Juan Luis (1492?–1540), Spanish humanist and teacher. Born in Valencia, he attended the University of Paris (1509–14) and lived most of his life in Flanders. With his friend Erasmus he prepared a widely used commentary (1522) of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. From 1523 to 1528 Vives visited England, taught at Oxford, befriended More, and became Catherine of Aragon’s confidant. While in Paris, Vives repudiated medieval logic as useless (Adversus pseudodialecticos, 1520) and proposed instead a dialectic emphasizing resourceful reasoning and clear and persuasive exposition (De tradendis disciplinis, 1532). His method was partially inspired by Rudolph Agricola and probably influential upon Peter Ramus. Less interested in theology than Erasmus or More, he surpassed both in philosophical depth. As one of the great pedagogues of his age, Vives proposed a plan of education that substituted the Aristotelian ideal of speculative certainty for a pragmatic probability capable of guiding action. Vives enlarged the scope of women’s education (De institutione feminae Christianae, 1524) and contributed to the teaching of classical Latin (Exercitatio linguae latinae, 1538). A champion of European unity against the Turks, he professed the belief that international order (De concordia, 1526) depended upon the control of passion (De anima et vita, 1538). As a social reformer, Vives pioneered the secularization of welfare (De subventione pauperum, 1526) and opposed the abuse of legal jargon (Aedes legum, 1520). Although his Jewish parents were victimized by the Inquisition, Vives remained a Catholic and managed to write an apology of Christianity without taking sides in controversial theological matters (De veritate fidei, 1543). C.G.Nore. volition, a mental event involved with the initiation of action. ‘To will’ is sometimes taken to be the corresponding verb form of ‘volition’. The concept of volition is rooted in modern philosophy; contemporary philosophers have transformed it by identifying volitions with ordinary mental events, such as intentions, or beliefs plus desires. Volitions, especially in contemporary guises, are often taken to be complex mental events consisting of cognitive, affective, and conative elements. The conative element is the impetus – the underlying motivation – for the action. A velleity is a conative element insufficient by itself to initiate action. The will is a faculty, or set of abilities, that yields the mental events involved in initiating action.
There are three primary theories about the role of volitions in action. The first is a reductive account in which action is identified with the entire causal sequence of the mental event (the volition) causing the bodily behavior. J. S. Mill, for example, says: ‘Now what is action? Not one thing, but a series of two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect. . . . [T]he two together constitute the action’ (Logic). Mary’s raising her arm is Mary’s mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s volitional state nor her arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the entire causal sequence (the ‘causing’) is the action. The primary difficulty for this account is maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate volition and the resultant bodily behavior without referring to action.
There are two non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the initiating volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of the volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: ‘The Min. . . is to be accounted active i. . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In plucking this flower I am active, because I do it by the motion of my hand, which was consequent upon my volition’ (Three Dialogues). In this century, Prichard is associated with this theory: ‘to act is really to will something’ (Moral Obligation, 1949), where willing is sui generis (though at other places Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do something). In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come under attack by Ryle (Concept of Mind, 1949). Ryle argues that it leads to a vicious regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do it, and so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is nothing beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of Ryle’s, which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of art; ‘[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like] ‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility’ (Concept of Mind). Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action with the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: ‘Volition or willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is nothing but that particular determination of the mind, whereb. . . the mind endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to be in its power’ (Essay concerning Human Understanding). This is a functional account, since an event is an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm rising is Mary’s action of raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her willing to raise it. If her arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch, it would not be action, even if the bodily movements were photographically the same. In response to Ryle’s charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal theorists tend to identify volitions with ordinary mental events. For example, Davidson takes the cause of actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid Sellars takes volitions to be intentions to do something here and now. Despite its plausibility, however, the causal theory faces two difficult problems: the first is purported counterexamples based on wayward causal chains connecting the antecedent mental event and the bodily movements; the second is provision of an enlightening account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does justice to the conative element. See also ACTION THEORY, FREE WILL PROB- LEM , PRACTICAL REASONING , WAYWARD CAUSAL CHAI. M.B. Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), French philosopher and writer who won early fame as a playwright and poet and later was an influential popularizer of Newtonian natural philosophy. His enduring reputation rests on his acerbically witty essays on religious and moral topics (especially the Philosophical Letters, 1734, and the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764), his brilliant stories, and his passionate polemics against the injustices of the ancien régime. In Whitehead’s phrase, he was more ‘a philosophe than a philosopher’ in the current specialized disciplinary sense. He borrowed most of his views on metaphysics and epistemology from Locke, whose work, along with Newton’s, he came to know and extravagantly admire during his stay (1726–28) in England. His is best placed in the line of great French literary moralists that includes Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, and Camus.
Voltaire’s position is skeptical, empirical, and humanistic. His skepticism is not of the radical sort that concerned Descartes. But he denies that we can find adequate support for the grand metaphysical claims of systematic philosophers, such as Leibniz, or for the dogmatic theology of institutional religions. Voltaire’s empiricism urges us to be content with the limited and fallible knowledge of our everyday experience and its development through the methods of empirical science. His humanism makes a plea, based on his empiricist skepticism, for religious and social tolerance: none of us can know enough to be justified in persecuting those who disagree with us on fundamental philosophical and theological matters. Voltaire’s positive view is that our human condition, for all its flaws and perils, is meaningful and livable strictly in its own terms, quite apart from any connection to the threats and promises of dubious transcendental realms.
Voltaire’s position is well illustrated by his views on religion. Although complex doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation strike him as gratuitous nonsense, he nonetheless is firmly convinced of the reality of a good God who enjoins us through our moral sense to love one another as brothers and sisters. Indeed, it is precisely this moral sense that he finds outraged by the intolerance of institutional Christianity. His deepest religious thinking concerns the problem of evil, which he treated in his ‘Poem of the Lisbon Earthquake’ and the classic tales Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759). He rejects the Panglossian view (held by Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of Leibniz) that we can see the hand of providence in our daily life but is prepared to acknowledge that an all-good God does not (as an extreme deism would hold) let his universe just blindly run. Whatever metaphysical truth there may be in the thought that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,’ Voltaire insists that this idea is ludicrous as a practical response to evil and recommends instead concrete action to solve specific local problems: ‘We must cultivate our garden.’ Voltaire was and remains an immensely controversial figure. Will Durant regarded him as ‘the greatest man who ever lived,’ while Joseph de Maistre maintained that ‘admiration for