Edward Feser's Blog, page 91

Anthony Brueckner (1953 - 2014)

Philosopher Tony Brueckner of UC Santa Barbara died this week.  Tony was a professor of mine when I was in graduate school, and served on my dissertation committee.  I remember him as an excellent teacher, a formidable philosopher, and a nice guy with a droll sense of humor.  I recall a phony pop quiz he handed out in class one day.  The first multiple-choice question read: “What is your name? (A) Bruce, (B) other.”  After a reference he once made to the tune in a comment in the margins of a term paper of mine, I can never listen to Steely Dan’s “The Fez” without thinking of Tony.
Tony was a philosopher’s philosopher, and his work was largely devoted to a rigorous investigation of the philosophical issues surrounding Cartesian skepticism.  No one seriously interested in that topic can avoid grappling with Tony’s work on it, most of which is collected in his book Essays on Skepticism .  Related issues are pursued in Debating Self-Knowledge , co-written with Gary Ebbs.
By all accounts (such as this one) he was a kind man.  R.I.P.

Self control

The relationship between memory and personal identity has long been of interest to philosophers, and it is also a theme explored to good effect in movies and science fiction.  In Memento , Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) has largely lost his ability to form new memories following an attack in which he was injured and his wife raped and murdered.  He hunts down the attacker by assembling clues which he either writes down or tattoos on his body before he can forget them. 
In Philip K. Dick’s short story “Paycheck” (which is better than the movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck), the protagonist Jennings has agreed to work for two years on a secret project knowing that his memory of it (and of everything else that happened during those years) will be erased when the task is completed.  When he awakens after the memory wipe, he learns that he had, during the course of the two years, voluntarily agreed to forego the large paycheck he had originally contracted for in exchange for an envelope full of seemingly worthless trinkets.  He spends the rest of the story trying to figure out why he would have done so, and it becomes evident before long that it has something to do with the secret project’s having been a device which can see into the future. 
(Readers who haven’t either seen Memento or read Dick’s story or seen the movie version are warned that major spoilers follow.)Memento is a terrific movie and deserves the hype it has gotten.  Its philosophical interest lies not only in its relevance to discussions of memory and personal identity, but also in the way it illustrates the problems of interpretation and indeterminacy raised by twentieth century philosophers like Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson.  Leonard supposes that taking photographs, writing himself notes, and getting tattoos will allow him to preserve the information he acquires before he can forget it.  The trouble is that he still forgets the context in light of which the photographs he took and the words he writes down or tattoos got the sense he originally had in mind.  Deprived of this forgotten context, he is unable correctly to understand what the words and pictures really mean, so that neither he -- nor, really, even the viewer -- knows just how very far off track he has gotten as he pursues his attacker.  We know, and eventually he knows, that he has been manipulated in ways he cannot fully fathom, but what is deliberately left unclear by the movie is the extent to which this is the case or how long it has been going on.

What is of interest for present purposes, however, is that we find out by the end of the movie that among the people who have been deliberately leading Leonard down blind alleys is Leonard himself!  It turns out that, realizing at one point that he has been manipulated by others, Leonard decides to get revenge on one of those manipulators -- Teddy -- by leaving himself clues falsely implicating Teddy as the man who raped and murdered his wife.  Leonard knows that he will forget that he has himself laid these false clues, and that his future self will kill Teddy, supposing that he is avenging his wife’s death when in fact he is really punishing Teddy for having manipulated him.
Now what I want to focus on is a question raised by Leonard’s planting of false clues for his later self to misinterpret.  As background, keep in mind that for us Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosophers (unlike, say, for Lockeans), Leonard’s anterograde amnesia in fact raises no problems of personal identity.  Leonard remains the same person over time as long as he is the same form-matter composite over time, which he is as long as he is alive and whether or not he can remember anything of his past life.  Indeed, he would remain the same person even if his brain had been so damaged that he spent the rest of his life totally unconscious.  (Since this is not a post about personal identity per se, I’m not going to pursue this issue further but just take for granted in what follows the A-T view.  See David Oderberg’s essay “Hylemorphic Dualism” for exposition and defense of the A-T approach to personal identity.)
A second background assumption I’m going to make is the correctness of the standard Thomistic natural law view about lying.   Part of that standard view is that lying is intrinsically wrong.  But that doesn’t mean we always have to reveal the truth -- we can remain silent or, under some circumstances, even speak evasively using a broad mental reservation.  It doesn’t rule out certain customary forms of speech that are not literally true -- joking, for example, or saying “I’m fine, how are you?” when meeting someone even though you are feeling miserable -- because the standard view is that given the nuances of linguistic usage, these don’t count as lies.  Nor, on the standard view, does deception always involve lying, and neither is deception itself always and intrinsically wrong (though of course it often is wrong given the circumstances).  For you might know and intend that someone be deceived when you use evasive language that isn’t strictly untrue and thus not a lie.  But directly and unambiguously communicating some meaning that is contrary to what you really think would be a lie.  And while outright lying is not necessarily seriously wrong -- probably most lies are not -- it is still at least mildly wrong.  (Here too I’m not going to pursue this set of issues further at present, because the post is not about lying per se; and I have in any event discussed the ethics of lying many times and at considerable depth in previous posts, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Please do not waste time raising questions or objections concerning this issue in the combox unless you’ve read those posts, because I’ve probably answered your question or objection in one of them.) 
Now, coming back to Memento, let’s ask: Was Leonard lying when he arranged misleading clues for his later self?  Obviously he was deceivinghimself and -- given that his aim was to bring about a murder -- doing so immorally.  But was he doing so by means of a lie in the strict sense?  Can you literally lie to yourself?  One Thomistic natural law theorist, Austin Fagothey, thinks not.  Discussing the conditions under which a sign of some sort (whether linguistic, a gesture, or whatever) counts as a lie, Fagothey writes that “the sign must be made to another person, for speech is communication between minds.  It is impossible to lie to oneself…” (Right and Reason, Second edition, pp. 309-10).
To understand Fagothey’s point here it is crucial to reemphasize that not all deception involves lying.  Again, if I speak evasively I may deceive you without lying.  For example, if I tell the proverbial murderer who comes to the door looking for you that “He is not inside this house” -- suppose you are actually hiding in my backyard -- and he goes away thinking that you are nowhere around, I have deceived him but I have not lied.  Similarly, if I don’t let myself dwell on certain unpleasant truths, knowing that I am likely to forget them if I keep my mind off of them long enough, there is a sense in which I have deceived myself.  Fagothey isn’t denying that that is possible.  His point is that that is different from lying.  What he has in mind by “lying” is the sort of thing I would be doing if I told the murderer flatly: “He is nowhere in the vicinity, neither in the house, nor in the backyard, nor the garage, nor anywhere else nearby as far as I know.  Nor, Mr. Murderer, am I in any way speaking evasively or using any sort of mental reservation.  You can take my word for it.”  If I said that while knowing full well that you were in the backyard, I would be lying.  (Never mind for now about the morality of it -- the point is that it would be a lie, whether justifiable or not.)  Fagothey is saying that it is impossible to lie to yourself in thatstrict sense. 
Obviously there is something to what he is saying.  Imagine me talking, not to the murderer, but to myself -- while looking in the mirror, say, trying to appear sincere -- saying “Your friend isn’t really in the backyard, Ed.  Honest!”  It’s ridiculous to think this would count even as an attempt at lying.  I would know, in the very act of “communicating” the meaning that is contrary to what I really think, that it is contrary to what I really think.  This seems a bit like trying to get yourself to think that you are not really thinking -- a self-defeating exercise.  At most my little monologue while looking in the mirror might count as a kind of joke.  (That’s an interesting question -- can you literally jokewith yourself even if you can’t lie to yourself?  Maybe so, though perhaps this really just amounts to thinking about jokes or other funny things.) 
So, should we conclude that Leonard was not lying to himself -- even though he was of course deceiving himself -- when he laid those clues for his later self to misinterpret? 
A Lockean who takes continuity of consciousness to be definitive of personal identity might argue as follows.  Given Leonard’s condition, there is no significant psychological continuity between the “Leonard” who decides to deceive his future “self” and the later “Leonard” who is deceived.  So (the argument might go) they are really different persons.  And in that case “Leonard” really has lied to “himself”; or rather, the earlier “Leonard” has really told a lie to the later “Leonard” precisely because they are notthe same person.  This would be a way of arguing that the scenario involves genuine lying, consistent with Fagothey’s view that it is impossible to lie to oneself.  For there are, on this view, really twoselves in question, not one.  As I’ve indicated, though, from an A-T point of view the Lockean is just wrong and there is only one person here, in which case this would not be a way of showing that there is genuine lying (again, as opposed to self-deception) involved.
And yet there really does seem to be something like actual lying going on in the scenario in question.  Leonard writes down Teddy’s license plate number as if it were a clue, knowing that his future self will falsely suppose it to be that of his wife’s killer.  In his internal monologue, he even describes what he is doing as “lying” to himself.  He is, in effect, deliberately “communicating” what he knows to be the falsehood that Teddy is the killer to a mind, albeit to his own future mind.  We can even imagine him leaving a note for himself that says flatly “Note to self: Teddy is the killer!” (though he doesn’t actually go that far, wanting to leave at least a little in the way of further investigation for his future self to carry out).
I am inclined to think, then, that this may in fact be a case of lying, Fagothey’s remarks notwithstanding.  What Fagothey should say is that you can’t lie to yourself in ordinary circumstances precisely because in ordinary circumstances the “recipient” of the message (namely you) cannot even in principle take what you say for truth.  And the recipient’s being able at least in principle to take what you say for truth seems a necessary condition for lying.  (That’s why you cannot in principle lie to a stone, a plant, or an earthworm, since they cannot even entertain propositions at all, let alone regard them as true.)  In unusual cases, though, such as those involving anterograde amnesia like Leonard’s, lying to yourself seems possible insofar as the “recipient” of the message (your future self) can in principle take it to be true.
If lying in the strict sense is always at least mildly wrong (as the standard Thomistic view holds) then it would be wrong to lie to yourself the way Leonard does, even if you are lying for a good end (unlike Leonard, who lies to himself for a bad end).  But what about what Jennings does to his future self in “Paycheck”?  Here there is no lying involved, but Jennings does do something that would at least in ordinary circumstances be wrong if done to another.  If you had contracted for a large paycheck and someone rigged things so that instead of getting it you got a bag of trinkets, I think it would in most cases be wrong for him to do so even if the trinkets will benefit you (as they end up benefiting Jennings, in ways his post-memory-loss self doesn’t foresee, in the story). 
Now, in the movie version, the trinkets end up not only benefiting Jennings, but saving his own life and the lives of millions of other people.  It would not be wrong, given the nature of property rights, for one person to deprive another of his contracted paycheck and give him the trinkets instead if that was what was at stake.  But suppose that what was at stake was something far less dramatic.  Suppose that by replacing the paycheck with the trinkets without your consent, I could guarantee that you would be better off in some significant way that nevertheless fell far short of being a matter of life and death.  (Perhaps this would, in ways you are unable at present to see, enable you to get a better job, or make a friend you wouldn’t otherwise have met.)  Would it be morally permissible for me to do it?
It depends.  If you were one of my young children, it seems clear that there are cases where I could, for your own good, legitimately override some contract you had made.  (Suppose you had agreed to mow a neighbor’s lawn for five dollars and I arrange to have a bag of trinkets delivered to you instead, knowing that one of them is a valuable baseball card that will fetch you $50.)  But if you were a perfect stranger, it seems equally clear that I could not legitimately do this.  What we are describing here is a kind of paternalistic intervention, and that is appropriate only where someone has something like paternal authority over another. 
Now, obviously we are in something like a paternalistic relationship to our future selves.  We have not only the right but the duty to do what is in our future best interests.  Hence what Jennings does to his future self, though initially unpleasant -- Affleck’s stunned and angry reaction on opening the envelope of trinkets (when what he expected was $92 million) is one of the better scenes in an otherwise disappointing movie -- is perfectly morally legitimate.

Welcome to the machine

Not too long ago I attended a conference on theology and technology sponsored by First Things.  Unsurprisingly, the question arose whether modern technology is on balance a good or bad thing, and the general view seemed to be that it was in itself neutral -- its goodness or badness deriving from the circumstances of its use.  As Fr. Thomas Joseph White pointed out, however, from a Thomist point of view, while circumstances can certainly make the use of technology bad, of itself it is actually good rather than merely neutral.  It is the product of the practical intellect, the exercise of which per se helps perfect us (even if, again, circumstances can make technology, like other products of practical reason, evil). 
Naturally I wholeheartedly agree, being not only a Thomist but a confirmed city dweller and something of a technophile.  Still, it is worthwhile considering whether there is something special about modern circumstances that makes technology morally problematic.  I think there is, though by no means do I think these circumstances suffice to make modern technology on balance a bad thing.  On the contrary, I think on balance it is a very good thing.  But all good things can lead us to hubris if we are not careful, and there is a special way in which we moderns need to be careful.To see how requires some metaphysical background.  I’ve written many times about the Aristotelian distinction between “nature” and “art,” as set out in Book II of Aristotle’s Physics.  What is “natural” in Aristotle’s sense is what has an intrinsic principle of operation.  To use one of my stock examples, a liana vine (the kind of vine Tarzan swings around on) is a “natural” object insofar as its vine-like activities -- taking in water through its roots, exhibiting certain characteristic growth patterns, etc. -- are the result of tendencies inherent to it.  By contrast, a hammock that Tarzan might make out of living liana vines is an “artifact” rather than a natural object insofar as its distinctive hammock-like function -- serving as a comfortable place to take a nap -- is not intrinsic to the vines but has to be imposed from outside by Tarzan.  That is why, left to themselves, the vines will tend to lose the hammock-like arrangement Tarzan imposes on them.  Tarzan might have to keep re-tying the vines and/or to prune them to keep them functioning as a hammock, but he will not have to interfere with them to keep them functioning as vines.  That is, of course, just what they are inclined to do on their own, without interference. 

As I’ve noted many times, the distinction Aristotle is getting at here is really the distinction between substantial formand accidental form, and whether something came about through human interference or not is at the end of the day a secondary issue.  For there are man-made things that have substantial forms and are thus “natural” in the relevant sense (e.g. new breeds of dog, water synthesized in a lab) and there are things that are not man-made but rather the result of natural processes that are nevertheless not “natural” in the relevant sense but have only an accidental rather than substantial form (e.g. a random pile of stones or dirt, qua pile, that has formed at the bottom of a hill).  The usual cases of things with merely accidental forms are man-made, though, so that we tend (wrongly) to regard the man-made as per se “unnatural,” and the usual cases of objects that occur apart from human action are “natural” in the sense of having a substantial form, so that we tend (wrongly) to assimilate what is “natural” in the sense of occurring apart from human action to what is “natural” in the sense of having a substantial form or intrinsic principle of operation.
Metaphysically speaking, only “natural” objects, i.e. those with substantial forms, are true substances.  For example, a liana vine, a stone, a tree, a dog, or a human being are all true substances.  The acquisition of a mere accidental form cannot generate a new true substance but merely modifies a preexisting substance.  A hammock that Tarzan makes from the vines, for example, is not a true substance.  Rather, it is the vines that are the true substances, and the hammock-like arrangement is a mere accidental form that the substances have taken on.  A watch is also not a true substance.  Rather, the bits of metal and the like that make up the watch are the true substances, and the time-telling feature is a mere accidental form (or collection of accidental forms) that have been imposed upon them.  (And the bits of metal, in turn, are true substances only qua bits, and not (say) qua gears, for the form of being a watch gear is also a merely accidental form.  The bits have an inherent tendency to behave as metal -- conducting electricity, being malleable, etc. -- but not an inherent tendency to function as parts of a time-telling device.) 
True substances -- “natural” objects in the relevant sense, objects with substantial forms -- are thus metaphysically more fundamental than accidental arrangements, or “artifacts” of the usual sort.  There could, perhaps, be a world with only things having substantial forms, but certainly not a world with things having only accidental forms.  (This is why it is a deep mistake to think of the world on the model of an artifact and of God on the model of an artificer, after the fashion of William Paley and ID theory.  That gets the world fundamentally wrong and it gets divine creative activity fundamentally wrong.  But that’s an issue I’ve addressed many times in other contexts.) 
Even if atomism or some modern variation on it were the correct account of the ordinary objects of our experience (which it most definitely is not), that would not eliminate the distinction between substantial and accidental forms, but merely relocate all substantial form to the level of the atoms (or whatever the fundamental particles turn out to be) and make of everything else in the universe mere accidental forms.  The idea that modern science “refuted” the doctrine of substantial form is one of the many urban legends of modern intellectual life. 
Obviously these are large claims, but the point isn’t to expound and defend them here; I‘ve already done that elsewhere.  (See my book Scholastic Metaphysics , especially chapter 3, for my most detailed exposition and defense of the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of substances and substantial forms.  See also David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism .  I’ve discussed these issues several times here on the blog, e.g. hereand here.)
The point, rather, is this.  That there is a difference between “nature” and “art” -- or more precisely, a difference between objects having substantial forms and those having merely accidental forms -- and that the former are metaphysically more fundamental than the latter, is easier to perceive in a low tech society than in a high tech society.  Just think of the examples Aristotle gives in the Physics of objects that are not “natural” in the relevant sense but have merely accidental forms -- beds, cloaks, and the like.  And think of how crude a bed or a cloak of Aristotle’s day would be compared even to the cheap sort of thing you can buy at Ikea or Target today.  It would wear its “natural” origins on its face.  You would see the rough and knotty wood of the bed, say, or the animal skin out of which the cloak was made, and perceive right away that the wood or the skin was the real substance and the bed- or cloak-like shape and function as a relatively superficial pattern imposed on it.  The metaphysically secondary nature of such accidental forms would be manifest.  And you would be living in a larger environment in which, even in the cities, “natural” objects in the relevant Aristotelian sense -- wood, stone, dirt, etc. -- would surround you, and would not look all that terribly different from what they were like before the sculptor applied his chisel or the carpenter his hammer.
By contrast, the objects that surround us in everyday life in the modern city are almost always things whose underlying “natural” substrates -- those things which are the true substances and which underlie the accidental forms -- have been highly processed.  They do not wear their “natural” origins on their sleeve.  This is true even of the most “natural” (in the sense of non-man-made) materials.  The wood and metal that make up the pieces of furniture now right in front of me, for example, are so highly processed and have been so slickly painted or varnished or otherwise made so sleek that what strikes you most clearly is not this is metalor this is wood, but rather this is a filing cabinet and this is a desk.  It is even more obviously true of the great many everyday objects made out of plastic.  As I have noted in a recent post, plastic is plausibly “natural” in the Aristotelian sense of having a substantial form, since it has irreducible causal powers (a mark of the presence of a substantial rather than accidental form).  The same can be said of other common man-made materials (Styrofoam, glass, etc.).  Since they don’t occur “in the wild” but are man-made, that they are “natural” (in the sense, again, that they have substantial forms) doesn’t hit you in the face as it does with the wood or stone you’d see in the wild; and since plastic etc. have, on top of that, all sorts of accidental forms imposed on them (e.g. the shapes, colors, textures, etc. of cups, Frisbees, computers, and the like, and the associated observer-relative functions) their underlying natural/substantial form basis is far from obvious to casual inspection.
Moreover, even when objects that are clearly natural (again, in the relevant sense of “natural”) are present in the modern city -- trees, grass, etc. -- they are present in a way that is often so much the result of human planning that the accidental forms -- the shape of the lawn and the uniformity of the length of the blades of grass, the shape of the hedges, etc. -- strike you as much as the natural object itself does.
So, you might say that the world around us modern city dwellers is so covered over with accidental forms that the substantial forms that underlie them are visible only with effort.  And as a result, it is easier for us to fall prey to the illusion that there is no deep difference between substantial and accidental forms, and indeed no such thing as “nature” in the Aristotelian sense.  That this is an illusion there can be no doubt, because on analysis it can be seen that we cannot even make coherent sense of a material order that did not at some level exhibit what Aristotelians call substantial forms.  (Again, see Scholastic Metaphysics.)  But it takes more work for those immersed in highly technology to see that it is an illusion -- or it does, anyway, if (as is so often the case) their natural metaphysical sensibilities have been dulled by the post-Cartesian, post-Humean assumptions that they have picked up from the surrounding intellectual culture.
Now, when I made this point at the conference referred to above, Prof. Peter Lawler made, in response, the important point that even the modern city dweller knows one natural substance very well indeed, namely himself.  But I think even our awareness of ourselves as “natural” has been dulled in the modern world by the layers of accidental forms, as it were, through which we have come to perceive ourselves.  There are, for one thing, the perfectly legitimate adornments and grooming practices -- clothing, jewelry, coiffed hair and trimmed nails, shaving, bathing, perfuming, etc. -- that have always been a part of human culture.  Then there are the morally more problematic bodily and psychological alterations familiar from modern life -- extensive plastic surgery, extensive tattooing and body piercing, heavy use of drugs to alter behavior, etc. 
These practices are problematic, for the natural law theorist, when they cross the line separating beautifying adornment or correction of defects (which are perfectly legitimate) from deliberate mutilation (which is not legitimate, except when done to preserve the whole organism).  Where exactly the line is to be drawn would take some careful analysis to determine, but the morality of bodily modification is not, in any event, our present subject.  What is important to note for present purposes is that the more we modify ourselves -- even when we do so legitimately -- the less obvious is our status as “natural” objects in the relevant, Aristotelian sense.  We can even start to take seriously the suggestion that we are “really” just “machines” of a sort -- a machine being a paradigm instance of something having a merely accidental rather than substantial form.  (On that subject, some relevant posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)
The moral implications all of this has from a traditional natural law perspective are obvious.  For good and bad as objective features of the world are, for natural law theory, determined by what is “natural” in the technical Aristotelian sense of what tends to fulfill the ends toward which a thing is directed by virtue of its substantial form.  To the extent that we lose sight of the “natural” in the sense of that which has a substantial form or intrinsic principle of operation -- an intrinsic principle by virtue of which it is naturally directed to the realization of certain ends -- we thereby also lose sight of “good” and “bad” as objective features of the world, and thus lose sight of the preconditions of an objective moral order.
(Critics are asked kindly to spare us the common stupid objections to the effect that everything is really natural since everything is governed by the laws of nature; or that a consistent natural law theorist would have to reject eyeglasses and ear plugs as unnatural; etc. etc.  I’ve discussed the sense of “natural” relevant to natural law theory in previous posts, such as this one, this one, and this one.  For more detailed exposition and defense of traditional natural law theory, see chapter 5 of Aquinas , my Social Philosophy and Policyarticle “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” and my forthcoming article “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” an excerpt from which recently appeared in National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.)
So, to the extent that modern technology dulls our awareness of the natural, it poses a moral hazard -- not in itself but by virtue of circumstances.  But it is possible to overstate the hazard, and people do not (and, I think, never could) consistently treat themselves or the world as if there were no such thing as “nature” in the Aristotelian sense.  (For example, I suspect that the fad for “organic” goods reflects a confused sense of the natural in something like this sense.)  As Horace wrote, you can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she’ll come back in through the window.  Until she does, welcome to the machine. 

What’s around the web?

John Searle is interviewed at New Philosopher.  He’s in fine Searle form (and well-armed, as you can see from the photo accompanying the interview):  “It upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up.”
Jeremy Shearmur is interviewed at 3:AM Magazineabout his work on Karl Popper and F. A. Hayek.  Standpoint magazine on Hayek and religion.
A memorial conference for the late E. J. Lowe will be held this July at Durham University. 
Steely Dan is being sued by former member David Palmer.  GQ magazine looks back on Steely Dan’s Aja, and The Quietus celebrates and cerebrates the 40thanniversary of Pretzel Logic.  Donald Fagen’s book Eminent Hipsters is reviewed in City Journal and in the New York Observer .John Haldane discusses Alasdair MacIntyre, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis at Ethika Politika. 

In The New Atlantis, Roger Scruton on “Scientism in the Arts and Humanities.”
Philosopher of language Scott Soames is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  Soames discusses, among other things, his defense of a variation on the originalist approach to interpreting the U.S. constitution.  This is a subject explored in some of the essays in Soames’ new book Analytic Philosophy in America and Other Historical and Contemporary Essays , wherein he comments on Roe v. Wade and other crucial Supreme Court cases.

That Sony holds the rights to make Spider-Man movies has so far kept him from joining the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  But there are several ways it could still happen.

Elmar J. Kremer has just published Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God .  Bill Vallicella comments on the book. 

Some other recent books of interest: Stephen Boulter, Metaphysics from a Biological Point of View , “a defense of Scholastic metaphysical principles based on contemporary evolutionary biology”; Charlie Huenemann, Spinoza’s Radical Theology ; Peter Adamson, ed., Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays (reviewedat Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews); and Stephen Mumford and Matthew Tugby, eds., Metaphysics and Science (also reviewed at NDPR).
Some forthcoming books: From Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary ; and from Mark Anderson, Plato and Nietzsche: Their Philosophical Art .
When was the last time you heard the Thomist A. D. Sertillanges, or even Aquinas himself, being discussed on the radio?  For me it was (to my surprise) this afternoon after tuning in to The Hugh Hewitt Show.  Turns out that Lee Cole, who teaches philosophy at Hillsdale College, and Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale, have been discussing Aquinas with Hewitt in a series of shows.  You can find the show transcripts here.

Dharmakīrti and Maimonides on divine action

Here’s a juxtaposition for you: the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti (c. 600 - 660) and the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138 - 1204).  Both had interesting things to say about divine action, Dharmakīrti from the point of view of a critic of theism and Maimonides from the point of view of a theist committed to “negative theology.” 
Theism of a sort reminiscent of Western philosophical theology has its defenders in the history of Indian philosophy, particularly within the Nyāya-Vaiśeșika tradition.  In particular, one finds in this tradition arguments for the existence of īśvara (the “Lord”) as a single permanent, personal cause of the world of intermittent things.  The debate between these thinkers and their Buddhist critics parallels the dispute between theists and atheists in the West.  (To map the Indian philosophical traditions onto those of ancient Greece, you might compare the Buddhist position to that of Heraclitus, the Advaita Vedanta position of thinkers like Shankara (788 - 820) to that of Parmenides, and Indian theism to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.  But the similarities should not be overstated.)Dharmakīrti’s critique of theistic arguments is usefully surveyed by Roger Jackson in his 1986 article “Dharmakīrti's Refutation of Theism” (from Philosophy East and West Vol. 36, No. 4).  In response to arguments from intermittent things to a permanent cause, Dharmakīrti objects:

How, if an entity is a cause,(But is said) sometimes to be
A non-cause, can one assert in any way
That a cause is a non-cause?  One cannot so assert.

Jackson comments:
Successive causality and noncausality poses a problem because the causal entity posited by the theist, īśvara, is permanent.  He cannot, therefore, change from moment to moment, and if he is asserted to be causal, then he must always be causal, and can never become noncausal, for that would entail a change in nature, an impossibility for a permanent entity… Simultaneous causality and noncausality poses a problem, because īśvara is a single entity, yet is being furnished with contradictory qualities at one and the same time.  Contradictory properties cannot be predicated of a single, partless entity at one and the same time, and if these properties are reaffirmed, then īśvara cannot be single, but must be multiple.  Īśvaracannot, thus, be a creator of intermittent entities. (pp. 330-31)
The objection can be read as a dilemma, to the effect that īśvara either acts successively or he acts simultaneously, and each possibility leads to an unacceptable conclusion.  Start with the first horn of the dilemma.  If īśvara acts successively, then since intermittent things sometimes exist and sometimes do not, that means that he is sometimes causing them and sometimes not causing them.  That in turn entails that he undergoes change, in which case he is not the permanent entity he is supposed to be.  To put the point in Western terms, if īśvara is sometimes not causing intermittent things and then sometimes is causing them, then he goes from potency to act and is thus not immutable.
Now the Western classical theist will say that the divine first cause of things must be eternal or outside of time and thus does not act successively.  Rather, he causes the world of intermittent things in a single timeless act.  This brings us to the second horn of the dilemma posed by Jackson in expounding Dharmakīrti.  If īśvara timelessly causes intermittent things (as the Western classical theist would put it), then he simultaneously causes an intermittent thing (insofar as he is what makes it true that such a thing exists at the times when it does exist) and does not cause it (insofar as he refrains from making it true that it exists at the times when it does not exist).  But then we are making contradictory attributions to īśvara, insofar as we say both that he is causing and that he is not causing.  And to avoid this contradiction by making these attributions of two different causes would be to abandon the unity attributed to īśvara.
There is a fallacy here, though, which can be seen by comparison with the following example.  Suppose I am drawing a line across the top of a piece of paper, but that at the same time I am not drawing a line at the bottom of the paper.  So I am both drawing and not drawing at the same time.  Is there a contradiction here?  No, because I am not both drawing and not drawing in the same respect.  There would be a contradiction only if it were said that I am both drawing a line at the top of the page and also at the same time not drawing a line at the top of the page.  But that is not what is being said.  What is being said is that I am drawing a line at the top of the pageand at the same time not drawing a line at the bottom of the page, and there is no contradiction in that. 
Similarly, suppose we say that īśvara timelessly causes an intermittent being A that exists from 8 am until 9 am.  Then he is not causing it to be the case that A exists before 8 am or after 9 am but is causing it to be the case that A exists between 8 am and 9 am.  There would be a contradiction here only if it were being claimed either that īśvara both causes and does not cause A to exist between 8 and 9 am, or if it were being claimed that īśvara both causes A to exist before 8 am and does not cause A to exist before 8 am, or if it were being claimed that īśvara both causes A to exist after 9 am and does not cause A to exist after 9 am.  But of course none of these things is being claimed.  What is claimed is rather that īśvara causes the existence of something that exists during the interval in question but not before or after it, and there is nothing contradictory in that.
More can be said -- which brings us to Maimonides, who, though he certainly did not have Dharmakīrti in mind, says things that imply a response to the objection under consideration.  Maimonides famously holds that we cannot make affirmative predications of God but only negative predications.  We can say what God is not but not what he is.  What about attributions of actions to God, as when we say that God shows mercy to us?  For Maimonides these should be understood as assertions not about God’s essence but rather about his effects.  To say that God shows mercy is to say that his effects are like the effects a merciful human agent would produce.
Now, consider the suggestion that a diversity of effects implies diversity in the cause -- in particular, that it implies either numerically distinct causes (which, in the case of divine action, would conflict with monotheism) or a distinction of parts (which would conflict with divine simplicity).  Dharmakīrti might be read as putting forward such an objection, if we interpret him as saying that insofar as īśvara both produces intermittent things and does not produce him, then we have to say either that there is more than one divine cause (one which causes intermittent things and one which does not) or distinct parts within īśvara (a part which causes intermittent things and a part which does not). 
Maimonides (though, again, he is obviously not addressing Dharmakīrti himself!) responds to this sort of objection, in his Guide of the Perplexed , using the analogy of fire:
Many of the attributes express different acts of God, but that difference does not necessitate any difference as regards Him from whom the acts proceed. This fact, viz., that from one agency different effects may result, although that agency has not free will, and much more so if it has free will, I will illustrate by an instance taken from our own sphere. Fire melts certain things and makes others hard, it boils and burns, it bleaches and blackens. If we described the fire as bleaching, blackening, burning, boiling, hardening and melting, we should be correct, and yet he who does not know the nature of fire, would think that it included six different elements, one by which it blackens, another by which it bleaches, a third by which it boils, a fourth by which it consumes, a fifth by which it melts, a sixth by which it hardens things--actions which are opposed to one another, and of which each has its peculiar property. He, however, who knows the nature of fire, will know that by virtue of one quality in action, namely, by heat, it produces all these effects. If this is the case with that which is done by nature, how much more is it the case with regard to beings that act by free will, and still more with regard to God, who is above all description. (Book I, Chapter 53)
So, just as effects as diverse and indeed opposed as bleaching and blackening, hardening and melting, can be produced by one and the same cause, heat, so too can a radical diversity of effects be produced by a divine cause which is absolutely simple and unique.  And (we might add, applying the point on Maimonides’ behalf to Dharmakīrti’s objection) just as heat will effect some things in one of the ways named while affecting others not at all, so too does the same absolutely simple God cause it to be the case that a thing exists at one point while not causing it to be the case that it exists at some other point.
Maimonides considers a related objection in Book II, Chapter 18, to the effect that “a transition from potentiality to actuality would take place in the Deity itself, if He produced a thing only at a certain fixed time.”  Maimonides says that “the refutation of this argument is very easy,” for a transition from potency to act need occur only in things made up of form and matter.  (Aquinas would add that it could occur in something immaterial but still composed of an essence together with a distinct act of existence, viz. an angel.)  To suppose that since the material things of our experience go from potential to actual when they produce a temporally finite effect, so too would God have to go from potential to actual in order to produce a temporally finite effect, is to commit a fallacy of accident.  All the philosophy professors who have ever lived or who are likely ever to live have been under ten feet tall, but it doesn’t follow that every philosophy professor must necessarily be under ten feet tall.  And even if the causes with which we are directly aware in experience produce their effects by virtue of moving from potency to act, it doesn’t follow that every cause must necessarily move from potency to act.
(I have considered related objections in this post and this one.)

I was wrong about Keith Parsons

Longtime readers know that Prof. Keith Parsons and I have not always gotten along.  Some years ago he famously expressed the view that the arguments of natural theology are a “fraud” that do not rise to the level of a “respectable philosophical position” worthy of “serious academic attention.”  I hit back pretty hard at the time, and our subsequent remarks about each other over the years have not been kind.  I had come to the conclusion that Prof. Parsons was unwilling to engage seriously with the best arguments of natural theology.  But I am delighted to say that I was wrong.  Prof. Parsons has said that his earlier remarks about the field were “unfortunate”and “intemperate and inappropriate, however qualified.”  He has shown admirable grace and good sportsmanship in his willingness to bury the hatchet despite how heated things had been between us.  And he has most definitely engaged seriously with the arguments of traditional natural theology in our recent exchange.  I take back the unkind remarks I have made about him in the past.  He is a good guy.
Keith is now wrapping up his side in our initial exchange.  If you have not done so already, give it a read.  In the near future we will have an exchange on the subject of atheism and morality.  I look forward to it.  Keith has also expressed to me his admiration for the quality of the comments readers have been making on our exchange.  I agree, and I thank the readers both of my blog and of Keith’s blog over at Secular Outpost.

Stop it, you’re killing me!

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Ferris Jabr of Scientific American kindly informs us that nothing is really alive, not even Jabr himself or his readers.  Fairly verbose for a dead guy, he develops the theme at length -- not by way of giving an explicit argument for his claim, so much as by putting forward considerations intended to make it appear something other than the killer joke it seems on its face to be.
The routine is familiar, even if Jabr’s thesis is a bit more extreme than that of other biological reductionists.  There’s no generally agreed upon definition of life; there are borderline cases such as viruses; living and non-living things are all made up of the same kinds of particles; so…
The “so” part is where these sorts of views get into trouble, because the reductionist conclusions -- let alone Jabr’s eliminativist conclusion -- don’t follow, and even Jabr doesn’t really claim to have establishedthat there is no such thing as life (as opposed to merely putting it out there as a proposal).  Indeed, if the line between the living and the non-living is as blurry as Jabr alleges, one might just as well argue that everything is alive, rather than that nothing is.
That either extreme conclusion equally well “follows” from Jabr’s premises shows that something has gone wrong here.  But then, denying apparently obvious distinctions is typically a mark of imprecise rather than rigorous thinking.  So too is the marketing of such denials as “liberating” (as Jabr claims the denial that life exists is).  As always, the “épater la bourgeoisie” rhetorical force of bizarre claims is doing at least as much work as the philosophical and scientific considerations are. 

The essence of life
But let’s look at the latter.  Jabr begins by noting:
Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life.  To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution.  But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.
End quote.  Now, while we Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophers can hardly deny that there is no “universally accepted” definition of life, we maintain that a “precise” definition of life is in fact possible.  Living things, the Scholastic holds, are those which exhibit immanent causation as well as transeunt (or “transient”) causation; non-living things exhibit transeunt causation alone.  Transeunt causal processes are those that terminate in something outside the cause.  Immanent causal processes are those which terminate within the cause and tend to its good or flourishing (even if they also have effects external to the cause).  For example, an animal’s digesting of a meal is a causal process that tends to the good or flourishing of the animal itself (though it also has byproducts external to the animal, such as the waste products it excretes).  By contrast, one rock’s knocking into another is a transeunt causal process, in that it does not in any sense tend to the good or flourishing of the rock itself.  (For recent exposition and defense of this characterization of life, see chapter 8 of David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism , and his paper “Synthetic Life and the Bruteness of Immanent Causation.”)
Now, Scholastics distinguish between the essenceof a thing and its properties, where both terms are used in a way that is crucially different from the way they are usually used by most contemporary philosophers.  One way to think of the essence of a thing is as what we capture when we give its genus and specific difference (where a “specific difference” is what differentiates one species from others in the same genus, and where “genus” and “species” are to be understood in their traditional logical, rather than biological, senses).  To take a traditional example for purposes of illustration, suppose we take a human being to be a rational animal (“animal” being the genus and “rational” the specific difference).  The properties of a human being (as the Scholastic uses the term “properties”) are what flow or follow from this essence, and include things like the capacity for perceptual experience, the capacity for self-movement, the ability to form concepts, and so forth.  Rational animality is not the cluster of these properties, but rather that by virtue of which a thing has them.  And “properties” are not any old characteristics a thing has, but only those that flow from a thing’s essence -- that is to say, those that are proper to a thing.  (For exposition and defense of the Scholastic conception of essence and properties, see chapter 4 of my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction .) 
From a Scholastic point of view, the problem with too much contemporary thinking about the nature of life is that it focuses on what are really properties of life (again, in the Scholastic sense of “properties”) and tries to characterize life in terms of one of these properties or a cluster of properties.  Since an essence is not a property or cluster of properties (but is rather that from which properties flow), it is no surprise that the essence of life (or of anything else for that matter) comes to seem elusive.  Growth, reproduction, and the like are key to understanding life, but they are not the essence of life.  They are rather properties, which flow or follow from the essence.  The essence is rather a matter of the capacity of a natural substance for immanent causation or self-perfective activity -- that is to say, the ability of a thing to act for the sake of its own good or flourishing.
Now one of the several reasons why we must distinguish essence and properties is that without this distinction we cannot make sense of the distinction between normal and defective instances of a kind.  For example, cats are of their nature four-legged, but that does not mean that every single cat will in fact have four legs.  For genetic defect or injury might deprive some cat of one or more of its legs.  Four-leggedness is a property of cats in the sense that it flows from their essence, but the flow can be “blocked,” as it were.  Now if instead we think of the essence of a cat as a cluster of attributes (as contemporary metaphysicians typically would), we might conclude that “being four-legged” must not really be essential to being a cat (since there are three-legged cats), and thus must not be one of the attributes in the cluster.   But we would fail thereby to capture the way in which a cat’s lacking all of its four legs is abnormal in a way that (say) its failing to be grey is not.  This can be captured only by seeing four-leggedness as a true property which flows from but is nevertheless distinct from the essence (which is why in aberrant cases it may not be manifested), whereas greyness is not a property of the cat at all (in the Scholastic sense) but rather what Scholastics would call a “contingent (as opposed to proper) accident” of the cat. 
In the case of defining life in general, when we fail to distinguish between essence and properties we will make similar mistakes.  We might conclude, for example, that the capacity for reproduction is not really essential to living things, since there are living things (e.g. mules, and organisms whose sexual organs have been damaged) which cannot reproduce.  This would be to fail to see that reproduction could still be essential to life in the sense of being a property (again, something which flows from the essence) even if in some cases it doesn’t manifest itself (where such cases are to be understood as aberrant or abnormal).  In general, looking for some feature that is present in absolutely every single instance -- and then concluding, when a feature isn’t always present, that it must not really be “essential” after all -- is just too crude a way of proceeding when trying to characterize life.  From an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, contemporary metaphysicians (and contemporary biologists when wearing their metaphysician’s hats) are simply too conceptually impoverished correctly to approach questions about essence.  (Obviously this raises many questions, but the usual questions are all answered in books like Oderberg’s, and mine, which were cited above.)
Borderline cases
The absence, from contemporary thinking about essence, of the distinction between substantial form and accidental form is, like the absence of the distinction between essence and properties, another source of confusion when thinking about life.  Hence some readers are bound to think of computer viruses as examples of entities that are self-perfective or act for their own good or flourishing, and would thus (it might be supposed) be candidates for living things given the Scholastic account of life.  But computer viruses have merely accidental forms rather than substantial forms.  That is to say, unlike true substances, which have an inherent or “built-in” principle of activity (as e.g. an acorn is inherently directed toward becoming an oak), a computer virus has an externally imposed principle of operation (as e.g. the parts of a watch have no inherent tendency to tell time, but have that function only insofar as it is imposed on them externally by the watchmaker and the users of the watch).  Now a living thing is a kind of substance, with a substantial form; it is inherentlydirected toward acting for its own good or flourishing rather than being so directed only by some external factor.  Since computer viruses are not like that -- qua artifacts they have only accidental forms or externally imposed principles of operation -- they are not alive, even if they mimic some aspects of life.  (Of course, talk of substantial form raises many questions, which I have dealt with many times.  See chapter 3 of Scholastic Metaphysics for my most detailed discussion and defense of the distinction between substantial form and accidental form.)
What of real viruses?  Are they alive or not?  There is no such thing as “the” Aristotelian-Scholastic position on this question, since Scholastic metaphysics must be applied to such questions in conjunction with whatever the empirical facts turn out to be.  (Criticisms to the effect that the Aristotelian thinks these matters can be settled from the armchair are simply aimed at a straw man.)  Oderberg argues in Real Essentialism that viruses are not alive, but the Scholastic approach to the nature of life certainly doesn’t hinge on the question.  In general, the significance of borderline cases is massively overstated where questions of essence are concerned. 
As I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics, the reality of essences in general cannot coherently be denied, and anything that has a regular pattern of operation or activity must ipso facto have an essence.  If for some substance we find it hard to determine whether it is of kind A or kind B, it will nevertheless in fact be either of kind A or B, or of some heretofore unknown kind C.  It will, that is to say, in fact have an essence, whether or not we know its essence.  Where natural substances are concerned, vagueness is always epistemological rather than metaphysical. 
Obviously this requires argumentation -- again, see Scholastic Metaphysics, and also Oderberg’s Real Essentialism -- but the point is that for the biological reductionist merely to cite borderline or vague cases cuts no ice.  Certainly it begs the question against the Scholastic -- who has independent metaphysical reasons for the claim that vagueness is epistemological rather than metaphysical -- to suggest that viruses and the like show that there is no fact of the matter about whether a thing is alive.  Just as hard cases make bad law, obsession with borderline cases (which is rife in modern philosophy) makes for bad metaphysics. 
Reductionism
A third element in Jabr’s position is the implicit assumption that since living and non-living things are made of the same particles, the former must differ from the latter only in degree rather than in kind.  He writes:
All observable matter is, at its most fundamental level, an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These associations range in complexity from something as simple as, say, a single molecule of water to something as astonishingly intricate as an ant colony. All the proposed features of life — metabolism, reproduction, evolution — are in fact processes that appear at many different regions of this great spectrum of matter. There is no precise threshold.
End quote.  Now, the “no precise threshold” stuff is, like the appeal to viruses as borderline cases, an expression of the idea that the distinction between living and non-living things is inherently vague.  But whereas the appeal to viruses has to do with considerations specific to that kind of entity, here the appeal is to more general metaphysical considerations.  In particular, it is an appeal to the thesis that all natural objects are “really” “nothing but” fundamental particles.  “Therefore” whatever is true of any natural object must (Jabr presumably holds) “really” be a truth about how fundamental particles are arranged.
We saw some time back how this assumption determines how Alex Rosenberg approaches the question of life in his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  We also saw, in the same post, how Rosenberg is led -- implicitly rather than explicitly in his case -- to just the sort of eliminative position vis-à-vis life that Jabr endorses.  And we saw too that there are no good arguments whatsoever for that position.  For there are no good arguments for the assumption that it rests on, viz. that whatever is real must “really” be “nothing but” particles and their arrangements.  (See also this follow-up post on Rosenberg’s biological reductionism.)
To be sure, it is often claimed that “science shows” that this is the case, but science shows nothing of the kind.  Rather, the view in question -- essentially a modern riff on the atomism of Democritus and Leucippus -- is read into science and then read back out again.  The Aristotelian-Scholastic position is that there are irreducible natural substances wherever there are irreducible causal powers, and where there are irreducible substances the parts of such substances -- including the particles in question -- exist in them virtually rather than actually.  In that sense, the substances are, metaphysically speaking, more fundamental than the particles, not less.  (For the full story, see chapter 3 of Scholastic Metaphysics.)
Now, in the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, the fundamental divisions in the natural world are between the inorganic and the organic, between merely vegetative forms of life (in the technical Aristotelian sense of “vegetative”) and sentient forms of life, and between sentient forms of life and the rational sort of life characteristic of human beings.  If atomism or its modern variants had in fact been proved by modern science, then we would expect that none of these divisions would be problematic for the contemporary naturalist.  But in fact they all remain problematic.  The difficulties facing reductive accounts of the “propositional attitudes” (beliefs, desires, etc.) are well-known to philosophers of mind, as are the difficulties facing attempts to give a reductive account of “qualia.”  Yet the distinction between propositional attitudes (with their characteristic intentional content) on the one hand and merely qualitative mental states on the other is, essentially, the distinction between what Aristotelians would call intellective or rational powers and mere sentience; that is to say, it marks the third of the fundamental divisions in nature affirmed by the Aristotelian.  And the distinction between creatures which possess qualia and those which do not is very close to the distinction the Aristotelian traditionally draws between sentient and non-sentient forms of life; that is to say, it marks the second of the fundamental divisions in nature affirmed by the Aristotelian. 
Then there is the division between the inorganic and the organic.  As the atheist and naturalist philosopher Alva Noë has acknowledged:
Science has produced no standard account of the origins of life.
We have a superb understanding of how we get biological variety from simple, living starting points. We can thank Darwin for that. And we know that life in its simplest forms is built up out of inorganic stuff. But we don't have any account of how life springs forth from the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to bridge...
[W]e have large-scale phenomena in view (life, consciousness) and an exquisitely detailed understanding of the low-level processes that sustain these phenomena (biochemistry, neuroscience, etc). But we lack any way of making sense of the idea that the higher-level phenomena just come down to, or consist of, what is going on at the lower level…
A living cell is more than just a chemical compound, even if every part of the cell is composed of inorganic elements. A cell, after all, is alive. What we lack, as in the case of mind, is a way of understanding how life happens due to the mere combination of nonliving precursors.
End quote.  In other words, how to reduce the organic to the inorganic is (hoopla over the Miller-Urey experiment and the like notwithstanding) no more evident now than it was when Galileo and Co. pushed the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition to the margins of Western intellectual life.  (I had reason to discuss Noë’s views at greater length hereand here, and questions about the origin of life at greater length here.)
So, the traditional Aristotelian divisions in nature are really no closer to being dissolved today than they ever were.  And there is, I maintain, no argument to the contrary that doesn’t beg all the important questions.  “We ‘know’ that the older, Aristotelian metaphysics is wrong and naturalist metaphysics correct because ‘science shows’ this; and we ‘know’ that this is the correct way to interpret ‘the science’ because we ‘know’ that the older metaphysics is wrong and that a naturalist metaphysics is better.”  There really is nothing more to the contemporary consensus than this kind of circular reasoning. 
In any event, I defend the radically anti-reductionist, Aristotelian hylemorphist approach to understanding the natural world at length in Scholastic Metaphysics (as does Oderberg in Real Essentialism).  Reductionist appeals to arrangements of particles etc. that do not respond to Aristotelian arguments merely assume precisely what is at issue, since the Aristotelian would agree with the naturalist on the scientific facts but dispute the naturalist’s interpretation of those facts.  You might say that the rumors of Aristotle’s death have been greatly exaggerated (as this, and this, and this, and this, and thisall indicate).  And thus so too are rumors to the effect that “nothing is truly alive.”

L.A. area speaking engagements

On Saturday, March 29, I’ll be the keynote speaker at the Talbot Philosophical SocietySpring Conference at Biola University in La Mirada, CA.  The theme of the talk will be “The Scholastic Principle of Causality and the Rationalist Principle of Sufficient Reason.”  Bill Vallicella will be the respondent.  Come out and see the dueling philosophy bloggers.
On Friday, April 4, I’ll be speaking at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA.  The theme of the talk will be “What We Owe the New Atheists.”  More information here.As I’ve previously announced, summer speaking engagements outside the L.A. area include events in Newburgh, NY, Berkeley, and Princeton. 

Gelernter on computationalism

People have asked me to comment on David Gelernter’s essay on minds and computers in the January issue of Commentary.  It’s written with Gelernter’s characteristic brio and clarity, and naturally I agree with the overall thrust of it.  But it seems to me that Gelernter does not quite get to the heart of the problem with the computer model of the mind.  What he identifies, I would argue, are rather symptomsof the deeper problems.  Those deeper problems are three, and longtime readers of this blog will recognize them.  The first two have more to do with the computationalist’s notion of matter than with his conception of mind.As I have emphasized many times, most participants in the debate between materialism and dualism, on both sides, simply take for granted a conception of matter inherited from Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and the other early moderns.  On that conception, matter is essentially devoid both of teleology and of the qualitative features that common sense attributes to it.  That is to say, there is, on this view of matter, nothing inherent to it that corresponds to the “directedness” toward an end (or “finality,” to use the Scholastic jargon) that the Aristotelian attributes to all natural substances.  Nor are secondary qualities like color, sound, odor, etc. as common sense understands them (that is to say, as we “feel” them in conscious awareness) really out there in matter itself.  What is there, on this view, is only color as redefinedfor purposes of physics (in terms of the surface reflectance properties of objects), sound as redefined (in terms of compression waves), and so forth.  Matter on this conception is exhaustively describable in terms of the quantifiable categories to which physics confines itself. 

Now for the Aristotelian, the point isn’t that the moderns’ conception of matter is wrong so much as that it is incomplete.  The trouble is not with thinking of matter the way Galileo, Descartes, and their successors have, but with taking this to be an exhaustive conception, as something other than a mere abstraction from a much richer concrete reality.  And if it is taken as an exhaustive conception, then a Cartesian form of dualism is hard to avoid.  For to say that matter is essentially devoid of qualitative features like color, sound, taste, etc. and that these exist only as the qualia of conscious experience just is to make of qualia something essentially immaterial.  And to say that matter is essentially devoid of anything like “directedness” or “finality” is ipso facto to make of the “directedness” or “intentionality” of desires, fears, and other such states also something essentially immaterial.  Cartesian dualism was not a rearguard reaction against the early moderns’ new conception of matter, but on the contrary a direct consequence of that conception.  (I addressed this issue at length in my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, and it is a point Nagel himself has also emphasized.) 
This brings us to the first of the three deep problems with computationalism.  Computationalists, like materialists in general but also like Cartesians (though unlike us Aristotelians), take for granted the broadly Galilean or Cartesian conception of matter.  Hence they will never in principle be able to fit the qualia definitive of consciousness into their account of the mind, since they are operating with a conception of matter that implicitly excludes the qualitative from material processes from the get go.  Their accounts of the qualitative will therefore always in effect either change the subject or amount to a disguised eliminativism.  This result can be avoided by giving up the assumption that the Galilean/Cartesian conception of matter really captures all there is to matter, but this would amount to abandoning materialism in favor of one of its rivals (if not Aristotelianism, then neutral monism, panpsychism, or the like). 
The second deep problem with computationalism is that on a Galilean/Cartesian conception of matter, there can be nothing inherentto the material world that corresponds to notions like “information,” “algorithm,” “symbols,” and the like.  For these notions smack of the “directedness” or intentionality that the Galilean/Cartesian conception denies to matter.  The notion of a material “symbol” could be relevant to explaining mental phenomena only if it is aboutsomething; the notion of “information” could be relevant to explaining thought only if it entails semantic content; and so forth.  Yet there can be no such thing as aboutness, semantic content, or the like in a material world utterly devoid of “directedness” or “finality.”  Hence the key notions of computationalism can on a Galilean/Cartesian conception of matter at best be regarded only as observer-relativefeatures of the material world rather than intrinsic to the material world, and are, accordingly, not available as ingredients in a scientific account of the mind.  This is a point John Searle made in his 1990 article “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” (in a line of argument that is distinct from, and deeper than, his better known “Chinese Room” argument).  Similar arguments have been made by Saul Kripke, Karl Popper, and others.  (I develop the point in The Last Superstition , and have discussed Searle’s and Popper’s arguments here, and Kripke’s argument here.) 
Here too the problem can be avoided by abandoning the Galilean/Cartesian conception of matter.  But to regard something like information and algorithmic processes as intrinsic to material substances is precisely to return to something like an Aristotelian conception of the world and its commitment to formal and final causes.  (Rightly understood, that is -- not the crude caricatures of formal and final causality usually attacked in discussions of these matters.)  As the neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg once put it:
The concept of information, properly understood, is fully sufficient to do away with popular dualistic schemes invoking spiritual substances distinct from anything in physics. This is Aristotle redivivus, the concept of matter and form united in every object of this world, body and soul, where the latter is nothing but the formal aspect of the former. The very term ‘information’ clearly demonstrates its Aristotelian origin in its linguistic root.
Indeed, I would say that something at least likecomputationalism, if conjoined with an Aristotelian conception of matter, might shed considerable light on the mental lives of non-human animals.  However, this would still leave untouched what is distinctive about human beings -- our capacity to form abstract concepts (as when we form the concepts man and mortal), to put them together into judgments (as when we judge that all men are mortal), and to reason from one judgment to another in a logical way (as when we conclude from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man that Socrates is mortal).  This brings us to the third problem with computationalism, which is that the most a computational system can ever do is simulate conceptual thought, and never in principle actually carry it out. 
The reason is that material symbols and processes cannot in principle have the universality of reference and determinacy of content that are characteristic of concepts.  For example, the concept triangle of its nature applies to every single triangle without exception, whereas a material symbol either has no inherent connection to triangles at all (as in the case of the English word “triangle,” which applies to triangles merely by convention) or has an inherent connection but strictly applies only to some triangles but not all (as in a drawing of a triangle, which will always be either equilateral, isosceles, or scalene and thus strictly apply only to some of these but not all; will be of a specific color that not all triangles have; and so forth).  There is also nothing in the material properties of any symbol or system of symbols that entails any determinate or exact representational content.  For example, there is nothing in the symbol “triangle” that entails that it represents a specific triangle, or triangles in general, or the word “triangle” itself, or a person who calls himself “triangle,” or what have you.  And merely adding further material symbols as interpretations of the first just kicks the problem up to a higher level, since these symbols themselves are, qua purely material, as indeterminate in their representational content as the one we started out with.
The basic point is as old as Plato and Aristotle and has been in recent years developed by James Ross, and I develop and defend Ross’s argument at length in my American Catholic Philosophical Quarterlyarticle “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”  (I briefly sketched the argument in my review of Ray Kurzweil’s book How to Create a Mind in First Things, and had reason to discuss it in a recent series of blog posts, here, here, here, and here.)
Hence, from an Aristotelian point of view, even if qualia and some kinds of intentionality could be regarded as corporeal features of organisms on a “beefed up,” neo-Aristotelian conception of matter, conceptual thought could not be, and thus could not be captured even by a suitably updated computationalism.  Conceptual thought -- which is distinctive of our rational or intellectual powers as Aristotelians understand them -- is essentially incorporeal. 
When Gelernter rightly complains of the inability of computationalism to account for the subjectivity of conscious experience, then, I would argue that this inability is a symptom of the computationalist’s implicit commitment to a Galilean/Cartesian conception of matter, from which the qualitative has been extruded.  It isn’t computationalism per se that is the problem, at least if the computationalist categories could be reinterpreted (as perhaps Braitenberg would interpret them) in an Aristotelian fashion.  Subjectivity, in any case, isn’t for the Aristotelian the mark of the corporeal/incorporeal divide, since non-human animals (like Nagel’s famous bat) are entirely corporeal but nevertheless have subjective experiences of a sort.
Similarly, when Gelernter points out that “computers can be made to operate precisely as we choose; minds cannot,” I would argue that this is a consequence of the deeper point that the conceptual content of thought cannot be reduced to any set of relations between material symbols.  There can in principle never be anything more than a very rough and general correlation between, on the one hand, the structure of corporeal states (whether in the brain, the organism as a whole, or the organism together with its environment), and, on the other hand, the conceptual content of our thoughts.  Hence, even if we had total technological mastery of the relevant corporeal features of a human being, we would still never be able, even in principle, to predict and control the content of human thought with precision. 
Some of Gelernter’s other points (such as that “computers can be erased; minds cannot”) are also important and deserve closer analysis than I have time to provide here.  Still, they seem to me less fundamental than what I take to be the most basic problems with computationalism.
Gelernter also makes some suggestive remarks about emotions and experiences.  He writes, for example, that “feelings are not information!  Feelings are states of being… To experience is to be some way, not to do some thing.”  This cries out for elaboration, which he does not have space to give in the article.   What exactly does Gelernter have in mind here by the distinction between “being” and “doing”?
One way to read this might be in terms of what in recent analytic philosophy has been called the distinction between “categorical” and “dispositional” properties.  A dispositional property would be one that a thing has when a certain conditional statement is true of it, namely a statement to the effect that if a certain kind of stimulus is present to the thing, then a certain kind of manifestation will follow.  For example, brittleness is a dispositional property insofar as it involves the truth of a conditional to the effect that if a brittle thing is struck with a hard object, then it will shatter.  Categorical properties, by contrast, would be those a thing simply has, unconditionally as it were.  Shape is sometimes given as an example insofar as (it is sometimes held) a thing’s shape is something it simply has, unconditionally rather than merely as a manifestation in the presence of an appropriate stimulus. 
Now whether the distinction holds up -- as opposed to purported categorical properties being ultimately reducible to dispositional ones, or purportedly dispositional ones being reducible to categorical ones -- is a matter of controversy in recent analytic metaphysics.  (I discuss the controversy, and the relationship between the categorical/dispositional distinction and the Scholastic theory of act and potency, in Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction .)  But it is certainly relevant to the dispute in recent philosophy of mind over whether the qualia characteristic of emotional states and other conscious experiences can be explained in materialist terms.  Functionalism -- of which computationalism is a variety -- essentially takes all mental phenomena to be describable in dispositional terms.  The belief that it is raining or the experience of pain in one’s back, for example, would be characterized as internal states that will tend under appropriate conditions to manifest themselves by generating certain further internal states and/or certain kinds of overt behavior (grabbing an umbrella in the first case, say, or moaning in the second case).  The critic of functionalism then objects that the feel or “quale” of the pain is something that the person or animal having it has, or at least might have, categorically, apart from any associated disposition.  For the feel or quale of the pain could in principle exist (so the argument goes) even if it were associated instead with a disposition to laugh rather than moan, and the disposition to moan could exist even if it were associated with some quale other than the one we associate with pain, or indeed with no qualia at all (as in the case of a “zombie”). 
Yet from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view such arguments are deficient, both because the categorical/dispositional distinction is too crude and fails to capture all the nuances enshrined in the theory of act and potency (as I discuss in Scholastic Metaphysics), and because “zombies” and related notions are dubious insofar as they reflect a Galilean/Cartesian conception of matter of the sort the Aristotelian would reject (a topic I discussed in a recent post). 
But Gelernter might have something else in mind, and there may in any event be another way to elaborate his point.

Can you explain something by appealing to a “brute fact”?

Prof. Keith Parsons and I have been having a very cordial and fruitful exchange.  He has now posted a response to my most recent post, on the topic of “brute facts” and explanation.  You can read his response here, and find links to the other posts in our exchange here.  Since by the rules of our exchange Keith has the last word, I’ll let things stand as they are for now and let the reader imagine how I might respond.
Another one of my old sparring partners, Prof. Robert Oerter, raises an interesting objection of his own in the combox of my recent post, on which I will comment.  I had argued that if we think of laws of nature as regularities, then no appeal to such laws can explain anything if the most fundamental such laws are regarded as inexplicable “brute facts.”  Oerter writes:To change the example, consider: “The cause of the forest fire was the lightning that hit that tree.”

Suppose the lightning was a brute fact (a bolt out of a clear blue sky, as it were). How does its brute-fact-ness in any way decrease its explanatory power? It's still the cause of the forest fire, isn't it?
End quote.  Now, let me first reiterate that my remarks in the earlier post were about, specifically, laws of nature understood as regularities.  Even if Oerter’s example were a case of a brute fact serving as a genuine explanation, that wouldn’t affect the point that laws understood as regularities wouldn’t be true explanations if the fundamental level of laws were a brute fact.  (And Oerter may well agree with that much, for all I know.) 
But Oerter’s question is still a fair one.  Whatever we think of the regularity view of laws, we might yet wonder whether other kinds of thing might be genuinely explanatory even if they were brute facts.  Wouldn’t Oerter’s imagined bolt of lightning be a good example? 
I would say that on analysis it would notbe.  Consider first that we can distinguish a metaphysical sense in which something might be claimed to be a “brute fact” from an epistemological sense in which it might be.  Something would be a brute fact in the epistemological sense if, after exhaustive investigation, we did not and perhaps even could not come up with a remotely plausible explanation for it.  Something would be a brute fact in the metaphysical sense if it did not, as a matter of objective fact, have any explanation or intelligibility in the first place.  With a metaphysical brute fact, it’s not merely that we can’t discover any explanation, it’s that there isn‘t one there to be discovered.
Now I do not deny that there could be epistemological “brute facts,” but only that there could be metaphysicalbrute facts.  But it seems clear that whatever plausibility Oerter’s example has derives entirely from the possibility that a bolt of lightning of the sort he imagines might be an epistemological brute fact.  For we can certainly imagine cases where a bolt of lightning strikes and causes a forest fire but where there was only clear blue sky and no storm clouds present, nor even some bizarre cause (a gigantic Tesla coil, say, or an angry Thor flying about).  But that by itself is just to imagine unexplained lightning appearing.  It does not amount to imagining lightning that as a matter of objective fact has no explanation suddenly appearing.  (And as I have argued in several places, and at greatest length in Scholastic Metaphysics , in fact we cannot, contra Hume, coherently describe a case where this latter sort of thing happens.)
Indeed, it isn’t even quite right to say that what Oerter is describing is a case of a cause that is entirely epistemologically“brute,” let alone metaphysically brute.  For of course, the reason why we’re willing to regard an unexplained instance of lightning as a cause of a forest fire is that we know a lot about lightning in general, such as that it can cause forest fires.  So, whether or not we know the source of the lightning Oerter asks us to imagine, we know at least that it is lightning, and it is because we know that it is an instance of that general class of thing that we regard it as the sort of thing that could cause a forest fire.  We know, in effect, its formal and material causes insofar as we know that it is lightning rather than (say) a hallucination or some atmospheric condition that merely superficially resembles lightning.  And we know also its final cause insofar as we know that it has certain causal powers such as the power to ignite wood, where casual powers are “directed” toward their outcomes as toward an end.  What we lack is, at most, merely knowledge of the lightning’s own efficientcause.  Precisely for that reason, though, the lightning is not a “brute fact,” full stop, either metaphysically or epistemologically, even if there is an at least epistemologically “brute” aspect to it. 
But we can say more.  For the lightning causes the forest fire precisely insofar as (the Aristotelian will say) it actualizes the potentiality of whatever foliage it strikes to catch fire.  But the lightning can do this only insofar as it is itself actualized (for, since the lightning is not a necessarily existing thing, it too has to go from potential to actual).  And whatever is actualized (so the Aristotelian will also say) is actualized by something already actual.  Now what we’ve got in any case where C is actualized by B only insofar as B is in turn actualized by A is an essentially ordered causal series, in which the action of the members lower down in the series is unintelligible apart from the impartation to them of causal power by members higher up in the series.  This, of course, is the basis for Scholastic arguments to the effect that the lightning could not exist and operate at all even for an instant apart from a purely actual (and thus divine) conserving and concurring cause, who is first in the essentially ordered series in question.  But that conclusion can be bracketed off for present purposes.  What matters for the moment is just that on the Scholastic analysis, the lightning cannot intelligibly actualize without itself being actualized (whether or not this regress leads us to a divine first actualizer).
So, to conceive of the lightning as a cause of the fire, we ultimately cannot avoid thinking of it as having an efficient cause of its own -- at least to conserve in being, and concur in, its causal activity at the moment at which it actualizes the fire.  Hence our grasp of its being a cause of the fire entails bringing in all of the four causes, in which case it is hardly an unintelligible “brute fact.”  Of course, this analysis brings in specifically Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysical notions, but there is nothing suspect about that.  For in order to evaluate a claim like Oerter’s claim that a bolt of lightning can be a genuine explanation even if it had no explanation of its own, we need to ask ourselves what it is to be an explanation in the first place, and in particular what it is to be a causal explanation (since the lightning is in the case at hand claimed to provide a causal explanation of the fire).  And the Scholastic holds, on independent grounds, that formal, material, final, and efficient causes are all part of a complete explanatory story. 
If Oerter or anyone else wants to reject this metaphysical picture they are free to do so, but then they have to provide an alternativemetaphysical story about how explanation and causation work -- and it has to be a story on which the lightning could be a genuine explanation of the fire without having an explanation of its own.  Merely suggesting that the fire would be an explanation even if it lacked an explanation of its own is not enough, for this either fails to describe the situation in sufficient metaphysical detail to allow us to conclude anything from it (if no account of explanation and causation is given) or it will beg the question (if some non-Scholastic account of explanation and causation is implicitly being presupposed). 
I would say that what would clearly make Oerter’s case is an example where it is evident both (i) that A genuinely explains B, and yet (ii) that A has no formal, material, efficient, or final cause of its own.  In such a case A itself would clearly be a “brute fact.”  But I submit that no such example is forthcoming.  For the more we peel away formal, material, final, and efficient causality from our conception of A, the more we, by that very fact, peel away anything in A that could make of it an explanation of B or of anything else.   A cause is intelligible as a cause only insofar as it is intelligible in itself. 
[For earlier posts on related matters, go hereand here.]