whatever reason, we should try and stay alive. Something must still be done. Something must still be built. Our existence, though imperfect, should not be cut short.
Philipp Mainländer is one of the very few philosophers who did not turn a blind eye to this possibility.
A Life Oriented Inward
Mainländer, born Philipp Batz in 1841, lived an outwardly unremarkable and inwardly withdrawn life. He was trained by his father in commerce, briefly enlisted in the military, and largely self-educated himself through solitary reading. Poetry and philosophy offered him a sense of coherence, that the ‘disorder’ of experience could at least be diagnosed.
At some point, he seemed to have encountered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, who, even having only recently died, had already influenced nineteenth-century German thought considerably.
Of course, Schopenhauer had quite the disquieting philosophy, too.
Schopenhauer claims that the foundation of reality is not reason or purpose, but a blind, irrational, and ceaseless striving that constitutes the inner essence of all things, which he calls the Wille zum Leben, or Will to Live, which sustains life without regard for happiness or meaning. To Schopenhauer, desire renews itself endlessly, and satisfaction collapses almost immediately.
For lack of a better analogy, he thinks to exist is to be caught in a rushing river, grabbing at roots along the bank for momentary relief only to have them break apart as you cling to them. You are expected to experience pain in this cycle. The river’s momentum overwhelms any other purposes you manage to theorize.
Mainländer accepted Schophenhauer’s claims almost without reservation. What troubled him was not the claim that life was saturated with suffering, but that said suffering does not have a direction. A world governed by the Will, he believed, couldn’t just move aimlessly. Movement itself implies a trajectory, and if existence was indeed inseparable from pain, then the direction of that movement ought to be explainable.
So, in his central work, The Philosophy of Redemption, Mainländer explains just that.
The world, he argues, is made up of individuality and movement. Individuality splits reality into separate beings; movement compels them forward. Both components arise from the same source. And yet, what distinguishes Mainländer from other pessimists is that he believes movement, one of the key components of our existence, trends toward extinction. He believe the Will to Live is indicative of our contradictory nature, and puts forward in its place the Will to Die.
God, After the Fact
At the origin of all thing, Mainländer suggests a single, undivided unity. He names this unity God, and insists, quite carefully, that the term is philosophical rather than theological.
Mainländer’s God does not preside over the world as a theistic God would. Instead, he believes God is the world, or rather, dismantled himself into it. And, due to fact that His ‘unity’ could not be annihilated all at once, it fractured into individuality, giving rise to a multiplicity of separate beings such as you and I. Both components of the Mainländer’s universe post-God, that being movement and individuality, unfold as the gradual attenuation of that original unity, slowly moving toward an end consisting of non-being.
This, for labelling sake, is what we call a pandeistic theory, combining “pan-” for all, and deism.
Toward Stillness
Mainländer names this end redemption. It is only obtainable through the exhaustion of striving itself. When movement ends, suffering, bound as it is to movement, ends with it. Non-being is preferable to being, for Mainländer, because it is the logical preference.
“In the heart of things, the immanent Philosopher sees in the entire cosmos only the deepest longing for complete extinction; it is as if he heard clearly the call that pierces all the celestial spheres: Redemption! Redemption! Death to our Life! and the cheering reply: you all will find extinction and will be redeemed”
From Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption)
So what we have, so far, is this: suffering is unavoidable in existence; suffering persists because existence itself is movement; and movement tends, inevitably, toward non-being.
So, if the end of all striving is already fixed, and if suffering plagues us every step along the way, then why on Earth should we continue bearing it?
Why persist through exhaustion when we will, inevitably, die?
If we recall that the foundation of Schopenhauer’s river was momentum, and clinging to the banks for momentary relief from suffering, then the foundation of Mainländer’s river would be its direction — that you will inevitably fall off a waterfall and surely die. He would not see a point to clinging to the banks as you are only prolonging your time in this river of pain. In fact, he believes you should redeem yourself by swimming with the current to kill yourself, thus satiating the cosmos’ longing for complete extinction.
What makes Mainländer’s philosophy difficult to assimilate to is that it simply doesn’t issue any demands. It calls for us to do nothing. Our lives will conclude regardless. Human action neither completes nor obstructs it. Nothing is required, and nothing is prohibited.
Perhaps this is what makes Mainländer a bit uncomfortable to read. Philosophical frameworks tend to survive throughout time because they are, at least for the most part, practicable, pragmatic, or useful, offering some sort of consolation, motivation, or ways by which we should reform our lives.
His system does none of this, perhaps because he placed no value on longevity, believing it to be irrelevant to a universe oriented toward exhaustion.
Shortly after the publication of The Philosophy of Redemption, Mainländer took his own life. Naturally, the proximity of this act to his work has invited speculation, though such speculation proves little. Many who articulate pessimistic philosophies live long lives; many who end their lives hold no philosophy at all. However, personal suffering and a history of mental illness in his family almost certainly shaped Mainländer’s fate, as well as, perhaps, his disposition toward the darker reaches of pessimistic philosophy.
Written by Major Moss
Writer and student at the University of Texas at Austin.
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