Maverick Philosopher

Defining 'Accident'

In a comment thread, I offered this definition of 'accident':

D1. A is an accident of substance S =df (i) A is a particular; (ii) A is dependent for its existence and identity on S; (iii) A is predicable of S.

A particular, by definition, is an unrepeatable item.  So a substance and one of its accidents are both particulars.  To mark the difference between, say, Socrates and his pallor, we can say that the substance is a concrete particular while the accident is an abstract particular.  A universal, by definition, is a repeatable item.

David Brightly responds:

Bill,  I'm worried about condition (iii).  I'm not sure what it means for a particular to be predicable of a substance.  I understand what it means for a universal U to be predicable of a substance s, viz, s might instantiate U.  But since particulars are unrepeatable no substance can instantiate a particular.  For me the notions of universality and instantiation are bound together like opposite poles of a diameter (but perhaps I'm wrong on this).  So 'predicable' applied to particulars must mean something else. Does 'p is predicable of s' simply mean that s 'has' p or that p is 'in' s?   If this is right another question arises.  What work does (iii) do that isn't already built into (i) and (ii) together?  Can you give an example where (i) and (ii) hold for particular p and substance s yet p is not an accident of s because p is not predicable of s?    

When I say 'My coffee cup is blue,' I am predicating a property of my cup.  We predicate properties using predicates.  The predicate is a linguistic item, 'blue.'  If I were speaking German the predicate would be different, 'blau.'  But the property predicated would be the same.  When I predicate in overt English speech, I produce a token of the word-type 'blue.' The property, however, is an extralinguistic item.  I don't produce it. I am just assuming (though I could easily argue for it) that we cannot get by with predicates alone: we need properties.  Properties, or at least some properties, do not depend on the existence of English or any language, not do they depend on the existence of minds.

D2.  F-ness is a property =df F-ness is a predicable entity.

D3. Property F-ness is predicable of individual a =df a is F.

D4. The predicate 'F' is true of a =df a is F.

D5. The indicative sentence 'Fa' is true =df a is F.

Given that there are properties, the question arises whether they are universals  or particulars.  Note that there is nothing in the notion of a property defined as a predicable entity to require that properties be universals.  The definition leaves open whether they are universals or particulars.

If blueness is a universal, and not a constituent of the cup, then we can say that the cup instantiates blueness.

D6. U is a nonconstituent universal =df U is possibly instantiated.

If blueness is a particular, and not a constituent of the cup, and is therefore an accident of the cup, then we can say that blueness inheres in the cup.

D7.  A is an accident of substance S =df A inheres in S.

Note: not 'possibly inheres,' but 'inheres.'  Let us refer to instantiation and inherences as 'ties.'  Obviously, they are very different ties. 

I think these definitions answer Brightly's first question.  If properties are accidents,then properties are predicable without being instantiable. 

The second question concerns the work that (iii) does in (D1).  Could a particular be dependent on a substance without being predicable of it?  I think so.  A bulge in a carpet satisfies the first two conditions but not the third. 

Admittedly, the sentence, 'The carpet is bulged' predicates bulgedness of the carpet.  Bulgedness is a property of the carpet.  Bulgedness, however, is not the same as the bulge in the carpet.  Suppose the carpet has two bulges in it.  Then we have one accident *bulgedness* but two bulges.  The accident is a property of the carpet; the bulges are not.  If Socrates is freckled, then he has many freckles.  But his *freckledness* is one accident. 

Related articles

Against Ostrich Nominalism

Accidents of a Substance: Simple or Complex?

On the Nature of Accidents: Objections and Replies

Substance and Accident: The Aporetics of Inherence

On the Nature of Accidents: Objections and Replies

Lukas Novak comments and I respond.

Bill, what follows is what I consider the most important objection against your theory. It seems to me that in order to keep the basic meaning of "universal" and "particular" the following definitions must be assumed:

1. A universal is that which is (truly) predicable of many particular instances.  BV: I agree if 'many' means two or more.  I would add that a universal is a repeatable entity.  But I suspect Novak will not agree with my addition.  I suspect his view is that there are no universals in extramental reality.  Universals are concepts.  Hence I would expect him to balk at 'entity.'

2. X is an instance of a given universal U iff U is predicated of X.  BV: I would say 'predicable' instead of 'predicated.'  Predication is something we do in thought and with words.  A universal can have an instance whether or not any predication is taking place.

3. U1 is subordinate to U2 iff all instances of U1 are instances of U2. This is expressed in language in the form "Every U1 is an U2" - for example, "Every man is an animal".  BV: OK.

4. Every universal has at least some possible instances, unless it is intrinsically inconsistent.  Now whiteness and color are universals. By common sense, color is  superordinate to whiteness. So, every whiteness is a color. Peter's whiteness, on the other hand, is a particular. We must assume that Peter's whiteness is an instance of whiteness, and also of color - since whiteness and color are not intrinsically inconsistent and there are no more plausible candidates to [be] their instances than Peter's whiteness, Bob's blackness etc.  BV: So far, so good!

But here comes the problem. If Peter's whiteness contains whiteness, then Peter's color contains color as its constituent.   BV:  It is true that Peter is white, and it is true that if Peter is white, then he is colored.  But it doesn't follow that there is the accident Peter's coloredness.  Accidents are real (extramental) items.  Peter really exists and his whiteness really exists.  But there is not, in addition to Peter's whiteness, the accident Peter's coloredness. 

Argument 1: It is accidental that Peter is white (or pale) due perhaps to a deficiency of sunlight.  But it is not accidental that Peter is colored.  Peter is a concrete material particular, and necessarily, every such particular has some color or other.  Therefore, being colored is not an accident of Peter. Being colored is essential to Peter.

Argument 2:  The truth-maker of 'Peter is white' is Peter's being white.  But Peter's being white is also the truth-maker of 'Peter is colored.'  Therefore, there is no need to posit in reality, besides Peter's being white, Peter's being colored.

I therefore say that there is no such accident as Peter's being colored.  Consequently, the rest of Novak's reasoing is moot. 

You may perhaps say that Peter's whiteness also contains color because whiteness contains color, but certainly color does not contain whiteness in that case (else they would coincide), and therefore Peter's color does not contain whiteness.

BV: We have to be careful not to equivocate on 'contain.'  In one sense of 'contain,' whiteness contains color or coloredness.  We could call this conceptual inclusion:  whiteness includes coloredness as a part.  In a second sense of 'contain, ' if x is an ontological constituent of y, then y contains x.  Thus the accidental compound [Peter + whiteness]  contains the substance Peter and the accident whiteness, but does not contain them in the way whiteness contains color. 

Consequently, Peter's color is not an instance of whiteness. But this contradicts the fact that Peter's color just is Peter's whiteness, because Peter's whiteness is a color (by def. 3, assuming that whiteness is subordinate to color), and there is no other color in Peter than his whiteness (let us so stipulate).

Put very simply: if Peter's whiteness is just Peter+whiteness+NE+time, then Peter's color is just Peter+color+NE+time, but then Peter's whiteness is not Peter's color. But this is wrong since whiteness is subordinate to color and so any instance of whiteness must be identical to an instance of color.    

BV: Novak's argument could be put as follows:

a. If Peter's whiteness is a complex having among its constituents the universal whiteness, then Peter's coloredness is a complex having among its constituents  the universal coloredness.  

b. These are numerically distinct complexes.

Therefore

c. Peter's whiteness is not Peter's coloredness.

d. (c) is false.

Therefore

e. Peter's whiteness is not a complex.

By my lights, the argument is unsound because (a) is false as I already explained: there is no such complex as Peter's coloredness.

Related articles

Accidents of a Substance: Simple or Complex?

Constituent Ontology and the Problem of Change: Can Relational Ontology Do Better?

Substance and Accident: The Aporetics of Inherence

Substance and Accident: The Aporetics of Inherence

1.If substance S exists and accident A exists, it does not follow that A inheres in S.  An accident cannot exist without existing in some substance or other, but if A exists it does not follow that A exists in S.  If redness is an accident, it cannot exist except in some substance; but if all we know is that redness exists and that Tom exists, we cannot validly infer that Tom is red, i.e., that redness inheres in Tom.

2. So if A inheres in S, this inherence  is something in addition to the existence of S and the existence of A.  There is more to Tom's being red than Tom and redness.  We must distinguish three items: S, A, and the tie of inherence.  S and A are real (mind-independent) items.  Presumably the tie of inherence is as well.  Presumably we don't want to say that A inheres in S in virtue of a mental synthesis on our part.

3. My question: what is inherence?  What is the nature of this tie?  That the accident of a substance is tied to it, and indeed necessarily tied to it, is clear.  The nature, not the existence, of the tie is what is in question.

4. Inherence is not an external relation on pain of Bradley's regress. 

5. Inherence is not identity.  This was argued earlier.

6.  A is not a part of S.  This too was argued earlier.

7.  Is S a part of A?   For Brentano, an accident is a whole a proper part of which is the substance itself -- but there is no other proper part in addition to the substance!  Every part of the accident is either the substance or a part of the substance.  This I find bizarre.  Suppose a chocolate bar is both brown and sticky.  What distinguishes the brownness accident from the stickiness accident if both have as sole proper part the chocolate bar?  (For a very clear exposition of Brentano's theory, see R. Chisholm, "Brentano's Theory of Substance and Accident" in his Brentano and Meinong Studies.)

8.  I made a similar suggestion, namely, that S is a part of A, except that I assayed accidents as akin to facts.  This has its own difficulties.

9. Here is Dr. Novak's scholastic suggestion:

I take the connexion between S and A to be that of a receptive potency and its corresponding act. S contains an intrinsic relation of "informability" to all its possible accidents, and A contains an intrinsic relation of informing toward S. Together these two constitute an accidental whole of which they are not just parts but complementary intrinsic causes: S is its material cause and A its formal cause. They are unified in jointly intrinsically co-causing the one accidental composite.

This implies that we must distinguish among three items: the substance (Peter, say), his accidents (being hot, being sunburned, being angry, being seated etc.) and various accidental wholes each composed of the substance and one accident. 

So it seems that Novak is committed to accidental compounds such as [Socrates + seatedness] where Socrates is the material cause of the compound and seatedness the formal cause.  Moreover, the substance has the potentiality to be informed in various ways, and each accident actualizes one such potentiality.

Recall that what we are trying to understand is accidental change.  And recall that I agree with Novak that we cannot achieve a satisfactory analysis in terms of just a concrete particular, universals, and an exemplification relation.  If Peter changes in respect of F-ness, and F-ness is a universal, then of course there are two times t and t* such that Peter exemplifies F-ness at t but does not exemplify F-ness at t*.  But this is not sufficient for real accidental change in or at Peter.  For the change is not relational but intrinsic to Peter. So, whether or not we need universals, we need a category of entities to help us explain real change.  As Novak appreciates, these items must be particulars, not universals.

What we have been arguing about is the exact nature of these particulars.  I suggested earlier that they are property-exemplifications.  Novak on the basis of the above quotation seems to be suggesting that they are accidental compounds.

Suppose Socrates goes from seated to standing to seated again.  In this case of accidental change we have one substance, three accidents, and three accidental compounds for a total of seven entities.  Why three accidents instead of two?  Because the second seatedness is numerically different from the first.  (Recall Locke's principle that nothing has two beginnings of existence.)  And because the second accident is numerically distinct from the first, the first and the third accidental compound are numerically distinct.

When Socrates stands up, [Socrates + seatedness] passes out of being and [Socrates + standingness] comes into being and stays in being until Socrates sits down again.  So these accidental compounds are rather ephemeral objects, unlike Socrates.

Perhaps they help us understand change.  But they raise their own questions.  Socrates and seated-Socrates are not identical.  Presumably they are accidentally the same.  Is accidental sameness the same as contingent identity?  What are the logical properties of accidental sameness?  Is an Ockham's Razor type objection appropriately brought against the positing of accidental compounds?

Related articles

Accidents of a Substance: Simple or Complex?

Constituent Ontology and the Problem of Change: Can Relational Ontology Do Better?

Bare Particulars and Lukáš Novák's Argument Against Them

More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

Accidents of a Substance: Simple or Complex?

Dr. Novak is invited to tell me which of the following propositions he accepts, which he rejects, and why:

0. I have reservations about an ontology in terms of substances and accidents, but anyone who adopts such an ontology needs to provide a detailed theory of accidents.  This post sketches a theory. It has roots in Aristotle, Brentano, Chisholm, Frank A. Lewis, and others who have written about accidental compounds or accidental unities. 

1. Accidents are particulars, not universals, where particulars, unlike universals, are defined in terms of unrepeatability or uninstantiability.

2. The accidents of a substance are properties of that substance.  Tom's redness, for example, is a property of him.  That there are properties is a datanic claim; that some of them are accidents is a theoretical claim. Accidental properties are those a thing need not have to exist.  I am using 'property' in a fairly noncommittal way.  Roughly, a property is a predicable entity.

3. It follows from (1) and (2) that some properties are particulars. 

4. A substance S and its accident A are both particulars.  S is a concrete particular while A is an abstract particular.  For example, Tom is a concrete particular; his redness is an abstract particular.  It is abstract because there is more to Tom than his being red.

5. Accidents are identity- and existence-dependent upon the substances of which they are the accidents.  An accident cannot be the accident it is, nor can it exist, except 'in' the very substance of which it is an accident.  Accidents are not merely dependent on substances; they are dependent on the very substances of which they are the accidents.  'In' is not to be taken spatially but as expressing ontological dependence.  If the being of substances is esse, the being of accidents is inesse.  These are two different modes of being.

6. It follows from (5) that accidents are non-transferrable both over time and across possible worlds.  For example, Peter's fear cannot migrate to Paul: it cannot somehow leave Peter and take up residence in Paul.  Suppose Peter and Paul are both cold to the same degree.  If coldness is an accident, then each has his own coldness.  The coldnesses are numerically distinct.  They cannot be exchanged in the way jackets can be exchanged.  Suppose Peter and Paul both own exactly similar jackets.  The two men can exchange jackets.  What they cannot do is exchange accidents such as the accident, being jacketed.  Each man has his own jacketedness.

Now for a modal point.  There is no possible world in which Peter's coldness exists but Peter does not.  Peter's coldness does not necessarily exist, but it is necessarily such that, if it does exist, then Peter exists.  And of course the accident cannot exist except by existing 'in' Peter.  So we can say that Peter's coldness is tied necessarily to Peter and to Peter alone: in every possible world in which Peter's coldness exists, Peter exists; and in no possible world does Peter's coldness inhere in anything distinct from Peter.  The same goes for Peter's jacketedness.  Peter's jacket, however, is not necessarily tied to Peter: it can exst without him just as he can exist without it.  Both are substances; both are logically capable of independent existence.

The modal point underins the temporal point.  Accidents cannot migrate over time because they are necessarily tied to the substances of which they are the accidents.

7.  It follows that the superficial linguistic similarity of 'Peter's jacket' and 'Peter's weight' masks a deep ontological difference: the first expression makes reference to two substances while the second makes reference to a substance and its accident.

8 If A is an accident of S, then A is not related to S by any external relation on pain of Bradley's regress.

9 If A is an accident of S, then A is not identical to S.  For if A were identical to S, then A would be an accident of itself.  This cannot be since 'x is an accident of y' is irreflexive.

10.  If A is an accident of S, then A cannot be an improper or proper part of S.  Not an improper part for then A would be identical to S.  Not a proper part of S because accidents depend on substances for their identity and existence.  No proper part of a whole, however, depends for its existence and identity on the whole: it is the other way around: wholes depend for their identity and existence on their parts.

11.  How then are we to understand the tie or connection between S and A?  This is the connection expressed when we say, for example, that Socrates is white.  It is an intimate connection but not as intimate as identity.  We need a tie that is is less intimate than identity but more intimate than a relation. 

We saw in #10 that an accident cannot be a part (ontological consituent) of its substance.  But what is to stop us from theorizing that an accident is a whole one of the proper parts of which is the substance?  This is not as crazy as it sounds.

12.  Let our example be the accidental predication, 'Socrates is seated.'  Start by giving this a reistic translation:  'Socrates is a seated thing.'  Take the referent of 'Socrates' to be the  substance, Socrates.  Take the referent of 'a seated thing' to be the accidental compound Socrates + seatedness.  This compound entity has two primary constituents, Socrates, and the property of being seated.  It has as a secondary constituent the tie designated by '+.'  Now read 'Socrates is a seated thing' as expressing, not the strict identity, but the accidental sameness of the two particulars Socrates and Socrates + seatedness.  Thus the 'is' in our original sentence is construed, not as expressing instantiation, or identity, but as expressing accidental sameness.   Accidental sameness ties the concrete particular Socrates to the abstract particular Socrates + seatedness.

13.  The accidental compound is an extralinguistic particular having four constituents:  a concrete particular, a nexus of exemplification, a universal, and a temporal index.  Thus we can think of it as the thin fact of Socrates' being seated.  'Thin' because not all of Socrates' properties are included in this fact.

14. My suggestion, then, is that accidents are thin facts.  To test this theory we need to see if thin facts have all the features of accidents.  Well, we have seen (#1) that accidents are particulars.  Thin facts are as well.  This is a case of what Armstrong calls the Victory of Particularity: a particular's exemplification of a universal is a particular.

Accidents are properties and so are thin facts: both are ways a substance is. Both are predicable entities. 'Socrates is seated' predicates something of something.  On the present theory it predicates an abstract particular of a concrete particular where the predicative tie is not the tie of instantiation (exemplification) but the tie of accidental sameness.

Accidents are abstract particulars, and so are thin facts.  They are abstract because they do not capture the whole reality or quiddity of the substance. 

Accidents depend on substances for their identity and existence.  The same is true of thin facts.  A fact is a whole of parts and depends for its identity and existence on its parts, including the substance. 

Accidents are non-transferrable.  The same holds for thin facts. 

Accidents are necessarily tied to the substances of which they are accidents.  The same goes for thin facts: the identity of a thin fact depends on its substance constituent.

An accident is not identical to its host substance.  The same is true of thin facts. Socrates' being seated is not identical to Socrates. 

An accident is not externally related to its substance.  The same is obviously truth of thin facts. 

Accidents are not parts of substances.  The same holds for thin facts. 

Finally, no accident has two beginnings of existence.  If Elliot is sober, then drunk, then sober again, his first sobriety is numerically distinct from his second: the first sobriety does not come into existence again when our man sobers up.  The same is true of thin facts.  Elliot's beng sober at t is distinct from Elliot's being sober at t*.

15.  On the above theory, an accident is a complex. It follows that an accident is not a trope, pace Dr. Novak.  Tropes are very strange animals.  A whiteness trope is an abstract particular that is also a property and is also ontologically simple.  An example is the particular redness of Tom the tomato.  I can pick out this trope using 'the redness of Tom and Tom alone' where the 'of' is a subjective genitive.  But note that  the 'of Tom and Tom alone' has no ontological correlate.  The trope, in itself, i.e., apart from our way of referring to it, is simple, not complex.  And yet it is necessarily tied to Tom. This, to my mind, makes no sense, as I explained in earlier posts.  So I reject tropes, and with them the identification of accidents with tropes.

My conclusion, then, is that IF -- a big 'if' -- talk of substances and accidents is ultimately tenable and philosophically fruitful, THEN accidents must be ontologically complex entities.  Anyone who endorses accidents is therefore a constituent ontologist. 

Garrigou-Lagrange on Thomas on the Divine Persons as Subsistent Relations

What follows is the whole of Chapter 16 of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange's Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought.  My critical comments are in blue.

Chapter 16: The Divine Persons

Person in general is a being which has intelligence and freedom. Its classic definition was given by Boethius: Person is an individual subject with an intellectual nature. [548] Hence person, generally, is a hypostasis or a suppositum, and, specifically, a substance endowed with intelligence. [549] Further, since person signifies substance in its most perfect form, it can be found in God, if it be stripped of the imperfect mode which it has in created persons. Thus made perfect, it can be used analogically of God, analogically, but still in its proper sense, in a mode that is transcendent and pre-eminent. Further, since revelation gives us two personal names, that is, the Father and the Son, the name of the third person, of the Holy Spirit, must also be a personal name. Besides, the New Testament, in many texts, represents the Holy Spirit as a person. [550].

Now, since there are three persons in God, they can be distinct one from the other only by the three relations which are mutually opposed (paternity, and filiation, and passive spiration): because, as has been said, all else in God is identical.

Comment: The persons are distinct, numerically distinct.  And they are really distinct: distinct in reality, not merely relative to our thought.  What makes the persons distinct given that each is God and there is only one God?  What is the principium individuationis within the Godhead?  The relations between them. Thus the Father is distinct from the Son because the Father stands in the paternity relation to the Son but not vice versa.  It is difficult to see, however, how a relation between x and y can constitute the numerical difference between x and y.  I should think that the numerical difference between x and y is a logically prior condition of their standing in any relation.  So I am already having difficulty following the Thomist account. 

These real relations, since they are subsistent (not accidental): and are, on the other hand, incommunicable (being opposed): can constitute the divine persons. In these subsistent relations we find the two characteristics of person: substantiality and incommunicability.

Comment:  If the relations were accidental, i.e., accidents, then they would be dependent in their being on something else, and the objection I just made would hold.  So they are said to be subsistent, i.e., substances in their own right.  And since they are 'incommunicable,' they have two characteristics of persons.  The problem, however, is to understand how the relata of the relations (of paternity, filiality, etc.)  can be (identical to) the relations.  Paternity and filiality are different relations.  So if the Father = paternity, and the Son = filiality, then it is easy to see how the Father and the Son are distinct. But what is difficult if not  impossible to understand is how the Father could be identical to paternity and the Son to filiality.

A divine person, then, according to St. Thomas and his school, is a divine relation as subsistent. [551] Elsewhere the saint gives the following definition: [552] A divine person is nothing else than a relationally distinct reality, subsistent in the divine essence.

These definitions explain why there are in God, speaking properly, not metaphorically, three persons, three intellectual and free subjects, though these three have the same identical nature, though they understand by one and the same intellective act, though they love one another by one and the same
essential act, and though they freely love creatures by one and the same free act of love.

Comment:  So the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father by the same act of loving.  But acts are individuated by their objects.  So loving the Father is a different act than loving the Son.  It cannot be the same act on pain of incoherence.  But Aquinas says that they love by the same act.  He has to say this because he cannot admit that there are three separate unities of consciousness in the Godhead.  For this would entail that there are three Gods.

Hence, while we say: The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, we also say: The Father is not the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is not the Son. In this sentence the verb "is" expresses real identity between persons and nature, and the negation "is not" expresses the real distinction of the persons from each other.

Comment:  This is contradictory as I have explained many times before, assuming that 'nature' refers to an individual existing nature.  If the 'is' is taken to be the 'is' of identity, logical inconsistency is unavoidable.  If F = G and S = G. then F = S, by the symmetry and transitivity of identity.    You cannot consistently with that go on to say that it is not the case that F = S.

These three opposed relations, then, paternity, filiation, and passive spiration, belong to related and incommunicable personalities. Thus there cannot be in God many Fathers, but one only. Paternity makes the divine nature incommunicable as Father, though that divine nature can still be communicated to two other persons. To illustrate. When you are constructing a triangle, the first angle, as first, renders the entire surface incommunicable, though that same surface will still be communicated to the other two angles; and the first angle will communicate that surface to them without communicating itself, while none of the three is opposed to the surface which they have in common.

Comment: Garrigou-Lagrange is fudging now.  He says that the opposed relations belong to related personalities.  This is not what he said before.  Before he said that the persons just are subsistent relations.  Well, which is it?  Are the relations identical to persons, or do the relations belong to persons?  This fudge is to be expected since the doctrine attempts to articulate discursively a reality that lies beyond the discursive intellect, a reality that is mystical.

Here appears the profundity of Cajetan's [553] remark: the divine reality, as it is in itself, is not something purely absolute (signified by the word "nature") nor something purely relative (signified by the name "person"): but something transcending both, something which contains formally and eminently [554] that which corresponds to the concepts of absolute and relative, of absolute nature and relative person. Further, the distinction between nature and the persons is not a real distinction, but a mental distinction (virtual and minor): whereas the distinction between the persons is real, by reason of opposition. On this last point theologians generally agree with Thomists.

Comment:  Cajetan's remark is profound.  The divine reality must be absolute, not relative.  But it must also in some sense be personal since the reality of persons surpasses that of every other category of entity.  But persons are relative to each other.  So the divine reality must in some sense be multi-personal and yet absolute. As I see it, theology issues in 'necessary makeshifts' that try to articulate in coherent discursive terms a trans-discursive reality.  So it is no surprise that every  doctrine of the Trinity issues in problems, questions, and outright inconsistencies.  The doctrines point beyond themselves to a reality that cannot be grasped in discursive terms.

This is why doctrinal fights are absurd.  Some doctrines are better than others, but in the end all are untenable.  The divine reality is not a doctrine!

Related articles

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More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

De Trinitate: The Statue/Lump Analogy and the 'Is' of Composition

The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Is the Skeleton of a Cat Feline in the Same Sense as a Cat is Feline?

Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

Garrigou-Lagrange on Private Revelations: Part One

Gilson and the Avicennian-Thomistic Common Natures Argument

Chapter III of Etienne Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers is highly relevant to my ongoing discussion of common natures.    Gilson appears to endorse the classic argument for the doctrine of common natures in the following passage (for the larger context see here): 

Out of itself, animal is neither universal nor singular.  Indeed, if, out of itself, it were universal, so that animality were universal qua animality, there could be no singular animal, but each and every animal would be a universal. If, on the contrary, animal were singular qua animal, there could be no more than a single animal, namely, the very singular to which animality belongs, and no other singular could be an animal. (77)

This passage contains two subarguments.  We will have more than enough on our plates if we consider just the first.  The first subargument, telescoped in the second sentence above, can be put as follows:

1. If animal has the property of being universal, then every animal would be a universal.  But:

2. It is not the case that every animal is a universal.  Therefore:

3. It is not the case that animal has the property of being  universal.

This argument is valid in point of logical form, but are its premises true?  Well, (2) is obviously true, but why should anyone think that (1) is true?  It is surely not obvious that the properties of a nature must also be properties of the individuals of that nature. 

There are two ways a nature N could have a property P.  N could have P by including P within its quidditative content,  or N could have P by instantiating P.  There is having by inclusion and having by instantiation.

For example, 'Man is rational' on a charitable reading states that rationality is included within  the content of the nature humanity.  This implies that everything that falls under man falls under rational.  Charitably interpreted, the sentence does not state that the nature humanity or the species man is rational.  For no nature, as such, is capable of reasoning.  It is the specimens of the species who are rational, not the species.

This shows that we must distinguish between inclusion and instantiation.  Man includes rational; man does not instantiate rational. 

Compare 'Man is rational' with 'Socrates is rational.'  They are both true, but only if 'is' is taken to express different relatons in the two sentences.  In the first it expresses inclusion; in the second, instantiation.  The nature man does not instantiate rationality; it includes it.  Socrates does not include rationality; he instantiates it.

The reason I balk at premise (1) is because it seems quite obviously to trade on a confusion of the two senses of 'is' lately distinguished.  It confuses inclusion with instantiation.  (1) encapuslates a non sequitur.  It does not follow from a nature's being universal that everything having that nature is a universal.  That every animal would be a universal would follow from humanity's being universal only if universality were included in humanity.  But it is not:  humanity instantiates universality.  In Frege's jargon, universality is an Eigenschaft of humanity, not a Merkmal of it.

Since the first subargument fails, there is no need to examine the second.  For if the first subargment fails, then the whole Avicennian-Thomist argument fails.   

Related articles

Transitivity of Predication?

More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

This is proving to be a fascinating topic.  Let's push on a bit further.

Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either mode of esse.  The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale.  We can speak of these in English as real existence and intentional existence. 

According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass.  Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble?  So take Socrates.  Socrates is human.  The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass.  The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates.  For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself.   There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known.  The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely.  Call it the common nature (CN).  It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways.  It is also common to all the  singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing.  So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.

My concern over the last few days has been the exact ontological status of the CN. 

This morning, with the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated earlier:

A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.

B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete singulars and mental acts.

C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing.  It actually has properties, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of LEM) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.

D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.

(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak.  (B) appears to be Novak's view.  (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting.  My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits -- to put it anachronistically -- all the problems of Meinongianism.  The doctor angelicus ends up with  Meinongian monkey on his back.

Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind. 

Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t?  The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds.  For at t there were no humans and no finite minds.  But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality.  This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all.  For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker.  Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being  exists.  In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds.  The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization.  Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):

Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.

Socrates est rationalis, quia home est rationalis, et no e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)

Aquinas' point could be put like this.  (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii)  the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.

Now this obviously implies that the CN humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence.  So we either go the Meioningian route or we say that CNs  exist in the mind of God.  Kenny:

Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind.  There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; theitrs, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)

This may seem to solve the problem I raised.  CNs are not nothing because they are divine accusatives.  And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.

The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world.  One ought to be forgiven for thinking that solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture.  But this is a separate can of worms. 

Related articles

Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

Lukáš Novák on Common Natures

Stanislav Sousedik's "Towards a Thomistic Theory of Predication"

Existentials and Their Equivalents: Aid and Comfort for the Thin Theory?

Aquinas Meets Frege: Analysis of an Argument from De Ente et Essentia

Gyula Klima on Thomistic Common Natures: Some Questions

Lukáš Novák on Common Natures

The following is a comment by Dr. Novak on an earlier post about Stanislav Sousedik's Thomist theory of predication.  That post has scrolled off into archival oblivion, so I reproduce the comment here and add some comments in blue.

  ......................

What is, for me, most striking about Bill's troubles with Sousedík's elaboration of the Thomistic theory of predication is first, that he seems to spell out precisely the questions that I regard as the most fundamental ones in all this business, and second, that these are precisely the questions that had stirred the development of the more and more elaborate late-scholastic theories of universals (or predication, for this is one and the same problem for the scholastics). In this comment, I will try just to sketch the direction in which I think the answers can be found; perhaps to elaborate on some points later.

BV:  I am encouraged by LN's judgment that I have stumbled upon the most fundamental questions despite my lack of deep familiarity with late Scholasticism.

Now the core problem of course is the problem of common natures. I am afraid that there is a slight misunderstanding about the meaning of this term, and Sousedík's choice of his term -- "absolute subject" -- just makes it worse. It is common to talk of a common or "absolute" nature as though it were an entity or item beside universals and individuals, indeed, "jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein". Truly it seems absurd to postulate such an entity which clearly violates the principle of excluded middle.

However, despite the manner of talk of the scholastics and of Sousedík, one must resist considering an "absolute nature" as an item or entity. There is no such entity called "absolute nature". There are particulars which exist really, and there are universals which exist intentionally. And they have something in common -- the "objective content" which exists both really, as individualised and
identified with the particular(s), and intentionally, as abstracted and universalised, as a universal. This "something in common" is called the "common nature", but it is not something over and above the universal or the particular. We should not say -- and we do not say, properly -- that there is some "absolute nature". The nature can only be absolutely considered, that is, considered under a kind of "second order abstraction" - viz. under abstraction from the fact whether it is or is not considered under abstraction from individuality.

BV:  I note that LN uses 'item' and 'entity' interchangeably.  That is not the way I use the terms.  For me, an entity is anything that has being or existence, anything that has esse.  'Nonexisting entity' is therefore a contradiction in terms.  My use of 'item,' however, is ontologically noncommital.  Accordingly, 'nonexisting item' is not a contradiction in terms.   I am pleased to find that I use the term in exactly the same way that Daniel D. Novotny does in his paper, "Scholastic Debates About Beings of Reason" in Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag, 2012), p. 26.  'Item' as I use it is the most inclusive term in the philosophical lexicon.  Anything to which one can refer, anything that one can single out in thought, anything that can be counted as one, whether it exists or not, is an item.  Nonexistent objects, impossible objects, incomplete objects -- all are items. 

Now the common nature, the nature considered absolutely, i.e., considered apart from both real existence and intentional existence and from the accidents that accrue to it when it exists either really (in things) or intentionally (in the mind), is clearly not an entity, but it is an item.  Or so I maintain.  It is not an entity because it has neither esse naturale nor esse intentionale.  Here LN and I agree.  But it is an item because we have singled it out in thought and are talking about it.  After all, the common nature is not nothing.  It is a definite item.  Take felinity considered absolutely.  It is distinct from humanity considered absolutely.  It is not the felinity in my cat, nor the felinity in my mind when I think about the cat.  It is a selfsame item that can exist in either way, or in both ways.  And is is a different selfsame item than the common nature humanity that can exist either in particular humans or in minds or both.

LN says that the common nature " is not something over and above the universal or the particular."  If this means that the common nature felinity is not an entity in addition to really existing particular cats and the intentionally existing universal, then I agree.  It is not an entity because it has no mode of being.  But surely the selfsame felinity that is in my cat and in my mind when I think about the cat, precisely because it is common, cannot be identical to the felinity really existing in cats or the felinity intentionally existing in minds thinking about cats.  So in that sense it is indeed an item (not an entity) "over and above the universals or the particular."

The intended meaning of the saying that this "absolute nature" is neither one nor many, neither real nor intentional etc. is not that there is in fact some primitive constituent item out there devoid of all these properties. That would indeed be absurd. The meaning is that the nature - which in fact is
both many [namely according to its real existence in particulars] and one [according to its intentional existence in a universal] (note that this is not a contradiction!) -- this very nature does not possess any of these two modes of being and the consequent properties "of itself", that is, necessarily, i.e.
it can be consistently grasped without them or "absolutely"; and only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that. Just like a chemist can grasp water as water, that is, according to the properties that belong to water on the basis of its chemical constitution, and disregard whether it is for example cold or hot. He would say that water as water is neither hot nor cold, even neither hot nor not-hot - without thereby necessarily postulating some item called "absolute water" over and above the individual instances of water of various temperatures.

BV:  What the foregoing implies, however, is that the common nature exists only in the mind of one who abstracts both from real existence and from intentional existence.  The crucial phrase is, "only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that."  This implies that the common nature is only as grasped by a mind.  That in turn implies that common natures have esse after all -- in contradiction to the theory.  It also implies that common natures are universals -- again in contradiction to the theory.

In this connection it is important to note that Jacques Maritain, no slouch of a Thomist, speaks of THREE esse's. (Degrees of Knowledge, p. 129, n. 115)  He calls them esse naturae [sic], esse intentionale, and esse cognitum seu objectivum.  The latter mode of being is the mode of being of common natures.

My cat exists outside the mind as a concrete singular.  Its mode of existence is esse naturae, or esse naturale. Now my mind, in knowing the cat, does not become a cat.  So the felinity in my mind when I know the thing before me as a cat cannot exist in my mind in the same way that it exists in the cat outside my mind.  Rather, it exists in the mode of esse intentionale which implies that it is abstract and universal as opposed to concrete and singular. Now suppose I abstract from both of these modes of existence. So abstracting, I focus upon the common nature.  About this common nature, Maritain says that it too is "abstract and universal." (Ibid.) 

The fact that Maritain speaks of a third mode of esse points up the problem I am having with common natures.  What Maritain says strikes as reasonable.  But it contradicts what LN says is the Thomist doctrine.  The official doctrine is that the common nature is neither universal nor particular.  Maritain, however, quite reasonably says that the common nature is abstract and universal.

In other words: you cannot start with "absolute natures" as some elementary items and then try to build the common-sense particulars out of them. Quite the other way around: you take the familiar particulars, then you become aware that you are able to grasp them by means of universal concepts, and then you proceed to identify what the universal concept has "taken" from the particular (its
"objective content") and what not (the properties of concepts /like being universal/ as opposed to their notes). That which the universal concept has captured of the particular is the "common nature"; it is something existing as really identified to the particular (or else it could not have been abstracted
from there) - therefore it cannot, of itself, require universality. But it is also something capable of existing as identified to a universal concept; therefore it cannot, of itself, be incompatible with universality.

So, a common nature is not some elementary ontological item, a philosophical "atom"; it is an abstraction of an abstraction.

BV:  LN's phrase 'objective content' is a felicitous one.  The common nature is the objective content of my subjective concept of a cat, say, but it is also to be found in the cat existing in the mode of esse naturale.  Now the dispute, as I see it, is about the exact status of these objective contents or common natures.  I can think of three possibilities:

A. The common nature really exists.
B. The common nature does not exist, really or intentionally, but has Meinongian Aussersein status.  (This seems to be Novotny's view.  See p. 34 of his article cited above.)
C. The common nature exists intentionally, not really, as an object of a double abstraction.

Now both LN and I reject (A).  I opt for (B).  Accordingly, my thesis is that the doctrine of common natures inherits -- to put it anachronistically! -- all of the problems of Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein. LN seems to be opting for (C).  The trouble with(C) is that it contradicts Thomist doctrine according to which the common nature is neither universal nor particular, neither one nor many, and neither really nor intentionally existent.  For on (C), the common nature, as Maritain said, is "abstract and universal."  It is also one not neither one nor many, and intentionally existent, not neither really nor intentionally existent.

There is more to LN's comment, but the rest will have to be addressed in a separate post or posts.

Related articles

Stanislav Sousedik's "Towards a Thomistic Theory of Predication"

Gyula Klima on Thomistic Common Natures: Some Questions

Stanislav Sousedik and the Circularity Objection to the Thin Theory

Geach on the Real Distinction II: The Argument from Intentionality

Aquinas Meets Frege: Analysis of an Argument from De Ente et Essentia

Bare Particulars and Lukáš Novák's Argument Against Them

In his contribution to the book I am reviewing, Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag, 2012), Lukáš Novák mounts an Aristotelian argument against bare particulars.  In this entry I will try to understand his argument.  I will hereafter refer to Professor Novák as 'LN' to avoid the trouble of having to paste in the diacriticals that his Czech name requires.

As I see it, the overall structure of LN's argument is an instance of modus tollens:

1. If some particulars are bare, then all particulars are bare.
2. It is not the case that all particulars are bare.
Therefore
3. No particulars are bare.

On the Very Idea of a Bare Particular

'Bare particular' is a technical term in philosophy the provenance of which is the work of Gustav Bergmann. (D. M. Armstrong flies a similar idea under the flag 'thin particular.')  Being a terminus technicus,  the term does not wear its meaning on its sleeve. It does not refer to particulars that lack properties; there are none.  It refers to particulars that lack natures or nontrivial essential properties.  (Being self-identical is an example of a trivial essential property; being human of a nontrivial essential property.)  Bare particulars differ among themselves solo numero: they are not intrinsically or essentially different, but only numerically different.  Or you could say that they are barely different. Leibniz with his identitas indiscernibilium would not have approved. 

The notion of a bare particular makes sense only in the context of a constituent ontology according to which ordinary particulars, 'thick particulars' in the jargon of Armstrong, have ontological constituents or metaphysical parts.  Consider two qualitatively indiscernible round red spots.  There are two of them and thay share all their features.  What is the ontological ground of the sameness of features?  The sameness of the universals 'in' each spot.  What grounds the  numerical difference? What makes them two and not one?  Each has a different bare particular among its ontological constituents.  BPs, accordingly, are individuators/differentiators. On this sort of ontological analysis an ordinary particular is a whole of ontological parts including universals and a bare particular.  But of course the particulars exemplify the universals, so a tertium quid is needed, a nexus of exemplification to tie the bare particular to the universals. 

The main point, however, is that there is nothing in the nature of a bare particular to dictate which universals it exemplifies: BPs don't have natures.  Thus any BP is 'promiscuously combinable' with any first-order universal.  On this Bergmannian ontological scheme it is not ruled out that Socrates might have been an octopus or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy.  The other side of the coin is that there is no DE RE metaphysical necessity that Socrates be human.  Of course, there is the DE DICTO metaphysical impossibility, grounded in the respective properties, that an octopus be human.  But it is natural to want to say more, namely that it is DE RE metaphysically impossible that Socrates be an octopus.  But then the problem is: how can a particular qua particular 'contradict' any property?  Being an octopus 'contradicts' (is metaphysically inconsistent with)  being a man.  But how can a particular be such as to disallow  its exemplification of some properties? (116)

Thus I agree with LN that if there are bare particulars, then there are no DE RE metaphysical necessities pertaining to ordinary particulars, and vice versa. This is why LN, an Aristotelian, needs to be able to refute the very notion of a bare particular.

LN's Argument for premise (2) in the Master Argument Above

LN draws our attention to the phenomenon of accidental change.  A rock goes from being cold to being hot.  Peter goes from being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras to being  knowledgeable about it.  These are accidental changes: one and the same particular has different properties at different times.  Now a necessary condition of accidental change is that one and the same subject have different properties at different times.  But is it a sufficent condition?  Suppose Peter is F at time t and not F at time t* (t* later than t).  Suppose that F-ness is a universal.  It follows that Peter goes from exemplifying the universal F-ness at t to not exemplifying it at t*.  That is: he stands in the exemplification relation to F-ness at t, but ceases so to stand to t*.  But there has to be more to the change than this.  For, as LN points out, the change is in Peter.  It is intrinsic to him and cannot consist merely in a change in a relation to a universal.  Thus it seems to LN that, even if there are universals and particulars, we need another category of entity to account for accidental change, a category that that I will call that of property-exemplifications.  Thus Peter's being cold at t is a property-exemplification and so is Peter's not being cold at t*.  Peter's change in respect of temperature involves Peter as the diachronically persisting substratum of the change, the universal coldness, and two property-exemplifications, Peter's being cold at t and Peter's being not cold at t*.

These property-exemplifications, however, are particulars, not universals even though each has a universal as a constituent.  This is a special case of what Armstrong calls the Victory of Particularity: the result of a particular exemplifying a universal is  a particular.   Moreover, these items have natures or essences: it is essential to Peter's being cold that it have coldness as a constituent.  (This is analogous to mereological essentialism.) Hence property- exemplifications are particulars, but not bare particulars.  Therefore, (2) is true: It is not the case that all particulars are bare. 

I find LN's argument for (2) persuasive.  The argument in outline:

4. There are property-exemplifications
5. Property-exemplifications are particulars
6. Property-exemplifications have natures
7. Whatever has a nature is not bare
Therefore
2. It is not the case that all particulars are bare.

Premise (1) in the Master Argument

LN has shown that not all particulars are bare.  But why should we think that (1) is true, that if some particulars are bare, then all are?   It could be that simple particulars are bare while complex particulars, such as property-exemplifications,  are not bare.  If that is so, then showing that no complex particular is bare would  not amount to showing that no particular is bare.

The Master Argument, then, though valid, is not sound, or at at least it is not obviously sound: we have been given no good reason to accept (1).

Property-exemplifications, Tropes, and Accidents

But in all fairness to LN I should point out that he speaks of tropes and accidents, not of property-exemplifications.  I used the latter expression because 'trope' strikes me as  out of place.  Tropes are simples.  Peter's being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras at t, however, is a complex, and LN says as much on p. 117 top.    So the entity designated by the italicized phrase is not a trope, strictly speaking.  'Trope' is a terminus technicus whose meaning in this ontological context was first given to it by Donald C. Williams.  

Well, is the designatum of the italicized phrase an accident?  Can an accident of a substance have that very subtance as one of  its ontological constituents?  I should think not.  But Peter's being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras at t has Peter as one of its constituents.  So I should think that it is not an accident of Peter.

I conclude that either I am failing to understand LN's argument or that he has been insufficiently clear in expounding it.

A Final Quibble

LN suggests that the intuitions behind the theory of bare particulars are rooted in Frege's mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive distinction between concepts and objects. "Once this distinction has been made, it is very hard to see how there might be a genuine case of logical de re necessity." (115) The sentence quoted is true,  but as I said above, the notion of a bare particular makes no sense except in the context of a constituent ontology.   Frege's, however, is not a constituent ontology like Bergmann's but what Bergmann calls a function ontology.  (See G. Bergmann, Realism, p. 7.  Wolterstorff's constituent versus relation ontology distinction is already in Bergmann as the distinct between complex and function ontologies.)  So I deny that part of the motivation for  the positing of bare particulars is an antecedent acceptance of Frege's concept-object distinction.  I agree that if one accepts that distinction, then logical or rather metaphyscal de re necessity goes by the boards.  But the Fregean distinction is not part of the motivation or argumentation for bare particulars. 

Just what considerations motivate the positing of bare particulars would be a good topic for a separate post. 

John W. Carlson's Words of Wisdom: A Philosophical Dictionary for the Perennial Tradition

Dear Bill (if I may), 

I came across your interesting 2009 post on "The Dictionary Fallacy," and I would like to follow up.

I wonder whether you are aware of my recent work, Words of Wisdom: A Philosophical Dictionary for the Perennial Tradition (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).  Attached are the publisher's notice, plus an interview I did with the blog called "Catholic World Report."  My own thinking about dictionaries -- and specifically philosophical dictionaries -- can be gathered from the interview, as well as from the Introduction to my volume, which can be accessed as the "Excerpt" highlighted near bottom of p. 1 of the UNDP announcement. 

I would be pleased to see you mention Words of Wisdom on "Maverick Philosopher," and to learn what you think about my project. 

Best wishes from a philosopher who can't seem to get himself to retire,

John W. (Jack) Carlson
Professor of Philosophy
Creighton University
Omaha, Neb. 68142

Dear Professor Carlson,

I am pleased to announce your book on my weblog which, at the moment, is experiencing  traffic of over 2000 page views per day.  So I should be able to snag a few readers for your work.

I read the The Catholic World Report interview and I find myself in complete agreement with much of what you say. For example, I wholly agree with the following:

CWR:  Let’s begin with a Big Picture question: what is the state of philosophy today? I ask because philosophy today seems to be dismissed often by certain self-appointed critics. For example, the physicist (and atheist) Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing, said in an interview with The Atlantic that philosophy no longer has “content,” indeed, that“philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, ‘Those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.’” Why this sort of antagonism toward philosophy?

Dr. Carlson:So Krauss in a single sentence denigrates both philosophy and gymnasium. May we begin by remarking that Plato—who thought highly of both—would not be impressed? 

Your question, of course, is a good one.  A response to it requires noting salient features of Western intellectual culture, as well as key concerns of philosophers in the recent past. Over the last century and a half, our culture has come to be dominated by the natural or empirical sciences and technological advances made possible by their means. It thus is not surprising that there has arisen in various quarters a view that can be characterized as “scientism”—i.e., one according to which all legitimate cognitive pursuits should follow the methods of the modern sciences. Now, somewhat ironically, this view is not itself a scientific one. Rather, it can be recognized as essentially philosophical; that is, it expresses a general account of the nature and limits of human knowledge. But if it indeed is philosophical, we might well ask on what basis scientism is to be recommended.  Does this view adequately reflect the variety of ways in which reality can be known? To say the least, it is not obvious that the answer to this question is “Yes.”

Lawrence Krauss is one of a large number  (along wth Jerry Coyne, Stephen Hawking, et al.) of preternaturally ignorant scientists whose arrogance stands in inverse relation to their ignorance of what is outside their specialties.  They know nothing of philosophy and yet 'pontificate' (if I may be permitted the use of this term in the presence of a Catholic) in a manner most sophomoric.  Their education has been completely lopsided: they have no appreciation of the West and its traditions and so no appreciation of how natural science arose. 

I criticize Krauss's scientistic nonsense in a number of posts showing  him the same sort of contempt that he displays towards his superiors.  These posts can be found here. His book is so bad it takes the breath away.  If you haven't read it, you should, to get a sense of the lack of humanistic culture among too many contemporary scientists. 

What you say about scientism is exactly right.  I have made similar points over the years, but it seems one can never get the points through the thick skulls of the science-idolaters.

I have an entire category devoted to scientism.  My definition of the term is contained in What is Scientism?

So I salute you and your book, and look forward to reading it.

Yours in the love of philosophy,

Bill Vallicella

P. S. Retiring may be like marrying.  Wait too long and you'll never do it.

Stanislav Sousedik's "Towards a Thomistic Theory of Predication"

Enough of politics, back to some hard-core technical philosophy.  If nothing else, the latter offers exquisite escapist pleasures not unlike those of chess. Of course I don't believe that technical philosophy is escapist; my point is a conditional one: if it is, its pleasures suffice to justify it as a form of recuperation from  this all-too-oppressive world of 'reality.'  It's what I call a 'fall-back position.'

I have been commissioned to review the collection of which the above-captioned article is a part.  The collection is entitled Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag 2012) and includes contributions by Peter van Inwagen, Michael Loux, E. J. Lowe, and several others.  My review article will address such topics as predication, truth-makers, bare particulars, and the advantages and liabilities of constituent ontology.  I plan a series of posts in which I dig deep into some of the articles in this impressive collection.

Stanislav Sousedik argues for an "identity theory of predication" according to which a predicative sentence such as 'Peter is a man' expresses an identity of some sort between the referent of the subject 'Peter' and the referent of the predicate 'man.'  Now to someone schooled in modern predicate logic (MPL) such an identity  theory will appear wrongheaded from the outset.  For we learned at Uncle Gottlob's knee to distinguish between the 'is' of identity ('Peter is Peter') and the 'is' of predication ('Peter is a man').

But let's give the Thomist theory a chance.  Sousedik, who is well aware of Frege's distinction, presents an argument for the identity in some sense of subject and predicate.  He begins by making the point that in the declarative 'Peter is a man' and the vocative 'Peter, come here!' the individual spoken about is (or can be) the same as the individual addressed.  But common terms such as 'man' can also be used to address a person.  Instead of saying,  'Peter, come here!' one can say 'Man, come here!'  And so we get an argument that I will put as follows:

1. Both 'Peter' and 'man' can be used to refer to the same individual. Therefore

2. A common term can be used to refer to an individual.  But

3. Common terms also refer to traits of individuals.  Therefore

4. The traits must be identical in some sense to the individuals.  E.g., the referent of 'Peter' must be in some sense identical to the referent of 'man.'

But in what sense are they identical?  Where Frege distinguishes between predication and identity, Sousedik distinguishes between weak and strong identity. 'Peter is Peter' expresses strong identity while 'Peter is a man' expresses weak identity.  "Strong identity is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive, weak identity has none of these formal properties." (254)  It thus appears that strong identity is the same as what modern analytic philosophers call (numerical) identity.  It is clear that 'Peter is a man' cannot be taken to express strong identity. But what is weak identity?

S. is a constituent ontologist.  He holds that ordinary substances such as Peter have what he calls "metaphysical parts."  Whereas Peter's left leg is a physical part of him, his traits are metaphysical parts of him.  Thus the referents of the common terms 'man,' 'animal,' living thing,' etc. are all metaphysical parts of Peter.  Clearly, these are different traits of Peter.  But are they really distinct in Peter?  S. says that they are not: they are really identical in Peter and only "virtually distinct" in him.  The phrase is defined as follows.

(Def. 1)  Between x, y there is a virtual  distinction iff (i) x, y are really identical; (ii) x can become an object of some cognitive act Φ without y being the object  of the same act Φ . . . . (251)

For example, humanity and animality in Peter are really identical but virtually distinct in that humanity can be the intentional object of a cognitive act without animality being the object of the same act.  I can focus my mental glance so to speak on Peter's humanity while leaving out of consideration his animality even though he is essentially both a man and an animal and even though animality is included within humanity. 

The idea, then, is that Peter has metaphysical parts (MPs) and that these items are really identical in Peter but virtually distinct, where the virtual distinctness of any two MPs is tied to the possibility of one of them being the object of a cognitive act without the other being the object of the same act.

Is S. suggesting that virtual distinctness is wholly mind generated?   I don't think so.  For he speaks of a potential distinction of MPs in concrete reality, a distinction that becomes actual when the understanding grasps them as distinct.  (253) And so I take the possibility mentioned in clause (ii) of the above definition to be grounded not only in the mind's power to objectify and abstract but also in a real potentiality in the MPs in substances like Peter.

One might be tempted to think of weak identity as a part-whole relation.  Thus one might be tempted to say that 'Peter' refers to Peter and 'man' to a property taken in the abstract that is predicable not only of Peter but of other human beings as well.  'Peter is a man' would then say that this abstract property is a metaphysical part of Peter.  But this is not Sousedik's or any Thomist's view.  For S. is committed to the idea that "Every empirical individual and every part or trait of it is particular." (251)  It follows that no metaphysical part of any concrete individual is a universal.  Hence no MP is an abstract property.  So weak identity is not a part-whole relation.

What is it then?

First of all, weak identity is a relation that connects a concrete individual such as Peter to a property taken abstractly.  But in what sense is Peter identical to humanity taken abstractly?   In this sense:  the humanity-in-Peter and the humanity-in-the-mind have a common constituent, namely, humanity taken absolutely as common nature or natura absoluta or natura secundum se.  (254)  What makes weak identity identity is the common constituent shared by the really existing humanity in Peter and the intentionally existing  humanity in the mind of a person who judges that Peter is human.

So if we ask in what sense the referent of 'Peter' is identical to the referent of 'man,' the answer is that they are identical in virtue of the fact that Peter has a proper metaphysical part that shares a constituent with the objective concept referred to by 'man.'  Sousedik calls this common constituent the "absolute subject."  In our example, it is human nature taken absolutely in abstraction from its real existence in Peter and from its merely intentional existence in the mind.

Critical Observations

I am deeply sympathetic to Sousedik's constituent-ontological approach, his view that existence is a first-level 'property,' and the related view that there are modes of existence. (253)  But one of the difficulties I  have with S.'s  identity theory of predication is that it relies on common natures, and I find it difficult to make sense of them as I already spelled out in a previous post.    Common natures are neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular.  Humanity is many in things but one in the mind.  Hence taken absolutely it is neither one nor many.  It is this absolute feature that allows it be the common constituent in humanity-in-Peter and humanity-in-the-mind.  And as we just saw, without this common constituent there can be no talk of an identity between Peter and humanity.  The (weak) identity 'rides on' the common constituent, the natura absoluta.  Likewise, humanity is particular in particular human beings but universal in the mind (and only in the mind).  Hence taken absolutely it is neither particular nor universal. 

But it also follows that the common nature is, in itself and taken absolutely, neither really existent nor intentionally existent.  It enjoys neither esse naturale (esse reale) nor esse intentionale.  Consequently it has no being (existence) at all. This is not to say that it is nonexistent.  It is to say that it is jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein to borrow a phrase from Alexius von Meinong, "beyond being and nonbeing." 

The difficulty is to understand how there could be a plurality of distinct items that are neither universal nor particular, neither one nor many, neither existent nor nonexistent.  Note that there has to be a plurality of them: humanity taken absolutely is distinct from animality taken absolutely, etc.  And what is the nature of this distinctness?  It cannot be mind-generated.  This is because common natures are logically and ontologically prior to mind and matter as that which mediates between them. They are not virtually distinct.  Are they then really distinct?  That can't be right either since they lack esse reale.

And how can these common or absolute natures fail to be, each of them, one, as opposed to neither one nor many?  The theory posits a plurality of items distinct among themselves.  But if each is an item, then each is one.  An item that is neither one nor many is no item at all.

There is also this consideration.  Why are common natures more acceptable than really existent universals as constituents of ordinary particulars such as Peter?    The Thomists allow universals only if they have merely intentional existence, existence 'in' or rather for a mind.  "Intentional existence belongs to entities which exist only in dependence upon the fact that they are objects of our understanding." (253)  They insist that, as S. puts it,  "Every empirical individual and every part or trait of it is particular." (251)  S. calls the latter an observation, but it is not really a datum, but a bit of theory.  It is a datum that 'man' is predicable of many different individuals.  And it is a datum that Peter is the subject of plenty of essential predicates other than 'man.'  But it is not a clear datum that Peter is particular 'all the way through.'  That smacks of a theory or a proto-theory, not that it is not eminently reasonable.

One might 'assay' (to use G. Bergmann's term) an ordinary particular as a complex consisting of a thin or 'bare'  particular instantiating universals.  This has its own difficulties, of course, but why should a theory that posits common natures be preferrable to one that doesn't but posits really existent universals instead?  Either way problems will arise.

The main problem in a nutshell is that it is incoherent to maintain that some items are such that they have no being whatsoever.  'Some items are such that they have no being whatsoever' is not a formal-logical contradiction, pace van Inwagen, but it is incoherent nonetheless.  Or so it seems to me. 

Aquinas Meets Frege: Analysis of an Argument from De Ente et Essentia

The other day I expressed my reservations as to the coherence of the Thomistic notion of a common nature.  Let's plunge a little deeper by considering the argument from Chapter 3 of Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence (tr. Robert T. Miller, emphasis added):

The nature, however, or the essence thus understood can be considered in two ways.
First, we can consider it according to its proper notion, and this is to consider it absolutely. In this way, nothing is true of the essence except what pertains to it absolutely: thus everything else that may be attributed to it will be attributed falsely. For example, to man, in that which he is a man, pertains animal and rational and the other things that fall in his definition; white or black or whatever else of this kind that is not in the notion of humanity does not pertain to man in that which he is a man. Hence, if it is asked whether this nature, considered in this way, can be said to be one or many, we should concede neither alternative, for both are beyond the concept of humanity, and either may befall the conception of man. If plurality were in the concept of this nature, it could never be one, but nevertheless it is one as it exists in Socrates. Similarly, if unity were in the notion of this nature, then it would be one and the same in Socrates and Plato, and it could not be made many in the many individuals. Second, we can also consider the existence the essence has in this thing or in that: in this way something can be predicated of the essence accidentally by reason of what the essence is in, as when we say that man is white because Socrates is white,
although this does not pertain to man in that which he is a man.

The argument may be set forth as follows:

1. A nature can be considered absolutely or according to the being it has in this or that individual.

2. If a nature is considered absolutely, then it is not one.  For if oneness were included in the nature of humanity, e.g., then humanity could not exist in many human beings.

3. If a nature is considered absolutely, then it is not many. For if manyness were included in the nature of humanity, e.g., then humanity could not exist in one man, say, Socrates.

Therefore

4. If a nature is considered absolutely, then it is neither one nor many, neither singular nor plural.

I find this argument intriguing because I find it extremely hard to evaluate, and because I find the conclusion to be highly counterintuitive.  It seems to me obvious that a nature or essence such as humanity is one, not many, and therefore not neither one nor many!

The following is clear.  There are many instances of humanity, many human beings.  Therefore, there can be many such instances. It follows that there is nothing in the nature of humanity to preclude there being many such instances.  But there is also nothing in the nature of humanity to require that there be many instances of humanity, or even one instance.  We can express this by saying that the nature humanity neither requires nor precludes its being instantiated. It allows but does not entail instantiation.  This nature, considered absolutely, logically allows multiple instantiation, single instantiation, and no instantiation.  It logically allows that there be many men, just one man, or no men.

That much is crystal clear.  But surely it does not follow that the nature humanity is neither one nor
many.  What Aquinas is doing above is confusing what Frege calls a mark (Merkmal) of a concept with a property (Eigenschaft)  of a concept.  (See Foundations of Arithmetic, sec. 53, first publ. 1884)  The marks of a concept are the subconcepts which are included within it.  Thus man has animal and rational as marks.  But these are not properties (Eigenschaften) of the concept man since no concept is an animal or is rational.  Being instantiated is an example of a property of man, a property that cannot be a mark of man.   If being instantiated were a mark of man, then the concept man could not fail to be instantiated.  In general, the marks of a concept are not properties thereof, and vice versa. 

A couple more examples.  Three-sided is a mark of the concept triangle, but is is not a property of this concept for the simple reason that no concept is three-sided. Male is a mark of the concept bachelor, but not a property of it since no concept is male.

Aquinas has an insight which can be expressed in Fregean jargon as follows.  Being singly instantiated -- one in reality --  and being multiply instantiated -- many in reality -- are not marks (Merkmale) of the nature humanity.  But because he (along with everyone else prior to 1884) confuses marks with properties (Eigenschaften), he concludes that the nature itself cannot be either one or many.  But surely the nature itself is one, nor many.  That is consistent with holding that the nature admits of single instantiation, multiple instantiation, or no instantiation.

To put it another way, Aquinas confuses the 'is' of predication ('Socrates is a man') with the 'is' of subordination ('Man is an animal').  Man is predicable of Socrates, but animal is not predicable of man, pace Aristotle, Categories 3b5: no concept or nature is an animal.  Socrates falls under man; Animal falls within man.  Falling-under and falling-within are different relations.  Animal is superordinate to man while man is subordinate to animal. But that is not to say that animal is predicable of man.  Both animal and man are predicable of Socrates, which is to say: Socrates falls under both concepts.  But man does not fall under animal, animal falls within man.  If man fell under animal, then the concept man would be an animal, which is absurd.

For these reasons I do not find the argument from De Ente et Essentia compelling.  It is based on confusions that the great logician Gottlob Frege was the first to sort out. But perhaps there is a good Thomist response.

Gyula Klima on Thomistic Common Natures: Some Questions

In his SEP article, The Medieval Problem of Universals, Gyula Klima offers the following explanation of the Thomistic doctrine of common natures:

So, a common nature or essence according to its absolute consideration abstracts from all existence, both in the singulars and in the mind. Yet, and this is the important point, it is the same nature that informs both the singulars that have this nature and the minds conceiving of them in terms of this nature. To be sure, this sameness is not numerical sameness, and thus it does not yield numerically one nature. On the contrary, it is the sameness of several, numerically distinct realizations of the same information-content, just like the sameness of a book in its several copies. Just as there is no such a thing as a universal book over and above the singular copies of the same book, so there is no such a thing as a universal nature existing over and above the singular things of the same nature; still, just as it is true to say that the singular copies are the copies of the same book, so it is true to say that these singulars are of the same nature.

I am struggling to understand this.  Consider the common nature humanity. When we consider it in itself, or absolutely, we abstract from its existence in material singulars (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, . . .) and from its existence in minds.  When we consider it absolutely we thus consider it in abstraction from esse, whether esse naturale or esse intentionale.  So considered, the common nature has no mode of esse or existence.  Having no mode of existence, the common nature does not exist.  This prompts my first question:

Q1. How can an item have no being or existence at all?  (I am using 'being' and 'existence' interchangeably.)  Would it not then be nothing?  But it is not nothing; it is the very common nature that it is, one distinct from other common natures.   What we have here, as it seems to me, is an anticipation of Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein, with the problems that the latter brings in  its train.  But having invoked Meinong I now send him back to his jungle; my present concern is merely to understand Aquinas.  There is this item, humanity, which, absolutely considered, has no being, but is nonethless a definite mind-independent item.  Mind-independent yet beingless.  Do you not find this puzzling?

I am not suggesting that there is a narrowly-logical (purely formal) contradiction in There is an item that has no being.  Some will  be tempted to mount that objection since the italicized sentence certainly does smack  of formal-logical contradiction: There is an x such that x is not.  But the formal-logical contradiction seems to dissipate if we put it like this: Some item is beingless, where 'some' has no existential or ontological import whatsoever.  The latter italicized sentence is not formally self-contradictory. Its form is Some F is G which admits of true substitution-instances. 

So I see no formal-logical contradiction in the doctrine of common natures any more than I see a formal-logical contradiction in Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein.  My point is not formal-logical but metaphysical.  I just don't understand how something can be mind-independent without having any being at all.

Note also that this item -- humanity as common nature or natura absoluta -- is neither particular nor universal.  It would be particular if it existed with esse naturale in singulars; it would be universal if it existed with esse intentionale in a mind.  But in itself, considered absolutely, it exists in neither way and is therefore  neither particular nor universal.  This prompts my second question:

Q2.  How can a nature be common and yet not in some sense universal?  There is this item which we are considering in abstraction from its material existence in singulars and from its immaterial existence in minds.  It seems that what we must say  that it is universal, not particular. After all, it is common.  How can an item be common to many (to many material singulars and to many acts of thinking) without being universal?

These are not rhetorical questions.  I really don't understand the doctrine.  (Some people have the unpleasant habit of accusing one of posing rhetorical questions when one genuinely asks questions.  Isn't that what philosophers mainly do, ask questions?)

What's more, common natures are neither one nor many.  In De Ente et Essentia, Thomas gives an argument for this claim, an argument I examine and reject in a separate post.   At the moment I am concerned with the intelligibility of the claim, not its justification.  I want to understand the claim, but so far I am finding it unintelligible.  Hence my third question:

Q3.  How can a common nature be neither one nor many?  Must it not be one item to be common?

Klima offers an analogy.  It is a commonplace that there can be many copies of the same book.  Each copy is a material singular.  And of course 'same book' does not refer to a material singular over and above the many copies.  And yet the same information-content is expressed in each (uncorrupted) copy and is understood by each mind that reads (with comprehension) a copy.  A common nature, then, is like the information-content of a book. 

Unfortunately, this analogy does not help me.  It seems obvious to me that the information-content is one, not neither one nor many. 

To sum up.  A common nature, considered absolutely,  is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular.  Considered absolutely, it exists neither in singulars nor in minds.  What's more, this absolute consideration, this consideration of it as it is in itself, does not make of it an abstractum that depends on a mind for its existence.  And so it has some sort of mind-independent status along with its matter-independent status.  Having neither esse naturale nor esse inentionale, it has no being at all.  Having no being at all, we can say that common natures are ausserseiend in Meinong's sense, jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing."  Each of these items is a pure Sosein with no Sein.

Is this a coherent conception?  I can't see that it is. But I don't claim to have refuted it.  For my misgivings rest on an assumption that, while it  seems intuitively obvious to me,  I would be hard-pressed to justify in a non-circular way,, namely, that whatever has mind-independent status must have some mode of being or other.

Frege Meets Aquinas: A Passage from De Ente et Essentia

Here is a passage from Chapter 3 of Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence (tr. Robert T. Miller, emphasis added):

The nature, however, or the essence thus understood can be considered in two ways. First, we can consider it according to its proper notion, and this is to consider it absolutely. In this way, nothing is true of the essence except what pertains to it absolutely: thus everything else that may be attributed to it will be attributed falsely. For example, to man, in that which he is a man, pertains animal and rational and the other things that fall in his definition; white or black or whatever else of this kind that is not in the notion of humanity does not pertain to man in that which he is a man. Hence, if it is asked whether this nature, considered in this way, can be said to be one or many, we should concede neither alternative, for both are beyond the concept of humanity, and either may befall the conception of man. If plurality were in the concept of this nature, it could never be one, but nevertheless it is one as it exists in Socrates. Similarly, if unity were in the notion of this nature, then it would be one and the same in Socrates and Plato, and it could not be made many in the many individuals. Second, we can also consider the existence the essence has in this thing or in that: in this way something can be predicated of the essence accidentally by reason of what the essence is in, as when we say that man is white because Socrates is white, although this does not pertain to man in that which he is a man.

What intrigues me about this passage is the following argument that it contains:

1. A nature can be considered absolutely (in the abstract) or according to the being it has in this or that individual.
2. If a nature is considered absolutely, then it is not one.  For if oneness were included in the nature of humanity, e.g., then humanity could not exist in many human beings.
3. If a nature is considered absolutely, then it is not many. For if manyness were included in the nature of humanity, e.g., then humanity could not exist in one man, say, Socrates.
Therefore
4. If a nature is considered absolutely, then it is neither one nor many, neither singular nor plural.

I find this argument intriguing because I find it extremely hard to evaluate, and because I find the conclusion to be highly counterintuitive.  It seems to me obvious that a nature or essence such as humanity is one, not many, and therefore not neither one nor many!

The following is clear.  There are many instances of humanity, many human beings.  Therefore, there can be many such instances. It follows that there is nothing in the nature of humanity to preclude there being many such instances.  But there is also nothing in the nature of humanity to require that there be many instances of humanity, or even one instance.  We can express this by saying that the nature humanity neither requires nor precludes its being instantiated. This nature, considered absolutely, logically allows multiple instantiation, single instantiation, and no instantiation.  It logically allows that there be many men, just one man, or no men.

But surely it does not follow that the nature humanity is neither one nor many.  What Aquinas is doing above is confusing what Frege calls a mark (Merkmal) of a concept with a property (Eigenschaft)  of a concept.  The marks of a concept are the subconcepts which are included within it.  Thus man has animal and rational as marks.  But these are not properties of the concept man since no concept is an animal or is rational.  Being instantiated is an example of a property of man, a property that cannot be a mark of man.   In general, the marks of a concept are not properties thereof, and vice versa.  Exercise for the reader:  find a counterexample, a concept which is such that one of its marks is also a property of it.

Aquinas has an insight which can be expressed in Fregean jargon as follows.  Being singly instantiated -- one in reality --  and being multiply instantiated -- many in reality -- are not marks (Merkmale) of the nature humanity.  But because he (along with everyone else prior to 1884) confuses marks with properties (Eigenschaften), he concludes that the nature itself cannot be either one or many.

To put it another way, Aquinas confuses the 'is' of predication ('Socrates is a man') with the 'is' of subordination ('Man is an animal').  Man is predicable of Socrates, but animal is not predicable of man, pace Aristotle, Categories 3b5: no concept or nature is an animal.  Socrates falls under man; Animal falls within man.  Animal is superordinate to man while man is subordinate to animal.

For these reasons I do not find the argument from De Ente et Essentia compelling.  But perhaps there is a good Thomist response.

Geach on the Real Distinction II: The Argument from Intentionality

See Geach on the Real Distinction I for some background on the distinctio realis.  This post lays out the argument from intentionality to the real distinction.

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance whom I have named 'Max Black.' How are we to understand the relation between the mental act of my thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, namely the cat I am thinking of? What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max?  Or perhaps Max is in front of me and I am seeing him.  What makes my seeing a seeing of him?

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X -- it is thus that our mind 'reaches right up to the reality'; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the 'ordinary' way called esse naturale. This solution resolves the difficulty. It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95)

But what the devil does that mean? Allow me to explain. The main point here is that ofness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object. Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my thinking of Max and Max. My thinking of Max just is the mental occurrence of the very same form or nature -- felinity -- which occurs physically in Max. Max is a hylomorphic compound, a compound of form and (signate) matter. Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind. It is his form that is in my mind. But if felinity informs my mind, why isn't my mind a cat? Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in. One and the same form -- felinity -- exists in two different modes. Its mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale.

Because my thought of Max just is the intentional occurrence of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. One could call this an identity theory of intentionality.

What if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to cease to exist while I was thinking about him? My thinking would be unaffected: it would still be about Max in exactly the way it was about him before. The Thomist theory would account for this by saying that while the form occurs with esse intentionale in my mind, it does not occur outside my mind with esse reale.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality. If you can see your way clear to accepting it as the only adequate account of intentionality, then it supplies a reason for the real distinction.  For the account requires that there be two distinct modes of esse, an immaterial mode, esse intentionale, and a material mode, esse naturale. Now if F-ness can exist in two different modes, then it cannot be identical to either and must be really distinct from both. (Cf. "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul, pp. 62-64.)

This argument for the real dstinction is only as good as the Thomist theory of intentionality which in turn rests on the notion of a common nature, felinity, say, which is indifferent to existence inasmuch as it can exist with esse naturale in Max and with esse intentionale in a Max-thinker, but taken in itself  and absolutely is neither material nor mental, neither many nor one.

The aporetics of common natures will be taken up in subsequent posts.

Kenny, Geach, and the Perils of Reading Frege Back Into Aquinas

I have been studying Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002).  I cannot report that I find it particularly illuminating.  I am troubled by the reading back of Fregean doctrines into Aquinas, in particular in the appendix, "Frege and Aquinas on Existence and Number." (pp. 195-204)  Since Kenny borrows heavily from Peter Geach, I will explain one of my misgivings in connection with a passage from Geach's important article, "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul.  Geach writes,

Frege, like Aquinas, held that there was a fundamental distinction in rebus answering to the logical distinction between subject and predicate -- the distinction between Gegenstand (object) and Begriff (concept). [. . .] And for Frege the Begriff, and it alone, admits of repetition and manyness; an object cannot be repeated -- kommt nie wiederholdt vor. (45-46)

So far, so good.  Geach continues:

Understood in this way, the distinction between individual and form is absolutely sharp and rigid; what can be sensibly said of one becomes nonsense if we try to say it of the other. [. . .] Just because of this sharp distinction, we must reject the Platonic doctrine that what a predicate stands for is is some single entity over against its many instances, hen epi pollon. On the contrary:  the common nature that the predicate 'man' (say) stands for can be indifferently one or many, and neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself.  This point is made very clearly by Aquinas in De Ente et Essentia.  Again we find Frege echoing Aquinas; Frege counts oneness or manyness (as the case may be) among the properties (Eigenschaften) of a concept, which means that it cannot at the same time be one of the marks or notes (Merkmalen) of that concept. (46)

I smell deep confusion here.  But precisely because the confusion runs deep I will have a hard time explaining clearly wherein the confusion consists.  I will begin by making a list of what Geach gets right.

1. Objects and individuals are unrepeatable. 
2. Concepts and forms are repeatable.
3. Setting aside the special question of subsistent forms, no individual is a form, and no object is a concept.
4. Frege distinguishes between the marks of a concept and the properties of a concept. The concept man, for example, has the concept animal as one of its marks.  But animal is not a property of man, and this for the simple reason that no concept is an animal.  Man has the property of being instantiated.  This property, however, is not a mark of man since it is not included within the latter's conceptual content:  one cannot by sheer analysis of the concept man determine whether or not there are any men.  So there is a sense in which "neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself."  This is true if taken in the following sense: neither being instantiated singly nor being instantiated multiply is a mark of the concept man.

But how do these points, taken singly or together, support Geach's rejection of "the Platonic doctrine that what the predicate stands for is some single entity over against its many instances"?  They don't!

It seems obvious to me that Geach is confusing oneness/manyness as the relational property of single/multiple instantiation with oneness/manyness as the monadic property of being one or many.  It is one thing to ask whether a concept is singly or multiply instantiated.  It is quite another to ask whether the concept itself  is one or many.  It is also important to realize that a Fregean first-level concept, when instantiated, does not enter into the structure of the individuals that instantiate it.  Aquinas is a constituent ontologist, but Frege is not.  This difference is deep and causes a world of trouble for those who attempt to understand Aquinas in Fregean terms.  For Frege, concepts are functions, and no function enters into the structure of its argument.  The propositional function x is a man is not a constituent of Socrates.  What's more, the value of the function for Socrates as argument is not a state of affairs with Socrates and the function as constituents. The value of the function for Socrates as argument is True; for Stromboli as argument, False.  And now you know why philosophers speak of truth-values.  It's mathematical jargon via Frege the mathematician.

The Fregean concept man is one, not many.  It is one concept, not many concepts.  Nor is it neither one nor many.  It can have one instance, or many instances, or no instance.   The Thomistic form man, however, is, considered in itself, neither one nor many.  It is one in the intellect but (possibly) many in things.  In itself, however, it is neither.  And so it is true to say that the form is not "some single entity over against its many instances."  It is not a single entity because, considered in itself, it is neither single nor multiple.

But this doesn't follow from point (3) above.  And therein consists Geach's mistake.  One cannot validly move from the "sharp distinction" between individuals/objects and forms/concepts  to the conclusion that what a predicate stands for is not a single entity.  Geach makes this mistake because of the confusion  exposed two paragraphs supra.  The mutual exclusion of objects and concepts does not entail that concepts cannot be single entities.

There is another huge problem with reading Frege back into Aquinas, and that concerns modes of existence (esse).  A form in the intellect exists in a different way than it does in things.  But if Frege is right about existence, there cannot be modes of existence.  For if existence is instantiation, then there cannot be modes of existence for the simple reason that there cannot be any modes of instantiation.

I'll say more about this blunder in another post.  It rests in turn on a failure to appreciate  the radically different styles of ontology practiced by Aquinas and Frege.  In my jargon, Aquinas is a constituent ontologist while Frege is a nonconstituent ontologist.  In the jargon of Gustav Bergmann, Aquinas is a compex ontologist while Frege is a function ontologist.

Geach on the Real Distinction I

Oceans of ink have been spilled over the centuries on the celebrated distinctio realis between essence and existence (esse).  You have no idea how much ink, and vitriol too, has flooded  the scholastic backwaters and sometimes spilled over into mainstream precincts. Anyway, the distinction has long fascinated me and I hold to some version of it.  I will first give a rough explanation of the distinction and then examine one of Peter Geach's arguments for it.

1.  First of all, we can say that the real distinction is so-called because it is not a merely conceptual or notional distinction.  It is not like the distinction between the Morning Star and the Evening Star. It is not a distinction parasitic upon how we view things or refer to them.  It is more like the distinction between Venus and Mars.  The MS and the ES are two "modes of presentation" (Fregean Darstellungsweisen) of one and the same chunk of extramental physical reality, the planet Venus.  But Venus and Mars are not modes of presentation but entities in their own right.  Venus and Mars are distinct in reality not merely in conception.

2. But although the Venus-Mars distinction is a real distinction, the distinction between essence and existence cannot be like this.  For while each of the planets can exist without the other, essence and existence cannot each exist without  the other.  A thing's existence is nothing wthout the thing whose existence it is, and thus nothing without the thing's essence.  I hope it is obvious that the existence of this particular coffee cup would be nothing without the cup and the cup's individual essence.

3. It is less obvious that the individual essence would be nothing without existence.  But to make the problem more difficult I will assume that there are no nonexistent individuals, that nothing is an individual unless it exists. This implies that before Socrates came into existence there was no individual essence Socrateity.  His coming into being was not the actualization of a pre-existent wholly determinate individual essence.  (This has implications for the theory of creation: it imples that creation is out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.)  It also implies that there is no individual essence corresponding to the name 'Vulcan' when this is used to denote an intra-Mercurial planet.  My assumption is anti-Meinongian and (I believe) also anti-Avicennian.  (There was a time, long ago, when the Muslims weren't total slouches when it came to philosophy. 'Avicenna' is the Latinization of 'Ibn Sina.')

4.  The essence and the existence of a particular individual are thus each dependent on the other but nonetheless really, not merely notionally,  distinct.  Really distinct (like Venus and Mars, but unlike the Morning Star and the Evening Star) but inseparable (unlike Venus and Mars).  They are really distinct like my eye glasses and my head but not separable in the manner of glasses and head. So an analogy mght be the convexity and concavity of one of the lenses.  The convex surface cannot be without the concave surafce and vice versa, but they are really distinct.  'Convex' and 'concave' are not merely two different ways of referring to the same piece of glass.  There is a real mind-independent difference.  But it is only  an analogy.

5. Now what reason could we have for accepting something like the the real distinction?  Here is one of Geach's arguments, based on Aquinas,  from "Form and Existence," reprinted in Peter Geach, God and the Soul (Thoemmes Press, 1994), pp. 42-64.  Geach's argument is on p. 61.  I'll put the argument in my own way.  I find the argument convincing.

Suppose you have two numerically distinct instances of F-ness.  They don't differ in point of F-ness, since each is an instance of F-ness.  But they are numerically distinct.  So some other factor must be brought in to account for the difference.  That factor is existence.  They differ in their very existence.  Since they differ in existence and yet agree in essence, essence and existence are really distinct.

Max Black was famous for his iron spheres.  (Geach does not mention Black.) He hypothesizes a world consisting of just two of them and nothing else, the spheres being alike in every relational and monadic respect.  In Black's boring world, then, there are two numerically distinct instances of iron sphere.  Since both exist, and since they differ solo numero, I conclude that they  differ in their very existence.  Since they differ in their existence, but agree in their iron sphericity, there is a real distinction between existence and nature or essence.

Suppose you deny that.  Suppose you say that the spheres do not differ in their very existence and that they share existence.  The consequence, should one cease to exist, would be that the other would cease to exist as well, which is absurd.

Hylomorphic Ontological Analysis and the Puzzle of Prime Matter

Recent posts have discussed  hylomorphic dualism in the philosophy of mind. It is a serious contender in the arena of competing positions -- unlike say, eliminative materialism, which is not. (If you think I'm just gassing off about EM, read the entries in the eponymous category.) But now I want to take a step back from the special topic of the mind-body problem to the more general theme of hylomorphic ontological analysis as such.  In this post I examine some ideas in John Haldane's "A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind" in Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics, ed. David S. Oderberg, Blackwell, 1999, pp. 40-64. But first some background.

In the 20th century Anglosphere, most philosophical analysis has been conceptual and linguistic. Moore and Russell were major practitioners. Decidedly less popular has been phenomenological analysis. Think Husserl. And least popular has been ontological analysis. The Iowa School (Gustav Bergmann and Co.) and Thomism are  the two major representatives of it. Ontological analysis takes as its object the (mind-independently) existent. It operates on the assumption that ordinary particulars have ontological constituents, and it tries to specify what these constituents are. These constituents are of course not spatial parts and they 'lie deeper' (whatever exactly this means) than the targets of chemical and physical analysis. They are items like these: universals, tropes, non-relational ties, Castaneda's ontological operators, Armstrong's thin particulars, Bergmann's bare particulars, and others besides.

2. Hylomorphic analysis is one type of ontological analysis. One analyzes meso-particulars such as a statue or a horse into form (morphe) and matter (hyle) among other constituents. These constituents are sometimes called principles, using the word in an old-fashioned way. Thus one speaks of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, or of the soul as life principle. The principle of individuation is not a statement or proposition but a real factor 'in' things that accounts for their numerical difference.

3. What motivates the hylomorphic approach? John Haldane has something interesting to say on this point:

. . . a condition of there being something for thought to take hold of is that the something has structure. Equivalently, a condition of there being thought is that there be relevant structuring principles (sortal and characterizing concepts plus logical constants.)

So we arrive at hylomorphic analysis. Every particular may be understood in terms of the instantiation of a formal principle. Its form makes it to be the kind of thing it is, providing its definitive structure, its characteristic powers and liabilities, and so on. However, since, ex hypothesi, things of the same specific sort have formally identical principles there arises the question of numerical difference. The analysis is completed by introducing the idea of matter as that which is structured and is the basis of numerical individuation within species. (49-50)

The motivation for hylomorphism is something like this. Thinking, in virtue of its intentionality, refers beyond itself to what it is not, namely, to 'objective' things and states of affairs. Whether thinking succeeds in referring beyond itself to things that exist independently of thought is of course a further question; but it is clear that thinking and indeed all forms of intentionality purport so to refer. For example, my perceiving of a distant mountain purports to reveal a physical object that exists whether I or anyone perceives it. This purport is part of the very sense of outer perception. Borrowing a line from the neglected German philosopher Wolfgang Cramer, outer perceiving is of objects as non-objects. The meaning, I hope, is clear: in outer perceiving the object is intended as more than a mere intentional object or accusative of awareness; it is intended as precisely something that exists as a non-object, as something that exists in itself, apart from the consciousness that posits it as existing in itself.

Now if one, setting aside skeptical worries, simply assumes that thought sometimes makes contact with reality, then one can ask: what must real things be like if thought is to be able to make contact with them? What must these things be like if it is to be possible for thought to "take hold of" them as Haldane puts it? The answer is that these mind-independent things must be conformable to our thought, and our thought to them. There must be some sort of isomorphism between thought and thing. Since we cannot grasp anything unstructured, reality must have structure. So there have to be principles of form and organization in things. But these formative principles must form something or determine something which, in itself, is at least relatively formless or indeterminate. There must be something which, in itself is (relatively) formless, is susceptible of being informed, or receptive of formation. In this way matter comes into the picture.

4. But now let's consider some puzzles. The proximate matter of a chair consists of its legs, seat, back. But this proximate matter itself has form. A leg, for example, has a shape and thus a form. (Form is not identical to shape, since there are forms that are not shapes; but shapes are forms.) Suppose the leg has the geometrical form of a cylinder. (Of course it will have other forms as well, the forms of smoothness and brownness, say.) The cylindrical form is the form of some matter. The matter of this cylindrical form is wood, say. But a piece of wood is a composite entity the parts of which have form and matter. For example, the complex carbohydrate cellulose is found in wood. It has a form and a proximate matter. But cellulose is made of beta-glucose molecules. Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of subatomic particles like electrons, and these of quarks, and so it goes.

The idea is that hylomorphic analysis is iterable. The iteration has a lower limit in prime or primordial or ultimate matter (materia prima.). Ultimate matter, precisley because it is ultimate, has no form of its own. As Haldane describes it, it is "stuff of no kind." (50)

Now one puzzle is this. Prime matter is not nothing. If it were nothing, then there would be no proximate matter either. Consider the lowest level of proximate matter. Consider a particle whose matter is prime matter. If prime matter is nothing at all, then this smallest particle could not exist, (since it is built up out of its components and one of them does not exist), and nothing having it as a component could exist. So prime matter is not nothing. But it is not something either. For if it were something it would have form or structure or organization. Obviously nothing can exist that is not definite and determinate. If you say the indeterminate, the apeiron, exists, WHAT are you saying exists? WHAT are you talking about? There has to be a whatness, a form, for it to be intelligible to say that something exists. 'X exists' says nothing. Recall the isomorphism between thought and reality that is part of the motivation for hylomorphic analysis. Something bare of determinateness is unthinkable and hence nonexistent.

We are driven to the conclusion that prime matter is not nothing and also not something. This certainly looks like a contradiction. But it is a contradiction apparently forced upon us if we embrace hylomorphic ontological analysis. For this analysis is iterable. One cannot stop shy of primate matter, for if there is no ultimate matter then there is no proximate matter either.

To avoid the contradiction one might say that prime matter, though not something actual is not nothing in that it is pure potency: the pure potentiality to receive forms is essentially the way Haldane puts it. (50) Does this help? Not much. What exactly is the difference between a pure potentiality to receive any form and nothing at all? Something that is not F or G or H, etc. but is receptive to these forms has no determinate nature. Without a determinate nature, how can it be anything at all?

5. Furthermore, a pure potency cannot be an ontological building block out of which to construct something actual. So should we say that prime matter is a mere abstraction? But then forms free of matter would also be mere abstractions. How can a substance be built up out of abstractions?

This second  problem concerns the status of the so-called 'principles' form and matter.  They don't have an independent existence, else they would be substances in their own right.  Is their status then merely mental?  That can't be right either since a hylomorph (a hylomorphic compound) cannot  be compounded of  components whose status is merely mental.  Why not?  Well, the typical hylomorph enjoys extramental existence, and it is difficult to see how such a thing could be built up out of constituents whose status was wholly intramental.

Feser Defends Hylomorphic Dualism Against My Criticism

I want to thank Edward Feser for responding to my recent post, A Problem for the Hylomorphic Dualist.  And while you are at Ed's site, please read his outstanding entry, So you think you understand the cosmological argument?, an entry with which I agree entirely.

Ed writes,

Naturally, since I am a hylemorphic dualist, I completely disagree with Bill here. Let’s start with the last charge -- that hylemorphic dualism “make[s] an exception in the case of the human soul [that] is wholly unmotivated and ad hoc and inconsistent with hylomorphic ontology.” That the view is not “unmotivated and ad hoc” is easily shown. Bill himself would surely acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for hylemorphism, even if he doesn’t accept that view himself. He would also acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for dualism, a view he is sympathetic with. But then he should also acknowledge that someone could find both sorts of arguments convincing. And in that case he should acknowledge that someone could have good philosophical reasons for thinking that there must be some way to combine hylemorphism and dualism.

I agree that there are serious arguments for hylomorphism, and I especially agree that there are strong arguments for dualism.  And I agree that someone who finds both hylomorphism and dualism persuasive will have a motivation to try to combine them by showing how the special-metaphysical thesis of dualism can be accommodated within the general-metaphysical scheme of hylomorphism. 

But if one has good arguments for position A and good arguments for position B, it doesn't follow that one has good arguments for the combined position A + B.  For there may be a good reason why the two positions cannot be combined.  And so it is in the present case.  The case for hylomorphism and the case for dualism do not add up to a case for  hylomorphic dualism.  So while I agree with Ed that one who has good reason to be a hylomorphist and good reason to be a dualist will be powerfully motivated to combine the two positions, I do not agree that the reasons for hylomorphism and dualism, respectively, add up to reasons for the hylomorphic dualism.  A psychological motivation is not the same as a justificatory reason. 

Ed continues:

Nor, contrary to what Bill implies, is Aquinas somehow departing radically from Aristotle. For Aristotle too was committed both to hylemorphism and to the view that the intellect is immaterial -- indeed, to the view that the active intellect is immortal. To be sure, that does not by itself show that Aristotle’s views are identical to or entail Aquinas’s; the Averroists took Aristotle’s position in a very different direction, and contemporary commentators often find it simply puzzling. But the reason they do -- namely, that it seems odd to say both that the soul is the form of the body and that one of its capacities is somehow separable from the body -- is similar to the reason Bill finds Aquinas’s position puzzling. Needless to say, Aristotle had no Christian theological ax to grind; he was simply following the philosophical arguments where they led. There is no reason to accuse Aquinas of doing anything different, and it is hardly unreasonable to suggest that the way to harmonize the various aspects of Aristotle’s position is the way Aquinas does. That does not mean that one might not still question whether Aquinas’s position is ultimately coherent (as Bill does), or criticize it on other grounds. But the charge that it is “wholly unmotivated and ad hoc” -- a piece of Christian apologetics with no independent philosophical rationale -- is, I think, completely unwarranted. 

Clearly, Aristotle had no Christian axe to grind.  And so if the active intellect (nous poietikos) mentioned in De Anima III, v (430a) is a subsistent element of the human soul, capable of existence independent of matter, then Aquinas' position on the human soul would have been anticipated by Aristotle, and what I said, or rather suspected, about Aquinas implanting Christian  notions in the foreign soil of Aristotelianism would be insupportable.  But the interpretation of De Anima III, v is a vexed and vexing matter as the material in the hyperlink Ed provided makes clear.  If, as some commentators maintain, Aristotle is discussing the divine mind and not the human mind, then it cannot be maintained that Aristotle was anticipating Aquinas.

The important question, of course, is whether the human soul, or any part theoreof, can be coherently conceived as a subsistent form, whether this is maintained by Aristotle or Aquinas or both.  Ed now addresses my puzzle head on:

The soul is, for Aquinas, the form of the body. So how could it possibly exist apart from the body? Bill asks why things should be any different with human beings than they are with Fido. But Aquinas is quite clear about the answer to that question: The difference is that the human soul carries out immaterial operations (i.e. intellectual ones) while a dog’s soul does not. And if it operates apart from matter and agere sequitur esse, then it must subsist apart from matter.

I grant that the human soul, unlike the canine, carries out immaterial operations.  The argument is this:

a.  The human soul engages in immaterial operations
b.  Agere sequitur esse: whatever operates I-ly must be (exist) I-ly.
Therefore
c.  The human soul, qua executing immaterial operations, exists immaterially.

But how is this relevant to the issue I am raising?  Let's assume that the above argument is sound.  What it shows is that the human soul enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  But it does not show that a form of an animal body enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  It is one thing to establish that the human soul, or an element thereof, exists immaterially; quite another to show that this immaterial element is a form.  I hesitate to say that Ed is conflating these two questions.  What he might be doing is begging the question against me: he may be just assuming what I am questioning, namely, that the human soul is a form, and then taking an argument for the immateriality of the soul to be an argument for the immaterial existence of a form of the human body.  Quoting further from Feser:

Necessarily, a form is a form of that of which it is the form. But a subsistent form is possibly such as to exist apart from that of which it is the form. These propositions cannot both be true.

That they can both be true can be seen when we keep in mind how Aristotelians understand concepts like necessity, possibility, essence, and the like. Suppose we say that it follows from the nature or essence of a dog that it has four legs. Does that mean every single dog necessarily has four legs? No, because a given dog might have lost a leg in an accident, or failed to develop all four legs due to some genetic defect, or (if only recently conceived and still in the womb) may simply not yet have developed all four legs. What it does mean is rather that a mature dog in its normal state will necessarily have four legs. As Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot have emphasized, “Aristotelian categoricals” of the form S’s are F convey a norm and are not accurately represented as either existential or universal statements of the sort familiar to modern logicians. “Dogs have four legs” is not saying “There is at least one dog, and it has four legs” and neither is it saying “For everything that is a dog, it is four legged.” It is saying that the typical dog, the normal (mature) dog, has four legs.

I of course agree with the bit about the dog and his nature.  But I question its relevance to my point.  I grant that from the fact that it is the nature of a dog to have four legs it does not follow that every dog has four legs.  In parallel with this, Ed seems to be suggesting that while it is the nature of a form to be a form of something, it does not follow that every form is a form of something. I deny the parallel.  The claims are on different levels.  The 'canine' claim is about a particular nature (essence), dog-nature.  My claim is about the principles (in the scholastic sense) deployed by hylomorphic ontologists  in their ontological assays.  A form is a 'principle' not capable of independent existence in the manner of a primary substance.

How form and matter operate in the analysis of material substances becomes clearer if we examine a criticism the distinguished Aristotelian Henry Veatch lodges against Gustav Bergmann. (See here for the rest of the post from which the following blue section is excerpted and for bibliographical data.)

Veatch Contra Bergmann

Veatch now lodges a reasonable complaint against Bergmann. How could "matter or bare particulars [be] among the ultimates that one arrives at in a process of analysis. . ."? "For how could anything which in itself is wholly indeterminate and characterless ever qualify as a 'thing' or 'existent' at all?" (81) On Bergmann's assay, an ordinary particular has more basic entities as its ontological constituents. But if one of these constituents is an intrinsically indeterminate and intrinsically characterless entity, how could said entity exist at all, let alone be a building block out of which an ordinary particular is constructed?

For Veatch, form and matter are not ontological atoms in the way bare particulars and simple universals are ontological atoms for Bergmann. "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (80) 'Principle' is one of those words Scholastics like to use. Principles in this usage are not propositions. They are ontological factors invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own. Let me try to make Veatch's criticism as clear as I can.

An ordinary particular is a this-such. The thisness in a this-such is the determinable element while the suchness is the determination or set of determinations. Veatch's point against Bergmann is not that ordinary particulars are not composites, this-suches, or that the thisness in a this- such is not indeterminate yet determinable; his point is that the determinable element cannot be an ontological atom, an entity more basic than the composite into which it enters as ontological building block. The determinable element cannot be a basic existent; it must be a principle of a basic existent, where the basic existent is the this-such. This implies, contra Bergmann, that what is ontologically primary is the individual substance, the this-such, which entails that matter and form in an individual substance cannot exist apart from each other. They are in some sense 'abstractions' from the individual substance. The form in a material this-such is not merely tied to matter in general, in the way that Bergmannian first-order universals are tied to bare particulars in general; the form is tied to the very matter of the this-such in question. And the same goes for the matter: the designated matter (materia signata) of Socrates cannot exist apart from Socrates' substantial form.

Veatch says that Bergmann cannot have it both ways: "His bare particulars cannot at one and the same time be utterly bare and characterless in the manner of Aristotelian prime matter and yet also be 'things' and 'existents' in the manner of Aristotelian substances." (82-83)

 The point I want to underscore is that, as Veatch puts it,  "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being."  Ed continues,

Similarly, to say “Human souls are associated with bodies” is to say that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body, just like the human hand in its normal state is associated with its body. But it doesn’t follow that it cannot exist apart from the body, any more than it follows that the hand (at least while its tissues are still alive) can exist apart from the body. And again, the reason this is possible with the human soul and not with Fido’s soul is that the human soul, unlike Fido’s soul, carries out immaterial operations even when it is associated with the body.

Here again I think Ed is failing to engage the problem I raised.  I do not question that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body.  And I do not question that it can exist apart from its body.  What I am questioning is the conceptualization of the human soul as a form.  And so, while Ed has said many things with which I agree, he has not given me a reason to retract my criticism.  To put it another way, he has not given me a reason why I should accept argument A below over argument B:

Argument A:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; the human soul is the form of the human body; therefore, there are forms that can exist apart from the matter they inform.

Argument B:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; no form can exist apart from the matter it informs; therefore, the human soul is not the form of the human body.

I have another argument that Ed may recall from our discussions at my old Powerblogs site, namely, an argument based on the premise that a form cannot be a subject of experience, which is what a soul must be.  But that's a separate post.

On the TFL (Mis)Representation of Singular Propositions as General

The following is a valid argument:

1. Pittacus is a good man
2. Pittacus is a wise man
-----
3. Some wise man is a good man.

That this argument is valid I take to be a datum, a given, a non-negotiable point. The question is whether traditional formal logic (TFL) is equipped to account for the validity of this argument. As I have already shown, it is quite easy to explain the validity of arguments like the above in modern predicate logic (MPL). In MPL, the logical form of the above argument is

Gp
Wp
---
(Ex)(Wx & Gx).

In order to evaluate the argument within TFL, it must be put into syllogistic form, otherwise the rules of the syllogism cannot be applied to it. Thus,

Every Pittacus is a wise man
Some Pittacus is a good man
-----
Some wise man is a good man.

This has the form:

Every P is a W
Some P is a G
-----
Some W is a G.

It is easy to prove that this form is valid by using a Venn diagram (not to be confused with an Euler diagram), or by applying the syllogistic rules. You will notice that I have rigged the argument so that those who deny that universal propositions have existential import will be satisfied that it is valid. Note also that the Venn diagram test would not work if the argument were given the following form:

Every P is a W
Every P is a G
-----
Some W is a G.

You can verify for yourself that if you diagram the premises you will not thereby have diagrammed the conclusion.

But is it logically acceptable to attach a quantifier to a singular term? How could a proper name have a sign of logical quantity prefixed to it? 'Pittacus' denotes or names exactly one individual. 'Every Pittacus' denotes the very same individual. So we should expect 'Every Pittacus is wise' and 'Pittacus is wise' to exhibit the same logical behavior. But they behave differently under negation.

The negation of 'Pittacus is wise' is 'Pittacus is not wise.' So, given that 'Pittacus' and 'every Pittacus' denote the same individual, we should expect that the negation of 'Every Pittacus is wise' will be 'Every Pittacus is not wise.' But that is not the negation (contradictory) of 'Every Pittacus is wise'; it is its contrary. So 'Pittacus is wise' and 'Every Pittacus is wise' behave differently under negation, which shows that their logical form is different. My argument can be put as follows:

a. Genuinely singular sentences have contradictories but not contraries.
b. Sentences like 'Every Pittacus is wise' have both contradictories and contraries.
Therefore
c. Sentences like 'Every Pittacus is wise' are not genuinely singular.
d. 'Pittacus is wise' is genuinely singular.
Therefore
e. The TFL representation of singular sentences as quantified sentences does not capture their logical form, and this is an inadequacy of TFL, and a point in favor of MPL.

MPL 1, TFL 0.

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.

None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been  refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.

 

Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks.  (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.)  But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.

Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience -- Philosophy always resurrects its dead -- holds.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

Aquinas on Intentionality: Towards a Critique

Yesterday I quoted Peter Geach in exposition of Aquinas' theory of intentionality.  I will now quote Anthony Kenny in exposition of the same doctrine:

The form is individuated when existing with esse naturale in an actual example of a species; it is also individuated, in quite a different way, when it exists with esse intentionale in the mind of a thinker.  Suppose that I think of a crocodile.  There seem to be two things that make this thought the thought that it is: first, that it is a thought of a crocodile and not, say, of an elephant; second, that it is my thought and not yours or President Bush's.  Other things may be true of thoughts -- e.g. that they are interesting,  obsessive, vague -- but these seem to be the two things essential to any thoughts: that they should be someone's thoughts, and that they should be thoughts of something.  The theory of intentionality is meant to set out both  these features.  The form of crocodile when existing in nature is individuated by the matter it informs; when existing intentionally, it is individuated by the person in whose mind it exists. (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 169)

The idea, then, is that one and the same form is both in the thing outside the mind (the crocodile in Kenny's example) and in the mind of the person who is thinking about the crocodile.  It is this self-same form that makes the thought a thought of a crocodile as opposed to a thought of something else.  But the form exists in mind and in thing in two different ways.  It exists in the mind with esse intentionale (intentional be-ing), but exists in the thing with esse naturale (natural be-ing).  (My use of 'be-ing' to translate esse is not for the sake of being cute but to underscore the crucial distinction between the infinitive esse (to be) and the present participle ens, both of which can be translated with 'being.')

The distinction between the two modes of be-ing is needed in order to avoid the consequence that a mind thinking about a crocodile either has a crocodile in it or is itself a crocodile.  A thought of a red sunset is not a red thought, and a thought of a crocodile does not have the properties characteristic of a crocodile.

I now pass over to critique.  Let's first note a distinction that I fudged yesterday for the sake of brevity, brevity being the soul of blog.  Reverting to yesterday's example, it is the distinction between thinking of  a cat (some cat or other) and thinking of a particular cat such as Max Black.  It is one thing to explain how my thought of a cat is a thought of a cat (as opposed to a dog or a kangaroo), and quite another to explain how my thought of Max the cat is a thought of Max. The Thomist theory may well be up to the first task.  But I'm not sure it is up to the second.

Matter is the principium individuationis.  What makes  a cat an individual cat numerically distinct from other cats is its signate or designated matter (materia signata).  In extramental reality, then, Max's individuality is bound up with his signate matter.   But when Max's form exists in my mind with esse intentionale, it is exists in an immaterial way.  What then individuates Max's form as it exists in my mind with esse intentionale?  And if nothing individuates it, then what makes my thought of Max the cat a thought of Max (as opposed to a thought of some cat or other)?

I hope to expatiate further on this tomorrow.

Esse Intentionale and Esse Naturale: Notes on Geach on Aquinas on Intentionality

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts is possible.  Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance whom I have named 'Max Black.'  How are we to understand the relation between the mental act of my thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, namely the cat I am thinking of?  What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max?

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X -- it is thus that our mind 'reaches right up to the reality'; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the 'ordinary' way called esse naturale.  This solution resolves the difficulty.  It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95) 

But what the devil does that  mean?  Allow me to explain.  The main point here is that ofness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object.  Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my thinking of Max and Max.  My thinking of Max just is the mental occurrence of the very same form or nature -- felinity -- which occurs physically in Max.  Max is a hylomorphic compound, a compound of form and (signate) matter.  Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind.  It is his form that is in my mind.  But if felinity informs my mind, why isn't my mind a cat?  Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in.  One and the same form -- felinity -- exists in two different modes.  Its mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale.

Because my thought of Max just is the intentional occurrence of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max.  One could call this an identity theory of intentionality. 

What if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to cease to exist while I was thinking about him?  My thinking would be unaffected: it would still be about Max in exactly the way it was about him before.  The Thomist theory would account for this by saying that while the form occurs with esse intentionale in my mind, it does not occur outside my mind with esse reale.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality.  There is more to it of course, and it is open to some very serious objections.  These will be discussed tomorrow perhaps.

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part One)

A reader recalled my posts on evil as privatio boni from the old blog and wants me to upload them to the new, which I will gladly do.  So far I managed to scare up two.  Here is the first.

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The goddess of blogging sent me Peter Lupu whose comments are a welcome stimulant. Peter displays the virtues of a good commenter and indeed co-worker: he is 'up to speed,' 'in there' with the terminology, and he knows how to oppose without becoming churlish. He tells me that theists, confronted with the logical argument from evil should not reject the premise that objective evil exists. I agree. But a good philosopher examines every aspect of a problem, no matter how bizarre it appears at first, and every premise and every inferential joint of every argument pertaining to the problem. So we need to consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

 For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present --namely, the diseases and wounds -- go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, -- the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils -- that is, privations of the good which we call health -- are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem -- dating back beyond Hume to Epicurus -- of reconciling the existence of God (as standardly defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first  note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.

The Problem of Pain

But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positive evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, etc.

Two Possible Responses. Pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. But the painfulness of this substratum is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness.  If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent.   This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain.   Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for another time.

Total Dependence and Essence/Existence Composition

Anthony Flood has done metaphysicians a service by making available John N. Deck’s excellent, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Language of Total Dependence. This is an essay that Anthony Kenny, no slouch of a philosopher, saw fit to include in his anthology, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).

Mr. Flood finds Deck’s argument to be "unanswerable" to such an extent that it broke the hold of Thomism on him. Although I am not a Thomist, I believe I can show that Deck’s argument is not compelling.

This essay divides into two parts. In the first, I state what I take to be Deck’s argument; in the second, I show how it can be answered from the position worked out in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated (Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002).

Deck’s Argument Entdeckt

On classical theism, divine creation is creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Of course, this does not mean that God creates out of some stuff called ‘nothing’; it means that it is not the case that there is something distinct from God out of which God creates. Thus divine creation, classically understood, is not the forming of a pre-given matter, or any sort of operating upon something whose existence is independent of God. Creation out of nothing thus implies that created entities (creatures) are totally dependent on God. By comparison, when I make a sandwich, the product is only partially dependent on me: I merely assemble pre-given ingredients. Human 'creations' are out of something distinct from their 'creators.' Divine creations are out of nothing distinct from their Creator.

Ontological Analysis in Aristotle and Bergmann: Prime Matter Versus Bare Particulars

Hardly anyone reads Gustav Bergmann any more, but since I read everything, I read Bergmann. It is interesting to compare his style of ontological analysis with that of the great hylomorphic ontologists, Aristotle and Aquinas. The distinguished Aristotelian Henry B. Veatch does some of my work for me in a fine paper, "To Gustav Bergmann: A Humble Petition and Advice" in M.S.Gram and E.D.Klemke, eds. The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann (University of Iowa Press, 1974, pp. 65-85)

I want to focus on Veatch's comparison of Aristotle and Bergmann on the issue of prime matter/bare particulars. As Veatch correctly observes, "all of the specific functions which bare particulars perform in Bergmannian ontology are the very same functions as are performed by matter in Aristotle . . . ." (81) What are these functions?

Scholastic Realism and Predication

This post continues our explorations in the philosophy of The School. What is a scholastic realist? John Peterson (Introduction to Scholastic Realism, Peter Lang, 1999, p. 6) defines a scholastic realist as follows:

S is a scholastic realist =df i) S is a moderate realist and ii) S believes that universals exist in some transcendent mind, i.e., the mind of God.

A moderate realist is defined like this:

S is a moderate realist =df i) S denies that universals exist transcendently and ii) S affirms that universals exist immanently both in matter and minds.

A universal exists transcendently just in case it exists "independently of matter and mind." One who holds that universals exist independently of matter and mind is a Platonic or extreme realist. A moderate realist who is not a scholastic realist Peterson describes as an Aristotelian realist. Such a philosopher is a moderate realist who "denies that universals exist in some transcendent mind."   In sum, and interpreting a bit:

Platonic or extreme  realist:  maintains that there are universals and that they can exist transcendently, i.e., unexemplified (uninstantiatied) and so apart from matter and mind.

Moderate realist:  denies that there are any transcendent universals and maintains that universals exist only immanently in minds and in matter.

Scholastic realist: moderate realist who believes that there is a transcendent mind in which universals exist.

Aristotelian realist:  moderate realist who denies that there is a transcendent mind in which universals exist.

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen

Here is another of the scholastic manuals I pulled off my shelf: Fernand van Steenberghen, Ontology (Nauwelaerts Publisher, Brussels, 1970, tr. Moonan).  A paragraph from p. 278 supports my thesis that the distinction between primary substance and suppositum is an ad hoc device invented for a theological purpose, a device for which there is no independent philosophical warrant:

4. The problem of subsistence or personality.  This problem was inserted into metaphysics for the benefit of theology, as is quite plain, in order to prepare the way for a satisfactory explanation of the theological  mystery of the incarnation, the question of knowing how and why the human nature of Jesus Christ does not constitute a human person.  But this problem is extraneous to philosophy and must remain so, for from the metaphysical point of view, there is no reason for distinguishing individual nature and individual.  It is therefore contrary to any sane method to ask in ontology on what conditions an individual nature might not be a suppositum (or person, where it is an intelligent nature that is in question.)

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Klubertanz

This recent excursion into the philosophy of The School is proving to be quite fascinating, and I thank Dr. Novak et al. for their stimulation.  I should say that I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of scholastic material, from Aquinas to Zubiri,  from Maritain to Marechal, over the past 40 years, so it is not as if I am a complete stranger to it; I do confess, however, to finding some of it mumbo-jumbo and lacking in the sort of analytic rigor that we broadly analytic types prize. To get a better handle on the notion of suppositum ('supposit' in English), this morning I pulled down from the shelf a number of scholastic manuals.

Let us first  turn to George P. Klubertanz, S. J., Introduction to the Philosophy of Being, 2nd ed. (Meredith Publ., 1963).  Back in the day, when Catholic colleges were Catholic as opposed to catholic, this textbook was inflicted upon many a bored undergraduate in required courses. In those days, philosophy was taught systematically; this was before and during Vatican II, before and while  the rot set in (if rot it was) and before chaos descended, the kind of chaos that issued in the Vagina Monologues being presented at the University of Notre Dame.  (To cop a riff from Dennis Prager, there is no coward like an academic coward, and the abdication of authority on the part of university officials from the 60s on is something to marvel at.)

But I digress.  According to Klubertanz, "The first substance is the singular substance which exists.  When we want to designate the being precisely as an existing, substantial, complete individual, we call it a 'supposit.'" (251)  He goes on to say that a supposit is a "complete individual" and therefore not something common to many in the manner of a secondary substance.  Nor is a supposit an integral part, or an essential part, of a substance.  Klubertanz gives the example of the body of a living thing as an example of an essential part of it -- presumably because a living thing cannot exist without a body -- and the example of a hand as an example of an "integral part."  Klubertanz gives no rigorous definition of the latter phrase, but I surmise that an integral part is a part that is not essential to the whole of which it is a part.  Thus a primary substance such as a particular man can exist without a hand.

More Christology: Freddoso on Supposita

To better understand the doctrine of supposita and the role it plays in the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, we turn to Alfred J. Freddoso, Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation (bolding added):

According to the Christian faith, as defined in this instance by the great Christological Councils and mirrored in centuries of liturgical practice and theological reflection, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. More precisely, he is a single divine person, the eternal Word, in whom are united, whole and unmixed, a divine nature and a human nature--so that he is, to quote Chalcedon, "one with the Father in his divinity and one with us in his humanity."

In expounding this doctrine medieval theologians fashioned the technical metaphysical notion of a suppositum (or hypostasis), i.e. an independently existing ultimate subject of characteristics.4 The philosophically astute will detect at once that, so understood, the concept of a suppositum is remarkably akin to that of an Aristotelian primary substance or individual(ized) nature. Indeed, had it not been for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, medieval Christian thinkers would never have been led to assert that suppositum and substance (or: individual nature) are distinct concepts. To speak now only of the Incarnation, Christ's individual human nature, i.e. the individual composed of a body and an intellective soul and united to the Son of God, is a paradigmatic Aristotelian [primary] substance . . . .Yet, because of its metaphysical union with and dependence upon the eternal Word, this nature is not the ultimate metaphysical subject of Christ's characteristics--not even of his "purely human" characteristics. So in this one instance, known to us only by divine revelation, we have a substance which is not a suppositum, a substance which is metaphysically "sustained" by something distinct from it. To complete the picture, a person is just a suppositum with an intellectual nature, i.e. a suppositum essentially endowed with intellect and free will.

In technical medieval terminology, then, Jesus Christ is a divine suppositum or person, the Son of God, who has freely "assumed" and now "sustains" an individual human nature. What's more, this human nature is united to the divine person "hypostatically," i.e. in such a way that properties had immediately by the human nature have the Son of God as their ultimate metaphysical subject--in a manner analogous to that in which many properties had immediately by a proper part of a whole have the whole itself as their ultimate metaphysical subject.

Supposita

We have been discussing the question of the logical consistency of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.  Dr. Lukas Novak (Charles University, Prague) has offered a solution to the consistency problem that relies crucially on the notion of a suppositum or supposit.  If I have understood him, his suggestion is that there is nothing logically problematic in the suggestion that the individual divine nature has three supposits, The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

It is worth reminding ourselves that any solution to the consistency problem will depend on one's background logic and general ontology.  And the same holds if one decides that the problem is insoluble.

But being none too clear about what a supposit is supposed to be, I asked Novak  if he could define the term and how it stands vis-a-vis such terms as 'bare particular' (Gustav Bergmann) and 'thin particular' (David Armstrong).  He responded as follows:

Ad 4) X is a suppositum iff X is something endowed with individual nature and suppositality, that is, X is both uninstantiable and incommunicable to a subject (and not a part nor an aggregate).

Ad 5) It is better said that Socrates' humanity inheres in Socrates, who is a suppositum. Suppositum is not a bare or thin particular. If there were bare particulars, they would probably be classified as supposita, but classically supposita are not considered to be "thin" or "bare" - they have their rather "thick" essences or natures de re necessarily. Socrates is identical to Socrates' suppositum. Socrates' humanity inheres in Socrates and is a metaphysical constituent of Socrates. Socrates' humanity plus his suppositality makes up Socrates. Neither Socrates' humanity nor his suppositality are entities in their own right, they are just aspects or metaphysical constituents of Socrates. So I use "inhere" here as _not_ implying any particular kind of distinction between the nature and the suppositum.

Contemporary Czech Analytic Scholasticism

Vlastimil Vohánka reports: 

I observe you're discussing with my friend Lukas Novak.

 

Here, in the Czech Republic, one of the most atheistic and secularist countries in the world, one can, paradoxically, observe a sort of revival of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy, including the inauguration of philosophical organizations and of a Neo-Aristotelian journal, several conferences, and interaction with the mainstream, sometimes with original results, both in the history of philosophy and systematic philosophy. You can take a look at these sites:

Suarez Society (international)
Caramuel conference 2006

Czech Aristotelian Society

Studia Neoaristotelica (a new journal of the societies; partially in Czech and Slovak, in the future to a greater degree in world languages).

 

The leading figure of the young Czech scholastics, who are my friends, is Prof Stanislav Sousedík (* 1931), a historian of baroque philosophy and systematically a theorist of predication. He has published extensively in Czech and German.

 

There will be a conference on the synthesis of ontology of scholasticism and analytic philosophy (Prague, Czech Republic, 2010, c. June 28 -- June 30, organized by Charles University in Prague -- Catholic Theological Faculty). 

 

The themes are:

Aristotelian metaphysics and its plausibility; scholastic development of Aristotelian metaphysics; contemporary metaphysics: being and existence, realism vs. nominalism, structure of particulars, persistence through time, the necessary and the possible, propositions and states of affairs, causes and explanation; God. From the invited speakers, E. J. Lowe, Michael J. Loux, Gyula Klima, David S. Oderberg, Robert Passnau, Edward Feser, and Uwe Meixner have confirmed their attendance. I repent that before the budget of the conference was run out I had not asked you whether you would come.