Showing papers in "Review of Metaphysics in 2003"

From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on early analytic philosophy

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Does Aristotle Have a Consistent Account of Vice

Abstract: HOW ARE WE TO UNDERSTAND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VICE (1) in Aristotle's ethics? (2) As many commentators have noted, it is by no means obvious that Aristotle's scattered remarks about vice really add up to a coherent account In several places Aristotle clearly assigns the leading role in the explanation of vicious action to reason We see this, for example, in the unequivocal claim that acts expressing intemperance are "in accordance with choice" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (3) This is important, in part because it provides a basis for the distinction between vice and akrasia Although both the intemperate and the akratic do what they ought not, the intemperate pursue their goal guided by reason and with "little or no appetite" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), (4) whereas the akratic act from appetite (5) What both pursue and what both ought not pursue--is bodily pleasure (6) The difference is that the vicious pursue bodily pleasure because they think it is the central component in the good life (7) Thus, they choose pleasure as a good, indeed as the most important good The akratic, on the other hand, pursue bodily pleasure as such and do so contrary to their conception of the good When Aristotle writes about vice as a disposition to choose what promotes a certain conception of the good, and especially when he is distinguishing between intemperance and weakness, one cannot but be struck by the similarity between virtue and vice Both are fixed conditions of the soul that concern the choice of what promotes what appears to be good The virtuous and vicious alike pursue their respective goals without strong appetite, and both enjoy a harmony between what they find pleasant and what they take to be good The only difference, it seems, is that the virtuous choose that which promotes what is actually good and the vicious select what falsely appears good Elsewhere, however, Aristotle seems to have a different, distinctly Platonic, conception of vice in mind (8) In 312, for example, he clearly indicates that the appetites of the intemperate do not always fall in behind reason's lead There he describes the appetites of the vicious as "great and strong" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (9) and "disobedient to the ruling principle" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (10) Later, in 94, Aristotle draws a picture of the vicious soul that could not be more different from the psychically stable and harmonious virtuous soul For [bad people, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]] are in conflict ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) with themselves, and while they desire ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) some things, they wish ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) for other things, like the akratic ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]); for they select instead of what they believe to be good for them, things that are pleasant yet harmful ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]); they also pull back because of cowardice or laziness from doing what they think is best for them ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (11) A few lines later Aristotle's description of the vicious soul stands in stark contrast to what is said in book 7 about how that the elements of the intemperate soul are united in the pursuit of a common goal [The vicious] do not rejoice and grieve with themselves Their soul is in conflict ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) On the one hand, it is pained on account of vice ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) when it is kept from some things, and on the other, it is pleased, and the one part drags it here and the other there, just as if it is being pulled apart ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (12) At 941166b7-8 it is clear that the conflict Aristotle is thinking about is between wish ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), a desire generated by reason itself and appetite ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII …

The Activity of Happiness In Aristotle’s Ethics

Abstract: I THERE HAS BEEN A LONGSTANDING DEBATE about the relation of virtue and happiness in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle seems to have two contradictory positions. One position is found in book 1, chapter 7, where happiness is the highest good, an activity of soul in conformity with virtue. In context, this seems to indicate human virtue as a whole, involving both moral and intellectual virtues. The other position occurs much later in book 10, chapters 6-8, where happiness is identified with wisdom alone. This later context seems to posit an opposition between a supreme happiness related to wisdom and contemplation and a secondary happiness associated with justice and the moral virtues. The debate centers on how to reconcile these two positions. One group of commentators takes book 10 as determinative and thus tortures the text in book i to say the same thing. This position is described as intellectualist or exclusivist and produces certain puzzles in reading Aristotle's ethical theory. These puzzles are not benign since the privileged position given wisdom in book 10 seems at odds with the discussion of virtue in book I and its development in the Nicomachean Ethics as a whole. Indeed, Aristotle appears inconsistent or even contradictory, recommending in these two brief chapters of book 10 a life devoted to contemplation that only grudgingly allows for the necessity of the practical life discussed in such detail in the rest of his ethical works. If this is the case, under what conditions are we expected to forgo contemplation to engage in the various activities of the moral virtues? Since no conditions are spelled out in the text, the range of speculation is confused and ways around the apparent inconsistencies complex. The other group takes 1.7 as determinative for the definition of human virtue, and its task is to explain whether 10.7-8 fits into Aristotle's general ethical position. In this view, virtue is understood inclusively, with both ethical and intellectual components. So far no satisfactory account of 10.6-8 has been able to integrate it into Aristotle's account of virtue and happiness, with the result that it is either ignored as an aberration or left as an anomaly. The goal of this paper is to provide a reading of 10.1-8 that can show how Aristotle's account of contemplation and the moral virtues is part of a single vision of happiness. (1) I will endeavor to argue that the discussion of pleasure in 10.1-5 is continuous with that of happiness in 10.6-8. One aspect of this continuity is that pleasure and happiness are both defined as the same kind of activity, one that accompanies certain other activities under specific conditions. Another aspect of this continuity is that Aristotle distinguishes different kinds of pleasure, those related to bodily conditions and those related to activities desirable in themselves. He ends this account of pleasure by mentioning that each animal has its own specific pleasure. This last topic leads directly into the discussion of happiness, where Aristotle distinguishes different kinds of activities associated with happiness and seeks to determine which activity is the happiness specific to the human soul. The continuity of the discussion as a whole also provides the context in which Aristotle distinguishes between pleasure and happiness. Their structure as activities makes them similar, which leads some to hold the opinion that pleasure is in fact happiness. Aristotle, however, holds that they are different. First, pleasure has its origin in the basic need of an organism to preserve itself. No matter how much pleasure can be associated with activities done for their own sake, this root meaning keeps Aristotle from identifying pleasure with happiness. Second, the definition of happiness becomes increasingly refined until it is identified with contemplation of the divine. The first element of this discussion of contemplation has long been recognized, evaluating the opinions that a life of pleasure, a practical life, or a contemplative life constitutes happiness. …

Kant on Moral Education, or "Enlightenment" and the Liberal Arts

Abstract: "THE ONLY THING NECESSARY IS NOT THEORETICAL LEARNING, but the Bildung of human beings, both in regard to their talents and their character." Kant's epigrammatic observation in his 1778 letter to Christian Wolke, director of the Philanthropin, (1) adumbrates not only his mature sense of "enlightenment" but also the pedagogical role of his critical philosophy and his own life's work. Over a decade earlier, his reading of Rousseau's Emile: or, On Education had "set him straight" about what constitutes the true dignity of humanity, namely, that it did not consist in the advance of knowledge by scholarly inquiry as he had believed. The primary thing was, instead, the "restoration of the rights of humanity," an objective articulated in Kant's mature moral thought as that pedagogical method which facilitates the self-consciousness and efficacy of the moral law in the individual. In another 1778 letter, this time to his former student, Marcus Herz, Kant states that the "main purpose of his academic life," which he "at all times keeps before him," is to "cultivate good characters." In both his lectures on anthropology and on pedagogy, Kant repeatedly emphasizes the need for education and, by extension, for attending to the education of the educator. Human beings are nothing save what education makes of them, but they can only be educated by other human beings who must themselves first be educated. (2) As early as his 1775/ 76 anthropology lectures, Kant observes that "if teachers and priests were educated, if the concepts of pure morality would prevail among them, then ... the whole could afterwards be educated." (3) The resulting task is clear: it is incumbent on every generation to work on the plan of a more purposive education," a task Kant describes as the "greatest and most difficult problem that can be assigned to humankind. (4) That Kant understood his critical philosophy to be in service to that task may be gleaned from the statements he makes within it. In the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant expresses concern about "the youth entrusted to academic instruction" as being central to the critical challenge to dogmatism, stating that "exactly the opposite" to the usual dogmatic procedure "must take place in academic training, but of course only on the presupposition of a thorough instruction in the critique of pure reason." (5) In the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Practical Reason--a text whose own purpose is to "point out the most general maxims of the doctrine of method of a moral education (Bildung) and exercise" (6)--Kant makes one of his most explicit claims for the pedagogical function of the critical philosophy as such, declaring the remedy for the "error of still crude, unpracticed judgment" to be the critical philosophy as the science required for the cultivation of reason, a science to be mastered precisely by those who would take upon themselves a pedagogical role in relation to others: a "science (critically sought and methodically instituted), a narrow gate leading to a doctrine of wisdom, when by this is understood not merely what one ought to do, but what ought to serve teachers as a guideline in order that they may clearly and capably pave the path to wisdom which everyone should follow and keep others from going astray. Philosophy must at all times preserve this science." (7) Not only has the pedagogical role and character of the critical philosophy gone widely unnoticed; to the extent Kant's concern with education (and moral education in particular) is recognized, it is held to be in conflict with his formal moral philosophy. (8) Moreover, however lamentable the editors of Philosophen als Padagogen find it to be, Kant is commonly accorded no place among classical pedagogical thinkers. (9) The purpose of this essay is to argue for the systematic incorporation of a pedagogical role in the critical philosophy, namely, in the form of the Doctrines of Method (Methodenlehren, literally "ways of instruction," from the roots methodus and doctrina) with which Kant concludes each of his major works: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment--both reflective aesthetic and teleological judgments--and Metaphysics of Morals: Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. …

Revisiting the Myth: Husserl and Sellars on the Given

Abstract: I IN SCIENCE, PERCEPTION, AND REALITY, Sellars marvels at the power of fashion in philosophy, which all too often offers us the spectacle of a stampede rather than a careful sifting of gold from dross. (1) Sellars was worried that the flight from phenomenalism would lead to the familiar pendulum effect and so thwart his effort to "usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage," as Rorty has put it. (2) Accordingly, Sellars's critique of the Myth of the Given aimed to show that what was really wrong with phenomenalism was nothing particular to the sense-data of the positivists but the framework of givenness itself. Sellars's critique of the Given made an enormous impact, but did it not set off a new stampede? On the contemporary horizon, the dust is settling around numerous philosophies, including phenomenology, and the hoofprints look strikingly like those of the postpositivistic analytic philosophers who are Sellars's progeny. And, some might think, not without good reason. Are not phenomenology and phenomenalism kindred cousins? Does not the notion of an immediate, private "given" lie so much at the core of the Husserlian enterprise that phenomenology is unthinkable without it? Does not Husserl wish to erect the edifice of objective knowledge on this unshakable foundation? Does not Sellars extend his critique of the Given to Chisholm and so to Brentano and Husserl? (3) When we come to the essence of the matter, can we not treat Husserl and Russell in one breath as an indivisible unity, as does Rorty throughout Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature? (4) In the wake of Sellars, Wittgenstein, Rorty, the linguistic turn, and the rest, would we not do well only to mention and not to use the word "given" in polite philosophical company? According to the spirit if not the letter of Sellars, it is my hope in this paper to redimension the relationship between postpositivistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology by revisiting some of the arguments advanced by Sellars against the Myth of the Given and in favor of the linguistic turn. One thesis advanced in this paper is that there is more common ground between Husserl and Sellars than is usually thought. For the main aim of Sellars's critique is to attack the given as the immediate and to show that empirical knowledge requires concepts, inferences, and language. Here there is little if any disagreement with Husserl, who is hardly concerned with immediacy and makes very similar points about the mediacy of empirical knowledge, albeit in a different way. However, certain divergences remain, and a second aim of this paper is to reconstruct and evaluate them. One important dispute concerns the relation between language and intentionality. For Sellars and his progeny, language is a precondition for attentive, object-directed consciousness; whereas on a phenomenological account, there are prepredicative, preverbal forms of intentionality. A second, related difference arises in the respective approaches to intersubjectivity. Sellars treats the attribution of intentionality to others as primarily a theory for the explanation of behavior; whereas for Husserl the "constitution" of the other is not primarily theoretical, and a relation to behavior does not belong to the very concept of intentionality. Behind these disputes lie certain deeper differences concerning the nature of the mental and the relation between science and everyday life. For there is a secondary tendency in Sellars's linguistic turn which shies away from the given not as the immediate but more generally as the subjective, experiential dimension of life, which Sellars sometimes associates with the Cartesian, "mind's eye" view of consciousness. Sellars's functional-linguistic approach to intentionality aims to define the mental without making any explicit reference to the properly subjective dimension of mental life. This approach is meant to clear the way for an eventual reduction of the mental to the physical in neurophysiological terms. …

Rationalized Passion and Passionate Rationality: Thomas Aquinas on the Relation between Reason and the Passions

Abstract: THE PRESENCE OF EMOTIONS IN HUMAN LIFE and behavior is undeniable. The task of the philosopher is to understand them and, more particularly, to focus on the conflict with reason that they seem to cause within human nature. However, insofar as philosophy defines itself as an attempt at rational reflection, what is ultimately at stake is the way in which philosophy understands itself. When we limit ourselves to the way in which emotions are present in human nature, different options present themselves. In a dualistic model emotions can be said to belong to the realm of the body. They must therefore necessarily be dominated by reason. Body is opposed to mind, and emotions to the rational. Another approach consists in bringing the emotions within the soul. This leads to the idea of an internal division of the soul into a rational and irrational part, a so-called divided reason. Reason has to learn how to use the irrational in itself in an appropriate way. The main problem with this theory is that it remains dualistic. The internalization of the passions has not solved anything. A third possibility presents itself whenever some kind of unity of body and soul is recognized. The passions or emotions do not any more belong to the body alone or to the irrational in the soul alone. They are to be located in the interplay between the bodily and the mental. In this case reason can no longer be put over and against the passions. On the contrary, reason has an original relationship to the emotions. The emotions in their turn are not rational in the strict sense of the word, but they are certainly not strangers to rationality. In this case "reason" is understood in another, broader sense, because what is happening here is more than the internalization of the conflict between the emotions and reason, described above, which leads to an irrational and rational part of the soul. It ultimately means a redefinition of the concept of reason itself and a neutralization of the concept of the "irrational." Thomas Aquinas wrote for the first time in the history of philosophy a systematic treatise on the human passions that considered them from an anthropological as well as from a moral point of view. His theory of the passions belongs to this third or what we could call "Aristotelian" approach. The aim of this article is to bring out the richness of Aquinas's insights by analyzing his theory within the broader framework of his anthropology. A brief look at the existing secondary literature on the passions according to Thomas Aquinas shows us that the older literature on this topic is historically oriented. It looks for the philosophical sources of Thomas's theory in ancient philosophy. The insights of Thomas are consequently only paraphrased, and briefly so. More recent studies take a different approach. Some of them deal with the passions in general. Others either focus on one particular passion or one specific aspect of the passions or try to formulate the impact of Thomas's insights on his ethics in general. Besides these studies are also to be mentioned books that discuss the passions within the broader framework of another larger topic. These studies do not and cannot always do justice to the richness of Thomas's treatise on the passions. (1) The relatively meager interest in this topic of medieval philosophy is in a way surprising given the fact that it is a major topic of research in ancient philosophy. We can refer here to the works of Julia Annas and Martha Nussbaum. (2) Recent studies about so-called emotional intelligence should also be noted here. These studies, however, are not founded upon any historical knowledge. Consequently, the classical philosophical questions about the relation between reason and emotion, or about the place that the emotions may hold in a moral theory, are omitted. (3) The purpose of this article is to relate the passions to Thomas's anthropological presuppositions. More precisely, I intend to show that his theory of the passions is based upon three fundamental insights of his anthropology that are related among themselves as three concentric circles. …

Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will

Abstract: ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING IF TROUBLESOME DEBATES within medieval philosophy is the paradoxical question of whether St. Thomas Aquinas, arguably the most influential theologian the medieval Catholic Church produced, defends an account of moral responsibility that is consistent with the Christian faith. Debate regarding the orthodoxy of Aquinas's action theory has surfaced intermittently since at least the thirteenth century, attracting the attention of both supporters and detractors. The aboriginal dispute centered on whether Thomas's account of the will (voluntas) could provide an adequate foundation for moral responsibility. Medieval critics such as Henry of Ghent (d. 1293) and William de la Mare (d. 1290) charged that Aquinas's understanding of the will as a passive potency that always follows the judgments of practical deliberation led to cognitive determinism. For such critics, if the will were determined by the intellect, then it would lack freedom, and if it lacked freedom, then moral responsibility would fall by the wayside. To deny the will's independence from the intellect was, to such theologians, incompatible with Catholic teaching on moral responsibility. (1) Medieval Thomists such as the Dominican master John of Paris (d. 1306), on the other hand, attempted to defend Aquinas against such charges. Adopting Thomas's notion of the passivity of the will, John nonetheless denied that such a position necessarily interferes with moral responsibility. He justified this stance on the grounds that an agent's freedom is only violated when it is necessitated contrary to its own nature. Because the will is naturally suited to follow practical deliberation, its necessitation by the intellect leaves its freedom intact. (2) Something of this polemical spirit has reawakened in recent years among students of medieval philosophy. Ever since Odon Lottin raised the question in his pioneering studies on medieval ethics and moral psychology in the last century, scholars have taken a lively interest in whether Aquinas's considered view of the will was principally a voluntaristic or an intellectualistic one. On Lottin's account, Thomas did in fact defend the passivity of the will but only in his early works. In his mature writings, by contrast, he abandoned this position in favor of a more active conception of the will. (3) It should be noted that Lottin's theory initially garnered the support of some very eminent thinkers, Bernard Lonergan among them. (4) The claim that Aquinas abandoned his early view of the will as found, for example, in the prima pars of the Summa theologiae for a later, more voluntaristic view of the will as found in De malo, question 6, however, is not without its troublesome implications. (5) Most notably, if Lottin's interpretation is right, it renders vital sections of the Summa, Thomas's masterpiece, the product of immaturity that must, as one contemporary scholar has pointed out, either be ignored or read with caution. (6) Furthermore, even if it is true that Aquinas introduces a radically new account of the will in De malo, Question 6 (c. 1270), one would naturally expect it to inform other late works--such as the prima secundae of the Summa--that were composed at approximately the same time. However, there is scant evidence that the prima secundae as a whole has a particularly voluntaristic orientation. (7) Recent scholarship has evinced a reaction against Lottin's interpretation of Aquinas's moral psychology. Exegetes continue to dispute whether Aquinas was principally a voluntarist or an intellectualist but seem less interested, as a general rule, in the question of whether there occurred a development in his view of the will. Rather, they largely assume that he held a consistent position throughout his career, although what precisely that position amounts to is the source of disagreement. Recent interpretations have ranged from presenting Aquinas as a thoroughgoing intellectualist to a defender of erstwhile voluntarism and erstwhile intellectualism, depending on the context. …

Does Kantian Virtue Amount to More Than Continence

Abstract: AS IS WELL KNOWN, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant begins his analysis of what he takes to be our shared, prephilosophical understanding of morality by insisting that the good will is the only thing in this world (and even beyond this world) that is good without limitation (ohne Einschrankung). (1) In accounting for the goodness of this will, Kant draws a sharp contrast between duty and inclination as the two competing sources of motivation for the human will, and claims that only action from duty possesses moral worth. Given this connection between the good will and duty, the picture seems to be that having a good will amounts to doing one's duty for the sake of duty, not from emotion or inclination. Kant famously contrasts action done from duty and action done from inclination in his discussion of four kinds of conformity to duty. Neither the prudent shopkeeper, who treats his customers fairly out of self-interest, nor the man of sympathy, who helps others out of a sense of sympathy, displays moral worth. By contrast, Kant finds moral worth in both the person who performs beneficent action even though his own sorrows have extinguished natural sympathy for others and in the person who performs beneficent action despite what might be characterized as a wholesale indifference to the sufferings of others. These two characters seem to be grudging moralists whose sense of duty either is sufficient in the absence of natural emotions and inclinations or must overcome countervailing emotions and inclinations. (2) This account of the good will has struck many readers as counterintuitive. Whereas Kant seems to think that the person in whom a sense of duty must overcome indifference or contrary inclination can and does display a good will, our intuitions about human goodness suggest that there is something deficient or lacking in the grudging agent. Aristotle, for example, would think that the grudging moralist displays continence, rather than virtue, because he thinks it is the mark of the virtuous person that he does not experience a conflict between the rational and nonrational parts of the soul and that his emotions and appetites harmonize with rational judgments. Such doubts about the moral psychology of the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason motivate and structure an examination of Kant's later and less familiar ethical texts, which appear to articulate a full conception of virtue and a more robust moral psychology. (3) Yet the prospect for reconstructing a Kantian account of virtue from these texts that assigns moral value to emotions and inclinations appears bleak when we see that Kant conceives of virtue as moral strength of will over recalcitrant inclinations and characterizes virtue in terms of the autocracy of pure practical reason. This conception of virtue in terms of self-rule over one's sensuous nature initially reinforces, rather than resolves, familiar criticisms of Kant's rationalism. The aim of this paper is to show that the self-mastery constitutive of Kantian virtue requires not only the regulation, but also the cultivation, of one's sensible nature according to reason; this means that certain states rooted (at least in part) in the affective and conative side of human nature play an important role within Kant's account of virtue. The paper is divided into four sections. After analyzing Kant's conception of autocracy and its relation to autonomy (section 1), section 2 investigates the worry that autocracy is a repressive form of self-governance. Section 3 introduces the resources and subtleties in Kant's doctrines that make room for his positive account of the role emotions and appetites play within virtue. This constructive role sensibility plays within virtue is set out in (some) detail in section 4. I Kant's Conception of Virtue as Autocracy. Kant's most extended discussion of virtue as a character trait appears in The Doctrine of Virtue. …

The Paradoxes of Hylomorphism

Abstract: I THE CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUE OF HYLOMORPHISM. In its extension to human beings, hylomorphism is the view that a human being is a composite of form and matter. In this respect, the hylomorphist maintains that human beings are like every other organism, for every organism is a composite of form and matter. Of course, the form and the matter of a human being are not to be understood on the order of spatially separated parts, like an arm and a leg. Rather, they are metaphysical constituents of a single, individual substance--what the scholastics would have called an ens per se. The most common example used, since Aristotle, to illustrate the correlative ideas of matter and form is that of a bronze statue. (1) The bronze that composes the statue illustrates the concept of matter. Matter is the stuff of which something is composed, and like the bronze, it is stuff that can take on many distinct forms. By contrast, the shape of the statue illustrates the concept of form. The shape of the statue is what makes it to be the kind of thing that it is--a statue. It is the shape of the statue that determines that it is a statue. Likewise, the substantial form of an individual substance makes it to be the kind of thing that it is. The form is what determines the otherwise indeterminate matter to compose a thing of a definite kind. Of course, as scholars have long known, this example has serious limitations. For one thing, a substantial form, as the scholastics understood it, is much more dynamic than a mere shape. For example, the substantial form of an oak tree somehow explains how and why an oak tree can do everything that it does. So the substantial form of an oak tree could not be something as simple or crude as its shape. Nevertheless, the example of the bronze statue does have the virtue of illustrating one of the chief advantages of hylomorphism as a philosophy of the human person. Although we can talk about the bronze and the shape of the statue, respectively, it still seems correct to say that the statue is exactly one thing, not two things. (2) Likewise, although we can talk about the matter and the form of a human being, the hylomorphist insists that a human being is exactly one thing, not two things accidentally conjoined. It is at just this point that hylomorphism has come in for a lot of criticism lately. The criticism, expressed in various ways, is that hylomorphism is fundamentally ambiguous. Understood in one way, it is simply a garden variety of nonreductive materialism. Understood in another way, it is actually a kind of dualism. Thus, according to Bernard Williams, Hylomorphism earns its reputation as everybody's moderate metaphysics of mind, I believe, by in fact wobbling between two options. In one of them, soul does basically appear only adjectivally, and while the doctrine is, so far as I can see, formally consistent, it is only a polite form of materialism, which is cumbrous, misleading, and disposed to point in the wrong direction from the point of view of deeper theoretical understanding. It also has precisely this disadvantage of readily sliding into the other view, in which soul tries to transcend its adjectival status, and become the bearer of personal proper names. (3) Why does Williams think that hylomorphism wobbles between materialism and dualism? On closer inspection, Williams and others locate the source of the difficulty in an ambiguity in the notion of form. Williams introduces the ambiguity through Aristotle's definition of the soul as "the first actuality of a natural body which has life potentially." (4) According to Williams, This claim is categorically puzzling. For soul is said to be substance, and there are references (as here) to a soul, or the soul. Yet the claim itself does not seem to introduce any particular item for any particular soul to be. It seems to introduce something more in the nature of a fact, or, possibly, a property. …

Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth and Language

Abstract: IT IS SHOCKING THAT IN THE VOLUMINOUS SECONDARY LITERATURE that surrounds Heidegger's relationship to the Middle Ages, or the well-trodden field of "Heidegger and Theology," so few acknowledge the essential relationship between Heidegger's notion of truth and Duns Scotus's revisionary Aristotelianism. Heidegger's debt to the late thirteenth-century doctor subtilis manifests itself on the opening page of Being and Time. Heidegger asks, not about being, but about the meaning of being, that is, to what essence (logos) does the word "being" refer. (1) Further on Heidegger writes: "higher than actuality stands possibility." (2) For Scotus (by distinction from Thomas Aquinas), possibility is higher than actuality because being is essentia. Even Etienne Gilson, the great enemy of "essentialism," and his German counterpart, Gustav Siewerth, failed to recognize the Heidegger-Scotus connection. I have heard that Gilson used to recommend Heidegger's 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics to his undergraduates. This suggests that he completely misjudged the polemical relationship that exists between Aquinas's ontology and Heidegger's. Siewerth passionately believed that Heidegger was one with him in ridding metaphysics of the infectious influence of Scotism! (3) He assumed that Heidegger's forgetfulness of being was the forgetfulness of esse. Had he read the early Heidegger more carefully (all of his references are to the middle and later writings), he would have seen that whatever else being means for Heidegger, it is primally understandable. Being for Heidegger is not what the Thomists call existentia, pure contentless positivity, the sheer act of upsurge from nothingness, which analogically indicates the infinite Creator; it is rather fore-theoretical historically determined intelligibility. Heidegger's Seinsvergessenheit is not the forgetfulness of esse but the forgetfulness of haecceitas. How is this massive oversight by such eminent neo-Scholastics possible? I believe it is entirely due to their neglect of the young Heidegger's Scotus study, the 1916 Habilitationsschrift, The Categories and Theory of Meaning of Duns Scotus. (4) We have too long assumed (on the later Heidegger's misleading suggestion) that this is a youthful work lacking direction, with no intrinsic connection to Being and Time. On the contrary, the most direct and vital connection exists between Scotus's account of the intuition of singularity (haeeceitas), Thomas of Erfurt's grammatical modes (modis significandi), Husserl's categorial intuition, and the young Heidegger's notion of "hermeneutical intution" of the fore-theoretical forms of meaning that "live in life itself." (5) Falling to recognize this, commentators both within and without the Heidegger school cannot but misunderstand Heidegger's relationship to the onto-theological tradition. In the Habilitationsschrift the young Heidegger appears to align himself with philosophers who hold ontological knowledge to be primarily intuition (for example, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Bonaventure, Scotus, and in the modern period, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl). He argues that the truth of judgment, propositional truth, is derivative or founded, secondary to the direct apprehension of being, without which it cannot occur. Heidegger writes in Being and Time that judgment is logos as apophainesthai, language that "lets something be seen." Primal truth, aletheia, is unconcealment. (6) Judgment enables or hinders unconcealment. Because it can allow the thing to show itself or cover it over once again, logos apophainesthai can be true or false. Heidegger writes, "as aletheuein the 'being true' of logos means: to take beings that are being talked about in legein as apophainesthai out of their concealment; to let them be seen as something unconcealed (alethes); to discover them. Similarly 'being false,' pseudesthai, is tantamount to deceiving in the sense of covering up: putting something in front of something else (by way of letting it be seen) and thereby passing it off as something it is not. …

Doing Philosophy Historically

Abstract: QUINE IS SAID TO HAVE JOKED THAT "there are two sorts of people interested in philosophy, those interested in philosophy and those interested in the history of philosophy." (1) Though many of us would bristle at Quine's joke, it makes a straightforward point: that there is a distinction to be drawn between trying to solve contemporary philosophical problems and trying to understand the philosophers of the past. Doing philosophy and studying its history are separate enterprises, at least in principle, and they must be carefully distinguished. (2) In the last several decades, however, doing so has become more complicated, as it has become common for philosophers to speak of a third enterprise that must be distinguished both from doing philosophy and from studying its history. This enterprise is called "doing philosophy historically." (3) Doing philosophy historically involves more than simply doing philosophy since not every attempt to solve philosophical problems does so by engaging with thinkers from the past. We can try to solve philosophical problems in nonhistorical ways--through conceptual analysis or the study of ordinary language, for example. Doing philosophy historically also involves more than simply studying the history of philosophy since not every attempt to understand the thinkers of the past is also an attempt to solve contemporary philosophical problems. We can try to understand what Aristotle or Aquinas said without asking whether what they said is true, rational, or relevant to our own concerns. Doing philosophy historically is thought to be a hybrid, an attempt to gain philosophical understanding through or by means of an engagement with philosophy's past. It takes the study of history to be a philosophical method and a method that offers a kind of illumination that is difficult or perhaps impossible to gain in any other way. This much seems clear; but the matters of what it means to do philosophy historically, and of what sort of illumination this enterprise offers, are much less clear. My aim here is to explore what is involved in doing philosophy historically. I want to offer an explication of this enterprise's goals and methods, one that serves to distinguish it both from the practice of philosophy more narrowly construed and from the study of the history of philosophy. I also want to investigate the value of this activity--that is, to explain what kind of illumination it offers and why this illumination is worth seeking. Accordingly, the rest of the paper falls into three parts. In the first, I examine a number of current views about what it means to do philosophy historically and explain why I find them inadequate. In the second section, I raise the question of what kind of understanding is gained through the study of history--any kind of history. I do so by drawing on John Herman Randall's discussion of the "genetic method." (4) In the third section, I extend Randall's discussion of the genetic method to the case of philosophy and explain how a study of past philosophy might teach philosophical lessons. I also ask what assumptions we must make about philosophy if it is to be possible for us to learn such lessons. These assumptions, I argue, are plausible. (5) I It is not difficult to describe the enterprise of doing philosophy historically in very general terms. Let us imagine two ideal types: the pure philosopher and the pure historian of philosophy. The pure philosopher is interested solely in "doing" philosophy--that is, in discovering the answers to contemporary philosophical questions. He may want to know whether uncaused free action is possible or moral values objective, for example. He may not be particularly interested in the history of earlier attempts to answer these questions. He simply wants to know the answers, and he may not think that a familiarity with the history of his questions will help him find them. Indeed, the pure philosopher may suspect that paying too much attention to this history will lead him away from the answers he seeks. …

Nonexistents Then and Now

Abstract: I PROBLEM: THE BEING OF NONEXISTENTS In matters of irreality, medieval philosophers were not much concerned with fiction as such The prime focus of their attention was theology, and their dealings with nonexistence related to the role of such items in relation to the thoughts of God rather than those of man In this light, the medievals approached the issue of nonexistents on essentially the following basis: God created the world about us His choice to create this world was a free choice--had he wanted to do so, he could have created the world differently The things that would have existed had he done this are of course nonexistent And on this basis room must be made for such beings as a deliberative possibility because in order to make a rational choice God had to make comparisons To assure the freedom of God's creative choice there have to be other possibilities, and to implement the idea of other possibilities it is necessary to postulate other possibles, that is, mere possibilia As the medievals saw it, in order to create his world in a manner that is wise and good, God had to compare his actual creation choices with their (inferior) alternatives And so he therefore must, by way of contrast, contemplate nonexistence and nonexistents But nonexistents are--so it would seem--in principle unknowable The difficulty that arises here was contemplated by Moses Maimonides whose position in this regard was summarized by Harry Austryn Wolfson as follows: Knowledge of non-existent things was objectionable to the medievals on two main grounds First, it was not true knowledge, if by truth is meant correspondence of the idea in the mind to an object outside the mind Second, in the event the non-existent object became existent, it would imply a change of the knower (1) Given such problems, it should occasion no surprise that St Thomas Aquinas grappled at some length with the issue of nonexistent possibles in the context of the question of God's knowledge of things that are not A synopsis of Thomas's general position is clearly conveyed in the following passage: The relation of the divine knowledge to other things, therefore, will be such that it can be even of non-existing things Now, the artisan knows through his art even those things that have not yet been fashioned, since the forms of his art flow from his knowledge to external matter for the constitution of the artifacts Hence, nothing forbids that there be in the knowledge of an artisan forms that have not yet come out of it Thus, nothing forbids God to have knowledge of the things that are not Moreover, by that operation through which it knows what a thing is, even our intellect can know those things that do not actually exist It can comprehend the essence of a lion or a horse even though all such animals were to be destroyed But the divine intellect knows, in the manner of one knowing what a thing is, not only definitions but also enunciables as is clear from what we have said Therefore, it can know even the things that are not But not all non-beings have the same relation to His knowledge For those things that are not, nor will be, nor ever were, are known by God as possible to His power Hence, God does not know them as in some way existing in themselves, but as existing only in the divine power (2) Thus Thomas's position is that God has full knowledge of nonexistents since they correspond to concepts in his intellect, which comprehends all "enunciables" Indeed, God must be able to grasp these for several reasons: (1) because he otherwise would not be omniscient, (2) because his omnibenevolence requires comparative preferences, and (3) because his omnipotence would otherwise be impeded as well, since the full exercise of any power (including creative power) requires knowledge of the range of alternatives lying within one's power …

Gadamer on Context-Dependence

Abstract: This paper deals with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of the manner in which cognition depends on its historical context. In section II the historical background of this theory is briefly described. In ...

The Problem of the Enlightenment: Strauss, Jacobi, and the Pantheism Controversy

Abstract: Denn was die Philosophen sogar ein wenig nachsehend und parteiisch gegen Enthusiasten und Schwarmer macht, ist, dass sie, die Philosophen, am allermeisten dabei verlieren wurden, wenn es gar keine Enthusiasten und Schwarmer mehr gabe. Lessing, Uber eine zeitige Aufgabe I IN HIS FIRST BOOK, LEO STRAUSS PROVIDES the reader with an interesting clue to one of the sources of his groundbreaking critical study of the Theological-Political Treatise. While identifying the guiding question of his undertaking, he also points out its pedigree: Even if all the reasoning adduced by Spinoza were compelling, nothing would have been proven. Only this much would have been proven: that on the basis of unbelieving science, one could not but arrive at Spinoza's results. But would this basis itself thus be justified? It was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi who posed this question, and by so doing lifted the interpretation of Spinoza--or what amounts to the same thing--the criticism of Spinoza on to its proper plane. (1) This statement is both literally and figuratively singular: the only reference to Jacobi in the whole book, unaccompanied by any mention of its source, it makes us wonder about the importance of this author for Strauss's endeavour. A renowned critic of the Enlightenment, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) singled out Spinoza as one of the main targets of his attacks. (2) Similarly, in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, Strauss casts doubt on the legitimacy of Spinoza's attack against revealed religion, thereby also questioning the foundations of the Enlightenment. In a discerning review of the book, his contemporary Gerhard Kruger noted that in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, "there is concealed a fundamental philosophic discussion of the problem of the Enlightenment." (3) If this interpretation is sound, then from a merely formal point of view the procedure followed by Strauss closely resembles that of Jacobi: to address the problem of the Enlightenment by means of a critical assessment of Spinoza. (4) However, even if Strauss's critique of Spinoza may be said to take its cue from Jacobi, it is not clear whether the latter's influence reaches beyond this initial impulse, nor is it clear to what extent. Recently it has been suggested not only that Spinoza's Critique of Religion is "by its own account, `Jacobian' in orientation," but also that "the Jacobian dilemma and the critique of rationalism [remained] fundamental for Strauss's perspective" throughout his career. (5) Moreover, these assumptions carry an implicit criticism, to the extent that Strauss may be said to be heir to the irrationalism, conservatism, and authoritarianism attributed to the anti-Enlightenment with which Jacobi is commonly associated. (6) This paper will attempt to show that such assessments are in need of qualification. It will be argued that even if a certain affinity between Strauss and Jacobi can be shown to exist, this affinity is far more complex than it seems. In order to bring out this complexity, a closer look will be taken at those writings in which Strauss discusses Jacobi. To begin, there is his doctoral dissertation, which, although he later disparaged it as "a disgraceful performance," nevertheless merits closer investigation. (7) A comprehensive account, moreover, must broaden the inquiry. After the completion of Spinoza's Critique of Religion, Strauss worked as a coeditor of the Jubilee Edition of Moses Mendelssohn's collected works. As a part of this employment, he conducted research into the so-called Pantheism Controversy. This debate was launched by Jacobi, with Moses Mendelssohn as its principal addressee, and initially concerned the philosophical legacy of the thinker and writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. However, it soon developed into a full-blown debate concerning the foundations and the legitimacy of the Enlightenment, involving such prominent contemporaries as Johann Georg Hamann, Immanuel Kant, Karl Reinhold, and Johann Gottfried Herder. …

Hume’s Nonreductionist Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract: HUME'S A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE constitutes a philosophical anthropology quite different from a philosophy of (self-)consciousness or of the subject. According to Hume, the Self or Subject is itself a product of human nature, that is, of the workings of a structured set of principles which explains all typically human phenomena. On the same basis, Hume discusses all "moral" subjects, such as science, morality and politics (including economics), art and religion as well as the different reflections about all these such as philosophy, criticism, political theory, history, theology, and so forth. The Treatise therefore is the study of the (de facto) possibility conditions of what is (typically) human. The principles of human nature are not primarily reason, or free will and reason, but the heart, (1) that is, a combination of principles concerning the imagination and the sensibility or the emotions, all of them irrevocably socially determined. I In terms of cognition, humans clearly surpass animals in complexity, even though animals are quite capable of transcending what is merely given at any moment. Already at the level of sensibility, there is--as Kant would also say--a synthesizing activity present in both humans and animals which transforms the mere givenness of similar data into a perception of similarity, and the mere givenness of data appearing next to and after one another into a perception of spatial proximity and temporal succession. The capacity to anticipate things that are not yet there or to postulate things that are not present (or no longer present) is extremely important for survival. This capacity depends on the ability to establish concrete causal links and on the expectations resulting from them. In this way, the domain of reality--what we take into account in our beliefs and actions--expands into a concrete past and a concrete future. The three "natural" relations ensure that what is given is not simply a mere multiplicity but forms an integrated totality of connections, that is, a world, indeed a world not limited to the present. (2) Hume devotes relatively little attention to the astonishing capacities for establishing spatio-temporal connections and connections of resemblance. He does not dwell on what everybody already agreed upon and which was only a subsidiary point as to his real topic: knowledge and probability. As is well known, his interest is directed more specifically to the relation of causality. (3) He asks himself what might be the basis of this transcendence of the given. (4) Contrary to what philosophers had previously thought, that basis is not the ratio, it is the factual psychological constitution of the human mind. The capacity to establish causal connections is of a piece with our ability to form beliefs or expectations concerning the necessity of these connections. The beliefs are of such a nature that what counts for us is not only what is directly present but also what is believed to belong to the past or the future. Belief is nothing other than a "lively idea": an imaginative activity in which what is not present is taken equally seriously (equally "lively") as what is present. (5) The principle that permits us to form expectations about the future and to take the past into account is called "reason" by Hume, and it should not be confused with Descartes's ratio since it is also at work in beings that are said to lack reason, such as animals, children, and insane persons. It is a kind of "animal reason," "a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls." (6) In human beings, however, this natural or animal reason is transcended in two ways, discussed successively in book 1, part 3, "Of knowledge and probability" (that is, on the different forms of science), and part 4, "Of the sceptical and other systems of philosophy" (that is, on philosophy), which successively form a kind of nontranscendental analytic and dialectic. In fact, these transcendences of animal reason cannot be explained exhaustively on the basis of an investigation of the understanding or of the human ability to form and to link together various sorts of ideas. …

Thomas Reid on Natural Signs, Natural Principles, and the Existence of the External World

Abstract: I AN EMPIRICIST, ONE MIGHT THINK, OUGHT TO BE AGNOSTIC about the existence of the external world. That, anyway, is the received wisdom of respected empiricists such as David Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), book I, part II, section VI, Of the idea of existence, and of external existence, Hume argues that: [N]o object can be presented resembling some object with respect to its existence, and different from others in the same particular; since every object, that is presented, must necessarily be existent. A like reasoning will account for the idea of external existence. We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion. (1) Later, in part IV, section II, Of scepticism with regard to the senses, Hume concludes that philosophy cannot rigorously prove the existence of external reality, even if the passions and in particular imagination are psychologically compelled to accept the existence of a real world beyond the contents of impressions and ideas. "We may well ask," he writes, "What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but 'tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings." (2) If these passages seem equivocal, Hume unambiguously applies the same distinction between what philosophical reason can know and what the passions command us to believe to another problem earlier in the text. In considering counterobjections to his critique of the idea of a true vacuum, in Treatise, part II, section V, Hume blunts the criticism that: "'Twill probably be said, that my reasoning makes nothing to the matter in hand, and that I explain only the manner in which objects affect the senses, without endeavouring to account for their real nature and operations." (3) Hume anticipates the complaint and replies: "I answer this objection, by pleading guilty, and by confessing that my intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or explain the secret causes of their operations. For besides that this belongs not to my present purpose, I am afraid, that such an enterprize is beyond the reach of human understanding, and that we can never pretend to know body otherwise than by those external properties, which discover themselves to the senses." (4) Hume has nevertheless been accused of violating his own scruples against ontic commitment to objects, events, or real properties in the external world, in the context of refuting any idea of the infinite divisibility of extension. In part II, section II, Of the infinite divisibility of space and time, Hume states: "[O]ur ideas are adequate representations of the most minute parts of extension; and thro' whatever divisions and sub-divisions we may suppose these parts to be arriv'd at, they can never become inferior to some ideas, which we form. The plain consequence is, that whatever appears impossible and contradictory upon the comparison of these ideas, must be really impossible and contradictory, without any farther excuse or evasion." (5) Commentators are divided about whether or to what extent Hume in this assertion lapses into methodological and doctrinal inconsistency. Hume's example is instructive because it illustrates the fact that the metaphilosophical endorsement of strict empiricist practices does not preclude an almost overwhelming desire on the part of metaphysicians of any philosophical school to want to say something more definite about the nature of the world, to establish a secure connection between what we perceive and think about the world and the way the world is in actuality. George Berkeley, in some ways an even more radical empiricist than Hume, answers this natural desire by denying altogether the existence of the world "without the mind," arguing that there are only minds and their ideas, that esse est percipi aut posse percipere, and that sensible things are congeries of ideas in the mind. …

On the Unity of Theoretical Subjectivity in Kant and Fichte

Abstract: THE BODY OF TEXTS THAT FORMS Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre is among the most significant products of that immensely fertile period spanning the publication of Kant's first Critique and Hegel's Phenomenology. Like many of Kant's earliest disciples and critics, Fichte was preoccupied with puzzles that arose in connection with certain distinctions presupposed or drawn by Kant throughout the writings of the Critical period. Among the many distinctions developed with great care in the three Critiques, the most important for Fichte were those drawn between the various powers or faculties of the human mind. (1) Fichte came to recognize that a well-grounded philosophical science would have to account for the complex structure of human subjectivity without dividing the mind into a mere aggregate of lifeless mental faculties. (2) As Fichte famously put it in the Grundlage, the aim of the Wissenschaftslehre is to introduce into "the whole human being that unity and connection that so many systems lack." (3) Despite obvious Romantic overtones, this quest for a single, unified account of the human mind amounted to the demand for a strictly scientific reconstruction of the Critical philosophy. On Fichte's view, philosophy would be able to come forward as a rigorous science of living subjectivity, with the force and evidence of geometry, only as a closed system of propositions derived from a self-evident first principle. (4) Fichte's rather idiosyncratic Kantianism has always been somewhat enigmatic, no less problematic to his contemporaries than to subsequent students of German Idealism. (5) In response to early critics like Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte insisted that the Wissenschaftslehre is "none other than the Kantian system," that it contains the same subject matter as the Critical philosophy, and differs only in method or manner of presentation. (6) Although it cannot be denied that the details of Fichte's Kant-interpretation do not always square easily with the letter of Kant's own texts, it is equally true that Fichte's relation to Kant has been obscured by several misconceptions about the project of a "doctrine of science" and its relation to human life. Two views in particular will be targeted in what follows. The first concerns the status of the absolute I that Fichte places at the head of philosophical science. On one account of the concept of subjectivity developed in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, the I that "originally posits simply its own being" is to be understood as an impersonal intelligence, responsible for creating nature and finite human minds in a mysterious process ex nihilo. (7) The second view, closely related to the first, concerns Fichte's various attempts to derive the various mental faculties and their "objects"--space, time, and the pure concepts of the understanding--from the absolute act of self-positing expressed in the first Grundsatz of the Grundlage tier gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. According to one prevalent and influential interpretation of this project, Fichte's derivation of the structures and necessary operations of finite reason from the principle of self-positing subjectivity is tantamount to a reduction of the various powers of the human mind to a single basic power (Grundkraft). (8) In both cases, the epistemological and moral trajectory of the Wissenschaftslehre is construed as a pre- or post-Critical "metaphysics of subjectivity" that stands in sharp contrast to Kant's modest version of transcendental idealism. (9) Fichte himself is partly to blame for the misunderstandings that have long surrounded his work. Throughout his writings and correspondence from the Jena period (1794-99), Fichte often criticizes as "dogmatic" the view, usually associated with Kant, that the primary object of thought is simply given to the mind. In a letter to Jacobi Fichte writes, "Kant clings to the view that the manifold of experience is something given--God knows how and why. But I straightforwardly maintain that even this manifold is produced by us through our creative faculty. …

Leibniz without Physics

Abstract: THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS in Leibniz and Aristotle. More generally, it concerns the relation of early modern philosophy to the preceding traditions. The inquiry is conducted by way of a review of Christia Mercer's Leibniz's Metaphysics: It's Origins and Development. (1) We thus begin with the question of Leibniz's intellectual development. What is the role of Leibniz's early work in the constitution of his mature philosophy? Conventional scholarship would emphasize 1686 as the point at which the Leibnizian philosophical system was in place, subsequent obscurities concerning forces and monads notwithstanding. In that year the Discourse on Metaphysics was completed, the Brief Demonstration of Leibniz's (1678) discovery of the conservation of living force was published, and the correspondence with Arnauld begun, leading to the 1695 publication of the New System and part I of its companion Specimen Dynamicum. On this forward-looking account, the early period recedes in importance. Against this rough but established consensus, Christia Mercer argues that far more weight needs to be given to Leibniz's early development--especially the period from 1668 to 1672--in the Aristotelian and Platonic eclecticism of seventeenth-century Germany. Daniel Garber's advertisement on the book jacket pertains: "Though it will be controversial, her position is one that must be reckoned with.... [I]t will be read and passionately debated for years to come." Leibniz's Metaphysics "is really two books in one." (2) The first book is Mercer's 1989 Ph.D. thesis that was nearing completion when she "discovered Leibniz's youthful Platonism and the Platonism of his teachers," in the face of which she "was forced to rethink everything but the core of [her] original interpretation" and write the second. (3) Owing to its two beginnings, the present volume implicates Aristotle and Aristotelianism (from the first beginning), as well as Plato and Platonism (from the second) in its account of Leibniz's development. These are four large specialties, and the number of reviewers competent to assess all the parts of her book will be small. I am not one of them and must refrain from comment on her important account of Leibniz's Platonism. The basic outline of Leibniz's Metaphysics is as follows (the descriptions of the parts are mine; they are close to Mercer's but not identical): Introduction: On First Truths and the historical terrain about to be excavated. Part one (chapter 1): Conciliatory eclecticism and its associated rhetoric of attraction. Part two (chapters 2-4): Metaphysics of substance and its Aristotelian character. Part three (chapters 5-6): Metaphysics of divinity and its Platonic character. Part four (chapters 7-10): Leibniz's metaphysics on newly excavated foundations. Conclusion: New truth about Leibniz. Appendix I: Basic tenets of Leibniz's mature philosophy. Appendix II: The heretofore hidden original assumptions. In the following, I survey parts one, two, and four of Leibniz's Metaphysics, focusing especially on the question of natural philosophy or physics: Is physics important (my view) or unimportant (Mercer's view) for Leibniz? I Conciliatory Eclecticism, Rhetoric of Attraction, and Leibnizian Novelty. Leibniz's Metaphysics begins (chapter 1) with the question of a philosopher's rhetorical strategy in the historical setting in which he finds himself. Related to rhetorical strategy is the issue of temperament or disposition: What does a thinker care about, victory or peace? Accordingly, is he temperate and irenic (Leibniz) or angry and agonistic (many of Leibniz's contemporaries, especially Cartesians), (4) and how might this affect his manner of writing for a given audience? Does Leibniz always say exactly what he believes, or does he--as Mercer claims--"present his discoveries with the right degree of rhetorical subtlety," even such that "the mature Leibniz is rarely explicit about his underlying beliefs," having "consciously hid[den] them beneath the surface of the text"? …

Aquinas on Concord: "Concord Is a Union of Wills, Not of Opinions"

Abstract: IN AT LEAST SIX PLACES AQUINAS WRITES: "Concord is a union of wills, not of opinions." (1) This dictum is problematic because one would think that without some union of opinions, union of wills can not obtain. This article seeks to clarify the meaning of this dictum and to show that it does not imply that shared opinions are unnecessary for concord. Before proceeding it is important to advert to a tempting but probably false lead: to read "opinion" against the background of the distinction between the different modes of cognition (opinion, science, understanding, and faith). (2) In his dictum, Aquinas does not seem to be using the term "opinion" in this specialized manner but rather as a general term to refer to beliefs. (3) I To examine concord as a feature of Aquinas's account of friendship one must start by looking at the dynamics of love. It was an accepted view, originating in Neoplatonism and influential in Christian mysticism, that love involves a certain movement toward a unity between the lover and the loved. When, in In III Sent, d. 27, q. 2, a. 1, Aquinas introduces "concord" as the fourth characteristic of reciprocal well-wishing and equates it with "union of wills," this must be read in its proper context: as one of the sorts of union that is part of the dynamics of love. (4) In ST I-II, q. 28, a. 1c, Aquinas distinguishes between two kinds of unions between lovers: real (physical closeness to each other) and affective. The affective union is love, and it puts in motion the process toward real union, which is an effect of love. (5) Affective union consists in some sort of apprehension and can take two shapes. In erotic love the lover apprehends the beloved as part of his own well-being. In love of friendship, unlike in erotic love, we do not have an expansion of the self such that it comes to encompass our friend's well-being. (6) Rather, what matters is that we perceive the friend as a like. Earlier, in ST I-II, q. 27, a. 3c, Aquinas is busy explaining how likeness (similitudo) "causes" love. (7) There he argues that likeness consists in the "sharing of one form," so two persons alike "are in some way one in that form," just as two human beings "are one in their belonging to the human species." He then goes on to say that, in this manner, "the love of one goes to the other as toward himself, and wills him good as he wills to himself." (8) From this it follows that the union which is sought after in love of friendship consists in having certain alikeness (that is, sharing in one form or uniformity). (9) Aquinas's discussions of concord are placed within discussion of two kinds of relationships: (1) the relationship between lover and beloved, and (2) the relationship between those who pursue a common end (or love the same person). (10) I start by looking at (1) as discussed in In III Sent, d. 27, q. 1, a. 1c. A loves B. This apparently carries the consequence that the will of B becomes a sort of directing rule (regula operas) for A. (11) But what does it mean for the will of the beloved to become a directive rule for the lover? There Aquinas argues that when the appetite or affection (affectus) fixes itself on an object apprehended as good, the loved good impresses its form on the appetite or affect of the lover, not unlike the way intelligible forms impress their form on the intellect. The fact that the beloved impresses its form on the lover's appetite creates a kind of union: "the lover is one with the beloved, who is made into the form of the lover." (12) In this fashion, as Aquinas says, love can be said to be "transformative." (13) Things move (and human beings act) in accordance with their form (unumquodque autem agit secundum exigentiam suae formae). In the case of human beings, this form--namely, the end we are after is both our principle of action and a rule of our works (principium agendi et regula operis). Thus, the lover whose affection is informed by the beloved becomes inclined by love to act according to what is required by (the form of) the beloved (exigentiam amanti). …

How religious experience ‘works’: Jamesian pragmatism and its warrants

Abstract: THIS ESSAY IS A RECONSIDERATION of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, a work intended by James as a study of the more revealing features of human nature. Significant among James's contributions, the Varieties integrates the widest range of his psychological and philosophical precepts. It illustrates the aptness of the pragmatic standard of truth as well as the quality of experience when freed from philosophical censorship. Throughout the work there are clear affinities to the commonsense realism of Thomas Reid as well as to a folk psychology whose warrants possess an insistent authenticity otherwise lacking in the formalisms of logic and metaphysics, not to say in the reliable but lifeless laws of science. I Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds. (1) The Varieties of Religious Experience is not a theological treatise but an inquiry into a ubiquitous feature of the human condition and thus of human nature itself. Its author makes this clear at the outset, claiming competence as a psychologist and promising no more, therefore, than an examination of those "religious propensities of man" which James takes to be "at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution." (2) The "at least" is clearly ironical for James will argue throughout the work that this aspect of one's mental constitution is generative of thoughts, sentiments and actions at once new, different, original, and of the greatest consequence. As an enduring feature of our mental constitution, the religious contents are under no special burden of vindication or verification for they are vindicated and verified precisely by their ubiquity and efficacy. This "radical empiricist," true to the authentic ism, accepts no philosophical a priori that would pass judgment on just which experiences are to count and which are to be rendered otiose. Just in case there are religious thoughts and sentiments widely experienced, abidingly efficacious, central to actually lived lives, it is not for the psychologist to await some "metaphysical" license before including them among subjects of interest. In this independence of inquiry, this openness to realities set before us as indubitable facts of mental life, James records what Louis Dupre discovers in an entire generation of American philosophers: Those authors, raised in the hard school of a pioneering country where a man had to find things out for himself, deemed it necessary to acquire experience before interpreting it. Nor did they, as the 'empiricists' of the past, restrict experience to sense perception and its interpretation. Those men let no one tell them what was, and what was not 'meaningful' as experience. (3) Once an entire realm of experience is liberated from the role of a defendant in the dock and is found to be truly broad in its reach and powerful in its effects, the question of its epistemic status can be addressed. On this point we can take our lead from Louis Menand's observation that, "James invented pragmatism ... in order to defend religious belief in what he regarded as an excessively scientistic and materialistic age." (4) Jamesian pragmatism is the exhaustive or ultimate means by which to defend any and every belief, including, alas, those that would ground an excessively scientistic and materialistic age. It is after his pragmatism is examined that one comprehends the fuller nature and function of Jamesian belief and that seemingly paradoxical couplet, the will to believe. With this in place, one may then move more surely to and through The Varieties of Religious Experience. Pragmatism of the Jamesian variety has in its pedigree the anti-skeptical commonsense realism of Thomas Reid, which supplies a useful starting point. …

The Waning of the Light: The Eclipse of Philosophy

Abstract: I THERE WAS A TIME, EONS AGO, when philosophy as the love of wisdom could lay claim to all knowledge. Aristotle's corpus of writings covered all the main areas of inquiry then known, including an original organon on syllogistic logic and scientific method. But this hegemony over knowledge was soon challenged by separatist disciplines forming their own research strategies. As early as the third century B.C.E., following the deaths of Alexander and Aristotle, the ruling Ptolemies created in Alexandria two centers of scientific research, the Library and the Museum, rivaling the Academy and Lyceum of Athens. In those state-supported institutions specialized research by grammarians, mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, biologists, and physiologists replaced the more speculative syntheses of knowledge of the previous Hellenic period. The resident scholars and those affiliated by correspondence (Archimedes) or as legatees (Galen and Ptolemy) were the originators of axiomatic geometry and what we now refer to as protoscience: for example, Euclid, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Apollonius, Heraclides, Hipparchus, and Aristarchus. (1) Each of the major founders of modern classical science acknowledged their indebtedness to these extraordinary ancient Greeks who initiated the scientific exploration of the universe. To justify Copernicus's entertaining the hypothesis that the earth undergoes two motions, an annual orbital revolution around the sun and a diurnal rotation on its axis, in his Preface to On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, Osiander quotes Plutarch as stating that Philolaus the Pythagorean says that "the earth moves around a [central] fire with an obliquely circular motion like the sun and moon," while Heraclides claimed that it rotated on its axis "like a wheel." (2) Copernicus himself cites Aristarchus who, because of his prescient heliocentric conception of the universe, is known as the "Copernican of antiquity." Similarly, Kepler's break with tradition in concluding that the orbital motion of Mars was elliptical and nonuniform rather than uniformly circular, was indebted to Archimedes and Apollonius. As he wrote to a friend, "if the orbit were a perfect ellipse ... the problem would already have been solved by Archimedes and Apollonius." (3) While Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, particularly his third law, vindicated Copernicus's belief in heliocentrism, it was Galileo's telescopic discoveries reaching for the first time beyond naked-eye observations that offered empirical evidence in its support. Furthermore, it was his incisive critique of Aristotle's qualitative classification of motions underlying the distinction between the celestial and terrestrial worlds that demolished Aristotle's cosmology. Yet Galileo still praised Aristotle as "a man of brilliant intellect," although his real admiration was for the Pythagoreans Archytas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus who, despite the contrary evidence of their senses, declared that the earth moved. But it was Archimedes that he described as "that divine man" whose writings are such that "all other geniuses are inferior." (4) While this astronomical revolution eventually transformed the cosmos from a finite to an infinite universe, it was a lesser known revolution due to investigations in optics and physiology, along with the revival of the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus to replace Aristotle's organismic cosmology, that generated the epistemological and ontological problems confronted by modern classical philosophers. Aristotle held a direct realist conception of knowledge, claiming that the attributes and forms of objects are reinstated in our minds, supporting his well-known definition of truth and falsity: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true, so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false. …