Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

394 GLOSSARY
disposition:
double aspect theory:
dualism:
emergent properties:
epistemology:
agent chooses to do something, that agent could
always have chosen to do otherwise. However, there
were also those who argued that human actions are
determined, and that the will is not free. Their reasons
for this fell into two groups. One group involved
theological propositions, such as the assertion that
God is omniscient, or that all events are predestined,
in that they figure in God’s eternal and irresistible
plan. The other reason for denying human free will
lay in the idea that absolutely all events have a cause,
and that a cause necessitates its effect.
in contemporary philosophy, to speak of a
‘disposition’ of X is to say what X will do, if…, or of
what X would have done, if…. So, for example,
brittleness is a disposition, in that to call something
brittle is to say what it will do if, or would have done
if, something strikes or had struck it.
a theory of the relations between mind and body.
According to it, mind and body are different aspects
of, or expressions of, an underlying reality. The most
celebrated exposition of a double aspect theory in the
seventeenth century is to be found in the writings of
Spinoza.
this term has two senses, (a) ‘Substance dualism’: this
is a theory of the nature of the mind and of the body,
and asserts that minds and bodies are substances of
radically different kinds, (b) Some modern
philosophers also recognize what they call ‘property
dualism’, according to which the properties of things
can be sharply differentiated into two groups, mental
and physical. Descartes was an upholder of substance
dualism; Spinoza rejected this, but accepted property
dualism.
it has been argued that, in the course of evolution,
there come into existence ‘emergent properties’, that
is, properties which could not have been predicted on
the basis of a knowledge of previous properties. This
is also put by saying that there come into existence
properties which cannot be ‘reduced’ (see
‘reductionism’) to other properties. It has been argued
that life and reflective thought are emergent
properties in this sense.
the theory of knowledge (from the Greek word ‘epist
m ’). Strictly, this is the branch of philosophy which