To give a comprehensive account of the main problems of metaphysics in the space of a few pages is clearly quite impossible. What follows is necessarily highly selective and to that extent misleading; it, nevertheless, attempts to offer an introduction to metaphysical thinking itself rather than reflection on the nature of metaphysics.
The early Greek philosophers asked the question ti to on, "What is existent?" or "What is really there?" They originally interpreted this as a question about the stuff out of which things were ultimately made, but a new twist was given to the inquiry when Pythagoras, in the late 6th century bc, arrived at the answer that what was really there was number. Pythagoras conceived what is there in terms not of matter but of intelligible structure; it was the latter that gave each type of thing its distinctive character and made it what it was. The idea that structure could be understood in numerical terms was probably suggested to Pythagoras by his discovery that there are exact correlations between the lengths of the strings of a lyre and the notes they produce. By a bold extrapolation he seems to have surmised that what held in this case must hold in all cases.
The Pythagorean theory that what is really there is number is the direct ancestor of the Platonic theory that what is really there is Forms, or Ideas (eidē, or ideai). Plato's Forms were also intelligible structures and not material elements, but they differed from Pythagorean numbers by being conceived of as separately existent. There was, as Plato put it, a "place accessible to the intelligence," which was the place, or realm, of Forms. Each Form was a genuine existent, in the sense of being precisely what it pretended to be; the Form of Beauty, for example, was beautiful through and through. By contrast, the many particular things that partook of or resembled what was truly beautiful were one and all defective. However beautiful any one of them might be, it was also in another respect lacking in beauty. It turned out to possess contradictory characteristics, and as such could never be identified with true reality.
Plato had taken over from his predecessor Heracleitus, who flourished at about the beginning of the 5th century bc, the doctrine that the world of sensible things is a world of things in constant flux; as he put it in the Theaetetus, nothing is in this world because everything is in a state of becoming something else. Forms were needed to provide stable objects for knowledge as well as to answer the question of what is ultimately real. Although Plato played down the reality of sensible things, making them mere objects of opinion and describing them as falling between what is and what is not, he did not deny their existence. It was not his thesis that Forms alone exist. On the contrary, he appears to have held that God (who was certainly not a Form) had somehow fashioned the physical world on the model of the Forms, using space as his material. This is the description that is given in the Timaeus, in a passage that Plato perhaps meant his readers not to take quite literally but that stated his view as plainly as he thought it could be stated. In this passage God appears in the guise of the "Demiurge," although he is referred to freely in other Platonic dialogues. Souls were also distinct from Forms in Plato's thought.
In the discussions that developed around the theory of Forms, many difficulties were revealed, most of them familiar to Plato himself. The question of how the one Form was supposed to relate to the many particulars that participated in or resembled it was nowhere satisfactorily answered. The difficulty turned on how the Form was to be thought of at once as an existent and as a structure. Plato seemed on occasion to think of it as a structure hypostatized, or given real existence. This thesis led to the antinomies exposed in the "third man" argument. According to this theory, particular men were alleged to be human because of their relationship to "Man himself"; i.e., the Form of man. But whence did the latter derive its nature? Must there not be a second Form to explain what the first Form and its particulars have in common, and will not this generate an infinite regress? Again, the problem of the precise population of the world of Forms never got a definitive solution, perhaps because the theory of Forms was put to more than one purpose. Sometimes it was said that there is a Form corresponding to every general word, but elsewhere the theory was that what is merely negative (e.g., lifeless) has no need of a special Form, nor does what is manufactured. There is even a question as to whether trivial everyday things such as mud and hair and dirt have Forms, though it is agreed that there is a Form of man.
The problems just referred to were stated trenchantly in Plato's dialogue the Parmenides; the discussion there ends with the statement that the Forms must be retained if an account of intelligible discourse is to be given, but no indication is offered as to how the theory is to be refurbished. Some Platonic scholars have inferred that Plato virtually gave it up, but such evidence as there is suggests that he only transformed it into a theory of Form-numbers, more openly Pythagorean than the earlier version. There are many references in Aristotle to this theory of Form-numbers, but no writing of Plato's own on the subject has survived, and it is virtually impossible at this late stage to say what this theory really comprised.
One further feature of the theory of Forms must be mentioned here: the view that there is a supremely important Form, the Form of goodness, or of the Good, which somehow determines the contents of the world of Forms and brings order into it. In a celebrated but brief and tantalizing passage in Politeia, the Form of the Good is spoken of as being to the intelligible realm what the sun is to the visible realm; just as the sun makes living things grow and renders them visible, so the Good is responsible for the existence and intelligibility of Forms, though it is itself "on the other side of Being." This passage had a tremendous historical influence on the Neoplatonists, who saw it as anticipating the ultimate ineffable reality—the One, from which everything describable was in some way an emanation—in which they came to believe. It seems possible, however, that Plato had no such mystical thoughts in mind but simply wanted to say that the world of Forms is ordered through and through, everything in it being there for a purpose. The Form of Good is, in fact, the counterpart of the nous (Mind) of Anaxagoras, another of Plato's predecessors, which was supposed to arrange everything for the best.
The most famous critic of Plato's theory of Forms was Aristotle, who devised his doctrine of categories largely to counter it. According to this doctrine, "being is spoken of in many ways": one can say that there are such things as individual horses, but one can also say that there is such a thing as being a horse, or as being upside down. Expressions can be classified under various heads: predicates signify substances (e.g., "man" or "horse"), qualities (e.g., "white"), relations (e.g., "greater"), quantities (e.g., "three yards long"), time (e.g., "last year"), and so on—sometimes Aristotle listed ten categories, sometimes only eight. The kind of being that any predicate possesses, however, is derivative in comparison with the being of an individual substance, a particular man or a particular horse. It is such things that exist in the primary sense, and it is upon their existence that the existence of other types of being depends. Or, to put the point in not quite Aristotelian terms, primary substances are the only concrete existents; Socrates, the bearer of a proper name, exists in a way in which humanity or whiteness or being greater do not. The latter are really no more than abstractions, and nothing but confusion can arise from neglecting that fact.
Mention has already been made of the difficulties into which this doctrine led when it came to describing primary substances; it appeared that these entities could not be characterized but only named or pointed to, a conclusion accepted much later by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a 20th-century philosopher, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and by Russell in his lectures on logical atomism. These difficulties, however, were not seen at the time the theory was promulgated, and it is more important here to emphasize the fact that it undermined any doctrine of the Platonic type. To argue that Forms, or numbers, alone are real is to argue for the reality of abstractions; to put the point succinctly, beauty exists only so long as something is beautiful, and that something must be a concrete individual. Or if this is not quite true (for, after all, it could be said that there is such a thing as having a million sides even if nothing in fact has a million sides), concrete existence must precede abstract existence in some cases at least: the "x" in "x is red" must sometimes be replaceable by an actual rather than a merely possible entity.
A prominent subject of philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages was what came to be known as the problem of universals, which concerned the ontological status, or type of existence, to be assigned to the referents of general words. One of Plato's critics had said, "I see particular horses, but not horseness"; and Plato had answered, "That is because you have eyes but no intelligence." There can be no doubt that Plato thought that horseness, the Form of horse, or Horse itself, to use his own expression, was something that existed separately; it could be discerned not by the bodily eyes but by the eye of the soul. The view that besides individual horses there also exists the Form of horse was known in the Middle Ages as Realism. Aristotle was also alleged to be a Realist, because he too thought that Forms were really there, although only as embodied in particular instances. More skeptical philosophers denied the reality of universals altogether, some identifying them with thoughts (conceptualists), others with mere names (nominalists).
The dispute about universals was in fact very confused. At least two quite separate issues were involved. First of all, there was the question about the status to be assigned to whatever it was that predicates referred to; this question seemed urgent just because, for example, geometricians were able to discuss the properties of the triangle or the circle. What and where were the triangle and the circle? In fact, the Aristotelian doctrine of categories had already indicated that the being of any predicate was necessarily different from that of primary substances; the circle did not and could not exist as this man or this horse did. When Aristotle is described as a Realist in the dispute about universals, the description is very misleading. In one sense he did not believe that universals are real at all; in another sense, however, he did, and this is where the second issue arose. Some people who denied the reality of universals wanted to say that all classification is artificial; the descriptions men give of things depend upon their interests as much as upon what is really there. Aristotle, by contrast, believed in a doctrine of natural kinds; he thought that every particular horse, for example, embodied the form or objective essence of horse, which was accordingly a genuine, if abstract, constituent of the world. The question of the extent to which classification is artificial is clearly quite different from that of the status of universals; it remains to be answered even if the latter problem is dismissed, as it is by modern philosophers who say that only proper names and individuating phrases have referents; general words do not. These differences, however, were not clearly seen either in the Middle Ages or during the 17th century, when the whole question was discussed at length by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
In discussions of the problem of universals, it was frequently claimed, especially by nominalists, that only particulars exist. The notion of a particular is in many respects unclear. Strictly speaking, the terms particular and universal are correlatives; a particular is an instance of universal (for example, this pain, that noise). It would seem from this that particulars and individuals should be the same, but there are writers who distinguish them. Bradley, in his Principles of Logic (1883), treated particulars as mere momentary instantiations of universals and contrasted them with individuals as continuants possessing internal diversity. An individual can be not merely identified but also re-identified; because it lasts through time, it may possess incompatible attributes at different periods of its history. A particular, on the other hand, is nothing but an instantiation of an attribute and as such must possess that attribute if it is to be anything. Similarly, a particular can be met with once, but not again; as time moves on, it passes out of existence and is replaced by another particular that may resemble it but is not literally identical with it.
If particulars and individuals are thus distinguished, it is by no means clear that only particulars exist, or indeed that they exist at all; it could be that they are no more than abstract aspects of genuinely concrete entities such as persons or material things. But there are arguments on the other side, advanced in a variety of forms by David Hume and Bertrand Russell. Hume believed that the ultimate constituents of the world were either impressions or their fainter copies, ideas; both were species of perceptions. Impressions he defined as "internal and perishing existences"; they were of various kinds, embracing feelings as well as such things as experienced colours and smells, but all were at best extremely short-lived. Impressions arose in human consciousness from unknown causes; their existence could not, however, be denied. By contrast, the existence of continuing and independent material objects and of continuing minds was extremely precarious; analysis showed both to be no more than bundles of perceptions, united by certain relations, and Hume more than once referred to them as "fictions," although it turned out on examination that they were not fictions in the way ghosts are. Hume's reasons for advancing these views were primarily epistemological; he thought that statements about continuants were all open to doubt, although statements about the contents of immediate experience could not be challenged. When it was a question of what really existed, the only sure answer was items in consciousness—namely, impressions and ideas.
Russell, who was generally sympathetic to this answer, added another argument derived from logic: proper names, he said, were names of particulars, which must accordingly exist. Ordinary proper names (such as "Socrates") had other functions than to denote, but logically proper names ("this" was Russell's example) served simply to pick out objects of immediate acquaintance. Russell was apparently unabashed by the consequence that such objects would be both private to the experience of particular persons and of very brief duration; he thought his doctrine of "logical constructions," which allowed for "inferred entities" on the basis of what is immediately certain, would provide the publicity and continuity necessary to do justice to actual experience. These assumptions, however, have met with serious criticism. P.F. Strawson, a British philosopher whose thought centres on the analysis of the structure of ordinary language, especially in his Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959), not only attacked Russell's account of proper names but argued that experience demands a framework of basic particulars that are not Russell's momentary private objects but continuing public existents—in fact, individuals in the terminology explained above. If experience consisted of nothing but sounds, the minimum prerequisite of intelligibility would be that there should be a continuing master sound, an analogue in this medium of continuing material substance in the material order. Without such basic particulars as continuing material things, identification and reidentification would be impossible. Strawson conceded that persons as well as things were genuine continuants, but maintained all the same that the hypothesis that reality might consist of nothing but minds was quite untenable. Minds are no more than aspects of persons, and persons have bodies as well as minds. Strawson agreed that disembodied existence was logically possible, but added that such existence would make no sense except as a survival of embodied existence in a common public world.
It remains to add here that a number of philosophers have tried to argue that the basic items in reality should be described not as substances but in some other terms. Russell at one stage in his career spoke of the world as consisting of events; his former colleague A.N. Whitehead made the notion of process central in his metaphysics. Developments in modern physics undoubtedly lend a certain plausibility to these and similar views. Yet it remains difficult to understand what an event could be in which nothing was concerned, or how there could be a process in which nothing was in process. Event and process, in fact, are expressions that belong to derivative categories in the general Aristotelian scheme; like all other categories, they depend on the category of substance. If the latter is removed, as these metaphysicians propose to remove it, it is hard to know what is left.
Perhaps the most celebrated issue in classical metaphysics concerned the existence of God. God in this connection is the name of "the perfect Being" or "the most real of all things"; the question is whether it is necessary to recognize the existence of such a being as well as of things that either are or might be objects of everyday experience. A number of famous arguments have been advanced from the time of the Greeks in favour of the thesis that such a recognition is necessary. The neatest and most ingenious was the a priori argument of St. Anselm in the 11th century, who said that "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" must exist in fact as well as in thought, for if it existed only in thought and not in fact, something greater than it could be conceived, namely the same thing existing in fact. God necessarily exists, because the idea of God is the idea of that than which nothing greater can be conceived. This is the argument later known as the ontological proof. Relatively few philosophical theologians, either in the Middle Ages or later, could bring themselves to accept this bold piece of reasoning (although Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel all accepted it in principle); most preferred to ground their case for God's existence on premises that claimed to be empirical. Thus, St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the most influential Scholastic philosopher, in the 13th century argued that to explain the fact of motion in the world, the existence of a prime mover must be presupposed; that to account for contingent or dependent being the existence of something that is necessary or self-contained must be presumed; that to see why the world is orderly and why the different things in it fit together harmoniously, a situation that might not have obtained, a Creator who fashioned it on these lines must be postulated—adding in each case "and this all men call 'God'." These are versions of the first cause argument and the argument from design, which were to figure prominently in the thinking of later theistically inclined metaphysicians.
The first cause argument should, perhaps, be examined in somewhat greater detail, because it both has an immediate plausibility and lies at the basis of many different kinds of metaphysical systems (that of Hegel, for example, as well as that of Aquinas). The argument begins with the innocent-looking statement that something contingent exists; it may be some particular thing, such as oneself, or it may be the world in general (thus, the description of the proof as being a contingentia mundi, or "from the contingency of the world"). In describing oneself or the world as contingent, one means only that the thing in question does not exist through itself alone; it owes its being to the activity of some other thing, as a person owes his being to his parents. Contingent things are not self-complete; they each demand the existence of something else if they are to be explained. Thus, the move is made from contingent to necessary being; it is felt that contingent things, of whatever order, cannot be endlessly dependent on other contingent things but must presuppose a first cause that is self-complete and so exists necessarily. In Hegel the necessary being is not a separate existent but, as it were, an order of things; the loose facts of everyday life and even of science are said to point to a system that is all-embracing and in which everything is necessarily what it is. The principle of the argument, however, is unchanged despite the change in the conclusion.
Damaging criticism was brought against all the traditional arguments for God's existence by Hume and Kant in the 18th century. The ontological proof was undermined by the contention that "being is not a real predicate"; existence is not part of the concept of God in the way in which, for example, being all-powerful is. To say that something exists is not to specify a concept further but to claim that it has an instance; it cannot be discovered whether a concept has an instance by merely inspecting it. The first cause argument, it was contended, suffers from two fatal weaknesses. Even if it is correct in its assertion that contingent being presupposes necessary being, it cannot identify the necessary being in question with God (as happened in each of the Thomistic proofs) without resurrecting the ontological argument. If it is true, as supporters of the causal proof suppose, that God alone can answer the description of a necessary being, then whatever exists necessarily is God and whatever is God exists necessarily. Modern supporters of the causal proof have tried to meet this objection by saying that the equivalence is one of concepts, not of concept and existent; the existence of a necessary being is already established in the first part of the argument, and the equivalence in the second part of the argument is between the concept of necessary being and the concept of God. In other words, they distinguish between existence and essence. In the first part of the argument, the existence of a necessary being is proved; in the second part of the argument, the essence of that necessary being is identified with what men call God. Beyond this first contended weakness, however, there are grave difficulties in the move from contingent to necessary existence. Things in the experienced world are causally related, and some account of this relationship can be given in terms of the temporal relations of events; causal relations hold primarily between kinds of events, and a cause is, at least, a regular antecedent of a specific kind of effect. But when an attempt is made to extend the notion of causality from a relationship that holds within experience to one that connects the experienced world as a whole to something that falls wholly outside it, there is no longer anything firm on which to hold. The activities of God cannot precede happenings in the world because God is, by definition, not in time; and how the relationship is to be understood in these circumstances becomes highly problematic. Some metaphysicians, like some recent theologians, seek to evade the difficulty by saying that God is not the cause of the world but its ground, or again by distinguishing causes of becoming, which are temporal, from a cause of being, which is not. It is doubtful whether these moves do more than restate the problem in different terms.
The argument from design is itself a form of causal argument and accordingly suffers from all the difficulties mentioned above, together with some of its own, as Hume and Kant both point out. Even on its own terms it is wrong to conclude the existence of a Creator rather than an architect. Furthermore, it infers that the being in question has unlimited powers, when all that the evidence seems to warrant is that its powers are very great. The argument lost much of its force by the publication of the English naturalist Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. The unbroken reign of law throughout natural evolution is impressive, but as a line of reasoning it does not seem to bear close examination.
The metaphysical problem of God's existence is more of an issue today than the problem of universals; there are still thinkers who hope to restate the old proofs in more convincing ways. The ontological proof, in particular, has won renewed attention from thinkers such as Norman Malcolm, a philosopher strongly influenced by Wittgenstein, and Charles Hartshorne, an American Realist whose form of theism is called panentheism (the doctrine of a God who has an unchanging essence but who completes himself in an advancing experience). Increasingly, however, philosophers of religion are preoccupied not with these metaphysical abstractions but with the status and force of actual religious claims. "The most real of all things" is no longer at the centre of their attention: they seek to investigate God as a suitable object for worship.
As well as believing in the reality of Forms, Plato believed in the immortality of the human soul. The soul was, he thought, an entity that was fundamentally distinct from the body although it could be and often was affected by its association with the body, being dragged down by what he called in one passage "the leaden weights of becoming." The soul was simple, not composite, and thus not liable to dissolution as were material things; further, it had the power of self-movement, again in contrast to material things. Ideally the soul should rule and guide the body, and it could ensure that this situation persisted by seeing that the bodily appetites were indulged to the minimum extent necessary for the continuance of life. The true philosopher, as Plato put it in the Phaedo, made his life a practice for death because he knew that after death the soul would be free of bodily ties and would return to its native element. He also thought that the soul was "akin" to the Forms; it was through the intellect, the purest element in the soul, that the Forms were discovered.
Plato mentioned and attempted to refute alternative accounts of the relationship of soul and body, including a Pythagorean view that described the soul as an "attunement" of the body and thus tried to explicate it as a form or structure rather than an independently existing thing. A theory of this kind was worked out but not taken to its logical conclusion by Aristotle in his treatise De anima (On the Soul). Aristotle defined soul in terms of functions. The soul of a plant was concerned with nutrition and reproduction, that of an animal with these and with sensation and independent movement, that of a man with all these and with rational activity. The soul was, in each case, the form of some body, and the clear implication of this was that it would disappear as the body in question dissolved. To be more accurate, the soul was the principle of life in something material; it needed the material element to exist, although it was not itself either material or immaterial but, to put it crudely, an abstraction. Even though Aristotle wasclearly committed by everything he said in the earlier parts of the De anima to the view that the soul is not anything substantial, he nevertheless distinguished toward the end of this work between what he called the active and the passive intellects and spoke of the former in Platonic terms. The active intellect was, it appears, separate from the rest of the soul; it came "from outside" and was in fact immortal. It was, moreover, essential to the soul considered as rational, for "without this nothing thinks." Aristotle thus showed the Platonic side of his thought in the very act of trying to emancipate himself from this aspect of Platonism.
In more recent metaphysics less has been heard of the soul and more of the mind; the old problem of the relationship of soul and body is now that of the relationship of mind and body. Most, if not all, subsequent discussion of this subject has been affected by the thinking of Descartes. In his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy), he argued that there was a total and absolute distinction between mental and material substance. The defining characteristic of matter was to occupy space; the defining characteristic of mind was to be conscious or, in a broad sense of the term, to think. Material substance was, so to speak, all one, although packets of it were more or less persistent; mental substance existed in the form of individual minds, with God as the supreme example. The mental and the material orders were each complete in themselves, under God; it was this fact that made it appropriate for him to use the technical term substance in this context: mental substance and material substance. The logical consequence of this view, drawn by some later Cartesians, was that there can be no interaction between mind and body; all causality is immanent, within one order or the other, and any appearance of mind affecting body or of body affecting mind must be explained as the result of a special intervention by God, who, on the occasion of changes in one substance, brings it about that there are corresponding changes in the other. Descartes himself, however, had no sympathy with this view, which was called occasionalism. On the contrary, he stated explicitly that he was not in his body as a pilot is in a ship but was "more intimately" bound up with it. Mind could affect body and vice versa because mind and body had a specially close relationship, which was particularly evident in the aspects of conscious life that have to do with sensation, imagination, and emotion as opposed to pure thought.
Descartes's conviction that, despite their intimate union in this life, mind is really distinct from body sprang from his confidence in the cogito argument. It was possible, he believed, to doubt the existence of his body (what was certain was only that he had the experience of having a body, and this might be illusory) but not the existence of his mind, for the very act of doubting was itself mental. That mind existed was evident from the immediate testimony of consciousness; that body existed was something that needed an elaborate proof, involving his doctrine of clear and distinct ideas and his attempt to establish the existence of a God who is no deceiver. Apart from this, Descartes appealed to arguments of a broadly Platonic type to bring out what was truly distinctive about mind. He admitted that sensation and imagination could be understood only if referred to the mind–body complex but contended that acts of the pure intellect and of will (here his thought was influenced by that of St. Augustine, the great 5th-century Christian thinker) belonged to the mind as it was in itself. Descartes did not claim to have a philosophical proof of the immortality of the soul—that, in his view, required the assurance of revelation—but he did think that his theory prepared the way for that doctrine by establishing the separate existence of mind.
The Cartesian account of mind and body had many critics even in Descartes's own day. Hobbes argued that nothing existed but matter in motion; there was no such thing as mental substance, only material substance. Materialism of a sort was also supported by Descartes's correspondent Pierre Gassendi, a scientist and Epicurean philosopher. A generation later Spinoza was to refashion the whole Cartesian metaphysics on bold lines. In place of the two distinct substances, each complete in itself yet each liable to external interference should God will it, Spinoza posited a single substance, God or Nature, possessed of infinite attributes, of which the mental and the material alone are known to men. The "modes," or manifestations, of this substance were what they were as a result of the necessities of its nature; arbitrary will neither did nor could play any part in its activities. Whatever manifested itself under one attribute had its counterpart in all the others. It followed from this that to every mental event there was a precisely corresponding physical event, and vice versa. A man was thus not a mysterious union of two different elements but a part of the one substance that, like all other parts, manifested itself in different ways under different attributes. Spinoza did not explain why it was that physical events could be correlated with mental events in the case of a human being but not in that of, for example, a stone. His theory of psycho-physical parallelism, however, has persisted independently of his general metaphysics and has found supporters even in modern times.
One way in which Spinoza threw fresh light on the mind–body problem was in calling attention to the influence of the body on the mind and in taking seriously the suggestion that they be treated as a single unit. In this respect, his work on the subject was far in advance of the Empiricist philosophers of the next century. Hume notoriously dismissed Cartesian substance as a "chimera" and argued that minds and bodies alike were nothing but "bundles of perceptions," interaction between which was always possible in principle; in practice, however, he stuck to the old-fashioned view that mind is one thing and body another and did nothing to explore their actual relationships. Empiricist philosophy of mind, both in Hume and in his successors, such as James Mill, was generally crude; it consisted largely in an attempt to explain the entire life of the mind in terms of Hume's ontology of impressions and ideas. Nor did Kant make much, if any, advance in this particular direction, convinced as he was of the necessity of accepting an empirical dualism of mind and body. It was left to Hegel and the Idealists to look at the problem afresh and to bring out the way in which mental life and bodily life are intimately bound together. The accounts of action and cognition given by T.H. Green and Bradley, and more recently by R.G. Collingwood, are altogether more enlightening than those of Empiricist contemporaries just because they rest on a less dogmatic basis and a closer inspection of fact.
No metaphysical problem is discussed today more vigorously than that of mind and body. Three main positions are held. First, there are still writers (e.g., H.D. Lewis in his work The Elusive Mind ) who think that Descartes was substantially right: mind and body are distinct, and the "I" that thinks is a separate thing from the "I" that weighs 170 pounds. The testimony of consciousness is invoked as the main support of this conclusion; it is alleged that all men know themselves to be what they are, or at least who they are, apart from their bodily lives; it is alleged again that their bodily lives present themselves as experiences—i.e., as something mental. The existence of mind, as Descartes claimed, is certain, that of body dubious and perhaps not strictly provable. Second, there are writers such as Gilbert Ryle who would like to take the Aristotelian theory to its logical conclusion and argue that mind is nothing but the form of the body. Mind is not, as Descartes supposed, something accessible only to its owner; it is rather something that is obvious in whatever a person does. To put it crudely, mind is simply behaviour. Finally, there are many philosophers who, although more generally sympathetic to the second solution than to the first, wish to provide for an "inner life" in a way in which Behaviourism does not; P.F. Strawson is a typical example. To this end they try to assert that the true unit is neither mind nor body but the person. A person is something that is capable of possessing physical and mental predicates alike. This is, of course, to say that the "I" that knows simple arithmetic and the "I" that has lost weight recently are the same. How they can be the same, however, has not so far been explained by supporters of this view.
Aside from these main positions, an interesting development is the stress laid by writers—such as Stuart Hampshire, an "ordinary language" philosopher—on self-activity as the distinguishing characteristic of mind. According to this view, a human being is a body among bodies but is, as Plato said, self-moving as material things are not. That this should be so—that human beings are possessed of wills and can in favourable circumstances act freely—is taken as an ultimate fact neither requiring nor capable of explanation. It is often denied that any scientific discovery could give rational grounds for questioning this fact. It is also stressed that the causality of a human being is fundamentally different from that of a natural subject, intentional action being quite other than mere behaviour determined from without.
Connected with these topics is the problem, much discussed in recent philosophy as a result of the rise of cybernetics, of what differentiates men from machines. Two answers used to be given: the power to think and consciousness. Now, however, there exist machines whose calculating abilities far surpass those of any human being; such machines may not literally think, but they certainly arrive at conclusions. Furthermore, it is not true that their operations are of a purely routine nature: there is a sense in which they can improve their performance in the light of their "experiences." They even have an analogue of consciousness in the sensitivity they show to external stimuli. These facts suggest that the gap between minds and machines is less wide than it has often been thought to be; they do not, however, destroy it altogether. Human beings possess powers of creative thought unlike anything found in machines; as Noam Chomsky, an American linguistics scholar, has stressed (and as Descartes urged in his Discours de la méthode), the ability of human beings to handle language in such a way that they comprehend any one of an infinite number of possible expressions is something that cannot be explained in mechanical terms. Again, as J.R. Lucas, a British philosopher, has argued, human beings have the ability to diagnose and correct their own limitations in a way to which there is no parallel in machines. As some older philosophers put it, man is a being with the power of self-transcendence; he can work within a system, but he can also move to another level and so see the shortcomings of the system. A machine can only work within a system; it operates according to rules but cannot change them of its own accord.
Finally, mention should be made of an extreme Materialist solution to the mind–body problem: this solution holds that states of mind are in fact states of the brain. Supporters of this theory agree that the two are separate in idea but argue that physiology shows that despite this they are contingently identical. What seems to be a state of mind, above all to its possessor, is really a state of the brain, and mind is thus reduced to matter after all. It is not clear, however, why physiologists should be granted the last word on a topic like this, and, even if it were agreed that they should be, the correlations so far established between mental occurrences and states of the brain are at best sketchy and incomplete. Central-state Materialism, as this theory is called, professes to have the weight of contemporary science behind it, but it turns out in fact to have drawn to a remarkable degree on what it thinks will be the science of tomorrow.
The problem of the existence of material things, first propounded by Descartes and repeatedly discussed by subsequent philosophers, particularly those working within the Empiricist tradition, belongs to epistemology, or the science of knowledge, rather than metaphysics; it concerns the question of how it can be known whether there is a reality independent of mind. There are, however, problems about nature and the external world that are genuinely metaphysical.
There is first of all the question of the status, or standing, of material things, the kind of being they possess. It has been repeatedly suggested by metaphysical philosophers that the external world is in some way defective in reality, that it is a mere phenomenon, something that seems to be what it is not. Plato, as has already been pointed out, held that objects of the senses generally answered this description; they each appeared to possess characteristics that they could not in fact have (water could not be at once hot and cold) and were to that extent delusive rather than real. There was no stability in the world of phenomena and therefore no true reality. In taking this view, Plato drew no contrast between the world of nature and the world of man, although he undoubtedly believed that souls had a superior status. Leibniz, a later philosopher who also followed this general line of thought, began by explicitly opposing souls to material things. To speak precisely, nothing truly existed except monads, and monads were souls, or spiritual beings: all had perceptions, although these varied enormously in degree of clarity (the perceptions of the monads constituting what is commonly called a stone were singularly faint). Although the final description of the world must thus be given in mental terms, it did not follow that nature as normally perceived is a total illusion. Men perceive as well as think, and, although perception is in fact simply a confused form of thought, it is not for that reason to be set aside altogether. The world of nature, the world of things in space and time, is, as Leibniz put it, a "well-founded phenomenon"; it is what all men must judge to be there, given that they are not pure intellects but necessarily remain to some extent prisoners of their senses.
A theory on somewhat similar lines was worked out by Kant in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of Pure Reason), despite Kant's explicit dissent from Leibniz' account of perception as confused thinking. Kant contrasted a realm of things as they are in themselves, or noumena, with a realm of appearances, or phenomena. The former are unknown, and indeed unknowable, though it seems clear that Kant tended to think of them on lines like those of Leibniz; phenomena do not exist independently but are dependent on consciousness, though not on any one person's consciousness. Kant expressed this position by saying that things phenomenal are empirically real but transcendentally ideal; he meant that they are undoubtedly there for the individual subject, though when examined from the point of view of critical philosophy, they turn out to be conditioned by the mind through the forms of sensibility and understanding imposed upon them. Kant's most striking argument for this conclusion was that space and time are neither, as the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton supposed, vast containers inside which everything empirical is situated nor, as Leibniz had suggested, relations between things confusedly apprehended but are rather what he mysteriously called "pure intuitions," factors inherent in the sensibilities of observers. Without observers space and time disappear along with their contents; but once the human point of view is assumed, in the form of percipients who are directly aware of the world through their senses, space and time become as real as anything—indeed, more real because of their pervasive character. There is nothing that falls within experience that does not have temporal relations, and all the data of the senses have spatial relations as well.
Kant's arguments in support of his revolutionary thesis about space and time unfortunately depend to a large extent on his mistaken philosophy of mathematics, and they have accordingly been discounted by later philosophers. In modern philosophy the issues raised in these discussions survive only in the form of an inquiry into the status of nature as investigated by the natural scientist. Descartes already pointed out that material things in fact have properties different from those they seem to have; they appear to possess secondary qualities such as colour or smell but turn out when thought about strictly to be colourless and odourless lumps of matter occupying and moving about in space. Locke endorsed this distinction between primary qualities (such as extension, motion, figure, and solidity) and secondary qualities; but George Berkeley, a major British Empiricist of the early 18th century, criticized it sharply as absurd: to imagine something that has primary but no secondary qualities is psychologically impossible. For Berkeley the world of the scientist was a fiction and perhaps not even a necessary fiction at that. It seems clear, however, that Berkeley's arguments do not undermine the important distinction between primary and secondary qualities, where the former are treated as fundamental and the latter as derivative; they are valid only against Locke's mistaken claim that primary qualities are objective and secondary qualities subjective. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that the scientist often knows why the phenomena are as they are, in contrast to the plain man; to that extent nature as he understands it is truer, if not more real, than nature as it is taken to be in everyday experience. Why this should be is not satisfactorily explained by philosophers who follow Berkeley's lead on this question. Nor has either party to the controversy noted sufficiently the extent to which nature as commonly thought of is conceived as penetrated by mind, both when it is taken as intelligible and, still more interestingly, when poets ascribe to it moods or treat it as kindly or hostile. There is analytic work to be done here to which critical philosophers have still to address themselves.
Connected with the questions just discussed are problems about the organizing principles of nature; i.e., about natural causality. It has been said that the Greeks thought of the world as a vast animal (indeed, the conceptual scheme that Aristotle devised for dealing with nature makes sense only if something like this is presupposed). Nature is the sphere in which different kinds of things are all striving to realize their characteristic form; purpose, though not perhaps explicit purpose, governs it throughout. Aristotle was not entirely insensitive to what are now known as the physical and chemical aspects of the universe, but he treated them as subordinate to the biological aspect in a way modern thinkers find surprising. Even the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—were seen by him as each seeking its natural place in the cosmos. The contrast between this view and that favoured by Descartes could hardly be sharper. According to Descartes nature is not an organism but a mechanism; everything in it, including animal and human bodies, although not including the human mind, must be understood on mechanical principles. In taking this line, Descartes was endorsing a way of thinking that was central in the new physical science developed by Galileo at the beginning of the 17th century and that was to remain central in the thought of Newton. Descartes himself was not a pure mechanist because he believed that mind was governed by principles of its own; his work, however, undoubtedly encouraged the thought, frequently debated at the time of the Enlightenment, that mental life equally with the physical world must be explicable in mechanical terms. This was a position whose validity at the theoretical level Kant reluctantly admitted, only to try to turn its edge by his dichotomy of theory and practice. Everything in nature, including human behaviour, was subject to causal determination. The dignity and uniqueness of man, however, could be preserved because of the fact that in moral action man raised himself above the sphere of nature by thinking of himself as part of a world of free spirits.
Kant also produced interesting thoughts on the subject of living phenomena. Reflection on the concept of an organism had convinced him that a being of this sort could never be accounted for satisfactorily in mechanical terms; it was futile to hope that someday in the future there would appear a Newton of biology capable of explaining mechanically the generation of even so apparently simple a thing as a blade of grass. To judge or speak of organic phenomena demanded a special principle that was teleological (i.e., related to design or purpose) rather than mechanical. Kant, however, refused to allow that this principle had constitutive force. It belonged, he said, only to "reflective judgment" and thus did not rank alongside the principles of understanding that were so important in physical science. Men must have recourse to a principle of purposiveness in order to speak of living things, but they must not imagine that such recourse would enable them to explain their existence and behaviour in any strict sense of the term. They have insight only into what they can produce, and what they can produce are machines, not organisms. Many of Kant's detailed remarks on this subject seem outmoded in the light of subsequent scientific developments; nevertheless, the problem he raised is still the subject of vigorous debate among philosophically minded biologists. His emphasis on the uniqueness of the concept of an organism, which he says is only imperfectly explicated in the language of ends and purposes, is particularly valuable.
It remains to mention the seemingly eccentric view of nature taken by Hegel, who regarded it as at once the antithesis to and a prefiguration of the world of spirit. Nature had to exist to provide material for spirit to overcome, although it was a gross mistake to think of it as essentially a lifeless mechanism. Instead of reducing the organic to the inorganic, men should see the latter as pointing forward to the former, which in turn offered a foretaste of the rational structure exhibited by the world of mind. Hegel's disdain for scientists of proved ability, such as Newton and John Dalton, and his endorsement against them of amateur scientists such as the German writer Goethe, make it hard to take his philosophy of nature seriously. It contains, even so, some interesting points, not least the demonstration that in finding nature to be throughout subject to law the scientist is presupposing that it is thoroughly penetrated by mind. To understand these views properly, however, it is necessary to understand Hegel's system as a whole.
Many metaphysicians have argued that neither time nor space can be ultimately real. Temporal and spatial predicates apply only to appearances; reality, or what is real, does not endure through time, nor is it subject to the conditions of space. The roots of this view are to be found in Plato and beyond him in the thought of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides and Zeno, the propounder of several paradoxes about motion. Plato conceived his Forms as eternal objects whose true location was nowhere. Similarly, Christian philosophers conceived of God as existing from everlasting to everlasting and as present in all parts of the universe. God was not so much in space and time as the source of space and time. Whatever falls within space and time is thereby limited, for one space excludes another and no two times can be simultaneous. God, however, is by definition an infinite being and so must exist timelessly and apart from space.
Reference has already been made to the way in which Kant argued for an intimate connection between time and space and human sensibility: that human beings experience things as being temporally and spatially situated is to be connected with the nature of their minds, and particularly with their sensory equipment. Kant was entirely correct to describe space and time as "intuitions," by which he meant that they are peculiar sorts of particulars; he was right again to insist on the centrality in sensing of the notions of here and now, which can be indicated but not reduced to conceptual terms. It is highly doubtful, however, whether he had sufficient grounds for claiming a priori insight into the nature of space and still more that of time; his case for thinking that space and time are "pure" intuitions was palpably inadequate. The lesson to draw from his careful discussion of this subject might well be not that there must be a form of reality lying beyond space and time but rather that nothing can be real that does not conform to spatial and temporal requirements. Space and time are bound up with particularity, and only what is particular can be real.
It was only in a weak sense that Kant denied the reality of time and space. Other philosophers have certainly been bolder, though generally on the basis of a less solid grasp than Kant possessed of what it is to experience temporally and spatially. Thus, Bradley argued against the view that space and time are "principles of individuation" by alleging that no specification of spatial or temporal position, whether in terms of here and now or by the use of spatial coordinates or dating systems, could achieve uniqueness. Any descriptions such as "at 12 o'clock precisely on January 4, 1962" or "just 75 yards due north of this spot" might apply to infinitely many times or places in the universe, for there was nothing to prevent there being infinitely many temporal and spatial orders. Bradley forgot that the whole meaning of a spatial or temporal description is not exhausted when attention is given to the connotations of the terms used; what has to be considered is the words as used in their context, which is that of a person who can indicate his position in space and time because of the fact that he is himself situated in space and time. One cannot express uniqueness in words as such, but he can use words to express uniqueness. Bradley's suggestion that it is possible to conceive of many temporal and spatial orders is by no means free from controversy. In general, men think of all events as happening before, simultaneously with, or after the moment that is called "now," all spatial positions as relating in some way or other to the point that is called "here." In circumstances where this cannot be done, as with events or places in a dream, men dismiss them as quite unreal. That there might be events or places with no relation to their own now and here is something they often refuse to take seriously, though there are theories in modern science that suggest that they are wrong to do so.
It was pointed out earlier that to say that something is unreal in a metaphysical context is often to say that it is unintelligible, and it is not surprising to find that arguments about the unreality of space and time have often turned on conceptual considerations. Thus, it is alleged that there is an incoherency in the notion of space because it claims to be a whole that is logically prior to its parts, and nevertheless turns out in practice to be merely an indefinitely extensible aggregate. Everything that occupies space falls within a wider spatial context; the thought of space as such is, as Kant saw, involved in any spatial description. Yet space as such is something that constantly eludes man's grasp; space, as man knows it, is just one spatial situation after another.
The difficulties found in the notion of time turn on the combination in it of the idea that time is continuous and the idea that it is made up of discrete parts. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who was concerned with the notions of duration and movement, said that time was experienced as continuous; it was only the "spatialized" time measured by clocks that was taken to have separable parts (minutes, hours, weeks, and so on), and this "public" time was merely conventional. This, however, seems altogether too easy a solution of the problem, for privately experienced time also goes by (one stretch of it follows another), and the thesis that public time is merely conventional is at best highly controversial. It must be allowed that time is commonly thought of as at once flowing and, as it were, subject to arrest. Whether this is, in fact, openly inconsistent may be doubted, but it is on points like this that the metaphysical case in question rests.
Few British or American philosophers discuss these questions now, largely because they have been persuaded by Moore that any attack on such central notions in men's thought as these must be mistaken in principle. As a result, little attention is given to a question that deserves investigation; namely, what is to take the place of space and time in metaphysical thought. Idealist writers constantly said that space and time qualified appearances, and that nothing that did so could fail to be taken up in the higher experience that was experience of reality. But how is this supposed to be done? Time is perhaps cancelled and yet preserved in the idea of eternity, space in the thought of something that is at once omnipresent yet not in any particular place. But what is there that is positive about these notions? The eternal, it is sometimes said, is not to be identified with what lasts through all time; it is, strictly, outside time altogether. But what does it mean to say this? When it is said, for example, that numbers or truths are eternal, the proper inference is that they have nothing to do with time; to inquire when they came into or will go out of existence is to ask a question that is ill posed. When God, however, is said to be eternal, the impression is often given that he has temporal characteristics, although in some higher form. What this higher form is deserves careful consideration, the result of which might be that it is not the conception of time that is incoherent but the conception of God.
As well as arguing for the separate existence of mental substance, metaphysicians have claimed that mind is, as it were, the key to the understanding of the universe. What exists is spirit, or at least is penetrated by spirit. This is the thesis of Idealism, a type of philosophy that is often derided but that, like its rival Materialism, has a constantly fresh appeal. This view is worth examining in more detail than has so far been possible.
It is best to begin by distinguishing the thesis of Idealism proper from some others with which it is readily confused. Leibniz said that the true atoms of nature were monads or souls; at bottom nothing existed except minds. Berkeley claimed that sensible things have no existence without the mind; there are spirits that experience, including an infinite spirit, and there are the contents of their experiences, but there is no independently existing world of matter. For the philosophers who followed Hegel, both Leibniz and Berkeley were "subjective" Idealists: they conceived of reality in terms of the experiences of individual minds. Hegel's view, by contrast, was that what exists is not so much pure mind as mind writ large; i.e., the universe is penetrated by mind and exists for the sake of mind, and it cannot be understood unless this fact is grasped. Hegel was thus not committed to denying that there is an independent world of nature but, on the contrary, openly proclaimed it. Nature was there for mind to master it and in so doing to discover itself.
The field in which Hegel first worked out this theory was that of human affairs. The human world may be said to be mind made objective because it consists of a series of structures—examples would be a language, a set of moral or political procedures, a science, a practical art such as medicine—that constitute mental achievements. The mind involved in structures of this kind, however, is collective rather than personal. An art such as medicine or a science such as mathematics is not the invention of any particular individual; and although individuals have contributed and are contributing to the advancement of each structure, they do so not in their personal capacity but as embodying impersonal intelligence.
Because the human world thus embodies mind, or spirit, it needs to be understood in a special way—in terms of what Hegel called "concrete universals." Concepts of this kind are in order when it is a question of grasping a particular sort of subject matter—one in which there are intimate connections between the data under consideration. Connections in nature are, on the surface at any rate, of a purely external character; striking a match, for example, has nothing internally to do with producing a flame. When, however, a historian considers the different stages of some movement or process, or when an anthropologist studies the various aspects of the life of a society, the material they confront is internally related just because it represents the work of mind—not, of course, of mind working in a vacuum but of mind facing and reacting with greater or less intelligence to particular situations. It is not surprising in these circumstances to find that the conceptual structure employed by the student of human affairs is, in important respects, profoundly different from that employed by the student of nature. In the latter, what are in question are constant conjunctions, observed but not understood; in the former, men have insight into what happens or obtains because they can reenact in their own minds the thought behind the material they study.
All this is, or should be, comparatively uncontroversial; it represents the truth behind the claim of Wilhelm Dilthey, a German philosopher and historian of ideas, that human affairs can be understood, as it were, from within, by means of what he called Verstehen ("understanding"). But of course it is one thing to say this and another altogether to argue that the universe at large should be construed as if it were mind writ large. What makes Hegelianism intriguing to some and totally implausible to others is precisely that it makes this extravagant claim. As has already been mentioned, the world of nature for Hegel is in one way independent of mind: its being is certainly not its being perceived. It is, nevertheless, relevant to mind in all sorts of important ways: in providing a setting in which mind can act, in constituting an obstacle that mind can overcome, in presenting mind with something seemingly alien in which it can nevertheless find itself insofar as it discovers nature to be intelligible. If Hegel were asked why there was a world of nature at all, his answer would be "for the sake of mind." Just as man's social environment affords opportunities to the individual to come to full knowledge of himself by realizing his differences from and dependence upon others, so the world of nature affords similar opportunities. By transforming the natural scene, men make it their own. In so doing they come to know what they can do, and thus what they are.
There is, perhaps, more to this doctrine than appears at first sight. It is, however, easier to assent to it in general terms than to follow Hegel over it in detail. According to the Idealist account, there is in the end only one true description of the universe, namely that which is couched in terms of the concrete universal. Reality is a single self-differentiating system, all the parts of which are intimately connected; it is spirit that expresses itself in the natural and human worlds and comes to consciousness of itself in so doing. Any other account of the matter—for example, that given by the scientist in terms of experienced uniformities—must be dismissed as inadequate. To Hume's objection that there is an absolute logical difference between propositions expressing matters of fact and existence and propositions expressing relations of ideas, Hegel replies brusquely that the distinction is untenable. At a certain level, perhaps, facts are taken as "brute." Even the scientist, however, never abandons his aspiration to understand them—it is only provisionally that he talks in terms of "ultimate inexplicabilities"—and the philosopher knows that the demand to incorporate all knowledge in a single system is not to be denied. It is a demand that, as Hegelians are willing to admit, can in practice never be met but that, nonetheless, ceaselessly makes itself felt. That such is the case is shown by the extraordinary fascination exercised by this strange but remarkable type of philosophy.
To try to understand the universe in terms of spirit is characteristic of philosophers whose main extra-philosophical interests are in the humanities, particularly in historical studies. Relatively few scientifically minded thinkers have followed this line of thought, and many Idealists of repute, including Bradley and Benedetto Croce (an Italian philosopher and literary critic whose major philosophical work was published in four volumes between 1902 and 1917 under the general title La filosofia dello spirito ("The Philosophy of the Spirit"), have been least convincing when writing about science. Hegel himself, perhaps, had less sympathy with scientific than with historical aspirations; this is not to say, however, that he was ill-informed about contemporary science. He knew what was going on, but he saw it all from his own point of view, the point of view of one who was entirely convinced that science could not produce any ultimate answers. He valued science but rejected the scientific view of the world.


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Celebrating George Pimentel on his 100th birthday
UC Berkeley, College of Chemistry Press Release
Image: (l to r) Kenneth Herr and George Pimentel discuss production of the infrared spectrometer that was placed on the Mars Mariner 6 and 7 spacecraft that went to Mars in 1969 and discovered that there was water on the planet. (Photo: College of Chemistry)
George Pimentel (1922-1989) was a native of California. Born May 2, 1922, in the Central Valley to French parents, he grew up in a poor section of Los Angeles and, after finishing high school in 1939, worked his way through a chemistry major at UCLA. Graduating in 1943, he came north to join the Manhattan Project at UC Berkeley. When he grasped the full implications of the project, however, he enlisted in the Navy and volunteered for submarine duty in the hope of hastening the war's end. In 1946 he returned to Berkeley for graduate work in infrared spectroscopy under the supervision of Kenneth Pitzer. Upon receipt of his Ph.D. in 1949, he joined the Berkeley faculty, of which he remained an active member until his death.
During the 1950s George developed the matrix isolation technique to trap free radicals, preventing their loss through chemical reaction and thus allowing spectroscopic study. Throughout the world, that technique has led to the discovery of many highly reactive molecules. Infrared spectroscopy also enabled George himself to advance our understanding of hydrogen bonding, a central feature of all biological chemistry.
In the mid 1960s, George's study of fast reactions unlocked the secret for converting chemical energy directly into laser light. The chemical laser has since taught us much about chemical reactions and about the transfer of energy among molecules. It has also been developed into large and powerful laser systems. Meanwhile, George's high-speed infrared spectroscopic techniques proved adaptable to the devising of instruments for remotely determining the composition of the atmosphere and surface of Mars. Spectrometers constructed and assembled in his laboratories yielded dramatic findings in the space missions of Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969 including the discovery of water on Mars.
In 1967, at the age of 45, George applied to become a scientist-astronaut. After the most demanding of physical and intellectual tests, the National Academy of Science ranked him first among its thousand or so applicants. Only the discovery of a minor abnormality in one retina prevented him from joining NASA's program. A fellow applicant, who fondly remembered George's warmth and enthusiasm, recalled that when George was asked how he would react to the prospect of a two-year, high-risk trip to Mars, his instant reply was, "Where do I sign up?"
George was also well known for his contributions to science education through the CHEM STUDY project, a national effort to improve high-school chemistry teaching. He participated in the production of films and other supplementary materials and in the training of teachers nationwide.
George was also an outstanding leader. On the Berkeley campus, he served as director of the Laboratory of Chemical Dynamics and as associate director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He spent the years 1977 through 1980 in Washington as deputy director of the National Science Foundation, where he significantly raised awareness of the need for funding and public understanding of scientific research. In 1986 he was president of the American Chemical Society.
George was born in 1922 and passed away in 1989. He would have turned 100 this year on May 2nd. An in depth biography about George written by professor emeritus Bradley Moore is available on the National Academy of Sciences website.
Note: this article has been updated to correct George Pimentel's birth date from May 15, 1922 to May 2, 1922.
150th Celebration topic page
Berkeley Chemistry: 1868 to the Present

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Home » IPL » Mumbai Indians
IPL 2019: After Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma expresses discontent on no-ball mishap during RCB vs MI clash
Posted On / March 29, 2019 / by Anirudh Singh
In a last-over thriller, Mumbai Indians defeated Royal Challengers Bangalore by 6 runs at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium yesterday evening. But it was an umpiring blunder that led to a huge uproar after the match.
On-field umpire S Ravi failed to call a no-ball off Lasith Malinga on the last ball of the match. After watching the replay on the giant screen, RCB skipper Virat Kohli criticized the decision and said, "We are playing at the IPL level and not playing club cricket. The umpires should have had their eyes open".
This started the debate on Twitter on the use of technology during the match.
In the world of technology that we live in, a NO BALL like that should NOT happen!
End Of Story!
— Kevin Pietersen🦏 (@KP24) March 28, 2019
In an era of so much technology and with so much at stake NO BALLS should never ever be missed …. #JustSaying #IPL2019
— Michael Vaughan (@MichaelVaughan) March 28, 2019
"That is a ridiculous call at the last ball. If it is a game of margins, I don't know what is happening. They should have been more sharp and careful out there", Kohli added.
The winning captain Rohit Sharma also expressed discontent during the post-match presentation. He said "I just got to know when we crossed the rope. Somebody just told me it was a no-ball. These kind of mistakes are not good for the game of cricket, it's pretty simple, the over before that. Bumrah bowled a ball which wasn't a wide ball. Those are game-changers".
"There's a TV up there, they have to watch what's happening, It is as simple as it is. Players can't do much. The only thing they can do is walk off and shake hands because it was the last ball. It's disappointed to see that. I hope they rectify their mistakes like we do when we make mistakes", he added.
With this, Mumbai Indians registered their first victory of the season. The world's no. 1 bowler, Jasprit Bumrah was awarded the 'Man of the Match' for his exceptional, match-winning performance (3 wickets for 20 runs in 4 overs).
TAGS: IPL, IPL 2019, Mumbai Indians, RCBvMI, Rohit Sharma, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Virat Kohli
CATEGORY: IPL, Mumbai Indians, Players, Rohit Sharma, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Virat Kohli


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Lipid physiology in beluga (Huso huso L.) - the relationship between developmental stages, 11-ketotestosterone levels and ovarian lipid uptake
Ranay Ahavan, Sobhan
If you would like to read this item, please apply for an inter-library loan from the University of Otago via your local library.
Cite this item: Ranay Ahavan, S. (2019). Lipid physiology in beluga (Huso huso L.) - the relationship between developmental stages, 11-ketotestosterone levels and ovarian lipid uptake (Thesis, Doctor of Philosophy). University of Otago. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10523/9404
In egg-laying fish, survival of the embryonic and initial larval stages depends on accumulation of substantial reserves of yolk and lipid within the egg during oocyte growth. In sturgeon, a non-teleost basal ray-finned fish, the relationship between lipid physiology and oogenesis has not been investigated. Gonadal development is arrested in the early stages of maturation. However, androgens have been implicated in regulation of early follicular growth in several vertebrate classes. Considering such gaps in the literature, this thesis, therefore, aimed to elucidate key physiological and molecular changes associated with lipid biology during oocyte development in beluga, or great sturgeon. Moreover, the effects of 11-ketotestosterone treatment on ovarian growth and mRNA levels of putative lipidation-related genes were investigated in pre-vitellogenic (PV) ovaries of sturgeon.
To do so, as a first attempt, the developmental stages of oocytes from captive beluga were classified through an analysis of general appearance of intact oocytes after non-lethal biopsy techniques which was followed by histological observations (Chapter 2). The different stages of oocyte growth were standardized based on morphological criteria. As such, ovaries of captive beluga were classified as being in the perinucleolar (PN), oil droplet (OD), primary yolk (PY), secondary yolk (SY) or tertiary yolk (TY) stage.
To focus on sturgeon lipid physiology, an investigation was conducted to determine changes in lipid transport, concentration of sex steroids, and expression of genes that have been implicated in ovarian lipid uptake during the reproductive cycle (Chapter, 3). The lipoprotein profile changes were determined using fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC). Also, the triglycerides (TGs), and cholesterol changes in the FPLC extracted fractions of lipoprotein profiles were determined. Plasma levels of sex steroid hormones (17β-estradiol (E2) and 11-ketotestosterone (11-KT)) and lipid (TGs, cholesterol and phospholipid) were elevated during gonadal development. Using gel filtration, low levels of TGs and cholesterol were observed in different lipoprotein classes across different stages of oogenesis, but no differences were found. Albumin, vitellogenin (Vtg) AB2b, immunoglobulin light chain precursor and immunoglobulin heavy chain were detected as components of different lipoprotein fractions by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS). The expression of housekeeping genes was significantly affected by gonadal development. Also, a high abundance of 5S ribosomal RNA transcripts was detected in early stages of gonadal development. In this study the geometric means of ribosomal RNA (5S, 18S and 28S rRNA) was used to normalize the transcript abundance of putative lipidation-related genes. The transcript abundances of lipoprotein lipase (lpl), and apolipoprotein e (apoe) and lipoprotein receptors, i.e., very-low density lipoprotein receptors (vldlr), and low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 8-like (lrp8), increased in the early stages of oogenesis (from PN to OD) and decreased thereafter.
To get insights into the association between Lpl, which is a central enzyme in TG metabolism, and sturgeon lipid physiology (Chapter 4), the full-length beluga lpl cDNA encoding a 501 residue (amino acid) protein was isolated. Phylogenetic analysis indicates a monophyletic ancestry of Lpl from beluga with other sturgeon, tetrapods and Latimeria, rather than with modern teleost fish. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that LPL protein is highly conserved during vertebrate evolution. A specific sturgeon polyclonal antibody against bacterially expressed beluga Lpl was successfully developed. The mRNA abundance of lpl by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, identification of the Lpl protein in different tissues by Western blotting and localisation of Lpl in ovarian tissue (immunohistochemistry) was achieved by employing contemporary molecular and biochemical techniques. The lpl mRNA and protein was present in almost all assayed tissues. A higher expression of lpl was detected in liver and heart which would suggest that these tissues synthesize Lpl. Three different-sized proteins, representing putative mature (58 kDa), glycosylated (70 kDa) and broken down fragments of Lpl (38 kDa), were detected in ovarian tissues. The 70 kDa band was also found in liver, intestine, heart and spleen. The immunohistochemistry results showed positive specific staining in the follicle cells surrounding the oocyte.
A positive effect of 11-KT on oocyte growth, facilitating lipid uptake during the early stages of reproduction, has been reported in some fish species. Therefore, to evaluate the effects of 11-KT on ovarian growth of beluga with pre-vitellogenic oocytes, an in vivo 11-KT implant study was conducted (Chapter 5). The results confirmed that 11-KT increased the levels of serum 11-KT, associated with increased oocyte diameters and increased expression of lipidation-related transcripts three weeks after onset of treatment. However, serum E2, TGs and cholesterol levels, ovarian yolk uptake, and ovarian reproductive stage remained unchanged.
To further explore the role of different hormones on the expression of lipidation-related transcripts, a short-term (24 hour) in vitro explant study was conducted, using PV ovarian tissue (Chapter 6). The results indicate that follicle-stimulating hormone, 11-KT, and to some extent E2 are important factors in the regulation of genes believed to be involved in ovarian lipid uptake and transport.
Together, this thesis provide molecular, hormonal and biochemical information on non-teleost ray-finned fish during gonadal development. The research advance the understanding of ovarian pre-vitellogenic growth, focusing on ovarian lipid physiology in sturgeon. The low levels of TGs and cholesterol within different lipoprotein classes and the presence of albumin and vitellogenin AB2b in lipoproteins suggest that lipid physiology in sturgeon may be different from that in some model teleost fish. The transcript abundances of putative lipidation-related genes indicate that these genes were highly expressed at pre-vitellogenic stages, before lipid accumulation into oocytes. This pattern of expression implies that the oocytes need to be fully prepared during early stages of oogenesis before transition into the vitellogenesis growth stages. Although 11-KT increased the oocyte diameter in pre-vitellogenic beluga, it is still to be elucidated whether this effect is direct or indirect. The increase in lpl mRNA expression following both in vivo and in vitro 11-KT treatment shows that the effect of 11-KT in early ovarian growth is likely mediated to some extent by lpl.
Advisor: Lokman, Peter Mark
Degree Discipline: Zoology
Keywords: Sturgeon; Oogenesis; Pre-vitellogenesis
Zoology collection [313]


Alhaji Zubairu Galadima, the Director, National Orientation Agency, Kaduna State, has urged the media to assist in tackling the systemic neglect inhibiting the development of Adolescents and Young Persons (AYP) in Nigeria.
Galadima made the appeal on Tuesday in Zaria at a one-day dialogue on AYP with media executives, reporters and producers in the state.
He said that the media should particularly scale up programmes on HIV/AIDS targeting adolescents and young people because of their tendencies to take risky behaviours.
"Firstly, the media has helped in addressing some of the challenges affecting the well being and growth of adolescents and young persons.
"However, they need to do more in redirecting the energies of youths to avoid actions that will negatively affect their lives.
"Adolescents and young people need proper guidance to avoid risky sexual behaviours which can cause them to contract HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
"The media must encourage parents, communities and government to properly guide young people towards more responsible and beneficial behaviours that will add value to them, their families and the country,'' the NOA chief said.
Also, Rabiu Musa, the Media and External Relations Officer, UNICEF, Kaduna office, commended the media in the state for their contributions.
He said that they facilitated the rating UNICEF Nigeria received as one of the best organisations addressing issues affecting children and women.
Musa said that UNICEF had developed close collaboration with the media in the areas of health, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene, child protection, education and HIV/AIDS.
He said that it was also using special events for advocacy to improve the quality of lives of children.
"It is critical to appreciate the media in the presentation of critical issues affecting children and women in the country.
"It is unfortunate that the AYP is being disregarded in spite of the fact that they are a large group of the society.
"We must encourage and shape them to take right decisions and embrace non-risky behaviours as they grow in life,'' he added.
Musa called for more concerted efforts to encourage adolescents to know their HIV status, access healthcare services and avoid behaviours that would place their lives at risk.


text:
RSpec.describe RuboCop::Cop::Severity do
  let(:refactor) { described_class.new(:refactor) }
  let(:convention) { described_class.new(:convention) }
  let(:warning) { described_class.new(:warning) }
  let(:error) { described_class.new(:error) }
  let(:fatal) { described_class.new(:fatal) }

  it 'has a few required attributes' do
    expect(convention.name).to eq(:convention)
  end

  it 'overrides #to_s' do
    expect(convention.to_s).to eq('convention')
  end

  it 'redefines == to compare severities' do
    expect(convention).to eq(:convention)
    expect(convention).to eq(described_class.new(:convention))
    expect(convention).not_to eq(:warning)
  end

  it 'is frozen' do
    expect(convention.frozen?).to be(true)
  end

  describe '#code' do
    describe 'refactor' do
      it { expect(refactor.code).to eq('R') }
    end

    describe 'convention' do
      it { expect(convention.code).to eq('C') }
    end

    describe 'warning' do
      it { expect(warning.code).to eq('W') }
    end

    describe 'error' do
      it { expect(error.code).to eq('E') }
    end

    describe 'fatal' do
      it { expect(fatal.code).to eq('F') }
    end
  end

  describe '#level' do
    describe 'refactor' do
      it { expect(refactor.level).to eq(1) }
    end

    describe 'convention' do
      it { expect(convention.level).to eq(2) }
    end

    describe 'warning' do
      it { expect(warning.level).to eq(3) }
    end

    describe 'error' do
      it { expect(error.level).to eq(4) }
    end

    describe 'fatal' do
      it { expect(fatal.level).to eq(5) }
    end
  end

  describe 'constructs from code' do
    describe 'R' do
      it { expect(described_class.new('R')).to eq(refactor) }
    end

    describe 'C' do
      it { expect(described_class.new('C')).to eq(convention) }
    end

    describe 'W' do
      it { expect(described_class.new('W')).to eq(warning) }
    end

    describe 'E' do
      it { expect(described_class.new('E')).to eq(error) }
    end

    describe 'F' do
      it { expect(described_class.new('F')).to eq(fatal) }
    end
  end

  describe 'Comparable' do
    describe 'refactor' do
      it { expect(refactor).to be < convention }
    end

    describe 'convention' do
      it { expect(convention).to be < warning }
    end

    describe 'warning' do
      it { expect(warning).to be < error }
    end

    describe 'error' do
      it { expect(error).to be < fatal }
    end
  end
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
#define lfunc_c
#define LUA_CORE

#include "lprefix.h"

#include <stddef.h>

#include "lua.h"

#include "ldebug.h"
#include "ldo.h"
#include "lfunc.h"
#include "lgc.h"
#include "lmem.h"
#include "lobject.h"
#include "lstate.h"
#include "lstring.h"

CClosure *luaF_newCclosure (lua_State *L, int nupvals) {
  GCObject *o = luaC_newobj(L, LUA_VCCL, sizeCclosure(nupvals));
  CClosure *c = gco2ccl(o);
  c->nupvalues = cast_byte(nupvals);
  return c;
}

LClosure *luaF_newLclosure (lua_State *L, int nupvals) {
  GCObject *o = luaC_newobj(L, LUA_VLCL, sizeLclosure(nupvals));
  LClosure *c = gco2lcl(o);
  c->p = NULL;
  c->nupvalues = cast_byte(nupvals);
  while (nupvals--) c->upvals[nupvals] = NULL;
  return c;
}

/*
** fill a closure with new closed upvalues
*/
void luaF_initupvals (lua_State *L, LClosure *cl) {
  int i;
  for (i = 0; i < cl->nupvalues; i++) {
    GCObject *o = luaC_newobj(L, LUA_VUPVAL, sizeof(UpVal));
    UpVal *uv = gco2upv(o);
    uv->v = &uv->u.value;  /* make it closed */
    setnilvalue(uv->v);
    cl->upvals[i] = uv;
    luaC_objbarrier(L, cl, uv);
  }
}

/*
** Create a new upvalue at the given level, and link it to the list of
** open upvalues of 'L' after entry 'prev'.
**/
static UpVal *newupval (lua_State *L, int tbc, StkId level, UpVal **prev) {
  GCObject *o = luaC_newobj(L, LUA_VUPVAL, sizeof(UpVal));
  UpVal *uv = gco2upv(o);
  UpVal *next = *prev;
  uv->v = s2v(level);  /* current value lives in the stack */
  uv->tbc = tbc;
  uv->u.open.next = next;  /* link it to list of open upvalues */
  uv->u.open.previous = prev;
  if (next)
    next->u.open.previous = &uv->u.open.next;
  *prev = uv;
  if (!isintwups(L)) {  /* thread not in list of threads with upvalues? */
    L->twups = G(L)->twups;  /* link it to the list */
    G(L)->twups = L;
  }
  return uv;
}

/*
** Find and reuse, or create if it does not exist, an upvalue
** at the given level.
*/
UpVal *luaF_findupval (lua_State *L, StkId level) {
  UpVal **pp = &L->openupval;
  UpVal *p;
  lua_assert(isintwups(L) || L->openupval == NULL);
  while ((p = *pp) != NULL && uplevel(p) >= level) {  /* search for it */
    lua_assert(!isdead(G(L), p));
    if (uplevel(p) == level)  /* corresponding upvalue? */
      return p;  /* return it */
    pp = &p->u.open.next;
  }
  /* not found: create a new upvalue after 'pp' */
  return newupval(L, 0, level, pp);
}

static void callclose (lua_State *L, void *ud) {
  UNUSED(ud);
  luaD_callnoyield(L, L->top - 3, 0);
}

/*
** Prepare closing method plus its arguments for object 'obj' with
** error message 'err'. (This function assumes EXTRA_STACK.)
*/
static int prepclosingmethod (lua_State *L, TValue *obj, TValue *err) {
  StkId top = L->top;
  const TValue *tm = luaT_gettmbyobj(L, obj, TM_CLOSE);
  if (ttisnil(tm))  /* no metamethod? */
    return 0;  /* nothing to call */
  setobj2s(L, top, tm);  /* will call metamethod... */
  setobj2s(L, top + 1, obj);  /* with 'self' as the 1st argument */
  setobj2s(L, top + 2, err);  /* and error msg. as 2nd argument */
  L->top = top + 3;  /* add function and arguments */
  return 1;
}

/*
** Raise an error with message 'msg', inserting the name of the
** local variable at position 'level' in the stack.
*/
static void varerror (lua_State *L, StkId level, const char *msg) {
  int idx = cast_int(level - L->ci->func);
  const char *vname = luaG_findlocal(L, L->ci, idx, NULL);
  if (vname == NULL) vname = "?";
  luaG_runerror(L, msg, vname);
}

/*
** Prepare and call a closing method. If status is OK, code is still
** inside the original protected call, and so any error will be handled
** there. Otherwise, a previous error already activated the original
** protected call, and so the call to the closing method must be
** protected here. (A status == CLOSEPROTECT behaves like a previous
** error, to also run the closing method in protected mode).
** If status is OK, the call to the closing method will be pushed
** at the top of the stack. Otherwise, values are pushed after
** the 'level' of the upvalue being closed, as everything after
** that won't be used again.
*/
static int callclosemth (lua_State *L, StkId level, int status) {
  TValue *uv = s2v(level);  /* value being closed */
  if (likely(status == LUA_OK)) {
    if (prepclosingmethod(L, uv, &G(L)->nilvalue))  /* something to call? */
      callclose(L, NULL);  /* call closing method */
    else if (!l_isfalse(uv))  /* non-closable non-false value? */
      varerror(L, level, "attempt to close non-closable variable '%s'");
  }
  else {  /* must close the object in protected mode */
    ptrdiff_t oldtop;
    level++;  /* space for error message */
    oldtop = savestack(L, level + 1);  /* top will be after that */
    luaD_seterrorobj(L, status, level);  /* set error message */
    if (prepclosingmethod(L, uv, s2v(level))) {  /* something to call? */
      int newstatus = luaD_pcall(L, callclose, NULL, oldtop, 0);
      if (newstatus != LUA_OK && status == CLOSEPROTECT)  /* first error? */
        status = newstatus;  /* this will be the new error */
      else {
        if (newstatus != LUA_OK)  /* suppressed error? */
          luaE_warnerror(L, "__close metamethod");
        /* leave original error (or nil) on top */
        L->top = restorestack(L, oldtop);
      }
    }
    /* else no metamethod; ignore this case and keep original error */
  }
  return status;
}

/*
** Try to create a to-be-closed upvalue
** (can raise a memory-allocation error)
*/
static void trynewtbcupval (lua_State *L, void *ud) {
  newupval(L, 1, cast(StkId, ud), &L->openupval);
}

/*
** Create a to-be-closed upvalue. If there is a memory error
** when creating the upvalue, the closing method must be called here,
** as there is no upvalue to call it later.
*/
void luaF_newtbcupval (lua_State *L, StkId level) {
  TValue *obj = s2v(level);
  lua_assert(L->openupval == NULL || uplevel(L->openupval) < level);
  if (!l_isfalse(obj)) {  /* false doesn't need to be closed */
    int status;
    const TValue *tm = luaT_gettmbyobj(L, obj, TM_CLOSE);
    if (ttisnil(tm))  /* no metamethod? */
      varerror(L, level, "variable '%s' got a non-closable value");
    status = luaD_rawrunprotected(L, trynewtbcupval, level);
    if (unlikely(status != LUA_OK)) {  /* memory error creating upvalue? */
      lua_assert(status == LUA_ERRMEM);
      luaD_seterrorobj(L, LUA_ERRMEM, level + 1);  /* save error message */
      /* next call must succeed, as object is closable */
      prepclosingmethod(L, s2v(level), s2v(level + 1));
      callclose(L, NULL);  /* call closing method */
      luaD_throw(L, LUA_ERRMEM);  /* throw memory error */
    }
  }
}

void luaF_unlinkupval (UpVal *uv) {
  lua_assert(upisopen(uv));
  *uv->u.open.previous = uv->u.open.next;
  if (uv->u.open.next)
    uv->u.open.next->u.open.previous = uv->u.open.previous;
}

int luaF_close (lua_State *L, StkId level, int status) {
  UpVal *uv;
  while ((uv = L->openupval) != NULL && uplevel(uv) >= level) {
    TValue *slot = &uv->u.value;  /* new position for value */
    lua_assert(uplevel(uv) < L->top);
    if (uv->tbc && status != NOCLOSINGMETH) {
      /* must run closing method, which may change the stack */
      ptrdiff_t levelrel = savestack(L, level);
      status = callclosemth(L, uplevel(uv), status);
      level = restorestack(L, levelrel);
    }
    luaF_unlinkupval(uv);
    setobj(L, slot, uv->v);  /* move value to upvalue slot */
    uv->v = slot;  /* now current value lives here */
    if (!iswhite(uv)) {  /* neither white nor dead? */
      nw2black(uv);  /* closed upvalues cannot be gray */
      luaC_barrier(L, uv, slot);
    }
  }
  return status;
}

Proto *luaF_newproto (lua_State *L) {
  GCObject *o = luaC_newobj(L, LUA_VPROTO, sizeof(Proto));
  Proto *f = gco2p(o);
  f->k = NULL;
  f->sizek = 0;
  f->p = NULL;
  f->sizep = 0;
  f->code = NULL;
  f->sizecode = 0;
  f->lineinfo = NULL;
  f->sizelineinfo = 0;
  f->abslineinfo = NULL;
  f->sizeabslineinfo = 0;
  f->upvalues = NULL;
  f->sizeupvalues = 0;
  f->numparams = 0;
  f->is_vararg = 0;
  f->maxstacksize = 0;
  f->locvars = NULL;
  f->sizelocvars = 0;
  f->linedefined = 0;
  f->lastlinedefined = 0;
  f->source = NULL;
  return f;
}

void luaF_freeproto (lua_State *L, Proto *f) {
  luaM_freearray(L, f->code, f->sizecode);
  luaM_freearray(L, f->p, f->sizep);
  luaM_freearray(L, f->k, f->sizek);
  luaM_freearray(L, f->lineinfo, f->sizelineinfo);
  luaM_freearray(L, f->abslineinfo, f->sizeabslineinfo);
  luaM_freearray(L, f->locvars, f->sizelocvars);
  luaM_freearray(L, f->upvalues, f->sizeupvalues);
  luaM_free(L, f);
}

/*
** Look for n-th local variable at line 'line' in function 'func'.
** Returns NULL if not found.
*/
const char *luaF_getlocalname (const Proto *f, int local_number, int pc) {
  int i;
  for (i = 0; i<f->sizelocvars && f->locvars[i].startpc <= pc; i++) {
    if (pc < f->locvars[i].endpc) {  /* is variable active? */
      local_number--;
      if (local_number == 0)
        return getstr(f->locvars[i].varname);
    }
  }
  return NULL;  /* not found */
}

void luaF_shareproto (Proto *f) {
  int i;
  if (f == NULL || isshared(f))
    return;
  makeshared(f);
  luaS_share(f->source);
  for (i = 0; i < f->sizek; i++) {
    if (ttype(&f->k[i]) == LUA_TSTRING)
      luaS_share(tsvalue(&f->k[i]));
  }
  for (i = 0; i < f->sizeupvalues; i++)
    luaS_share(f->upvalues[i].name);
  for (i = 0; i < f->sizelocvars; i++)
    luaS_share(f->locvars[i].varname);
  for (i = 0; i < f->sizep; i++)
    luaF_shareproto(f->p[i]);
}


Taylor Lianne Chandler - the girlfriend of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps - has told Radar Online she was born intersex, which means she was born with both sets of reproductive organs.
She told the gossip website: "I was born with male genitalia with no testicles, but I also have a uterus and no ovaries."
It's believed that Michael, who is currently in rehab serving a six-month suspension from competitive swimming after his DUI in September - wasn't aware of his girlfriend's intersex news until she wrote to him recently.
"I never lied to him," Chandler insists. "We were together for such a short period of time, I never had a chance to tell him about my life."
Will their romance continue when he comes out of rehab? Taylor isn't sure: "Michael is a brand, and dating someone like me may not be the best thing. I just hope he follows his heart and not what his people tell him."
Yesterday, Taylor appeared to reference some of the articles written about her when she wrote on Facebook: "Two steps forward and 100 steps backwards. That is what life feels like to me right now. In a world of educated people that had all the facts of intersex and what it means and then to sell a magazine say[ing] Michael Phelps is dating a MAN. I have cried now for an hour, thrown up anything in my system till I dry heaved. I just can't believe this is happening in 2014!"
Last week, in a lengthy Facebook post, Taylor wrote: "I was born intersex and named David Roy Fitch at birth. By the time I could walk and talk I made it clear I was a girl and dressed as one … The problem is I have made friends that I never told and dated and married people that knew nothing of my past. If you don't understand what intersex is, Google it. I was never a man, never lived as a man. No one can say they knew me as a man or produce a photo of me as a man."