Edward Feser's Blog, page 93

A world of pure imagination

Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear'd in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produc'd.
David Hume
Come with me and you'll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look and you'll see
Into your imagination
Willy Wonka
David Hume is a curiosity.  Philosophical adolescents of all ages thrill to his famously subversive doctrines concerning religion, causation, practical reason, value, the self, and metaphysics in general.  And yet these doctrines rest on philosophical assumptions that are at best extremely controversial (such as the thesis that what is conceivable is possible) and at worst known to have been decisively refuted (such as the thesis that a concept is a kind of image) and even self-undermining (such as Hume’s Fork).  Having been drawn and found agreeable, Hume’s conclusions persist, like zombies, beyond the death of the arguments that led to them.
It is especially ironic that people who think of themselves as staunchly objective, guided by rational argument grounded in the hard earth of observable reality, should regard Hume as a hero.  For Hume’s philosophy destroys reason and experience alike, effectively reducing both to the entirely subjective arena of imagination.  Hume’s is a realm of unreality -- he is Willy Wonka without the chocolate, but only impressions and ideas of chocolate. 

As is well known to regular readers of this blog, Scholastics and other Aristotelians distinguish the faculties of sensation, imagination, and intellect.  Sensation is what you deploy when you have a perceptual experience of (say) a certain man.  Now though you are aware of the man by means of a percept of the man, it is for the Aristotelian the man himself, and not the percept, that is the object of sensory experience.  Hallucinations and the like do not cast doubt on this, any more than the fact that this or that dog might be missing a leg casts doubt on the proposition that dogs have four legs.  A three-legged dog is a damaged or abnormal dog and thus precisely notwhat you should look to if you’re interested in determining the nature of dogs.  Similarly, a hallucination is an abnormal perceptual experience, and one typically resulting from some sort of damage or dysfunction.  It is thus precisely the sort of thing you should not look to in order to discover the nature of normal sensory experience.  A philosopher who takes hallucinations, illusions, and the like to “show” that the objects of sensation are not really external objects is like a biologist who takes the existence of three-legged dogs to “show” that dogs don’t naturally have four legs.
Imagination is what you deploy when you form mental images or phantasms of what you’ve seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted.  Hence as you sit back relaxing one evening you might call to mind what a certain man you saw that day looked like, what his voice sounded like, what his handshake felt like, and so forth.  Though the man and his qualities all exist outside your mind, they are not immediately present to you as you sit there imagining them.  And of course you might form images of men you have not actually perceived and who do not exist.  For instance, you might imagine a man that is like the one you saw but five feet taller, or with red hair rather than black, or who wears a colorful costume and fights crime, or who has wings.  In general, in imagination we can separate out various aspects of the things we’ve perceived -- this or that color, shape, sound, texture, flavor, odor, or what have you -- and recombine them in all sorts of novel ways.  As these facts indicate, imagination has a subjective character that distinguishes it from sensory experience.
Intellect is what you deploy when you grasp the concept of a man, when you put this concept together with others to form a judgment (such as the judgment that all men are mortal), and when you reason from one judgment to another in a logical way (as when you think all men are mortal, so the man I met today is mortal).  Concepts, and the acts of judgment and reasoning that presuppose them, are irreducible to what sensation and imagination are capable of, for reasons I’ve set out many times (e.g. briefly here, and at systematic length here).  Concepts have a universal reference that no percept or image can have; they can be determinate, precise, or unambiguous in their content in a way no percept or image can be; and we can form concepts of things which can in no way be perceived or imagined.  Like sensation, intellect is objective, but in a different way.  Sensation reveals to us only particular things that exist independently of our minds.  The intellect grasps natures that are universal, existing not only in the particular things we perceive but in things we have not perceived and never could perceive. 
Now, Hume essentially collapses both intellect and sensation into imagination.  Start with intellect.  Hume, like Berkeley, reduces concepts to mental images together with general names.  Ever since Wittgenstein’s critique of classical empiricism, it seems generally to have been acknowledged among analytic philosophers that this account of concepts is hopeless, but any Scholastic could have told them the same.  And this mistake of Hume’s underlies his accounts of causation, substance, and other basic metaphysical notions.  The suggestion that we have no clear concept of causal connection, substance, etc. only seems plausible if we think of having a concept of these things as a matter of being able to form some kind of mental image of them.  Once that assumption is abandoned, the force of the arguments dissipates.  And the knowledge of arithmetic and geometry available even to a child suffices to show just how stupid the assumption is.  To have the concept of a triangle is not a matter of having any sort of mental image, since what we can imagine is only ever this or that particular sort of triangle rather than triangularity in the abstract.  Nor is it to have an image of the word “triangle,” since that word is only contingently connected with what it refers to.  (To have the concept triangle is to have the very same thing Euclid had, even though he did not know the English word “triangle.”)  Similarly, knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 is not a matter of forming images of the shapes “2,” “+,” etc., since those symbols too are only contingently related to the strictly unimaginable realities they name. 
(Nor are these realities to be thought of on the model of any of the ghostly objects of empiricist and materialist caricature -- ectoplasm, magic fairy dust, or whatever  -- all of which are things which can be imagined in the sense that we can form mental images of them.  Skeptics who attack such sophomoric caricatures are missing the whole point, insofar as they assume that to make sense of something we have to be able to regard it as the sort of thing that could at least in principle be seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled.  But whether that is the case is, of course, precisely what is at issue.  Nor would mathematics and science be possible if it were the case.)
Hume also effectively reduces sensation to imagination insofar as he strips the former of its objectivity.  For Hume there are in the mind only impressions and ideas, where the former are what we are aware of in sensation and the latter the faint copies of impressions that are formed in imagination.  But impressions have no essential connection to anything mind-independent.  When you perceive a man it is really only the impressions associated with the man -- these colors, those shapes, etc. -- that you perceive, and you cannot know one way or the other whether there is anything external to the mind which corresponds to them.  They are thus as subjective as mental images.  Indeed, while Hume characterizes an “idea” or image as a less vivid version of an impression, you could just as well characterize an impression as a more vivid version of an idea or image. 
Impressions are also image-like in that they are more or less conceived of in a manner similar to the “pulled apart” elements that imagination recombines as it likes.  Again, it isn’t strictly a man of which one has a Humean impression.  It is rather a set of color patches, shapes, sounds, etc., which the mind combines and labels “man.”  This too is a model contemporary analytic philosophers know to be hopelessly crude, and have known it ever since Wilfrid Sellars’ attack on the “myth of the given.”  Hume takes a perceptual experience to be reducible to an aggregate of impressions, but the notion of a Humean impression is itself an abstraction from an actual experience.  When you read a book it is a book that you are perceiving, not a whitish rectangular expanse, a feeling of smoothness, a sound as of paper crinkling, etc.  These “impressions” are not more basic than the experience as a whole, any more than a foot or a kidney is more basic than the organism of which they are parts.  On the contrary, organisms are more basic than their organs, and the latter have to be understood in light of the former rather than the other way around.  “Impressions” and the like are related to ordinary perceptual experiences in the same way.  Hence analyzing perceptual experiences in terms of Humean impressions gets things the wrong way around.
It is no surprise, then, that for Hume neither intellect nor sensation can ever “advance a step beyond” that “narrow compass” of “the universe of the imagination” -- that is, beyond “ourselves.”  There is only the play of subjective appearances available to you here and now.  Some of them you take to comprise a particular material object really existing external to your mind, some of them to amount to concepts and truths that apply far beyond not only what is outside your mind here and now but even beyond anything you have experienced or will experience.  But all of that is illusion, or at least the supposition that you have any reason whatsoever to believe any of that is in Hume’s view an illusion.  Nor is it any surprise that, once again to quote Willy Wonka channeling Hume, in a “world of pure imagination… what we'll see will defy explanation.”  For explanation requires the intellect to grasp what sensation and imagination cannot -- objective causal connections, the essences of things, and so forth -- all of which go by the board in Hume’s philosophy.
What is surprising is that anyone would still take seriously Hume’s doctrines given the fallaciousness of the arguments on which they rest.  Or rather, it is not surprising at all.   Like the imagined religious believers at whom he so often directs his contempt, the Humean skeptic knows in advance the conclusions he wants to reach, and isn’t too particular about how he gets there.  He wants a world in which causation will not get him to an Uncaused Cause, in which good and bad are not objective features of reality but mere sentiments, nor rationality anything more than the slave of the passions.  For as Willy Wonka tells us, in a Humean world, a world of pure imagination:
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world, there's nothing to it.

Studia Neoaristotelica

Readers not already familiar with it should be aware of Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism .  Recent issues include articles by Nicholas Rescher, Richard Swinburne, Theodore Scaltsas, William Vallicella, James Franklin, Helen Hattab, and other authors known to readers of this blog.  Subscription information for individuals and institutions can be found here.

2014 Thomistic Seminar

The 9thAnnual Thomistic Seminar for graduate students in philosophy and related disciplines, sponsored by The Witherspoon Institute, will be held from August 3 - 9, 2014 in Princeton, NJ.  The theme is “Aquinas, Christianity, and Metaphysics” and the faculty are John Haldane, Edward Feser, John O’Callaghan, Candace Vogler, and Linda Zagzebski.  The application deadline is March 15.  More information here.
I noted some other upcoming speaking engagements for this summer hereand here.

Heavy Meta

My new book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction will be out this May.  I’ve expounded and defended various aspects of Scholastic metaphysics at some length in other places -- for example, in chapter 2 of The Last Superstition and chapter 2 of Aquinas -- but the new book pursues the issues at much greater length and in much greater depth.  Unlike those other books, it also focuses exclusively on questions of fundamental metaphysics, with little or no reference to questions in natural theology, ethics, philosophy of mind, or the like.  Call it Heavy Meta.  Even got a theme song.
To whet your appetite, here’s the cover copy and a detailed table of contents:Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics.  The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader’s understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader’s understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy.  The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated.  The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0. Prolegomenon
0.1 Aim of the book
0.2 Against scientism
0.2.1 A dilemma for scientism
0.2.2 The descriptive limits of science
0.2.3 The explanatory limits of science
0.2.4 A bad argument for scientism
0.3 Against “conceptual analysis”
1. Act and potency
1.1 The general theory
1.1.1 Origins of the distinction
1.1.2 The relationship between act and potency
1.1.3 Divisions of act and potency
1.2 Causal powers
1.2.1 Powers in Scholastic philosophy
1.2.2 Powers in recent analytic philosophy
1.2.2.1 Historical background
1.2.2.2 Considerations from metaphysics
1.2.2.3 Considerations from philosophy of science
1.2.2.4 Powers and laws of nature
1.3 Real distinctions?
1.3.1 The Scholastic theory of distinctions
1.3.2 Aquinas versus Scotus and Suarez
1.3.3 Categorical versus dispositional properties in analytic metaphysics
2. Causation
2.1 Efficient versus final causality
2.2 The principle of finality
2.2.1 Aquinas’s argument
2.2.2 Physical intentionality in recent analytic metaphysics
2.3 The principle of causality
2.3.1 Formulation of the principle
2.3.2 Objections to the principle
2.3.2.1 Hume’s objection
2.3.2.2 Russell’s objection
2.3.2.3 The objection from Newton’s law of inertia
2.3.2.4 Objections from quantum mechanics
2.3.2.5 Scotus on self-motion
2.3.3 Arguments for the principle
2.3.3.1 Appeals to self-evidence
2.3.3.2 Empirical arguments
2.3.3.3 Arguments from PNC
2.3.3.4 Arguments from PSR
2.4 Causal series
2.4.1 Simultaneity
2.4.2 Per se versus per accidens
2.5 The principle of proportionate causality
3. Substance
3.1 Hylemorphism
3.1.1 Form and matter
3.1.2 Substantial form versus accidental form
3.1.3 Prime matter versus secondary matter
3.1.4 Aquinas versus Scotus and Suarez
3.1.5 Hylemorphism versus atomism
3.1.6 Anti-reductionism in contemporary analytic metaphysics
3.2 Substance versus accidents
3.2.1 The Scholastic theory
3.2.2 The empiricist critique
3.2.3 Physics and event ontologies
3.3 Identity
3.3.1 Individuation
3.3.2 Persistence
3.3.2.1 Against four-dimensionalism
3.3.2.2 Identity over time as primitive
4. Essence and existence
4.1 Essentialism
4.1.1 The reality of essence
4.1.2 Anti-essentialism
4.1.3 Moderate realism
4.1.4 Essence and properties
4.1.5 Modality
4.1.6 Essentialism in contemporary analytic metaphysics
4.2 The real distinction
4.2.1 Arguments for the real distinction
4.2.2 Objections to the real distinction
4.3 The analogy of being

Jerry-built atheism

David Bentley Hart’s recent book The Experience of God has been getting some attention.  The highly esteemed William Carroll has an article on it over at Public Discourse.  As I noted in a recent post, the highly self-esteemed Jerry Coyne has been commenting on Hart’s book too, and in the classic Coyne style: First trash the book, then promise someday actually to read it.  But it turns out that was the second post Coyne had written ridiculing Hart’s book; the first is here.  So, by my count that’s at least 5100 words so far criticizing a book Coyne admits he has not read.  Since it’s Jerry Coyne, you know another shoe is sure to drop.  And so it does, three paragraphs into the more recent post:
[I]t’s also fun (and marginally profitable) to read and refute the arguments of theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided is true beforehand. [Emphasis added]
Well, no, Jerry, not only there.Now, criticizing what a book says when you haven’t actually read it is no mean feat.  After all, you’re lacking some of the basic resources commonly thought to be useful in doing the job, such as knowledge of what the book says.  How does Coyne pull it off?  MacGyver style.  He jerry-builds a critique out of the metaphysical equivalent of rubber bands and paper clips.   Unfortunately, Coyne is more of a MacGruber than a MacGyver, so the result is (as it were) an explosion which brings the house down upon Coyne and his combox sidekicks while leaving Hart unscathed.

Where most reviewers would prepare to attack an author’s arguments by consulting his book to find out what they are, Coyne’s procedure is to consult his own hunches about what might be in the book.  (All part of not “prov[ing] what one has decided is true beforehand,” you see.)  Coyne writes:
[A reviewer says that] Hart has presented the Best Case for God, and we’ve all ignored it… 
But what, exactly do we mean by “the opposition’s strongest case”?  I can think of three ways to construe that:
1. The case that provides the strongest evidence for God’s existence.  This is the way scientists would settle an argument about existence claims: by adducing data. This category’s best argument for God used to be the Argument from Design, since there was no plausible scientific alternative to God’s creation of the marvelous “designoid” features of plants and animals. But Darwin put paid to that one…
2. The philosophical argument that is most tricky, or hardest to refute: in other words, the argument for God that has the greatest degree of sophistry.  This used to include the Ontological Arguments, which briefly stymied even Bertrand Russell. But we soon realized that “existence is not a quality”, and that, in fact, existence claims can be settled only by observation or testing, not by logic.
3. The argument that is irrefutable because it’s untestable.  Given that arguments in the first two categories are now untenable, people like Hart have proposed conceptions of God that are so nebulous that we can’t figure out what they mean.  And because they are not only obscure but don’t say anything about the nature of God that can be compared to the way the universe is, they can’t be refuted…
And this, in fact, is what Hart has apparently done in his new book…
End quote.  Now, it’s interesting that Coyne’s first two possibilities roughly correspond to the contemporary philosophical naturalist’s standard assumption that if you’re not doing natural science, then the only thing left for you to be doing is mere “conceptual analysis,” which (so the standard objection goes) can only ever capture how we think about reality, but not reality itself.  Traditional metaphysics, which purports to be neither of these things, would thus be ruled out as groundless at best and (as the logical positivists claimed) strictly meaningless at worst -- not too different from Coyne’s third option.
The thing is, this commonly parroted contemporary naturalist assumption is just a modern riff on Hume’s Fork, viz. the thesis that “all the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact” (Hume, Enquiry IV.1).  And Hume’s Fork is notoriously self-refuting, since it is not itself either a conceptual truth (a matter of the “relations of ideas”) or empirically testable (a “matter of fact”).  Now, the contemporary naturalist’s variation is in exactly the same boat.  The claim that the only respectable options are natural science and conceptual analysis is itself neither a claim that is supported by natural science, nor something revealed by conceptual analysis.  (The naturalist might try to bluff his way past this difficulty by asserting that neuroscience or cognitive science supports his case, but if so you should call his bluff.  For neuroscience and cognitive science, when they touch on matters of metaphysical import, are rife with tendentious and unexamined metaphysical assumptions.  And insofar as such assumptions are naturalist assumptions, the naturalist merely begs the question in appealing to them.)
So, the naturalist unavoidably takes a third cognitive stance distinct from natural science or conceptual analysis, in the very act of denying that it can be taken.  That is to say, he takes a distinctively metaphysical stance.  And so does Coyne.  Like his more philosophically sophisticated fellow contemporary naturalists, Coyne supposes that if a claim isn’t (1) a proposition of natural science or (2) what Coyne calls a proposition of “logic,” which his example (the ontological argument) indicates he takes to involve a mere analysis of concepts with no purchase on objective reality, then it must be (3) “untestable,” “nebulous,” “obscure,” etc.  But this supposition is itself neither a proposition of type (1) nor of type (2), in which case, by Coyne’s criterion, his own position must be regarded as (3) “untestable,” “nebulous,” “obscure,” etc.
In fact traditional metaphysics is not “untestable,” “nebulous,” “obscure,” etc., and neither are the traditional arguments of natural theology that are built upon it.  Take, for example, the Aristotelian-Scholastic theory of actuality and potentiality.  It is motivated completely independently of any theological application, and has been worked out over the centuries in systematic detail.  It argues that neither a static Parmenidean conception of the material universe nor a radically dynamic Heraclitean conception can in principle be correct; that natural science would not in principle be possible if either extreme position were correct; and that the only way in principle that both extremes can be avoided is by acknowledging that actuality and potentiality (or “act and potency,” to use the traditional jargon) are both irreducible aspects of mind-independent reality. 
Now precisely because the theory concerns what must be presupposed by any possible natural science, it is not the sort of thing that can be overthrown by any scientific discovery.  It goes deeper than any possible scientific discovery.  But that does not make it “untestable.”  To be sure, it is not going to be refuted by observation and experiment -- precisely since it concerns what any possible observation and experiment must presuppose -- but it can be challenged in other ways.  Are the arguments given for it valid?  Are the distinctions it makes carefully drawn?  Are there alternative ways of dealing with the facts it claims that it alone can account for?  And so forth.  Defenders of the theory take such challenges seriously and offer responses to them.  And they offer arguments, not appeals to intuition, or faith, or ecclesiastical authority.  (I’ve defended the theory of actuality and potentiality in several places, such as in Chapter 2 of Aquinas .  An even more detailed exposition and defense will be available in my forthcoming book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction .  The book won’t be out until May, but Coyne will no doubt have a 2500 word refutation up by tomorrow.) 
Now the core Scholastic arguments for the existence of God rest on the theory of actuality and potentiality.  (I defend these arguments too in several places, such as Chapter 3 of Aquinas.  For a popular presentation of one of them, see this public lecture.)  Because that theory is concerned with what any possible natural science must presuppose, the theistic arguments built upon it, like the theory itself, cannot in principle be overthrown by natural science.  But, like that theory, that does not make the arguments “untestable.”  As with the theory of actuality and potentiality, we can ask various critical questions of the arguments -- Are the arguments valid?  Are their premises true?  Are there alternative ways of dealing with the facts they claim that they alone can account for?  Etc. -- and we can see how well the arguments can be defended against them.  At no point do the arguments appeal to intuition, faith, authority, etc.
New Atheist types will insist that there can be no rationally acceptable and testable arguments that are not empirical scientific arguments, but this just begs the question.  The Scholastic claims to have given such arguments, and to show that he is wrong, it does not suffice merely to stomp one’s feet and insist dogmatically that it can’t be done.  The critic has to show precisely where such arguments are in error -- exactly whichpremise or premises are false, or exactly where there is a fallacy committed in the reasoning.  (In Aquinasand in the public lecture just linked to, I show why the usual objections have no force.)  Moreover, as we have seen, the New Atheist refutes himself in claiming that only the methods of natural science are legitimate, for this assertion itself has no non-question-begging scientific justification.  It is merely one piece of metaphysics among others.  The difference between the New Atheist metaphysician and the Scholastic metaphysician is that the Scholastic knows that he is doing metaphysics and presents arguments for his metaphysical positions which are open to rational evaluation.  The New Atheist, by contrast, has no non-question-begging arguments for his naturalist metaphysics, but only shrill and dogmatic assertion.   He thinks that to show that he is rational and that his opponent is not, all he needs to do is loudly to yell “I am rational and you are not!” 
Coyne is, of course, evidently unfamiliar with any of the ideas referred to, even though they are at the heart of the Western theological tradition he ridicules.  He will dismiss them preemptively as “bafflegab,” “nebulous,” etc., though he has absolutely no non-question-begging reason for doing so.  He is, as I have pointed out before, exactly like the populist anti-science bigot who dismisses quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and the like merely because the terminology of such theories sounds odd to him and the conclusions seem counterintuitive.  Coyne would deny that the analogy is any good, but of course this just begs the question yet again.  What he needs to do is actually carefully to study the arguments of those he disagrees with, and then to show specifically where the arguments go wrong -- rather than engage in the usual New Atheist hand-waving about how they’re not worth the time, or that someone somewhere has already refuted them anyway, or that they’re motivated by wishful thinking, etc.  But that is exactly what he refuses to do.
Then again, Coyne assures us that he has in fact “spent several years reading theology.”  Really?  Apparently it was all in badly transliterated Etruscan, viewed through gauze bandages on a Kindle with a cracked and flickering screen.  While drunk.  And asleep.  How else to explain the following?  Of the claim that:
God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.
Coyne, wearing his vast theological learning lightly, casually asserts:
Aquinas, Luther, Augustine: none of those people saw God in such a way.
I can’t top Kenny Bania’s reaction when reading this passage from Coyne.  Unlike Kenny, though, Jer, we’re not laughing with you.

Estranged notions

Strange Notions is a website devoted to discussion between Catholics and atheists and operated by Brandon Vogt.  It’s a worthwhile enterprise.  When he was getting the website started, Brandon kindly invited me to contribute to it, and also asked if he could reprint old posts from my blog.  I told him I had no time to contribute new articles but that it was fine with me if he wanted to reprint older pieces as long as they were not edited without my permission.  I have not kept a close eye on the site, but it seems that quite a few old blog posts of mine have been reprinted.  I hope some of Brandon’s readers find them useful, but I have to say that a glance at the site’s comboxes makes me wonder whether allowing such reprints was after all a good idea.  Certainly it has a downside.Blogging, especially for a personal blog like mine, is a very different kind of writing than the sort one does for a book, a journal article, or a general audience magazine (whether print or online).  Blog posts are typically written in an ad hocway.  They are often commentaries on the controversy du jour, direct replies to an article or blog post that recently appeared at some other site, responses to reader comments or questions, or reflections spawned by what the blogger happens to have been reading or thinking about lately.  The style of a blog post is informal and more intimate than that of a book or article, and more likely to reflect the author “with his hair down” than those other sorts of writing typically do.  It also reflects the interests, background knowledge, and attitudes of the blog’s regular readership.  The author knows that he can address certain issues, casually refer to certain other writers or ideas, and make certain jokes or offhand political remarks that would not be appropriate in other kinds of writing, because most of his readers, including the ones who don’t necessarily agree with him, already know “where’s he’s coming from.” 

The tone and content of a particular blog post are inevitably going to reflect the circumstances under which it was written.  If a blogger is replying to something a reasonable and polite critic has said, the tone is likelier to be gentlemanly.  If he is replying instead to a nasty and unreasonable person, the tone is likelier to be hard-edged.  If he is commenting on a matter of academic controversy, there might be a casual use of technical terminology or references to writers and ideas with which the average reader will be unfamiliar, whereas on more general topics a blog post might be more accessible to the non-specialist.  But in most cases, a blog post is simply not going to be written the way an article for a general audience would be, especially if the writer happens to be an academic. 
In short, context is crucial and has to be kept in mind if one is to give a fair reading of what a blogger has written.  It is hard enough to get even some of the regular readers of one’s own blog to keep this in mind.  I can hardly ever say anything about God, the soul, or natural law without some atheist reader complaining that I have not, in the particular blog post he happens to have bothered reading, proved the existence of God or the soul or the soundness of the natural law approach to ethics -- as if I ought to be expected to start from first principles and repeat everything I’ve already written elsewhere every single time I write a blog post on those subjects.  (And of course if I do go on at greater length about these matters, the same readers will accuse me of being too long-winded.)  It is also impossible to write about political matters without a contingent of crackpots, whether of the right or of the left, reading all sorts of ridiculous things into what one has said.  (A recent example here.) 
Naturally, the context of a post is even more likely to be ignored when it is reprinted years later at a very different website.  A case in point is provided by the post I wrote about a year and a half ago on my conversion from theism to atheism and then back again to theism.  It is currently being reprinted at Strange Notions, broken up (as the original was not) into three parts.  Quite understandably, some of the Strange Notions readers seem baffled by it.  Who are all these academic philosophical writers I refer to?  Why do I refer to them rather than just state the actual arguments for theism that I think are compelling?  Why don’t I say much about Catholicism, specifically?  Why the emphasis on philosophy to the exclusion of other aspects of religion?  Who do I think I am to suppose Strange Notions readers would want to read a three part piece on all this stuff? 
Those would be fair questions to raise about an article written for a non-academic website devoted to presenting Catholic apologetics to atheists.  But the article was not written for that website, and it was not my idea to reprint it there.  It was written for the personal blog of an academic philosopher, for readers not all of whom are Catholics but many or even most of whom have some acquaintance with and interest in academic philosophy, who are already familiar with the arguments I have given for theism in various books and articles but who are interested in knowing more of the details of how, intellectually speaking, I made a transition from atheism to theism.  I don’t know how useful the piece would be to general readers who aren’t coming from that sort of background -- if it is useful to any of them, great -- but I wasn’t writing it for them and it shouldn’t be judged as if I had been. 
I notice also that some Strange Notions readers are bothered by the polemical tone of some of the other posts of mine reprinted there, or by the fact that I don’t address this or that issue related to the subjects I discuss in the various posts.  Here too it has to be kept in mind that none of the posts were written as general purpose apologetics pieces in the first place, nor were any of them written for that site or reprinted there at my suggestion.  Some of them originally appeared in the middle of extended exchanges with other bloggers, and have been ripped from that original context.  For example, the post on the cosmological argument that Strange Notions has reprinted was written years ago in the middle of an ongoing exchange with Jerry Coyne and a couple of other New Atheist type bloggers, all of whom were gratuitously condescending and nasty.  My response to them was, accordingly, hard edged.  But removed from that original context and presented as if it were a general purpose stand alone article about the cosmological argument -- which is the impression given by the Strange Notions reprint -- that piece is bound to come off as needlessly aggressive and inappropriate for a website advertised (as Strange Notions is) as devoted to “charitable” discussion.  Had I written it for that site, or for an audience of fair-minded atheists (and I have always acknowledged that there are many such atheists) the tone would have been very different.  Strange Notions readers should also be aware that the criticisms some of them raise against that post were ones I answered years ago in a couple of follow up posts, hereand here.
(As my longtime readers know, I maintain that polemics are sometimes -- by no means always, but sometimes-- appropriate and even called for, and I have given philosophical and theological reasons for this claim.  Readers interested in those reasons are directed here, here, here, here, and here.)
Another post reprinted at Strange Notions, which deals with the Catholic understanding of tradition, was written years ago as part of an exchangephilosopher Dale Tuggy and I were having over the doctrine of the Trinity.  It was not in any way meant as a complete or stand alone treatment of the subject.  But the unwary reader might get the opposite impression given that it was taken from context and reprinted at a general purpose apologetics site.  Similar remarks could be made about some of the other posts of mine reprinted there.
Again, I hope at least some Strange Notions readers, whether theist or atheist, find the material useful.  If Brandon wants to keep reprinting my old stuff, I certainly appreciate his interest and he is free to do so if he thinks it conducive to the mission of his site.  But I would urge his readers to keep in mind the original context of the posts.  Estranged from that context, some notions are bound to seem stranger than they really are. 

The pointlessness of Jerry Coyne

People have asked me to comment on the recent spat between Jerry Coyne and Ross Douthat.  As longtime readers of this blog know from bitter experience, there’s little point in engaging with Coyne on matters of philosophy and theology.  He is neither remotely well-informed, nor fair-minded, nor able to make basic distinctions or otherwise to reason with precision.  Nor, when such foibles are pointed out to him, does he show much interest in improving.  (Though on at least one occasion he did promise to try actually to learn something about a subject concerning which he had been bloviating.  But we’re still waiting for that well-informed epic takedown of Aquinas we thought we were going to get from him more than two years ago.)Naturally, his incompetence is coupled with a preposterous degree of compensatory self-confidence.  As I once pointed out about Dawkins, Coyne may by now have put himself in a position that makes it psychologically impossible for him even to perceive serious criticism.  The problem is that his errors are neither minor, nor occasional, nor committed in the shadows, nor expressed meekly.  He commits a howler every time he opens his mouth, and he opens it very frequently, very publicly, and very loudly.  His blunders are of a piece, so that to confess one would be to confess half a decade’s worth -- to acknowledge what everyone outside his combox already knows, viz. that he is exactly the kind of bigot he claims to despise.  That is a level of humiliation few human beings can bear.  Hence the defense mechanism of training oneself to see only ignorance and irrationality even in the most learned and sober of one’s opponents; indeed, to see it even before one sees those opponents.  And so we have the spectacle of Coyne’s article last week on David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God , wherein he launches a 2800 word attack on a book he admits he has not read.  The sequel of self-delusion, it seems, is self-parody.

Still, it is worthwhile responding now and again to people like Coyne, so that bystanders who wouldn’t otherwise know any better can see just how pathetic are the “arguments” of New Atheists.  Consider Coyne’s recent response to Douthat.  As is typical of the New Atheist genre, we are confronted with a blizzard of sweeping and tendentious assertions, straw men, begged questions, missed points, well-poisoning, and other evidence that the writer has read a book about logical fallacies and mistaken it for a “How-To” guide.  It would take a short book to unpack all of Coyne’s errors here.  Indeed, even to see everything that is wrong just with Coyne’s remarks about the self and its purposes would take a mini lecture on the philosophy of mind.  So let’s do something of which Coyne is incapable.  Let’s focus.  Let’s set out -- precisely, calmly, and without all sorts of irrelevant remarks about Douthat’s desire for a cosmic father figure and the Inquisition and what a Martian would think of the Catholic Mass -- one very specific objection to materialism and see why Coyne fails even to perceive it, much less answer it.
Coyne had spoken of human beings forging their own purposes in the absence of God, and Douthat replied that given Coyne’s “eliminative materialist” view that the self might be an illusion, Coyne cannot coherently characterize himself as a “purpose-creating” agent in the first place.  In response Coyne tells us that “apparently [Douthat’s] notion of ‘purpose’ involves something given by Almighty God,” that Douthat “wants there to be a Douthat Soul that has a ‘purpose’ bestowed by a celestial deity,” etc. -- none of which, of course, is to the point.  You don’t need to be a theist or a believer in the soul to wonder how even the illusion of a single, unified self could arise out of inherently loose and separate fragments of either a psychological or neurological kind.  Even Hume acknowledged having failed to account for it.  This is what philosophers call the “unity of consciousness” problem, and even if atheism were demonstrably true that would contribute exactly nothing to the solution of the problem.  If Coyne were at all interested in the objective pursuit of truth -- as opposed to scoring cheap points against someone whose views he viscerally dislikes -- he would have seen that this, rather than some exercise in Freudian wishful thinking, is what Douthat is on about.  Materialism could still be false even if atheism were true, and Douthat’s point was about materialism, not atheism per se.
The varieties of “purpose”
But let’s put even that aside for the moment, because the unity of consciousness problem involves too many side issues (concerning qualia, the binding problem, etc.), and we need to try as far as we can to narrow Coyne’s attention on to something very, very specific and see if he can stay on point.  Consider the notion of “purpose.”  Coyne seems to think that all talk of purpose entails a conscious rational agent like us, but that is, conceptually speaking, just sloppy.  Where purpose is concerned -- a better term would be “teleology” or (better still because unassociated with irrelevant pop-theology baggage) the Scholastic’s term “finality” -- there are, as I have pointed out many times (e.g. here), at least five kinds, with each of the last four progressively more unlike the sort we know from introspection.  Hence we can distinguish:
1. The sorts of purposes we know from our own plans and actions.  In this case the end that is pursued is conceptualized.  When you order a steak, you conceptualize it as steak (as opposed, say, to vegetable protein processed to look and taste like steak), you express this concept linguistically by using the word “steak,” and so forth.
2. The sorts of purposes non-rational animals exhibit.  A dog, for example, exhibits a kind of purpose or goal-directedness when it excitedly makes its way over to the steak you’ve dropped on the floor.  Such a purpose is certainly conscious -- the dog will see the meat and imagine the appearance and taste of past bits of meat it has had, and it will also feel an urge to eat the meat -- but it is not conceptualized.  The dog doesn’t think of the meat as meat(as opposed to as textured vegetable protein), it doesn’t describe it using an abstract term like “meat,” etc.
3. The sorts of “purposes” plants exhibit.  A plant will grow “toward” the light, roots will “seek” water, an acorn “points to” the oak into which it will grow, etc.  These “purposes” are not only not conceptualized, but they are totally unconscious.  A plant will not only not think of the water it “seeks” aswater (as a human being would), but it will not feel thirst or anything else as it “seeks” it (as an animal would).
4. The “goal-directedness” of complex inorganic processes.  David Oderberg offers the water cycle and the rock cycle as examples of a kind of inorganic “goal-directedness” insofar as there is an objective (rather than merely interest-relative) fact of the matter about whether certain occurrences are parts of these causal processes.  For instance, the formation of magma may both cause certain local birds to migrate and lead to the formation of igneous rock, but causing birds to migrate is no part of the rock cycle while the formation of igneous rock is part of it.  That each stage of the process “points” to certain further stages in a way it does not “point” to other things it may incidentally cause reflects an extremely rudimentary sort of teleology.  It is a kind of teleology or “directedness” that involves neither conceptualization of the end sought (as human purposes do), nor conscious awareness of the end (as animal purposes do), nor the flourishing of a living system (as the “purposes” of plants do). 
5. Finally there is a kind of absolute bare minimum of “directedness” exhibited in even the simplest inorganic causal regularities.  As Aquinas argued, if A regularly generates some specific effect or range of effects B (rather than C, or D, or no effect at all), there is no way to make this intelligible unless we suppose that A is inherently “directed toward” or “points to” the generation of B (rather than to C, or D, or no effect at all).  Suppose all higher level causal regularities -- not only the water and rock cycles, but even simpler phenomena like the way the phosphorus in the head of a match generates flame and heat when the match is truck, or the way ice cools down room-temperature water surrounding it -- were entirely reducible to causation at the micro-structural level.  Still, we would have absolutely basic causal regularities -- the fact that some micro-structural phenomenon A regularly generates a range of outcomes B -- that is intelligible only if we suppose that A inherently points to B.  Or so the traditional Aristotelian view goes, anyway.  Here we lack in A not only conceptualization, consciousness, and life, but also complexity of the sort in view in teleology of Type 4.  There is just the bare “pointing to” or “directedness toward” B which would exist even if the causal transaction were not part of some larger structure. 
Now, let’s notice a couple of things.  First, none of this by itself has anything to do with theism.  The question of whether there is teleology, “directedness,” or finality in nature and the question of whether such teleology requires a divine cause are separate questions, even if they are related.  For as I have also pointed out many times (e.g., once again, here) there are several possible views one could take about purported teleology or finality of any or all of the five sorts just described:
A. One could hold that one or more of the kinds of teleology described above really do exist but that it is in no way inherent in the natural world, but rather imposed on it from outside by God in something like the way the purposes of an artifact are imposed on natural materials by us.  Just as the metal bits that make up a watch in no way have any time-telling function inherent in them but derive it entirely from the watchmaker and users of the watch, so too is the world utterly devoid of teleology except insofar as God imparts purposes to it.  This “extrinsic” view of teleology is essentially the view represented by William Paley’s “design argument.”
B. One could hold instead that teleology of one or more of the kinds described above really does exist and is inherent in the natural world rather than in any way imposed from outside.  Someone who takes this view might hold (for example) that an acorn really does have an inherent and irreducible “directedness” toward becoming an oak, or that in general efficient causes really are inherently “directed toward” or “point to” their effects, and that this just follows from their natures rather than from any external, divine directing activity.  Why does an acorn “point toward” becoming an oak?  Not, on this view, because God so directs it, but just because that is part of what it is to be an acorn.  This ”intrinsic” view of teleology is the one usually attributed to Aristotle (who, though he affirmed the existence of a divine Unmoved Mover, did not do so on teleological grounds, as least as usually interpreted). 
C. One could hold that teleology of one or more of the kinds described above really does exist and has its proximal ground in the natures of things but its distalground in divine directing activity.  On this view (to stick with the acorn example -- an example nothing rides on, by the way, but is just an illustration) the acorn “points to” becoming an oak by its very nature, and this nature is something that can be known whether or not one affirms the existence of God.  To that extent this view agrees with View B.  But a complete explanation of things and their natures would, on this View C, require recourse to a divine sustaining cause.  This is the view represented by Aquinas’s Fifth Way, which (as I have noted many times) has nothing whatsoever to do either with Paley’s feeble “design argument” or with the arguments of recent “Intelligent Design” theorists.  (I have expounded and defended Aquinas’s Fifth Way in several places, such as in my book Aquinas and in greatest detail in a recent Nova et Vetera article.) 
D. One could hold that one or more of the kinds of teleology described above are in some sense real but only insofar as they are entirely reducible to non-teleological phenomena.  To speak of something’s “pointing to” or being “directed toward” some end is on this view “really” just a shorthand for some description that makes no reference whatsoever to teleology or finality.
E. Finally, one could hold that none of the sorts of teleology described above exists in any sense, not even when understood in a reductionist way.  They are entirely illusory. 
Now, Coyne, fixated as all New Atheists are on the easy target of Paley’s “design argument,” evidently thinks that to affirm the existence of “purpose” or teleology in nature commits one to View A and thus directly commits one to theism.  But that is simply not the case.  That would be true only if teleology is regarded as entirely extrinsic to the natural order, as the purpose of a watch is entirely extrinsic to the physical components of the watch.  And one could hold instead that teleology is intrinsic to the natural order.  In that case one could maintain either that the question of teleology has nothing to do with whether there is a God (as View B maintains) or that if it does, it could still get you to God in only an indirect way, via further argumentation (as View C maintains).  Hence there are contemporary philosophers like George Molnar, John Heil, and Paul Hoffman who take a View B approach to teleology of at least Type 5.  (Molnar calls it “physical intentionality” and Heil calls it “natural intentionality.”)  Thomas Nagel appears to take a View B approach to teleology of Types 1 - 3 and perhaps of the other types as well.  Some of these writers -- indeed, perhaps all of them as far as I can tell (though I’m not sure in every case) -- are atheists.  And Thomists like myself, who take a Type C approach, agree that the question of whether there is teleology intrinsic to nature is a separate question from whether such teleology requires a divine cause.
Coyne also evidently thinks that to raise the question of whether materialists can account for “purposes” is to posit an immaterial soul and/or to raise some high-falutin’ “meaning of life” question.  But that isn’t the case either.  Aristotelians maintain that materialism cannot account for teleology of Types 2 - 5, but they would not attribute anything immaterial to the phenomena in question.  (Nor, in the case of Types 4 and 5, a soul.  Aristotle did think plants and animals have “souls” in the sense of an organizational principle by which they are alive, but he did not think of this as something immaterial.)  And someone could hold that human existence has no “meaning” or “purpose” in the sense of being part of some divine plan or preparatory for an afterlife, and still take the view that materialism cannot account for purposes of any or all of Types 1 - 5.  (That seems to be Nagel’s position, for example.) 
So, to question whether materialism can account for “purpose” has nothing necessarily to do with whether there is a God, nothing necessarily to do with whether human beings have immaterial souls, and nothing necessarily to do with whether there is, specifically, a “purpose” to human existence in the sense of a cosmic plan, an afterlife, etc.  Those are, contrary to what Coyne evidently supposes, separate issues.  What is the problem, then?
Materialism and “purpose”
To see the problem, consider first the conception of matter to which the materialist is committed.  In his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, materialist philosopher Alex Rosenberg writes:
Ever since physics hit its stride with Newton, it has excluded purposes, goals, ends, or designs in nature.  It firmly bans all explanations that are teleological… (p. 40)
Such characterizations of modern physics are easy to come by.  For example, philosopher of science David Hull writes:
Historically, explanations were designated as mechanistic to indicate that they included no reference to final causes or vital forces.  In this weak sense, all present-day scientific explanations are mechanistic. (“Mechanistic explanation,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy)
Now whether this sort of characterization is correct is in fact a matter of controversy.  Even in physics, teleology has sometimes been claimed to survive in the principle of least action.  And even if the description of the world physics gives us makes no reference to teleology, it wouldn’t follow that matter lacks any teleological features.  To draw that conclusion would require the further premise that physics gives us a description of matter that is, not only correct as far as it goes, but exhaustive.  And Aristotelians, Russellian neutral monists, and others would deny that premise.  But put all that aside.  The point for now is that materialists hold that matter is devoid of teleology or finality, because that is (so they suppose) what science tells them.
Now that means that of the approaches to teleology or finality described above, the materialist is committed to either View D or View E.  But View D really collapses into View E.  For attempts to reduce teleological notions to non-teleological notions are notoriously problematic.  To take a stock example, suppose it is claimed that such-and-such a neural structure in frogs serves the function or purpose of allowing them to catch flies (insofar as it underlies frogs’ behavior of snapping their tongues at flies).  And suppose it is claimed that this teleological description can be translated without remainder into a description that makes use of no teleological notions.  For instance, it might be held that to say that the neural structure in question serves that function is just shorthand for saying that it causesfrogs to snap their tongues at flies; or perhaps that it is shorthand for saying that the structure was hardwired into frogs by natural selection because it caused them to snap their tongues at flies.  The trouble is that the same neural structure will cause a frog to snap its tongue at lots of other things too -- at BB’s, black spots projected onto a screen, etc. -- yet it would be false to say that the function of the structure in question is the disjunctive one of getting frogs to eat either flies or BBs or spots on a screen, etc.   Of course, someone might respond: “But that’s because the reasonthe neural structure gets frogs to snap their tongues, and the reason it was favored by natural selection, was in order to get them to eat flies, not to eat BB’s or spots on a screen!”  But that’s just the point.  To say that “the reason” the structure exists is “in order to” get frogs to do that, specifically, is to bring teleological notions back into the analysis, when the whole point was to get rid of them. 
This sort of problem -- known by philosophers as the “disjunction problem” -- illustrates the impossibility of trying to reduce teleological descriptions to non-teleological ones.  Such purported reductions invariably either simply fail to capture the teleological notions, or they smuggle them in again through the back door and thus don’t really reduce them after all.  Hence, as naturalists as otherwise different as John Searle and Alex Rosenberg have acknowledged, a consistent materialist has at the end of the day to deny that teleology really exists at all.  That is to say, he has to opt for what I have labeled View E.
Now this is where an insuperable problem for materialism comes in.  If you take View E, then you have to say that teleology, purpose, “directedness” or “pointing toward” of any kind is an illusion.  But illusions are themselves instances of “directedness” or “pointing toward.”  In particular they are instances of intentionality, where intentionality is what the “directedness” or “pointing toward” that is definitive of teleology in general looks like in the case of mental states (thoughts, perceptions, volitions, and the like) in particular.  This is why the intentionality of the mental has notoriously been difficult for the materialist to account for.  For materialism maintains that there is no irreducible “directedness” in the world, yet intentionality just is a kind of “directedness.”  A thought or perception is about or directed at a state of affairs (whether real or illusory), a volition is about or directed at a certain outcome (whether actually realizable or not), and so forth.
As materialists like Alex Rosenberg and Paul Churchland see, this is why a consistent materialist really has to be an eliminativist and deny the reality of intentionality altogether.  The problem is that this simply cannot coherently be done.  To be sure, the eliminativist can avoid saying blatantly self-contradictory things like “I believe there are no beliefs,” but that doesn’t solve the basic problem.  For he will inevitably have to make use of a notion like “illusion,” “error,” “falsehood,” or the like even just to express what it is he is denying the existence of, and these notions are thoroughly intentional(in the sense of being instances of intentionality).  For one to be in thrall to an “illusion” or an “error” just is to be in a state with meaning, with directedness on to a certain content, and so forth.  In short, to dismiss the “directedness” or “pointing toward” characteristic of teleology and intentionality as an illusion is incoherent, since illusions are themselves instances of the very phenomenon whose existence is being denied.  We saw in a recent series of posts how Rosenberg tries to solve this incoherence problem -- in an attempt that is, to his credit, more serious than that of other eliminativists -- but fails utterly.
The basic problem, then, has nothing essentially to do with the existence of God, with the immateriality of the soul, with Douthat’s purported exercises in wish-fulfillment, or any other of the red herrings Coyne tosses out.  It is a problem -- and an insuperable one, I maintain -- that the materialist faces whether or not God exists, whether or notwe have immortal souls, whether or notthere is some larger cosmic purpose to human existence, etc.  It is also no answer whatsoever to the problem to make hand-waving references (as Coyne does in response to Douthat) to “arrangements of neurons,” to what is “evolutionarily advantageous,” or the like.  If someone says “The square root of four wears aftershave” and you demand that he explain what that even means, it is no answer at all if he says: “Well, there are these arrangements of neurons favored by natural selection that make it true that the square root of four wears aftershave.”  Similarly, if you demand of someone that he explain how he can coherently say both that there is no “directedness” of any sort in the world (which is what he is committing himself to when he says that teleology of any sort is unreal) but that we have an “illusion” of directedness (which is itself an instance of “directedness” since it involves intentionality), it is no answer at all to say “Well, natural selection hardwired into us these neural arrangements that generate this illusion.”  Shouting “Evolution did it!” or “Our neurons do it!” doesn’t magically make an incoherent statement into a coherent one.
Now, this is not exactly the issue Douthat raised against Coyne, but it is related to the one Douthat raises, and I have emphasized it because once the relevant distinctions are made the basic problem can be made very precise and the complete irrelevance to it of the issues raised by Coyne is crystal clear.  If materialism is true, then there can be no “directedness,” “aboutness,” one thing “pointing to” another, etc.  The appearance of such “directedness” must be an illusion or error.  Yet illusions and the like are themselves instances of “directedness,” “aboutness,” etc.  So it cannot coherently be maintained that “directedness” is an illusion.  So, since materialism entails that it is an illusion, materialism cannot coherently be maintained.
Now there are various possible ways a materialist might try to respond to this.  He could decide to accept some irreducible “directedness” or teleology into his picture of nature after all, but then he will essentially be joining Thomas Nagel in rejecting materialism in favor of a neo-Aristotelian position.  Or he could try to give some account of notions like “illusion,” “error,” and the like that doesn’t implicitly commit him to intentionality and thus to the existence of the very “directedness” that he is supposed to be denying.  But no one has come close to showing how this can be done -- Rosenberg gives about the best shot anyone has, but his account is not only tentative but (as I show in the posts referred to above) a complete failure.  Or the materialist could try to affirm the existence of “directedness” while at the same time reducing it to some non-teleological features of reality.  But that would require giving an analysis that neither surreptitiously eliminates rather than reduces teleology, nor implicitly smuggles it in again through the back door -- as attempts to solve problems like the “disjunction problem” tend to do.  No one has shown how to pull this off either.
If Coyne were serious and well-informed, though, those are the sorts of problems he would be trying to solve.  Yet a cringe-making attempt of Coyne’s some time back to deal with the challenge intentionality poses for materialism showed that -- unlike more formidable scientistic atheists like Rosenberg -- he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what the problem even is.  Not that he’s likely even to try to address it should he deign to comment on this post.  No doubt we’ll hear instead about how I’m just trying to rationalize my Catholic prejudices, or that most philosophers are atheists like Coyne, or that neuroscientists don’t believe in souls, or some other such stuff -- none of which has anything whatsoever to do with the subject at hand, of course, but that never stops Coyne.  But if he really wants slowly to work his way to a point from which he might someday have something remotely interesting to say about philosophy, Coyne could start by taking a lesson from former philosophy major Steve Martin. 

DSPT colloquium 2014

The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, CA will be hosting a colloquium on the theme “What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?  Dialogue between Philosophy and Theology in the 21st Century,” on July 16 - 20, 2014.  The plenary session presenters are Michael Dodds, OP, Edward Feser, Alfred Freddoso, John O’Callaghan, Michał Paluch, OP, John Searle, Robert Sokolowski, and Linda Zagzebski.  More information here.(I noted some other upcoming speaking engagements here.)

Oderberg reflects on Lowe

The following is a guest post by David S. Oderberg on the life, work, and legacy of the late E. Jonathan Lowe (pictured at left), who died on January 5.E.J. Lowe (1950-2014)My first intellectual encounter with Jonathan Lowe was around 1990 or 1991, while in the thick of my doctoral thesis. I was trying to defend a position in metaphysics that went against the majority view at the time, though a minority of significant philosophers agreed with it. The problem was one of finding some decent arguments in support of the minority view: merely citing a well-known adherent would not be enough.
My first personal encounter with Jonathan was soon after, at the time of my viva voce examination. He was one of my two examiners, an expert in the area but a source of sleepless nights as I worried whether I had done enough to pass. The first sight to greet me, distinctly remembered all these years later, was of two men solemnly walking through the Examination Schools, copies of my dissertation in their hands. I was sitting on a cold, wooden bench on my own, sweatily clutching a few notes, trying to discern from what seemed to be their grim faces the faintest hint of a reassuring glance or smile that let me know I would survive and possibly even come out with a doctorate. No such glimmer was forthcoming.

As I entered the examination room after them and took my place, Jonathan proceeded immediately to set my mind at ease. Yes, I would pass. They liked the dissertation, so they said. (Second lesson: when examining doctoral dissertations, I always  - well, nearly always - reassure the candidate before proceedings get under way. It’s an act of simple kindness of the sort that, for Jonathan at least, was intuitive.) Still, they needed to ask me a few questions. Whereupon both examiners, with Jonathan leading the way, subjected me to a two-hour barrage of questions and objections that convinced me the initial reassurance was a mistake and that I would fail after all. The way I handled the questions, if I had been the examiner I would have failed myself. The examination over, my heart thumping and my shirt collar drenched, they both gave me wide smiles and Jonathan congratulated me on my doctorate. A few nervous exchanges of jocularity later, off they walked and I blinked at the sunlight outside, wondering exactly what had happened.

There I was exposed, in however brief a period, to the two sides of Jonathan with which I am most familiar: the fearsome intellect, taking no prisoners, spotting holes in arguments with uncanny insight; the kindly, reassuring presence, smiling more often than not, incapable of genuine aggression in philosophical exchange, substituting in its stead a kind of drive or insistence, a relentless questioning that always got to the heart of an issue yet without any hint of malice calculated to make his opponent feel slighted or small.

One might think this was typical of the profession. That it is not is evidenced by the endless requests Jonathan received to act as doctoral examiner (let alone all the others, of  which more later). My third lesson from Jonathan: always tell your doctoral students, even before they put finger to keyboard, to start thinking about possible examiners and to pick them carefully. Alas, I contributed far too much to Jonathan’s workload over the years by recommending him as an examiner for my students or others who came to me for suggestions. I knew that, however formidable a challenge a student might have getting a dissertation past Jonathan, they would find themselves in the hands of someone who was fair, judicious, benevolent, and whose critique of their work could only make it better.

I suppose this was Jonathan’s personality, pure and simple. No one who met him could fail to be impressed by his geniality. This was not, however, a mere matter of the disposition of his humours. Jonathan was relentless in his search for truth. We sometimes hear of an academic who is ‘no respecter of persons’ in their remorseless quest for the right answers. This is always code for something less flattering about the way they conduct themselves in debate (whether in person or in print). Yet Jonathan was no respecter of persons in a far more favourable way. He never thought that part of the philosopher’s brief was to grind their opponent into the ground, hoisting the triumphalist flag of a debate won, a ‘knockdown argument’ scored. What he respected was the debate itself, the ideas at stake. One could dismember them as much as one liked; they felt no pain and the bad ones had no right to reassembly. As for persons and personalities - they were subject to the same rules of cordial and civilised discourse that applied to anyone, academic or not. As he conducted himself socially, so Jonathan behaved in the seminar room. True, it would have been exciting occasionally to see some fireworks fly from Jonathan, verbally or on paper, for it’s not as though polemics have no place among scholars. Yet I could not imagine such a thing being any more than contrived coming from such a warm and affable person as he was.

Over the years I saw Jonathan at various conferences and seminars, and we corresponded off and on. Knowing how overloaded he was, I was loath to burden him with yet another message about this or that (far too often a request for assistance). He was always the same, both physically and in his personality: the latter always amiable, smiling, or perhaps half-serious, half-smiling; the former, well - he had that enviable knack of never seeming to age. When he spoke at a conference I organised in 2011, I couldn’t help marvelling that he looked about as young as he did when he examined my dissertation. (I have learned no lesson from this, except perhaps to accept with grace one’s genetic lot.) When he told me of the upcoming marriage of one of his children, and how he seemed reluctant to make a big speech (wanting never to be the centre of attention, so I assumed), I needled him playfully about it, encouraging him to get up on a chair and declaim his pride to the guests. He went red, genuinely bashful at the thought of having to make, Heaven forbid, a wedding speech! Here was one of the world’s leading philosophers, a presenter at more conferences than I can count, one of the most confident writers and speakers I have witnessed, genuinely nervous at having to be the focus of a social gathering. (His wonderful wife, Susan, assured me he would make the speech - and so he did.)

For all his intellectual power and self-assurance, Jonathan was fundamentally self-effacing - one of the most underrated and disrespected virtues in an age of celebrity-idol worship. The UK government now requires all academics to demonstrate ‘impact’: how have their ideas changed the lives of people outside the academy? Where’s the evidence? The more quantifiable, the better: pure research for research’s sake, the simple, unadulterated pursuit of knowledge and wisdom might get a good rating in the next government assessment exercise, if you’re lucky, but an academic’s ‘impact’ is zero if they can’t prove they have done something specific to influence the minds of non-academics. Well and good, in a way: academic blogs, such as the present one, perform an enormous service in reaching out to people who might never pick up a philosophy book, or who if they do will never have the chance to participate directly in the debates going on within the academy. In fact, philosophers always delight in genuine impact, in the effect their ideas may have on the world. The problem is, we tend to measure it in centuries or even millennia, not the five-ten year scale required by the UK government.

I never asked Jonathan about the so-called ‘impact agenda’, but I have a fairly good idea of what he would have said (and probably did say to others). His own actions make it clear. For apart from the very occasional interview, I am not aware of his ever writing popular philosophy, pop articles or throwaway pieces. He may have spoken to non-philosophers in a formal setting occasionally (I do not know), yet he was anything but a ‘pop’ philosopher. He was, on the contrary, a philosopher’s philosopher, writing for his peers, speaking to his peers, pursuing what he thought needed pursuing, or what interested him. That’s why he entered the profession, and that’s what he continued to do until his tragic death.

How? How did Jonathan manage to produce over two hundred articles and around ten books, along with several edited collections and nearly a hundred book reviews? I know it wasn’t by sacrificing quality, because his work is of the highest rank from beginning to end. There is not a single publication from which I haven’t learned something, whether I agree with him or not. And the range of topics is vast - pretty much everything in metaphysics, of course, not to mention philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, action theory, conditionals, time and tense, philosophy of language, logic… Not much ethics or philosophy of religion, mind you, let alone aesthetics or political philosophy, for which more’s the pity; but that is symptomatic of the lamentable contemporary division between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ philosophy, where it is almost an axiom that if you specialise in one domain you couldn’t possibly have anything useful to say in the other. (Quine notoriously tried, with unhappy results that have perhaps set the tone.) Had he tried his hand, no doubt Jonathan’s effect on moral philosophy would have been as salutary as it has on metaphysics.

As one of the many philosophers who have read a large amount of Jonathan’s corpus I think I detect a style, or rather a method - welcoming yet fearsome. He tends to begin with some fairly ordinary, relatively uncontroversial observations about a subject. You find yourself nodding in agreement: yes, good place to start. Plausible intuitions. This should be fun. You convince yourself it’s going to be an easy ride. Five or ten pages in (Jonathan had the incredibly enviable knack of bringing in most of his papers at 30 double-spaced pages; would that we all had that gift of succinctness), you start to feel a little uneasy. It’s hard to put your finger on. He’s turning up the heat, ever so gently. It’s getting a little complicated. Soon you know it’s complicated. It’s usually mid-way through one of his papers that I start smacking my forehead (metaphorically, most of the time). I’m a bit lost; I need to read page 20 three times before I feel remotely confident in continuing. I keep at it, usually grabbing a scrap of paper (these days, my iPad or laptop) to try to reconstruct his argument. Once I think I’ve got it, I step gingerly forward, and then, by about page 25, I feel  as if I’m on a ski slope heading down, and dare not get off till I reach the bottom: I have to finish, I have to get the whole picture before I can go away and mull it over. Then, maybe a week or two later, I think I’ve got it. My inevitable conclusion: this topic, or debate, or issue, has now been decisively modified - perhaps taken in a different direction, maybe taken wholly in reverse to where it should have remained; but often decided pure and simple. (I felt the latter in particular when reading his paper on McTaggart’s indexical fallacy.) It’s not often that one can read a contemporary philosopher and think with confidence that they have actually done what they were supposed to do - answer the question correctly.

In the early 1990s, when Jonathan came to speak at a conference I organised, I distinctly remember him saying to me that he was working on a metaphysics textbook but that writing books wasn’t really his thing. He was turning out one article after another, but I too wondered whether he was capable of producing many books. More fool I, as he unleashed a torrent of textbooks and monographs from around that point on. I used his A Survey of Metaphysics for many years as the text for my final-year metaphysics course: a brilliant book, beyond what 99% of metaphysicians could produce, equally enjoyable and intimidating for the students, and for me less a textbook than a monograph from which I have learned an enormous amount. How he managed to write brilliantly on such a wide range of topics is beyond me.

As if his brilliance and peerless productivity were not enough, Jonathan was the most conscientious supporter of students and professional friends that I have known. I am embarrassed by the endless calls I made on his time to write me a reference or some letter of support, to give feedback on a paper, contribute to a book I was editing, provide some professional advice on this or that. Never, not once did he decline the request. Not once did he do less than take it with all seriousness and do exactly what was asked, even more than was necessary. I have heard the same repeated by student after student, by one freshly-minted PhD after another. If you were in line for promotion and needed a crucial reference from a ‘big name’, you asked Jonathan. If you needed backing for a grant application, you asked Jonathan. If you wanted to get an edited volume published but knew that you did not have well-known contributors and/or co-editors, you asked Jonathan. Countless students and academics owe their careers to him in one way or another. What he did for the profession, both intellectually and administratively (for want of a better word), would take several career lifetimes for the average academic.

When I first learned last summer than Jonathan was gravely ill, my heart sank. Not him, who never seemed to age, never slowed down. It wasn’t right. Then, when I emailed him in October of last year to see if he was on the mend, he replied directly to say that he was indeed recovering and expected to be back to full strength soon. I know he had cancelled all appointments; we were scheduled to speak together at a conference at the end of 2013 but he had to withdraw. Still, his personal reassurance set my mind at ease. Then to learn of his sudden death, when emails began coming my way asking if the rumours were true, was a body blow. I still cannot believe it, and I want to pretend it is all false.

I am sure plenty more people, apart from his devastated family, knew Jonathan better than I. I can only relate my perspective on a friendship that lasted over twenty years. On more than one occasion - a moment of crisis, when help was needed and gratefully received - I said to Jonathan directly that there was one, and only one, word to describe him, and it was not in English. Jonathan Lowe was a mensch. He was, in my humble view, the greatest philosopher the United Kingdom has produced in the last fifty years at least, and among the handful of greatest in the world. For all that his death is so, so untimely, he has left a wonderful legacy, a body of work to be studied by generations of philosophers for many years hence; indeed, a lifetime’s philosophy on which to reflect, as he spent his own life in the search for truth and wisdom. In latter years he moved more and more in the Aristotelian direction, which for me (albeit not for some others, no doubt) was a pleasure to behold. Now I will never know how far he would have taken his Aristotelian leanings. I know with utter certainty, however, that he was a mensch, and for that he must foremost be remembered.

Rest in peace.

17 January 2014

Does existence exist?

Existence exists.
Ayn Rand
Existence does not exist.
Cardinal Cajetan
Both Rand’s statement and Cajetan’s sound very odd at first blush.  What does it mean to say that existence exists?  Isn’t that like saying that stoneness is a stone or humanness is a human being, neither of which is true?  On the other hand, what does it mean to say that existence does not exist?  Isn’t that like saying that there is nothing that exists, which is also manifestly false?  Yet how could both of these statements be false?Suppose we interpreted them as the contraries “All existing things exist” and “No existing things exist.”  In that case, they could both be false if we supposed that there are at least some existing things that exist and some that do not exist.  But “Some existing things do not exist” is self-contradictory, and indeed “No existing things exist” seems no less so.  Moreover, “All existing things exist” itself seems as obviously true as a statement could be.  But it is also trivially true, a mere tautology.  And in any event, surely Cajetan did not mean to be uttering an obvious falsehood, nor Rand a trivial truth.  So, at second blush the statements might continue to seem very odd. 
Let’s try third blush.  Suppose we read “exists” in Fregean terms, as captured by the existential quantifier.  Then both statements come out as ill-formed formulae, complete gibberish.  Rand’s statement comes out as something like “There is an x such that there is an x such that…” and Cajetan’s as something like “It is not the case that there is an x such that there is an x such that…”  This would be to read Rand and Cajetan the way Anthony Kenny reads Aquinas in his book Aquinas on Being , and it is about as fair a reading of them as Kenny’s is of Aquinas -- which, as Gyula Klima pointed out, is not fair at all. 
Fourth blush is the charm.  In fact what each writer meant is perfectly intelligible when their statements are understood in context.  Rand’s remark is from her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology .  As Wallace Matson remarks in his essay “Rand on Concepts” in Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen’s anthology The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand , “I take her to mean by this that there are things independent of our thinking about them” (p. 23).  Rand takes this to be “axiomatic” in the sense that while it cannot be directly proved neither can it coherently be denied.  Why not?  Den Uyl and Rasmussen explore the theme in their own essay in the volume, “Ayn Rand’s Realism,” in which they note that for Rand since consciousness is always of or directed at an object, it is self-evident that something exists -- namely (as Rand states in the Foreword to the book) the object of one’s consciousness and oneself as the subject of consciousness.
Naturally one can raise questions about this.  Granted that the object of one’s consciousness exists qua object -- i.e. “intentionally” -- it doesn’t follow that it exists in mind-independent reality.  (A hallucinated tree certainly “exists,” but only qua hallucination, not qua material object.)  Granted that there is consciousness, a Lichtenberg or a Hume would still question -- not plausibly, but they would question -- whether there is an abiding self to serve as the subject of consciousness.  But even in this case Rand would arguably still have something that cannot coherently be denied, namely the existence at least of consciousness qua intentional.  More to the present point, “Existence exists,” understood merely as a claim to the effect that the existence of something or other cannot coherently be denied, is certainly intelligible.  But what does that tell us about mind-independent reality?
That brings us to Cajetan’s statement.  Jacques Maritain cites it at p. 20 of his A Preface to Metaphysics , when commenting on Cajetan’s commentary on Aquinas’s On Being and Essence .  Aquinas famously argues in that work that there is a real distinction between the essenceof a thing (what it is) and its existence (that it is).  When you perceive a tree what you perceive is being as confined, as it were, within that particular essence, the essence of that tree.  The intellect goes on to abstract the universal pattern treeness, and also to consider being as such.  But just as treeness in the abstract is different from the essence of this particular individual tree, so too is being as such, considered in the abstract or merely conceptually, different from the existence (or “act of existing”) of this particular individual tree.
Now as I read Maritain reading Cajetan, what the thesis that “Existence does not exist” comes to is simply the point that existence considered in the abstract by the intellect or conceptually is not the same thing as the actual existence of a concrete, mind-independent object.  And that is surely correct.  The point of making the point, for Maritain anyway, is (again, as I read him) to emphasize the distinction between Thomism and the Leibnizian sort of rationalism that holds that the order of mind-independent reality can be read off from the order of concepts.  This is, for the Thomist, one reason (not the only one) for insisting on the real distinction between essence and existence.  To deny the real distinction tends either to collapse essence into existence or collapse existence into essence.  Leibnizian rationalism tends in the latter direction -- collapsing existence into essence, where essences in turn collapse into concepts, which are essentially mind-dependent -- and this in turn tends in just the sort of idealist direction that was, historically, the sequel to rationalism as it gave way to Kantianism, Hegelianism, and the like. 
And as it happens, Rand, according to Den Uyl and Rasmussen (on p. 5 of the essay cited above), would, given her thesis that “Existence exists,” deny the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction.  The idea is that to know the essence or “what-ness” of a thing is to know that it exists, and no further explanation of its existence is needed.  Hence (so the line of thought seems to go) if I know, just from consciousness of such-and-such, what such-and-such is, then ipso facto I know the existence of such-and-such.  Hence if I cannot coherently deny consciousness of such-and-such, then I cannot coherently deny that “Existence exists.”  Or, again, so the argument seems to go. 
(Note that this would also help explain Rand’s atheism: If the existence of a contingent thing is not really distinct from its essence, so that existence needn’t be added to the essence of a thing in order for the thing to be actual, then the sort of argument Aquinas gives in On Being and Essence for the existence of God -- understood as ipsum esse subsistens or subsistent being itself -- as the source of the very existence of things, is blocked.)
If this is Rand’s view then she is definitely in conflict with Cajetan and other Thomists, just as the statements from them quoted at the beginning suggests (though for reasons much more complicated than the two statements considered in isolation would suggest).  For she seems at least implicitly committed to the view that the order of mind-independent reality can be read off from the order of concepts.  How can they differ so radically given that Rand on the one hand and Cajetan and other Thomists on the other are all Aristotelians?  Den Uyl and Rasmussen give us a clue when they tell us (p. 5) that Rand’s Aristotelianism is much like that of William of Ockham, who also denied the real distinction.  And Ockham, of course, is for Thomists the man who perhaps more than any other set in motion the disintegration of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition.
The irony is that Rand apparently adopted a position that in fact tends toward idealism in the course of trying to defend a realist metaphysics opposedto idealism.  But then, as Pius X could have told her, we “cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.”