Nov 2017

Question 1

Sanches, Francisco

1551–1623

Answer 1

Portuguese-born philosopher and distant cousin of Montaigne, educated at Monpellier and subsequently professor at Toulouse. In his most important work, Quod nihil scitur (That nothing is known, 1581) he presented a sceptical critique not only of prevailing Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies, but of mathematics and science in general, about which he held a kind of instrumentalism or constructive empiricism.

Question 2

actualization

Answer 2

For something to be actualized is for it to be made real, or made part of the actual world. In theology it may be important that God has no potential that is not actualized, since this would imply a change away from present perfection to something different and worse, or away from present imperfection to something better, neither of which is acceptable

Question 3

naive subjectivism

Answer 3

The view in the theory of ethics that when people make a moral judgement about some topic, they are strictly and literally describing their own feelings about the topic. The view has the disadvantage that if the speaker is sincere, then what is said will be true. That is, if when I say that liberalism is good I merely describe my feelings about liberalism, then, so long as I feel that it is good, what I say will be true. This unacceptable conflation of sincerity and truth is avoided by more subtle approaches to moral discourse: see expressivism, projectivism.

Question 4

instrumentalism

Answer 4

The view that a scientific theory is to be regarded as an instrument for producing new predictions or new techniques for controlling events, but not as itself capable of literal truth or falsity. The most famous example of this claim is that of Andreas Oseander (or Osiander, 1498–1552), whose Preface to De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium advocated that Copernicus’s heliocentric theory of the solar system should be accepted as a device for predicting eclipses and tides, but not regarded as true (and therefore potentially in conflict with Church doctrine). Instrumentalism diminishes the difficulty over our right to confidence in scientific theory, since it is easier to suppose that we have a right to adopt a theory as an instrument, than that we have a right to regard it as true. A tempting reaction to deep theoretical stress, such as the apparently incompatible wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics, is to suggest that each view serves as an instrument within its own proper sphere, and thereby to sidestep the theoretical urge to reconcile them. It is also tempting to take an instrumentalist (sometimes called heuristic) attitude to the use of devices such as sets, numbers, or possible worlds, that seem to facilitate our thinking in important ways, but not to deserve a place in our ontologies.
A difficult question in the philosophy of mind and language is to tell what distinguishes acceptance in a purely instrumentalist spirit from true belief. Some philosophers of a pragmatist bent, whilst sympathetic to instrumentalism, will be especially prone to deny that there is a real distinction here, since in such a philosophy all belief is simply acceptance into the system deemed most useful.

Question 5

pragmatism

Answer 5

The philosophy of meaning and truth especially associated with Peirce and James. Pragmatism is given various formulations by both writers, but the core is the belief that the meaning of a doctrine is the same as the practical effects of adopting it. Peirce interpreted a theoretical sentence as a confused form of thought whose meaning is only that of a corresponding practical maxim (telling us what to do in some circumstance). In James the position issues in a theory of truth, notoriously allowing that beliefs, including for example belief in God, are true if the belief ‘works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word’. On James’s view almost any belief might be respectable, and even true, provided it works (but working is not a simple matter for James). The apparently subjectivist consequences of this were wildly assailed by Russell, Moore, and others in the early years of the 20th century. This led to a division within pragmatism between those such as Dewey, whose humanistic conception of practice remains inspired by science, and the more idealistic route taken especially by the English writer F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937), embracing the doctrine that our cognitive efforts and human needs actually transform the reality that we seek to describe. James often writes as if he sympathizes with this development. For instance, in The Meaning of Truth (1909), p. 189, he considers the hypothesis that other people have no minds (dramatized in the sexist idea of an ‘automatic sweetheart’ or female zombie) and remarks that the hypothesis would not work because it would not satisfy our (i.e. men’s) egoistic cravings for the recognition and admiration of others. The implication that this is what makes it true that other persons (females) have minds is the disturbing part.
Peirce’s own approach to truth is that it is what (suitable) processes of enquiry would tend to accept if pursued to an ideal limit. Modern pragmatists such as Rorty and in some writings Putnam have usually tried to dispense with an account of truth (see minimalism), and concentrate, as perhaps James should have done, upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion, and need. The driving motivation of pragmatism is the idea that belief in the truth on the one hand must have a close connection with success in action on the other. One way of cementing the connection is found in the idea that natural selection must have adapted us to be cognitive creatures because beliefs have effects: they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of practical over pure reason, and continues to play an influential role in the theory of meaning and of truth. See also instrumentalism; logical positivism; pascal’s wager; science, philosophy of; will to believe.

Question 6

constructive empiricism

Answer 6

A position in the philosophy of science associated with the 20th-century Canadian philosopher Bas van Fraassen (The Scientific Image, 1980). Constructive empiricism divides science into observation statements and theory statements. It holds that the latter are capable of strict truth and falsity, but maintains that the appropriate attitude is not to believe them, but only to accept them at best as empirically adequate. It is often regarded as a variety of pragmatism or instrumentalism, although more orthodox varieties of those positions deny that theoretical statements have truth-values. A related view is held by Vaihinger, who, however, thinks that we can be sure that theoretical statements are actually false.

Question 7

Vaihinger, Hans

1852–1933

Answer 7

German philosopher. Vaihinger was educated in theology at Tübingen, and became professor at Halle. He is remembered for his ‘fictionalism’ or philosophy of ‘as if’. Influenced by Kant’s view that the mind sets itself problems that it cannot solve, and by the pessimism of Schopenhauer, Vaihinger denied that there is any prospect of achieving truth in many areas. Instead, thought proceeds by the use of fictions, or ideas known to be false. Ideas such as those of God, immortality, freedom, the social contract, or the virgin birth can be ‘beautiful, suggestive and useful’ although we know they have no application to reality. Theories are useful because they enable us to cope with what would otherwise be the unmanageable complexity of things. The doctrine bears some affinity to pragmatism, but differs in that Vaihinger thinks that our useful theories are nevertheless really false. Vaihinger’s most influential work was Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911, trs. as The Philosophy of ‘As If’, 1924).

Question 8

Herder, Johann Gottfried

1744–1803

Answer 8

German philosopher and historian, and an important influence on German Romanticism. Herder was originally destined for medicine, but at the university of Königsberg he changed his subject to theology, and made the acquaintance of Kant and Hamann. After various travels he took up the post of Generalsuperintendent of the clergy at Weimar.
Herder published continuously, his most important works being Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772, trs. as Treatise upon the Origin of Language, 1827) and Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (four parts, 1784–91, trs. as Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1800). His work, like that of Vico, is marked by a historical depth that led to dissent from the Enlightenment assumptions of a uniform, if progressing, human nature, and to a stress on the pervasive influence of history in the shaping of human language and art. Herder also attacked the prevailing faculty psychology of the time, holding that only nonsense arose from the standard distinctions between reason, will, desire, affection, and so forth. Rather, the person is a single unity (infused by a spirit or vital force, Kraft) that reasons, wills, and desires. Herder was also one of the first philosophers to identify the ability to reason with the ability to use language, and to equate thinking with inner speaking.

Question 9

conservation principles

Answer 9

The principles in physical theory asserting that some quantity, such as mass, momentum, energy or momentum-energy, is invariant over time.

Question 10

gambler’s fallacy

Answer 10

Also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy. Either
(i) the mistake of supposing that results on a system such as a roulette table will continue to display some pattern they have recently been showing (e.g. reds are ‘hot’), or
(ii) the converse mistake of supposing that an opposite pattern must be becoming due (by ‘the law of averages’).
In fact a fair gambling system is one on which the probability of some outcome remains exactly the same on each occasion: a roulette wheel has no memory. It should be noticed that if a system is not known to be like this there may be no fallacy. If we are betting on the weather, or a horse, it may be quite reasonable to take a sequence of rainy days, or a sequence of wins, as increasing the chance of another.

Question 11

meme

Answer 11

A meme is a cultural object like the mini-skirt, the computer virus, or the belief in ghosts, that can be replicated or passed on, and which in the processes of transmission evolves and seems to have a life of its own. The term was coined by the zoologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976): it has affinities with gene (the unit of biological selection), memory, and mimesis or imitation. Dawkins’s idea is that processes of evolution can occur given any entities that can be replicated. In the abstract, the process does not require that the entities involved are biologically defined. It is controversial whether the idea assists or obstructs attempts to understand cultural change through time.

Question 12

Rand, Ayn

1905–82

Answer 12

Russian-born novelist whose extreme and simplistic views give her a following on the political right. Her philosophy of ‘objectivism’ is in fact simple egoism, a doctrine widely thought untenable (see Butler, Joseph; prisoners’ dilemma). Politically she could see nothing but good in unfettered capitalism.

Question 13

voluntarism

Answer 13

Generally a position seeing reason and intellect as subservient to the will: any position sympathizing with Hume’s dictum that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. In ethics, voluntarism is the position that it is will or desire that creates values, although this is more commonly called projectivism or expressivism. The theological position that all values are traits that become elevated through being chosen by God is also known by the name. Also in theology, voluntarism is a term for the fideistic position that it is legitimate to believe in things because it is legitimate to want to do so. This position is found in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and the pragmatist James. Finally, the term is applied to the embracing metaphysic of Schopenhauer that places a blind and all-powerful will at the basis of all nature.

Question 14

chung or shu

Answer 14

In Confucianism, conscientiousness and altruism. Chung means the full development of the virtuous self, and shu means the extension of that mind to others. See also altruism, eudaimonia, friendship.

Question 15

extrinsic value

Answer 15

The value something has only insofar as it is conducive to something else; the opposite of intrinsic value.

Question 16

linguistic determinism/relativism

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 16

Also known as the thesis of linguistic determinism, the view named after the linguists Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), that the language people speak determines the way they perceive the world. As such, the view has a long history of adherents, including Aristotle (Rhetoric, Bk. iii). It is a central theme in Vico (The New Science) and a doctrine of von Humboldt’s. Whilst many philosophers accept that perception is ‘theory-laden’, and that the theories we can bring to bear are constrained by the concepts we have available, it is more difficult to read off just which concepts are available from the surface phenomena of language. Whilst Sapir himself thought of linguistic determinism in a relatively a priori way, his pupil Whorf collected evidence of linguistic and conceptual divergence from many Native American languages. Categories that may be very different include those of time, causation, and the self. It should be noted that some superficial examples of diversity that are frequently cited are in fact spurious. It is not true, for example, that the Indo-Aleut languages have a vast number of words for different varieties of snow.

Question 17

Price, Richard

1723–91

Answer 17

Welsh dissenting minister, moral philosopher, and actuary. Price’s A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758) is a late defence of rationalism in moral philosophy, against the moral sense theory of Hutcheson and the attempt to found morals on the passions in Hume. Price argues that moral opinion is more like understanding the nature of things than merely responding to them, and attempts to connect morality with an appreciation of the eternal and immutable nature of actions. In the same work Price also attempts a response to Hume’s scepticism about miracles. Although his work is not regarded as in the first rank, Price had considerable influence on the political and philosophical culture of his time: he was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, wrote an important pamphlet defending the American movement for independence, and was attacked by Burke for a similar defence of the French revolution. He also wrote on actuarial matters, and on the need for provision to extinguish the national debt.

Question 18

transformation rules

Answer 18

In logic, a rule entitling one to transform an expression of one form into that of another. The transformation of ¬(p & q) into ¬p ∨ ¬q is an example of De Morgan’s laws.

Question 19

Bradwardine, Thomas

c. 1300-49

Answer 19

One of the ‘Oxford Calculators’. He is remembered mainly by historians of medieval science as an influential mathematician. His principal work was De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (On the ratio of Velocities in Motions). In philosophy he wrote De futura contingentibus (On Future Contingents).

Question 20

end and means

Answer 20

The end of an action is that for the sake of which it is performed; the means is the way in which the end is to be achieved. The distinction arises in connection with various moral principles (you may not do evil for the sake of good; who wills the end wills the means; people must always be treated as ends, never merely as means) and its application is not always clear. For example, could you treat someone as a mere means if they want to be so treated, and you respond to that want? See double effect, principle of; means-ends reasoning.

Question 21

Jansenism

Answer 21

Christian sect owing allegiance to the doctrines of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585–1638). The principal tenet is that without the operation of divine grace, obedience to God’s commands is impossible. Grace itself is irresistible when offered, so the upshot is a theological determinism. The tragedian Racine was influenced by Jansenism which was condemned as heretical by Pope Innocent X. It is important in the history of philosophy because of the Port-Royal logic, and the influence of the Jansenist leader Arnauld.

Question 22

personal identity

Answer 22

The problem is that of what makes the identity of the single person at a time or through time. To take the latter first, we can each imagine ourselves as having been rather different, or as becoming rather different, as indeed we will in the normal course of life. What makes it the case that I survive a change, that it is still me at the end of it? It does not seem necessary that I should retain the body I now have, since I can imagine my brain transplanted into another body, and I can imagine another person taking over my body, as in multiple personality cases. But I can also imagine my brain changing either in its matter or its function while it goes on being me that is thinking and experiencing, perhaps less well or better than before. My psychology might change, so its continuity seems only contingently connected with my own survival. So, from the inside, there seems nothing tangible making it I myself who survives some sequence of changes. The problem of identity at a time is similar: it seems possible that more than one person (or personality) should share the same body and brain, so what makes up the unity of experience and thought that we each enjoy in normal living? The problems of personal identity were first highlighted in the modern era by Locke, who recognized that the idea that the sameness of a person might consist in the sameness of underlying mental substance, the solution proposed by Descartes, was incapable of providing any criterion for use in the ordinary empirical world, for instance in connection with the just attribution of responsibility for past action. Locke’s own solution lay in the unity of consciousness, and in particular in the presence of memory of past actions; this account has been criticized as either circular, since memory presupposes identity, or insufficiently consonant with normal practice, since people forget things that they themselves did. The unity of the self failed to survive the scrutiny of Hume, whose own theory that the unity consisted in a kind of fiction (perhaps like that of a nation or a club, whose existence through time is not an all-or-nothing affair) was one of the few parts of his philosophy with which he declared himself dissatisfied. The organizing principle behind the unity of consciousness was a central element in Kant’s reaction to the sensational atomism of the empiricists. Contemporary philosophy contains successors of all these attacks on the problem.

Question 23

Sun Tsu

Sunzi

Answer 23

Much-admired Chinese text on The Art of Warfare, ascribed to Sun Wu, a contemporary of Confucius. He is supposed to have demonstrated its principles on a bevy of the emperor’s concubines, who quickly became a disciplined body after he beheaded a couple of them for giggling.

Question 24

authenticity

Answer 24

The condition of significant, emotionally appropriate living. Contrasted, especially in Heidegger, with inauthenticity: a state in which life, stripped of purpose and responsibility, is depersonalized and dehumanized. See also alienation.

Question 25

Diotima of Manitea

Answer 25

A priestess whose teaching on the subjects of beauty and love is reported by Socrates in the Symposium. The historicity of Diotima has usually been doubted, although there are what appear to be bronze bas-relief representations of her dating from the 4th century bc, and her key doctrines differ tellingly from those of Plato.

Question 26

Socrates

469-399 BCE

Answer 26

The engaging and infuriating figure of the early dialogues of Plato, Socrates represented the turning point in Greek philosophy, at which the self-critical reflection on the nature of our concepts and our reasoning emerged as a major concern, alongside cosmological speculation and enquiry. The historical Socrates cannot easily be distinguished from the Platonic character, as there are few other sources for Socrates’s life and doctrines (Xenophon is one). He served as a soldier in the Peloponnesian War, and was married to Xanthippe, by whom he had three male children. He was of strong build, great endurance, and completely indifferent to wealth and luxury.
His subordination of all other concerns to a life spent inquiring after wisdom is the most commanding example, seldom approached, of the proper way of living for a philosopher. He remains the model of a great teacher, but it is uncertain whether he had anything in the nature of a formal school. His friendship with some of the aristocratic party in Athens is often supposed to explain why he was eventually brought to trial, on charges of introducing strange gods and corrupting the youth. Plato’s Crito and Phaedo record the inspirational manner in which he refused to break the laws of Athens and escape during the thirty days between his trial and execution, and they celebrate the fortitude with which he met his death. Whilst his skill at the dialectical, questioning method is unquestioned, his positive contributions and doctrines are matters of some debate, and opinions vary between ascribing to him many of the positive doctrines of Plato, and denying that he had any doctrines at all of his own, apart from his attachment to rigorous dialectical method as the instrument for separating truth from error. All the Greek schools of philosophy conceived of themselves as owing much to Socrates, except for the Epicureans who disliked him intensely, calling him ‘the Athenian buffoon’.

Question 27

Plato

c.429-347 BCE

Answer 27

Plato was born in Athens of an aristocratic family. He recounts in the Seventh Letter, which, if genuine, is part of his autobiography, that the spectacle of the politics of his day brought him to the conclusion that only philosophers could be fit to rule. After the death of Socrates in 399, he travelled extensively. During this period he made his first trip to Sicily, with whose internal politics he became much entangled; sceptics about the authenticity of the Seventh Letter suppose it to be a forgery designed to support the opposition party of Dion against the tyrant Dionysius II. He visited Sicily at least three times in all and may have been richly subsidized by Dionysius. On return from Sicily he began formal teaching at what became the Academy. Details of Plato’s life are surprisingly sparse, partly because of the Athenian convention against naming contemporaries in literary works; Aristotle, for example, although a student at the Academy for some twenty years, gives us no information about Plato’s life. As a result the dating of his works has to be established on internal evidence, and is subject to scholarly dispute.
Plato’s fame rests on his Dialogues which are all preserved. They are usually divided into three periods, early, middle, and late. Early dialogues include Hippias Minor, Laches, Charmides, Ion, Protagoras, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Gorgias, Meno, Cratylus, and the doubtful Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus, and Euthydemus; middle dialogues include Phaedo, Philebus, Symposium, Republic, Theaetetus; and to the late period belong Critias, Parmenides, Phaedrus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, and Laws. The early dialogues establish the figure of Socrates, portrayed as endlessly questioning, ruthlessly shattering the false claims to knowledge of his contemporaries. The aim of the elenctic method (see elenchus) is allegedly to clear the ground for establishing a just appreciation of virtue, but more is done negatively than positively. When Socrates asks ‘What is x?’ (virtue, justice, friendship, etc.), he is shown as brushing aside mere examples of x in favour of pursuit of the essence or form of x, or that which makes things x. In the middle dialogues, concern switches to the philosophical underpinnings of this notion of a form, possibly in response to pressure on Plato to justify the dialectical method as more than a sceptical game. The middle dialogues are not in dialogue form, and do not exhibit the Socratic method. The change may have been connected with Plato’s belief that the young should not be exposed to such drastic solvents (the teaching method of the Academy prohibited students younger than thirty years old from such exercises).
It is the middle dialogues that defend the doctrines commonly thought of as Platonism, and the positive doctrines are certainly uncompromising. A pivotal concept is that of the forms. These are independent, real, divine, invisible, and changeless; they share features of the things of which they are the form, but also cause them (so they are not simply common properties, or universals). Unique amongst them is the form of the good, the quasi-divine goal of mystical apprehension that could be achieved, if at all, only at the end of the philosophical pilgrimage.
Apprehension of the forms is knowledge (noēsis) whereas belief about the changing everyday world is at best opinion (doxa). Knowledge is recollection of the acquaintance we had with the forms before our immortal souls became imprisoned in our bodies (see anamnesis, beauty). The Republic develops the celebrated comparison between justice and order in the soul, and that in the state; the famous myth of the cave introduces the doctrine that only those who apprehend the form of the good are fit to rule.
The Parmenides and Theaetetus are late middle or early late dialogues, and the former contains sufficiently devastating criticism of the doctrine of forms to throw Plato’s later views into doubt. The latter is a brilliant investigation of the concept of knowledge that ushers in the classical and still widely accepted account of knowledge as true belief plus a logos, or certification by reason. In the late works, especially the last and longest dialogue, the Laws, Plato returns to the character of the ideal republic in a more sober manner, with civic piety and religion taking much of the burden of education away from philosophy. The Timaeus is especially interesting as a scientific treatise, whose cosmology echoed on in the Neoplatonism of the Christian era. Plato is generally regarded as the inventor of philosophical argument as we know it, and many would claim that the depth and range of his thought have never been surpassed.

Question 28

illicit major

Answer 28

Fallacy committed when a syllogism has a major term distributed in the conclusion but not in the premise. ‘Some mortals are herbivores; no lions are mortal; therefore no lions are herbivores.’

Question 29

Ockham, William of

c. 1285-1349

Answer 29

English theologian and philosopher. The first certain date of Ockham’s life is that he was ordained subdeacon in 1306. He joined the Franciscans, and lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard in Oxford between 1317 and 1319. His progress towards master of theology was halted by one Peter Lutterell, an ‘overzealous Thomist’, who accused Ockham of heresy before the university and the Pope. In 1328 his relations with the papacy deteriorated further when he defended, on behalf of the Franciscans and against the papacy, the doctrine that Jesus and the disciples owned no property; Ockham was forced to take refuge with Emperor Louis of Bavaria. He may have died of the Black Death, in the course of moves of reconciliation with the papacy.
Ockham is famous as the leader of the nominalists, or those who denied the reality of universals, or real distinct properties and natures apart from the things possessing them. While Ockham certainly held that everything that exists outside the mind is singular, he also allowed the mind a power of abstractive cognition (e.g. Bk. ii of the Sentences, q. 15), so his position may be nearer to a form of conceptualism. With the abandonment of realism about universals goes the epistemology postulating cognitions of intelligible species, and Ockham’s own epistemology depends on the intuitive cognition of particular, single things, and subsequent abstraction. Ockham’s scrupulous attention to the nature of language and to logic, as well as his doctrine of abstraction, makes him a forerunner of subsequent British empiricism. Ockham’s chief works are the Four Books of the Sentences, written around 1323, the Summa of Logic (before 1329), and the Quodlibeta septem (before 1333).

Question 30

sin

Answer 30

A moral category going beyond that of simple wrongdoing by its implications of evil, disobedience, depravity, stain, and wickedness. Sin therefore requires atonement, penitence, and self-abasement, not to mention punishment. The abjection and lack of self-respect implied in the cluster of ideas serve to emphasize the importance of redemption. They are therefore an important buttress to the power of those who claim to know how to provide it. The concept is only at home in a religious tradition built around the possibility of God’s disgust, and is not found pure and simple in classical thought, where offences were equally liable to divine vengeance whether voluntary or not. See also hell, original sin, predestination, Seven Deadly Sins.

Question 31

neurosis

Answer 31

A general term for a ‘nervous’ disease, i.e. a psychological disease without an organic cause. The term was first used in 1777 by Scottish doctor William Cullen. By the 19th century the term was in widespread use for a large variety of disorders ranging from stomach complaints to heart palpitations. Present-day usage, however, tends to conform to Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of it in his account of hysteria. Freud adopted the term in the 1890s and it soon became central to the development of psychoanalysis as the prime example of a type of psychological disturbance that, in contrast to psychosis, is susceptible to the talking cure. On Freud’s understanding of it, neurosis is the outward, symbolic expression of a psychical conflict in the subject’s unconscious—it manifests itself in a variety of symptoms, such as compulsion to repeat, fetishism, and so on. We become neurotic, according to Freud, as a defence against, or compromise with, an unconscious conflict. Freud also found that in conscious life the subject seems to derive satisfaction from their neurosis (which Freud referred to as the secondary gain of illness), and often exhibit considerable reluctance to ‘cure’ themselves in therapy.

Question 32

non-linear system

Answer 32

A mathematical concept that describes a complex situation in which inputs and outputs do not function proportionally. For example, as we have all been made aware in recent times, a small change in the temperature of the planet as a whole can cause massive changes in a great number of the earth’s systems, both artificial and natural. More simply put, a non-linear system is one in which causation appears to be indirect. Climate change is the indirect, unintended result of a similarly non-linear process known as modernization. But even that does not go far enough because not all the peoples on the planet have shown an interest in Modernity, so if we are to search for the true cause of climate change we have to ask why one group of people pursued the path of industrialization and others did not. See also complexity theory.

Question 33

ontology

Answer 33

In philosophy, the theory of the existence of things—at its most basic, or fundamental, it seeks to answer the question why there is something rather than nothing. It does not examine the existence of particular things; its focus is the more general level of the possibility and actuality of anything existing at all. In the 20th century, the most influential account of ontology is given by Martin Heidegger, in his extensive writings on the subject.

Question 34

OULIPO

Answer 34

A small group of novelists and mathematicians founded in France by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais for the purpose of exploring the creative interaction between the respective fields. The group’s name is an acronym derived from the very ‘pataphysical sounding OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle (workshop on potential literature), a fact that was surely not accidental given that many of its members were also involved in the Collège de ‘pataphysique, of which it is in fact an offshoot. Although the group itself has never had a particularly high profile, a number of its members have—the most prominent are undoubtedly Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino. The group used mathematical formulae to create what Perec referred to as writing machines. So for example the writers might adopt the constraint that they cannot use a certain letter, or they might write following the rule that each successive word in a sentence must be a letter longer than the previous word and so on.
Further Reading:
W. Motte (ed.)Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (1998).

Question 35

pataphysics

pataphysique

Answer 35

French author Alfred Jarry’s playful concept defined in Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911), translated as Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician (1965), as the science of imaginary solutions. More than that, in contrast to so-called general science, it is meant to be a science of the particular, a science of exceptions, and a science of alternative or supplementary universes. In 1948 a group of writers, basically the core of the group that would later call themselves OULIPO (Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco, among others), founded a Collège de ‘pataphysique and produced a periodical devoted to absurdist writing. The college and journal folded suddenly and without explanation in 1975. In an appropriately playful essay included in his final work, Critique et Clinique (1993), translated as Essays Critical and Clinical (1997), Gilles Deleuze suggests that Jarry is an unrecognized precursor to Heidegger because they are both engaged in the task of going beyond metaphysics. In no less playful fashion, though to perhaps more serious purpose, in Fatal Strategies (1983) Jean Baudrillard describes nuclear arms as a ‘pataphysical weapons system because it is intended not to be used, indeed it is intended to eliminate the very need for weapons. It is perhaps worth adding that Don Delillo’s early novel Great Jones Street (1973) contains a hilarious pastiche of this concept: in a scene about a third of the way into the novel there is a character who describes himself as a Professor of Latent History whose work deals with events that almost took place. Jarry is generally credited as a vital precursor to so-called absurdist writing, while ‘pataphysics seems to become prominent anywhere politics starts to seem absurd.
Further Reading:
C. Bök ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (2001).

Question 36

object

Objekt

Answer 36

The thing, which may be a person, body part, symbol, image, or idea, through which the drive seeks to attain its aim, namely its satisfaction or extinction (albeit temporary). In choosing this term, Sigmund Freud wanted to make the point that the drives (the psychological organization of the instincts) do not make a distinction between animate and inanimate, partial and whole, or even real and imagined. The notion of the object is central to psychoanalysis, particularly its theory of sexuality. At the most basic level, object choice defines sexual orientation (whether homosexual or heterosexual); but it also defines the nature of the sexual perversions (any form of sexuality not organized around a relationship to another person). Since object choice is said to occur in childhood, the theory of the object is particularly important to child psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein.
Objects can be both internal and external to the body—hunger, for example, feels as if it is located in the pit of the stomach, so it is internal; whereas sensation or touch, which is experienced through the skin, is external. The distinction between the internal and external object is by no means straightforward, however, because some objects appear external but only function if they are rendered internal, such as the thumb which the child sucks in order to go to sleep. Objects can thus be effective and ineffective and therefore subject to love and hate, often at the same time, a state that is known in psychoanalysis as ambivalence.
Klein called the ineffective objects ‘bad objects’ and the effective ones ‘good objects’ and based her theory of child development around the child’s need to learn to deal with the crises the bad objects apparently represent to them. The classic example of the bad object is the breast that does not provide milk. Understandably, perhaps, to the hungry child such an object can be an object of hatred. What should also be observed is that for the child the breast is not necessarily a part of the object called ‘mummy’, and for this reason it is known as a part object. The theory of how the child relates to a particular object (part or whole) is known as object relations theory: it is concerned with not only the feeling of love or hate towards the object, but also its placement (introjected or projected, i.e. internal or external), and the way they act on or with the object.
Further Reading:
J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse (1967), translated as The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973).

Question 37

ambivalence

Answer 37

The co-existence of contradictory feelings or impulses toward the same object. Sigmund Freud adapted the term from Eugen Bleuler’s groundbreaking work on schizophrenia, Dementia praecox oder der Gruppe der Schizophrenien (1911), translated as Dementia praecox or the group of schizophrenias (1950), to account for a commonly experienced problem in the transference process known as resistance. Freud noted that in some cases, the analysand’s affection for their analyst is also the reason they do not trust them and are unable to establish a proper therapeutic relationship. Ambivalence is also exhibited in those stages of sexual development when the libidinal and destructive tendencies toward an object operate side by side, as in the sadistic phases. Object relations theorists, especially child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, make extensive use of the concept to theorize the genesis of the mature ego. Klein theorizes that the child perceives every object ambivalently because this is what their experience teaches—the breast does not always produce milk, so it is at once a good object and a bad object. How the child deals with this will determine what kind of an adult they turn out to be. In Postcolonial Studies ambivalence has been used by critics like Homi Bhabha to account for the difficult situation of the subaltern subject torn between the material benefits colonization sometimes brings (e.g., jobs in colonial administration) and the crushing weight of the loss of national sovereignty.

Question 38

transference

Ubertragung

Answer 38

Initially used by Sigmund Freud as an alternative word to displacement for describing the process of the transfer of libidinal energy between one ideation of an unconscious thought or wish and another. However, he also used it to denote what occurs in the relationship between analyst and analysand and it is this sense of the term that has become dominant, not the least because of the influence of Jacques Lacan, who insists that the analytic relationship is the defining nucleus of psychoanalysis. Transference of this latter type refers to the process whereby the analysand projects onto the analyst the affectionate (positive transference) or the hostile (negative transference) feelings aroused by the analysis. In effect, the analysand acts towards the analyst as though he or she were the embodiment of the figure important to them from childhood (e.g. father, mother, uncle, etc.). Freud noticed that this often occurred when the analysand seemed most reluctant to reveal something, so he counted it among the defences of the unconscious, describing it as a form of resistance. But inasmuch as the analysand is thereby repeating or rehearsing the essentials of the relationship they once had with their father, etc., the transference could also be made to serve a positive therapeutic purpose because it afforded the opportunity of working through in the immediacy of the present the issues from the past.

Question 39

projection

Answer 39

In psychoanalysis, the process of transposing thoughts generated by the psyche onto the outside world, thus enabling the subject to rid themselves of character traits they would prefer not to see themselves have. For example, as Sigmund Freud argues, gothic tales and horror stories give body to nameless and essentially empty anxieties and fears as well as desires that most people have. It can take more paranoid forms, too, such as the subject who is uncertain about their ability to remain faithful who then projects infidelity onto their partner. Projection is central to the work of Melanie Klein, who employs it in her account of childhood development to explain how children ‘act out’ their internal thoughts. So when a child deliberately breaks a toy they could be seen as projecting their own sense of helplessness in the family situation. See also introjection.

Question 40

persona

Answer 40

The mask, role, or character which society expects individuals to present. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung used this term, which literally means ‘mask’, to describe the different social roles people are called on to play in everyday life. The complaint made by feminist critics that society demands that women be wives, mothers, mistresses, and so on, all at once, is in effect a statement about both the significance of personae in daily life and the difficulties they present when they come into conflict with one another. What is crucial, though, about this notion of persona is the fact the subject is always conscious of the fact that ‘they’ are never quite ‘that’, they are never quite what they appear to be. This is a potential source of both anxiety and comfort. Obeying the same logic, persona is also used in literary studies to describe the character an author adopts to tell a particular story. This concept is especially useful in the case of first person narratives to distinguish the ‘I’ of the text from the actual author.

Question 41

anomalous monism

Answer 41

A doctrine in the philosophy of mind associated with Davidson. In his influential paper ‘Mental Events’ (1970), Davidson asked how the following three propositions could be made consistent:
(i) mental events cause physical events,
(ii) where there is causation there is lawlike regularity,
(iii) there is no lawlike regularity connecting the mental and the physical.
His solution was to identify mental events with physical events (hence monism), but to deny that the classification of events as mental gave us a description apt for framing lawlike generalizations (hence anomalous, or not lawlike). Critics have charged that on this account the fact that a physical event falls under a mental description has no bearing on its causal powers, which are there in virtue of its purely physical nature, so that the causal power of the mental is not really protected by the combination. But the charge has in turn been rebutted, with defenders pointing out that it is no insult to the causal power of a hurricane that there are no laws framed in terms of hurricanes and what they do.

Question 42

evolutionary ethics

Answer 42

In the 19th century, the attempt to base ethical reasoning on the presumed facts about evolution. The movement is particularly associated with Spencer. The premise is that later elements in an evolutionary path are better than earlier ones; the application of this principle then requires seeing western society, laissez-faire capitalism, or some other object of approval, as more evolved than more ‘primitive’ social forms. Neither the principle nor the applications command much respect. The version of evolutionary ethics called ‘social Darwinism’ emphasizes the struggle for natural selection, and draws the conclusion that we should glorify and assist such struggle, usually by enhancing competitive and aggressive relations between people in society, or between societies themselves. More recently the relation between evolution and ethics has been re-thought in the light of biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection. See also evolutionary psychology.

Question 43

pleasure

plaisir

Answer 43

1. In a number of books and essays, starting with the pointedly titled Le Plaisir du texte (1973), translated as The Pleasure of the Text (1975), French literary critic Roland Barthes used the essentially untranslatable distinction between plaisir and jouissance as a crucial pivot around which his thinking on culture and literature turned. Unhappily, the English translation of The Pleasure of the Text blunts the significance of this distinction by rendering ‘jouissance’ as ‘bliss’, which lacks the force of the French original whose nearer cognates include ‘orgasm’ and ‘coming’. For Barthes the distinction is political: plaisir is a conscious, subject-centred form of enjoyment capable of being put into words, but for that reason it is compliant and sedate; whereas jouissance is unconscious and inexpressible, and thus revolutionary and violent. Insofar as we experience plaisir we remain within ourselves, while jouissance threatens to dissolve or destabilize our selfhood. Extending this logic to literature, Barthes squares up this distinction with the one he later makes between readerly and writerly texts, equating the former with plaisir and the latter with jouissance.
2. The second volume of Michel Foucault’s unfinished series of books on the history of sexuality, entitled L’Usage des plaisirs (1984), translated as The Uses of Pleasure (1985), problematized pleasure in a number of ways that have subsequently become influential, particularly in Cultural Studies. At the level of language, Foucault observed that the Ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a single word, like pleasure, capable of referring to such a wide variety of acts and affects. Thus his history tries to show how and why a word like ‘pleasure’ became necessary. Consistent with his earlier work on medicine, Foucault shows that the term ‘pleasure’ performs a regulatory function, but the way that regulatory function applies varies geographically and historically. For example, Christian doctrine proscribes certain types of pleasure because they divert the believer from the true path. By contrast, the Ancient Greeks regarded pleasure as a subsidiary issue to the more important matter of the ethics of one’s acts. Foucault’s concept of pleasure is as open-ended as his concept of power, but interestingly he is quite adamant that pleasure is a better term than desire (in contrast to in the work of his close friend Gilles Deleuze).

Question 44

post-feminism

Answer 44

The position, variously argued, that feminism (specifically radical or so-called Second Wave feminism) is no longer relevant in the present situation either because (in the affirmative case) it has achieved its goals and has therefore reached its limit of usefulness, or (in the negative case) it was wrongheaded to begin with and has been superseded by a more sophisticated version. More of a sound bite than a fully thought-out concept, it is a fundamentally conservative notion, much like Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the ‘end of history’, in that it wants to say both that the struggle for equality of the sexes is over and that the struggle was unnecessarily shrill and aggressive to begin with. However, as many feminist commentators have pointed out, the post-feminist position does not reflect the reality on the ground for the majority of women in the world today, who continue to face gender bias in the workplace and at home.
Further Reading:
S. Faludi Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (1991).

Question 45

nisus

Answer 45

an effort or striving toward a particular goal or attainment; impulse.
(Latin, endeavour, impulse, effort)
A central element of Aristotle’s theory of nature, rejected in the Renaissance, is that change and movement in nature should be thought of as the operation of a nisus or principle somewhat like aspiration, yearning, or desire, driving things to develop into what they are drawn to being. See mover, unmoved; teleology.
< Latin nīsus act of planting the feet, effort, equivalent to nīt(ī) to support or exert oneself + -tus suffix of v. action, with tt > from Latin: effort, from nītī to strive

Question 46

decision procedure

algorithm

Answer 46

(derived from the name of the Islamic mathematician Al-Khowarizmi)
A set of rules or instructions that will result in the solution of a problem. An algorithm gives a decision procedure, or computable method for solving a problem. Although an algorithm will solve the problem, it may not do so efficiently, and in the theory of computation algorithms may be measured for their efficiency and their behaviour in various circumstances, for example across average cases and unfavourable cases. See also Church’s thesis, decision problem, recursive, Turing machine.

Question 47

open sentence

Answer 47

A sentence containing free variables, i.e. an expression that is not itself interpretable as true or false, but that requires the addition of one or more quantifiers to become a closed sentence. ‘x loves y’ is an open sentence; ‘(∃x)(∀y) x loves y’ is a closed sentence, saying that someone loves everyone. An open sentence with n free variables may be thought of as an n-place predicate.
Guru Rinpoche Day

Question 48

Practical Criticism

Answer 48

A form of literary analysis which focuses exclusively on the text, ignoring such extraneous factors as authorial intention and historical context. The term originates with an experiment performed on Cambridge literature students by I. A. Richards. The students were given a selection of poems to read and comment on, but they were not given the titles of the poems, nor were they told anything about who the authors of the poems were. The idea was that the students should judge the texts before them solely on the basis of what they had in front of them. Richards was amazed at how poorly (in his view) the students performed and concluded that what was needed was more practical instruction in the art of reading texts. The results of his experiments (Richards’s own background was in fact in psychology) are written up in the appropriately titled Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (1929), which became a kind of handbook for the discipline of literary studies and had enormous influence. It was however his former student, F. R. Leavis, who popularized the method of ‘close reading’ through the journal, Scrutiny, which he founded. It became the default way of reading literary texts in most of the Anglophone world. Even after its influence waned in universities due to the impact of structuralism and poststructuralism in the 1960s, it remained very much in force in high schools and colleges well into the 1980s. The exception to this rule was the US, which was instead gripped by New Criticism, a home-grown mutation of Practical Criticism, that was similarly concerned to focus only on the text.
The strength of Practical Criticism was that it set aside the merely impressionistic responses found in what Terry Eagleton describes as the ‘belle-lettristic waffle’ of the then hegemonic Bloomsbury group of authors, and brought genuine rigour to the business of reading texts. Students were taught to better understand the effects of literary convention and technique (e.g. the role of metaphor), and were given free rein to pronounce judgement on the relative worth of specific texts. Practical Criticism, particularly its leading avatar F. R. Leavis, was virtually obsessed with deciding what did and did not belong in the canon of ‘great texts’ worthy of further study. While this enabled literary studies to develop standardized texts and more importantly standardized tests in schools, thus explaining its incredible influence, it also led to standardized responses to texts and promoted the idea that only certain responses (i.e. the teacher’s) could be considered valid. Because Practical Criticism ignored both the author’s and the reader’s background and was only interested in so-called ‘universals’ like ‘truth’, it consciously reduced the range of meanings any text might in fact yield. It was this factor more than anything that led to its eventual demise as other methods celebrating diversity of meaning came into fashion. But it was also attacked from a political perspective for ignoring the significance of identity politics, particularly issues to do with gender, race, and sexuality. The plurality of possible readings that texts can give rise to is explored by reader-response critics.
Further Reading:
P. McCallum Literature and Method: Towards a Critique of I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, and F.R. Leavis (1983).

Question 49

problematization

Answer 49

Probably the most influential conception of this term derives from Michel Foucault, whose work on health, incarceration, madness, and sexuality inquires how each of these things was rendered problematic, which is to say transformed into something capable of inducing or requiring action at the level of the state. In this sense, problematization is one of governmentality’s core processes.

Question 50

impredicative definition

Answer 50

Term coined by Poincaré for a kind of definition in which a member of a set is defined in a way that presupposes the set taken as a whole. Poincaré believed that paradoxes like those of Russell and the barber were due to such definitions, and therefore proposed banning them. But it turns out that classical mathematics requires such definitions at too many points for the ban to be easily observed. See also vicious circle principle.

Question 51

vicious circle principle

Answer 51

Principle proposed by Poincaré and Russell in order to solve the logical and semantic paradoxes. It would ban any collection (set) containing members that can only be defined by means of the collection taken as a whole. It is effectively a ban on impredicative definitions.

Question 52

vicious circle

Answer 52

Logic.
a(in demonstration) the use of each of two propositions to establish the other.
b(in definition) the use of each of two terms to define the other.
2a situation in which effort to solve a given problem results in aggravation of the problem or the creation of a worse problem: a vicious circle where the more I give them, the more they expect.

Question 53

psychosis

Answer 53

A 19th century psychiatric term for madness that was taken up by psychoanalysis to designate severe mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia), which it contrasted with the less severe disorders of neurosis. In general, psychoanalysis regards psychosis as untreatable because it has as its main symptom the complete breakdown of communication, thereby making the talking cure impossible. Yet, as the work of Jacques Lacan makes plain, psychoanalysis also regards psychosis as an incredibly important phenomenon from the point of view of studying how the psychical apparatus functions. Lacan’s theory of the genesis of psychosis hinges on the failure of the Oedipal process and the foreclosure of Name-of-the-Father, with the result that symbolic order is not properly formed and the subject is locked into a nightmarish world dominated by the imaginary. Unable to distinguish between the real and the unreal, the psychotic subject suffers delusional episodes that can make life extremely difficult for them. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reject the psychoanalytic explanation of the genesis of psychosis—in their view, its genesis can only be organic, i.e. the result of physiological changes in the brain itself. As a result, their work offers no theory for the treatment of psychosis; rather, it concentrates on adapting the world (and not the ‘patient’) to its symptoms.

Question 54

symbolic

symbolique

Answer 54

One of the three ‘orders’ (the others are the imaginary and the real) which, according to Jacques Lacan, structure human existence. Lacan adapted the concept from the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, in turn, took his model from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Taking Saussure’s idea that the signifier is arbitrary in its relation to the signified, that there is in effect no necessary link between a representation and its meaning, Lévi-Strauss extended this principle to all cultural phenomena and argued that what had to be understood was the symbolic system that gives all phenomena their specific meanings. Lacan adopts this argument and adds two important implications of his own: first, that the unconscious must be structured like a language for it to have produced such a system and to be able to exist within it; second, that the subject is born into the symbolic system which they have to learn to use and this experience is alienating. For Lacan the maturation of the ego occurs when the child is inducted into the symbolic order. Psychosis, for Lacan, is the state of being one falls into if this process of induction into the symbolic fails and the subject is left stranded in the illusory world of the imaginary.

Question 55

Imaginary

imaginaire

Answer 55

A concept used by Gaston Bachelard, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Paul Sartre to indicate (in their own differing ways) a process of the mind or the psychical apparatus susceptible to the seductions of the image. For Lacan, the imaginary is the state or order of mind of the child before it is inducted into the symbolic order via the process he referred to as the mirror stage. The child sees itself in the mirror and misrecognizes the image it sees reflected there as its true self. The ‘I’ in this sense is an image, which is to say a product of the imaginary. The imaginary is not a ‘childish’ state of mind, it is rather a state of mind ignorant of the limits of the real and therefore highly creative. But it can also be disturbing—the experience of psychosis is akin to being trapped in the imaginary.

Question 56

Name-of-the-Father, Wiki

Answer 56

Lacan’s concept draws on the mythical father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo;[2] and was used by him as a strategic move in his opposition to what he saw as the over-emphasis of object relations theory on the exclusive relationship of the individual and his/her mother as a dual pair.[3]

Lacan emphasised instead the importance of the third party in the Oedipus complex – what he called “the place that she [the mother] reserves for the Name-of-the Father in the promulgation of the law”.[4] He saw this as a vital element in helping each new member of the human race to move from an exclusive, primary relation to the mother[er] to a wider engagement with the outside, cultural world – the symbolic order.

Wider horizons
Anthony Stevens has similarly argued that “Traditionally, the father’s orientation is centrifugal, i. e., towards the outside world…his is the primary responsibility for facilitating the transition from home to society’.[5] Likewise the family therapist Robin Skynner sees the father (or fatherer) playing an essential role in the process whereby “the toddler has got to see that Mum isn’t God as a first step to seeing that Dad isn’t God, and that…he’s part of something bigger too”.[6]

For Lacan, that bigger context could be seen as “the chain of discourse…in which an entire family, an entire coterie, an entire camp, an entire nation or half the world will be caught”.[7] The internalisation of the Name of the Father with the passing of the Oedipus complex ensured for Lacan participation in that wider chain of discourse, and was for him an essential element of human sanity.

Lacan distinguishes between the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real father: “It is in the name of the father that we must recognise the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law” – as distinct from “the narcissistic relations, or even from the real relations, which the subject sustains with the image and action of the person who embodies it”.[8] This paternal function imposes the law and regulates desire in the Oedipus complex, intervening in the imaginary dual relationship between mother and child to introduce a necessary symbolic distance between them (Dylan Evans). ‘The true function of the Father is fundamentally to unite (and not to set in opposition) a desire and the Law’ (Écrits), and the Symbolic Father is thus not an actual subject but a position in the Symbolic Order.

By contrast the Imaginary Father is an imago, the composite of all the imaginary constructs that the subject builds up in fantasy around the figure of the father; and may be construed either as an ideal father or as the opposite, the bad father – what Slavoj Zizek referred to as “the reverse of the father, the “anal father” who lurks behind the Name-of-the-Father qua bearer of the symbolic law”.[9]

As to the real father, Lacan stresses how “the ravaging effects of the paternal figure are to be observed with particular frequency in cases where the father really has the function of a legislator…with too many opportunities of being in a position of undeserving, inadequacy, even of fraud, and, in short, of excluding the Name-of-the-Father from its position in the signifier”.[10]

Question 57

Psychosis, Lacanian, Wiki

Answer 57

Psychosis for Lacanians is the exact opposite of the Name of the Father – the absence of that identification with the symbolic order which ensures our place in the shared intersubjective world of common sense.[11] The Name-of-the-Father is thus the fundamental signifier which permits signification to proceed normally. It not only confers identity and position on the subject within the symbolic order, but also signifies the Oedipal prohibition (the “no” of the incest taboo).

If this signifier is foreclosed, in the sense of being excluded from the Symbolic Order, the result is psychosis. Psychotics have not been properly separated from their mother[er] by the fixed name-of-the-father, and hence relate to speech and language differently from neurotics.[12]

In On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (1957), Lacan represents the Oedipus complex as “the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father, that is, the metaphor that substitutes this Name in the place first symbolized by the operation of the absence of the mother”.[13] All paternity thus involves metaphoric substitution.

Lacan originally presents the ‘paternal metaphor’ in his Seminar La relation d’objet (1956–1957): it is the fundamental metaphor on which all signification depends (all signification is phallic). If the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed, as in psychosis, there can be no paternal metaphor and hence no phallic signification.

Question 58

foreclosure

Verwerfung/forclusion

Answer 58

The psychoanalytic term for the repudiation of a specific desire. It differs from repression in that the incompatible desire is not merely prevented from entering the consciousness, all trace of its existence is denied, as if the thought had never arisen. In his reading of Freud, Jacques Lacan treats foreclosure as the specific mechanism of psychosis (in contrast to neurosis); he argues that the psychotic subject forecloses on the Name-of-the-Father (that which organizes the subject’s symbolic field and gives them their identity and meaning to their reality). In effect, then, foreclosure is the repudiation of the organizational structure of reality, hence Lacan’s treatment of it as a flight into psychosis.