Edward Feser's Blog, page 85

Christmastime reading for shut-ins

Just announced: The Institute for Thomistic Philosophy. 
At Public Discourse, William Carroll gives us the scoop on Thomas Aquinas in China.
At Anamnesis, Joshua Hochschild asks: What’s Wrong with Ockham?
Philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger and physicist Lee Smolin have just published The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy .  In an interview, Smolin addresses the question: Who will rescue time from the physicists?In related news, io9 reports that scientists admit that they need philosophers. 

Forthcoming from Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum: What Tends to Be: Essays on the Dispositional Modality.  Details trickling out via Twitter, here, here, here, and here.
Philosopher Robert Koons has a blog: The Analytic Thomist.
Mathematician and philosopher James Franklin has a page at Academia.edu.  And, if you didn’t already know of it, a homepage.
At Scientia Salon, Massimo Pigliucci on Dupré, Fodor, Hacking, Cartwright, reductionism, and the disunity of the sciences.
Stephen Boulter reviews John Marenbon’s Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy at Philosophy in Review.
Check out The Journal of Analytic Theology.
Roger Scruton on the shock of the new, the power of kitsch, and the meaning of conservatism.

Knowing an ape from Adam

On questions about biological evolution, both the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and Thomist philosophers and theologians have tended carefully to steer a middle course.  On the one hand, they have allowed that a fairly wide range of biological phenomena may in principle be susceptible of evolutionary explanation, consistent with Catholic doctrine and Thomistic metaphysics.  On the other hand, they have also insisted, on philosophical and theological grounds, that not every biological phenomenon can be given an evolutionary explanation, and they refuse to issue a “blank check” to a purely naturalistic construal of evolution.  Evolutionary explanations are invariably a mixture of empirical and philosophical considerations.  Properly to be understood, the empirical considerations have to be situated within a sound metaphysics and philosophy of nature.For the Thomist, this will have to include the doctrine of the four causes, the principle of proportionate causality, the distinction between primary and secondary causality, and the other key notions of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics and philosophy of nature (detailed defense of which can be found in Scholastic Metaphysics ).  All of this is perfectly consistent with the empirical evidence, and those who claim otherwise are really implicitly appealing to their own alternative, naturalistic metaphysical assumptions rather than to empirical science.  (Some earlier posts bringing A-T philosophical notions to bear on biological phenomena can be found here, here, here, here, and here.  As longtime readers know, A-T objections to naturalism have absolutely nothing to do with “Intelligent Design” theory, and A-T philosophers are often very critical of ID.  Posts on the dispute between A-T and ID can be found collected here.)

On the subject of human origins, both the Magisterium and Thomist philosophers have acknowledged that an evolutionary explanation of the origin of the human body is consistent with non-negotiable theological and philosophical principles.  However, since the intellect can be shown on purely philosophical grounds to be immaterial, it is impossible in principle for the intellect to have arisen through evolution.  And since the intellect is the chief power of the human soul, it is therefore impossible in principle for the human soul to have arisen through evolution.  Indeed, given its nature the human soul has to be specially created and infused into the body by God -- not only in the case of the first human being but with every human being.  Hence the Magisterium and Thomist philosophers have held that special divine action was necessary at the beginning of the human race in order for the human soul, and thus a true human being, to have come into existence even given the supposition that the matter into which the soul was infused had arisen via evolutionary processes from non-human ancestors.
In a recent article at Crisis magazine, Prof. Dennis Bonnette correctly notes that Catholic teaching also requires that there be a single pair from whom all human beings have inherited the stain of original sin.  He also rightly complains that too many Catholics wrongly suppose that this teaching can be allegorized away and the standard naturalistic story about human origins accepted wholesale. 
The sober middle ground
Naturally, that raises the question of how the traditional teaching about original sin can be reconciled with what contemporary biologists have to say about human origins.  I’ll return to that subject in a moment.  But first, it is important to emphasize that the range of possible views consistent with Catholic teaching and A-T metaphysics is very wide, but also not indefinitely wide.  Some traditionalist Catholics seem to think that the willingness of the Magisterium and of contemporary Thomist philosophers to be open to evolutionary explanations is a novelty introduced after Vatican II.  That is simply not the case.  Many other Catholics seem to think that Pope St. John Paul II gave carte blanche to Catholics to accept whatever claims about evolution contemporary biologists happen to make in the name of science.  That is also simply not the case.  The Catholic position, and the Thomist position, is the middle ground one I have been describing.  It allows for a fairly wide range of debate about what kinds of evolutionary explanations might be possible and, if possible, plausible; but it also rules out, in principle, a completely naturalistic understanding of evolution. 
Perhaps the best-known magisterial statement on these matters is that of Pope Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis.  In sections 36-37 he says:
[T]he Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter -- for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.  However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church…
When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty.  For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.  Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
The pope here allows for the possibility of an evolutionary explanation of the human body and also, in strong terms, rules out both any evolutionary explanation for the human soul and any denial that human beings have a single man as their common ancestor.  This combination of theses was common in Thomistic philosophy and in orthodox Catholic theology at this time, and can be found in Neo-Scholastic era manuals published, with the Imprimatur, both before 1950 and in the years after Humani Generis but before Vatican II.
For example, in Celestine Bittle’s The Whole Man: Psychology, published in 1945, we find:
[T]he evolution of man’s body could, per se, have been included in the general scheme of the evolutionary process of all organisms.  Evolution would be a fair working hypothesis, because it makes little difference whether God created man directly or used the indirect method of evolution…
Whatever may be the ultimate verdict of science and philosophy concerning the origin of man’s body, whether through organic evolution or through a special act of divine intervention, man’s soul is not the product of evolution. (p. 585)
George Klubertanz, in Philosophy of Human Nature(1953), writes:
Essential evolution of living things up to and including the human body (the whole man with his spiritual soul excluded…), as explained through equivocal causality, chance, and Providence, is a possible explanation of the origin of those living things.  The possibility of this mode of origin can be admitted by both philosopher and theologian. (p. 425)
Klubertanz adds in a footnote:
There are some theological problems involved in such an admission; these problems do not concern us here.  Suffice it to say that at least some competent theologians think these problems can be solved; at any rate, a difficulty does not of itself constitute a refutation.
At the end of two chapters analyzing the metaphysics of evolution from a Thomistic point of view, Henry Koren, in his indispensible An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animate Nature (1955), concludes:
[T]here would seem to be no philosophical objection against any theory which holds that even widely different kinds of animals (or plants) have originated from primitive organisms through the forces of matter inherent to these organisms and other material agents…
Even in the case of man there appears to be no reason why the evolution of his body from primitive organisms (and even from inanimate matter) must be considered to be philosophically impossible.  Of course… man’s soul can have obtained its existence only through a direct act of creation; therefore, it is impossible for the human soul to have evolved from matter.  In a certain sense, even the human body must be said to be the result of an act of creation.  For the human body is made specifically human by the human soul, and the soul is created; hence as a human body, man’s body results from creation.  But the question is whether the matter of his body had to be made suitable for actuation by a rational soul through God’s special intervention, or if the same result could have been achieved by the forces of nature acting as directed by God.  As we have seen… there seems to be no reason why the second alternative would have to be an impossibility. (pp. 302-4)
Adolphe Tanquerey, in Volume I of A Manual of Dogmatic Theology (1959), writes:
It is de fide that our first parents in regard to body and in regard to soul were created by God: it is certain that their souls were created immediately by God; the opinion, once common, which asserts that even man’s body was formed immediately by God has now fallen into controversy…
As long as the spiritual origin of the human soul is correctly preserved, the differences of body between man and ape do not oppose the origin of the human body from animality…
The opinion which asserts that the human body has arisen from animality through the forces of evolution is not heretical, in fact in can be admitted theologically…
Thesis: The universal human race has arisen from the one first parent Adam.  According to many theologians this statement is proximate to a matter of faith.  (pp. 394-98)
Similarly, Ludwig Ott’s well-known Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, in the 1960 fourth edition, states:
The soul of the first man was created immediately by God out of nothing.  As regards the body, its immediate formation from inorganic stuff by God cannot be maintained with certainty.  Fundamentally, the possibility exists that God breathed the spiritual soul into an organic stuff, that is, into an originally animal body…
The Encyclical “Humani generis” of Pius XII (1950) lays down that the question of the origin of the human body is open to free research by natural scientists and theologians…
Against… the view of certain modern scientists, according to which the various races are derived from several separated stems (polygenism), the Church teaches that the first human beings, Adam and Eve, are the progenitors of the whole human race (monogenism).  The teaching of the unity of the human race is not, indeed, a dogma, but it is a necessary pre-supposition of the dogma of Original Sin and Redemption. (pp. 94-96)
J. F. Donceel, in Philosophical Psychology(1961), writes:
Until a hundred years ago it was traditionally held that the matter into which God for the first time infused a human soul was inorganic matter (the dust of the earth).  We have now very good scientific reasons for admitting that this matter was, in reality, organic matter -- that is, the body of some apelike animal.
Aquinas held that some time during the course of pregnancy God infuses a human soul into the embryo which, until then, has been a simple animal organism, albeit endowed with human finality.  The theory of evolution extends to phylogeny what Aquinas held for ontogeny.
Hence there is no philosophical difficulty against the hypothesis which asserts that the first human soul was infused by God into the body of an animal possessing an organization which was very similar to that of man.  (p. 356)
You get the idea.  It is in light of this tradition that we should understand what Pope John Paul II said in 1996 in a “Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.”  The relevant passages are as follows:
In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points…
Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis.  In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines.  The convergence in the results of these independent studies -- which was neither planned nor sought -- constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory…
[T]he elaboration of a theory such as that of evolution, while obedient to the need for consistency with the observed data, must also involve importing some ideas from the philosophy of nature.
And to tell the truth, rather than speaking about the theory of evolution, it is more accurate to speak of the theories of evolution.  The use of the plural is required here -- in part because of the diversity of explanations regarding the mechanism of evolution, and in part because of the diversity of philosophies involved.  There are materialist and reductionist theories, as well as spiritualist theories.  Here the final judgment is within the competence of philosophy and, beyond that, of theology…
Pius XII underlined the essential point: if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God…
As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.
End quote.  Some traditionalists and theological liberals alike seem to regard John Paul’s statement here as a novel concession to modernism, but it is nothing of the kind.  The remark that evolution is “more than an hypothesis” certainly expresses more confidence in the theory than Pius had, but both Pius’s and John Paul’s judgments on that particular issue are merely prudential judgments about the weight of the empirical evidence.  At the level of principle there is no difference between them.  Both popes affirm that the human body may have arisen via evolution, both affirm that the human soul did not so arise, and both refuse to accept the metaphysical naturalist’s understanding of evolution.  John Paul II is especially clear on this last point.  As you would expect from a Thomist, he rightly insists that evolutionary explanations are never purely empirical but all presuppose alternative background metaphysical assumptions.  Hence he notes that a fully worked out theory of evolution “must also involve importing some ideas from the philosophy of nature” and that here “the final judgment is within the competence of philosophy and, beyond that, of theology” -- not empirical science per se.  And as Bonnette notes, the Catechism issued under Pope John Paul II essentially reaffirms, in the relevant sections (396-406), the traditional teaching that the human race inherited the stain of original sin from one man.
Neither those conservative Catholics who would in principle rule out any evolutionary aspect to human origins, nor those liberal Catholics who would rule out submitting the claims made by contemporary evolutionary biologists to any philosophical or theological criticism, can find support in the teaching of either of these popes. 
Monogenism or polygenism?
But again, how can the doctrine of original sin be reconciled with what contemporary biology says about human origins?  For the doctrine requires descent from a single original ancestor, whereas contemporary biologists hold that the genetic evidence indicates that modern humans descended from a population of at least several thousand individuals. 
This is an issue I addressed a few years ago in a series of posts (here, here, and here).  Longtime readers will recall that I there rehearsed a proposal developed by Mike Flynn and Kenneth Kemp to the effect that we need to distinguish the notion of a creature which is human in a strict metaphysicalsense from that of a creature which is “human” merely in a looser, purely physiological sense.  The latter sort of creature would be more or less just like us in its bodily attributes but would lack our intellectual powers, which are incorporeal.  In short, it would lack a human soul.  Hence, though genetically it would appear human, it would not be a rational animal and thus notbe human in the strict metaphysical sense.  Now, this physiologically “human” but non-rational sort of creature is essentially what Pius XII, John Paul II, and the philosophers and theologians quoted above have in mind when they speak of a scenario in which the human body arises via evolutionary processes.
The Flynn-Kemp proposal is this.  Suppose evolutionary processes gave rise to a population of several thousand creatures of this non-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” sort.  Suppose further that God infused rational souls into two of these creatures, thereby giving them our distinctive intellectual and volitional powers and making them truly human.  Call this pair “Adam” and “Eve.”  Adam and Eve have descendents, and God infuses into each of them rational souls of their own, so that they too are human in the strict metaphysical sense.  Suppose that some of these descendents interbreed with creatures of the non-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” sort.  The offspring that result would also have rational souls since they have Adam and Eve as ancestors (even if they also have non-rational creatures as ancestors).  This interbreeding carries on for some time, but eventually the population of non-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” creatures dies out, leaving only those creatures who are human in the strict metaphysical sense. 
On this scenario, the modern human population has the genes it does because it is descended from this group of several thousand individuals, initially only two of whom had rational or human souls.  But only those later individuals who had this pair among their ancestors (even if they also had as ancestors members of the original group which did not have human souls) have descendents living today.  In that sense, every modern human is both descended from an original population of several thousand and from an original pair.  There is no contradiction, because the claim that modern humans are descended from an original pair does not entail that they received all their genes from that pair alone. 
Of course, this is speculative.  No one is claiming to know that this is actually what happened, or that Catholic teaching requiresthis specific scenario.  The point is just that it shows, in a way consistent with what Catholic orthodoxy and Thomistic philosophy allow vis-à-vis evolution, that the genetic evidence is not in fact in conflict with the doctrine of original sin.  Naturally other Catholics and Thomists might reasonably disagree with it.
Having said that, I have yet to see any plausible objections to the Flynn-Kemp scenario.  This brings us back to Prof. Bonnette’s article.  In response to the Flynn-Kemp proposal, he writes:
The difficulty with any interbreeding solution (save, perhaps, in rare instances) is that it would place at the human race’s very beginning a severe impediment to its healthy growth and development.  Natural law requires that marriage and procreation take place solely between a man and a woman, so that children are given proper role models for adult life.  So too, even if the union between a true human and a subhuman primate were not merely transitory, but lasting, the defective parenting and role model of a parent who is not a true human being would introduce serious disorder in the proper functioning of the family and education of children.  Hence, widespread interbreeding is not an acceptable solution to the problem of genetic diversity.
Moreover, given the marked reduction in the number of ancient HLA-DRB1 alleles found by the later genetic studies of Bergström and von Salomé, it may turn out that no interbreeding is needed at all, or at most, that very rare instances of it may have occurred.  Such rare events might not even entail the consent of true human beings, since they could result from an attack by a subhuman male upon a non-consenting human female.
I put to one side Prof. Bonnette’s remarks about the genetic evidence, which I’ll leave to the biologists to evaluate.  Bonnette allows that some interbreeding may have occurred, but he claims that it cannot have been “widespread” and that the reason has to do with natural law.  But what is the problem, exactly?
Back in 2011, when Flynn, Kemp, and I first wrote on this topic and the Flynn-Kemp proposal was getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere, some people objected that interbreeding of the sort in question amounted to bestiality.  But of course, no one is suggesting that we should approve of the interbreeding in question.  The claim is merely that in fact it may have happened, even if this was contrary to natural and divine law (just as Cain killed Abel even though this was contrary to the natural law, and just as Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, even though this was contrary to divine law). 
Nor would it be a good objection to suggest that no one would plausibly have been tempted to engage in such interbreeding.  After all, the scenario in question would hardly be comparable to that of the average member of contemporary civilization being tempted to have sex with an ape, which would of course not be psychologically plausible.  For one thing, the sub-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” creatures in question would notbe like apes, or indeed like any of the non-human animals with which we are familiar.  They would more or less look like us.  Furthermore, they would even act like us to some degree.  As I noted in a recent post, though a purely material system could never in principle exhibit true rationality, it might simulateit to a significant extent (just as if you add enough sides to a polygon you will get something that looks like a circle even though it could not really be a circle).  The sub-rational creatures in question would have been sphexish, but a sufficiently complex sphexish creature might seem not to be on a superficial examination.  Recall Popper’s distinction between four functions of language: expressive, signaling, descriptive, and argumentative.  The sub-rational creatures in question would not be capable of the latter two functions (which presuppose rationality) but they might have exhibited very sophisticated versions of the first two functions.
Meanwhile, the earliest true humans would not have had anything like the modern civilizational accompaniments of sexual activity, especially given the effects of original sin.  Obviously it would be absurd to think of their liaisons as involving smooth techniques of romantic seduction, contemporary standards of personal hygiene, etc.  So, the cultural “distance” between primitive true human beings and the sub-rational creatures in question need not have been so great as to make the sexual temptation psychologically implausible.  It might have been comparable to a very uncultured and unsophisticated person taking sexual advantage of an even more unsophisticated and indeed very stupid person.  Not that it was exactly like that, since even a stupid person is still intelligent in the strict sense, whereas the sub-rational creatures in question wouldn’t even rise to the level of stupidity.  The point is that the situation could have been psychologically close enough to that for the temptation to be real.  (As I indicated, partly in jest, in one of the earlier posts, we might think on the model of Charlton Heston’s character “Taylor” being attracted to the Linda Harrison character “Nova” in Planet of the Apes -- not that the early sub-rational creatures would have looked quite that good!)
It doesn’t seem that the “bestiality” issue per se is really the heart of Prof. Bonnette’s objection, though.  His point seems instead to be that a “union” of a true human being with a sub-rational creature of the sort in question would be dysfunctional vis-à-vis the proper rearing of truly human children.  This is true, but it is hard to see how it is a problem for the Flynn-Kemp scenario, for nothing in that scenario requires that such “unions” be anywhere close to optimal from a child-rearing point of view, or even that there be “unions” (of some long-term sort) in the first place.  All that it requires is that there was enough interbreeding to account for the genetic evidence appealed to by contemporary biologists.  It isn’t clear how the question of whether, how, and to what extent the sub-rational creatures were involved in child-rearing affects the judgment that there was sufficient interbreeding. 
Perhaps Bonnette thinks that child-rearing would have been so deficient that the population of true humans could not have survived long enough to displace the sub-rational creatures.  But it is hard to see why.  Surely the child of a “union” between a true human being and one of the sub-rational creatures would have an advantage over the offspring of two sub-rational creatures, for such a child would itself have rationality and at least one rational parent, whereas the other sort of offspring would have neither.  Moreover, we needn’t think in terms of such pairings in the first place.  Why not think instead of a scenario where a truly human male forms a union with a truly human female but also has several sub-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” females as concubines, where the resulting children are all essentially reared by the human couple?  And such arrangements need only have occurred frequently enough for the truly human population to supplant the population of sub-rational creatures.  There is no need to flesh out the Flynn-Kemp scenario in the specific way Bonnette (apparently) does.
So, it seems to me that neither Prof. Bonnette nor anyone else has raised any serious difficulty for the Flynn-Kemp proposal.  However, Prof. Bonnette is right to hold that many Catholics need to show greater caution when commenting on matters pertaining to evolution.

Causality and radioactive decay

At the Catholic blog Vox Nova, mathematics professor David Cruz-Uribe writes:
I… am currently working through the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas as part of his proofs of the existence of God… [S]ome possibly naive counter-examples from quantum mechanics come to mind.  For instance, discussing the principle that nothing can change without being affected externally, I immediately thought of the spontaneous decay of atoms and even of particles (e.g., so-called proton decay).
This might be a very naive question: my knowledge of quantum mechanics is rusty and probably out of date, and I know much, much less about scholastic metaphysics.  So can any of our readers point me to some useful references on this specific topic? I’ve discussed this issue before, and one of Cruz-Uribe’s readers directs him to a blog post of mine in which I responded to a version of this sort of objection raised by physicist Robert Oerter.  Unfortunately, the combox discussion that ensues largely consists of a couple of Cruz-Uribe’s readers competing with each other to see who can emit the most squid ink (though Brandon Watson manfully tries to shine some light into the darkness).  One reader starts things out by writing:

Feser’s… argument seems to boil down to saying, “Just because we can’t find a cause for quantum phenomena doesn’t mean there isn’t one.” … Thing is, Bell has shown that you can’t have local unknown variables in quantum events. Bohm’s interpretation would give you the possibility of unknown variables (thus taking out the random, seemingly acausal, aspect), but at the price of locality (in short, such variables would be global, and not tied to a specific location; so you lose any predictability, anyway).
As readers of the post on Oerter know, this essentially just repeats the completely point-missing objection from Oerter that was the subject of the post, while ignoring what I said in the post in reply to the objection!  The combox discussion goes downhill from there, with so many points missed, questions begged and crucial distinctions blurred that you’d think you were reading Jerry Coyne’s blog. 
Cruz-Uribe’s reader accuses me of having a “weak” understanding of the relevant physics, which is why he launches into the mini lesson on Bell and Bohm.  But it’s his reading skills that are weak, since I made it clear in the post that I wasn’t in the first place making any claim about the physics of systems of the sort in question, and thus wasn’t saying anything that could be incompatible with what we know from physics.  In particular, I wasn’t advocating a “hidden variable theory” or the like, but rather making a purely philosophical point about causality that is entirely independent of such theories.
This is one of many factors that hinder fruitful discussion of these topics even with well-meaning people (like Cruz-Uribe) who know some science but know little philosophy.  They constantly translate philosophical claims into the physics terms that they feel more comfortable and familiar with, and proceed to run off at high speed in the wrong direction. 
This is why you really can’t address specific issues like radioactive decay without first doing some general philosophical stage-setting.  For it’s never really the empirical or scientific details that are doing the work in objections to Scholastic metaphysics like the one at issue.  What’s really doing the work is the ton of philosophical baggage that the critics unreflectively bring to bear on the subject -- the assumptions they read into the physics and then read back out again, thinking they’ve raised a “scientific” objection when what they’ve really done is raised a question-begging philosophical objection disguised as a scientific objection.  
(I imagine that educated religious people like Cruz-Uribe and his readers aren’t fooled by this kind of sleight of hand in other scientific contexts.  For instance, I’d wager that they would be unimpressed by arguments to the effect that neuroscience has shown that free will is an illusion.  As I have argued hereand here, neuroscience has shown no such thing, and such claims invariably rest not on science but on tendentious philosophical assumptions that have been read into the scientific findings.  But exactlythe same thing is true of claims to the effect that quantum mechanics has falsified the principle of causality, or that Newton or Einstein refuted the Aristotelian analysis of change.)
In what follows, then, I will first prepare the ground by calling attention to some common fallacies committed by critics of Scholastic metaphysics who appeal to modern physics -- fallacies some of which are committed by Cruz-Uribe’s readers in the course of their combox discussion.  Anyone wanting to comment intelligently on the subject at hand has to take care to avoid these fallacies.  Second, I will make some general remarks about what a philosophical approach to the subject at hand involves, as opposed to the approach taken by physics.  (I’ve discussed this issue many times before, and indeed did so in a couple of posts -- hereand here-- that followed up the post on Oerter that Cruz-Uribe and his readers were discussing.)  Finally, in light of this background I’ll address the specific issue of radioactive decay and causality.
Fads and fallacies in the name of science
So, let’s consider some of the confusions that are rife in discussions of the relationship between physics on the one hand and philosophy (and in particular Scholastic philosophy) on the other:
A. Conflating empirical and metaphysical issues: Those who know some science but not a lot of philosophy very often assume that when a Scholastic philosopher says something about the nature of causality, or substance, or matter, or the like, then he is making a claim that stands or falls with what physics tells us, or at any rate should stand or fall with what physics tells us.  But this is a category mistake.  Scholastic metaphysics is not in competition with physics, but approaches the phenomena at a different (and indeed deeper) level of analysis.  Its claims do not stand or fall with the findings of physics, any more than the claims of arithmetic stand or fall with the findings of physics.  Indeed, like arithmetic, the basic theses of Scholastic metaphysics are (so the Scholastic argues) something any possible physics must presuppose.
Sometimes the critics assume that Scholastic metaphysics is in competition with physics because they are themselves making question-begging metaphysical assumptions.  For instance, they might assume that any rationally justifiable claim about the nature of matter simply must be susceptible of formulation in the mathematical language of physics, or must be susceptible of empirical falsification.  They are essentially making a metaphysics out of physics.  Only physics can tell us anything about the nature of physical reality (so the critic supposes), so any claim about the nature of physical reality is implicitly, even if not explicitly, a claim of physics.  As we will see below, this cannot possibly be right.  Physics cannot even in principle tell us everythingthere is to know about physical reality (let alone reality more generally).  But even if the assumption in question could be right, it simply begs the question against the Scholastic merely to assert it, since the Scholastic rejects this assumption, and on the basis of arguments that need to be answered rather than ignored (arguments I’ll discuss below). 
Sometimes the conflation of empirical and metaphysical issues is due less to such large-scale philosophical assumptions than to a simple fallacy of equivocation.  Both physicists and Scholastic metaphysicians use terms like “cause,” “matter,” and the like.  A superficial reading therefore often leads critics to assume that they are addressing the same issues, when in fact they are very often not using the key terms in the same sense. 
Sometimes the conflation is due to sheer intellectual sloppiness.  Critics will formulate the issues in ridiculously sweeping terms, making peremptory claims to the effect that “Aristotelianism was refuted by modern science,” for example.  In fact, of course, the labels “Aristotelianism” and “modern science” each cover a large number of distinct and logically independent ideas and arguments, and these need carefully to be disentangled before the question of the relationship between Scholastic metaphysics and modern physics can fruitfully be addressed.  It is no good to say (for example) that since Aristotle’s geocentrism and theory of natural place have been falsified, “therefore” we should not take seriously his theory of act and potency or the account of causality that rests on it.  This is simply a non sequitur.  Such issues are completely independent of one another, logically speaking (regardless of the contingent historicalassociation between them).
B. Conflating genus and species: Even when physicists and Scholastic metaphysicians are using terms in the same sense, critics often confuse what is really only a specific instance of the general class named by a term with the general class itself.  For example, where the notion of “cause” is concerned, Scholastic metaphysicians distinguish between formal, material, efficient, and final causes.  Where efficient causes are concerned, they distinguish between principal and instrumental causes, between series of causes which are essentially ordered and those which are accidentally ordered, and between those which operate simultaneously versus those which are ordered in time.  They distinguish between total causes and partial causes, and between proximate and remote causes.  They regard causality as primarily a feature of substances and only secondarily as a relation between events.  They distinguish between causal powers and the operation of those powers, between active causal power and passive potencies.  And so forth.  All of these distinctions are backed by arguments, and the Scholastic maintains that they are all necessary in order to capture the complexity of causal relations as they exist in the actual world. 
Now, those who criticize Scholastic metaphysics on scientific grounds typically operate with a very narrow understanding of causality.  In particular, they often conceive of it as a deterministic relation holding between temporally separated events.  They will then argue (for example) that quantum mechanics has undermined causality thus understood, and conclude that it has therefore undermined causality full stop.  One problem with this, of course, is that whether quantum mechanics really is incompatible with determinism is a matter of controversy, though as I have said, nothing in the Scholastic position stands or falls with the defensibility of Bohmian hidden variable theories.  The deeper point is that it is simply fallacious to suppose that to undermine one kind of causality (and in one kind of context) is to undermine causality as such.  Certainly it begs the question against the Scholastic, who denies that all causality reduces to deterministic relations holding between temporally separated events.
The conflation of a general class with a specific kind within the general class is evident too in discussions of motion.  Scholastics and other Aristotelians think of motion in general as change, and change as the actualization of potency.  Local motion or change with respect to place or location is just one kind of actualization of a potency, and is metaphysically less fundamental than other kinds.  When motion is discussed in modern physics, however, it is of course local motion that is exclusively in view. 
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this focus, but it would be fallacious to draw, from what modern physics says about “motion” (in the sense of local motion), sweeping conclusions about what Aristotelians say about “motion” (in the sense of the actualization of potency).  This would be to confuse what is true of one kind of change for what is true of change as such.  Yet this kind of fallacious conflation is very common.  Of course, a critic of Scholastic metaphysics might claim that local motion is the only kind of change there really is, but merely to assertthis is simply to beg the question against the Scholastic, who has arguments for the claim that local motion cannotbe the only kind of change there is.  (I have addressed this particular issue in detail elsewhere, e.g. hereand here.)
C. Confusing general principles with specific applications of those principles: When a thinker, whether a philosopher or a scientist, puts forward a general principle, he sometimes illustrates it with examples that later turn out to be deficient.  But it simply doesn’t follow that the general principle itself is mistaken.  For example, people often think of the evolution of the horse as a neat transition from very small animals to ever larger ones, as in the kind of exhibit they might have seen in a natural history museum as a child.  It turns out that things aren’t quite so neat.  There is no hard and fast correlation between the size of a horse and where it appears in the fossil record.  It doesn’t follow, however, that modern horses did not evolve from much smaller animals.  That earlier accounts of the evolution of the horse turn out to be mistaken does not entail that the general principle that horses evolved is mistaken.  (ID enthusiasts are kindly asked to spare us any frantic comments about evolution.  This is not a post about that subject.  It’s just an example.) 
However, though philosophical naturalists never tire of making this point when Darwinism is in question, they suddenly forget it when Aristotelianism or Scholasticism is what is at issue.  For example, Aristotelians defend the reality of final causality -- the idea that natural substances and processes are inherently “directed towards” certain characteristic effects or ranges of effects.  In previous centuries, the idea was often illustrated in terms of Aristotle’s view that heavy objects are naturally directed toward the center of the earth as their “natural place.”  That turns out to be mistaken.  This is often treated as a reason for rejecting the idea of final causality as such, but this simply doesn’t follow.  In general, the deficiencies of this or that illustration of some Scholastic metaphysical thesis are simply not grounds for rejecting the thesis itself.  (I’ve addressed this issue at greater length before, e.g. here, here, and here.)
The limits of physics
So that’s one set of background considerations that must be kept in mind when addressing topics like the one at issue: the begged questions, blurred distinctions, and missed points which  chronically afflict the thinking of those who raise purportedly scientific objections to Scholastic metaphysics.  Let’s move on now to the second set of background considerations, viz. the limits in principle to what physics can tell us about physical reality, and the unavoidability of a deeper metaphysical perspective. 
As I have emphasized many times, what physics gives us is a description of the mathematical structure of physical reality.  It abstracts from any aspect of reality which cannot be captured via its exclusively quantitative methods.  One reason that this is crucial to keep in mind is that from the fact that something doesn’t show up in the description physics gives us, it doesn’t follow that it isn’t there in the physical world.  This is like concluding from the fact that color doesn’t show up in a black and white pen and ink drawing of a banana that bananas must not really be yellow.  It both cases the absence is an artifact of the method employed, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the reality the method is being used to represent.  The method of representing an object using black ink on white paper will necessarily leave out color even if it is there, and the method of representing physical reality using exclusively mathematical language will necessarily leave out any aspect of physical reality which is not reducible to the quantitative, even if such aspects are there.
But it’s not just that such aspects might be there.  They must be there.  The quantitative description physics gives us is essentially a description of mathematical structure.  But mathematical structure by itself is a mere abstraction.  It cannot be all there is, because structure presupposes something concrete which hasthe structure.  Indeed, physics itself tells us that the abstraction cannot be all there is, since it tells us that some abstract mathematical structures do not fit the actual, concrete material world.  For example, Einstein is commonly taken to have shown that our world is not really Euclidean.  This could only be true if there is some concrete reality that instantiates a non-Euclidean abstract structure rather than a Euclidean abstract structure.  So, physics itself implies that there must be more to the world than the abstract structure it captures in its purely mathematical description, but it does not and cannot tell us exactly what this concrete reality is like. 
That physics by itself only gives us abstract structure is by no means either a new point or a point emphasized by Scholastics alone.  It was made in earlier generations by thinkers like Poincaré, Russell, Eddington, Weyl, and others, and in recent philosophy has been emphasized by Grover Maxwell, Michael Lockwood, Simon Blackburn, David Chalmers, and others. 
Moreover, we know there must be more to causality specifically than physics does or could tell us about.  The early Russell once argued that causation must not be a real feature of the world precisely because it does not show up in the description of the world physics gives us.  For physics, says Russell, describes the world in terms of differential equations describing functional relations between events, and these equations make no reference to causes.  “In the motions of mutually gravitating bodies, there is nothing that can be called a cause, and nothing that can be called an effect; there is merely a formula” (“On the Notion of Cause,” pp. 173-74).  Russell’s position has been the subject of a fair bit of attention in recent philosophy (e.g. here). 
Now, I don’t myself think it is quite right to say that physics makes no use of causal notions, since I think that physics tells us something about the dispositional features of fundamental particles, and dispositionality is a causal notion.  Still, as other philosophers have argued, higher-level causal features -- such as the causation we take ourselves to experience continuously in everyday life, in the behavior of tables, chairs, rocks, trees, and other ordinary objects -- are more difficult to cash out in terms of what is going on at the micro level described by physics.  Hilary Putnam is one contemporary philosopher who has addressed this problem, as I noted in a post from a few years ago.  Trenton Merricks is another, and argues that at least macro-level inanimate objects are unreal, since (he claims) they play no causal role in the world over and above the causal role played by their microphysical parts.
Merricks thinks living things are real, and certainly a Russell-style across-the-board denial of causation would be incoherent, for a reason implicit in a fact that the later Russell himself emphasized.  Our perceptual experiences give us knowledge of the external physical world only because they are causally related to that world.  To deny causality in the name of science would therefore be to undermine the very empirical foundations of science. 
Now, if there must be causality at the macro level (at the very least in the case of the causal relations between the external world and our perceptual experiences of it), and this causality is not captured in the description of the world that physics itself gives us, then it follows that there is more to causality than physics can tell us.  And even if you dispute the views of Russell, Putnam, Merricks, et al., physics itself is not going to settle the matter.  For it is not an empirical matter, but a philosophical dispute about how to interpret the empirical evidence.
(Nor will it do to dismiss such disputes on the grounds that the competing views about them are “unfalsifiable.”  It may be that there is no human being more comically clueless than the New Atheist combox troll who thinks he can dismiss philosophy on grounds of falsificationism -- a thesis put forward by a philosopher, Karl Popper.  As Popper himself realized, falsificationism is not itself a scientific thesis but a meta-level claim about science.)
If physics in general raises philosophical questions it cannot answer, the same is if anything even more clearly true of quantum mechanics in particular.  Feynman’s famous remark that nobody understands quantum mechanics is an overstatement, but it is certainly by no means obvious how to interpret some of the theory’s stranger aspects.  Quantum mechanics has been claimed to “show” all sorts of things -- that the law of excluded middle is false, that scientific realism is false, that idealism is true, etc.  By itself it shows none of these things.  In each case, certain philosophical assumptions are first read intoquantum mechanics and then read out again.  But the same thing is true of claims to the effect that quantum mechanics undermines causality.  By itself it does not, and could not, show such a thing either.  Here as in the other cases, it is the metaphysical background assumptions we bring to bear on quantum mechanics that determine how we interpret it.  This is as true of philosophical naturalists, atheists, et al. as it is of Scholastics. 
Now, the Scholastic metaphysician argues, on grounds entirely independent of questions about how to interpret quantum mechanics, that there are a number of metaphysical theses that any possible empirical science is going to have to presuppose.  Most fundamentally, there is the Aristotelian theory of act and potency, according to which we cannot make sense of change as a real feature of the world unless we recognize that there is, in addition to what is actual on the one hand, and sheer nothingnesson the other, a middle ground of potentiality.  Change is the actualization of a potentiality, and unless we affirm this we will be stuck with a static Parmenidean conception of the world.  And that is not an option, because the existence of change cannot coherently be denied.  Even to work through the steps of an argument for the non-existence of change is itself an instance of change.  Sensory experience – and thus the observation and experiment on which empirical science rests – presupposes real change.  (Hence it is incoherent to suggest, as is sometimes done, that relativity shows that change is illusory, since the evidence for relativity presupposes sensory experience and thus change.)
Now, the main concepts of the Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysical apparatus – substantial form and prime matter, final causality and efficient causality, and so forth – are essentially an outworking of the theory of act and potency.  You can argue about whether this or that object truly has a substantial form or is merely an aggregate, about whether we have correctly identified and characterized the teleological features of such-and-such a natural process, and so on.  What cannot be denied is that substantial form, teleology, etc. are bedrock features of the natural order and will inevitably feature in a complete picture of the physical world at somelevel of analysis.  All of that follows from a consistent application of the theory of act and potency.  It also cannot be denied that any potential that is actualized is actualized by something already actual.  That is the core of the “principle of causality,” and It follows from the principle of sufficient reason -- a principle which, rightly understood, also cannot coherently be denied.  
I spell out the reasons for all of this in detail, and also discuss the inherent limitations of empirical science, in Scholastic Metaphysics .  The point to emphasize for present purposes is that the Scholastic holds that there a number of general metaphysical truths which we can know completely independently of particular disputes within physics or any other empirical science, precisely because they rest on what any possible empirical science must itself presuppose.  (One of Cruz-Uribe’s readers insinuates that in resting its key theses on something other than empirical science, Scholastic metaphysics undermines the possibility of any common ground with its critics.  But this is precisely the reverse of the truth and once again completely misses the point.  Since Scholastic metaphysical arguments begin with what empirical science presupposes -- for example, the possibility of sensory experience, and the possibility of at least partial explanations -- they thereby begin precisely with what the critics already accept, not with what they reject.)
Radioactive decay
So, here is where we are before we even get to the issue of radioactive decay:  Purportedly physics-based objections to Scholastic metaphysics – including objections to Scholastic claims about causality -- are, as a matter of course, poorly thought out.  They commonly blur the distinction between empirical and philosophical claims, confuse what is really only one notion of causality with causality as such, and confuse mere illustrations or applications of general metaphysical principles with the principles themselves.  Meanwhile, we know on independent grounds that physics, of its very nature, cannot in principle tell us everything there is to know about physical reality, including especially the causal features of physical reality.  Its exclusively mathematical conceptual apparatus necessarily leaves out whatever cannot be captured in quantitative terms.  Physics also implies that there must be something more to physical reality than what it captures, since mathematical structure is of itself a mere abstraction and there must be some concrete reality which has the structure.
We also know that quantum mechanics in particular raises all sorts of puzzling metaphysical questions (not merely about causality) that it cannot answer.  And, the Scholastic argues, we know on independent grounds – grounds that any possible empirical science must presuppose – that there are a number of metaphysical truths that we must bring to bear on our understanding of the world whatever the specific empirical facts turn out to be, including the truth that causality must be a real feature of the world.
So, when critics glibly allege that radioactive decay or other quantum phenomena undermine causality, the trouble is that they are making a charge that doesn’t even rise to the level of being well thought out.  It is preposterous to pretend that the burden of proof is on the Scholastic to show that quantum mechanics is compatible with Scholastic claims about causality.  The burden of proof is rather on the critic to show that there really is any incompatibility.  (Few people would claim that the burden of proof is on anyone to prove that quantum mechanics doesn’t establish idealism, or doesn’tundermine the law of excluded middle, or doesn’t refute scientific realism.  It is generally realized that the claims in question here are very large ones that go well beyond anything quantum mechanics itself can be said to establish, so that the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to claim quantum mechanics has such sweeping implications.  So why is the burden of proof on the Scholastic to show that quantum mechanics doesn’t undermine causality?)
In particular, the critic owes us an account of why, since physics cannot in principle capture all there is to physical reality in the first place -- and in particular arguably fails entirely (as Russell held) to capture causality in general -- we should regard it as especially noteworthy if it fails to capture causality in one particular case.  If the critic, like the early Russell, denies that there is any causality at all, he owes us an account of how he can coherently take such a position, and in particular how he can account for our knowledge of the world physics tells us about if we have no causal contact with it.  If the critic says instead that genuine causality does exist in some parts of nature but not in the particular cases he thinks quantum mechanics casts doubt on, he owes us an account of why we should draw the line where he says we should, and how there could besuch a line.  (As we had reason to note recently with respect to PSR, it is difficult to see how it could be coherent to think that things are in principle explicable in some cases while denying that they are in general explicable in principle.  Yet to affirm the principle of causality in some cases and deny it in others seems similarly incoherent.) 
In short, anyone who claims that quantum mechanics undermines Scholastic metaphysical claims about causality owes us an alternative worked-out metaphysical picture before we should take him seriously (just as anyone who would claim that quantum mechanics undermines the law of excluded middle owes us an alternative system of logic if we are to take him seriously).  And if he gives us one, it would really be that metaphysical system itself, rather than quantum mechanics per se, that is doing the heavy lifting.
Now, no one expects a logician to launch into a mini treatise on quantum mechanics before setting forth a textbook exposition of classical logic, law of excluded middle and all.  The reason is that it is widely understood that it is just false to say flatly that “Quantum mechanics has undermined classical logic.”  Quantum mechanics has done no such thing.  Rather, some people have been led by their metaphysical speculations about quantum mechanics to wonder whether logic might be rewritten without the law of excluded middle.  Logicians who have independent grounds to think that the law of excluded middle cannotbe false have no reason to take these speculations very seriously or respond in detail to them when going about their ordinary work.
Similarly, there is no reason why a Scholastic metaphysician should be expected to launch into a detailed discussion of quantum mechanics before deploying the principle of causality in a general metaphysical context, or when giving an argument for the existence of God.  For it is also simply false to say that “Quantum mechanics has undermined the principle of causality.”  It has done no such thing.  The most that one can say is that some people have been led by their metaphysical speculations about quantum mechanics to wonder whether metaphysics might be rewritten in a way that does without the principle of causality.  But metaphysicians who have independent grounds to think that the principle of causality cannot be false have no reason to take these speculations very seriously or to respond in detail to them when going about their ordinary work.
Of course, logicians have examined proposed non-classical systems of logic, and classical logicians have put forward criticisms of these alternative systems.  The point is that their doing so is not a prerequisite of their being rationally justified in using classical logic.  Similarly, a Scholastic metaphysician, especially if he is interested in questions about philosophy of nature and philosophy of physics, can and should address questions about how to interpret various puzzling aspects of quantum mechanics.  But the point is that doing so is not a prerequisite to his being rationally justified in appealing to the principle of causality in general metaphysics or in presenting a First Cause argument for the existence of God.
But how might a Scholastic interpret phenomena like radioactive decay?  I hinted at one possible approach in the post on Oerter linked to above, an approach which is suggested by the way some Scholastic philosophers have thought about local motion.  Some of these thinkers, and Aquinas in particular, take the view that a substance can manifest certain dispositions in a “spontaneous” way in the sense that these manifestations simply follow from its nature or substantial form.  A thing’s natural tendencies vis-à-vis local motion would be an example.  These motions simply follow from the thing’s substantial form and do not require a continuously conjoined external mover.  Now, that is not to say that the motion in question does not have an efficient cause.  But the efficient cause is just whatever generated the substance and thus gave it the substantial form that accounts (qua formal cause) for its natural local motion.  (It is commonly but erroneously thought that medieval Aristotelians in general thought that all local motion as such required a continuously conjoined cause.  In fact that was true only of some of these thinkers, not all of them.  For detailed discussion of this issue, see James Weisheipl’s book Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages, from which I borrow the language of “spontaneity.”  I also discuss these issues in more detail here.)
Now, Aquinas himself elaborated on this idea in conjunction with the thesis that the “natural place” toward which heavy objects are inclined to move is the center of the earth, and he supposed also that projectilemotions required a conjoined mover insofar as he regarded them as “violent” rather than natural.  Both of these suppositions are outmoded, but the more general thesis summarized in the preceding paragraph is logically independent of them and can easily be disentangled from them.  One can consistently affirm (a) that a substance will tend toward a certain kind of local motion simply because of its substantial form, while rejecting the claim that (b) this local motion involves movement toward a certain specific place, such as the center of the earth.  (This is a point missed by one of the more clueless commentators in Cruz-Uribe’s combox, whose capacity for grasping obvious distinctions is not much better than his reading ability.  He ridicules the distinction I make here without offering the slightest explanation of what exactly is wrong with it.) 
Indeed, some contemporary Aristotelians have proposed that affirming (a) while rejecting (b) is the right way to think about inertialmotion: Newton’s principle of inertia, on this view, is a description of the way a physical object will tend to behave vis-à-vis local motion given its nature or substantial form.  (Again, see this article for discussion of the relevant literature.)  The point for present purposes, though, is that the idea just described also provides a model -- I don’t say it is the only model, just a model -- for understanding what is going on metaphysically with phenomena like radioactive decay. 
The idea would be this.  Let’s borrow an example from philosopher of science Phil Dowe’s book Physical Causation , since I’ll have reason to return to the use he makes of it in a moment.  Dowe writes:
Suppose that we have an unstable lead atom, say Pb210.  Such an atom may decay, without outside interference, by α-decay into the mercury atom Hg206.  Suppose the probability that the atom will decay in the next minute is x.  Then
                        P(E|C) = x
where C is the existence of the lead atom at a certain time t1, and E is the production of the mercury atom within the minute immediately following t1.  (pp. 22-23)
Now, applying the conceptual apparatus borrowed from Aquinas (which, I should add, Dowe himself does not do), we can say that the decay in question is “spontaneous” in something like the way Aquinas thought the natural local motion of a physical substance is “spontaneous.”  In particular, given the nature or substantial form of Pb210, there is a probability of x that it will decay in the next minute.  The probability is not unintelligible, but grounded in what it is to be Pb210 .  The decay thus has a cause in the sensethat (i) it has a formal cause in the nature or substantial form of the particular Pb210 atom, and (ii) it has an efficient cause in whatever it was that originally generated that Pb210 atom (whenever that was). 
It is worth noting that you don’t need to be a Scholastic to think that there really is causation in cases like this, which brings me to Dowe’s own use of this example.  As Dowe notes, even if it is claimed that decay phenomena are incompatible with deterministic causality, it doesn’t follow that there is no causality at all in such cases.  All that would follow is that the causality is not deterministic.  In defense of the claim that there is causality of at least an indeterministic sort in cases like the one he cites, he writes:
If I bring a bucket of Pb210into the room, and you get radiation sickness, then doubtless I am responsible for your ailment.  But in this type of case, I cannot be morally responsible for an action for which I am not causally responsible.  Now the causal chain linking my action and your sickness involves a connection constituted by numerous connections like the one just described.  Thus the insistence that C does not cause E on the grounds that there’s no deterministic link entails that I am not morally responsible for your sickness.  Which is sick.  (p. 23)
Dowe also points out that “scientists describe such cases of decay as instances of production of Hg206… [and] ‘production’ is a near-synonym for ‘causation’” (p. 23).  This sounds paradoxical only if we fallaciously conflate deterministiccausality and causality as such.
Interestingly, elsewhere in his book, Dowe argues that Newton’s first law should be interpreted as entailing, not that a body’s uniform motion has no cause, but rather that its inertia, conceived of as a property of a body, is its cause (pp. 53-54).  This dovetails with the analysis of inertial motion given by some contemporary Aristotelians, to which I alluded above.  John Losee, in his book Theories of Causality , discusses Dowe’s views and notes the parallel between what Dowe says about radioactive decay and what he says about inertia (p. 126).  The parallel, I would say (using notions neither Dowe nor Losee appeal to), is this: In both cases, Dowe is describing the way a thing will “spontaneously” tend to behave given its nature or substantial form (albeit the manifestation of the tendency is probabilistic in the case of Pb210 but not in the case of inertial motion). 
So, Dowe’s views seem to some extent to recapitulate the elements of the Aquinas-inspired account of radioactive decay sketched above, which I earlier put forward in the post replying to Oerter.  It is worth emphasizing that neither Dowe nor Losee has any Scholastic ax to grind, and that I came across their work long after writing that post -- so as to forestall any objection to the effect that the proposed account is somehow a merely ad hoc way to try to get round the objection from radioactive decay (an objection that would be absurd in any case given that the basic concepts made use of in the proposed account are centuries old).  On the contrary, it is an account that someone could accept whateverhis views about Scholastic metaphysics in general, or about the application of the principle of causality to arguments for God’s existence.
In any event, as I have said, the burden of proof is not on the Scholastic metaphysician to provide an account of how radioactive decay can be reconciled with the principle of causality, because claims to the effect that there is an incompatibility are not even well-motivated in the first place.  The burden of proof is rather on the critic of Scholastic metaphysics to develop an alternative metaphysical framework on which the rejection of the principle of causality is defensible, and within which the critic might embed his favored interpretation of quantum mechanics.  But don’t hold your breath.  For the Scholastic has grounds entirely independent of issues about quantum mechanics or radioactive decayto conclude that no such alternative metaphysics is forthcoming. 

Working the net

The Daily Beast nominates Aristotle for a posthumous Nobel prize.  (Even Aristotle’s mistakes are interesting: Next time you see a European bison, you might not want to stand behind it.  Just in case.)
Physicist George Ellis, interviewed at Scientific American, criticizes Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and scientism in general.  Some choice quotes: “[M]athematical equations only represent part of reality, and should not be confused with reality,” and “Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation.”
Richard Bastien kindly reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics in Convivium Magazine.  From the review: “Feser’s refutation [of scientism]… alone makes the purchase of the book well worthwhile.”At The Chronicle of Higher Education, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel explains how David Chalmers’ book The Conscious Mind challenged his confidence in materialism, and scientist Andrew McAfee explains how Bjørn Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist and the work of Julian Simon expose the ideological thinking underlying many environmentalist claims.

Mike Flynn calls attention to the new magazine Sci Phi Journal, which is devoted to science fiction and philosophy, naturally.  Here’sthe website, and here’sthe first issue.
While on the subject of science fiction: Jonathan Nolan is working on adapting Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series for HBO. 
Philosopher Anna Marmodoro is interviewed at 3:AM Magazineabout Aristotle, causal powers, philosophy of perception, and the Incarnation.
On causal powers, laws of nature, and the medieval-to-modern transition: Eric Watkins’ anthology The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives is reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Anthony McCarthy on the abortion debate at Oxford that never happened.
I called attention recently to the DSPT’s video interviews with participants in its summer 2014 conference.  New interviews have since been added to the DSPT YouTube playlist, including clips with Fr. Thomas Joseph White, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Steven Long, and Matthew Levering.
The Thinker-Artist , Mark Anderson’s e-book of philosophical fiction, will be available for free at Amazon this Friday (today) and Saturday.

Progressive dematerialization

In the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, it is the intellect, rather than sentience, that marks the divide between the corporeal and the incorporeal.  Hence A-T arguments against materialist theories of the mind tend to focus on conceptual thought rather than qualia (i.e. the subjective or “first-person” features of a conscious experience, such as the way red looks or the way pain feels) as that aspect of the mind which cannot in principle be reduced to brain activity or the like.  Yet Thomistic writers also often speak even of perceptual experience (and not just of abstract thought) as involving an immaterial element.  And they need not deny that qualia-oriented arguments like the “zombie argument,” Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” Thomas Nagel’s “bat argument,” etc. draw blood against materialism.  So what exactly is going on here?Here as in other areas of philosophy, misunderstanding arises because contemporary readers are usually unaware that classical (Aristotelian/Neo-Platonic/Scholastic) philosophers and modern (post-Cartesian) philosophers carve up the conceptual territory in radically different ways, and thus often don’t use key terms in the same sense.  In this case, terms like “matter” and “material” have a very different force when writers like Aristotle and Aquinas use them than they have when Descartes, Hobbes, or your average contemporary academic philosopher uses them.  There are at least three ways in which this is true. 

The matter of the moderns
First, and as I have noted many times, the tendency in post-Cartesian philosophy and natural science is to conceive of matter in exclusively quantitative terms and to regard whatever smacks as irreducibly qualitative as a mere projection of the mind.  This is the origin of “the qualia problem” for materialism.  The reason materialists cannot solve the problem is that since they have defined matter in such a way as to exclude the qualitative from it, qualia -- which are essentially qualitative, as the name implies -- are necessarly going to count as immaterial.  Materialist “explanations” of qualia thus invariably either change the subject or implicitly deny the existence of what they are supposed to be explaining.  (The basic point goes back to Cudworth and Malebranche and is the core of Nagel’s critique of physicalist accounts of consciousness.)
This is a point I‘ve developed at length many times (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, and here) and I won’t belabor it here.  Suffice it to say that for the A-T philosopher, while this is a strike against materialism it isn’t really an argument for dualism unless one accepts the purely quantitative conception of matter in question -- as Cartesians do but A-T does not.  From an A-T point of view, the modern “mathematicized” conception of matter is essentially incomplete.  It’s true as far as it goes, but it’s not the whole truth.  So, the failure of some feature to be analyzable in material terms as materialists and Cartesians understand “material” does not entail that it is not material full stop.  It might still count as material on some more robust conception of matter.  And there is a sense in which, for A-T, qualia are indeed material, at least if we use “material” as more or less synonymous with “corporeal.”  For A-T philosophers regard qualia as entirely dependent on physiology.  Our having the qualia associated with seeing a red object, for example, is entirely dependent on bodily organs like the retina, the optic nerve, the relevant processing centers in the brain, and so forth.
This brings us to the second way in which A-T philosophers carve up the conceptual territory in ways contrary to the assumptions typically made by modern philosophers.  For some modern dualists are bound to object: How, on any conception of matter, could qualia be entirely dependent on such bodily organs?  Don’t attempts to analyze qualia in terms of (say) neuronal firing patterns fail whether or not we think of matter as exhaustively quantitative?  The trouble with such objections, though, is that they think of materiality or corporeality in essentially reductionist terms.  They suppose that to say that such-and-such a feature is corporeal entails saying that it is reducible to some lower-level feature of the body.  Hence when they hear the A-T philosopher say that qualia are corporeal and dependent on bodily organs like the brain, they suppose that the A-T philosopher is claiming (as a materialist might) that an experience of red is “nothing but” the firing of such-and-such neurons, that an experience of pain is “nothing but” the firing of some other group of neurons, etc.
But that is simply a fundamental misunderstanding of the A-T position.  The A-T philosopher entirely rejects the reductionist assumption that lower-level features of a system are somehow “more real” than the higher-level features, or in any other way metaphysically privileged.  Hence he rejects the idea that to affirm that some feature of the world is both real and material is to suppose that it is exhaustively analyzable into, or entirely reducible to or emergent from, some collection of lower-level material features.  (The words “exhaustively” and “entirely” are crucial here.  Naturally, the A-T philosopher does not deny that a system can be analyzed into its parts and that this has explanatory value.  The point is that this is only part of the story.  The parts in turn cannot properly be understood except in relation to the whole, at least in a true substance as opposed to an artifact.  See chapter 3 of Scholastic Metaphysics for detailed treatment of this issue, including responses to the usual objections.)
Within the material world, A-T philosophers traditionally hold that there are at least four irreducible kinds of substance: inorganic substances; merely vegetative organic substances (in the technical Aristotelian sense of “vegetative”); sensory or animal substances; and rational animals or human beings.  Only in the case of the last does the A-T position hold that there is a strictly immaterial or incorporeal aspect.  Non-human animal life is irreducible to vegetative life and vegetative life is irreducible to the inorganic, yet all are still entirely material.  Again, materiality or corporeality simply has nothing essentially to do with reducibility.
So, in order to understand what A-T philosophers mean by “matter” and “material,” the reader must be careful not to read into their statements the exclusively quantitative construal of “matter” or the reductionist construal of “material” that are at least implicit in the usage of the average modern philosopher.  How, then, does the A-T philosopher understand “matter” and “material”?
Degrees of immateriality
This brings us to the third point, which is that from the A-T point of view, matter is to be understood primarily in contrast to form, where the matter/form distinction is a special case of the more general distinction between potentiality and actuality.  Consider a triangle drawn on a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker.  It is a composite of a certain form, triangularity, and a certain kind of matter, ink.  (Metaphysically, things are more complicated than that, since the triangle is an artifact and thus triangularity is an accidental form modifying something already having a substantial form; and the ink, accordingly, is a kind of secondary matter, rather than the prime matter that substantial forms inform.  But we can ignore all that for present purposes.  Again, see Scholastic Metaphysicsfor the full story.)
The ink qua ink is potentially a triangle, or a circle, or a square, or some other figure.  The form triangularitymakes it actually one of these rather than the others.  The form triangularityis of itself universal and one.  That is to say, it is the same one form -- triangularity -- that is instantiated in this triangle, in other triangles drawn on the whiteboard, in triangles drawn in geometry textbooks or in sand at the beach, etc.  By contrast, the specific bit of ink that has taken on that form on the whiteboard is particular, and makes of the triangle a mere particular instance of triangularity among multiple particular instances.  That it is made of this particular bit of ink also makes the triangle changeableand imperfect.  The triangle can be damaged or erased altogether, and even when it exists it does not instantiate triangularity perfectly, insofar as the sides of any material triangle are never perfectly straight, etc.  By contrast, triangularity as such is perfect triangularity, and indeed is the standard by reference to which particular instances of triangularity are judged more or less perfect or imperfect.  Triangularity as such is also permanent.  Individual triangles change and are generated and corrupted, but triangularity as such is timeless and unchanging. 
So, form qua form corresponds in A-T metaphysics to actuality, universality, unity, permanence, and perfection.  Matter qua matter corresponds to potentiality, particularity, multiplicity, changeability, and imperfection.  Now, these characteristics are susceptible of degrees, so that there is a sense in which materiality and immateriality can come in degrees.  The more something exhibits potentiality, particularity, multiplicity, changeability, and/or imperfection, the more matter-like it is.  The more something exhibits actuality, universality, unity, permanence, and/or perfection, the more immaterial it is.  It is in light of this that we can understand how, though A-T regards perceptual experience (and the qualia associated with it) as corporeal, there is nevertheless a sensein which it has an immaterial aspect.
For A-T epistemology, knowledge or cognition involves a kind of union of the knower and the thing known insofar as the former comes, in a sense, to possess the form of the latter.  Now, knowledge or cognition can be either of a sensory sort or of an intellectual sort.  The first sort we share with other animals; the second is the sort we have and other animals do not.  It is the second, intellectual sort of cognition that is in the strict sense immaterial and is thus incorporeal.  But sensory cognition, though corporeal, is immaterial in a loose sense insofar as there is a way in which it involves having the form of the thing known without having its matter.
Consider the perceptual representation of an apple that you form when you look at it.  The color, part of the shape, and the appearance of the texture of the apple are captured in the visual experience, whereas the interior of the apple, its weight, its solidity, and other characteristics are not captured.  By capturing the former without the latter, the visual experience involves a kind “dematerialization,” as it were.  It “pulls” the forms redness, roundness, etc. from the apple so that they exist as qualia of conscious experience rather than in the apple itself, while “leaving behind” the rest of the apple.  But this is not a strict dematerialization, of course, any more than is the “dematerialization” accomplished by a photorealistic still life painting of the apple (which also captures the color, shape, etc. without capturing the interior of the apple, its weight and solidity, etc.).  For just as the painting is itself embodied in canvas and paint, which are material, so too is the perceptual experience embodied in physiological activity, which is also material. 
Now, the loose sort of “dematerialization” accomplished by physiological activity can be more thoroughgoing than the sort involved in a perceptual experience.  The visual experience of the apple is an experience of this particular apple, capturing its particular color, shape, etc.  But a mental image of an apple might resemble many apples -- say, by virtue of more vaguely capturing the color or shape, or by leaving out features such as idiosyncratic indentations or areas of discoloration.  And other representations encoded physiologically (such as those posited by cognitive scientists) might be even further than a vague visual image is from physically resembling any particular thing, as a blueprint or wiring diagram is very far from resembling any actual building or computer.  This distance from the kind of close resemblance between a representation and particular thing represented that is involved in a perceptual experience gives mental images and more abstract neural representational states a kind of generality which can superficially resemble the universality of concepts.  This distance from the particular things thus makes these representations “immaterial” in a loose sense.
Still, strictly speaking, they are material.  And neither neural representations nor anything else material can in principle have the true universality of reference that concepts have, nor the determinate or unambiguous content that concepts can have.  For material representations will of their nature have particularizing features that prevent them from capturing the universality of a concept, and will be systematically indeterminate or ambiguous between alternative possible semantic properties.  Hence, just as you will never get a true circle from a polygon no matter how many sides you add to it, you will never get a true concept from a material representation, no matter how many particularizing features are removed from it, and no matter how many other representations you add to it in a system of material representations in order to narrow down the range of possible semantic contents.  In both cases, you can at best only get a simulation.  To be sure, the simulation might be very impressive.  A polygon with sufficiently many sides can fool the eye and appear to be a circle.  A sufficiently powerful computer program might appear to be intelligent.  But if you examine any polygon carefully enough its non-circularity is bound to become evident, and if you examine the outputs of any computer carefully enough its “sphexishness”is bound to become evident.
The thesis that concepts are in principle irreducible to material representations is something I’ve defended at length elsewhere, most systematically and in greatest depth in my ACPQ article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”  (Some relevant blog posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)  Anyway, arguing for the immateriality of thought is not the point of the present post.  The point is to note that on the A-T view, whereas sensation and imagination are immaterial in a loose sense, conceptual thought is immaterial in a strict sense. 
Even then there is the qualification to be made that the human intellect must constantly “turn to the phantasms,” as Aquinas puts it -- that is, it depends on sensation for the raw materials from which it abstracts concepts, and it makes use of mental imagery even when entertaining the most abstract concepts.  For instance, the concept triangularitycannot be identified with any mental image of a triangle nor with the word “triangle,” but we tend to form images either of the geometrical figure or of the word whenever we entertain the concept.  (Previous posts with some relevant discussion can be found here, here, here, and here.)  As rational animals we are composites of the corporeal and incorporeal and are thus not entirely divorced from matter even in our intellectual activity.  Only an essentially incorporeal intellectual substance -- an angel, or God -- would be that.
Hence we find in A-T writers a distinction between three degrees of immateriality:
1. The quasi-immateriality or “immateriality” in a loose sense of sensations, mental images, and other neural representations.  These we share with the lower animals.  The “immateriality” is loose because these are all corporeal or intrinsically dependent on matter. 
2. The strict immateriality of true concepts.  These we do not share with the lower animals.  But, though not intrinsically dependent on matter, our intellectual or conceptual activity is extrinsically dependent on matter insofar as we require sensation and mental imagery -- and thus sense organs and brain activity -- as a source of information and as an accompaniment to the act of thinking.
3. The absolute independence of matter of angelic intellects and the divine intellect, which do not require bodily organs even extrinsically.

Interview with the metaphysician

Recently I was interviewed by two different websites about Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction .  Both interviews have now been posted.  The first interview is at Thomistica.net, where the interviewer was Joe Trabbic.  The second interview is at Strange Notions, where the interviewer was Brandon Vogt.  The websites’ respective audiences are very different, as were the questions, so there isn’t any significant overlap between the two interviews.

Augustine on the immateriality of the mind

In Book 10, Chapter 10 of On the Trinity, St. Augustine argues for the immateriality of the mind.  You can find an older translation of the work online, but I’ll quote the passages I want to discuss from the McKenna translation as edited by Gareth Matthews.  Here they are:
[E]very mind knows and is certain concerning itself.  For men have doubted whether the power to live, to remember, to understand, to will, to think, to know, and to judge is due to air, to fire, or to the brain, or to the blood, or to atoms… or whether the combining or the orderly arrangement of the flesh is capable of producing these effects; one has tried to maintain this opinion, another that opinion.
On the other hand who would doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges?  For even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wishes to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to consent rashly.  Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, he would be unable to doubt about anything at all…[T]he mind knows itself, even when it seeks itself, as we have already shown.  But we can in no way rightly say that anything is known while its substance [or: essence] is unknown.  Wherefore, since the mind knows itself, it knows its own substance [or: essence].  But it is certain about itself, as is clearly shown from what we have already said.  But it is by no means certain whether it is air, or fire, or a body, or anything of a body.  It is, therefore, none of these things…

For the mind thinks of fire in the same way as it thinks of air or any other bodily thing of which it thinks.  But it can in no way happen that it should think of that which itself is, in the same way as it thinks of that which it itself is not.  For all these, whether fire, or air, or this or that body, or that part or it thinks of by means of an imaginary phantasy, nor is it said to be all of these, but one or the other of them.  But if it were any one of them, it would think of this one in a different manner from the rest.  That is to say, it would not think of it by means of an imaginary phantasy, as absent things or something of the same kind are thought of which have been touched by the sense of the body, but it would think of it by a kind of inward presence not feigned but real -- for there is nothing more present to it than itself; just as it thinks that it lives, and remembers, and understands, and wills.  And if it adds nothing from these thoughts to itself, so as to regard itself as something of the kind, then whatever still remains to it of itself, that alone is itself.  (pp. 55-57)
Useful discussions of these passages can be found in chapter 6 of Matthews’ book Augustine,and, more recently, in Bruno Niederbacher’s essay “The human soul: Augustine’s case for soul-body dualism” in the considerably revised 2014 second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Augustine.  (The bracketed alternative translation of Augustine’s word for “substance” as “essence” is not my addition, by the way, but is in the McKenna/Matthews translation.  Matthews and Niederbacher both regard this translation of substantia as equally plausible or even more plausible in this particular context.)
In the first two paragraphs quoted we have a version of what is sometimes called “the Augustinian cogito,” insofar as Augustine prefigures (here and in Book XI, Chapter 26 of The City of God) Descartes’ famous Cogito, ergo sum.  You cannot coherently doubt that you live, remember, understand, will, think, know, and judge, since, Augustine argues, the very act of doubting that one does these things itself involvesdoing them. 
Of course, you could doubt that you “live” in the sense of having a metabolism, etc., insofar as you can wonder (as Descartes did) whether you are really a spirit divorced from any body and are merely hallucinating that you have one.  But what Augustine means here is that even in that case you couldn’t coherently doubt that you “live” in the sense of existing as a disembodied, thinking thing.
Augustine also notes that even if one is committed to some version of materialism according to which our mental powers are to be attributed to the brain, to atoms, to some particular kind of arrangement of the flesh, or what have you, one could still at least coherently doubtthat this was the case in a way one cannot coherently doubt that one thinks, wills, etc.  In the remaining passages, Augustine develops this contrast in a manner intended to show that the mind cannot be material in these ways or any other way.  Of course, this approach to arguing for the mind’s immateriality also sounds very proto-Cartesian, though I think Augustine’s arguments here are not exactly the same as any of Descartes’.
Matthews plausibly suggests that, whether Augustine intended it or not, there are two distinct arguments to be found in the last two paragraphs quoted above.  Let’s consider them in order.  In the third paragraph the argument seems to me plausibly reconstructed in the following way (which, I should note, is not necessarily the way Matthews or Niederbacher would reconstruct it):
1. The mind knows itself with certainty.
2. But a thing is known only when its essence is known.
3. So the mind knows its own essence with certainty. 
4. But the mind is not certain that it is the brain, or atoms, or an arrangement of flesh, or anything else that is material.
5. So it is not part of the essence of the mind to be the brain, or atoms, or an arrangement of flesh, or anything else that is material.
What should we think of this argument?  I’m not certain, though some objections that might at first glance seem strong are not in fact decisive.  Matthews notes that functionalists claim that the mind could be realized in the brain but also in other material systems, such as a sufficiently complex computer.  Hence “a mind might know its own essence without knowing what matter it is realized in” (Matthews, Augustine, p. 46).  The point, I gather, is that while the mind can doubt that it is realized in this particular kind of matter or that kind, this may merely reflect the fact that it is realizable in multiple sorts of matter, and does not entail that it could exist apart from any matter at all. 
However, even apart from the deficiencies of functionalist theories of mind, this does not seem to me to be a good objection (though in fairness to Matthews I should emphasize that he considers this as an objection which might be raised against his own reconstruction of the argument, which is not exactly the same as mine).  Augustine’s point is not that there is something special about the particular examples he cites -- the brain, atoms, configurations of flesh, etc. -- that makes it possible for the mind to doubt that it is any of them.  His point is precisely that what is true of them is going to be true of anything material.  The mind, he could point out in response to our imagined functionalist, can doubt that it needs to be “realized” in anything material in the first place.  Even the functionalist would agree that it is at least possible coherently to doubt this, and that is all Augustine needs for the argument to go through (assuming it is otherwise unproblematic).
A functionalist may respond that it is also possible to doubt that the mind is realized in any postulated immaterial substrate.  But as I have pointed out when addressing parallel objections to Cartesian dualism (hereand here), this sort of objection just completely misses the dualist’s point.  In Descartes’ case, he is not (contrary to the stock caricature) postulating a ghostly kind of stuff (“ectoplasm” or whatever) in which thought merely contingently inheres, so that one might coherently suppose it possible in principle for the one to exist apart from the other.  For Descartes, the res cogitans is not merely a substrate which underlies thought, but just is thought.  There is no conceptual space between them by which the functionalist might pry them apart.  Augustine, it seems, is saying something similar.  In knowing with certainty that it thinks, wills, understands, etc., the mind knows its essence, not merely activity contingently related to that essence which might in principle exist apart from it.
Matthews also notes that a critic may object to the claim that a thing is known only when its essence is known.  He cites Aristotle’s example of thunder, which one could know is a noise in the clouds even if he does not know the essence of thunder.  Or we might note that someone could obviously know that water is the liquid which fills lakes and oceans and falls from the sky as rain even if he does not know that water is H2O. 
This is a stronger objection, but in reply it could be noted that premise 2 may not actually be essential to the argument.  Augustine need not claim of everythingthat when it is known, its essence is known.  Perhaps he could simply argue that this is true of the mind, specifically.  For as Niederbacher emphasizes in his discussion of this argument, Augustine takes the mind to have a special immediate access to itself that it does not have to other things.  (Hence Niederbacher calls the argument under discussion “the cognitive access argument.”)  In the preceding chapter, Augustine had written that “when it is said to the mind: ‘Know thyself,’ it knows itself at the very instant in which it understands the word ‘thyself’; and it knows itself for no other reason than that it is present to itself” (On the Trinity, Book 10, Chapter 9, p. 54).  The idea might be that absence of certainty is possible only where our access to a thing is not immediate.  For example, we can be less than certain about the things we see because our access to them is mediated by light, the optic nerve, stages of neural processing, etc., and this opens the door to the possibility of illusion and hallucination.  But the certainty that the “Augustinian cogito” shows that the mind has vis-à-vis itself implies that its access to itself is not mediated.
So, it may be that, given Augustine’s view about the mind’s immediate access to itself, it is steps 3 - 5 that are the really essential ones in the “cognitive access argument,” and the problematic premise 2 can drop out as inessential.  The basic idea would be that given the mind’s immediate access to itself, it has a certainty about its essence that it does not have about whether it is the brain, atoms, etc., so that nothing of the latter, material sort can be part of its essence.
But this brings us close to the thrust of the argument of the last passage from Chapter 10 quoted above, which Matthews judges to be not only a distinct argument but a stronger one.  In this passage, Augustine says of “fire, or air, or this or that body” that we think of them “by means of an imaginary phantasy,” or mental image.  But Matthews suggests that whether we always make use of mental images, specifically, when we think of material things is not really essential to Augustine’s point.  What is essential is rather the claim that we always make use of mental representationsof some sort or other.  Thus the mind’s cognitive access to material things is always mediated in a way Augustine thinks its cognitive access to itself is not. 
Thus we have what I take to be a plausible reconstruction of the overall thrust of the reasoning of the last passage from chapter 10 quoted above:
1. The mind knows itself directly, without the mediation of a mental image or any other representation.
2. But the mind knows material things only via the mediation of a mental image or some other representation.
3. So, the mind is not a material thing.
In defense of premise 1, Augustine would, again, presumably say that if we were to deny it, then we would be faced with the possibility of skepticism about the mind’s own existence.  Yet the “Augustinian cogito” shows that such skepticism is impossible.  So we must affirm premise 1.
In defense of premise 2, we could note that, apart from eliminative materialists, materialists themselvestend to affirm that all thought takes place by means of mental representations of some sort (whether “sentences in the head,” distributed representations, or whatever).  Hence they cannot consistently reject premise 2.  Augustine and materialists of the sort in question are essentially in agreement that in general, thought involves mental representations.  The difference is just that Augustine thinks the “Augustinian cogito” shows that there is an exception in the special case of the mind’s knowledge of itself. 
As Matthews notes, a critic might still object to premise 1 on Freudian grounds.  It might be claimed that in the case of unconscious mental states, the mind knows itself (insofar as it discovers that it has a repressed desire of some sort, say) but that it does not do so directly(since the desire is unconscious).  But as Matthews also notes, this wouldn’t really be a strong objection.  Much of the talk about “unconscious” mental states seems to me pretty loose.  John Searle argues that to attribute a so-called “unconscious mental state” to someone is really just to attribute to him a neural state with the capacity or disposition to cause a conscious mental state.  This seems to me essentially correct.  What is strictly mental is the conscious state caused by the neural state, so that we don’t really have a counterexample to the claim that the mind always knows itself directly.
Given Augustine’s emphasis on the mind’s direct and certain knowledge of itself, the arguments we’ve been examining have, as I have said, a clearly proto-Cartesian flavor about them.  It is worth noting, though, that whatever one thinks of it, Augustine’s reasoning is not the same as that of Cartesian “conceivability arguments” (which I have discussed critically hereand here).  There is no attempt to read off, from what we can conceive, conclusions about mind-independent reality, after the fashion of rationalist metaphysics.  The introspective approach to the study of the mind that Augustine shares with Descartes has no essential connection with Cartesian/Leibnizian rationalism. 

DSPT symposium papers online (Updated)

Last week’s symposium at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley was on Fr. Anselm Ramelow’s anthology God, Reason and Reality .  Some of the papers from the symposium are now available online.  In my paper, “Remarks on God, Reason and Reality,” I comment on two essays in the anthology: Fr. Ramelow’s essay on God and miracles, and Fr. Michael Dodds’ essay on God and the nature of life.  Fr. Ramelow’s symposium paper is “Three Tensions Concerning Miracles: A Response to Edward Feser.”

UPDATE 11/16: Fr. Dodds' paper "The God of Life: Response to Edward Feser" has now been posted at the DSPT website.  Also, a YouTube video of all the talks and of the Q & A that followed has been posted.

DSPT symposium papers online

Last week’s symposium at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley was on Fr. Anselm Ramelow’s anthology God, Reason and Reality .  Some of the papers from the symposium are now available online.  In my paper, “Remarks on God, Reason and Reality,” I comment on two essays in the anthology: Fr. Ramelow’s essay on God and miracles, and Fr. Michael Dodds’ essay on God and the nature of life.  Fr. Ramelow’s symposium paper is “Three Tensions Concerning Miracles: A Response to Edward Feser.”

DSPT interviews (Updated)

Back from another very pleasant and profitable visit to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley.  Many thanks to my hosts and to everyone who attended the symposium.  The DSPT has just posted video interviews of some of the participants in the July conference on philosophy and theology.  John Searle, Linda Zagzebski, John O’Callaghan, and I are the interviewees.  You can find them here at YouTube.

Update 11/14: The DSPT will be adding new video clips weekly to its YouTube playlist.  This week an interview with Fred Freddoso has been added.