Rosenberg on naturalism

A reader writes to inform me of Alex Rosenberg’s very interesting essay “The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality.” Rosenberg’s thesis? That naturalism entails nihilism; in particular, that it entails denying the existence of objective moral value, of beliefs and desires, of the self, of linguistic meaning, and indeed of meaning or purpose of any sort. All attempts to evade this conclusion, to reconcile naturalism with our common sense understanding of human life, inevitably fail. Naturalism, when consistently worked out, leads to a radical eliminativism. Says my informant: “Why, it sounds shockingly similar to some things you once wrote in a book that was all about sperm, does it not?” Indeed, except that when I said it I was a “religiously inspired bigot,” whereas when Rosenberg says it he gets a respectful link, complete with a fanboyish exclamation point. Odd, no?

Not really. Because in The Last Superstition I argue that the implications in question constitute a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism, whereas Rosenberg (who is himself a naturalist) regards them instead as a set of depressing truths we must learn to live with. As you’ll see from Rosenberg’s combox, not all naturalists agree with him. But naturalist religionists are an ecumenical bunch. They’ll allow you to draw any absurd conclusion you wish from naturalist premises, as long as (naturally enough) you never under any circumstances question the premises themselves.

As TLS argues at length, the position Rosenberg rightly takes to follow from naturalism is not only depressing; it is incoherent. Therefore, naturalism is false. Furthermore (and as I also argue at length in TLS) there are no non-question-begging arguments for naturalism in the first place. Its hegemony over contemporary intellectual life owes entirely to a mixture of philosophical muddleheadedness, ignorance of philosophical history, and anti-religious animus. (Again, see TLS for the details.)

Rosenberg’s essay only bolsters the already ample evidence for these claims. Let’s take them in order:

1. Naturalism is incoherent: Suppose (as I argue in TLS) that Rosenberg is right about what naturalism implies. In that case there are no beliefs or desires, nor is there any such thing as the “original intentionality” or meaning that common sense says thoughts have, and which it takes to be the source of the derived intentionality exhibited by language. But then, Rosenberg rightly concludes, there’s no such thing as “the” real or actual meaning of a work of art, a human action, or indeed of anything else. There is simply no fact of the matter about what anything means. So far so good, and so far what Rosenberg is doing is simply noting that Quine’s famous thesis of the indeterminacy of meaning is not some eccentricity on Quine’s part, but follows from the naturalistic assumptions Quine shares with most contemporary academic philosophers.

The trouble is that if this is correct, then there is in particular no fact of the matter about what Rosenberg or any other naturalist means when he puts forward a naturalistic thesis. Objectively speaking there is no more reason to think that their utterances express a naturalistic position than that they express a Cartesian one or an Islamic one, or indeed that they are anything more than empty verbiage. The choice is purely pragmatic, or determined by social or economic forces or toilet training, or by Darwinian selection pressures, or by whatever it is this year’s clever young naturalistic philosophers are saying determines it.

Now this is absurd enough, but naturalists have already long inured themselves to accepting such nonsense. Writers like John Searle have been pointing out the paradox for years, to no effect. It doesn’t phase the average naturalist, any more than the hardened criminal feels even a twinge of guilt upon committing his 345th felony. The mental calluses are too thick. You see, if naturalism leads to absurdity, then it must not really be absurdity; because, kids, naturalism just can’t be wrong. Only those dogmatic religious types think otherwise.

But it’s worse than all that. For it won’t do for the naturalist to say: “OK, so we’ve got to swallow some bizarre stuff. But we’re just following the argument where it leads!” What argument? There’s no fact of the matter here either – no fact of the matter about which argument one is presenting, and in particular no fact of the matter about whether one’s arguments conform to valid patterns of inference. In the case at hand, there is simply no fact of the matter about whether Rosenberg’s own arguments (or those of any other naturalist) are sound or entirely fallacious. So why should we accept them? I suppose Rosenberg could always do what any serious philosopher would when dealing with those who stubbornly disagree with him – start a petition to pressure the APA to settle the question in his favor. But until that happens, we’ll just have to wait on pins and needles.

So, that’s one fatal problem, and there’s more to be said about it. If you simply cannot bear the thought of helping to fund the purchase of my next martini or holy card by ordering a copy of TLS, then at least read James F. Ross’s unjustly neglected article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”

There are other incoherencies too. For example, Rosenberg keeps telling us that this or that commonsense feature of human nature is an “illusion” – despite the fact that illusions themselves are intentional phenomena, and thus the sort of thing which, on Rosenberg’s account, naturalism entails doesn’t exist. Rosenberg also seems to think that blindsight phenomena give us a reason to be eliminativists about phenomenal consciousness. But this is incoherent too, because the only reason we judge something to be a case of blindsight in the first place is that we have phenomenally conscious experiences to compare it to. Furthermore, Rosenberg assures us that the mind is merely the product of a long process of selection which favored those who were skilled at detecting other people’s motives. But since “motives” are themselves intentional mental phenomena, they can hardly coherently be appealed to in an account of how the mind originated. (Nor will it do to suggest that Rosenberg means only that our more complex minds evolved in order to detect other people’s motives; for it is the existence of any intentionality at all which poses a uniquely difficult problem for naturalism, not merely the existence of complex minds like ours.)

Of course, these are very old and very well-known problem with eliminative materialism, and eliminative materialists typically pooh-pooh them or (more commonly) simply ignore them. Even non-eliminativist naturalists do the same. What none of them do is actually answer such objections, except with “solutions” which also presuppose intentionality and/or consciousness and thus simply raise the same difficulty at a higher level. The problem is obvious, and obviously fatal, and yet amazingly, it is rarely addressed (Rosenberg’s essay completely ignores it). Victor Reppert and William Hasker have put forward what I think is the correct explanation of this bizarre state of denial: Even naturalists who are not eliminative materialists suspect that their position may inevitably lead them in an eliminativist direction, and they want to keep the option open. Precisely because the obviously fatal objection to eliminative materialism is so obvious and so fatal, the typical naturalist pays it little or no heed, lest he be forced by it to give up naturalism itself – a position which is, as Hasker puts it, something like “a theological dogma” for those philosophers committed to it. Like children, they hope the problem will just go away if they pay it no attention.

Let’s move on to the second claim I have said is given some further confirmation by Rosenberg’s essay:

2. There are no non-question-begging arguments for naturalism: Rosenberg’s thinks we have to accept the depressing consequences he outlines because he thinks naturalism is clearly true. Why?

The only argument he gives – implies, really – is the standard, tired “heroic age of science” argument: Modern science implies naturalism, so it must be true. But why accept this conditional? It would certainly come as news to Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Locke, and many of the other founders of modern science and philosophy who (given that they were theists and/or dualists of one stripe or another) rejected naturalism (not to mention the many non-naturalist scientists and philosophers who have succeeded them, down to the present day). It also comes as news to us reactionary Aristotelians and Thomists, who hold that an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics and philosophy of nature is perfectly compatible with the findings of modern science.

But Rosenberg assures us that 17th century scientists and philosophers of the stripe just mentioned “purged” or “ruled out” Aristotelian formal and final causes and the like. If what Rosenberg means by this is that they decided simply to ignore formal and final causes, then he is right. But if what he means is that they somehow refuted the claim that formal and final causes exist, or even cast the slightest doubt on their existence, then he is most definitely wrong, as I have argued at length in several places, including TLS and Aquinas. Indeed, as I argue there, the reality of formal and final causes is in fact rationally unavoidable.

But even if we A-T types are wrong, that would do nothing to show that naturalism is true, because there is still the non-naturalistic interpretation of science defended by dualists, idealists, and representatives of other modern schools of thought which accept the broadly mechanistic or non-teleological conception of nature endorsed by naturalists, but deny that nature so conceived is all that exists. True, their position is currently a minority view. But X is the majority view among contemporary academic philosophers does not entail X is true or even X is the only view worth taking seriously. Indeed, by itself it does not even entail X is plausible.

Anyway, whenever Rosenberg or some other naturalist tells you that “Science has shown such-and-such,” what he really means is “Science as interpreted in light of a naturalistic metaphysics has shown such-and-such.” And when he is telling you specifically that what science has shown is that naturalism is true, what he is doing, accordingly, is begging the question. Nothing more. Which brings us to:

3. The hegemony of naturalism over contemporary intellectual life owes entirely to philosophical muddleheadedness, ignorance of philosophical history, and anti-religious animus: We’ve already noted a fair bit of muddleheadedness. Rosenberg’s implicit assumption that realism about the mental entails the view that a thought is a kind of inner “representation” is a possible instance of ignorance of (a big chunk of) philosophical history. As I have noted in several earlier posts (e.g. here), this “representationalist” conception of thought is a modern, Cartesian, and entirely contingent assumption that classical and medieval thinkers would have rejected (rightly, in my view).

In general, contemporary naturalistic philosophers – or at least those whose naturalism is “scientistic,” as Rosenberg’s self-consciously is – tend to have little or no knowledge of the many deep differences between modern, Cartesian versions of dualism and classical (Platonic or Aristotelian-Thomistic) ones, between modern rationalist and empiricist arguments for God’s existence and classical (Neo-Platonic or A-T) ones, and so on. They assimilate the classical theories to the modern ones and thus falsely assume that refuting the latter suffices to refute the former. (Even then, their understanding of modern forms of non-naturalism is often laughable; e.g. they often claim that Cartesian dualism involves “positing” the existence of “mind-stuff” or “ectoplasm.”)

How about the animus against religion? Well, Rosenberg tells us that a belief in meanings and purposes is what puts us on a “slippery slope” to religion. About that he is, I would say, absolutely right. But of course, that gives us a reason to endorse Rosenberg’s rejection of purposes and meanings (as he seems to think it does) only if we already know that no religion is true. Naturalism, we all thought, was supposed to show us that religion is an illusion; now, it turns out, naturalism merely assumes this.

Beg the question much?

Anderson’s Pure

Contemporary academic philosophers tend to be dismissive of the idea that philosophy has any intrinsic moral or spiritual significance. To be sure, the left-of-center ones among them (which is most of them) do think that it can be indirectly morally beneficial insofar as it disabuses the young people who study it of (what these philosophers regard as) the moral, political, and religious illusions foisted upon them by their parents and the surrounding culture. But they have little time for the notion of philosophy as a way of life, as something inherently practical as well as intellectual – something which of its very nature tends toward the moral and spiritual betterment of those devoted to it. W. V. Quine once wrote a condescending piece about Mortimer Adler, brushing aside the latter’s complaint that contemporary philosophy has lost contact with the concerns of ordinary people. “The student who majors in philosophy primarily for spiritual comfort is misguided and is probably not a very good student anyway,” Quine assured his readers, “since intellectual curiosity is not what moves him.” You can find the essay in Quine’s anthology Theories and Things. I remember as a young man reading it and chuckling knowingly at Adler’s evident folly.

Well, I was the fool. Here as in so many other ways, the elegant Harvard man Quine was wrong and the pugnacious academic outsider Adler was right. It would take me many years to get to the point where I could even begin to see why.

Of course, when one considers some of the things contemporary philosophy students are taught, one can understand why Quine might seem to have the better of the argument. There are, for instance, the ridiculous caricatures of the classical arguments for religion and for traditional morality, commonly used as fodder for exercises in “thinking critically.” (“Critical thinking” about religion and traditional morality, you see, involves ignoring the actual views of their greatest defenders, briskly refuting a few straw men instead, declaring a once-and-for-all victory against the forces of reaction, and dismissing anyone who objects to this farcical procedure as an ill-informed right-wing religious fanatic with a political agenda.) Then there are the arid technicalities many a philosophy teacher puts in place of these more traditional themes, divorced from any context which might make their significance intelligible. (I know of a prominent academic philosopher who once spent an entire Introduction to Philosophy course introducing his hapless charges to two topics: direct reference theory and Goodman’s grue paradox. That is an extreme case, but it illustrates the mentality.) Add to this the phony “professionalism” that is too often a mask for careerism and lazy conformity to fashionable academic opinion, and the result does indeed seem devoid of moral or spiritual import, or at least of any positive moral and spiritual import.

But things were not always so. From the point of view of the classical philosophical tradition – the tradition represented by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas – the metaphysical preconditions of there being such things as philosophical and scientific inquiry in the first place inexorably lead us, upon rational analysis, to a divine sustaining cause of the world who is necessarily also the source and standard of all value; and they lead us too to the recognition that that within us which grasps these truths – the intellect – is like unto this divine source, and has (as Aristotle put it) the “service and contemplation” of the divine as its highest fulfillment. To be sure, these thinkers differed, often dramatically, over the details. But on this big picture they were agreed. Contra Quine and the majority of contemporary academic philosophers, the ancients and medievals regarded the intellectual and the spiritual, reason and religion, as necessarily fused all the way down.

That the ancients and medievals had it right is something I have done my own small part to try to show in books like The Last Superstition and Aquinas. Other contemporary philosophers have taken on the same task. David Conway’s book The Rediscovery of Wisdom: From Here to Antiquity in Quest of Sophia – which was, incidentally, instrumental in leading Antony Flew away from atheism – is one important example. Now comes another, Mark Anderson’s Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One. It is a small gem of a book – wise and beautifully written, both in substance and in style something like a glimpse into a lost and longed-for world. Here is the book description from the back cover:

Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One is an experimental work of philosophy in which the author aspires to think his way back to a “premodern” worldview derived from the philosophical tradition of Platonism. To this end he attempts to identify and elucidate the fundamental intellectual assumptions of modernity and to subject these assumptions to a critical evaluation from the perspective of Platonic metaphysics. The author addresses a broad range of subjects - from ethics, politics, metaphysics, and science to the philosophies of Plato, Plotinus, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche - without losing sight of the single aim of formulating a premodern perspective in opposition to modernity. The work culminates in a series of essays on the practice of purification, a form of intellectual and spiritual discipline acknowledged by ancient and medieval philosophers alike to be a necessary preliminary to metaphysical insight.

Pure is informed throughout by rigorous scholarship, but it is not an “academic” work. The author avoids the plodding and professorial tone typical of contemporary philosophical research in favor of a meditative and aphoristic style. The book, in short, is learned without being pedantic. Readers interested in the history of philosophy and the intellectual roots of the crisis of modernity will find in Pure substantial matter for reflection.

As this indicates, Anderson’s approach is (unlike my own) Platonic rather than Aristotelian or Thomistic. More precisely, it is Neo-Platonic, though as Anderson emphasizes, the label “Neo-Platonism” is something modern scholars have imposed on Plotinus and Co., not one they applied, or would have applied, to themselves. The great Neo-Platonists regarded their position as Platonic without qualification, as at most an elaboration of themes Plato himself hinted at rather than the invention of anything radically new. I sympathize with this interpretation, and Anderson endorses it unapologetically. It is but one of the many ways in which Pure is refreshingly old-fashioned.

Nor should the differences between the Neo-Platonic and the Aristotelian-Thomistic views of the world be overstated. The extent to which Aristotle himself departed from Plato is a matter of controversy. The Neo-Platonists incorporated aspects of Aristotelianism into their own system. The Augustinian brand of Christian theology Aquinas grafted Aristotelianism onto was already heavily influenced by Neo-Platonism. The central theme of the Summa Theologiae – God as the first cause and last end of creation, He from Whom the world derives and to Whom it seeks to return – echoes Plotinus. And there are various other specific aspects of Aquinas’s thought which have long been understood as evincing a Neo-Platonic influence – such as his use of the language of “participation,” the henological approach to God in the Fourth Way, and the many citations of Pseudo-Dionysius.

More than any other recent defense of classical philosophy, Anderson’s book revives and reasserts the ancients’ emphasis on the moral preconditions of attaining philosophical understanding. This is the “purification” referred to in the back cover description and alluded to in the book’s title – a purification having physical, ethical, intellectual, and spiritual components, all spelled out in Pure with reference to the Platonic tradition. As might be expected from that tradition, the purification in question fundamentally concerns deliverance from our enslavement to things material or bodily. But contrary to the standard caricature, the Platonist does not condemn either the body or the material world in general as such. What is condemned is rather the disorder which makes the body and its appetites the master of the soul, and the material realm rather than the immaterial the primary object of the intellect’s attention. The body has its place – and it should know its place, which is to be in every way subordinate to the soul, permitted to realize its desires only as reason dictates. And the material realm, while worthy of our empirical scientific efforts, points beyond itself to a higher realm, the object of a higher science – metaphysics – and ultimately to a divine Source of all which is no less an object of rational investigation than of spiritual aspiration.

For the typical modern reader, especially the typical contemporary academic philosopher, all of this is bound to raise eyebrows. Some riff on materialism and empiricism – a “naturalistic” approach to metaphysics and epistemology, say, to use the currently fashionable jargon – is de rigueur. But from a classical realist point of view – the basic metaphysical perspective shared in common by Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, whatever their differences – the falsity of materialism and empiricism is obvious. For (a) the reality of universals is unavoidable, (b) universals are necessarily immaterial, and (c) our conceptual grasp of them cannot in principle either be accounted for in terms of sensation alone or reduced to material processes in the brain. (To be sure, for Aristotle and the Scholastics there is nothing in the intellect that did not arise from the senses. But this does not entail the British empiricists’ thesis that concepts just are faint copies of sensations.) Moreover, to adopt some form of classical metaphysics is more or less to commit yourself to some kind of classical theism: a Platonic theory of Forms leads inexorably to something like the Form of the Good or The One; an Aristotelian act/potency distinction leads inexorably to that which is Actus Purus; a Thomistic essence/existence distinction leads inexorably to that which is ipsum esse subsistens.

I have elaborated on all of this in The Last Superstition and Aquinas. What Anderson emphasizes is the moral dimension to this fundamental metaphysical dispute. A culture as deeply informed as ours is by the errors of materialism and empiricism is bound to be a culture obsessed with material gain and prone to sensual overindulgence, and a culture dominated by these vices is bound to be drawn, in its intellectual moments, toward materialism and empiricism. The philosophical and moral errors in question are mutually reinforcing, and their combination is, for Anderson, of the essence of “modernity” – a condition possible at any time, even if it is the dominant spiritual condition of our own times. And from the point of view of classical philosophy, modernity in this sense is (as Anderson paraphrases the Socrates of the Phaedo) “the greatest and most extreme of all evils.” For of its essence it positively drives us away from the Good, in the classical sense – away from the pursuit of it, away from even the possibility of knowledge of it. Modernity is the life of Plato’s cave.

Certainly the greatest of the ancient philosophers would find their modern counterparts thoroughly uncongenial – in their dogmatic materialism, their dogmatic egalitarianism, their atheism, their easygoing attitude toward sensual indulgence, their tendency to think of justice primarily in material, economic terms (whether socialist, liberal, or libertarian – these are just different strains of the same virus). As Anderson acidly puts it: “Contemporary philosophers refuse to admit that Plato meant what he wrote, for what he wrote generally amounts to a repudiation of their moral and intellectual lives.”

That is an aphorism, and like all aphorisms it needs to be read with care – something the unsympathetic reader is unlikely to bring to his evaluation of a book like Pure. Secular left-of-center academics are happy to bend over backwards, forwards, and in every other direction to discern some rational insight packed into a throwaway aphorism of a Nietzsche (say) or the half-baked political rants of a Chomsky or Zinn. But they will dismissively nitpick even the most carefully formulated utterances of a conservative or religious writer. One can imagine what they would do with an Anderson line like this: “We must not refute Hume, we must refuse to converse with him – we must forget him.”

But this is another aphorism, and that Anderson does not mean by it to deny that the critic of Hume must provide arguments is clear from the rest of the book. For example, in criticizing the fideism of some Christians, Anderson rejects “groundless belief deriving from authority, hope, or desire” and insists that “we must not simply advocate the groundless substitution of a premodern metaphysical perspective for the assumptions of modernity.” The premodern perspective is something that can and must be argued for.

Regarding Hume, readers of The Last Superstition know that I consider him overrated, a “mere – brilliant – sophist,” as Elizabeth Anscombe famously described him. (I say this as a former atheist, who used to admire Hume greatly.) Hume’s best-known positions typically rest on crude philosophical errors (such as his assimilation of the intellect to the senses). And while (as Anscombe rightly conceded) in the course of developing his sophistries he sometimes raises interesting and important philosophical questions, his stature owes less to this than to his political usefulness – not in the sense of everyday electoral politics or even political philosophy, but in the sense that he has become a symbol of intellectual opposition to the claims of religion, a kind of anti-Aquinas who is thought somehow to have exposed natural theology as vacuous once and for all. It is Hume’s conclusions that his admirers like, and even if his arguments for those conclusions are worthless, continuing the fiction that he was a thinker comparable to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Co. affords those conclusions an unearned respectability they would not otherwise have. (Hume is in this respect like Marx.)

I do not want to put words in Anderson’s mouth, but my sense is that that is what he is getting at in the aphorism in question: We must stop participating in the maintenance of this fiction that Hume was ten feet tall, stop treating him as anything but the easily dispatched sophist that he was, stop buying into the lie that he did any serious damage whatsoever to the arguments of classical metaphysics. In a sane world, Hume would be treated as a curiosity and nothing more – a clever fellow who propagated some interesting errors. In short, he would be treated the same way contemporary secular academic philosophers treat Aquinas.

As the reference to Anderson’s views on Christianity indicates, Pure is not written from a Christian point of view, or at least not an explicitly Christian point of view. Indeed, it seems to me that Anderson’s brief remarks about early Christianity vis-à-vis Platonism overstate the fideism of the former (though he is careful to qualify his remarks as intended to apply to “some” Christian thinkers). But in this too Anderson’s book is refreshingly old-fashioned – reflective of a more sane era in the history of philosophy when the debate was not over whether God exists (every rational person knew that) but rather over how one ought to worship Him. With Pure, Anderson has contributed to the restoration of philosophical sanity.

McInerny on De Koninck

Pietas and gratitude. On this fine Thanksgiving Day, you could do worse than spend a few moments reading what the esteemed Ralph McInerny recently had to say about his teacher Charles De Koninck, one of the leading lights of Laval Thomism. McInerny has been editing a new edition of De Koninck’s works, the second volume of which has just appeared. You can and should order them here and here.

(Addendum: I notice that for some reason, Amazon’s page on volume 1 of De Koninck’s collected writings contains reviews, not of De Koninck’s book, but of Ralph McInerny’s autobiography. The “Look Inside” feature also gives you a look at McInerny’s book rather than at De Koninck. Bizarre. Anyway, go ahead and order McInerny’s autobiography too, because it is a great read. More information about the De Koninck volumes can be found here and here.)

Oderberg contra Strawson on act and potency

Some time back I linked to my Philosopher’s Digest review of Galen Strawson’s Analysis article “The identity of the categorical and the dispositional.” Here is a review of David Oderberg’s article “The non-identity of the categorical and the dispositional,” a reply to Strawson. The distinction Strawson and Oderberg are debating is, essentially, the all-important Aristotelian distinction between act and potency. Strawson rejects the distinction and Oderberg upholds it.

Earman and Oderberg on miracles

Bill Vallicella quotes John Earman:

...if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

Well, maybe, and maybe not. But from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view, a miracle is not to be understood as “a violation of a law of nature” in the first place. That’s just yet one more modern philosophical error alongside all the others. For a useful discussion of how A-T does understand miracles, see pp. 148-9 of David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism, available here through the magic of Google Books. (For the whole book, you’ll need to shell out a mere $31.16 at Amazon, which if you haven’t already you should do at once.) As Oderberg’s discussion implies, Bill is mistaken in attributing the definition in question to Aquinas, whose actual view (I would argue) is that miracles are suspensions of the laws of nature (as Oderberg puts it) rather than violations.

Plato’s affinity argument

In an earlier post I suggested that the arguments of great philosophers of the past need to be understood, not only in the context of their times, but also in light of how later thinkers built on them. For an argument can contain, inchoately, real insights which only later thinkers were able to spell out adequately; and we will miss these insights if, overly fearful of anachronism, we insist pedantically on reading the argument in isolation from this later tradition. What ultimately matters in philosophy is not exactly who said exactly what, exactly when and exactly how. What matters is what is true, and whether an argument is likely to lead us to it. Anachronism, then, while a danger, is a less serious danger than loss of truth. To think otherwise is to abandon philosophy for mere scholarship. (Scholarship has its place, of course. But its place is to serve the ends of philosophy.)

What immediately prompted that post were some reflections on Plato’s Phaedo, on which I had been lecturing at the time. The Phaedo is famously concerned with the immortality of the soul, and Socrates is represented as putting forward four main lines of argument in its defense – or rather, as commentators these days often emphasize, four sub-arguments in the course of what should be understood as a single long, complex argument. Modern readers of the Phaedo often dismiss the arguments as manifestly bad. David Stove, in The Plato Cult, describes them as “so contemptible that, on their own merits, they could hardly ever have imposed upon a child of eight” (pp. 100-1). This sort of judgment is, I think, completely unwarranted. When understood both in the context of Plato’s philosophy as a whole and in light of the ongoing classical tradition of thinking about the soul which Plato inaugurated, his arguments can be seen to be very interesting indeed. That is not to say either that Plato’s arguments are adequate as they stand or that all of them can at the end of the day be defended. It is to say instead that the arguments embody serious considerations in favor of the soul’s immortality, and that at least some of these considerations were developed by later writers into more complete and compelling arguments. Modern readers often fail to see this because – as with their treatment of Aquinas’s Five Ways – they too frequently lack familiarity with the metaphysical presuppositions of the arguments, and read into them modern assumptions which classical writers did not make and often would have rejected.

The four arguments in question are usually labeled the cyclical argument, the recollection argument, the affinity argument, and the final argument. Let us begin by briefly surveying the arguments. It is evident from the dialogue that the cyclical and recollection arguments are intended to work in tandem. Putting aside the details of the examples Socrates uses in stating them (e.g. the long discussion about the Form of Equality) we might summarize the case that these first two arguments are together intended to make as follows:

1. We have knowledge (of Forms and of mathematical truths) that could not have come from sensory experience or in any other way been learned during this life.

2. So it must have been acquired during an existence prior to this one.

3. So our souls must have pre-existed their embodiment in this life.

4. But things arise out of their opposites in a cyclical pattern, such as sleeping from waking and waking from sleeping.

5. So, just as souls pre-exist their embodiment during life, so too must they continue on disembodied after death.

One way this line of reasoning might be challenged is via the suggestion that even if our souls pre-existed this life, perhaps their embodiment has altered them to such an extent that they will not survive our deaths, the “cycle” being thereby broken. Answering such an objection seems to be the point of the affinity argument, the core of which might be summarized as follows:

1. The soul knows the Forms, which are eternal, whereas the senses know material things, which pass away.

2. But each of these faculties is like the thing it knows (e.g. the senses are material, the soul is invisible).

3. Thus it is because the senses are like the things they know that they too pass away.

4. So the soul, since it is like the Forms that it knows, must not pass away.

Following Socrates’ presentation of the affinity argument in the Phaedo, his interlocutors Simmias and Cebes raise some further objections, including Simmias’s famous suggestion that the soul may be a mere harmony or attunement of the body’s components, like the harmony of a lyre. This begins a long discussion which culminates in the final argument, which might be summarized as follows:

1. The soul is the principle by which a thing is alive.

2. So it participates in the Form of Life.

3. But a thing cannot participate in contrary Forms (e.g. fire, which participates in the Form of Hot, cannot participate in the Form of Cold).

4. So the soul cannot participate in the Form of Death.

5. So the soul cannot perish.

Now I have no intention of exploring each of these arguments in any detail. Indeed, the line of reasoning enshrined in the combination of the cyclical and recollection arguments is one which I – as a Thomist who takes the soul to be the form of the body – do not think can succeed at the end of the day. One obvious objection to it is that its first premise is false if (as I would maintain) an Aristotelian analysis of concept formation is correct. Another is that step 2 doesn’t follow from step 1 all by itself: Even if our knowledge of forms and of mathematical truths cannot have come from the senses, it may be that it was stamped into our intellects by God when He created our souls (as per a rationalist theory of innate ideas) or that it results from a kind of divine illumination (as per St. Augustine). And of course, the stuff about things arising out of their opposites needs to be tightened up, to say the least. All the same, I’m sure a serious Platonist could give the argument a run for its money, and it would be a useful philosophical exercise to see how far it could be defended against objections. Much farther than most contemporary readers would suppose, I would bet.

Anyway, it is the second two arguments that I think are the most interesting. In the case of the final argument, this is not because it is sufficient to establish personal immortality. It is not. But what it does do, it seems to me, is foreshadow the Aristotelian-Thomistic insight that while particular composites of matter and form – that is, individual material substances – are generated and pass away, form itself (and thus the soul) is not susceptible of perishing. For a material substance’s perishing just amounts to its matter losing its form, and a form can’t coherently be said to lose its form (because it is a form). But then, since the soul is (on the A-T analysis) just a kind of form, the soul is not susceptible of perishing.

The reason this does not by itself establish personal immortality is that the forms of material things, considered by themselves, are in general mere abstractions. What exist concretely are individual material substances, and thus form and matter together. For this reason, matter too, considered apart from form, is a mere abstraction – speaking concretely, matter always exists with some form or other. And thus, if the soul qua form were imperishable merely in the sense just described, it would be no more imperishable than matter is. As Aquinas says in On the Principles of Nature, “prime matter [i.e. matter without form], and even form, are neither generated nor corrupted… properly speaking, only composites are generated” (2.15). A thing’s matter carries on after its destruction in the sense that the matter simply takes on a new form; its form carries on in the sense that some new substance with the very same form can always come into being. It is only the individual concrete substance that the form and matter together compose which comes into being and passes away. Since it passes away, though, the survival of its form – its soul, in the case of a living thing – merely qua something which another, future substance might take on, does not entail that the substance itself survives in any sense. When a particular rose bush dies, its form carries on in the sense that new rose bushes can always come into being, but that rose bush is gone for good.

For the imperishability of the human soul to ensure personal immortality, then – the survival not merely of the abstract form of man, but of your form or soul specifically – it would have to be what the forms of other material things in general are not: a kind of subsistent form, something whose operations are not, or at least are not entirely, dependent on matter. That is to say, it would have to be something which operates as a kind of immaterial particular thing even when it informs the matter of the body. Only then would its survival count as the survival of the particular human being whose soul it was. Or rather, it would count as the survival of the chief part of that particular human being; for the whole human being to come back into existence, the soul would have to be reunited with the matter that made up its body, which in Aquinas’s view it does at the resurrection. But the survival of the soul as a kind of immaterial particular at least makes this possible in a way it would not be if the human soul were like every other form.

I spell out Aquinas’s position in detail in chapter 4 of Aquinas. The point for now is that the reasons why the soul should be understood as something which operates independently of matter are not to be found in Plato’s final argument. But they are hinted at in Plato’s remaining argument for the soul’s immortality, namely the affinity argument.

As it happens, the affinity argument is the one some commentators seem to regard as the worst of Plato’s arguments for the soul’s immortality. One reason for this is that they often interpret it as an argument from analogy. That is to say, they think Plato is arguing along something like the following lines: If the soul is like the Forms in one respect – namely, being invisible to the senses – then it is probably like them in another respect as well, viz. in being imperishable. The trouble with the argument, then, is obvious: The analogy is simply too weak and undeveloped to support the conclusion.

It is understandable why a modern reader would read the argument this way. Plato does make use of an analogy, after all. And modern readers are used to thinking of metaphysical arguments as quasi-empirical hypotheses a la Paley’s “design argument” for God’s existence. But as every Thomist knows, not every philosophical use of analogy constitutes an “argument from analogy” in the modern sense, and metaphysical arguments (or good metaphysical arguments, anyway) are not quasi-scientific empirical ones. A failure to make these distinctions is what leads so many modern readers to misread Aquinas’s Fifth Way as a precursor of Paley. It is also what leads them to misread Plato as offering a lame argument from analogy for the immortality of the soul.

In fact, as Michael Pakaluk has pointed out, the affinity argument is not an “argument from analogy” at all, but rather “an argument about the nature of things.” Plato is not saying: “The soul is like the Forms in one way, so there is some significant probability that it is like them in this other way too.” Rather, he is saying something like: “The soul of its nature is X. But as we know from the example of the Forms, which are also X, things that are X are imperishable. So the soul is imperishable.”

What is X? As Lloyd Gerson suggests in his book Knowing Persons: A Study of Plato, what Plato seems to be emphasizing here is that the soul, like the Forms, is immaterial (p. 86). What the argument is (arguably) saying, then, is that whereas the senses pass away just as the things they know pass away, because both are material, the soul by contrast must be as imperishable as the things it knows – namely the Forms – because like the Forms, it is immaterial. In other words, it is, on this interpretation, the immaterial nature of the Forms that makes them imperishable, so that something that shares that nature – as (the argument claims) the soul does – must be equally imperishable. Notice, again, that this is not a probabilistic argument from analogy, but, in effect, an attempt at a proof. The argument is not:

1. The Forms are imperishable.

2. The soul is in some other respects analogous to the Forms.

3. So it is probably like them in being imperishable too.

That would indeed be a bad argument. Rather, the argument is (I am suggesting) to be understood along something like the following lines:

1. What is immaterial is imperishable.

2. The Forms are immaterial.

3. So the Forms are imperishable.

4. But since the soul knows the Forms, it must be as immaterial as they are.

5. So the soul must be imperishable.

Say what you will about this argument, it is not an argument from analogy, and it is not probabilistic. (Leave such weak tea arguments to the moderns. The ancient and medieval philosophers preferred the strong drink of metaphysical demonstration.)

OK, but what of the crucial premise 4? If it does not rest on an argument from analogy, what does it rest on? I would suggest that what Plato is gesturing at here is a line of argument that would later be developed more thoroughly and carefully by writers like Aristotle and Aquinas. The basic idea is that the intellect’s grasp of an abstraction like triangularity (for example) would simply not be possible unless it were as immaterial as triangularity itself is. There are three main considerations in favor of this judgment:

A. For a parcel of matter to take on a form is for it to become a thing of the kind the form is a form of; for example, for it to take on the form of triangularity is just for it to become a triangle. Now for the intellect to grasp the nature of a thing is just for it to take on the form of that thing. And in that case, if the intellect were material, it would become a thing of the kind that it grasps; for instance, it would become triangular when it grasps the form of triangularity. But this is obviously absurd. So the intellect is not material.

B. Forms and our thoughts about them are precise, exact, or determinate in a way no material thing can be even in principle; hence a thought cannot possibly be anything material.

C. Forms are universal while material representations are necessarily particular; hence to grasp a form cannot in principle be to have a material representation of any sort.

Obviously these arguments need spelling out, and I have said much more about them in several places. All of them are discussed in The Last Superstition (see especially pp. 123-126) and at greater length in Aquinas (see especially pp. 151-159), and both books set out in detail the metaphysical background apart from which the arguments cannot properly be understood. Arguments of the sort represented by B and C are discussed in more detail in the “Intentionality” chapter of my book Philosophy of Mind. Argument B in particular was the subject of an earlier post, and has in contemporary philosophy been developed most thoroughly by James Ross (see e.g. his article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought”). The point for now is that there is a family resemblance between what Plato was apparently up to in the affinity argument, and later arguments in the broad classical tradition that attempt to show, not by means of probabilistic arguments from analogy, but on the basis of an analysis of the nature of thought itself, that the soul (or its intellectual powers, in any event) cannot even in principle be material.

Apart from their misguided tendency to interpret classical metaphysical arguments as quasi-empirical hypotheses, another reason modern interpreters often badly misunderstand the affinity argument may be that, as Gerson notes, they tend to take for granted a post-Cartesian “representationalist” conception of knowledge (Knowing Persons, pp. 81-2). But the classical and medieval approach to knowledge was in general not representationalist. The great pre-modern writers did not regard the mind as a veil of “representations” which needed somehow to be correlated with external objects and events. Rather, for them knowledge involved a kind of union – not a correlation, but an identity of sorts – of the knower and what is known, insofar as when we know, one and the same essence or nature exists simultaneously in the intellect and in the world. (I have discussed this idea at greater length in an earlier post.) Naturally, then, if the object of knowledge is immaterial, that with which it is (in some sense) identical – the state of the knower – was regarded by them as immaterial too.

Here, though, as so often happens when modern readers encounter the arguments of ancient and medieval philosophers, the clearing up of one misunderstanding is likely only to lead to another. “How can the mind possibly be identical with what it knows?” the modern reader is bound to ask incredulously. “What absurdity!” Just as they often assume (with little or no argument, other than an appeal to the authority of Frege) that the concept of existence is entirely captured by the existential quantifier, so too might contemporary readers assume that the concept if identity is entirely captured by the identity relation as it is understood in modern logic. But this would be a mere prejudice. As Gyula Klima has emphasized in a series of important papers, the metaphysical doctrines of pre-modern philosophers typically presuppose semantic and logical doctrines that are very different from, but every bit as sophisticated and defensible as, those taken for granted by most contemporary philosophers. (What I have to say in the earlier post just linked to, and what I have said in recent posts about the Thomistic doctrine of analogy, may provide at least a hint of some of the differences. But this is a gigantic topic of its own.)

In general, while contemporary readers know that the difference between their view of the world and that of the ancient and medieval philosophers is radical, they generally do not know just how radical it is. Indeed, their ignorance of the differences is so great that they typically do not so much as even understand what the ancients and medievals were saying – hence (for example) they regard Aristotle as having put forward a “functionalist” “philosophy of mind,” Plato as having given an “argument from analogy,” and Aquinas as having foreshadowed Paley. In short, the moderns insist on reading the great figures of pre-modern philosophy as if they were all essentially just less well-informed versions of themselves – a double insult.

I suggested in an earlier post that Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument for dualism represents a corrupted version of earlier and better Scholastic arguments. What is true in it isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t true. But if Descartes marks a decline, Plato’s affinity argument marks the beginning of an ascent. It is a mark of our own philosophical impoverishment that we can no longer recognize either the ascent or decline for what they were – much less the power of the Aristotelian-Scholastic arguments to which the ascent led and away from which the decline has taken us.

Of course, you might not agree with me about that. So at least agree with the more measured words of Gerson, with which I’ll conclude: “[The affinity] argument, like the others, is not supposed to stand on its own. And at its core there is an argument which, far from being inconsequential, is the origin of a family of immensely influential arguments for the immateriality of the person. These arguments are refined and elaborated upon by countless later Platonically inspired philosophers. They are still, in my view, worthy of interest.” (Knowing Persons, p. 79)

An ambiguous conservative

It appears The American Conservative is making some of their archived content freely available online. For those who might be interested, here is a review I wrote for them some years back of An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke, edited by Ian Crowe. As the review indicates, Burke’s sometimes ambiguously conservative thought raises questions about precisely what conservatism is and exactly how it relates to tradition – questions that are especially pressing today, when some conservatives are advising their fellows to abandon the cause of upholding certain aspects of traditional morality in the interests of preserving electoral viability. These are questions I have addressed elsewhere – for example, in this post about conservatism and tradition and this article about the metaphysical foundations of conservatism.

Final causality and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover

In several recent posts I have had reason to refer to a key difference between Aristotle and Aquinas: Aquinas holds that though final causes are immanent to the natural order, their existence nevertheless requires an explanation in terms of God’s directing things towards their natural ends. Aristotle, by contrast, takes the existence of final causes to be a basic feature of reality which requires no divine explanation. To be sure, Aristotle, like Aquinas, is a theist; in particular, like Aquinas he holds that there could be no change or motion at all unless there were a divine Unmoved Mover. But he does not think final causes per se provide a second route to God. There is in Aristotle a precursor to the First Way, but no precursor to the Fifth Way.

None of this is terribly controversial; it is standard stuff in Aristotle scholarship. Still, a couple of folks in the comboxes seem to be puzzled about it, so it might be worthwhile briefly to review Aristotle’s position.

The background to Aristotle’s view as developed in the Physics is a critique of the theories of atomists like Leucippus and Democritus, who favored a materialist explanation of the world which eschews final causes altogether, and the view of Anaxagoras that the order of the world requires an explanation in terms of a divine intelligence. Aristotle’s view is the middle ground position that there is such a thing as goal-directedness in nature, but that it is entirely immanent to the natural order: “That which is by nature and natural is never disordered. For nature is everywhere a cause of order.” (Physics 252a11-12, as translated by Monte Ransome Johnson in his book Aristotle on Teleology) For Aristotle, to be “natural” is ipso facto to be ordered in the sense of having an end toward which one is directed. That which requires an outside source to order or direct it toward an end would, for him, by that very fact not be a natural object at all but an artifact.

Book II of the Physics contains an extended defense of his position, and Aristotle responds to those who claim that goal-directedness or purpose requires conscious deliberation or planning of the sort we rational beings engage in:

It is ridiculous for people to deny that there is purpose if they cannot see the agent of change doing any planning. After all, skill does not make plans. If ship-building were intrinsic to wood, then wood would naturally produce the same results that ship-building does. If skill is purposive, then, so is nature. (Physics 199b26-31, Waterfield translation)

What he is saying here is that the fact that goal-directedness does not require conscious deliberation is evident from the fact that a skilled craftsman can carry out his work without even thinking about it – “on autopilot” as we might put it today, or without first ”making plans,” as Aristotle puts it. If this is possible for someone with such skill, there is in Aristotle’s view no reason not to think it also possible for natural objects. This is the force of the ship-building example: If there were something in the very nature of wood that “directed it” toward the end of becoming a ship, then what in the case of human craftsmanship results from deliberate design – a ship – would in that case result “naturally” instead, i.e. without conscious deliberation at all, as an oak derives from an acorn without the acorn planning this result.

Of course, as it stands this particular argument is open to the objection that even the skilled craftsman must at some point have consciously and deliberately learned his trade, which is not true of natural objects. And Aristotle does indeed have other arguments for the reality of final causes in nature. The point is just that the passage in question illustrates that Aristotle was concerned to deny that purpose or goal-directedness must necessarily be associated with conscious deliberation. And throughout the discussion in Book II of the Physics, Aristotle is keen to emphasize how purposes clearly exist in nature apart from deliberation, as they do in the behavior of spiders, ants, and the like (Physics 199a20-21) and in plants (Physics 199b9).

Now it does not in fact follow from the considerations that Aristotle adduces that a divine ordering intelligence is not necessary in order to explain the existence of final causes. As I noted in an earlier post, between Aristotle’s position and the (William Paley-like) view represented by Anaxagoras, there is a middle position represented by Aquinas’s Fifth Way, according to which purposes are indeed immanent in the way Aristotle says they are (rather than extrinsic a la Paley), but still ultimately need to be explained by reference to God’s ordering of things to their ends. Aristotle was, in Aquinas’s view and mine, just wrong to think otherwise.

There can, in any event, be no doubt that he did think otherwise. As he says in the Eudemian Ethics: “The divine is not an ordering ruler, since he needs nothing, but rather is that for the sake of which wisdom gives orders” (1249b13-15, as translated by Ransome Johnson). And far from having, as ideas in his intellect, the ends towards which the things of the mundane realm are directed by nature – as Aquinas holds that God does – the Unmoved Mover famously has in Aristotle’s view only himself as a proper object of thought (Metaphysics 1074b33-34).

That is not to say that final causality plays no role at all in Aristotle’s account of God’s relationship to the world. For he also famously holds that the way the Unmoved Mover moves the world is as a final cause, as the perfect end toward which things are naturally directed. And as the quotation from the Eudemian Ethics indicates, wisdom itself directs us toward the Unmoved Mover, the “service and contemplation” of whom is in Aristotle’s view the highest end of human existence (Eudemian Ethics 1249b21). But this is perfectly consistent with his view that final causes themselves are just part of the natural order, not put into things by God. “The Unmoved Mover is the final cause of things” does not entail “The Unmoved Mover orders things toward their final causes.” Rather, the fact that all things have the Unmoved Mover as their ultimate end is, for Aristotle, itself just a basic feature of reality – and something the Unmoved Mover himself, as Aristotle conceives of him, is too lofty to give any thought to.

Sartre on theism and morality

If God is dead, is everything permitted? Yes and no. There is a connection between the existence of God and the possibility of morality, but it is not as direct as many religious believers – and some atheists – think it is. Take Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom Bill Vallicella has been writing a series of interesting blog posts this week. Sartre was an atheist, and he held, famously, that in a Godless universe there can be no objective standards of moral value. Why did he think this? First of all, because standards of moral value presuppose, Sartre maintained (correctly, in my view), that there is such a thing as human nature. But in a Godless universe there can be no such thing as human nature. Why not? As Bill reconstructs Sartre’s argument:

The argument seems to be:

There is no God
Essences or natures are divine concepts
-----
There is no human nature.

Another argument Sartre may have in mind is this:

Man has a nature only if man is a divine artifact
There is no God and hence no divine artifacts
-----
Man has no nature.

But as Bill goes on to point out, a problem with this argument is that it is not as clear as Sartre thinks it is that there being such a thing as human nature presupposes that essences are divine concepts or that we are divine artifacts. For example, Aristotle held that there is such a thing as human nature, but (despite his belief in an Unmoved Mover of the universe) did not think of us as divine artifacts.

What is going on here, I surmise, is that Sartre has uncritically bought into the modern notion that to attribute purposes to natural objects and processes is ipso facto to commit oneself to a divine designer a la William Paley. And as I have been pointing out in a series of posts on teleology, Paley, and related matters, that is an error, at least from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view. For A-T, the natures and final causes of things are immanent to them. Natural objects are not like machines, the parts of which have no inherent ordering to the end they serve, so that the parts cannot even be made sense of as serving a common end apart from a “designer” who forces them into their machine-like configuration. Rather, that a heart (for example) is “directed toward” or “ordered to” the end of pumping blood is something true of it simply by virtue of its being a heart at all, and would remain true of it whatever its cause or even if (per impossibile) it had no cause. For A-T, the natures of things can be known, at least in principle, entirely apart from questions about their origins, and human nature would still be what it is whether or not we were created by God. Sartre would need an additional argument against views like Aristotle’s, then, before he could make the case that in a Godless universe there could be no such thing as human nature and thus no objective source of value.

Does that mean that there is no connection between theism and morality? By no means. For whatever Aristotle believed, Aquinas and his followers argue (e.g. in Aquinas’s Fifth Way) that the existence of final causes, and thus of things having the natures that natural objects do in fact have, must ultimately be traced to the divine intellect. It’s just that the inference is not as direct as Paley, Sartre, and other moderns think it is. As I have pointed out before (following an observation made by Christopher Martin) modern philosophers tend to think that it is easy to get from the existence of purposes in nature to the conclusion that God exists, but frightfully difficult to show that there really are any purposes in nature. Classical philosophers, by contrast, tend to think that it is obvious that there are purposes in nature, and that where the real philosophical work comes in is in showing that these purposes entail the existence of God. It can be done, but a middle stage is required between the premise “Final causes exist” and the conclusion “God exists.” (For an exposition of how this will go, see the section on the Fifth Way in The Last Superstition, and, especially, the longer exposition in the relevant section of Aquinas.)

So, one way in which morality does depend on the existence of God is that morality presupposes (as Sartre correctly recognizes) the existence of essences and final causes, and these in turn must ultimately be explained in terms of God (but only via arguments that are less obvious and direct than Sartre supposes). That is, it depends on God in the way everything depends on God. Is there any special dependence of morality on God, though – some way that it depends on theism in the way other aspects of the natural world do not? Yes, in two respects: First, for moral imperatives to have the force of law in the strict sense (and not merely as the course of action wisdom recommends if we seek to fulfill our nature) ultimately requires that they be understood as having in some sense been issued by an authoritative lawgiver. Since the existence of God can (according to A-T) be proved by rational arguments, so too (for that very reason) can the existence of such a lawgiver. There is no appeal here to “blind faith,” and to bring God into the picture is perfectly consistent with the imperatives of natural law being natural (as opposed to resting on special divine revelation). Still, there is an irreducible theological component to morality when it is understood in its totality, even if much of it can be known completely apart from God. (See the “Ethics” chapter of Aquinas for the complete story.)

Second, given that the existence of God can in fact be rationally established (as, again, A-T maintains), a complete system of morality is inevitably going to make reference to our distinctively religious obligations. Furthermore, there are requirements of the natural law that would, at least as a matter of psychological fact, be very difficult for us to live up to if we had no hope of a reward in the hereafter for injustices and hardships suffered here and now. Religion thus serves as a practically indispensible aid to morality. (Again, see Aquinas, and the section in TLS on natural law, for more.)

Now if there is a sense in which morality does ultimately rest on the existence of God, does that not entail that my criticism of Sartre is mere quibbling? It does not, for this reason. If the A-T view of morality is correct, then even if morality ultimately depends on God, we could nevertheless discover a great deal about our moral obligations even if we did not know that God exists. Compare: We can discover a great deal about the way the natural world works via empirical scientific research, without making any direct reference to God and His purposes. To know about the periodic table of elements, for example, does not require that we first prove God’s existence, even if God’s existence is the ultimate explanation of the periodic table (because it is the ultimate explanation of everything). Similarly, we can to a large extent understand human nature even if we bracket off the question of God’s existence. And for that reason, we can know a great deal about what fulfills our nature – and thus about the content of our moral obligations – even if we do not think of that nature as given to us by God.

Hence when Sartre finally met his Maker and was asked to account for (say) his notorious sexual immorality, or his support for communism, we can be confident that said Maker would not have been impressed had Sartre replied: “But Lord, I honestly did not know that You existed!” We can imagine God responding: “Even if I were to grant you that dubious proposition, how is it relevant? You didn’t need Me around to tell you that promiscuity and mass murder are evil. Your knowledge of human nature was enough to tell you that.” And were Sartre to reply: “But I honestly didn’t believe in human nature either!” perhaps God might say: “Oh, please. Next you’ll tell Me that you weren’t certain that the empirical world was anything other than a dream!” For it takes an enormous amount of self-deception to get oneself to doubt that there is such a thing as human nature, just as it would take an enormous amount of self-deception to get oneself seriously to believe that one’s entire life is only a dream. In particular, and in both cases, it takes the sort of self-deception only intellectuals are capable of – the sort embodied in bizarre revisionist systems of metaphysics of the kind rife in modern philosophy.

Be all that as it may, the point is that the A-T view of things does not, as the careless reader might have supposed, make things easier for the secularist, morally speaking. On the contrary, it makes things much harder on him. For, contra the implications of a Paley-style view of God’s relationship to the world, ignorance of the Author of nature does not excuse ignorance of the nature of things, and thus it does not excuse ignorance of the demands of the natural law. You can know that things have natures and final causes – and thus you can know what morality requires of you at least in general terms – whether or not you know that there is a God. And that is one reason why it is a more than academic matter to point out where Sartre goes wrong in his claims about the relationship between theism and morality.

Bonus observation: As Bill notes, Sartre took the bizarre view that to believe in an objective source of morality somehow entails looking for an “excuse” to avoid taking “responsibility” for one’s actions. Bill notes some of what is wrong with such a view. But why would Sartre think it at all plausible in the first place? Here, I speculate, we see the malign influence on modern moral theorizing of Kant – in particular, of all the Kantian stuff about heteronomy versus autonomy, and about how our moral dignity requires that we be conceived of as “self-legislators” and “ends in ourselves.” On this view, unless the demands of morality can be interpreted as in some sense self-imposed – as something we bind ourselves to, by virtue of being rational agents – then morality could only be a restriction on our freedom and dignity. In particular, human dignity requires (on this view) that morality not be seen as imposed on us from outside – by nature, say, or God. If you believe such blasphemous liberal modernist tosh, then perhaps Sartre’s characterization of the idea of an objective moral standard as an “excuse” to avoid taking “responsibility” for one’s freedom might seem halfway plausible. If not, then you might consider Sartre’s view as (possibly) yet one more decadent riff on this poisonous Kantian theme.

Here endeth the rant about Kant. But more later.

Martin on sexual virtue

In his book Practical Ethics, Peter Singer assures us that “sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious that those raised by sex.)”

These sentences are so morally obtuse that only Singer could have written them. That sex does raise unique moral issues of its own is obvious. Sex is the means by which new human beings come into existence – the only means historically, and the usual means for the foreseeable future even if human cloning becomes (God forbid) feasible and widespread. Sex is also fraught with emotions deeply tied to our sense of identity, shame, and self-respect. This is why rape is different from, and worse than, mere battery; why even most sexual libertines would never dream of parading around naked in public; why they also typically regard sexual harassment as a uniquely grave moral wrong; why they are jealous of rivals to the affections of their lovers in a way they are not jealous of business rivals; and so on and so forth. All of this is, I say, obvious. But then, denying the obvious is typically Step 1 in a Peter Singer argument in “ethics.”

Equally obviously, people are bound to disagree over the moral implications of these facts about sex. The point is just that there can be no reasonable doubt that sex does in fact raise unique moral issues of its own, however we end up answering them. (I defend the traditional answers in chapter 4 of The Last Superstition.)

To those with any remaining unreasonable doubts on this matter, I commend Christopher F. J. Martin’s fine article “Are there virtues and vices that belong specifically to the sexual life?”, published several years ago in Acta Philosophica (you’ll have to scroll down to get to it). Like Martin’s writing generally, this article evinces an unusual combination of wisdom, philosophical depth, and humor. Martin is often characterized as an analytical Thomist. I have on several occasions recommended his excellent book Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations. Another book well worth tracking down is his An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy.

Beckwith on Thomism and ID

Over at his Return to Rome blog, my friend and occasional co-blogger Frank Beckwith weighs in on the Thomism vs. Intelligent Design controversy. While you’re there, take a look around the rest of Frank’s blog – lots of interesting stuff, especially for readers interested in Catholic/Protestant issues.

The Greek atomists and the god of Paley

In recent posts, I have been defending classical theism and criticizing Paley-style “design arguments” as time wasters at best and theologically dangerous at worst because of their implicit anthropomorphic conception of God. Here’s another way to look at the problem.

As is well known, the ancient Greek atomists were forerunners of modern naturalism. They pioneered the mechanistic approach to the study of nature. They were critical of traditional religion. They denied that there is any Uncaused Cause sustaining the world in being. But they were not atheists as that term is understood today. They generally acknowledged that the gods existed. They just regarded them as one part of the natural order among others. Were they writing today, they might have expressed their position by comparing the gods to extraterrestrials or beings from another dimension.

If you are a Christian, suppose it turned out that there really was such a being as Yahweh, but he was an alien from Alpha Centauri who had decided for a few centuries to have a little fun with the ancient Israelites. In particular, suppose it turned out that something like the events recounted in the Old Testament really did happen, but only as interpreted by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods. Would you feel vindicated? Would you expect Richard Dawkins to repent and race over to the nearest revival meeting? No, because even Dawkins is not that foolish, and neither are you.

Certainly the atomists would have responded with a gigantic yawn. And rightly so, because if God were really a space alien, then He wouldn’t be God. He certainly wouldn’t be worthy of worship. Scary, maybe. Perhaps for that reason someone you might not want to tick off. But still merely a cosmic despot, or (if we’re lucky) a cosmic kindly old grandfather. It really doesn’t matter for religious purposes, because, again, he would not in that case be any more worthy of worship than Superman.

Thus, if contemporary naturalists were wise, they would stop getting so upset over the arguments of ID theorists, given that those theorists themselves keep insisting, quite rightly, that their arguments don’t (and, I’ve been arguing, can’t) strictly get you anything more grand than E.T. If the ancient atomists could happily accept that, why couldn’t the American Atheists? Perhaps someday they’ll wise up and realize they can. For with respect to the anthropomorphic god of Paley, you might as well say: “There probably is such a god, but stop worrying and enjoy your life anyway.”

You see, there is a reason why Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and all the others among the very greatest thinkers of the Christian tradition insisted on classical theism. There is a reason why it is reflected in the creeds and councils, and why it is the infallible, irreformable doctrine of Holy Mother Church. Nothing less gets you beyond the naturalism of the ancient atomists. Which, if ID theory ever gained wide acceptance, would simply become the naturalism of the modern naturalists. Darwinism will have been defeated, but a redefined naturalism will bop along unscathed. The last laugh will belong to Democritus rather than Dembski. Then many will say bitterly, in the wake of their Pyrrhic victory: “Even the naturalists believe, and tremble not at all.”

The metaphysics of jazz

It wouldn’t be right to let 2009 pass without a mention of the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s classic album Kind of Blue. Just beautiful. Give a listen to “Freddie Freeloader,” courtesy of YouTube. And since this is a philosophy blog written by a guy with a taste for the sauce, follow it up with Jon Hendricks’ absolutely delightful vocalese version of the song, from 1990. Like some of Hendricks’ other lyrics (e.g. the ones he wrote for the Manhattan Transfer’s vocalese take on Clifford Brown’s “Sing Joy Spring”) the words to “Freddie” evince a kind of strange Gnostic metaphysics of the soul – worked, in this case, into the story of a legendary bartender. (I kid you not.) Bad theology? Sure. But terrific jazz. Enjoy.

The trouble with William Paley

In The Last Superstition and elsewhere, I have been very critical of both William Paley of “design argument” fame and of contemporary Intelligent Design theory. These criticisms have had nothing whatsoever to do with a desire to conform to Darwinian orthodoxy. They have had to do instead with a rejection of the most basic metaphysical and methodological assumptions underlying by the “design inference” strategy shared by Paley and ID theorists. (I am aware that not all ID theorists are trying to do exactly what Paley was doing. But the differences are irrelevant, because what I object to is what they have in common.)

The problems are twofold. First, both Paleyan “design arguments” and ID theory take for granted an essentially mechanistic conception of the natural world. What this means is that they deny the existence of the sort of immanent teleology or final causality affirmed by the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic tradition, and instead regard all teleology as imposed, “artificially” as it were, from outside. I devoted a couple of recent posts to explaining in some detail the differences between these approaches to teleology (here and here). And I emphasized that one of the objections the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition has to the mechanistic denial of final causality is that it makes efficient causality unintelligible. Causes and effects become “loose and separate”; any effect or none might in principle follow upon any cause. This not only paves the way for the paradoxes of Hume, but (more to the present point) undermines the possibility of showing how the very fact of causation as such presupposes a sustaining First Uncaused Cause. The metaphysically necessary connection between the world and God is broken; in principle the world could exist and operate just as it does apart from God. The most we can say is that this is so improbable a hypothesis that it can safely be ruled out; for as Paley and Co. assure us, it is far more likely that an extremely powerful and intelligent “designer” put together the “machine” that is the universe.

The second problem is that Paley and Co. conceptualize this designer on the model of human tinkerers, attributing our characteristics (intelligence, power, etc.) to him in a univocal rather than an analogous way (to allude to a crucial Thomistic distinction explained in a previous post). To be sure, “design arguments” also emphasize that the differences between human artifacts and the universe indicate that the designer’s power and intelligence must be far vaster than ours. But we are necessarily left with a designer conceived of in anthropomorphic terms – essentially a human being, or at least a Cartesian immaterial substance, with the limitations abstracted away. The result is the “theistic personalism” (as Brian Davies has labeled it) which has displaced classical theism in the thinking of many contemporary philosophers of religion.

“OK,” you might say, “so the arguments in question do not get us with certainty all the way to the God of classical theism. So they only get us part way, and only with probability. That’s something, isn’t it?”

Well, no, actually it isn’t. Suppose you are a Christian, and suppose I gave you a powerful argument for the existence of Zeus, or of Quetzalcoatl. Would you run out and wave it defiantly in the faces of your New Atheist friends? Presumably not; it would be less a vindication than an embarrassment. To be sure, such an argument wouldn’t necessarily be incompatible with Christianity. You could always interpret Zeus or Quetzalcoatl as merely an unusually impressive created being – a demon, say, or an extraterrestrial. Indeed, that’s how you should interpret them if they are real, because whatever Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would be if they existed, they would not be divine in the classical theistic sense of “divine.” On classical theism, there doesn’t simply happen to be one God, as if only one applicant bothered responding to the "Creator needed; long hours but good benefits" job ad; there couldn’t possibly be more than one God, given what God is. Anything less than Being Itself or Pure Act, anything less than That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived, anything less than that which is absolute divine simplicity, absolutely incomparable, would simply not be God. There is no such thing as “almost” being God; it’s all or nothing. But precisely for that reason, while to prove the existence of Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would not be to disprove God’s existence, neither would it advance you one inch to proving it. It would be completely irrelevant.

Same thing with the arguments of Paley and Co. You do not get from them – not one inch, not one degree of probability – to the God of classical theism, of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, of the Creeds and councils of the Church, the “I am who am” of Exodus. What you get instead is something like the Ralph Richardson Supreme Being character from Time Bandits. Really really powerful? – no doubt about it. Super smart too – wouldn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit against him! A snappy dresser. But not God. Because a god apart from whom the world might in theory exist anyway – as a mechanical conception of nature entails – is not, cannot be, the God of classical theism. Nor can a god who is powerful and intelligent in just the way we are, only more so.

Or as the analytical Thomist philosopher Christopher F. J. Martin amusingly puts it in his very fine book Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations:

The Being whose existence is revealed to us by the argument from design is not God but the Great Architect of the Deists and Freemasons, an impostor disguised as God, a stern, kindly, and immensely clever old English gentleman, equipped with apron, trowel, square and compasses. Blake has a famous picture of this figure to be seen on the walls of a thousand student bedrooms during the nineteen-seventies: the strong wind which is apparently blowing in the picture has blown away the apron, trowel and set-square but left him his beard and compasses. Ironies of history have meant that this picture of Blake’s is often taken to be a picture of God the Creator, while in fact Blake drew it as a picture of Urizen, a being who shares some of the attributes of the Great Architect and some of those of Satan.

The Great Architect is not God because he is just someone like us but a lot older, cleverer and more skilful. He decides what he wants to do and therefore sets about doing the things he needs to do to achieve it. God is not like that. As Hobbes memorably said, "God hath no ends": there is nothing that God is up to, nothing he needs to get done, nothing he needs to do to get things done. In no less lapidary Latin, Aquinas said "Vult ergo Deus hoc esse propter hoc; sed non propter hoc vult hoc". In definitely unlapidary English we could say: The set-up, A-for-the-sake-of-B is something that God wants; but it is not that God wants B and for that reason wants A. We know that the set-up A-for-the-sake-of-B is something that God wants, because it is something that exists, and everything that exists, exists because of God’s will. But it is simply profane to think that you can infer from that the unfathomable secrets of the inside of God’s mind and will. Acorns for the sake of oak trees, to repeat an example of Geach’s, are definitely something that God wants, since that is the way things are. But it is not that God has any special desire for oak trees (as the Great Architect might), and for that reason finds himself obliged to fiddle about with acorns. If God wants oak-trees, he can have them, zap! You want oak trees, you got ’em. "Let there be oak trees", by inference, is one of the things said on the third day of creation, and oak trees are made. There is no suggestion that acorns have to come first: indeed, the suggestion is quite the other way around. To "which came first, the acorn or the oak?" it looks as if the answer is quite definitely "the oak". In any case, what’s so special about oak trees that God should have to fiddle around with acorns to make them? God is mysterious: the whole objection to the great architect is that we know him all too well, since he is one of us. Whatever God is, God is not one of us: a sobering thought for those who use "one of us" as their highest term of approbation.

The argument from design fails, then, because [as Martin argues earlier in the book] it is an argument from ignorance, because it confuses the final and efficient modes of explanation, and because even if it succeeded it would not prove the existence of God but of some Masonic impostor. But like other bad arguments, its defeat and death has left it to wander the world like a ghost, oppressing the spirits of those who are looking for other and better arguments. (pp. 181-2)

Needless to say, to worship Urizen or Ralph Richardson is not to worship God. But then, to devote enormous amounts of energy to defending arguments which could only ever get you to Urizen or Ralph Richardson would seem an odd enterprise for those whose interest is in promoting the worship of God. This is part of the problem with Paley-style “design arguments” and ID theory, at least insofar as the latter is thought to give support to theism. Even if they are successful – and my own view is that they are at least better than Martin gives them credit for – they distract attention from arguments which really do establish the existence of God. Worse, they lead people to a false conception of God – God as an anthropomorphic tinkerer, God as a cosmic Boy Scout or Santa Claus, a god-of-the-gaps, a scientific posit on all fours with quarks and selective pressures.

“But ID arguments raise serious questions about Darwinism!” Maybe so, and that is not unimportant. But my interest here is in the question of what sorts of arguments establish the existence of the God of classical theism. And to challenge Darwinism, even to refute Darwinism, would not be to establish classical theism. Indeed, it would not even be to refute naturalism. For, the pretenses of its less astute advocates notwithstanding, naturalism is a metaphysical theory, not an empirical one; and it is always possible for a naturalist to throw up his hands at Darwinism’s failure to explain this or that, and insist on general metaphysical grounds that there must nevertheless be some other naturalistic explanation or other out there, even if we have not or cannot discover it. That is in effect the approach taken by wiser naturalists – not Darwinian religious fanatics like Dawkins, Dennett, and Co., but more sober and serious theorists like David Stove, Jerry Fodor, Thomas Nagel, and Noam Chomsky, none of whom thinks Darwinism has come anywhere close to a complete naturalistic explanation of biological phenomena.

That is not to say that I think naturalistic metaphysics is believable even for a moment. It isn’t. But the point is that the dispute concerns basic metaphysics, not empirical science. Where the dispute over theism, specifically, is concerned, it is a waste of time to try to beat the naturalists at their own game, viz. empirical theorizing on the basis of a mechanistic conception of nature. That sort of thing will only ever get you at best to very remote, unusual, even extremely unexpected and impressive – but still perfectly natural – phenomena. It will not get you in the slightest toward God, because God is not one natural object among others, not even the most powerful and intelligent natural object, not even an immaterial natural object. (From a Scholastic point of view, “natural” does not entail “material” – angels and demons are immaterial, but still part of the natural, created order. Nor does the entailment seem to hold even from a naturalistic point of view, given e.g. that Quine is perfectly happy to countenance abstract objects if they are necessary to make sense of empirical science.)

The trouble with Paley-style arguments, then, is not that they are bad science – they may or may not be, depending on which ones we are talking about – but that they are bad theology. If you assume otherwise, then perhaps – as J. B. Phillips put it in a different context – your god is too small.

William Lane Craig on divine simplicity

The doctrine of divine simplicity holds that God is in no way composed of parts. Not only is God incorporeal and immaterial, and thus not composed of form and matter, He is also not composed of essence and existence. Rather, His essence is His existence. There is also no distinction within God between any of the divine attributes: God’s eternity is His power, which is His goodness, which is His intellect, which is His will, and so on. Indeed, God Himself just is His power, His goodness, etc., just as He just is His existence, and just is His essence. Talking or conceiving of God, God’s essence, God’s existence, God’s power, God’s goodness, and so forth are really all just different ways of talking or conceiving of one and the very same thing. Though we distinguish between them in thought, there is no distinction at all between them in reality.

This doctrine is absolutely central to the classical theistic tradition, and has been defended by thinkers as diverse as St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes, to name just a few. It is affirmed in such councils of the Roman Catholic Church as the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and Vatican I (1869-70) – which means that it is de fide, an absolutely binding, infallible, irreformable teaching of the Church, denial of which amounts to heresy. Divine simplicity is generally understood to follow from the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of God as pure actuality. For something composed of parts presupposes the combination of those parts and thus a reduction of potentiality to actuality; and a purely actual being has no potentiality to actualize.

Nevertheless, contemporary philosophers and theologians are often critical of the doctrine of divine simplicity, and a reader has asked me to comment on this critique of the doctrine by William Lane Craig. (Craig is a Protestant, and thus is not troubled by the centrality divine simplicity has in Catholic doctrine.)

Before commenting, let me say that I have the greatest respect and admiration for Craig, who is, needless to say, one of the great Christian apologists of the age, a brilliant philosopher, and a fine scholar. His work on the history of the cosmological argument played a role in my own conversion, since it helped lead me to see how very badly most critics of the argument misunderstand it. (Craig and I have met only once, over a decade ago when he was visiting the UC Santa Barbara campus and kindly presented a guest lecture on the kalam cosmological argument to the Introduction to Philosophy class I was then teaching. I was still an atheist in those days, though the intellectual barriers to theism were just starting to crumble thanks in no small part to him.)

In the short piece linked to above, Craig offers three criticisms of the doctrine of divine simplicity. First, in response to the notion that the divine attributes are not distinct from one another, Craig says:

Existence is part of God's nature. But existence is not the same property as, say, omnipotence, for plenty of things have existence but not omnipotence. It remains very obscure, therefore, how God's nature or essence can be simple and all His properties identical.

Second, in response to the claim that God’s nature is not distinct from His existence, Craig says:

In a sense, God has no essence on this view, rather He just is the pure act of being unconstrained by any essence. He is, as Thomas says, the pure act of being subsisting. The problem is, this doctrine is just unintelligible.

Third, Craig says that the doctrine of divine simplicity entails that “God has no properties distinct from His nature,” and objects that:

[This claim] runs into the severe problem that God does seem to have accidental properties in addition to His essential ones. For example, in the actual world, He knows, loves, and wills certain things which He would not know, will, or love had He decided to create a different universe or no universe at all. On the doctrine of divine simplicity God is absolutely similar in all possible worlds; but then it becomes inexplicable why those worlds vary if in every one God knows, loves, and wills the same things.

Let me take the first two objections first, and begin by making two observations. First, note that both objections more or less amount to little more than the assertion that we can’t make sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity – that it is “very obscure” or “unintelligible.” Little or no actual argument is given for this claim, at least not in Craig’s brief piece. (The bit about how existence and omnipotence are different seems, without additional argumentation, merely to beg the question.) But the fact that a great many major philosophers and theologians have regarded divine simplicity as intelligible should at least give us pause; surely we need more than the mere assertion of unintelligibility, or an expression of one’s personal difficulty in making sense of the doctrine, if we are to be justified in rejecting it.

A second, and by no means unrelated preliminary point is that Craig makes no reference here to the famous Thomistic doctrine of analogy, which from a Thomistic point of view is crucial to properly understanding divine simplicity. To illustrate the idea of analogy, consider the word “see.” When I say that I see a tree outside my window and that I see the details of an insect’s eye through a microscope, I am using “see” in a univocal way, in the same sense in both cases. When I say that Rome is the Holy See, I am now using “see” in an equivocal way, that is, in an entirely different and unrelated sense. But when I say that I can see the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem, I am now using the term in neither a univocal nor an equivocal sense, but rather in an analogical way. That is to say, what one does when he “sees” the truth of the theorem is not the same as what he does when he sees a tree, but it is not completely different either. There is an analogy between the sort of thing we do with our eyes and the sort of thing we do with our intellects that makes it appropriate to describe both as kinds of “seeing.”

Now the Thomistic doctrine of analogy tells us that when we correctly predicate some attribute of God, we are using the relevant terms, not in a univocal way, but in an analogous way. That is to say, when we say for example that God has power, we don’t mean that He has power in exactly the sense we do, though we also don’t mean that His power is completely unlike what we call power in us. Rather, when we call God powerful we are saying that there is in God something analogous to power in us. Or take a more clearly metaphysically loaded term like “being,” as used in a sentence like “God has being.” Accidents and substances can both be said to have being, but accidents lack the independent existence that substances have; material things and angels can both be said to have being, but material things are composites of matter and form while angels are forms without matter; created things and God both have being, but in created things essence and existence are distinct and in God they are not; and so forth. The being of an accident is analogous to that of a substance, that of a material thing is analogous to that of an angel, and that of a created thing is analogous to that of God; that is to say, it is neither completely identical nor absolutely incomparable.

When we bring the concept of analogy to bear on the doctrine of divine simplicity, we can see what is wrong with Craig’s bare assertion that the doctrine is unintelligible. For this assertion has whatever plausibility it has, I would suggest, only if we think of God as having an essence, as existing, and as having power, knowledge, etc. in the same or univocal sense in which we and other creatures have these things. For what we call power in us is clearly different from what we call knowledge in us; our essences are different from our “acts of existing” (to use the Thomistic jargon); and so forth. So to say that knowledge (in that sense) is identical to power (in that sense), etc. does seem unintelligible. But that is simply the wrong way to understand the doctrine of divine simplicity. Properly understood, the doctrine does not say that power, knowledge, goodness, essence, existence, etc., as they exist in us, are identical. Rather, it says that there is in God something that is analogous to power, something analogous to knowledge, something analogous to goodness, etc., and that these “somethings” all turn out to be one and the same thing. “Power,” “knowledge,” “goodness,” etc. are merely different, analogously used descriptions we use in order to refer to what is in God one and the same reality, just as (to borrow Frege’s famous example) the expressions “the morning star” and “the evening star” differ in sense while referring to one and the same thing (the planet Venus).

Precisely because God is simple, though, there is in Aquinas’s view a sense in which we cannot strictly know His essence. For we know things in the strict sense by being able to define them in terms of genus and specific difference, and since God is absolutely simple, there is in Him no distinction between genus and difference, and thus no way to define Him (again, in this technical sense of “define”). God is not merely a unique member of some general class of things; the fact that there is one God is not some metaphysical accident, but an absolute metaphysical and conceptual necessity. But precisely for that reason, precisely because He is so radically unlike anything in the created order, we simply cannot expect to comprehend Him with anything close to the sort of clarity with which we can understand the denizens of that order.

Now this is the God to which the arguments of classical natural theology – by which I mean arguments falling into the broad metaphysical tradition inclusive of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Augustinianism and Thomism – inevitably lead. For such arguments all tend to the conclusion that the ultimate explanation of the world can only possibly lie in what is pure actuality, or being itself, or the One, or that in which essence and existence are identical; and all such concepts entail the doctrine of divine simplicity. What all this leaves us with vis-à-vis Craig’s first two criticisms is this: The arguments of natural theology entail the doctrine of divine simplicity; and thus, since (many of us would claim) we can know that those arguments are sound, we can know also that the doctrine of divine simplicity is true. Furthermore, the doctrine of analogy undermines any prima facie case for claiming that the doctrine of divine simplicity is unintelligible; and any residual sense of mystery is adequately accounted for by the fact that, given His nature, God is not the sort of thing we should expect to understand with the sort of clarity with which we understand the natural order.

What, then, of Craig’s third criticism, to the effect that the doctrine of divine simplicity entails that God has no accidental properties but only essential ones, which (Craig says) conflicts with the evident fact that God could have created a different universe and thus known, loved, and willed different things than in fact He has?

Here, building on a distinction famously made by Peter Geach, we need to differentiate between real properties and mere “Cambridge properties.” For example, for Socrates to grow hair is a real change in him, the acquisition by him of a real property. But for Socrates to become shorter than Plato, not because Socrates’ height has changed but only because Plato has grown taller, is not a real change in Socrates but what Geach called a mere “Cambridge change,” and therefore involves the acquisition of a mere “Cambridge property.” The doctrine of divine simplicity does not entail that God has no accidental properties of any sort; He can have accidental Cambridge properties.

Now it was Aquinas’s position that “since therefore God is outside the whole order of creation, and all creatures are ordered to Him, and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea, inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him” (ST I.13.7). As Barry Miller points out in his book A Most Unlikely God, this amounts to the claim that while the relation of creatures to God is a real one, the relation of God to creatures is a mere Cambridge one, so that (for example) God’s creating the universe is one of His merely Cambridge properties.

How can this be so? As Brian Davies points out in his chapter on divine simplicity in An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion (3rd edition), what is essential to acting is the bringing about of an effect in another thing, not undergoing change oneself as one does so. What is essential to teaching, for example, is that one cause someone else to learn, and not that one lecture, write books, or the like. Of course, in created things, bringing about an effect is typically associated with undergoing change oneself (e.g. for us to cause another to learn typically requires lecturing, writing, or the like as a means). But that is accidental to agency per se, something true of us only because of our status as finite, created things. We should not expect the same thing to be true of a purely actual uncaused cause of the world. Hence there is no reason to suppose that God’s creation of the world entails a change in God Himself.

Nor does anything about God’s other relations to the world entail that they involve anything other than Cambridge properties. For example, as Davies points out, God’s love for the world is not like our love, which typically springs from some need. God, as purely actual, needs nothing; it is not that He has some lack which He seeks to remedy by creating us or getting us to love Him, which would entail a non-Cambridge change in Him. Rather, God loves us in the sense of willing what is good for us, which He does changelessly. Similarly, God’s knowledge of things is not a matter of coming to know them. Rather, He knows all things by virtue of knowing Himself as timelessly creating them.

Obviously, much more could be said. But this much suffices to show that here, as in so many other contexts, seemingly damaging objections to traditional theological doctrines lose much or all of their force when the doctrines are understood in light of the classical metaphysical picture within which they were originally formulated. (For those who are interested, the writings by Miller and Davies cited above are good places to look for more detailed treatments of the topic of divine simplicity. I also say a little more more about it in Aquinas, and Eleonore Stump has a very useful chapter on the subject in her book Aquinas.)

StAR on TLS

Jef Murray at the St. Austin Review kindly reviews The Last Superstition in the latest (November/December) issue. Some excerpts:

A slam-dunk defense of God and of traditional Western philosophy against modernist fad “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens… [Feser] shows how nothing about Platonic/Aristotelian/Thomistic thought has ever been surpassed in its capacity to explain satisfactorily the universe around us. More than that, Feser shows what nonsense results from following the “modern” philosophies to their conclusions. His analysis of the witch’s brew of inconsistencies and downright absurdities produced by philosophers such as Hume is breathtaking… This book is that rare wonder -- a piece of brilliant writing that instructs at the same time that it entertains.

For more reviews of TLS (and of some other books you might find of interest) go here. And don’t forget, copies of TLS – not to mention its successor, Aquinas – make great stocking stuffers. You know the drill: Buy early and often!

Bill and Keith

Yesterday, my old internet pal Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly linked to my recent post about my old internet pal Bill Vallicella’s post on copy editors. And today we come full circle as Bill offers some kind words about Keith and me. So here are some words about them.

I have long regarded Bill as something like the Platonic Form of a philosophy blogger. His blog contains, in my view, just the right mix of serious posts and light ones, polemical political pieces and coolly intellectual ones, long posts and short posts, original pieces and links to the work of others, along with the occasional cooking tip or link to YouTube. Plus he is a terrific aphorist. And a solid technical philosopher. Gotta love it. If any of you readers find my own blog worthy of your time, you might give Bill some of the credit, since he has been my model. Chalk the defects up to yours truly.

Keith and I both started to write for Tech Central Station (now TCS Daily) back in 2003 – Keith a little sooner than I did – and I think Bill and I first made contact by email shortly thereafter. Keith later brought Bill and me on board his ground-breaking group blog The Conservative Philosopher, which was my own first foray into the blogosphere. So, again, if you like anything you see here, give Keith some credit too. He got me started.

Indeed, Keith got a lot of things started. The Conservative Philosopher featured, in its brief lifespan, many important posts by its fine list of contributors, including Keith himself. Many of the bloggers on its roster, including Bill and me, went on to form the nucleus of the Right Reason blog (edited by Max Goss) which had a pretty good run and got a fair amount of attention in the larger conservative blogosphere. Though he was not himself on its roster, Right Reason simply would not have existed without Keith Burgess-Jackson. He was the one who assembled most of the group that went on to form the core of RR (including Roger Scruton and John Kekes, its two most prominent philosophers). He was the one who came up with the idea of a group blog for conservative philosophers in the first place. His Conservative Philosopher blog established the original audience that went on to become the core audience for RR. Many friendships and professional contacts were formed through TCP and RR, and many books, articles, blog posts, and other activities resulted from these relationships. After RR’s own demise, several of us RR alumni (Frank Beckwith, Steve Burton, Lydia McGrew, and me) would reunite over at What’s Wrong with the World. We owe all of this to Keith’s original vision.

So thank you Bill! Thank you Keith!

Sounds like I’m toasting these guys. And why not? So here’s an idea. Pour yourself a strong one tonight and spend some time over at Bill’s blog and Keith’s blog. And raise a toast to them as you do so. That’s what I’ll be doing.

Copy editors and political correctness

Bill Vallicella has some strong words for overzealous copy editors: “Keep your political correctness to yourself. Don't replace the gender neutral 'his' with the abomination 'his/her.' Keep your stinking leftist politics out of my manuscript. And don’t try to be what the Germans call a Besserwisser: don’t presume to know better what I want to say and how I want to say it.”

Amen. To be sure, I’ve had some very helpful copy editors, as I’m sure Bill has. But then, like him, I’ve also had some real fools. My “favorite” was the copy editor who ruined an entire weekend several years ago by filling the proofs of one of my books with something even worse than the abominable ”his/her”: the dreaded ungrammatical “they” and “their” sprinkled liberally and indiscriminately throughout the text wherever I had written “he” or “his.” Hence “Someone might claim that he can conceive…” became “Someone might claim that they can conceive…”; “Someone who puts his right hand…” became “Someone who puts their right hand…”; etc. Standard college student term paper stuff, of course, but something you’d think a professional copy editor would avoid like the plague.

Could such a brain-dead PC automaton get any worse? Yes “they” can. This one also put in “themselves” for “himself” – as in “A certain copy editor proved themselves unworthy of the paycheck they were about to receive” – and (the pièce de résistance) even invented a new word, “themself” (!) – as in “This particular copy editor made a complete ass of themself.” And it got even worse still, as the copy editor in question exhibited as feeble a grasp of English vocabulary as of English grammar : “glossed” (in the sense of “provided an explanation or interpretation of”) was changed to “glossed over”; “conception” was changed, throughout the text, to “concept”; and so forth.

As I say, I had to work day and night over a long weekend to fix up my poor book so that I could get it to the publisher by deadline – all the while trying to avoid a nervous breakdown and to resist as strong a temptation to commit homicide as I’ve ever felt.

At least the PC “non-sexist” stuff is not entirely the fault of copy editors, however. Many publishers of academic books and journals insist on this “inclusive language” nonsense, and it is an outrage. It is bad enough that one has to listen to PC-whipped academics at colloquia and the like gratuitously inserting “she” into their talks and comments wherever they can so as to prove their feminist bona fides. At least there one can just roll one’s eyes, say a quick prayer for the poor soul, and move on to the refreshments. But to have this ideological use of language foisted upon one by an editor is no more defensible than a requirement that all submissions reflect (say) a commitment to direct reference theory or four-dimensionalist metaphysics.

If “inclusive language” is your bag, knock yourself out. Be aware that the results are sometimes jarring. (Two recent and otherwise good books on Descartes’ Meditations consistently refer to “the Cartesian Meditator” of the work as “she.” I realize that Descartes’ meditative exercise is meant to be carried out by any reader, of either sex; but dammit, the guy who actually speaks to us in the book was named Rene, not Renee!)

But again, if a bad, blatantly politicized style is your thing… well, to each his own. As Bill says, just keep your stinking leftist politics out of my manuscript.

Mao-Maoing the Beck watchers

My apologies to Tom Wolfe.

By now you’ve no doubt heard of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn’s jaw-dropping paean to mass-murdering communist dictator Mao Zedong, first reported on Glenn Beck’s show. You might find the official “explanations” convincing. I don’t.

So what’s the deal? Is Dunn really a Maoist, or at least soft on Maoism?

There’s at least one alternative explanation. This incident reminded me of a bizarre student paper I read many years ago. The student had expressed an interest in writing something on the Marquis de Sade, and showed me some article about de Sade the student had been reading which was written from a pro-life point of view. I said it would be OK as long as the student could guarantee that the paper would be critical and argument-oriented – that is to say, that it would be an objective philosophical analysis of actual arguments and ideas, not a mere history lesson or political harangue.

After it was turned in and I started reading it, I could barely believe my eyes. It was, for one thing, little more than a recounting of the usual shocking facts about de Sade – his sexual perversions, physical abuse of women, rhapsodic descriptions of rape and torture, etc. But that wasn’t the beauty part. What was bizarre was how it was all summarized in a banal, matter-of-fact World Book Encyclopedia fashion – and then concluded with some commencement-speech style bromides about how de Sade “thought for himself” and “stood up for what he believed in” despite opposition from the political and religious authorities of his time. There was no acknowledgment whatsoever that de Sade’s views and actions, or the paper’s own “conclusions,” might be thought just a tad controversial (yes, even today!). No acknowledgement, much less any attempt to answer, the critical remarks about de Sade made in the pro-life oriented article which, as it turned out, had been the student’s only source material. Nor was there any hint whatsoever that the paper was the expression of some weird half-baked sexual nihilist philosophy arrived at, in standard college student fashion, via late-night, half-assed readings of Nietzsche and Anaïs Nin. Nor was it remotely well-written enough plausibly to reflect a clever attempt at satire. No, at bottom it had all the passion, grace, cliché-riddenness and general intellectual value of something acquired from a term paper mill.

So what was going on? Well, as near as I could figure, basically this: The student had to write on something and grabbed whatever was at hand as a topic, which for whatever reason happened to be this pro-life article on de Sade. The paper was then “written” by summarizing the facts cribbed from the article and then tossing in the usual “be yourself” clichés the student had picked up from the surrounding culture as a conclusion. Print it out, turn it in, and on to the next class. It was, I think, really that innocent – and therefore that awful.

The student’s name was not Anita Dunn, but – as you know if you’ve heard Dunn’s preposterous speech and noted what an exercise in the “banality of evil” it was – the similarities are otherwise striking. And it may be that Dunn’s mind has simply been so thoroughly rotted out by the surrounding liberal individualist culture and its endless celebration of “doing your own thing,” “being yourself,” “standing out from the crowd,” “thinking differently,” etc. etc. ad nauseam that as she prepared her speech, the first thing she thought of when she came across the Mao story she recounts is not “But this guy killed 65 million people!” but rather “Wow, he really believed in himself – this would make an inspiring anecdote for the kiddies!”

So, maybe Dunn is just a complete dimwit.

And then again, maybe she is a commie scumbag.

…but not the 90s

I can live with the Corey Hart comparison. But Vanilla Ice?! Man, that is low…

The Thomistic tradition, Part II

Concluding my overview of the main varieties of Thomism, with some final outtakes taken straight from the Aquinas cutting room floor:

6. Analytical Thomism: This newest approach to Thomism is described by John Haldane (pictured at left), its key proponent, as “a broad philosophical approach that brings into mutual relationship the styles and preoccupations of recent English-speaking philosophy and the concepts and concerns shared by Aquinas and his followers” (from the article on “analytical Thomism” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich). By “recent English-speaking philosophy” Haldane means the analytical tradition founded by thinkers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which tends to dominate academic philosophy in the English-speaking world. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and her husband Peter Geach are sometimes considered the first “analytical Thomists,” though (like most writers to whom this label has been applied) they did not describe themselves in these terms, and as Haldane’s somewhat vague expression “mutual relationship” indicates, there does not seem to be any set of doctrines held in common by all so-called analytical Thomists. What they do have in common seems to be that they are philosophers trained in the analytic tradition who happen to be interested in Aquinas in some way; and the character of their “analytical Thomism” is determined by whether it tends to stress the “analytical” side of analytical Thomism, or the “Thomism” side, or, alternatively, attempts to emphasize both sides equally.

We might tentatively distinguish, then, between three subcategories within the group of contemporary analytic philosophers who have been described as “analytical Thomists.” The first category comprises analytic philosophers who are interested in Aquinas and would defend some of his ideas, but who would also reject certain other key Thomistic claims (perhaps precisely because of their perceived conflict with assumptions prevalent among analytic philosophers) and thus fail to count (or even to count themselves) as “Thomists” in any strict sense. This sort of “analytical Thomism” might be said to emphasize the “analytical” element at the expense of the “Thomism.” Anthony Kenny (who rejects Aquinas’s doctrine of being) and Robert Pasnau (who rejects certain aspects of his account of human nature) would seem to exemplify this first tendency. A second category within analytical Thomism would comprise thinkers who do see themselves as Thomists in some sense, and who would argue that those aspects of Aquinas’s thought which seem to conflict with assumptions common among analytical philosophers can be interpreted or reinterpreted so that there is no conflict. This approach might be said to give both the “analytical” and the “Thomistic” elements of analytical Thomism equal emphasis, and is represented by thinkers like Geach, Brian Davies, and C. F. J. Martin (all of whom would attempt to harmonize Aquinas’s doctrine of being with Frege’s understanding of existence) and Germain Grisez and John Finnis (who would reinterpret Aquinas’s ethics so as to avoid what Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy”). The work of Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump also possibly falls into this second category, though since it is often interpretative and scholarly rather than programmatic, it is harder to say.

Thomists of other schools have been very critical of both of these strains within analytical Thomism, sometimes to the extent of dismissing the very idea of analytical Thomism as being no more coherent than (in their view) “transcendental Thomism” is. But there is a third possible category of “analytical Thomists,” namely those whose training was in the analytic tradition and whose modes of argument and choice of topics reflects this background, but whose philosophical views are in substance basically just traditional Thomistic ones, without qualification or reinterpretation. Here the “Thomism” would be in the driver’s seat and the “analytical” modifier would reflect not so much the content of the views defended but rather the style in which they are defended. The work of writers like Gyula Klima and David Oderberg seems to fall into this category. Moreover, some writers who appear to fall into the second category of analytical Thomists when writing on certain topics seem closer to this third category when writing on others. (Martin, Davies, and Haldane would be examples, since while some of their work attempts to harmonize analytic themes with Thomistic ones, at other times they are more inclined to challenge certain common analytic assumptions in the name of Thomism.)

In addition to the various schools of thought within Thomism that I have been describing, other approaches could be distinguished. For example, while Aquinas is generally understood to be an Aristotelian, commentators like Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995) have emphasized the Platonic elements in his thought. John Deely advocates bringing Thomism together with semiotics, the general theory of signs and signification. I have not attempted to be comprehensive, and what I have said about the main approaches has been brief and oversimplified. But hopefully it will give the reader some (very general) guidance through the gigantic and often bewildering body of literature on Aquinas and Thomism. In the interests of full disclosure, I might mention that my own understanding of Aquinas has been influenced most by the work of writers in the Neo-Scholastic, Laval/River Forest, and Analytical schools (especially the third category of analytical Thomism that I distinguished). In particular, I follow these approaches in reading Aquinas as the pivotal figure in an ongoing “Aristotelico-Thomistic” tradition, a “perennial philosophy” which has its roots in the best of ancient Greek thought and continues to this day.

Further reading:

Treatments of the history of and various schools of thought within Thomism can be found in: Romanus Cessario, A Short History of Thomism (Catholic University of America Press, 2003); Helen James John, The Thomist Spectrum (Fordham University Press, 1966); Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Blackwell, 2002); Ralph M. McInerny, Thomism in an Age of Renewal (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); and Brian J. Shanley, The Thomist Tradition (Kluwer, 2002). Useful collections of essays can be found in: Victor Brezik, ed., One Hundred Years of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterwards, A Symposium (Center for Thomistic Studies, 1981); Deal W. Hudson and Dennis Wm. Moran, eds., The Future of Thomism (American Maritain Association, 1992); and the series Thomistic Papers published by the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas (Meridian Books, 1958) contains a useful collection of papal statements on the significance of Aquinas for Roman Catholic thought. Gerald A. McCool has developed a controversial interpretation of the recent history of Thomism in a series of books; see his Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (Fordham University Press, 1989); From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (Fordham University Press, 1989); and The Neo-Thomists (Marquette University Press, 1994). His interpretation is debated in John F. X. Knasas, ed., Thomistic Papers VI (Center for Thomistic Studies, 1994).

The Neo-Scholastic approach to Aquinas is summarized in Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (B. Herder Co., 1950; reprinted by Ex Fontibus Co., 2006). A recent treatment of Garrigou-Lagrange’s thought is Richard Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P. (St. Augustine’s Press, 2005). Presentations of existential Thomism can be found in Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952) and Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent (Vintage Books, 1966). John F. X. Knasas, Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (Fordham University Press, 2003) is a recent defense and Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Catholic University of America Press, 2006) a recent critique. Two recent introductions to Laval/River Forest Thomism are The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Volume 1, edited and translated by Ralph McInerny (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) and Benedict M. Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). For transcendental Thomism, see Joseph Donceel, ed., A Marechal Reader (Herder and Herder, 1970). For Lublin Thomism, see Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (Eerdmans, 1997). For analytical Thomism, see the chapter on Aquinas in G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Basil Blackwell, 1961); John Haldane, ed., Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); The Monist, Vol. 80, No. 4 (1997), a special issue on Analytical Thomism edited by Haldane; and Craig Paterson and Matthew S. Pugh, eds., Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue (Ashgate, 2006).

Scruton mania [UPDATED]

Roger Scruton is without a doubt the greatest living philosopher of conservatism. Apart from political philosophy and current affairs, he has also written important works on ethics, culture, religion, the history of philosophy, and, above all, aesthetics. In addition, he has written several novels, and a couple of operas. To give you a sense of how prolific he is, Scruton’s works take up slightly more than an entire three-foot shelf in my library – and even then I’m missing a volume or two. Nor does that include his many newspaper and magazine pieces. And absolutely everything he writes is worth reading, even when one disagrees with it. (He is a bit more reactionary than I am vis-à-vis contemporary popular culture – though I agree with him that most of it is pernicious trash, and one sometimes suspects that his über-snobbery is meant to be provocative. And he is, for my money, not reactionary enough vis-à-vis religion and modern philosophy, including modern political philosophy. Too little metaphysics, too much Kant. Which, of course, means any Kant…)

If contemporary academic moral and political philosophy were something more than a clubby chat society for people with broadly left-liberal assumptions and sensibilities, Scruton would be as widely read and assigned as Rawls, Nozick, Gauthier, Cohen, Thomson, Parfit, and the rest of the usual suspects. But it isn’t, so he’s not.

Anyway. This year has seen not only two new works from Scruton – Beauty and Understanding Music – but also two important works about Scruton from Mark Dooley: his study of Scruton’s work, Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach, which appeared this summer; and his edited volume The Roger Scruton Reader, which comes out next month. These are long overdue, and we are in Dooley’s debt. Perhaps we’re seeing the beginnings of a Scruton boom – sculptor Alexander Stoddart is selling a bust of Scruton, which is available to adorn your private study in either a bronze, marble, or plaster version.

In any event, The Roger Scruton Reader promises to make Scruton’s writings more easily available, and will surely be widely assigned by liberal professors of ethics and of political philosophy to their students, so that they might at long last get an idea of what the best representatives of the other side are saying.

Or maybe not.

UPDATE: My esteemed What’s Wrong with the World co-blogger Lydia McGrew has reminded me of something about which I had completely forgotten: that Scruton, while he opposes creating a legal right to assisted suicide, has taken the view that there are cases where a doctor who intentionally hastens a terminal patient’s death (e.g. via an overdose of morphine) should not be prosecuted and – Scruton seems to think – has even done something admirable. (See chapter 4 of his book A Political Philosophy.) Says Lydia: “I do think that pro-life, contemporary, Christian conservative writers should moderate their raptures about Scruton somewhat in light of such views.” And she is absolutely right. Such views are – in my judgment no less than Lydia’s – gravely immoral, and I regret having overlooked this unhappy side of Scruton’s work.

The Thomistic tradition, Part I

I had originally intended to include in chapter 1 of Aquinas a brief overview of the history of Thomism. But as things turned out, the book was running too long, and since the section in question did not fit entirely smoothly into the chapter anyway, my editor and I decided to cut it out. Still, since it might be useful to readers looking for a quick rundown on the (often bewildering) variety of schools of thought that have developed within the Thomist tradition, here it is. (It begins a bit abruptly; it was meant to come immediately after the section on “Aquinas’s life and works,” and refers back to some issues raised in that section.) I’ve broken it into two parts: this post covers the history of Thomism up through the mid twentieth century; the second will cover analytical Thomism and offer some recommendations for further reading. Proud owners of Aquinas interested in a “Director’s Cut” can print and paste them between chapters 1 and 2.

The controversy over Aristotelianism hardly ended with Aquinas’s work, much less with his death. In 1270, while Aquinas was still alive, Stephen Tempier, the bishop of Paris, had condemned several propositions associated with Averroism, though these did not include any defended by Aquinas. But after Aquinas’s death, in 1277, Tempier went on to condemn 219 propositions, some of which were clearly to be found in Aquinas. This led Albert the Great to come to Paris to defend his former student, and other Dominicans also threw themselves into the task of upholding the doctrine of their fellow friar. Indeed, the study of Aquinas was to become mandatory within the order. This Dominican defense and consolidation of Aquinas’s teaching beginning just after his death is sometimes taken by historians to constitute the beginning of the first of three periods in the history of Thomism. That it was successful is evidenced by the facts that Aquinas was declared a saint by Pope John XXII in 1323, and that two years later, in 1325, Tempier’s condemnations of 1277 were revoked by his successor.

Just as Dominicans had generally defended Aquinas, members of the Franciscan order had been among his fiercest critics. The rivalry between the two orders would only become more bitter as a result of the influence of the Franciscan thinkers John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347). Scotus and Ockham tended toward voluntarism, which emphasizes God’s will over his intellect and thus makes his actions more impenetrable to our rational understanding than they are on Aquinas’s account. Ockham is famously associated with nominalism, which denies the existence of universals. From the Thomistic point of view, these doctrines threaten to undermine the intelligibility of the world and the rational foundations of ethics and of our knowledge of God. Aquinas’s positions were ably defended against them by the likes of John Capreolus (1380-1444), who became known as princeps Thomistarum or “foremost Thomist.”

A second period in the history of Thomism is sometimes dated roughly from the period of the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent (1545-63) which was called in reaction against it. Thomas de Vio, also known as Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534), produced a major commentary on the Summa Theologiae that would have a decisive influence upon the general understanding of Aquinas’s doctrines. Cajetan’s emphasis on continuity with Aquinas’s own positions was followed by later commentators such as Dominic Banez (1528-1604), and John Poinsot (1589-1644), who would come to be known as John of St. Thomas. This contrasted with the tendency of thinkers from the new Jesuit order, such as Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), to combine Aquinas’s thought with various non-Thomistic elements. These different tendencies, roughly associated with Dominicans and Jesuits respectively, gave rise to sometimes heated doctrinal disputes, the most famous being the controversy over grace, free will, and divine foreknowledge.

Ancient and medieval philosophy in general, and Thomism in particular, emphasized metaphysics over epistemology, and objective reality over our subjective awareness of it. The right order of inquiry, from this point of view, is first to determine the nature of the world and the place of human beings within it, and then on that basis to investigate how human beings come to acquire knowledge of the world. Modern philosophy, beginning with Rene Descartes (1596-1650), reverses this approach, tending as it does to start with questions about how we can come to have knowledge of the world and only then going on to consider what the world must be like, based on an account of our knowledge of it. In particular, both Descartes’ rationalism and the empiricism of writers like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume begin with the individual conscious subject or self, develop a theory about how that self can know anything, and then determine what reality in general must be like in line with their respective theories of knowledge.

One result of this subjectivist method was to make objective reality and common sense problematic in a way they had not been for Aristotle and Aquinas; skepticism thus came to seem a serious threat, and idealism (the view that the material world is an illusion and that mind alone is real) came to seem a serious option. Another consequence was that even when some sort of objective reality was acknowledged, doubts were raised about the possibility of knowing much about it beyond what the senses could tell us directly. Accordingly, grand metaphysical systems of the sort presented by Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas were called into question. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was an especially influential expression of hostility to traditional metaphysics, distinguishing as it does between “phenomena” (the world as it appears to us, of which we can have knowledge) and “noumena” (the world as it exists in itself, which we cannot know).

Nineteenth-century Thomists like Joseph Kleutgen (1811-83) sought to revive the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in the face of these modern developments, and their efforts were massively aided by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which called for a renewal of Thomism, and of Scholastic philosophy in general. The result was a Neo-Thomistic and Neo-Scholastic movement which marked a third phase in the history of Thomism, dominated Roman Catholic thought until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and has dramatically influenced the modern understanding of Aquinas’s thought down to the present day. Several schools of thought describing themselves as “Thomistic” have developed over the course of the last century or so, each representing a different response to the characteristic themes and assumptions of modern philosophy. Since they have had such a profound influence on the contemporary debate over Aquinas’s thought, it will be worthwhile briefly to describe the main positions:

1. Neo-Scholastic Thomism: The dominant tendency within Thomism in the first decades after the revival sparked by Leo’s encyclical, this approach is reflected in many of the manuals and textbooks widely in use in Roman Catholic colleges and seminaries before Vatican II. Due to its emphasis on following the interpretative tradition of the great commentators on Aquinas (such as Capreolus, Cajetan, and John of St. Thomas) and associated suspicion of attempts to synthesize Thomism with non-Thomistic categories and assumptions, it has also sometimes been labeled “Strict Observance Thomism.” Still, its focus was less on exegesis of the historical Aquinas’s own texts than on carrying out the program of deploying a rigorously worked out system of Thomistic metaphysics in a wholesale critique of modern philosophy. Its core philosophical commitments are summarized in the famous “Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses” approved by Pope Pius X. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964) is perhaps its greatest representative.

2. Existential Thomism: Etienne Gilson (1884-1978), the key proponent of this approach to Thomism, tended to emphasize the importance of historical exegesis but also to deemphasize Aquinas’s continuity with the Aristotelian tradition, highlighting instead the originality of Aquinas’s doctrine of being or existence. He was also critical of the Neo-Scholastics’ focus on the tradition of the commentators, and given what he regarded as their insufficient emphasis on being or existence accused them of “essentialism” (to allude to the other half of Aquinas’s distinction between being and essence). Gilson’s reading of Aquinas as putting forward a distinctively “Christian philosophy” tended, at least in the view of his critics, to blur Aquinas’s distinction between philosophy and theology. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) introduced into Thomistic metaphysics the notion that philosophical reflection begins with an “intuition of being,” and in ethics and social philosophy sought to harmonize Thomism with personalism and pluralistic democracy. Though “existential Thomism” was sometimes presented as a counterpoint to modern existentialism, the main reason for the label is the emphasis this approach puts on Aquinas’s doctrine of existence. Contemporary proponents include Joseph Owens and John F. X. Knasas.

3. Laval or River Forest Thomism: This approach emphasizes the Aristotelian foundations of Aquinas’s philosophy, and in particular the idea that the construction of a sound metaphysics must be preceded by a sound understanding of natural science, as interpreted in light of an Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Accordingly, it is keen to show that modern physical science can and should be given such an interpretation. Charles De Koninck (1906-1965), James A. Weisheipl (1923-1984), William A. Wallace, and Benedict Ashley are among its representatives. It is sometimes called “Laval Thomism” after the University of Laval in Quebec, where De Koninck was a professor. The alternative label “River Forest Thomism” derives from a suburb of Chicago, the location of the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science, whose members are associated with this approach. It is also sometimes called “Aristotelian Thomism” (to highlight its contrast with Gilson’s brand of existential Thomism) though since Neo-Scholastic Thomism also emphasizes Aquinas’s continuity with Aristotle, this label seems a bit too proprietary. (There are writers, like the contemporary Thomist Ralph McInerny, who exhibit both Neo-Scholastic and Laval/River Forest influences, and the approaches are not necessarily incompatible.)

4. Transcendental Thomism: Unlike the first three schools mentioned, this approach, associated with Joseph Marechal (1878-1944), Karl Rahner (1904-84), and Bernard Lonergan (1904-84), does not oppose modern philosophy wholesale, but seeks to reconcile Thomism with a Cartesian subjectivist approach to knowledge in general, and Kantian epistemology in particular. It seems fair to say that most Thomists otherwise tolerant of diverse approaches to Aquinas’s thought tend to regard transcendental Thomism as having conceded too much to modern philosophy genuinely to count as a variety of Thomism, strictly speaking, and this school of thought has in any event been far more influential among theologians than among philosophers.

5. Lublin Thomism: This approach, which derives its name from the University of Lublin in Poland where it was centered, is also sometimes called “phenomenological Thomism.” Like transcendental Thomism, it seeks to combine Thomism with certain elements of modern philosophy, though in a way that is less radically revisionist. In particular, it seeks to make use of the phenomenological method of philosophical analysis associated with Edmund Husserl and the personalism of writers like Max Scheler in articulating the Thomist conception of the human person. Its best-known proponent is Karol Wojtyla (1920-2005), who went on to become Pope John Paul II.

[To be continued]

Hank’s Pad

“Wow, first the urbane smoothness of Steely Dan and then the freewheeling Big Band sound of the Swing Era. Gee, if only there were a way to combine both…”

Say no more, music lover – feast your ears on “Hank’s Place” (a.k.a. “Hank’s Pad,” for owners of Donald Fagen’s Nightfly Trilogy):

Happy Columbus Day!

“Columbus is ours”: The great Pope Leo XIII on the great Christopher Columbus, of happy memory. And here is a series of lectures by Fr. John Hardon on Columbus the Catholic. Too much pro-Catholic bias, you say? OK, just for balance, I’ll throw in this defense of Columbus from the atheistic Ayn Rand Institute.

On the lighter side, here is a (somewhat goofy) version of the classic Fletcher Henderson tune “Christopher Columbus.” Enjoy, and raise a glass to the man who brought the West out west!

Libertarian neutrality so-called

John Rawls held that a liberal political order is neutral or impartial in three important senses: First, it treats persons as “ends in themselves” and thus as moral equals entitled to impartial concern; second, it seeks to realize its vision of justice in a way that is neutral between the diverse moral and religious worldviews prevailing among citizens of the society it is to govern; and third, it also neutral between the various alternative philosophical doctrines (liberal and non-liberal) individual political thinkers who could support it might be personally committed to. It rests instead on an “overlapping consensus” between moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines, while nevertheless sustaining a shared sense of justice between them, rather than a mere modus vivendi or truce between hostile factions.

Some libertarian theorists have proposed that their creed is more plausibly neutral or impartial in each of these three senses than egalitarian liberalism is. This idea is at least implicit in the thought of Robert Nozick, who also appeals to the Kantian principle of treating persons as “ends in themselves,” and who argues that a libertarian society constitutes a “framework for utopia” in which individuals and groups committed to wildly divergent moral, religious, and philosophical visions are all “free to do their own thing.” Will Wilkinson has been explicit in making a Rawlsian case for libertarianism, and legal theorist Randy Barnett, who endorses Wilkinson’s position, has presented similar arguments of his own.

My own view is that the “neutrality” of libertarianism is (like that of Rawlsian liberalism) completely bogus. I made the case for this judgment in an exchange with Wilkinson at TCS Daily a few years back (see here, here, and here). I make it at greater length in my paper “Self-Ownership, Libertarianism, and Impartiality,” which was presented at a conference at the University of Reading a few years ago and which is available at my website. Though Barnett is the direct target of most of what is said in the paper, its arguments apply to libertarianism in general, and it is my fullest “official statement” on the subject, for anyone who is interested.

What leads me to raise the issue here is an exchange over libertarianism and culture between Kerry Howley, Todd Seavey, and Daniel McCarthy in the latest (November 2009) issue of Reason magazine (in which, to my surprise, I play a small role as Howley’s and McCarthy’s “Exhibit A” instance of a “culturally right-wing libertarian” who went on to abandon libertarianism altogether).

Howley’s position is that libertarians should aim, not only to reduce governmental power, but also to change social attitudes. For Howley, “not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun.” There is also the “paternalism of the mob” enshrined in “tradition,” “convention,” “culture, conformism, and social structure,” which, even in the absence of the threat of imprisonment, can shore up “patriarchy” and endanger the “acceptance of gays and lesbians” and “the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three.” In short, for Howley any libertarianism worthy of the name must promote the cultural agenda of the left no less than the economic position of the anti-tax, anti-big government right.

Howley, in effect, abandons any pretense that libertarianism is “neutral” vis-à-vis the competing moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines to be found within a pluralistic society; for libertarianism must favor, in her view, the culturally leftish ones. This will no doubt come as an unhappy surprise to “libertarian neutrality” advocate Wilkinson, who once very charmingly identified Howley for his readers as his “primary oxytocin source”; their pillow talk – or is it biochem laboratory talk? – apparently doesn’t extend to political philosophy. (Then again, like the Rawlsians who are always chatting up their “neutrality” on moral and religious issues while pushing same-sex marriage and abortion on demand, Wilkinson’s writings have never left any doubt as to what he thinks a free society should look like. And it ain’t Malta.)

That is not to say that denying that libertarianism is neutral entails affirming that it must tend toward cultural leftism, specifically. In the last gasp of my own libertarianism, I argued – not implausibly, if I do say so myself – that one could make a strong libertarian case for conservative morals legislation. And Howley hardly makes much of a case for her own position; as Seavey acidly points out, it amounts to little more than the undefended assertion that “freedom’s just another word for Kerry Howley’s preferences.”

The thing is this: Key libertarian concepts like “freedom,” “rights,” “coercion,” “harm,” “self-ownership,” and the like are highly indeterminate. Their ambiguity makes them useful in libertarian rhetoric, but problematic when it comes to forging a coherent political philosophy. As I argue in the Journal of Libertarian Studies article just linked to, when the “ownership” in “self-ownership” is spelled out one way, the results tend to favor leftish moral views, and when spelled out another way (the way I favor in the article) they tend to favor conservative ones. Some such spelling out is necessary, but no possible spelling out ends up being “neutral” with respect to substantive liberal and conservative moral codes.

The “self” in self-ownership is equally ambiguous; and as I argue in my Social Philosophy and Policy article “Personal Identity and Self-Ownership,” different conceptions of the self, like different elaborations of the concept of “ownership,” have radically different moral implications – and again, in no case are these implications consistent with a vision of libertarianism as “neutral” between the conflicting moral, political, and religious doctrines prevailing within a pluralistic society.

Philosophically speaking, then, libertarianism is a mess. Its rhetorical power lies precisely in its purported hyper-neutrality, the conceit that libertarianism alone allows everyone – egalitarian hippies and entrepreneurs, evangelicals and atheists, ascetics and libertines, feminists and male chauvinists – to “do their own thing,” as Nozick put it. But when one tries to put philosophical muscle onto these bare bones, the whole thing falls apart. Like Rawlsian liberalism, libertarianism inevitably embodies a substantive vision of the good which crowds out every other under the pretense of doing precisely the opposite. Given the indeterminacy of its key concepts, that vision may end up being either more or less “left-wing” or more or less “right-wing” when those concepts are given a more substantive elaboration. But the idea of a political order which is “neutral” in some interesting way – a way which might resolve the festering cultural and political tensions characterizing modern pluralistic societies, by means of an appeal to a shared sense of justice rather than a mere modus vivendi – vanishes upon analysis like the mirage it is. That, in any event, is the position defended in the articles I have mentioned, and that is worked out most thoroughly in “Self-Ownership, Libertarianism, and Impartiality.”

Finally, I want to emphasize that the aim of that particular paper is only to refute the claim that libertarianism is or can be “neutral” in the sense in question. I know from bitter experience that writing on this subject seems to test certain libertarians’ reading skills, and I will no doubt be accused of seeking to impose Roman Catholicism, an Aristotelian-Scholastic curriculum, Steely Dan T-shirts, and who knows what else upon the freedom-loving citizens of these United States. But the argument has nothing whatsoever to do with my seeking to “impose” my “personal tastes,” or anything else, on anyone. It has to do, again, solely with the question of whether libertarianism is “neutral” in the relevant sense. So, if you want to comment on the argument of the paper, please stick to the subject.

In other news, Edward Feser has been awarded the Dawkins Prize…

OK, I’ve finally stopped laughing. I see two good things coming out of this:

1. We now have an absolutely infallible test for determining whether Obamolatry has yet completely rotted out a given individual’s mind: Either you’re sane and still have a shred of intellectual honesty, or you think Obama merits the Nobel Peace Prize. Apply to your liberal friends, sit back, and enjoy.

2. This farce will only solidify in the electorate’s mind the truth of what was blindingly obvious before the election and has become Metaphysically Certain since: Obama is an empty suit with no substantive achievements to speak of, who owes whatever standing he has entirely to the ridiculous fantasies that have been projected onto him by his sycophants.

Said sycophants will, of course, be utterly unmoved whatever their idol does or fails to do. But with the swing voters whose opinion actually makes the difference in elections, this will only hurt Obama. When buyer’s remorse has been setting in already, the last thing you want to do is double down on the salesman’s BS. And there ain’t enough cash left in the Treasury for this clunker.

So, thank you Nobel Committee! Next year, why not go ahead and award one to yourselves? Couldn’t make you look any worse…

Warburton on the First Cause argument

Bored while proctoring an exam today, I browsed through the desk drawer for something to read and found, among the other detritus of semesters past, a photocopy of the “God” chapter from Nigel Warburton’s Philosophy: The Basics, which some other professor had apparently once used for an Intro course. So I took a look. Several violent expletives later, the students had to ask me to quiet down so they could get back to distinguishing proximate genus from specific difference.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Warburton performs the usual ritual of criticizing the stupid “Everything has a cause etc.” version of the First Cause argument – a “version” which, of course, no one has ever actually defended. (Or, for you pedants out there, in case your Pastor Bob once taught it to you at Sunday school: a “version” which none of the many well-known philosophers who have endorsed the First Cause argument has ever actually defended.) That much would, perhaps, not be particularly noteworthy. This preposterous straw man litters both introductory philosophy textbooks and “New Atheist” pamphlets like the droppings stray neighborhood cats keep leaving on my lawn; and I have already declaimed upon the contemptible dishonesty of its use by pop atheists – and, most disgracefully, by many professional philosophers too – ad nauseam (e.g. here and here).

But Warburton ups the ante. Our man is not satisfied to leave his readers with the false impression that some actual theistic philosopher has ever argued “Everything has a cause; so the universe has an uncaused cause, namely God.” After all, a charitable reader might naturally, and quite rightly, think to respond: “Surely none of the defenders of this argument really said ‘everything’ – that would just be too obviously self-contradictory!” No, as if to forestall such a retort, Warburton assures us that “The First Cause Argument states that absolutely everything has been caused by something else prior to it,” that “The First Cause Argument begins with the assumption that every single thing was caused by something else,” and that the argument crucially assumes “that there can be no uncaused cause” (emphasis mine). Naturally, Warburton has no trouble “showing” that the defender of the First Cause Argument contradicts himself when he goes on to assert that God is an uncaused cause.

Strangely, Warburton provides no citations for this argument. Or not so strangely, since, as I have said, no defender of the First Cause argument has ever actually given it – not Plato, not Aristotle, not al-Ghazali, not Maimonides, not Aquinas, not Duns Scotus, not Leibniz, not Samuel Clarke, not Garrigou-Lagrange, not Mortimer Adler, not William Lane Craig, not Richard Swinburne, and not anyone else, as far as I know. Somehow, though, attacking this ridiculous caricature was judged by Warburton to be a more useful way of introducing his readers to the First Cause argument than presenting the actual views of any the great thinkers who’ve defended it. Wonder why.

Naturally too, Warburton also peddles the other standard myths about the First Cause argument. We are, for example, told matter-of-factly that “the argument presents no evidence whatsoever for a God who is either all-knowing or all-good.” Readers of The Last Superstition or Aquinas – or, more to the point, of the hundreds of pages written by the authors just mentioned arguing precisely for these and others among the divine attributes – know that this is what the kids today like to call “a blatant falsehood.” But again, this is something I’ve gone on about at length elsewhere (such as in the posts linked to above).

We are also told that what the argument seeks to rule out is “a never-ending series going back in time” – God as the knocker-down of the first domino, and all that. Never mind that most philosophers who have defended the argument – Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leibniz, to take perhaps the most significant figures – explicitly reject the strategy of arguing for a temporal first cause. And while there are other philosophers who have argued for a first cause of the beginning to the universe (most recently, William Lane Craig) Warburton entirely ignores their actual arguments as well.

So, what does Warburton’s discussion provide the beginning reader who is interested in learning about “the basics” (Warburton’s subtitle) of what philosophical theists have said about the First Cause argument? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

It will not do to suggest in his defense that Warburton only intended to show what was wrong with some crude arguments sometimes given by non-philosophers. For the title of his book is Philosophy: The Basics – not Crude Arguments Given By Non-Philosophers: The Basics.

Furthermore, when discussing some of the other traditional theistic arguments – the ontological argument and the design argument, for example – Warburton does attribute them to actual philosophers (Anselm and Descartes in the first case, Paley in the second). To be sure, his discussion is superficial here as well, but at least he is in these cases oversimplifying the actual arguments of these thinkers. By contrast, the purported “First Cause Argument” he criticizes bears no resemblance to anything a philosophical defender of the First Cause argument has actually said. That Warburton himself realizes this is evidenced by the fact that in this particular case, he does not even attempt to attribute the argument he is attacking to any actual philosopher.

So, why do a disgraceful number of professional philosophers – Warburton is hardly alone here – even bother with it? This too is a question I address in the first of the two posts linked to above. And it is hard to believe that the answer has anything to do with promoting a better public understanding of philosophy.

High IQ versus common sense?

Why do highly intelligent people often lack common sense? Bruce Charlton, editor of the journal Medical Hypotheses, has some thoughts here.

Fossils and Frankenstein monsters

One sometimes hears it said that studying the works of Thomists only distorts one’s understanding of Aquinas. “Read St. Thomas himself, and forget the commentators!” This sounds sophisticated, or is supposed to. In fact it is superficial. No great philosopher, no matter how brilliant and systematic, ever uncovers all the implications of his position, foresees every possible objection, or imagines what rival systems might come into being centuries in the future. His work is never finished, and if it is worth finishing, others will come along to do the job. Since their work is, naturally enough, never finished either, a tradition of thought develops, committed to working out the implications of the founder’s system, applying it to new circumstances and challenges, and so forth.

Thus Thomas had Cajetan, Plato had Plotinus, and Aristotle had Aquinas himself – to name just three famous representatives of Thomism, Platonism, and Aristotelianism, respectively. And thus you cannot fully understand Thomas unless you understand Thomism, you cannot fully understand Plato unless you understand Platonism, you cannot fully understand Aristotle unless you understand Aristotelianism, and so on. “But writers in the traditions in question often disagree with one another!” Yes, and that is all the more reason to study them if one wants to understand the founders of these traditions; for the tensions and unanswered questions in a tradition reflect the richness of the system of thought originated by its founder.

Great philosophers, then, are not museum pieces, or shouldn’t be. Karl Popper famously derided the incessant “spectacle cleaning” of those linguistic philosophers who became so obsessed with the words we use to talk about philosophically problematic phenomena that they lost sight of the phenomena themselves. Historians of philosophy can make a similar mistake if they are not careful, becoming so obsessed with the minutiae of historical context that they make the arguments of a Plato or an Aristotle, an Augustine or an Aquinas, a Descartes or a Kant come to seem like fossils, so deeply embedded in the contingent controversies of their times that they can no longer speak to us today.

When an argument presented as paradigmatically Thomistic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, or whatever is dismissed by the historian as “anachronistic” – as an accretion of the later tradition which must be stripped away in order to get at the “authentic” teaching of the founder, or as a reconstruction that goes beyond the actual text – then we are in danger of losing sight of the point of studying the thinkers in question in the first place. As Aquinas himself put it, “the study of philosophy is not about knowing what individuals thought, but about the way things are” (Exposition of Aristotle’s Treatise On the Heavens I.22). An argument as actually stated by some great philosopher of the past may be incomplete or unclear, and seem open to various objections. And yet it may also embody real insights, and contain in embryonic form a more compelling line of thought that later thinkers in the tradition have merely refined and strengthened rather than made from whole cloth. To ignore the latter is not to do justice to the thought of the founder, but precisely to do him an injustice. More to the point, it is to risk failure to discover the truth about some substantive philosophical matter in the name of a pedantic, narrow conception of “scholarship.” Hence those who study (for example) Plato’s arguments for the immorality of the soul and the theory of Forms, or Aquinas’s Five Ways, while ignoring the ways later Platonists and Thomists have interpreted and defended those arguments, blind themselves to the real power of these ideas.

As every Aristotelian knows, however, vices tend to come in pairs. And in avoiding the mistake of fossilizing great thinkers of the past, we must take care not to fall into the opposite error of making them over in our own image. This is what occasionally happens when the contemporary analytic philosopher pulls a volume of some great philosopher of the past off the shelf and decides he’s going to do said philosopher the favor of reconstructing his arguments in a style that might make them acceptable to a referee for Nous or The Philosophical Review. The result is sometimes interesting. But sometimes it involves (say) attributing to Aristotle a “functionalist” philosophy of mind, or interpreting Aquinas’s Third Way as an exercise in possible worlds theorizing. That is to say, the result is occasionally a kind of Frankenstein monster – the attempted reanimation of a (presumed) corpse via the latest philosophical technology, which yields only a grotesque distortion of the original. (Readers interested in these particular examples are referred to Aquinas, which among other things attempts to clear up some common misunderstandings of the Third Way and of the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to the mind-body problem.)

If the historian of philosophy is sometimes overly attentive to historical context, then, the analytic philosopher is sometimes insufficiently attentive to it. If his standard of philosophical respectability is what he was taught in grad school or what he hears talked about at the latest APA meeting, he is naturally going to assume that if Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, or whomever really has something of interest to say, it must be expressible within the conceptual boundaries with which he and his friends in the profession are familiar. But a past philosopher’s significance is not to be measured in terms of the degree to which he approximates our opinions and assumptions. On the contrary, as Christopher Martin has said, “the great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realise that after all we [moderns] might have been mistaken” (Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations, p. 203). A failure to interpret and evaluate the arguments of a past philosopher on their own terms not only entails misunderstanding what he had to say, but also deprives us of the opportunity of uncovering possible errors or limitations in our own thinking.

The only way for a philosopher to avoid both sterile historicism and ahistorical arrogance – both fossils and Frankenstein monsters – is to strive to understand the history of his subject while always keeping in mind that this historical knowledge is not an end in itself, but a means of approaching philosophical truth. In particular, it requires understanding the ongoing traditions of thought to which many of the great thinkers of the past contributed. To understand not just Thomas, Plato, or Aristotle, but Thomism, Platonism, or Aristotelianism, as living systems, is simultaneously to situate these thinkers within their proper intellectual context and to understand their contemporary relevance.