Maverick Philosopher

What Exists Exists

A miserable tautology?

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part Two (2021 Version)

Part One is here.

Some pains, though bad in themselves, are instrumentally good. You go for broke on your mountain bike. At the top of a long upgrade your calves are burning from the lactic acid build-up. But it's a 'good' pain. It is instrumentally good despite its intrinsic badness. You are satisfied with having 'flattened' that hill one more time. The net result of the workout is hedonically positive. But surely not all pains are classifiable as instrumentally good. Think of someone who suffers from severe chronic joint pain so bad that he can barely walk let alone pedal a bike. In alleviation thereof he daily ingests a cocktail of drugs with nasty side effects that make it impossible for him to think straight or accomplish anything. Surely the person's condition is evil. (But don't get hung up on the word 'evil' and don't assume that every evil is the responsibility of a finite agent. The evil of pain is a natural or physical, not a moral, evil.) Is this not a counterexample to the thesis that every evil is a privation or absence of good?　

Now 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.' I developed this suggestion in Part One and found reason to reject it.

B. Or one might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. One might point to the fact that pains are often very useful warning signals that indicate that something is going wrong in the body or that some damage is being done to the body: the pains in my knees inform me that I am running too long and hard and am in danger of an overuse injury. On this suggestion, then, pains are real but not evil. Consequently, pains are not counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni.

But this response is not very convincing. There are several considerations.

1. If pains are warning signals, then they are instrumentally good. But what is instrumentally good may also be intrinsically evil. The searing pain in a burnt hand, though instrumentally good, is intrinsically evil. Its positive 'entity' (entitas in scholastic jargon) is not well accommodated on the classical doctrine that evils are privationes boni. Again, the pain is not the mere absence of the good of pleasure, but something positively bad. After all, the hand is not numb or as if anaesthetized; there is a positive sensation 'in' it, and this positive sensation is bad. So even if every pain served to warn us of bodily damage, that would not detract from the positive badness of the pain sensation. One cannot discount the intrinsic positive badness by pointing to the fact that the pain is instrumentally good.

2. If pains are warning signals, it seems that many of them could perform this function without being so excruciating. The intensity of many pains seems out of all proportion to the good that they do in warning us of bodily damage. This excruciating intensity is part of the evil of pain. 

In The Human Predicament, David  Benatar adduces the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77) There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) 

3. It is a fact that the pain in my hand that warns me to remove it from the hot stove typically does not subside when the hand is removed. It continues to hurt. But what good purpose does this serve given that the warning has been heeded and the hand removed from the hot stove? The argument that pain is good, not evil, because it warns us about bodily damage fails to account for the pain that persists after the warning has been heeded. The pain in my burnt hand continues, of course, because the hand has been damaged; but then that pain is intrinsically and positively evil and the evil cannot be discounted in the way the pain at the time of the contact of hand with stove can be discounted.

4. There is no necessity that a warning system be painful. A robotic arm could have a sensor that causes the arm to retract from a furnace when the furnace temperature becomes damagingly high. The robot would feel nothing. We might have had that sort of painless warning system.

My interim conclusion may be set forth as follows:

Pains are natural evils

The evil of pain is not a mere absence of good

Ergo

Not all evils are privationes boni.

REFERENCES: Jorge J. E. Gracia, "Evil and the Transcendentality of Goodness: Suarez's Solution to the Problem of Positive Evils" in Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness (Cornell UP, 1991), pp. 151-176. David Benatar, The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017)

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part One (2021 Version)

For Vito Caiati.  This 2021 version of a November 2010 post corrects unclarities, infelicities of expression, and outright errors in the initial entry . And the font is more legible for ancient eyes.

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When theists are confronted by atheists with the various arguments from evil, the former should not reject the premise that objective evil exists.  That would eliminate the problem, but eliminativism here as elsewhere in philosophy is a shabby evasion. (Example: How does brain activity give rise to consciousness? No problem! Consciousness is an illusion!) Evil exists and it is not merely subjective. But the same is true of holes. See Holes and Their Mode of Being.  Holes are not nothing, and that is objectively the case despite their being absences.  You could say that holes have no positive entitative status and are only as privations.  (Curiously, as argued in the linked entry, they are empirically detectable absences which is another reason to hold that they are not nothing.)

So, to accommodate the objective reality of evil we should 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 David Hume to Epicurus -- of reconciling the existence of God (as traditionally 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.  In fact, I will lay it down as a condition of adequacy for any theory of evil that evil not be hypostatized.  If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then evil is not a substance.  That way lies Manicheanism.  There are no two co-equal 'principles' eternally at war, Good and Evil.  

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 as opposed to moral evils that come into the world via a misuse of free will.  Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The  what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. (This hyphenated locution from Thomas Nagel.) 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 positively evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.  And so we cannot dismiss evil as privatio boni.

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, clinical depression, etc.

Two Possible Responses

Felt 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 felt pains are evil but that the painfulness of a felt pain is a matter of projection.  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. I am not talking about the physical damage to the knee, if any, or about anything physical. By the experiential substratum I mean the felt datum precisely and only as felt, as lived though, as experienced.  I am talking about the physical pain as a phenomenal datum. The painfulness of this felt pain is something else again. On the objection now being considered, the painfulness of the felt pain is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The experiential 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." "Master desire and aversion!" 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.  One reduces the painfulness but without eliminating the felt pain. You still feel the sensation, but you have withheld the aversive overlay. 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. And a good Stoic one as well.  But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

I conclude that plenty of felt pains are not only objectively real but also objectively evil: their evilness is not a subjective addition.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil since they are outweighed by greater goods. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for Part II. Brevity is the soul of blog.

Existence as Completeness? Gilson on Scotus, Thomas, and the Real Distinction

I composed this entry with Lukáš Novák in mind. I hope to secure his comments.

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Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:

. . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence or reality.  This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.

In other words, existence is complete determinateness or completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).  Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists.  My intuitions on this matter are Thomistic rather than Scotistic.

According to Etienne Gilson, Duns Scotus held that actually to exist in reality = to be complete:

. . . actual existence appears only when an essence is, so to speak, bedecked with the complete series of its determinations. (Being and Some Philosophers, Pontifical Institute, Toronto, 1952, 2nd ed. , 89)

Actual existence thus appears as inseparable from the essence when essence is taken in its complete determination. (88)

An actually existing essence is, meaning by "is" that it exists, as soon as it is fully constituted by its genus, its species, its own individual "thisness," as well as all the accidents which go to make up its being. (86)

It follows that an actually existing thing is not the result of the superaddition of existence to a complete essence, but is just an essence in its completeness. This implies that there is no distinctio realis. For if an actually existing individual essence exists in virtue of being completely determinate, then there cannot be any distinction in reality between that complete essence and its existence. If Socrates is a wholly determinate essence, then, on the Scotist view as glossed by Gilson, there is no need for anything more to make him exist: nothing needs to be added ab extra.

What we have here are two very different theories of existence.  For the Scotist, existence belong in the order of essence as the maximal determinateness of essence.  For the Thomist, existence does not belong in the order of essence but is situated 'perpendicular' to it. Is there any way rationally to decide between these views? Could there be complete nonexistent objects? If yes, then the Scotist view would stand refuted.  If no, then the Thomist view would stand refuted.

Well, why can't there be complete nonexistent objects?  Imagine the God of Leibniz, before the creation, contemplating an infinity of possible worlds, each of them determinate down to the last detail.  None of them exists or is actual.  But each of them is complete.  One of them God calls 'Charley.'  God says, Fiat Charley! And Charley exists.  It is exactly the same world which 'before' was merely possible, but 'now'  is actual.  The difference is not one of essence, but one of existence.

So, while existence entails completeness, why should completeness entail existence?  

(Other questions arise at this point which are off-topic, for example, why Charley over Barley?  Why Charley over any other world?  Must God have a reason?  And what would it be?  Would it be because Charley is the best of all possible worlds?  Is there such a things as the BEST of all possible worlds?  Why some world rather than no world?  And so on. But these questions are off-topic.  Focus like a laser on the question about the 'nature' of existence.) 

The theological imagery is supposed to help you understand the ontological point.  But we needn't bring God into it. It would also not be to the point to protest that God creates out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.  My concern here is with the nature of existence, not with the nature of  God or of divine creation. All I need for my argument is the possibility that there be maximally determinate individual essences that do not exist.  If there are, then existence is not completeness.  But one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. Can either side refute the other?

In the end the dispute may come down to a profound and irresolvable difference in intuitions. 

What say you, Dr. Novak?

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World 'Relation' (2020 Version)

This from a reader:

I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation.  These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Do you agree? How would you unpack them?

These are hard sayings indeed.  Herewith, some rough notes on the aporetics of the situation.

I once cataloged twelve different meanings of 'world.' By 'world' here is meant the totality of creatures, the totality of beings brought into existence by God from nothing.  (Don't confuse this sense of 'world' with the sense of 'world' as the term is used in the 'possible worlds' semantics of modal discourse.) Now if  God is a being among beings, it would make no sense at all to say that "The world plus God is not more than God alone."  For if we could add the uncreated being (God) to the created beings, then we would have more beings.  We would have a totality T that is larger than T minus God.  If God is a being among beings, then there is a totality of beings that all exist in the same way and in the same sense, and this totality includes both God and creatures such that subtracting God or subtracting creatures would affect the 'cardinality' of this totality. (Not wanting to fall afoul of Georg Cantor, I assume that the number of (concrete) creatures is finite.)

But if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself in its absolute fullness, as per the metaphysics of Exodus 3:14 (Ego sum qui sum, "I am who am") then there is no totality of beings all existing  in the same way having both God and creatures as members.  When we speak of God and creatures,

. . . we are dealing with two orders of being not to be added together or subtracted; they are, in all rigour, incommensurable, and that is also why they are compossible.  God added nothing to Himself by the creation of the world, nor would anything be taken away from Him by its annihilation -- events which would be of capital importance for the created things concerned, but null for Being Who would be in no wise concerned qua being. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Scribners, 1936, p. 96.  Gilson's Gifford lectures, 1931-1932.)

Here, I am afraid, I will end up supplying some 'ammo' to my Protestant friends Dale Tuggy, Alan Rhoda, and James Anderson. For the Gilson passage teeters on the brink of incoherence.  We are told that there are two orders of being but that they are incommensurable. This can't be right, at least not without qualification.   If there are two orders of being, then they are commensurable in respect of being.  There has to be some sense in which God and Socrates both are.  Otherwise, God and creatures are totally disconnected, with the consequence that creatures fall away into nothingness.  For if God is Being itself, and there is no common measure, no commensurability whatsoever, between God and creatures, then creatures are nothing.  God is all in all. God alone is. 

Gilson is well aware of the dialectical pressure in this monistic direction: "As soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that there is a sense in which God alone is." (65)  If we emphasize the plenitude and transcendence of God, then this sensible world of matter and change is "banished at one stroke into the penumbra of mere appearance, relegated to the inferior status of a quasi-unreality." (64)  That's exactly right. (I will add in passing that this metaphysical conclusion underwrites the contemptus mundi of the old-time monk and his world flight.) But of course Christian metaphysics is not a strict monism; so a way must be found to assign the proper degree of reality to the plural world.

Here is the problem in a nutshell.  God cannot be a being among beings.  "But if God is Being, how can there be anything other than Himself?" (84)  We need to find a way to avoid both radical ontological pluralism and radical ontological monism.

It's a variation on the old problem of the One and the Many.  (It is important in these discussions to observe the distinction between Being and beings, between esse and ens, between das Sein und das Seiende.  Hence my use of the majuscule when I refer to the former and the miniscule when I refer to the latter.)

A. If Being itself alone is, then beings are not.  But then  the One lacks the many.  Not good: the manifold is evident to the senses and to the intellect.  The plural world cannot be gainsaid.  In theological terms: If God alone is, then creatures are not, even in those possible worlds in which God creates. But then what is the difference between possible worlds in which God creates and those in which he does not?

B. If beings alone are, then Being is not.  But then the many lacks the One.  Not good: the many is the many of the One.  A sheer manifold with no real unity would not a cosmos make.  The world is one, really one. It is One in itself, not merely by our conceptualization.

C. If Being and beings both are in the same way and and the same sense, then either Being is itself just another being among beings and we are back with radical pluralism, or Being alone is and we are back with radical monism.

Gilson's Thomist solution invokes the notions of participation and analogy.  God is Being itself in its purity and plenitude and infinity.  Creatures exist by participation in the divine Being: they are limited participators in unlimited Being. So both God and creatures exist, but in different ways.  God exists simply and 'unparticipatedly.'  Creatures exist by participation.  These are radically different modes of existence. God and creatures do not form a totality in which each member exists in the same way.  We can thus avoid each of (A), (B), and (C).

But the notion of participation is a difficult one as Gilson realizes.  It appears "repugnant to logical thought" (96):  ". . . every participation supposes that the participator  both is, and is not, that in which it participates." (96)  How so?

I exist, but contingently.  That is: I exist, but at every moment of my existence it is possible that I not exist. There is no necessity that I exist at any moment of my existence. I am not the source or ground of my own existence.  No existential boot-strapping! Assuming that I cannot exist as a matter of brute fact, my Being (existence) is not my own, but received from another, from God, who is Being itself.  So my Being, as wholly received from another, is God's Being.  But I am not God or anything else.  I have my own Being that distinguishes me numerically from everything else.  So I am and I am not that in which I participate.

To formulate the contradiction in a somewhat clearer form: My existence is MY existence, and as such 'incommunicable' to any other existing item AND my existence is NOT MY existence in that it is wholly derivative from Gods existence.

In terms of the One and the Many: Each member of the Many is itself and no other thing; its unity is its own and 'incommunicable' to any other thing, AND each member of the Many derives its ownmost unity and ipseity from the One without which it would be nothing at all, lacking as it would unity.

In terms of creation:  Socrates is not a character in a divine fiction; he does not exist as a merely intentional object of the divine mind; his mode of Being is esse reale, not esse intentionale, AND Socrates receives from his creator absolutely everything: his existence, essence, and properties as well as his free and inviolable ipseity and haecceity that make him an other mind, a Thou to the divine I, and a possible rebel against divine authority. So Socrates both is and is not a merely intentional object of the divine mind.

Gilson does not show a convincing way around these sorts of contradiction.

The One of the many is not one of the many: as the source of the many, the One cannot be just one more member of the many.  Nor can the One of the many be the same as the many: it cannot divide without remainder into the many.  The One is transcendent of the many.  But while transcendent, it cannot be wholly other than the many. For, as Plotinus says, "It is by the One that all beings are beings."  The One, as the principle by which each member of the many exists, cannot be something indifferent to the many or external to the many, or other than the many, or merely related to the many. The One is immanent to the many.  The One is immanent to the many without being the same as the many.  The One is neither the same as the many nor other than the many.  The One is both transcendent of the many and immanent in the many. Theologically, God is said to be both transcendent and omnipresent.  He is both transcendent and immanent.

What should we conclude from these affronts to the discursive intellect?  That there is just nothing to talk about here, or that there is but it is beyond the grasp of our paltry intellects?  If what I have written above is logical nonsense, yet it seems to be important, well-motivated, rigorously articulated nonsense.

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

I am presently re-reading The Paradoxical Structure of Existence (University of Dallas Press, 1970) in preparation for the existence chapter of my metaphilosophy book.  Wilhelmsen's book is sloppy in the manner of the 20th century Thomists before the analytic bunch emerged, but rich,  historically informed, and fascinating.  Poking around on the 'Net for Wilhelmsen materials, I found this by one William H. Marshner, and I now file it in my Wilhelmsen category.

Contingency and Composition

Joe, who describes himself as "a high school student with a passion for philosophy of religion and metaphysics," asked me a long series of  difficult questions. Here is one of them:

After reading [Edward] Feser's Five Proofs, I have had difficulties with the concept of sustaining causes. First, Feser argues  that composites require a sustaining cause in order to "hold them together" or keep them conjoined. But this seems to presuppose that all composite things (be it physical composites or metaphysical composites) are contingent.

 

But why suppose that, necessarily, all composites are contingent? What is incoherent about this:

 

X is a necessary being (i.e. X cannot fail to exist). X has metaphysical parts A, B, and C. Each of A, B, and C are also necessarily instantiated in reality, and the relations between A, B, and C are all necessarily instantiated in reality.

 

Why ought we to rule out this epistemic possibility? This seems to be a necessary being which is composite. It would be a counter-example to the assumption that composition entails contingency (where contingency means can fail to exist).

 

If we take composition broadly enough, composition does not entail contingency.  Consider the set, {1, 3, 5}. Assume that numbers are necessary beings. Then of course the set will also be a necessary being.  Furthermore, the relations that hold between the members of this set hold necessarily. For example, necessarily, 3 < 5, and necessarily, 3 > 1.  So if we think of sets as composite entities, then it is not the case that all composites are contingent.

 

But what Feser is concerned with are material particulars, or material substances, to use the Aristotelian-scholastic jargon, e..g., a horse, a statue, a man.  And of course these cannot be taken to be sets of their metaphysical parts.  If I understand Feser, what he is asking is: what makes a contingent being such as Socrates contingent?  The question is not whether he is contingent, but what makes him contingent. What is the ground of his contingency?  The answer is that Socrates is contingent because he is composite.  Composition or rather compositeness is the ground of contingency. His contingency is explained by his compositeness, in particular, his being a composite of essence and existence. So at the root of contingency is the real distinction (distinctio realis) of essence and existence in finite substances.

 

The claim is not that every composite entity is contingent, but that every contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composite. 

 

Now if a contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composed of essence and existence, then a necessary being, or rather, a necessary being that has its necessity from itself and not from another, is necessary in virtue of its being simple, i.e., absolutely non-partite.  This is how Thomists feel driven to the admittedly strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine of divine simplicity. 

 

If there is to be an ultimate explanation of the existence of contingent beings, this explanation must invoke an entity that is not itself contingent.  The ultimate entity must exist of metaphysical  necessity and have its necessity from itself.  Thomism as I understand it plausibly maintains that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. God is necessary because in God essence and existence are one and the same.

Thomas Merton's Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickey

As much of a flaky liberal as Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968) is, both politically and theologically, I love the guy I meet in the pages of the seven volumes of The Journals of Thomas Merton.  I am presently savoring Volume Six, 1966-1967.  This morning I came upon the entry of May 21, 1967, Trinity Sunday, in which he reports being "dazzled and baffled" by a new book on quantum physics by George Gamow.

The 52-year-old gushes excitedly  over the accomplishments of "Niels Bohr and Co." and "this magnificent instrument of thought they developed to understand what is happening in matter, what energy really is about  -- with their confirmation of the kind of thing Herakleitos was reaching for by intuition." (237) Now comes the passage the vitriol of which caught my attention:

What a crime it was -- that utterly stupid course on "cosmology" that I had to take here [at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in the 1940s] (along with the other so-called philosophy in Hickey's texts!). Really criminal absurdity! And at the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima! Surely there were people in the order who knew better than [to] allow such a thing! Dom Frederic, no. He couldn't help it. The whole Church still demanded this, and God knows, maybe some congregation still does. (237-238)

Now I have read my fair share of scholastic manuals, including Klubertanz, Vaske, van Steenberghen, Garrigou-Lagrange, Smith & Kendzierski, and a some others, but I was unfamiliar with this Hickey. Curious to see how bad his manuals could have been, I did some poking around but came up with very little. But I did glean some information from Benjamin Clark, O.C.S.O., Thomas Merton's Gethsemani:

We used as text the three-volume series by J.S. Hickey, abbot of Mount Melleray in Ireland 1932-1934, a text quite widely used in seminaries in the United States at the time. The text was in Latin, but English was spoken in class, unlike some seminaries in the United States at the time where the philosophy lectures were still given in Latin. Most of our students did not have enough Latin background for that, and some found even reading the text rough going at times.

Does anybody have volumes from the Hickey series? Is he willing to part with them?  What about scholastic cosmology as presented by Hickey got Merton so worked up?

My desultory research also led me to a quotation from a guy I know quite well:

At any rate, a recent blog post by Bill Vallicella got me thinking about it again. The post is ostensibly about the origins of political correctness. In reflecting on that, Vallicella also had this to say:

By the time I began as a freshman at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1968, the old Thomism that had been taught out of scholastic manuals was long gone to be replaced by a hodge-podge of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory.  The only analytic fellow in the department at the time was an adjunct with an M. A. from Glasgow. I pay tribute to him in In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct. The scholasticism taught by sleepy Jesuits before the ferment of the ‘60s was in many ways moribund, but at least it was systematic and presented a coherent worldview. The manuals, besides being systematic, also introduced the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, et al. By contrast, we were assigned stuff like Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. The abdication of authority on the part of Catholic universities has been going on for a long time.

So, how bad was scholastic manualism?

Edward Feser counts as a latter day manualist.  See his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). Here is an article by Ed in which he lays into David Bentley Hart to repel the latter's charge of scholastic manualism. Excerpt:

Menacing references to the threat of “manualism” and “baroque neoscholasticism” have long been a favored tactic in theologically liberal Catholic circles. Given Aquinas’s enormous prestige and influence within the Catholic Church, attacking some position he took has always been a tricky business. The solution was to invent a bogeyman variously called “manualism,” “sawdust Thomism,” etc. This allows the critic to identify the hated position with that and proceed as if it has nothing to do with Thomas himself. Such epithets generate something like a Pavlovian response in many readers, subverting rational thought and poisoning the reader’s mind against anything a Thomist opponent might have to say. Though neither a theological liberal nor a Catholic, Hart knows what buttons to push in order to win over the less-discriminating members of his audience. 

Another Uncompelling Argument in Illustration of Our Pascalian Predicament

This relates to my earlier discussion with Dr. Novak. See articles referenced infra. A reader thinks the following syllogism establishes its conclusion:

a) What doesn't have necessity from itself is caused;

b) The contingent does not have necessity from itself;

Ergo

c) The contingent is caused.

An argument establishes its conclusion just in case: (i) the argument is deductive; (ii) the argument is valid in point of logical form; (iii) the premises are all of them objectively certain. Establish is a very strong word; it is as strong as, and equivalent to, prove.

The argument above is a valid deductive argument, and the minor is true by definition. The major, however, is not objectively certain. In fact, it is not even true. The impossible doesn't have necessity from itself, but it has no cause since it doesn't exist.

But a repair is easily made. Substitute for (a)

a*) Whatever exists, but does not have necessity from itself, is caused.

Then the argument, for all we know, might be sound. But it still does not establish its conclusion.  For the major, even if true, is not objectively certain.  Ask yourself:

Is the negation of the repaired major a formal-logical contradiction? No. Is it an analytic proposition? No. Does it glow with the light of Cartesian self-evidence like 'I seem to see a tree' or 'I feel nauseous'? No.

So how can Novak & Co. be objectively certain that (a*) is true?  This proposition purports to be about objective reality; it purports to move us beyond logical forms, concepts, and mental states. Nice work if you can get it, to cop a signature phrase from the late, great David M. Armstrong.  (For the record: I reject Armstrong's naturalism and atheism.)

I conjecture that it is the overwhelmingly strong doxastic security needs of dogmatists that prevent them from appreciating what I am saying. They cannot tolerate uncertainty, and so they manufacture a certainty that isn't there.

That being said, Dr. Novak may like my Pascalian conjecture that it is due to the Fall of Man that we are in this suboptimal epistemic predicament, the predicament of craving certainty without being able to attain it.

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Is It Epistemically Certain that Whatever Begins to Exist is Caused?

I wrote that 

1) Whatever begins to exist is caused

is not epistemically certain. I don't deny that (1) is true; I deny that it can be known with certainty.  (As I explained earlier, truth and certainty are different properties.) And then I wrote that 

If an argument is presented for (1), then I will show that the premises of that argument are not, all of them, certain.

That is to say: if you try to show that (1) is certain by producing a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are certain, an argument that transmits the certainty of its premises to its conclusion, then I will show that the premises of that argument are not, all of them, certain. I am using 'certain' as short for 'epistemically certain.' 

Lukas Novak responded:

Let us play that game. I believe I have an argument to prove (1) that can be reduced exclusively to obvious conceptual truths. Let's go step by step; you say which premise you doubt and I will produce an argument for it.

My kick-off:

(1.1) Whatever does not have a cause and yet exists, exists necessarily.
(1.2) Whatever begins to exist never exists necessarily.
Ergo etc.

Which one do you doubt?

I have no problem with (1.2).  I would say, however, that (1.1) is not certain.  The negation of (1.1) is: Something exists contingently without cause.  This is not a formally self-contradictory proposition. So we cannot rule it out on formal-logical grounds alone the way we can rule out Something exists that does not exist. It is therefore logically possible (narrowly logically possible) that (1.1) be false.

Is (1.1) a conceptual truth as Lukas appears to be maintaining?  Well, can we know it to be true by sheer analysis of the concept uncaused existent?  Not as far as I can see. Analyzing that concept, all I get is: existent that is not the effect of any cause or causes. That every EFFECT has a cause is a conceptual truth, but not that every EVENT has a cause, or that every EXISTENT has a cause.

If Lukas is right, then it is epistemically certain that the physical universe, which is modally contingent (i.e., not necessary and not impossible) cannot be a brute fact.  So if Lukas is right, then it is epistemically certain that the physical universe cannot exist both contingently and without a cause.

Here is where I disagree. I believe that the physical universe (together with finite minds) exists, exists contingently, and is caused. But I don't believe that we can know this to be the case with certainty.

It may be that Lukas is thinking along the lines of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

Garrigou-Lagrange thinks that one violates the Law of Non-Contradiction if one says of a contingent thing that it is both contingent and uncaused.  He thinks this is equivalent to saying:

A thing may exist of itself and simultaneously not exist of itself. Existence of itself would belong to it, both necessarily and impossibly. Existence would be an inseparable predicate of a being which can be separated from existence. All this is absurd, unintelligible. (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, tr. Patrick Cummins, O. S. B., Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 65) 

Suppose that a contingent existent is one that is caused to exist by a self-existent existent.  If one then went on to say that such an existent is both contingent and uncaused, then one would embrace a logical contradiction.  But this presupposes that contingency implies causal dependency.

And therein lies the rub.  That the universe is contingent I grant.  But how does one get from modal contingency to the universe's causal dependence on a causa prima?  If one simply packs dependency into contingency then one begs the question.  What is contingent needn't be contingent upon anything. 

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John Peterson's Thomist Analysis of Change

1. The Riddle of Change. Change is ubiquitous. It is perhaps the most pervasive feature of our experience and of the objects of our experience.  But is it intelligible? Change could be a fact without being intelligible.  But the mind seeks intelligibility; hence it seeks to render change intelligible to it.  

There is something puzzling about change inasmuch as it seems to imply a contradiction. When a thing changes, it becomes different than what it was. But unless it also remains the same, we cannot speak, as we do, of one thing changing. But how can this one thing be both the same and different?  We ought not assume that there is an insoluble problem here. But we also ought not assume that a simple solution is at hand, or that some simple fallacy has been committed. We must investigate.  We do well to begin with some mundane, Moorean fact.

Suppose avocado A, which was unripe a week ago is ripe today. This is an example of alterational (as opposed to existential) change. Aristotelians and Thomists speak of accidental (as opposed to essential) change. But a wise man does not quibble over terminology.  The point is that the avocado has become different. But it has also remained the same. It is easy to see that there is no (alterational) change without unchange, i.e., without the persistence of a substratum of change which, as substratum of change, does not change.

 

This is because alteration (accidental change) is neither destruction nor duplication. The ripening of an avocado does not cause it to cease to exist.  And it is clear that one cannot speak of change if there are two avocados, A and B, indiscernible except in respect of ripeness/unripeness, such that A is unripe at time t while B is ripe at time t* (t*> t). Alteration requires that one and the same thing have incompatible properties at different times. This is necessary for alteration; whether it is sufficient is a further question.

Thus there is an apparent contradiction: the ripe avocado is both the same and not the same as the unripe avocado. If you think this puzzle is easily solved, then you haven't understood it. You cannot understand philosophy unless you understand the problems to which its theories and theses are the responses. Philosophy may be more than aporetics, but it is at least aporetics. If you lack the 'aporetic sense' then you lack the "feeling of the philosopher" Plato describes at Theaetetus 155.

2. Reality is contradiction-free. There are no contradictions in reality, but only in our thoughts about reality. That there are no contradictions in reality is not perfectly obvious, but it is very reasonably assumed to be true, and we have to start somewhere. Now if it is true, and if, as is obvious, changes occur, then the apparent contradiction has to be removed. If the apparent contradiction cannot be removed, that is, shown to be merely apparent, then change, which obviously exists in some sense, will have to be demoted to the status of a Bradleyan appearance. (See F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Book I, Chapter 5.)

The task, then, is to remove the apparent contradiction.

3. Avocado A, having altered, is both the same and different. How is that possible? One solution involves a distinction between numerical and qualitative sameness. A is numerically the same over the interval during which it goes from unripe to ripe, but not qualitatively the same over that interval. The sense in which A is the same is not the same as the sense in which A is not the same: A is numerically the same over the interval but not qualitatively the same over the interval. I will say no more about this solution in this post.

4. Instead of distinguishing two senses of 'same,' one can distinguish two senses of 'individual.' On an Aristotelian-Thomistic analysis, as presented by John Peterson ("Persons and the Problem of Interaction," The Modern Schoolman LXIII, January 1985, 131-137), the individual₁ is the primary substance, the avocado in our example. This primary substance is the individual substance, the individual this-such, together with its accidents. The primary substance at time t (when the ripening process begins) is the unripe avocado, and the primary substance at t* (when the process is completed) is a numerically different primary substance. It follows that the primary substance is not the substratum of change!

The substratum of change — that which stays the same throughout the change — is the individual₂, the secondary substance 'in' the individual₁. The secondary substance 'in' a primary substance is its individuated essence. Primary substances are capable of independent existence. Secondary substances, as constituents of primary substances, are not capable of independent existence. Yet these secondary substances are what ground diachronic identity.  So what grounds identity over time and underlies the change and persists through it is the individuated essence.

One can see how this distinction between two senses of 'individual' removes the contradiction. It is the individual₂ (the individuated essence) that is the same over time, and the individual₁ that is different over time. There is no one concretum that is the same and different. There are two 'things'  in the changing concretum. 

It follows that the unripe avocado I saw on my counter a week ago is not numerically the same ripe avocado that I see on my counter today. It is a numerically different avocado.

5. The scholastic analysis can be applied to persons and the problem of their identity over time and through change. Persons are individuals₂. Thus they are individuated essences or secondary substances. Elliot drunk and Elliot sober are the same person because the same individuated essence, the same instance of humanity, underlies the change in accidents.  But they are numerically different primary substances and thus numerically different human animals.

Peterson thinks this solution superior to the Cartesian view according to which a person is identified with a res cogitans. On the Cartesian view, the person is a primary as opposed to a secondary substance. As a primary substance, the person on the Cartesian view is capable of independent existence. Given that a person remains self-same through change, the res cogitans must remain self-same though change. But then how can Elliot drunk and Elliot sober be the same person? "For individuals₁, as was said, are not substrates through any change but are rather the termini in any change, that is, the terminus ad quem [endpoint toward which] and terminus a quo [endpoint from which] of a change." (p. 135)

6. Let us now consider existential or substantial change. When an avocado ripens, it acquires the property of being ripe and loses the property of being unripe. It seems as obvious as anything that alterational or accidental change requires a substratum. But when the ripe avocado becomes the stuff of guacamole, it suffers a much more radical change. The avocado ceases to exist. Can one speak here too of a substratum of change, something in the thing that remains the same through the change?

There is likewise a difference between Elliot's sobering up and Elliot's dying. When he sobers up, the substratum of the change on the Thomistic view is his individuated essence. But what is the substratum of the radical existential change which occurs when he dies? Peterson writes, "The substrate of this change, of course, cannot be a particular human essence since it is just this which has passed away." (135) The particular human essence is subject to passing away since it is a compound of form and matter. So Peterson proposes the Aristotelian view according to which "The substrate of change in the case of essential change is simply the potentiality on the part of any individual to become something essentially different from what it is." (135) This potentiality is matter. Since it is that which individuates the form, matter is an individual in a third sense. There are then three senses of 'individual':

Individual₁ = primary substance
Individual₂ = secondary substance = substrate of accidental change
Individual₃ = matter = substrate of essential or existential change

7. Possible Lines of Critique

A. Peterson's theory implies that the unripe avocado and the ripe avocado are two primary substances, not one. (Likewise for Elliot sober and Elliot drunk.)  But since now there is only one, the ripe one, the unripe one must have passed out of existence. This consequence of Peterson's theory seems to collide with the Moorean fact mentioned above, namely, that alterational or accidental change does not involve the destruction of the thing that changes. If the thing that changes is the unripe avocado one sees and touches, then that thing does not remain self-same over time: it passes out of existence. What remains the same over time is the individuated essence which one does not see and which is not a substance in its own right.

B. Matter, as the substrate of essential change, is prime matter.  It is very difficult to see how the notion of materia prima can be rendered intelligible.

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Contingent Existence Without Cause? Not Possible Says Garrigou-Lagrange

A reader claims that "to affirm that there are contingent beings just is to affirm that they have that whereby they are, namely, a cause." This implies that one can straightaway infer 'x has a cause' from 'x is contingent.' My reader would agree with Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange who, taking the traditional Thomist position, maintains the following Principle of Causality (PC):

. . . every contingent thing, even if it should be ab aeterno, depends on a cause which exists of itself.  (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, tr. Patrick Cummins, O. S. B., Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 62)

So even if the physical universe always existed, and therefore never came into existence, it would nonetheless require a cause of its existence simply in virtue of its being contingent.  I find myself questioning both my reader and Garrigou-Lagrange.  For it seems to me to be conceivable that an item be contingent but have no cause or ground of its existence.  This is precisely what Garrigou-Lagrange denies: "contingent existence . . . can simply not be conceived without origin, without cause . . . ." (p. 63)

But it all depends on what we mean by 'conceivable' and 'contingent.'  Here are my definitions:

D1. An individual or state of affairs x is conceivable =_df x is thinkable without formal-logical contradiction.

Examples.  It is conceivable that there be a mountain of gold and a tire iron that floats in (pure or near-pure) water.  It is conceivable that I jump straight out of my chair, turn a somersault in the air, and then return to my chair and finish this blog post.  It is inconceivable that I light a cigar and not light a cigar at exactly the same time.  As for formal-logical contradiction, here is an example:  Some cats are not cats.  But Some bachelors are married is not a formal-logical contradiction.  Why not? Because its logical form has both true and false substitution instances.

D2. An individual or state of affairs x is contingent =_df x is possibly nonexistent/nonobtaining if it exists/obtains, and possibly existent/obtaining if it does not exist/obtain.

The contingent is that which has a certain modal status: it is neither necessary nor impossible.  For example, me and my cigar are both contingent beings: neither is necessary and neither is impossible.  My smoking the cigar now is an example of a contingent state of affairs: it is neither necessary nor impossible that I smoke a cigar now.  The type of modality we are concerned with is broadly logical, not nomological.

Now is it conceivable that something exist contingently without a cause?  It seems so!  The nonexistence of the physical universe is thinkable without formal-logical contradiction.  The physical universe is contingent: it exists, but not necessarily.  Its nonexistence is possible.  Do I encounter a formal-logical contradiction when I think of the universe as existing without a cause or explanation? No.  An uncaused universe is nothing like  a non-triangular triangle, or a round square, or a married bachelor, or an uncaused effect. Necessarily, if x is an effect, then x has a cause.  It is an analytic truth that every effect has a cause.  The negation of this proposition is: Some effects do not have causes.  While this is not a formal-logical contradiction, it can be reduced to one by substituting synonyms for synonyms.  Thus, Some caused events are not caused.

Contrary to what Garrigou-Lagrange maintains, it is conceivable that the universe exist uncaused, despite its contingency.   If one could not conceive the uncaused existing of the universe, then one could not conceive of the universe's being a brute fact.  And 'surely' one can conceive of the latter.  That is not to say that it is possible.  There is a logical gap between the conceivable and the possible.  My point is merely that the 'brutality' of the universe's existence is conceivable in the sense of (D1). To put it another way, my point is that one cannot gain a a priori insight into the necessity of the universe's having a cause of its existence.  And this is because the Principle of Causality, if true, is not analytically true but synthetically true.

Of course, if one defines 'contingency' in terms of 'existential dependence on a cause' then  a thing's being contingent straightaway implies its being caused.   But then one has packed causal dependency into the notion of contingency when contingency means only what (D2) says it means.  That has all the benefits of theft over honest toil as Russell remarked in a different connection.

Garrigou-Lagrange thinks that one violates the Law of Non-Contradiction if one says of a contingent thing that it is both contingent and uncaused.  He thinks this is equivalent to saying:

A thing may exist of itself and simultaneously not exist of itself. Existence of itself would belong to it, both necessarily and impossibly. Existence would be an inseparable predicate of a being which can be separated from existence. All this is absurd, unintelligible. (p. 65)

Suppose that a contingent existent is one that is caused to exist by a self-existent existent.  If one then went on to say that such an existent is both contingent and uncaused, then one would embrace a logical contradiction.  But this presupposes that contingency implies causal dependency.

And therein lies the rub.  That the universe is contingent I grant.  But how does one get from contingency in the sense defined by (D2) supra to the universe's causal dependence on a causa prima?  If one simply packs dependency into contingency then one begs the question.  What is contingent needn't be contingent upon anything.

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Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis

The book has been recently translated.  

Unfortunately, I find myself in agreement with Josef Pieper as to the 'unreadibility' of the book: "The unfinished, and hardly readable book, Analogia Entis (1932), which he himself declares is the quintessence of his view, in fact gives no idea of the wealth of concrete material he spread out before us in those days."

Of course, the book is not strictly unreadable: I am reading it and getting something out of it.   But it has many of the faults of Continental writing and old-time scholastic writing. 

To make a really good philosopher you need to start with someone possessing a love of truth, spiritual depth, metaphysical aptitude, and historical erudition. Then some nuts-and-bolts analyst needs to beat on him with the logic stick until he can express himself clearly and precisely.  Such a thrashing would have done gentlemen such as E. Gilson and J. Maritain a world of good. Gallic writing in philosophy tends toward the flabby and the florid.

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Bare Particulars and Prime Matter: Similarities and Differences

This entry continues the discussion of prime matter begun here. That post is a prerequisite for this one.

Similarities between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter

S1. Bare particulars in themselves are property-less while prime matter in itself is formless.   The bare particular in a thing is that which exemplifies the thing's properties.  But in itself it is a pure particular and thus 'bare.'  The prime matter of a thing is the thing's ultimate matter and while supporting forms is itself formless.

S2. Bare particulars, though property-less in themselves, exemplify properties; prime matter, though formless in itself, is formed.

S3. There is nothing in the nature of a bare particular to dictate which properties it will exemplify.  This is because bare particulars do not have natures.  Correspondingly, there is nothing in the nature of prime matter to dictate which substantial forms it will take. This is because prime matter, in itself, is without form.

S4.  Bare particulars, being bare, are promiscuously combinable with any and all first-level properties. Thus any bare particular can stand in the exemplification nexus with any first-level property.  Similarly, prime matter is promiscuously receptive to any and all forms, having no form in itself.

S5.  Promiscuous combinability entails the contingency of the exemplification nexus.  Promiscuous receptivity entails the contingency of prime matter's being informed thus and so.

S6. Bare particulars are never directly encountered in sense experience.  The same holds for prime matter.  What we encounter are always propertied particulars and formed matter.

S7. A bare particular combines with properties to make an ordinary, 'thick' particular.  Prime matter combines with substantial form to make a primary (sublunary) substance.

S8. The dialectic that leads to bare particulars and prime matter respectively is similar, a form of analysis that is neither logical nor physical but ontological.  It is based on the idea that things have ontological constituents or 'principles' which, incapable of existing on their own, yet combine to from independent existents.  Hylomorphic analysis leads ultimately to prime matter, and ontological analysis in the style of Bergmann and fellow travellers leads to bare or thin particulars as ultimate substrata.

Differences Between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter

D1. There are many bare particulars each numerically different from every other one.  In themselves, bare particulars are many.  It is not the case that, in itself, prime matter is many.  It is not, in itself, parceled out into numerically distinct bits.

D2. Bare particulars are actual; prime matter is purely potential.

D3. Bare particulars account for numerical difference.  But prime matter does not account for numerical difference. (See Feser's manual, p. 199)  Prime matter is common and wholly indeterminate.  Designated matter (materia signata) is the principle of individuation, i.e., differentiation.

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Substantial Change, Prime Matter, and Individuation

Eric Levy wants to talk about prime matter.  I am 'primed' and my powder's dry:  Nihil philosophicum a me alienum putamus. "I consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to me."

Change, Accidental and Substantial 

There is no change without a substrate of change which, in respect of its existence and identity, does not change during the interval of the change. In a slogan: no change without unchange. No becoming other (alter-ation, Ver-aenderung) without something remaining the same. In the case of accidental change, the substrate is materia secunda, in one of its two senses, a piece of paper, say, as opposed to paper as a kind of material stuff. It is a piece of paper that becomes yellow with age, not paper as a kind of stuff. In the case of substantial change the substrate is said to be prime matter, materia prima. On the scholastic view, prime matter must exist if we are to explain substantial change. (See Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics, pp. 171 ff.) Thus to the problems with substantial change already mentioned (in an earlier portion of this  text not yet 'blogged') we may add the problems that are specific to prime matter. Besides the route to prime matter via substantial change, there is the route via the very procedure of hylomorphic analysis. Traversing these routes will give us a good idea of why the positing of prime matter has seemed compelling to scholastics.

Given that thought sometimes makes contact with reality, 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 they are to be intelligible to us? A realist 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 reality is not exhausted by forms and structures; there is also that which supports form and structure. In this way matter comes into the picture.  Forms are determinations.  Matter, in a sense that embraces both primary and secondary matter, is the determinable as such.

Proximate matter can be encountered in experience, at least in typical cases. 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 partite 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.

Hylomorphic analysis is thus iterable. The iteration cannot be infinite: the material world cannot be hylomorphic compounds 'all the way down,' or 'all the way up' for that matter. The iteration has a lower limit in prime or primordial or ultimate matter (materia prima), just as it has an upper limit in pure form, and ultimately in the forma formarum, God, the purely actual being. Must hylomorphic analysis proceed all the way to prime matter, or can it coherently stop one step shy of it at the lowest level of materia secunda? I think that if one starts down the hylomorphic road one must drive to its bitter end in prime matter. (Cf. Feser's manual, p. 173 for what I read as an argument to this conclusion.) Ultimate matter, precisely because it is ultimate, has no form of its own. As John Haldane describes it, it is "stuff of no kind." (“A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind” in Form and Matter, ed. Oderberg, p. 50) We could say that prime matter is the wholly indeterminate determinable. As wholly indeterminate, it is wholly determinable.

(Question: if prime matter is wholly indeterminate, is it also indeterminate with respect to being either determinate or indeterminate? Presumably not.  Is there a problem lurking here?)

The Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter

While it is easy to appreciate the logic that leads to the positing of prime matter, it is difficult to see that what is posited is coherently thinkable. Here is one consideration among several. Call it the Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter. It may be compressed into the following aporetic dyad:

1. Prime matter exists.

2. Prime matter does not exist.

Argument for limb (1). There is real substantial change and it cannot be reduced to accidental change. All change is reduction of potency to act, and all change requires an underlying substrate of change that remains self-same and secures the diachronic identity of that which changes. The substrate of a change is the matter of the change. What changes in a change are forms, whether accidental or substantial. Without the potency-act and matter-form distinctions we cannot accommodate the fact of change and avoid both the Heraclitean doctrine of radical flux and the Eleatic denial of change. Or so say the scholastics. In the case of accidental change, the subject or substrate is secondary matter (materia secunda). But substantial change is change too, and so it also requires a substrate which cannot be secondary matter and so must be prime matter. Given what we must assume to make sense of the plain fact of both accidental and substantial change, “prime matter must exist.” (Feser's manual, p. 172) It must exist in reality as the common basis of every substantial change.

Argument for limb (2). Prime matter is pure potency. It has to be, given the exigencies of accounting for substantial as opposed to accidental change. As pure potency, prime matter is wholly indeterminate and wholly formless. In itself, then, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually, as is obvious. But it also does not exist potentially: prime matter does not have potential Being. This is because the principle of the metaphysical priority of act over potency requires that every existing potency (e.g., the never actualized potency of a sugar cube to dissolve in water) be grounded in something actual (e.g., the sugar cube). The pure potency which is prime matter is not, however, grounded in anything actual. (Note that one cannot say that prime matter is a pure potency grounded in each primary substance. Prime matter is the ultimate stuff of each primary substance; it is not potency possessed by these substances.) Therefore, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually and it does not exist potentially. This is also evident from the first of the twenty-four Thomistic theses:

Potency and act are a complete division of being. Hence whatever is must be either pure act or a unit composed of potency and act as its primary and intrinsic principles. (Quoted by Feser, Schol. Metaph., p. 31)

If so, prime matter does not exist. For prime matter is neither pure act nor composed of potency and act. It is interesting to observe that while purely actual Being can itself be by being something actual, purely potential Being cannot itself be by being something potential (or actual). God is actual Being (Sein, esse) and an actual being (Seiendes, ens). But prime matter is neither potential nor actual. So prime matter neither is actually nor is potentially.

It thus appears that we have cogent arguments for both limbs of a contradiction. If the contradiction is real and not merely apparent, and the arguments for the dyad's limbs are cogent, then either there is no prime matter, the very concept thereof being self-contradictory, or there is prime matter but it is is unintelligible to us. One could, I suppose, be a mysterian about prime matter: it exists but we, given our cognitive limitations, cannot understand how it could exist. (Analogy with Colin McGinn's mysterianism: consciousness is a brain process, but our cognitive limitations bar us from understanding how it could be.) But I mention mysterianism only to set it aside.

But perhaps we can avoid contradiction in the time-honored way, by drawing a distinction. A likely candidate is the distinction between prime matter in itself versus prime matter together with substantial forms. So I expect the following scholastic response to my antinomy:

Prime matter exists as a real (extramental) factor only in primary substances such as Socrates and Plato. It exists only in hylomorphic compounds of prime matter and substantial form. But it does not exist when considered in abstraction from every primary substance. So considered, it is nothing at all. It is not some formless stuff that awaits formation: it is always already formed. It is always already parcelled out among individual material substances. Once this distinction is made, the distinction between prime matter in itself and prime matter together with substantial forms, one can readily see that the 'contradiction' in the above dyad is merely apparent and rests on an equivocation on 'exist(s).' The word is being used in two different senses. In (1) 'exists' means: exists together with substantial form. In (2), 'exist' means: exist in itself. Thus the aporetic dyad reduces to the logically innocuous dyad:

1*. Prime matter exists together with substantial forms.

2*. Prime matter does not exist in itself in abstraction from substantial forms.

Unfortunately, this initially plausible response gives rise to a problem of its own. If prime matter really exists only in primary substances, then prime matter in reality is not a common stuff but is parcelled out among all the primary substances: it exists only as a manifold of designated matters, the matter of Socrates, of Plato, etc. But this conflicts with the requirement that prime matter be the substratum of substantial change. Let me explain.

If a new substance S2 comes into existence from another already existing substance S1 (parthenogenesis may be an example) then prime matter is what underlies and remains the same through this change. Now this substratum of substantial change that remains the same must be something real, but it cannot be identical to S2 or to S1 or to any other substance. For if the substratum of substantial change is identical to S1, then S1 survives, in which case S2 is not a new substance generated from S1 but a mere alteration of S1. Don't forget that substantial change cannot be reduced to an accidental change in some already existing substance or substances. In substantial change a new substance comes to be from one or more already existing substances. (I will assume that creation or 'exnihilation' does not count as substantial change.)

If, on the other hand, the substratum of change is identical to S2, then S2 exists before it comes to exist. And it seems obvious that the substratum of substantial change underlying S2's coming to be from S1 cannot be some other substance. Nor can the substratum be an accident of S2 or S1. For an accident can exist only in a substance. If the substratum is an accident of S1, then S1 must exist after it has ceased to exist. If the substratum is an accident of S2, then S2 must exist before it comes to exist.

The argumentative punchline is that prime matter cannot exist only in primary substances as a co-principle tied in every case to a substantial form. If prime matter is the substratum of substantial change, then prime matter must be a really existent, purely potential, wholly indeterminate, stuff on its own.

The Problem of the Substrate

The problem just presented, call it the Problem of the Substrate or the Problem of the Continuant, may be pressed into the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. Prime matter is the substrate of substantial change.

2. Prime matter does not exist in reality except as divided among individual material substances.

3. The substratum of a substantial change cannot be identified with any of the substances involved in the change, or with any other substance, or with any accident of any substance. (For example, the substratum of the substantial change which is Socrates' coming into existence from gametes G1 and G2 cannot be identified with Socrates, with G1, with G2, with any other substance, or with any accident of any substance.)

 4. There is substantial change and it requires a really existent substrate.

The tetrad is inconsistent issuing as it does in the contradiction: Prime matter does and does not exist only in individual material substances.

The obvious solution is to deny (2). But if we deny (2) to solve the Problem of the Substrate, then we reignite the Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter. We solved the Antinomy by making a distinction, but that distinction gave rise to the Problem of the Substrate/Continuant. We appear to be in quite a pickle. (For more on the Substrate/Continuant problem, see John D. Kronen, Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan, “The Problem of the Continuant: Aquinas and Suárez on Prime Matter and Substantial Generation,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Jun., 2000), pp. 863-885.)

The Problem of Individuation

Finally a glance at the related ontological, not epistemological, problem of individuation. This problem is actually two problems. There is the problem of individuation proper, namely, the problem of what makes an individual substance individual as opposed to universal, and there is the connected problem of differentiation, namely, the problem of what makes numerically different individual substances numerically different. It is clear that prime matter cannot be the principle of differentiation. For one thing, prime matter is common to all material substances. For another, prime matter as pure potency is indeterminate, hence not intrinsically divided into parcels. Moreover, pace Feser, prime matter cannot “bring universals down to earth” in his phrase: it cannot be the principle of individuation, narrowly construed. (Schol. Metaph., p. 199) For what makes Socrates an individual substance rather than the substantial form he shares with Plato cannot be common, indeterminate, amorphous, matter.

Prime matter is not up to the job of individuation/differentiation. It is designated matter (materia signata quantitate) that is said to function as the ontological ground or 'principle' of individuation and numerical difference. Unfortunately, appeal to designated matter involves us in an explanatory circle. Designated matter is invoked to explain why Socrates and Plato are individual substances and why they are numerically different individual substances. But designated matter cannot be that which individuates/differentiates them since it presupposes for its individuation and differentiation the logically (not temporally) antecedent existence of individual material substances. Why are Socrates and Plato different? Because their designated matters are different. Why are their designated matters different? Because they are the matters of different substances. The explanation moves in a circle of rather short diameter.

Feser considers something like this objection but dismisses it as resting on a confusion of formal with efficient causality. But there is no such confusion in the objection as I have presented it. Efficient causality does not come into it at all. No one thinks that there is an agent who in a temporal process imposes substantial form on prime matter in the way that a potter in a temporal process imposes accidental form upon a lump of clay. I can grant Feser's point that prime matter and substantial form are related as material cause to formal cause. I can also grant that prime matter and substantial form are mutually implicative co-principles neither of which can exist without the other. Granting all this, my objection remains. Prime matter in itself is undifferentiated. It it differentiated and dimensive only in combination with substantial forms. But this is equivalent to saying that prime matter is differentiated and dimensive only as the designated matter of particular individual substances. But then designated matter cannot non-circularly explain why numerically different substances are numerically different. For the numerical difference of these matters presupposes the numerical difference of the substances.

On the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

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 material singulars or minds, and thus 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 (being) and intentional existence (being).  Real existence is existence 'outside' the (finite) mind. Intentional existence is existence 'in' or 'before' the mind.  The mentioned words are obviously not to be taken spatially.  Esse is the Latin infinitive, to be.  Every human mind is a finite mind, but don't assume the converse.

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.

Pause to appreciate how attractive this conception is. It secures the intrinsic intelligibility of the world while avoiding the 'gap problem' that bedevils post-Cartesian thought.

I need to know more, however, about  the exact ontological status of the common nature (CN) which is, as it were, amphibious as between knowing mind and thing known. 

With the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated in earlier forays:

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 extramental singulars and mental acts.  (Note: a mental act is a concrete singular because in time, though not in space.)

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, it does not merely possibly have them, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of the Law of Excluded Middle) 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 in earlier entries..  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 in the jungle with a  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 extramental 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 homo est rationalis, et non 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 common nature humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence.  So we either go the Meinongian route or we say that comon natures  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; third, 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.  Common natures 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.  Solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture. 

I  think about deus ex machina objections in philosophy in Deus ex Machina: Leibniz Contra Malebranche.

But if we don't bring God into the picture then we may face a trilemma:  either Platonism, or subjectivism, or Meinongianism.

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Book Notice: Edward Feser, Neo-Scholastic Essays

The phenomenal Edward Feser.  How does he do it?  He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college, five per semester; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children.  Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality.

He writes with clarity, style, and wit, and you don't want to end up on the wrong end of his polemics, as Lawrence Krauss did recently who got himself deservedly tagged by Ed as a "professional amateur philosopher."

Ed is an embodiment of one of the truths of Quine's essay Paradoxes of Plenty, namely, that a paucity of free time is not inimical to productivity.

Ed's latest collects 16 recent essays in the areas of philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Start with "The Road from Atheism," his intellectual autobiography.

You can get the book from Amazon for a paltry $19.02.  Amazon blurb:

In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments. This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as “analytical Thomism,” though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser’s academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas’s Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional “perverted faculty argument.”

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Posits or Inventions? Butchvarov and Geach on Intentionality

One philosopher's explanatory posit is another's mere invention.

In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, 1994, pp. 1-21), Panayot Butchvarov rejects  epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects  sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1)  Curiously enough, however, Butchvarov goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong!  Actually, 'posit'  is not a word he would use since Butchvarov claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects.  (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the hallucinated pink rat  are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.

But now consider the following passage from Anscombe and Geach's 1961 Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:

But saying this  has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else:  it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat.  This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist -- a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix.  Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)

Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology.  What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!

Ain't philosophy grand?  One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given. 

What is also striking about the above  passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.

Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations.  There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether a painting, a photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat.   Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.  And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X.  There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.

The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs  realization in some medium.  It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff.  Why can't consciousness of a cat  be nothing more than consciousness of a cat?  Why can't consciousness be exhausted  by its revelation of objects? This is the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness that Butchvarov espouses.  I don't advocate it myself, but I don't see that Geach has refuted it.  That derivative intentionality requires a medium does not show that original intentionality does.  No picture of a cat is exhausted by its depicting of a cat; there needs to be a physical thing, the picture itself, and it must have certain properties that found or ground the pictorial relation.  But it might be otherwise for original intentionality.

Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein.  Consciousness as being-conscioused.  Get it?  If memory serves, the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp has a theory along these lines, although the word I think he uses is Bewusstheit which, to coin an English expression, is the monadic property of consciousedness.  Perhaps there is an anticipation of Sartre/Butchvarov in Natorp.

But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental-contents conception.

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Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

I suspect that Vlastimil V's (neo-scholastic) understanding of potentiality is similar to the one provided by Matthew Lu in Potentiality Rightly Understood:

The substance view of persons holds that every human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them. For the adherent of the substance view of persons, "potential" does not essentially refer to some possible future state of affairs. Rather, in this conception of what I will call developmental potential, to say that an organism has the potential to manifest some property means that that property belongs essentially to the kind of thing that it is (i.e., is among the essential properties it has by nature). Whether or not a specific individual actualizes the potentialities of its nature is contingent; but those potentialities necessarily belong to its nature in virtue of its membership in a specific natural kind.

I don't understand this.  Let the property be rationality.  Let organism o belong to the natural kind human being.  We assume that man is by nature a rational animal. A human fetus is of course a human being.  Suppose the fetus is anencephalic.  It too is a human being -- it is not lupine or bovine or a member of any other animal species.  But it is a defective human being, one whose defect is so serious that it, that very individual, will never manifest rationality.  So how can every human being have "the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood"?  That is my question.  Now consider the following answers/views.

A1: The anencephalic human fetus does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality.  This is because it lacks "the largest part of the brain consisting mainly of the cerebral hemispheres, including the neocortex, which is responsible for cognition." (Wikipedia)

A2:  The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because it is a member of a species or natural kind the normal (non-defective) members of which do have the potentiality in question.

A3:  The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.

I think (A2) is the most charitable reading of the above quoted paragraph considered in the context of Lu's entire paper. Accordingly, a particular anencephalic fetus has the potentiality to manifest rationality because other genetically human members of the same species do have the potentiality in question.  This makes no sense to me.  But perhaps I am being obtuse, in which case a charitable soul may wish to help me understand.  To be perfectly honest, I really would like it to be the case that EVERY  "human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them."  I would like that to be the case because then I would not  have to supplement my Potentiality Argument against abortion with other principles as I have done in other entries.

What's my problem?  Let's start with an analogy. It is narrowly logically possible and broadly logically possible that I run a four-minute mile.  It is also nomologically possible that I run a four-minute mile. For all the latter means is that the laws of nature pertaining to human anatomy and physiology do not rule out a human being's running a four-minute mile.  Since they do not rule out a human being's running that fast, they don't rule out my running that fast.

But note that the laws of human physiology abstract entirely from the particularities and peculiarities of me qua individual animal.  They abstract from my particular O₂ uptake, the ratio of 'fast twitch' to 'slow twitch' muscle fibers in my legs, and so on.  And to be totally clear: it is the concrete flesh-and-blood individual that runs, 'Boston Billy' Rodgers, for example, that very guy, not his form, not his matter, not his nature, not any accident or property or universal or subjective concept or objective concept that pertains to him. 

Now consider the question: do I, BV, have the potential to run a four-minute mile? No.  Why not?  Because of a number of deficiencies, insufficiencies, limitations and whatnot pertaining to the particular critter that I am.  The fact that other runners have  the potential in question is totally irrelevant.  What do their individual potentialities have to do with me?  The question, again, is whether I, BV, have/has the potentiality in question.  It is also totally irrelevant that the laws of human physiology do not rule out my running a four-minute mile.  Again, this is because said laws abstract from the particularities and peculiarities of the concrete individual.  Surely it would be a very  serious blunder to suppose that the nomological possibility of my running a four-minute mile  entails the potentiality of my doing any such thing. That would be a two-fold blunder: (i) potentiality is not possibility, and (ii) potentiality is always the potentiality of some concrete individual or other.

Similarly, the anencephalic individual does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality.  The fact that normal human fetuses do have this potentiality is totally irrelevant.  What do their individual potentialities have to do with the potentialities or lacks thereof of the anencephalic individual?  It is also totally irrelevant that man is by nature a rational animal, that the capacity to reason is 'inscribed' (as a Continental philosopher might say) in his very essence.  For the question is precisely whether or not this very anencephalic individual has the potentiality to manifest rationality.  My answer, as you may have surmised, is No. 

I think I can diagnose the neo-Scholastic error, if error it is.  (I hope it is not an error, for then the Potentiality Argument is strengthened and simplified.)  Take a look at (A3):

A3. The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.

This, I submit, is a complete non-starter.  Whatever a natural kind is, it itself does not have the potential to be rational.  It can no more be rational than humanity in general can run.  (I once entered a 10 K event called 'The Human Race.' I did not compete against humanity in general, but against certain particular human critters.)

So it can't be the universal nature humanity that has the potential to be rational.  What about the individual or individualized nature, the human nature of Socrates, of Plato, et al.?  Could a particular individualized nature be that which has the potential to manifest rationality?  No again.  For it is but an ontological constituent of  a concrete man such as Socrates.  It is baby Socrates that has the potential to manifest rationality and excel in dialetic, not one of his ontological constituents.  Socrates is more than his individual human nature; there is also the dude's matter (materia signata) to take into consideration.  Our man is a hylomorphic compound, and it is this compound in which the potentiality to display rationality is grounded.

My diagnosis of neo-Scholastic error, then, is that neo-Scholastics, being Aristotelians, tend to conflate a primary substance such as Socrates with his individual(ized) nature. Since human nature in general includes the potential to be rational, it is natural to think that every individual(ized) human nature, whether normal or defective, has the potential to be rational.  But surely it is not the individual(ized) human nature that has the potential to be rational, but the ontological whole of which the individual(ized) human nature is a proper part.  In the case of the anencephalic fetus, this ontological whole includes defective matter that cannot support the development of rationality.  Only if one confuses the individual(ized) human nature of the anencephalic individual with the concrete anencephalic individual could one suppose that it too has the potential to manifest rationality.

The fact that Lu's paragraph above is ambiguous as between (A2) and (A3) further supports my contention that there is a confusion here.

My view, then, is (A1).  Abortion is a grave moral evil.  The Potentiality Argument, however, does not suffice as an argument against every instance of it.  This is not to say that the aborting of the anencephalic is morally acceptable.  It rather suggests that the PA requires some form of supplementation.

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Is Hegel Guilty of 'Epochism'?

In these politically correct times we hear much of racism, sexism, ageism, speciesism, and even heterosexism. Why not then epochism, the arbitrary denigration of entire historical epochs? Some years back, a television commentator referred to the Islamist beheading of Nicholas Berg as “medieval.” As I remarked to my wife, “That fellow is slamming an entire historical epoch.”

The names of the other epochs are free of pejorative connotations even though horrors occurred in those epochs the equal of any in the medieval period. Why then are the Middle Ages singled out for special treatment? This is no mean chunk of time. It stretches from, say, the birth of Augustine in 354 anno domini , or perhaps from the closing of the Platonic Academy in 529 A. D., to the birth of Descartes in 1596, albeit with plenty of bleed-through on either end: Greek notions reach deep into the Middle Ages, while medieval notions live on in Descartes and beyond.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) counts as an epochist. When he comes to the medieval period in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he puts on his “seven-league boots” the better to pass over this thousand year period without sullying his fine trousers. (Vol. III, 1) Summing up the “General Standpoint of the Scholastics,” he has this to say: “...this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return.” “Barren,” and “rubbishy” are other terms with which he describes it. (Vol. III, 94-95)

The politically correct may wish to consider whether the descendants of Hegel should pay reparations to the descendants of Thomas Aquinas, et al.

Addendum A, 9/17: 

Dennis Monokroussos quips:

If Aquinas had any descendants, you’d owe them reparations for slandering his good name at the end of your post. (Then again, if he had descendants, it wouldn’t have been slander.)

I know: you mean philosophical progeny. It’s a funny question though, about reparations. I kind of like the idea of having postmodern “philosophers” having to pay a sum to (actual) philosophers for having taken so many of their jobs since the 1980s.

That's a good one, Dennis.  As you may know, I don't much cotton to the notion of reparations, one of my arguments against which is here.  (WARNING: at the end of the hyperlink there lies (stands?) a post so exceedingly politically incorrect that leftists and their fellow travellers are hereby issued a strong Internet travel advisory.)

Addendum B, 9/17:

The Swabian genius tells us that "Scholasticism . . . is a barbarous philosophy . . . to which we cannot return."

Judgments in the history of philosophy of the form, There will be no return to X, are parlous. 

There was an amazing resurgence of scholasticism, Thomism in particular, in the 20th century, and not just in sleepy Jesuit backwaters.  Toward the end of that century, mirabile dictu, mainstream analytic philosophers joined in the renascence.  Surely there are more scholastic philosophers at work today than Hegelians, especially if we subtract those whose interest in Hegel is merely historical and scholarly.  I'll go further.  The School is alive and kicking with young hotshots; but how many proponents of The System are there?

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  dead while Meinongianism thrives. But Ryle too will be raised if my converse-Gilsonian  law of philosophical experience holds.

Etienne Gilson said, famously, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." I say, rather less famously,  "Philosophy always resurrects its dead."

With the example of Ryle in mind, we should approach the following quotation from Paul Guyer with some skepticism:

Kant radically and irreversibly transformed the nature of Western thought. After he wrote, no one could ever again think of either science or morality as a matter of the passive reception of entirely external truth or reality. In reflection upon the methods of science, as well as in many particular areas of science itself, the recognition of our own input into the world we claim to know has become inescapable. In the practical sphere, few can any longer take seriously the idea that moral reasoning consists in the discovery of external norms—for instance, objective perfections in the world or the will of God—as opposed to the construction for ourselves of the most rational way to conduct our lives both severally and jointly. (Paul Guyer, "Introduction: The Starry Heavens and the Moral Law," in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 1-25, at 3)

Guyer quotation lifted from the weblog of Keith Burgess-Jackson.

Addendum C, 9/17: 

A quotation from Russell that the shade of Hegel would approve of:

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.  (Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, p. 463)

I will comment on this passage and its spirit in a later entry.

Addendum D, 9/18:

D. M. adds, "Anthony Kenny had a nice quip in reply to the Russell quote. On page 2 of his edited work Aquinas, A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1969) (cited in Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 19), he says that the remark “comes oddly from a philosopher who took three hundred and sixty dense pages to offer a proof that 1 + 1 = 2.”

Thank you for reminding me of that Kenny riposte.  It hits the mark.

It is certainly false to say that, in general, it is unphilosophical or special pleading or an abuse of reason to seek arguments for a proposition antecedently accepted, a proposition the continuing acceptance of which does not depend on whether or not good arguments for it can be produced.  But if we are to be charitable to Lord Russell we should read his assertion as restricted to propositions, theological and otherwise, that are manifestly controversial.  So restricted, Russell's asseveration cannot be easily counterexampled, which is not to say that it is obviously true.

As we speak I am working on a longish post on this very topic.

Related articles

Some Favorable Citations of Suárez by Schopenhauer

Is Hegel the Protestant Aquinas?

Descartes' Life and Works

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

Has Even One Philosophical Problem Ever Been Solved?

Philosophers Who Compartmentalize and Those Who Don't

Lukas Novak on Reference to What is Not

Our Czech friend Lukas Novak sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:

(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.

In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view he seems to be endorsing.

I. Novak's Scotistic View

Novak writes,

Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.

[. . .]

 

It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced:

[. . .]

In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.

[. . .]

And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:

[. . .]

In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (emphasis added)

II. Some Questions and Comments

As a matter of fact we do at least seem to refer to nonexistent objects and say things about them, true and false.   Alexius von Meinong's celebrated goldner Berg, golden mountain, may serve as an example.  The golden mountain is made of gold; it is a mountain; it does not exist; it is an object of my present thinking; it is indeterminate with respect to height; it is 'celebrated' as it were among connoisseurs of this arcana; it is Meinong's favorite example of a merely possible individual; it -- the very same one I am talking about now -- was discussed by Kasimir Twardowski, etc.

Now if this seeming to refer is an actual referring, if we do refer to the nonexistent in thought and overt speech, then it is possible that we do so.  Esse ad posse valet illatio.  But how the devil is it possible that we do so?  (PR) is extremely plausible: it is difficult to understand how there could be reference to that which has no being, no esse, whatsoever.

If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy

D1. Possibilism is to be avoided.  We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being.

D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided.  We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceities that stand in for mere possibilia.

D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational or at least quasi-relational is to be respected and somehow accommodated.  No adverbial theories!

D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided.  Intentionality is real!

D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided.  When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!  

Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him.  He can tell me if my imputation is unjust.  In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands.  Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?

Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge.  If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite.  But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God.  See my substantial post on DEM objections in philosophy, here.

Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God.  Then he can be put to work.  Or, as my esteemed teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."

So how does it work?  It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain.  But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being.  Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being.  In themselves, they have no being at all.  God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind.    And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility.  It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.

That is the theory, assuming I have understood it.  And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata with the possible exception of (D3).  But here is one concern.  The theory implies that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect.  But that is not what I seem to be thinking about.  What I seem to be thinking about has  very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect.  An intentional object has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.

Connected with this concern is the suspicion that on Novak's theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach.  He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own.  So he identifies them with divine conceivings.  But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski.  (See  article below.)

My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind.  But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw.  Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.

My point could be put like this.  The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act.  But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc.  Novak's theory appears to fall into psychologism.   

Related articles

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

More Pictures from Prague

Bare Particulars and Lukáš Novák's Argument Against Them

Lukáš Novák on Common Natures

Prague Conference on Analytic Theology, September 2013

Divine Simplicity, the Formal Distinction, and the Real Distinction

If I understand Duns Scotus on the divine simplicity, his view in one sentence is that the divine attributes are really identical in God but formally distinct.  (Cf. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate 2005, p. 111)  I can understand this if I can understand the formal distinction (distinctio formalis)  and how it differs from the real distinction (distinctio realis).  This will be the cynosure of my interest in this post.

There appear to be two ways of construing 'real distinction.'  On the first construal, the real distinction is plainly different from the formal distinction.   On a second construal, it is not so clear what the difference is.  I have no worked-out view.  In this entry I am merely trying to understand the difference between these two sorts of distinction and how they bear upon the divine simplicity, though I will not say anything more about the latter in this installment.

First Construal of 'Real Distinction'

On the first construal, the real distinction is to be understood in terms of separability.  But 'separable' has several senses.  Here are my definitions of the relevant senses.  I am not trying to exposit Thomas or any scholastic.  I am merely trying to get to the truth of the matter.

D1. Individuals x, y are mutually separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that x exist without y, and y exist without x.

Example. The separability of my eyeglasses and my head is mutual: each can (in a number of different senses of 'can' including the broadly logical sense) exist without the other. This distinction is called real because it has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality.  It is not a merely verbal distinction like that between 'eyeglasses' and 'spectacles.' 

D2. Properties F, G are mutually separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that F be instantiated by x without G being instantiated by x, and vice versa.

Example. Socrates is both seated and speaking.  But he is possibly such as to be the one without the other, and the other without the one.  He can sit without speaking, and speak without sitting.  The properties of being seated and speaking, though co-instantiated by Socrates, are mutually separable. Of course, this does not imply that these properties can exist uninstantiated. 

D3. Individuals x, y are unilaterally separable =_df  it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair x, y  exist without the other, but not the other without the one.

Example. A (primary) substance S and one of its accidents A.  Both are individuals, unrepeatables. But while A cannot exist without S, S can exist without A.  Second example.  Consider a fetus prior to viability.  It is not an accident of the mother, but a substance in its own right.  Yet it cannot exist apart from the mother, while the mother can exist apart from it.  So what we seem to have here are two individuals that are unilaterally separable.

D4. Properties F, G are unilaterally separable =_df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair F, G be instantiated by x without the other being instantiated, but not the other without the one.

Example.   Suppose Socrates is on his feet, running.  His being on his feet and his running are unilaterally separable in that he can be on his feet wthout running, but he cannot be running without being on his feet.

D5.  Items (whether individuals or properties) I, J are weakly separable =_df I, J are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable.

On the first construal of 'real distinction,' it comes to this:

D6. Items (whether individuals or properties), I, J are really distinct =_df I, J are weakly separable.

My impression is that when Scotists speak of the real distinction they mean something identical to or very close to my (D6).  Real distinctness is weak separability.  Two items, whether individuals or properties, are really distinct if and only if they are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable.  According to Alan B. Wolter ("The Formal Distinction" in John Duns Scotus, 1265-1965, eds. Ryan and Bonansea, CUA Press, 1965, pp. 45-60),

In the works of Aquinas, for example, the term ['real distinction'] seems to have two basically different meanings, only one of which corresponds to the usage of Scotus, Ockham, or Suarez.  For the latter, the real  distinction is that which exists between individuals, be they substances or some individual accident or property.  It invariably implies the possibility of separating one really distinct thing from another to the extent that one of the two at least may exist apart from the other. (p. 46)

Second Construal of 'Real Distinction'

On a Thomist view, my essence and my existence are not really distinct on the first construal of 'real distinction' because they are mutually inseparable: neither can be without the other.  This strikes me as entirely reasonable.  My individual essence is nothing without existence, and there are no cases of pure existence.  I am not now and never have been an existence-less essence, nor a bit of essence-less existence. And yet Thomists refer to the distinction between (indvidual) essence and existence in finite concrete individuals as a real distinction.  So 'real distinction' must have a second basic meaning, one that does not require that really distinct items be either mutually or unilaterally separable.  What is this second basic meaning?  And how does it differ from the Scotistic formal distinction?

Seeking an answer to the first question, I turn to Feser's manual  where, on p. 74, we read:

But separability is not the only mark of a real distinction.  Another is contrariety of the concepts under which things fall . . . .  For example, being material and being immaterial obviously exclude one another, so that there must be a real distinction between a material thing and an immaterial thing.  A third mark sometimes suggested is efficient causality . . . .

In this passage, Feser seems to be saying that there is one disinction called the real distinction, but that it has more than one mark.  He does not appear to be maintaining that 'real distinction' has two different meanings, one that requires separability and another that does not.  On the next page, however, Feser makes a distinction between a "real physical distinction" and a "real metaphysical distinction" where the former requires separability but the latter does not.  He goes on to say that for Scotus and Suarez a necessary condition of any  real distinction in created things is that the items distinguished be separable: "a distinction is real only when it entails separability." (75)

The Formal Distinction

I asked: "What is the second basic meaning of 'real distinction'?"  The answer I glean from Feser is that the second meaning is real metaphysical distinction, a distinction that does not require separability.  Now for my second question: How does this real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction?  According to Cross, "the formal distinction is the kind of distinction that obtains between (inseparable) properties on the assumption that nominalism about properties is false." (108)  Feser describes it as a third and intermediate kind of disinction that is neither logical nor real. (75)  Both what Cross and Feser say comport well with my understanding of the formal distinction.

Consider the distinction between a man's animality and his rationality.  They are clearly distinct because there are animals that are not rational, and there are rational beings that are not animals.  It is also clear that the distinction is not purely logical: the distinction is not generated by our thinking or speaking, but has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic  reality.  Is it then a real distinction?  Not if such a distinction entails separability.  For it is not broadly logically possible that the rationality of Socrates exist without his animality, or his animality without his rationality.  Anything that is both animal and rational is essentially both animal and rational.  (Whereas it is not the case that anything that is both sitting and speaking is essentially both sitting and speaking.)   So the Scotist, for whom the reality of a real distinction entails separability,  says that what we have here is a formal distinction, a distinction between two 'formalities,' animality and rationality, that are really inseparable but formally distinct.

My second question, again, is this:  How does the real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction?  In both cases, the distinction is not purely logical, i.e., a mere distinctio rationis.  So in both cases the distinction has a basis in reality.  Further, in both cases there is no separability of the terms of the distinction.  Socrates cannot be rational without being an animal, and he cannot be an animal without being rational.  Similarly, he cannot exist without having an essence, and he cannot have an essence without existing.

So what is the difference between the real metaphysical distinction (that Feser distinguishes from the real physical distinction) and the formal distinction?  If I understand Feser, his view is that the formal distinction collapses into the virtual distinction, which is a logical distinction, hence not a real distinction, whereas the real metaphysical distinction is a real distinction despite its not requiring separability.  But what is the virtual distinction?

The Virtual Distinction

Feser tells us that a logical distinction is virtual "when it has some foundation in reality." (73)  A virtual distinction is a logical distinction that is more than a merely verbal distinction.  He gives the example of a man's nature which, despite its being one thing, can be viewed under two aspects, the aspect of rationality and the aspect of animality.  The distinction between the two aspects is not real but virtual.  The virtual distinction thus appears to be identical to the formal distinction. 

Accordingly, the difference between the real metaphysical distinction and the formal distinction is that the first is real despite its not entailing separability while the second is logical despite having a foundation in reality.  I hope I will be forgiven for not discerning a genuine difference between these two kinds of distinction.  Feser suggests that the difference may only be a matter of emphasis, with the Thomist emphasizing the logical side of the virtual/formal distinction and the Scotist emphasizing the real side. (76)

Should we then irenically conclude that the metaphysical real distinction of the Thomists (or, to be cautious, of Feser the Thomist) is the same as the formal distinction of (some of) the Scotists?

Essence and Existence Again

I am afraid that matters are much messier.  Suppose you agree that essence and existence in Socrates are neither mutually nor unilaterally separable.  Suppose you also agree that Socrates is a contingent being: he exists (speaking tenselessly) but there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist.  The second supposition implies that Socates does not exist just by virtue of his essence:  his existence does not follow from his nature.  Nor is his existence identical to his essence or nature, as it is in the ontologically simple God.  So they must be distinct in reality.  But -- and here comes trouble -- this real distinction in Socrates as between his essence and his existence cannot be a distinction between inseparable aspects.  Animality and rationality are inseparable aspects of Socrates' nature; but essence and existence cannot be inseparable aspects of him.  If they were inseparable, then Socrates would exist by his every nature or essence.  This seems to imply that  the metaphysical real distinction is not the same as the formal distinction.  For the metaphysical real distinction between essence and existence requires separability of essence and existence in creatures.

Aporetic Conclusion

It looks like we are in a pickle.  We got to the conclusion that the real metaphysical distinction is the same as the formal distinction.  But now we see that they cannot be the same.  Some may not 'relish' it, but the 'pickle' can be savored as an aporetic polyad:

1. Socrates is a metaphysically contingent being.

2. Metaphysical contingency entails weak separability (as defined above) of essence and existence.

3. Nothing is such that its essence and existence are weakly separable.

The triad is logically inconsistent. 

Solution by (1)-denial.  One cannot of course maintain that Socrates is metaphysically necessary.   But one could deny the presupposition upon which (1) rests, namely, the constituent-ontological assumption that Socrates is compounded of essence and existence.  On a relation ontology, essence-existence composition makes no sense. 

Solution by (2)-denial.  One could try to show that contingency has an explanation that does not require weak separability of essence and existence.

Solution by (3)-denial.   One could argue that the individual essence of Socrates can be wthout being exemplified along the lines of Plantinga's haecceity properties. 

Each of these putative solutions brings trouble of its own.

Related articles

Existence Neither Accidental Nor Essential

Is Dying an Accidental or a Substantial Change?

On animalism, I am just a (live) human animal.  And so are you.  But there is a reason to think that I cannot be identical to my animal body.  The reason is that it will survive me. (Assume that there is no natural immortality of the soul.)  Assume that I die peacefully in my bed. I went to bed, but now I don't exist: what occupies my place in the bed is a (human) corpse.  A dramatic change took place in the immediate vicinity of the bed.  One and the same  human body went from alive to dead.  This suggests that dying is an accidental as opposed to a substantial change.  If I understand it, this is roughly the Corpse Objection to animalism.  The objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me.  Me and my body have different persistence conditions.

But there is another way to look at the situation.  Me and my body have the same persistence conditions.  My body will not survive me.  Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change.  When I die, the animal body that I am ceases to exist and one or more new bodies begin to exist.  (If my death is peaceful, as opposed to, say, 'Islamic,' then only one new body begins to exist.)  So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist.  The change is not alterational but existential.  This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive.  As Patrick Toner puts it:

Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive.  This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts,  -- there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal.  When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. ("Hylemorphic Animalism" in Phil Stud, 155, 2011, pp. 65-81)

An Objection

This strikes me as problematic.  Suppose dying is a substantial change and that Peter and Paul die peacefully at the same instant in the same place.  Peter and Paul cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2  begin to exist.  Suppose C1 is Peter's corpse and C2 is Paul's corpse.  What accounts metaphysically for C1's being Peter's corpse and opposed to Paul's, and vice versa? What makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's?

Why should there be a problem?  Dying is a substantial change, but it is not annihilation. (At the other end, being born is a substantial change but it is not exnihilation: no animal is born ex nihilo.)   Since dying is not annihilation, a corpse comes to be when Peter dies. And since the change is substantial, not accidental, the substance Peter ceases to exist and a numerically different substance, C1, begins to exist.  Now every change is a change in a substratum or subject.  So what is the subject of the change when Peter dies?  Answer: prime matter, materia prima.  This is what all the scholastic manuals tell me.

But if prime matter underlies substantial change, and provides the continuity between Peter and his corpse, then, given that prime matter is wholly indeterminate and bare of all forms, substantial and accidental,  the continuity that prime matter allows does not distinguish between the change from Peter to Peter's corpse and the change from Paul to Paul's corpse.  The substratum of these two changes is the same, namely, prime matter.  If so, what makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's?  That's my problem.

This problem does not arise if dying is an accidental change. For then we can say that Peter's designated matter (materia signata quantitate) which is numerically distinct from Paul's continues in existence as Peter's corpse.  We have an accidental change, a change from being alive to being dead in a particular parcel of designated matter.

Toner's Reply

Patrick Toner's reply is that designated, not prime, matter accounts for the different continuities.  Peter's corpse is continuous with Peter because the same designated matter is present in Peter and his corpse, but a different parcel of designated matter is present in Paul and his corpse.  The fact that the matter underlying the two changes is prime, however,  does not prevent the matter from also being designated.  Toner in effect rejects my assumption that the substratum of a substantial change cannot be a particular parcel of designated matter. 

What I had gathered from the manuals (e.g. Feser's, p. 171 et passim) was that (i) materia prima is the subject of substantial change; (ii)  materia secunda is the subject of accidental change; (iii)  every change is either substantial or accidental; (iv) no change is both; (v) no change is such that its subject or substrate is both materia prima and materia secunda.

But if Toner is right, I am wrong about  (v).

Toner draws on Joseph Bobik's commentary on De Ente et Essentia:

When we talk about quantified matter ... we are not talking about anything other than the matter which is part of the intrinsic constitution of an individual composed substance, that matter which can also be described as prime, as designated, and as nondesignated... Thus, to talk about prime matter, quantified matter, nondesignated matter, and designated matter is to talk about the same thing, but to say four different things about it, to describe it in four different ways. To speak of quantified matter, or perhaps better of matter as quantified, is to speak of what the matters of all individual composed substances have in common, namely, that in their matters which accounts for the possibility of their matter's being divided from the matters of other individual substances; it is to speak of that which makes it possible for individual composed substances to have matter in common as part of their essence. Matter as designated presupposes, and adds to, matter as quantified; and what it adds is actual circumscription so as to be just so much. To say that matter is quantified is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out, and nothing else. To say that matter is designated is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out and circumscribed to be just so much, just so much as is in Jack or Paul or any given individual composed substance. (148, emphasis added)

Response to the Reply

The Bobik passage implies that some one thing can be described in two different ways, as designated matter and as prime matter.  But then what is the one thing that can be described in these two ways?  Presumably, it is a particular parcel of designated matter, the matter of precisely Peter, say, which is numerically distinct from the matter of precisely Paul.  Materia signata is matter in the concrete, and prime matter would then be an abstraction from it and from every discrete parcel of designated matter.

If prime matter is but an abstraction, how can it serve as the real substratum of any such real change as is the dying of an animal? That is a real, concrete, change.  If every change is a change in something, then the something must itself be real and concrete and particular. That's one problem.

A second is that if both substantial and accidental changes are changes in a concrete parcel of designated matter, then what becomes of the distinction between substantial and accidental changes?  Can every change be viewed as one or the other?  Is it just a matter of the same change being described in two different ways?

This requires further development and in any case it is just the beginning of the aporetics of prime matter, something to be pursued in subsequent entries.

Conclusion

Given the extreme difficulty of the notion of prime matter, a difficulty that transfers to the notion of substantial change, I don't see that the objection I raise above has yet been adequately answered.

Related articles

Patrick Toner on Hylomorphic Animalism

Some Concepts of Matter

Coming into Being and Passing Away: Two Definitions of Chisholm Examined

Some Concepts of Matter

Perhaps Patrick Toner could tell me whether whether I understand the different uses of 'matter' in Aristotelian-Scholastic (A-S) philosophy. Here are some of the distinctions as I understand and interpret them.

1. For starters, we can and do use 'matter' to refer to material particulars, a horse, a statue, a man, and indeed any hylomorphic compound, any compound of matter (in a different sense!) and form.  When we speak of the material world, we mean these material things some of which are primary substances.

2. Then there is matter as individual proximate matter: what a material thing is immediately made of.  Take a nice Southwest example, a quesadilla, the individual proximate matter of which is a tortilla and some melted cheese. 

3. Individual nonproximate matter.  The individual proximate matter of the melted cheese is some cheese. But this cheese and its material components, while individual, are not the proximate matter of the quesadilla.

4.  Matter as specific proximate matter: the various kinds of space-filling stuff.  Cheese and tortillas for example. 

5.  Matter as matter in general.  This is materia prima, prime matter, absolutely indeterminate and bare of any and all forms and, as such, pure potency to any and all forms.

On this scheme, (2) and (3) are designated matter (materia signata) while (4) is undesignated matter: the matter that can be referred to in a definition.  For example, if I eat a quesadilla, the matter I consume is designated matter whereas if I define  'quesadilla,' the matter entering the definition is undesignated and inedible:  'A quesadilla is a common item of Mexican cuisine consisting of a corn or flour tortilla folded over melted cheese and sometimes other ingredients in the shape of a half-moon.' 

Now what about secondary matter, materia secunda?  This contrasts with materia prima.  'Secondary matter' is an umbrella term covering both (2) and (3) and (4).  Or that's how I understand it.  Note that proximate matter is not the same as secondary matter.  The proximate matter of a meat ball is the meat (assuming it is made of meat only), but protein is part of its secondary matter without  being proximate matter.  The concept of proximate matter is relative; the concept of secondary matter is not.

Coming into Being and Passing Away: Two Definitions of Chisholm Examined

Some changes are merely accidental or alterational.  Others are substantial or existential.  It is one thing for Tom to gain or lose weight, quite another for him to come to be or pass away.  Alterational changes including gaining weight, shifting position, and becoming depressed.  Such changes are changes in a thing that already exists and remains self-same through the change.  Call that thing the substratum of the change.  It does not change; what changes are its properties.  In a slogan:  no alterational change without unchange.

But coming-to-exist and ceasing-to-exist also count as changes.  Call them existential changes.  This prima facie distinction at the Moorean or datanic level between alterational and existential change leaves open three theoretical options: (a) reduce existential change to alterational change; (b) reduce alterational change to existential change; (c) maintain that they are mutually irreducible.  (C) is the least theoretical of the three and the closest to the data; let's see if we can uphold it.

Now it seems obvious that existential change cannot be understood in terms of alteration of the very thing that undergoes it: before a thing exists it is simply not available to suffer any alteration, and likewise when it ceases to exist. Coming-to-be is not gain of a property, but gain of a thing together with all its properties; ceasing-to-be is not loss of a property, but loss of a thing together with all its properties. But it also seems obvious that  existential change cannot be understood in terms of the alteration of anything distinct from the thing that undergoes it. Thus I don't think that the following tensed definitions of Roderick Chisholm shed any real light on coming-to-be and passing away ("Coming into Being and Passing Away" in On Metaphysics, U. of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 56):

D1 x comes into being =df There is a property which is such that x has it and there is no property which is such that x had it

D2 x has just passed away =df Something that was such that x exists begins to be such that x does not exist.

Consider the second definition first. If Zeno the cat has just passed away, then the property of being triangular, my house, and me all begin to be such that Zeno does not exist. And conversely. No doubt. But surely the real change which is the ceasing to exist of a cat cannot be understood in terms of mere Cambridge alterations in Platonica or in concreta distinct from the cat. The right-hand side of (D2) cannot figure in a metaphysical explanation of the left-hand side. It is the other way around. The real change in the cat when it ceases to exist is the metaphysical ground of the Cambridge alterational change in the house. Now suppose a cat comes into being. Then of course there is some property that it has, and every property was such that the cat in question did not have it. But again, the real change that occurs when a cat comes into existence cannot be understood in terms of Cambridge alterations of properties.

So Chisholm's definitions, though true, shed no light on the metaphysics of coming-to-be and passing-away.  Real existential change cannot be understood in terms of Cambridge changes.

But if Zeno's coming to be cannot be understood in terms of (D1), why can't we say that his coming to be is just the alteration of the gametes whence he sprang?  Creation (exnihilation) aside, coming to be is coming to be from something that already exists.  So why not say that when a substance comes to exist it comes to exist by the alteration of an already existing substance or substances?

Consider the house of the Wise Pig.  It is made entirely of bricks.  It came to be from those bricks.  Assume that each brick is an Aristotelian primary substance.  Did a new Aristotelian substance come into existence when the assiduous pig changed a pile of bricks into a house proof against the depredations of the Big Bad Wolf?  Or did nothing new come into existence?  It would be reasonable to hold to the latter view and maintain that all that happened was that an alterational change occurred to the bricks.  Similarly when the house is disassembles.  Nothing passes out of existence.  You have what you started with, a loa of bricks.

It is different with cats and people.  For example, when a person dies, its body is altered in various ways; but if the person ceases to exist at death, its ceasing to exist is not identical to the person's body being altered in these ways. A rational substance ceases to exist. And the same holds when a person comes into existence either at conception or some time thereafter. This coming into being cannot be identified with the alteration of such already existent material particulars as the mother's uterus and its contents. A rational substance comes to exist. Generation and corruption, to use the not entirely felicitous Aristotelian language, are at least in some cases irreducibly existential changes. Whether or not the coming to be of the Wise Pig's brick house is an addition to being, a person's coming to be is. (On the Boethian definition invoked by scholastics, a person is a primary substance of a rational nature.)

If a person's coming to be is a change, it is an existential change. It is not an alterational change in an existing substance or in existing substances.  Nor do persons spring into existence ex nihilo.  Persons develop from nonpersons and in such away that the nonpersons cease to exist and the person begins to exist.  But if all change requires a substratum of change that remains self-same through the change, a substratum that provides continuity and ensures that the change is a change and not a replacement,  what the devil is the substratum in the case of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be?  The Aristotelian-scholastic answer is prime matter. Prime matter, however, though its postulation is well-motivated by a couple or three different lines of argumentation is arguably unintelligible.  Prime matter is a wholly indeterminate and wholly formless really existent stuff of which all material substances are composed.  It belongs wth G. Bergmann's bare particulars and Kant's Ding an sich in point of unintelligibility or so I would argue.

More on materia prima later.

Related articles

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

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

Book Notice: Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics

This from the back cover:

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (editiones scholasticae, vol. 39, Transaction Books, 2014) provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader’s understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader’s understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.

I thank Professor Feser for sending me a complimentary copy which arrived a couple of hours ago.  So far, I have read the Prolegomenon (pp. 6-30) which is mainly a critique of scientism together with a rejection of the view of  philosophy as mere 'conceptual analysis.'

Scientism is the doctrine that "science alone plausibly gives us objective knowledge, and that any metaphysics worthy of consideration can only be that which is implicit in science." (10)  That is exactly what it is in contemporary discussions, although, for the sake of clarity, I would have added 'natural' before both occurrences of 'science.'  Also worth noting is that scientism is to naturalism as epistemology to ontology: scientism is the epistemology of the ontological view according to which (concrete) reality is exhausted by the space-time manifold and its contents as  understood by physics and the natural sciences built upon it such as chemistry and biology.

I won't repeat Feser's arguments, but they are pellucid and to my mind conclusive.  The usual suspects, Lawrence 'Bait and Switch' Krauss and Alexander Rosenberg, come in for a well-deserved drubbing.  Ed's prose in this book is characteristically muscular, but he keeps his penchant for polemic  in check.

By the way, if you want to read a truly moronic article on scientism, I recommend (if that's the word) Sean Carroll, Let's Stop Using the Word "Scientism.  Carroll thinks that the word is "unhelpful because it’s ill-defined, and acts as a license for lazy thinking."  Nonsense.  He should read Feser or indeed any competent philosopher's discussion of the topic.

Some of my take on these matters is to be found in Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism.'

Some hold that  philosophy, because it is not science, can only be conceptual analysis.  Ed makes a forking good point when he observes that this view is a variation on Hume's Fork:

The claim that "all the objects of human reason or enquiry" [Hume] are or ought to be either matters of "conceptual analysis" matters of natural science is itself neither a conceptual truth nor a proposition for which you will find, or could find, the slightest evidence in natural science.  It is a proposition as metaphysical as any a Scholastic would assert, differing from the latter only in being self-refuting." (26)

 Related articles

What is Scientism?

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

Catholicism to Atheism and Back

 

What Exists Exists

Reflecting on the seeming tautology, 'What exists exists,' Jacques Maritain writes,

This is no tautology, it implies an entire metaphysics.  What is posited outside its causes exercises an activity, an energy which is existence itself.  To exist is to maintain oneself and to be maintained outside nothingness; esse is an act, a perfection, indeed the final perfection, a splendid flower in which objects affirm themselves. (A Preface to Metaphysics, Sheed and Ward, 1939, pp. 93-94)

This is the sort of writing, florid and French, that drives analytic philosophers crazy and moves them to mockery.  But I think Maritain is here expressing an important insight.  Let me see if I can explain it with as little reliance as possible on Maritain's Thomistic machinery.

1.  A tautology is a logical truth, a truth true in virtue of its logical form alone.  Now it certainly does seem that 'What exists exists' is true in virtue of its logical form alone.  Write it like this: For any x, if x exists, then x exists. By Universal Instantiation, we get if a exists, then a exists, which is of the form, if p then p, which is equivalent to p or not-p, which is the Law of Excluded Middle.

2.  On the other hand, it has been clear for a long time that 'exist(s)' is no ordinary predicate.  To say of an item that it exists is not to characterize it or classify it.  Existence is not a classificatory concept.  It doesn't partition neutral items into two classes, the existent ones and the nonexistent ones.  Pace Meinong, there are no nonexistent items. And existence certainly does not partition existing items into two classes, the existing and the nonexisting.  When I say of a thing that it exists I am saying that it is not nothing.  I am not saying that it is F or G, but that it is.  I am pointing to its sheer being or existence.

3.  The same goes for 'What exists, exists.'  Although it can be used to express a tautology, it can also be  used non-tautologically.  Used non-tautologically, it does not say that that-which-exists is that-which-exists; it says that  that-which-exists exists.  In other words, it does not say, tautologically, that beings are beings; it says, non-tautologically, that beings are.

4. Somewhere in The Enneads Plotinus writes, "It is by the One that all being are beings."  But there would be no need to drag The One into the picture if 'all beings are beings' is a tautology.  Tautologies do not need truth-makers.  Plotinus' point, of course, is that it is by the One that all beings are.  They are in virtue of the One; their Being derives from the One.  Whether or not that it true, we understand what is being said and we understand that 'all beings are being' is not a tautology.

5. Metaphysics targets the existence of that-which-exists, the Being of beings, the esse of entia, das Sein des Seienden.  Thus metaphysics presupposes a difference between existence and the existent.  But  existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana once observed. (Scepticism and Animal Faith, Dover, 1955, p. 48, orig. publ. 1923.) And so the logician will try to knock the wind out of the metaphysical sails by trying to accommodate the difference between existence and what exists in some such aseptic fashion as the following:

x exists =_df for some y, y = x.

Accordingly, existence is identity-with-something-or-other.  'Exists' as a load-bearing predicate gets replaced by some purely logical machinery: the particular quantifer, a bound variable, the identity sign, and a free variable.  Existence for the logician is a 'thin' topic.  Thin to the point of being anorexic.  It is just logical bones bare of metaphysical meat.

6. Well, why not be a thin theorist?  I have written a lot on this topic, so now I will be very brief.  While it is of course true that everything that exists is identical to something, namely, itself, this presupposes that the things in question exist in a sense that cannot be captured by the above definition.  Another way of putting the point is that the above definition is circular.  For it amounts to

x exists =_df for some y that exists, y = x.

If I want to know what it is for something to exist, I learn nothing by being told that it is identical to something that exists, although that is of course true.

7.  Getting back to Maritain, he is right as against the thin theorists: existence is a metaphysically weighty topic.  'What exists exists' can be given a non-tautological reading.  But on the thin theory, it could only amount to the tautological 'What is identical to something is identical to something.'  But whether existence is a perfection, or indeed the final perfection, or rather the opposite, as Santayana and Sartre would maintain, is a further question.

8.  Unfortunately, no resolute thin theorist will be persuaded by anything I or anyone says to abandon his theory.  All my dialectic can do is lead the reader to a point where he either gets it or he doesn't, where he either sees it, or he doesn't.  You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. 

It's a bit like arguments over religion.  If you think that religion is nothing but a tissue of childish superstitions, will I ever be able to convince you otherwise?  No.  For it is not a matter of  analytical intelligence, but of insight, or rather, in your case  a lack of insight. 

Related articles

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

 

The Fictional and the Merely Possible

"To be or not to be, that is the question."  Or at least that is one question.  Another is whether Hamlet, that very individual, might have been actual.

It is a mistake to conflate the fictional and the merely possible. Hamlet, for example, is a fictional individual, the central character and eponym of the Shakespearean  play.  Being fictional, he does not actually exist.  But one might be tempted to suppose  that while there is no man Hamlet in actuality, there could have been, that Hamlet is a possible individual.  But far from being possible, Hamlet is impossible.  Or so I shall argue.

First we need to agree on some definitions.

D1. x is impossible =_df x cannot exist, i.e., x  is necessarily nonexistent.

D2. x is incomplete =_df  there is a property P such that x is indeterminate with respect to P, i.e., it is not the case that x instantiates P and it is not the case that x does not instantiate P.

The Main Argument

1. Hamlet is an incomplete object.  He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name.  It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't. 

2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.

Therefore

3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)

Therefore

4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)

The reasoning is correct and premise (1) is surely true.  If you are inclined to reject (2), claiming that it does not hold for quantum phenomena, I will simply sidestep that whole can of worms by inserting 'macroscopic' or 'mesoscopic' or some other suitable qualifier between 'an' and 'incomplete.'

Note that Hamlet is impossible even if the properties he is ascribed in the play are members of  a logically consistent set.  One could say, with a whiff of paradox, that Hamlet is impossible despite the fact that his properties are compossible.  His impossibility follows from his incompleteness.  What this shows is that not every impossible object harbors internal contradiction.  So there there are at least two types of impossibilia, those whose impossibility derives from inconsistency and those whose impossibility derives from incompleteness.  To be admitted to the elite corps of the actual, one must satisfy both LNC and LEM.  That the impossible needn't be internally contradictory is an insight I owe to Daniel Novotny who kindly sent me a free copy of his excellent book on the scholasticism of the Baroque era entitled, Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel (Fordham 2013). I am indebted in particular to his discussion on p. 108.

Objection: "Hamlet is possible; it is just that his actualization would have to consist in his completion. Surely God could actualize Shakespeare's Hamlet (the prince, not the play) by appropriately supplementing his property set."

Reply:  Suppose God were to try to actualize Hamlet, the very same individual encountered in the play.  To do so, God would have to supplement Hamlet's property set, bringing it to completeness.  For only that which is wholly determinate can exist in (macroscopic) actuality.  But there is more than one way to effect this supplementation.  For example, if the fictional Hamlet is indeterminate with respect to whether or not he takes his eggs with hot sauce, an actual Hamlet cannot be. He either eats egggs or he doesn't, and he either takes them with hot sauce or he doesn't. 

Let AH1 be hot-sauce Hamlet and AH2 non-hot-sauce Hamlet.  Both are complete.  Let FH be the incomplete fictional individual in the play.

We may now argue as follows.

If God brings about the actuality of  both AH1 and AH2, then, since they are numerically distinct, neither of them can be identical to FH. But God must actualize one or the other if FH is to become actual. If God actualizes one but not the other, then it is possible that he actualize the other but not the the one.  But then the actualization of either is contingent.  Thus if God actualizes FH as AH1, then, since he could just as well have actualized AH2 as FH, the identity of FH with AH1 is contingent.  But identity cannot be contingent: if x = y, then necessarily x = y.  Therefore, God can actualize neither and fictional Hamlet is impossibly actual, i.e., impossible.

Here is a third consideration.  It seems to be part of the very sense of the phrase 'fictional individual' that such individuals be, well, fictional, that is, irreal or unreal.  Now the real includes not only the actual and the necessary, but that which is really possible albeit unactual.  Thus real possibilities cannot be made up by minds and so cannot be fictional.  Therefore Hamlet, as a fictional being, is not a possible being.

According to Novotny, "Suarez and other Baroque scholastic authors seem to assume without question that consistent fictions, such as Hamlet, might become real beings. This implies that Hamlet is a possible being and  that therefore he is a real being. [. . .] For several reasons I do not think that a consistent fiction as such is a real possible being." (108)

I agree, and the arguments above are my way of fleshing out Novotny's misgivings.

Addendum (21 November)

The original main argument above is invalid as a commenter points out.  Here is

The Main Argument Repaired

0. Necessarily, for every x, if x is a fictum of a finite mind, then x is incomplete.

0*. Necessarily, Hamlet is a fictum of a finite mind, Shakespeare's.  (That very fictional individual could not have been the fictum of any other mind.)

Therefore

1. Necessarily, Hamlet is an incomplete object.  He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name.  It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't.  (from 0, 0*)

2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.

Therefore

3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)

Therefore

4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)

Related articles

Actualist and Presentist Ersatzism and Arguments Against Both

Fiction

Another Example of Metaphysical Impossibility without Internal Inconsistency

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

WARNING!  Scholastic hairsplitting up ahead!  If you are allergic to this sort of thing, head elsewhere.  My old post, On Hairsplitting, may be of interest.

My  Czech colleague Lukas Novak seems to hold that there is no mode of being that is the mode of being of purely or merely intentional objects:

. . . no problem to say that a merely intentional object O has an esse intentionale; but what is this esse? There are reasons to think that it is nothing within O: for objects have intentional being in virtue of being conceived (known, etc. . . ), and cognition in general is an immanent operation, i.e., its effects remain within its subject. It would be absurd to assume that by conceiving of Obama just now (and so imparting to  him an esse intentionale) I cause a change in him! So intentional being seems to be a mere extrinsic denomination from the cognitive act, a merely extrinsic property. Consequently, objects which have only intentional being, are in themselves nothing. They do not represent an item in the complete inventory of what there is. It seems to me that it is an error (yes, I believe there are philosophical errors:-)) to assume that objects must be something in themselves in order to be capable of being conceived (or referred to).

While agreeing with much of what Novak says, I think it is reasonable to maintain that  merely intentional objects enjoy intentional being, esse intentionale, a mode of being all their own, despite the obvious fact that merely intentional objects are 'existentially heteronomous,' a phrase to be defined shortly.  But to discuss this with any rigor we need to make some distinctions.  I will be drawing upon the work of Roman Ingarden, student of Edmund Husserl and a distinguished philosopher in his own right.  I will be defending what I take to be something in the vicinity of Ingarden's position.

1. An example of a purely intentional object is a table that does not exist in reality, but is created by me in imagination with all and only the properties I freely ascribe to it.  In a series of mental acts (intentional experiences) I imagine a table.  The table is the intentional object of the series of acts.  It is one to their many, and for this reason alone distinct from them.  Act is not object, and object is not act, even though they are correlated necessarily.  In virtue of its intentionality, an act is necessarily an act of an object, the italicized phrase to be read as an objective genitive, and the object, being purely or merely intentional, is dependent for its existence on the act.   But although the object cannot exist without the act, the object is no part of the act, kein reeller Inhalt as Husserl would say.  So, given that the act is a mental or psychic reality, it does not follow that the object, even though purely intentional, is a mental or psychic reality.  Indeed, it is fairly obvious that the imagined table is not a mental or psychic reality.  The object, not being immanent to the act, is in a certain sense transcendent, enjoying  a sort of transcendence-in-immanence, if I remember my Husserl correctly.  Of course it is not transcendent in the sense of existing on its own independently of consciousness.  Now consider a really existent table.  It may or may not become my intentional object.  If it does, it is not a purely intentional object.  A purely intentional object, then, is one whose entire being is exhausted in being an object or accusative of a conscious intending.  For finite minds such as ours, nothing real is such that its being is wholly exhaustible by its being an intentional object.

My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind.  But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw.  Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.

2.  The problem posed by purely intentional objects can be framed as the problem of logically reconciling the following propositions:

A.  Some mental acts are directed upon nonexistent, purely intentional, objects.
B.  Anti-Psychologism:  These purely intentional objects typically do not exist intramentally, for the Twardowskian reasons above cited.
C.  These purely intentional objects do not exist extramentally, else they wouldn't be purely intentional.
D.  These purely intentional objects are not nothing: they have some mode of being.
E.  Existential Monism:  everything that exists or has being exists or has being in the same way or mode.

The pentad is logically inconsistent.  One solution is to reject (D):   Purely intentional objects do not exist at all, or have any sort of being, but we are nonetheless able to stand in the intentional relation to them.  To this Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann view I have two objections.  First, what does not exist at all is nothing, hence no definite object.  Second, if intentionality is a relation, then all its relata must exist. A better solution, that of Ingarden, is to reject (E).

3. Ingarden rejects Existential Monism, maintaining that  there are different modes of being. (TMB, 48) Here are four modes Ingarden distinguishes:

a. Existential Autonomy.  The self-existent is existentially autonomous.  It "has its existential foundation in istelf." (Time and Modes of Being, p. 43) 

b. Existential Heteronomy.  The non-self-existent is the existentially heteronomous.  Purely intentional objects  are existentially heteronomous:  they have their existential foundation not in themselves, but in another.  Now if existential heteronomy is a mode of being, and purely intentional objects enjoy this mode of being, then it follows straightaway that purely intentional objects have being, and indeed their own heteronomous being.  If Novak denies this, then this is where our disagreement is located.

c. Existential Originality. The existentially original, by its very nature, cannot be produced by anything else.  If it exists, it cannot not exist. (52)  It is therefore permanent and indestructible. God, if he exists, would be an example of a being that is existentially original.  But matter, as conceived by dialectical materialists, would also be an example, if it exists. (79)

d. Existential Derivativeness.  The existentially derivative is such that it can exist only as produced by another.  The existentially derivative may be either existentially autonomous or existentially heteronomous.  Thus purely intentional objects are both existentially derivative and existentially heteronomous.

4. Now let me see if I can focus my rather subtle difference from Novak.  I am sure we can agree on this much: purely intentional objects are neither existentially original nor existentially autonomous.  They are existentially derivative, though not in the way a divinely created substance is existentially derivative: such substances, though derivative, are autonomous.  So I think we can agree that purely intentional objects are existentially heteronomous.  The issue that divides us is whether they have their own, albeit heteronomous, being.  Or is it rather the case that their being reduces to the being of something else?  I say that purely intentional objects have a very weak mode of being, existential heteronomy, in Ingarden's jargon.  Novak denies this.  Novak cites his master, the doctor subtilis, Duns Scotus:

 

And if you are looking for some “true being” of this object as such [viz. of
the object qua conceived], there is none to be found over and above that
“being in a qualified sense”, except that this “being in a qualified sense” can
be reduced to some “being in an unqualified sense”, which is the being of
the respective intellection. But this being in an unqualified sense does not
belong to that which is said to “be in a qualified sense” formally, but only
terminatively or principiatively — which means that to this “true being” that
“being in a qualified sense” is reduced, so that without the true being of this
[intellection] there would be no “being in a qualified sense” of that [object
qua conceived]. - Ord. I, dist. 36, q. un., n. 46 (ed. Vat. VI, 289)

The idea seems to be that the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, and that it therefore has no 'true being' of its own. The purely intentional object has being only in a qualified sense.  This qualified being, however, reduces to the being of the intellection.  I think this reduction opens Scotus and Novak up to the  charge of psychologism, against which Ingarden, good student of Husserl that he was, rails on pp. 48-49 of TMB.  For if the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, then the purely intentional object has  mental or psychic being -- which is not the case.  The object is not a psychic content.  It is not the act or a part of the act; not is it any other sort of psychic reality. 

Psychologism is avoided, however, if purely intentional objects are granted their own mode of being, that of existential heteronomy.  Although they derive their being from the the being of mental acts, their being is not the being of mental acts, but their own mode of being.  Analogy:  Though created substance derive their being from God, their mode of being is their own and not the same as God's mode of being.

More With Novak on the Real Distinction

I have been defending the real distinction between essence and existence in contingent beings.  Lukas Novak, though not rejecting the distinction, finds my arguments wanting.  Here is his latest challenge to me:

1) First I will use your own weapons against you. The following triad is inconsistent, any two propositions entail the negation of the remaining one. Which limb do you reject?

 

 

 

 

a) Necessarily, Socrates exists iff Socrates is a man.
b) Possibly, Socrates does not exist.
c) Necessarily, Socrates is a man.

Yes, the triad is inconsistent.  I am tempted to reject (c).  Socrates is essentially a man, but not necessarily a man.  In terms of possible worlds: Socrates is a man in every possible world in which he exists, but, being contingent, he does not exist in every world.  So he is essentially a man but not necessarily a man.  God, by contrast, is both essentially divine and necessarily divine: he is divine in every world in which he exists, and he exists in every world.

But if I reject (c), how can I claim, as I have, that while Socrates is possibly nonexistent, he is not possibly non-human?  For if S. is not possibly non-human, that is equivalent to saying that he is necessarily human, which in turn is equivalent to (c).

Novak appears to have refuted my contingency argument for the real distinction.

2) When interpreting the modalities in your two sentences, one can interpret the implicit quantifications over possible worlds as comprising either all possible worlds, or just the possible worlds where Socrates exists at all.

Lukas is referring to the following  two sentences, the first of which I claimed is true, and the second of which I claimed is false (because Socrates is essentially a man):

A. Socrates exists & Socrates is possibly such that he does not exist.

B. Socrates is a man & Socrates is possibly such that he is not a man.

I say that in order that (A) be true, it must be interpreted so that "possibly" invokes quantification over all possible worlds, not just those where Socrates exists (because there is no possible world among those in which Socrates exists such that Socrates does not exist in that world). On the other hand, in order that (B) be false, the quantification implicit in the "possibly" must be restricted to those worlds only where Socrates exists. Because it is not true that Socrates is human in worlds where he does not exist at all. As you yourself concede, essence without existence is just nothing, so in a world where Socrates does not have existence, he neither has his essence, which is humanity. Thus the different modal behaviour of the sentences is merely apparent, it is a result of your tendency to interpret the quantification implicit in modal terms differently when speaking about existence and about essential predicates.

Novak's very powerful objection, in effect, is that the following are both true:

A* There are possible worlds in which Socrates does not exist

B*  There are possible worlds in which Socrates is not human

and that these are the same worlds.  What's more, the starred sentences are the only possible readings of my (A) and (B).  Since the starred sentences are both true, my contingency argument for the distinction between individual essence and existence in Socrates fails.  What I had argued is that, since Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human, his existing is not identical to his being an instance of humanity.

Novak's point could also be put as follows.  In every possible world in which Socrates exists, he is human, and in every world in which he is human, he exists.  Hence there is no world in which he has the one property but not the other.  Existing and being human are therefore necessarily equivalent, equivalent across all possible worlds.  If so, it is not the case that Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human.

I grant the necessary equivalence, but deny that one can infer the identity of existing and being human from it.  Necessary equivalence does not entail identity.  Triangularity  and trilaterality are necessarily equivalent but non-identical.

But this doesn't settle the matter.  Lukas could agree that, in general, necessary equivalence does not entail identity, but still claim that I have not given a compelling reason for thinking that existing and being a concrete instance of humanity are non-identical.  After all, he is not rejecting the real distinction, but arguing that I haven't proven it.

Despite the obvious force of Novak's argument, I think there is a way of construing 'Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human' that evades the argument.   Here goes.

Suppose we take 'Socrates' to refer to a concrete individual essence, one that, obviously, exists.  We can say, with truth, that this essence might not have existed, that its nonexistence is possible in the sense that there is nothing in this essence to insure (entail) that it exist.  But it is also true that this existing individual essence, this existing instance of humanity, could not have been anything other than an instance of humanity:  it could not have been an instance of any other nature, felinity, say.  The Socratic essence could not have been a feline essence.  Understood in this way, it seems to me true to say that Socrates (the individual Socratic essence) is possibly nonexistent but not possibly non-human.  But if it is not possibly non-human, then it is necessarily human, in which case the individual Socratic essence is to be found in every possible world.

This essence must have some ontological status, and indeed a necessary ontological status.  But we have to avoid reifying it.  We can say that is has a merely intentional status in those worlds in which Socrates does not exist.  That is, it exists only as a divine accusative in such worlds.  In such worlds the essence possesses esse intentionale but not esse reale.  In those worlds in which Socrates exists, the Socratic essence posseses both esse intentionale and esse reale.

We can remove the contradiction in the original triad without hypostatizing essences by ascending to a higher viewpoint: we bring God into the picture.  God is a necessary being, so all the essences that enjoy esse intentionale in his mind are necessary beings.  To some of them such as the Socrates essence he superadds existence.  Although it is false that, necessarily, Socrates is human, it is true that, necessarily, the Socratic individual essence includes humanity.   

But then it seems that the real distinction stands and falls with the doctrine of divine creation. 

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Existence Neither Accidental Nor Essential

Geach on the Real Distinction I

Defending the Distinctio Realis Against Anthony Kenny

This post defends the real distinction between essence and existence.  For some background, see Geach on the Real Distinction I.

In Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002, p. 45), Anthony Kenny writes, "Peter's continuing to exist is the very same thing as Peter's continuing to possess his essence; if he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a human being and vice versa."

What Kenny is doing in this passage and the surrounding text is rejecting the real distinction between essence and (individual) existence.  Thus in a cat, a dog, or a man, there is no distinction in reality between its essence or nature and its existence.  In general, for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K.  Thus for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man; for Socrates to continue to exist is for Socrates to continue to be a man; and for Socrates to cease to exist is for Socrates to cease being a man.

The claim that for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K, is to be understood, not as a logical or metaphysical equivalence, but as an identity that sanctions a reduction: the existence of Ks just is (identically) their K-ness.  Individual (as opposed to what Kenny calls specific) existence reduces to nature.  But that is just to say that there is no real distinction in a thing between its individual existence and its nature.  For example, there is no non-notional or real distinction in Socrates between him and his existence. 

I have three objections to this broadly Aristotelian theory of existence according to which individual existence reduces to nature.

An Argument from Contingency

Socrates might never have existed.  If so, and if, for Socrates, who is a man, to exist = to be a man, then Socrates might never have been a man. This implies that a certain man, Socrates, might never have been a man, which is absurd. Therefore, it is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist = to be a man.

The first premise ought to be uncontroversial.  Speaking tenselessly, Socrates exists and Socrates is a man.  But there is no logical or metaphysical necessity that the man Socrates exist.  So, Socrates, though he exists, is possibly such that he does not exist. (This is equivalent to saying that he is a contingent being.)   So, given that to exist = to be a man, the man Socrates is possibly such that he is not a man.  But this contradicts the fact that Socrates is essentially a man.  For if he is essentially a man, then he is necessarily such that he is a man.  Therefore, it is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist = to be a man.

Convinced?  Here is another way of looking at it.  I point to Socrates and say, 'This might not have existed.'  I say something true.  But if I point to him and say, 'This might not have been a man,' I say something false.  Therefore, for Socrates, to exist is not to be a man.  Of course, he cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot BE a man without BEING.  But that is not the question.  The question is whether Socrates' being or existence is reducible to his being a man.  I have just shown that it is not. Therefore, there is a real distinction between essence and existence in Socrates.

What holds for Socrates holds for every man.  No man's very existence is reducible to his being a man.  And in general, no individual K's individual existence is reducible to its being a K.

An Argument from Reference

If for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man, then, when he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a man.   But then the proper name 'Socrates' used after the philosopher's death does not refer to a man. But it does refer.  For I can make true statements about Socrates, e.g., 'Socrates taught Plato.'   And the name refers to a man.  When Socrates ceased to exist, 'Socrates' did not commence referring to some other thing, a jelly fish say, or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy, or more plausibly, a corpse.  A man taught Plato, not a corpse, or a pile of ashes.  Therefore, it is not the case that for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man.

To understand this argument, please note that it is not being denied that, necessarily, at every time at which Socrates is alive, Socrates exists if and only if he is a man.  Socrates cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot be a man without existing.  What is being denied, or rather questioned, is the identification of Socrates' existing with his being a man.  As I have pointed out many times before, logical equivalences do not sanction reductions. 

A Third Argument

We cannot say that to exist = to be a cat, for then only cats could exist.  We, or rather the Aristotelian,  has to say that, for cats, to exist = to be a cat.  In general, for K-items, to exist = to be a K.  But why stop here?  Can we stop here?  There are no cats in general.  There are only particular cats, any two of which are numerically distinct, and each of which has its own existence. Consider Max and Manny, two cats of my acquaintance.  Each has his own existence, but they share the nature, cat.  So if each exists in virtue of being a cat, then each exists in virtue of being the very cat that it is, which is to say:  for Max to exist is for Max to be Max, and for Manny to exist is for Manny to be Manny.  But then, generalizing, to exist = to be self-identical. The theory we began with collapses into the existence =  self-identity theory.

But while each thing is self-identical  -- this is just the Law of Identity -- no contingent thing is identical to its own existence.  For if Max were identical to his own existence, then Max would necessarily exist.  If God exists, then God is identical to his own existence.  But Max is not God. Therefore, existence cannot be reduced to self-identity in the case of contingent beings.

Of course, given that contingent things exist, they must be self-identical, and they cannot BE self-identical unless they ARE or exist.  But there might not have been any contingent things at all.  So the existence of a thing cannot be reduced to the self-identity it could have only if it exists.  Get it?  If yes, then you understand the real distinction.

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Geach on the Real Distinction I

More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

Could God and the Universe be Equally Real?

Incarnation, Substance, and Supposit

I am still digesting the discussions in Prague.  In this post I present part of the rambling and over-long paper I delivered, beefed up somewhat, in an attempt to formulate more clearly my main points.

The orthodox view of the Incarnation is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word or Logos, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. Although the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as we read in the New Testament, the Word does not merely assume a human body, nor does it acquire a universal property, humanity; the Word assumes a particularized or individualized human nature, body and soul. The eternal Word assumes or 'takes on' a man, an individual man, with an intellectual soul and an animal body. And it does this without prejudice to its divine nature.  But now a problem looms, one that can be articulated in terms of the following aporetic tetrad:

 

 

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures, as orthodoxy maintains.)
c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

The tetrad is logically inconsistent: any three limbs taken in conjunction entail the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction (a) & (c) & (d) entails the negation of (b). The solution to the tetrad is to deny (d). One does this by maintaining that, while the individualized human nature of Christ is a substance, it is not a substance that supports itself: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity. If the Incarnation as Chalcedonian orthodoxy understands it is actual, then it is possible. If so, alien supposition is possible, which straightaway entails a distinction between substance and supposit: while every substance has or is a supposit, not every substance has or is its own supposit. The individualized human nature of Christ is a supposited substance but is not a supposit.

Given the substance-supposit distinction, we can secure the coherence of both the Incarnation and Trinity doctrines.  Christ is one person (one supposit) in two natures while God is one nature in three persons (three supposits). 

In correspondence, Dennis Monokroussos writes, "(c) is unacceptable to the orthodox Christian. There are two natures in the Word, but not two primary substances."  I admit that I should have said something in defence of (c).  But I think it is clear that on orthodoxy the Son's assumption of human nature is the assumption of a particular(ized) human nature with all that that entails, namely, a particular human soul and a particular human body with the very materia signata that a human body must have to be a concrete physical entity.  Thus, in the Incarnation  the Son becomes one with a particular human concrete primary substance. It is not the case that the Son assumes human nature in the abstract, whether human nature as a universal or human nature as particularized but taken in abstraction from matter and existence. The Son of God become man, a man, a living, breathing, suffering man mit Haut und Haar, skin and hair. So, contra Monkroussos, there are two distinct primary substances, the Son, and the man Jesus.  There are two individual natures and two individual primary substances.  But there is, on orthodoxy, for soteriological reasons that needn't detain us, only one person, only one supposit of a rational nature.

The distinction between substance and supposit can now be explained as follows.  Since there are primary substances that are their own supposits and primary substances that are not, to be a primary substance and to be a (metaphysical as opposed to logical) supposit are not the same.  The man Jesus is not a primary substance that is its own supposit: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity.  (I borrow the phrase 'alien supposit' from Marilyn McCord Adams.)

The problem that needs solving is this.  If there are two individualized natures, one divine, the other human, and both including rationality, then there are two persons (assuming the Boethian definition of person.)  But orthodoxy requires that there be only one person.  The contradiction is avoided in the time-honored manner by making a distinction, in this case the distinction between substance and supposit.  The distinction allows that an individualized rational nature needn't be its own personal supposit.

The main point of my paper is that the substance-supposit distinction is ad hoc because crafted for the precise purpose of removing theological contradictions.  What makes it ad hoc is that there are no non-theological examples of the distinction. 

You might grant me that the distinction is ad hoc, but then ask: what is wrong with that?  What is wrong with it is that it does not advance the project of understanding how the doctrines in question (Trinity and Incarnation) are  rationally acceptable.  If the theological doctrines are rendered intelligible by a distinction crafted for that very purpose, then  we are turning in a very tight circle:  the doctrines in question are intelligible because the substance-supposit distinction is valid, and the distinction is valid because the doctrines are intelligible. In other words, the doctrines and the distinction stand and fall together. Hence the distinction, which has no application apart from the theological doctrines, does nothing to show how the doctrines are possible or intelligible to our finite, discursive reason.

If my problem is to understand how it is possible that two individualized rational natures be one person, you are not helping me if you make a distinction the validity of which presupposes the possibility in question.

"Look, the Incarnation as orthodoxy understands it is actual; therefore it is possible: esse ad posse valet illatio."

To which I respond: the precise question is whether the doctrine can satisfy a necessary condition of rational acceptability, namely, freedom from contradiction.  For if it is not free of contradiction, then it cannot be actual.  If such freedom is purchased in the coin of a distinction that is as questionable as the doctrine it is meant to validate, then no progress is made. 

Nothing I have said entails that the Incarnation is not actual.  For our inablity to understand how it is possible does not entail that it is not possible.  (Compare: our inability decisively to refute Zeno and demonstrate how motion is possible is consistent with motion's being actual.)  One can make a mysterian move here: the Incarnation (and the Trinity) are actual, but our cognitive architecture is such as to prevent us from ever understanding how they are possible.  What is unintelligible to us, might be intelligible to angelic intellects or to God.

Compare the mysterianism of Colin McGinn.  He maintains that consciousness is wholly natural, a brain-function, but that our cognitive architecture is such as to prevent us from every understanding how it could be a brain function.  That naturalism is true, he takes 'on faith,' relying (apparently) on the magisterium, the teaching authority of Science, while insisting (rightly in my opinion) that it is utterly unintelligible to us how meat could give rise to consciousness.  How could  meat mean?  Gushing over the complexity of brain meat cuts no ice, to mix some metaphors.

On the other hand, if we cannot understand how X is possible, is that not some sort of reason for suspecting that it is not possible?

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Trying to Understand Ockham on Supposita in Light of the Incarnation

On Primary Substances and Accidental Unities

Theology Wagging the Ontological Dog?

What is the Difference Between a Substance and a Supposit?

Is Socrates a Substance or a Cross-Categorical Hybrid?

Some Favorable Citations of Suárez by Schopenhauer

During a delightful rural ramble outside Prague, I mentioned to Daniel Novotný that Arthur Schopenhauer had a high opinion of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617).  Daniel said he had heard as much but wondered where Schopenhauer had indicated  his high regard for the scholastic philosopher.  Here are some passages, though I have the sense that I am overlooking a more striking quotation than any of the ones I have just now managed to locate.

1. There is a place in the early On the Four-Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason where Schopenhauer is speaking of the four causes mentioned by Aristotle at Analyt. Post., II, 11.  Schopenhauer describes the Metaphysical Disputations of Suárez as diesem wahren Kompendio der Scholastik, "this true compendium of scholasticism."  (Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, Zweites Kapitel, sec. 6, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, p. 15.)

If the index to Schopenhauer's magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (two vols., tr. Payne, Dover) is to be trusted, there are exactly six references to Suárez all of them in the first volume.

2."It was known even to the scholastics [note 24: Suarez, Disputationes metaphysicae, disp. III, sect. 3, tit. 3.] that, because the syllogism requires two premisses, no science can start from a single main principle that cannot be deduced further; on the contrary, it must have several, at least two, of these." (p. 63)

3. "Consequently, time and space are the principium individuationis, the subject of so many subtleties and disputes among the scholastics which are found collected in Suárez (Disp. 5, sect. 3)." (p. 113)

4. "That which for man is his unfathomable character, presupposed in every explanation of his actions from motives, is for every inorganic body precisely its essential quality, its manner of acting, whose manifestations are brought about by impressions from outside, while it itself, on the other hand, is determined by nothing outside it, and is thus inexplicable.  Its particular manifestations, by which alone it becomes visible, are subject to the principle of sufficient reason; it itself is groundless.  In essence this was correctly understood by the scholastics, who described it as forma substantialis. (Cf. Suárez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, disp. XV, sect. 1.) (p. 124)

5. P. 152, fn. 21: "The scholastics therefore said quite rightly: Causa finalis movet non secundum suum esse reale, sed secundum esse cognitum.  See Suárez, Disp. Metaph., disp. XXIII, sect. 7 et 8. ('The final cause operates not according to its real being, but only according to its being as that is known.' [Tr.]"

6. The following excerpt is from "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy," an appendix to the first volume of WWR, pp. 422-423, emphasis added):

We may regard as the third point the complete overthrow of the Scholastic philosophy, a name by which I wish here to denote generally the whole period beginning with Augustine, the Church Father, and ending just before Kant. For the chief characteristic of Scholasticism is, indeed, that which is very correctly stated by Tennemann, the guardianship of the prevailing national religion over philosophy, which had really nothing left for it to do but to prove and embellish the cardinal dogmas prescribed [pg 013] to it by religion. The Schoolmen proper, down to Suárez, confess this openly; the succeeding philosophers do it more unconsciously, or at least unavowedly. It is held that Scholastic philosophy only extends to about a hundred years before Descartes, and that then with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such investigation, however, is in fact not to be attributed to Descartes and his successors,  but only an appearance of it, and in any case an effort after it. Descartes was a man of supreme ability, and if we take account of the age he lived in, he accomplished a great deal. But if we set aside this consideration and measure him with reference to the freeing of thought from all fetters and the commencement of a new period of untrammelled original investigation with which he is credited, we are obliged to find that with his scepticism still lacking in true earnestness, and thus abating and passing away so quickly and so completely,  he has the appearance of wishing to discard all at once all the fetters of the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation; but does so only apparently and for a moment, in order to assume them again  and hold them all the more firmly; and it is just the same  with all his successors down to Kant.

7. "The word 'Idea,' first introduced by Plato, has retained ever since, through twenty-two centuries, the meaning in which he used it; for not only all the philosophers of antiquity, but also all of the scholastics, and even the Church Fathers, and the theologians of the Middle Ages, used it only with that Platonic meaning, in the sense of the Latin word exemplar, as Suárez expressly mentions in his twenty-fifth Disputation, Sect. 1." (p. 488)

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Avicenna's God and the Queen of England

For a long time now I have been wanting to study Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's hard-to-find The Paradoxical Structure of Existence.  Sunday I got lucky at Bookman's and found the obscure treatise for a measly six semolians.  I've read the first five chapters and and they're good.  There is a lack of analytical rigor here and there, but that is par for the course with the old-school scholastic philosophers.  They would have benefited from contact with analytic philosophers.  Unfortunately, most of the analysts of Wilhelmsen's generation were anti-metaphysical, being  logical positivists, or fellow travellers of same, a fact preclusive of mutual respect, mutual understanding, and mutual benefit  Imagine the response of a prickly positivist to one of Jacques Maritain's more effusive tracts.  But I digress.

Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) must have been a successful teacher: he has a knack for witty and graphic comparisons.  To wit:

Avicenna's God might be compared to the Queen of England, to a figurehead monarch.  No law in England has validity unless it bears the Queen's signature.  Until that moment the law is merely "possibly a law."  But Parliament writes the laws and the Queen signs them automatically.  Avicenna's order of pure essence is the Parliament of Being.  Avicenna's God gives the royal signature of existence; but this God, like England's majesty, is stripped of all real power and liberty of action.  (Preserving Christian Publications, 1995, p. 43.  First published in 1970 by U. of Dallas Press.)

 

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On Primary Substances and Accidental Unities

I asked genuinely, not rhetorically : What is the difference between an Aristotelian primary substance and a supposit (hypostasis, suppositum)?  The latter figures prominently in the  philosophy of the School, as some call it, and I need to get clear about what supposits are, how they differ from primary substances, and whether there are any non-theological reasons for making the distinction.  In pursuit of the first question I thought it advisable to state what I understand a primary substance to be.  So I wrote:

By 'substance' I mean an Aristotelian primary substance, an individual or singular complete concrete entity together with its accidents.  Among the characteristics of substances are the following: substances, unlike universal properties, cannot be exemplified or instantiated; substances, unlike accidents, cannot inhere in anything; substances, unlike heaps and aggregates, are per se unities. Thus Socrates and his donkey are each a substance, but the mereological sum of the two is not a substance.

I thought that was tolerably clear, but as so often happens, a commenter, ignoring my question, took issue with my set-up.  That is, he questioned my characterization of primary substance. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

In his last comment, John the Astute Commenter wrote,

. . . I *am* saying that Socrates taken together with his accidents is not strictly identical to Socrates taken in abstraction from his accidents. But that point is obvious. What I am adding is this: Socrates taken together with his accidents is not a substance, but an accidental unity of a substance and some accidents. So I deny your claim that "it is only Socrates together with his accidents that is a complete concrete individual primary substance." Socrates together with his accidents may well be the only complete concrete individual, but he is not a primary substance. Nor is he prime matter; as you say, he is a compound of prime matter and substantial form, although in conjunction with his accidents he plays the *role* of matter in the accidental unity between him and his accidents. This would seem to be a debate about Aristotelian exegesis, so I'll leave it there and not continue to hijack your discussion. As I said, I thought the discussion in Z.4-Z.6 would prove relevant to that discussion, but it would seem that I was mistaken on that score, for which I apologize.      

I will now continue in the second person.

No need  to apologize, John.  You have raised an interesting challenge which I ought to be able to meet.  But I want to avoid the labyrinth of Aristotle exegesis to the extent that that is possible, for, lacking as we do the latter-day equivalent of Ariadne's thread,  once we enter we are unlikely ever to find our way out again.

The disagreement seems to be as follows.  I claim that, from a broadly Aristotelian perspective, which is the perspective of Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and other medievals who speak of substances and supposita, Socrates is a concrete, complete, individual, primary substance at a time t only when taken  together with his accidents at t.  I don't deny that a primary substance can be considered in abstraction from its accidents.  What I am claiming is that in concrete, mind-independent reality Socrates must have some set of accidents or other, and that, only when he is taken together with his accidents is he a primary substance.

Your claim is that Socrates together with his accidents (at a time, presumably, if I may interpret you a bit) is not a primary substance but an accidental unity, a hylomorphic compound the 'matter' of which is Socrates as primary substance and the form of which is something like the conjunction of his accidents.  To put the disagreement as sharply as possible, I am claiming that Socrates counts as a primary substance only when taken together with his accidents, whereas you are claiming that Socrates so counts only when he is not taken together with his accidents, but taken in abstraction from his accidents.  For one your view, Socrates taken together with his accidents is an accidental unity, not a primary substance.  To get beyond a stand-off we need to consider some arguments.

Argument for My View

1. Every primary substance is ontologically basic, where ontologically basic entities are those that exist per se or independently  unlike secondary substances and accidents.

2. Every ontologically basic entity is complete.

Definition:  x is complete =_df for every predicate F, either x is F or x is not F.  (This is rough since some restrictions will have to be placed on the range of the predicate F.  But it is good enough for a blog post.)  Thus either Socrates is either seated at t or he is not.  If he is neither seated nor not seated at t, then he is an incomplete object.  But if he is an incomplete object, then he cannot exist.  Now every ontologically basic entity is possibly such that it exists.  Therefore, every ontologically basic entity is complete.  Every ontologically basic entity satisfies the predicate version of the Law of Excluded Middle.  (I don't think the converse is true, but then I am not affirming the converse.)

 Therefore

3. Every primary substance is complete. (from 1, 2)

4. No primary substance minus its accidents is complete.

5. No primary substance minus its accidents is a primary substance. (from 3,4)

Argument for John's View

A. The complete individual Socrates is a hylomorphic compound of matter and form (Premise).
B. The [primary] substance Socrates is the matter of the complete individual Socrates (Premise).
C.  For all x and for all y, if x is a hylomorphic compound and y is the matter of x, then x is not strictly identical to y.
Therefore,
D. The complete individual Socrates is not strictly identical to the [primary] substance Socrates.

Read charitably, John's argument is an enthymeme the suppressed or tacit premise of which is:

S. The complete individual Socrates is an accidental unity of Socrates + his accidents. 

Without suppressed premises (S), (B) is obviously false and the argument is unsound.  But with (S), John's argument begs the question.

Here is another wrinkle.  Some accidents are said to be 'proper.'  These are accidents that are entailed by the nature (essence) of the thing that has the nature, but they are, for all that, accidents.   A proper accident of a substance is one the substance cannot exist without.  To put it paradoxically, a proper accident of a substance is an accident that is 'essential' and therefore not 'accidental' to the substance whose accident it is.  But a better way to put it would be to say that a proper accident, though no part of the essence, is de re necessary to the substance having the essence. 

To adapt an example from John J. Haldane, if my cat Max is lounging by the fire, he becomes warm.  His warmth is an accident but not a proper accident or proprium.  Max is warm both temporarily and contingently in virtue of his proximity to the fire.  But the warmth that flows from his metabolic processes is a proper accident without which Max could not exist. 

Now let's suppose that this distinction is not a mere scholastic Spitzfindigkeit but 'holds water.'  Then, clearly, and pace John, Socrates together with his proper accidents cannot be an accidental unity.  So Socrates as primary substance must include at least his proper accidents.  

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What is the Difference Between a Substance and a Supposit?

Trying to Understand Ockham on Supposita in Light of the Incarnation

Theology Wagging the Ontological Dog?

Substance and Accident: The Aporetics of Inherence

Accidents of a Substance: Simple or Complex?

What is the Difference Between a Substance and a Supposit?

I need to answer three questions.  This post addresses the first.

1. What is the difference between an Aristotelian primary substance and a supposit (hypostasis, suppositum)?

2. Is there any non-theological basis for this distinction? 

3. If the answer to (2) is negative, is the addition of suppposita to one's Aristotelian ontology  a case of legitimate metaphysical revision or a case of an ad hoc theoretical patch job?  According to Marilyn McCord Adams, "Metaphysical revision differs from ad hoc theoretical patching insofar as it attempts to make the new data systematically unsurprising in a wider theoretical context." ("Substance and Supposits," p. 40)

The First Question

By 'substance' I mean an Aristotelian primary substance, an individual or singular complete concrete entity together with its accidents.  Among the characteristics of substances are the following: substances, unlike universal properties, cannot be exemplified or instantiated; substances, unlike accidents, cannot inhere in anything; substances, unlike heaps and aggregates, are per se unities.  Thus Socrates and his donkey are each a substance, but the mereological sum of the two is not a substance.

Now what is a supposit?  Experts in medieval philosophy -- and I am not one of them, nota bene -- sometimes write as if there is no distinction between a substance and a supposit.  Thus Richard Cross: "Basically a supposit is a complete being that is neither instantiated or exemplified, nor inherent in another."  ("Relations, Universals, and the Absue of Tropes," PAS 79, 2005, p. 53.) And Marilyn McCord Adams speaks of Socrates and Plato as "substance individuals" and then puts "hypostases or supposits" in apposition to the first phrase. (PAS 79, 2005, p. 15)

My first question, then is:  Is there any more-than-verbal difference between a substance and a supposit, and if so, what is it?

One answer that suggests itself is that, while every substance has a supposit, some substances have alien supposits.  (I take this phrase from Adams, p. 31 et passim.)  A substance has an alien supposit iff it is not its own supposit.  I understand Aristotle to maintain or at least be committed to the proposition that every (primary) substance is essentially its own supposit.  If so, then no substance is possibly such as to have an alien supposit.  If alien supposition is metaphysically or broadly logically possible, however, then we have a ground for a more-than-terminological distinction between substances and supposits.  Whether the converse of this conditional holds is a further question.  For it may be that there is a ground for the distinction even if alien supposition is not possible.

Incarnation, Trinity, and the separated soul's survival between death and resurrection are theological examples of alien supposition.  Whether there are non-theological examples is a further, and very important question, one the answer to which has consequences for questions (2) and (3) above.

The Incarnation is an example of alien supposition as I will now try to explain.

The orthodox view is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth.  Although the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as we read in the NT, the Word does not merely assume a human body, nor does it acquire a universal property, humanity; the Word assumes a particularized  human nature, body and soul.  The eternal Word assumes or 'takes on' a man, an individual man, with an intellectual  soul and and animal body.  But now a problem looms, one that can be articulated in terms of the following aporetic tetrad:

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)

b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity.  (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)

c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.

d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

The tetrad is logically inconsistent: any three limbs taken in conjunction entail the negation of the remaining one.  Thus the conjunction (a) & (c) & (d) entails the negation of (b).  The solution to the tetrad is to deny (d).  One does this by maintaining that, while the individualized human nature of Christ is a substance, it is not a substance that supports itself: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity.

If the Incarnation as Chalcedonian orthodoxy understands it is actual, then it is possible.  If so, alien supposition is possible, which straightaway entails a distinction between substance and supposit: while every substance has or is a supposit, not every substance has or is its own supposit.  The individualized human nature of Christ is a supposited substance but is not a supposit.

Let me now say a bit about the Trinity.  Here too a problem looms that can be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad.

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition) 

e. There are exactly three divine persons, Father, Son, Holy Ghost .  (Rejection of 'Quaternity')

f.  The individualized nature of God is a primary substance  of a rational nature.

d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

Again, the tetrad is inconsistent, and again the solution is to reject (d) by saying that, while the individualized divine nature is a primary substance, it is not one that supposits itself: it has three alien supposits, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The Son is thus the alien supposit of both God's divine nature and Christ's human nature.

My first question concerned the difference between a substance and supposit.  My tentative answer is that  while only substances can be supposits, there are substances that are not their own supposits nor are they supposits for anything else, an example being the individualized human nature of Christ.

Is there a non-theological basis for the distinction?  if not, then the suspicion arises that the distinction is purely ad hoc, crafted to save tenets of orthodox Christian theology.  But this is a question for another occasion.

Related articles

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

Trying to Understand Ockham on Supposita in Light of the Incarnation

Mereology and Trinity: Response to Wong

E. J. Lowe on the Distinction Between Constituent and Relational Ontology

Trying to Understand Ockham on Supposita in Light of the Incarnation

I am presently working through Marilyn McCord Adams, "Aristotelian Substance and Supposits" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 79, 2005, 15-72).  The Czech scholastics and sometime MavPhil commenters Novak, Novotny, Vohanka, et al. have kindly invited me to read a paper at a conference on the Trinity in Prague this September and now I am under the gun to write something worth their time and attention. 

Adams writes, p. 39, "(Ockham is willing to conclude that 'A human supposit can be assumed' is true, even though 'A human supposit is assumed' is contradictory; just as 'A white can be black' is true,  even though 'A white is black' is impossible.)"

My present purpose is to make sense of this quotation.

I give 'A white can be black' a de re reading as follows:

1. A white thing is (logically) possibly such that it is not white.

For example, here is a piece of white paper.  Heeding Mick Jagger's injunction, I can paint it black.  But I wouldn't be able to do this if it were not logically possible for this thing that is actually white to be non-white. Although, necessarily, nothing white is non-white, the piece of paper is contingently white.

I give 'A white is black' a de dicto reading:

2. It is not (logically) possible that a white thing be non-white.

On these readings, both (1) and (2) come out true.  (1) is about a thing (res) and ascribes a modal property to it; (2) is about a proposition (dictum) and ascribes a modal property to it.

I give 'A human supposit can be assumed' a de re reading:

3. A human supposit is (logically) possibly such that it is assumed.

From the opening page of Adams' paper, I gather that a supposit is an Aristotelian primary (individual) substance.  So Socrates and Plato are human supposits, while a donkey is a supposit that is not human.  And from her gloss on Boethius, I gather that a person is a primary substance of a rational nature.  So Socrates and Plato are persons while a donkey is not.

Now if God incarnate is one person in two natures, as Chalcedonian orthodoxy has it, then God cannot assume a man.  For a man is a supposit of a rational nature, hence a person.  If God were to assume a man, then God the Son -- a person -- would be assuming a second person.  But pace Nestorious, there are not two natures and two persons in Christ, but one person in two natures.  So what is assumed in the Incarnation is not a supposit but a particularized human nature.  This is why 'A human supposit is assumed' is contradictory. That is, in de dicto terms,

4. It is (logically) impossible that a human supposit be assumed.

(3) and (4) can both be true.  It is impossible that a human supposit be assumed, for it it were it wouldn't be a supposit; but something that is a human supposit is possibly such that it is assumed. But this has the strange consequence that human supposits are only contingently supposits.  So Socrates is not essentially a supposit,  and if a supposit is a primary substance, the Socrates is not essentially a primary substance.

Thus Adams ascribes to Ockham the view that "The property of being a supposit is not essential to any creatable/created thing, because any creatable/created thing whatever can exist wthout it." (p. 39)  So whatever is a supposit might not have been.  Or rather whatever is a supposit might not have been its own supposit: every supposit is possibly such as to have an 'alien supposit,' namely God.

What is curious here is how very specific theological doctrines are allowed to drive the general ontology. 

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. 

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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.

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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?

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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

Mereology and Trinity: Response to Wong

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.