Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either material singulars or minds, and thus without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence (being) and intentional existence (being). Real existence is existence 'outside' the (finite) mind. Intentional existence is existence 'in' or 'before' the mind. The mentioned words are obviously not to be taken spatially. Esse is the Latin infinitive, to be. Every human mind is a finite mind, but don't assume the converse.
According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.
Pause to appreciate how attractive this conception is. It secures the intrinsic intelligibility of the world while avoiding the 'gap problem' that bedevils post-Cartesian thought.
I need to know more, however, about the exact ontological status of the common nature (CN) which is, as it were, amphibious as between knowing mind and thing known.
With the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated in earlier forays:
A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.
B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete extramental singulars and mental acts. (Note: a mental act is a concrete singular because in time, though not in space.)
C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, it does not merely possibly have them, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of the Law of Excluded Middle) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.
D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.
(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting in earlier entries.. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits — to put it anachronistically — all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up in the jungle with a Meinongian monkey on his back.
Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.
Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete extramental singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):
Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.
Socrates est rationalis, quia homo est rationalis, et non e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)
Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.
Now this obviously implies that the common nature humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meinongian route or we say that comon natures exist in the mind of God. Kenny:
Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; third, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)
This may seem to solve the problem I raised. Common natures are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.
The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. Solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture.
The phenomenal Edward Feser. How does he do it? He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college, five per semester; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children. Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality.
He writes with clarity, style, and wit, and you don't want to end up on the wrong end of his polemics, as Lawrence Krauss did recently who got himself deservedly tagged by Ed as a "professional amateur philosopher."
Ed is an embodiment of one of the truths of Quine's essay Paradoxes of Plenty, namely, that a paucity of free time is not inimical to productivity.
Ed's latest collects 16 recent essays in the areas of philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Start with "The Road from Atheism," his intellectual autobiography.
You can get the book from Amazon for a paltry $19.02. Amazon blurb:
In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments. This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as “analytical Thomism,” though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser’s academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas’s Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional “perverted faculty argument.”
One philosopher's explanatory posit is another's mere invention.
In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, 1994, pp. 1-21), Panayot Butchvarov rejects epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1) Curiously enough, however, Butchvarov goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong! Actually, 'posit' is not a word he would use since Butchvarov claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects. (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the hallucinated pink rat are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.
But now consider the following passage from Anscombe and Geach's 1961 Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:
But saying this has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else: it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat. This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist — a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix. Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)
Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology. What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!
Ain't philosophy grand? One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given.
What is also striking about the above passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.
Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations. There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether a painting, a photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat. Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X. There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.
The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs realization in some medium. It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff. Why can't consciousness of a cat be nothing more than consciousness of a cat? Why can't consciousness be exhausted by its revelation of objects? This is the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness that Butchvarov espouses. I don't advocate it myself, but I don't see that Geach has refuted it. That derivative intentionality requires a medium does not show that original intentionality does. No picture of a cat is exhausted by its depicting of a cat; there needs to be a physical thing, the picture itself, and it must have certain properties that found or ground the pictorial relation. But it might be otherwise for original intentionality.
Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein. Consciousness as being-conscioused. Get it? If memory serves, the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp has a theory along these lines, although the word I think he uses is Bewusstheit which, to coin an English expression, is the monadic property of consciousedness. Perhaps there is an anticipation of Sartre/Butchvarov in Natorp.
But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental-contents conception.
I suspect that Vlastimil V's (neo-scholastic) understanding of potentiality is similar to the one provided by Matthew Lu in Potentiality Rightly Understood:
The substance view of persons holds that every human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them. For the adherent of the substance view of persons, "potential" does not essentially refer to some possible future state of affairs. Rather, in this conception of what I will call developmentalpotential, to say that an organism has the potential to manifest some property means that that property belongs essentially to the kind of thing that it is (i.e., is among the essential properties it has by nature). Whether or not a specific individual actualizes the potentialities of its nature is contingent; but those potentialities necessarily belong to its nature in virtue of its membership in a specific natural kind.
I don't understand this. Let the property be rationality. Let organism o belong to the natural kind human being. We assume that man is by nature a rational animal. A human fetus is of course a human being. Suppose the fetus is anencephalic. It too is a human being — it is not lupine or bovine or a member of any other animal species. But it is a defective human being, one whose defect is so serious that it, that very individual, will never manifest rationality. So how can every human being have "the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood"? That is my question. Now consider the following answers/views.
A1: The anencephalic human fetus does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality. This is because it lacks "the largest part of the brain consisting mainly of the cerebral hemispheres, including the neocortex, which is responsible for cognition." (Wikipedia)
A2: The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because it is a member of a species or natural kind the normal (non-defective) members of which do have the potentiality in question.
A3: The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.
I think (A2) is the most charitable reading of the above quoted paragraph considered in the context of Lu's entire paper. Accordingly, a particular anencephalic fetus has the potentiality to manifest rationality because other genetically human members of the same species do have the potentiality in question. This makes no sense to me. But perhaps I am being obtuse, in which case a charitable soul may wish to help me understand. To be perfectly honest, I really would like it to be the case that EVERY "human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them." I would like that to be the case because then I would not have to supplement my Potentiality Argument against abortion with other principles as I have done in other entries.
What's my problem? Let's start with an analogy. It is narrowly logically possible and broadly logically possible that I run a four-minute mile. It is also nomologically possible that I run a four-minute mile. For all the latter means is that the laws of nature pertaining to human anatomy and physiology do not rule out a human being's running a four-minute mile. Since they do not rule out a human being's running that fast, they don't rule out my running that fast.
But note that the laws of human physiology abstract entirely from the particularities and peculiarities of me qua individual animal. They abstract from my particular O2 uptake, the ratio of 'fast twitch' to 'slow twitch' muscle fibers in my legs, and so on. And to be totally clear: it is the concrete flesh-and-blood individual that runs, 'Boston Billy' Rodgers, for example, that very guy, not his form, not his matter, not his nature, not any accident or property or universal or subjective concept or objective concept that pertains to him.
Now consider the question: do I, BV, have the potential to run a four-minute mile? No. Why not? Because of a number of deficiencies, insufficiencies, limitations and whatnot pertaining to the particular critter that I am. The fact that other runners have the potential in question is totally irrelevant. What do their individual potentialities have to do with me? The question, again, is whether I, BV, have/has the potentiality in question. It is also totally irrelevant that the laws of human physiology do not rule out my running a four-minute mile. Again, this is because said laws abstract from the particularities and peculiarities of the concrete individual. Surely it would be a very serious blunder to suppose that the nomological possibility of my running a four-minute mile entails the potentiality of my doing any such thing. That would be a two-fold blunder: (i) potentiality is not possibility, and (ii) potentiality is always the potentiality of some concrete individual or other.
Similarly, the anencephalic individual does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality. The fact that normal human fetuses do have this potentiality is totally irrelevant. What do their individual potentialities have to do with the potentialities or lacks thereof of the anencephalic individual? It is also totally irrelevant that man is by nature a rational animal, that the capacity to reason is 'inscribed' (as a Continental philosopher might say) in his very essence. For the question is precisely whether or not this very anencephalic individual has the potentiality to manifest rationality. My answer, as you may have surmised, is No.
I think I can diagnose the neo-Scholastic error, if error it is. (I hope it is not an error, for then the Potentiality Argument is strengthened and simplified.) Take a look at (A3):
A3. The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.
This, I submit, is a complete non-starter. Whatever a natural kind is, it itself does not have the potential to be rational. It can no more be rational than humanity in general can run. (I once entered a 10 K event called 'The Human Race.' I did not compete against humanity in general, but against certain particular human critters.)
So it can't be the universal nature humanity that has the potential to be rational. What about the individual or individualized nature, the human nature of Socrates, of Plato, et al.? Could a particular individualized nature be that which has the potential to manifest rationality? No again. For it is but an ontological constituent of a concrete man such as Socrates. It is baby Socrates that has the potential to manifest rationality and excel in dialetic, not one of his ontological constituents. Socrates is more than his individual human nature; there is also the dude's matter (materia signata) to take into consideration. Our man is a hylomorphic compound, and it is this compound in which the potentiality to display rationality is grounded.
My diagnosis of neo-Scholastic error, then, is that neo-Scholastics, being Aristotelians, tend to conflate a primary substance such as Socrates with his individual(ized) nature. Since human nature in general includes the potential to be rational, it is natural to think that every individual(ized) human nature, whether normal or defective, has the potential to be rational. But surely it is not the individual(ized) human nature that has the potential to be rational, but the ontological whole of which the individual(ized) human nature is a proper part. In the case of the anencephalic fetus, this ontological whole includes defective matter that cannot support the development of rationality. Only if one confuses the individual(ized) human nature of the anencephalic individual with the concrete anencephalic individual could one suppose that it too has the potential to manifest rationality.
The fact that Lu's paragraph above is ambiguous as between (A2) and (A3) further supports my contention that there is a confusion here.
My view, then, is (A1). Abortion is a grave moral evil. The Potentiality Argument, however, does not suffice as an argument against every instance of it. This is not to say that the aborting of the anencephalic is morally acceptable. It rather suggests that the PA requires some form of supplementation.
In these politically correct times we hear much of racism, sexism, ageism, speciesism, and even heterosexism. Why not then epochism, the arbitrary denigration of entire historical epochs? Some years back, a television commentator referred to the Islamist beheading of Nicholas Berg as “medieval.” As I remarked to my wife, “That fellow is slamming an entire historical epoch.”
The names of the other epochs are free of pejorative connotations even though horrors occurred in those epochs the equal of any in the medieval period. Why then are the Middle Ages singled out for special treatment? This is no mean chunk of time. It stretches from, say, the birth of Augustine in 354 anno domini , or perhaps from the closing of the Platonic Academy in 529 A. D., to the birth of Descartes in 1596, albeit with plenty of bleed-through on either end: Greek notions reach deep into the Middle Ages, while medieval notions live on in Descartes and beyond.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) counts as an epochist. When he comes to the medieval period in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he puts on his “seven-league boots” the better to pass over this thousand year period without sullying his fine trousers. (Vol. III, 1) Summing up the “General Standpoint of the Scholastics,” he has this to say: “…this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return.” “Barren,” and “rubbishy” are other terms with which he describes it. (Vol. III, 94-95)
The politically correct may wish to consider whether the descendants of Hegel should pay reparations to the descendants of Thomas Aquinas, et al.
If Aquinas had any descendants, you’d owe them reparations for slandering his good name at the end of your post. (Then again, if he had descendants, it wouldn’t have been slander.)
I know: you mean philosophical progeny. It’s a funny question though, about reparations. I kind of like the idea of having postmodern “philosophers” having to pay a sum to (actual) philosophers for having taken so many of their jobs since the 1980s.
That's a good one, Dennis. As you may know, I don't much cotton to the notion of reparations, one of my arguments against which is here. (WARNING: at the end of the hyperlink there lies (stands?) a post so exceedingly politically incorrect that leftists and their fellow travellers are hereby issued a strong Internet travel advisory.)
Addendum B, 9/17:
The Swabian genius tells us that "Scholasticism . . . is a barbarous philosophy . . . to which we cannot return."
Judgments in the history of philosophy of the form, There will be no return to X, are parlous.
There was an amazing resurgence of scholasticism, Thomism in particular, in the 20th century, and not just in sleepy Jesuit backwaters. Toward the end of that century, mirabile dictu, mainstream analytic philosophers joined in the renascence. Surely there are more scholastic philosophers at work today than Hegelians, especially if we subtract those whose interest in Hegel is merely historical and scholarly. I'll go further. The School is alive and kicking with young hotshots; but how many proponents of The System are there?
Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected." (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction. Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is dead while Meinongianism thrives. But Ryle too will be raised if my converse-Gilsonian law of philosophical experience holds.
Etienne Gilson said, famously, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." I say, rather less famously, "Philosophy always resurrects its dead."
With the example of Ryle in mind, we should approach the following quotation from Paul Guyer with some skepticism:
Kant radically and irreversibly transformed the nature of Western thought. After he wrote, no one could ever again think of either science or morality as a matter of the passive reception of entirely external truth or reality. In reflection upon the methods of science, as well as in many particular areas of science itself, the recognition of our own input into the world we claim to know has become inescapable. In the practical sphere, few can any longer take seriously the idea that moral reasoning consists in the discovery of external norms—for instance, objective perfections in the world or the will of God—as opposed to the construction for ourselves of the most rational way to conduct our lives both severally and jointly. (Paul Guyer, "Introduction: The Starry Heavens and the Moral Law," in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 1-25, at 3)
Guyer quotation lifted from the weblog of Keith Burgess-Jackson.
Addendum C, 9/17:
A quotation from Russell that the shade of Hegel would approve of:
There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. (Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, p. 463)
I will comment on this passage and its spirit in a later entry.
Addendum D, 9/18:
D. M. adds, "Anthony Kenny had a nice quip in reply to the Russell quote. On page 2 of his edited work Aquinas, A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1969) (cited in Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 19), he says that the remark “comes oddly from a philosopher who took three hundred and sixty dense pages to offer a proof that 1 + 1 = 2.”
Thank you for reminding me of that Kenny riposte. It hits the mark.
It is certainly false to say that, in general, it is unphilosophical or special pleading or an abuse of reason to seek arguments for a proposition antecedently accepted, a proposition the continuing acceptance of which does not depend on whether or not good arguments for it can be produced. But if we are to be charitable to Lord Russell we should read his assertion as restricted to propositions, theological and otherwise, that are manifestly controversial. So restricted, Russell's asseveration cannot be easily counterexampled, which is not to say that it is obviously true.
As we speak I am working on a longish post on this very topic.
Our Czech friend Lukas Novak sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:
(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.
In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view he seems to be endorsing.
I. Novak's Scotistic View
Novak writes,
Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.
[. . .]
It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced:
[. . .]
In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.
[. . .]
And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:
[. . .]
In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (emphasis added)
II. Some Questions and Comments
As a matter of fact we do at least seem to refer to nonexistent objects and say things about them, true and false. Alexius von Meinong's celebrated goldner Berg, golden mountain, may serve as an example. The golden mountain is made of gold; it is a mountain; it does not exist; it is an object of my present thinking; it is indeterminate with respect to height; it is 'celebrated' as it were among connoisseurs of this arcana; it is Meinong's favorite example of a merely possible individual; it — the very same one I am talking about now — was discussed by Kasimir Twardowski, etc.
Now if this seeming to refer is an actual referring, if we do refer to the nonexistent in thought and overt speech, then it is possible that we do so. Esse ad posse valet illatio. But how the devil is it possible that we do so? (PR) is extremely plausible: it is difficult to understand how there could be reference to that which has no being, no esse, whatsoever.
If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy
D1. Possibilism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being.
D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceities that stand in for mere possibilia.
D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational or at least quasi-relational is to be respected and somehow accommodated. No adverbial theories!
D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided. Intentionality is real!
D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided. When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!
Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him. He can tell me if my imputation is unjust. In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands. Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?
Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge. If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite. But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God. See my substantial post on DEM objections in philosophy, here.
Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God. Then he can be put to work. Or, as my esteemed teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."
So how does it work? It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain. But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being. Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being. In themselves, they have no being at all. God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind. And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility. It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.
That is the theory, assuming I have understood it. And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata with the possible exception of (D3). But here is one concern. The theory implies that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. But that is not what I seem to be thinking about. What I seem to be thinking about has very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. An intentional object has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.
Connected with this concern is the suspicion that on Novak's theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach. He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own. So he identifies them with divine conceivings. But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski. (See article below.)
My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind. But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw. Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.
My point could be put like this. The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act. But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc. Novak's theory appears to fall into psychologism.
If I understand Duns Scotus on the divine simplicity, his view in one sentence is that the divine attributes are really identical in God but formally distinct. (Cf. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate 2005, p. 111) I can understand this if I can understand the formal distinction (distinctio formalis) and how it differs from the real distinction (distinctio realis). This will be the cynosure of my interest in this post.
There appear to be two ways of construing 'real distinction.' On the first construal, the real distinction is plainly different from the formal distinction. On a second construal, it is not so clear what the difference is. I have no worked-out view. In this entry I am merely trying to understand the difference between these two sorts of distinction and how they bear upon the divine simplicity, though I will not say anything more about the latter in this installment.
First Construal of 'Real Distinction'
On the first construal, the real distinction is to be understood in terms of separability. But 'separable' has several senses. Here are my definitions of the relevant senses. I am not trying to exposit Thomas or any scholastic. I am merely trying to get to the truth of the matter.
D1. Individuals x, y are mutually separable =df it is broadly logically possible that x exist without y, and y exist without x.
Example. The separability of my eyeglasses and my head is mutual: each can (in a number of different senses of 'can' including the broadly logical sense) exist without the other. This distinction is called real because it has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality. It is not a merely verbal distinction like that between 'eyeglasses' and 'spectacles.'
D2. Properties F, G are mutually separable =df it is broadly logically possible that F be instantiated by x without G being instantiated by x, and vice versa.
Example. Socrates is both seated and speaking. But he is possibly such as to be the one without the other, and the other without the one. He can sit without speaking, and speak without sitting. The properties of being seated and speaking, though co-instantiated by Socrates, are mutually separable. Of course, this does not imply that these properties can exist uninstantiated.
D3. Individuals x, y are unilaterally separable =df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair x, y exist without the other, but not the other without the one.
Example. A (primary) substance S and one of its accidents A. Both are individuals, unrepeatables. But while A cannot exist without S, S can exist without A. Second example. Consider a fetus prior to viability. It is not an accident of the mother, but a substance in its own right. Yet it cannot exist apart from the mother, while the mother can exist apart from it. So what we seem to have here are two individuals that are unilaterally separable.
D4. Properties F, G are unilaterally separable =df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair F, G be instantiated by x without the other being instantiated, but not the other without the one.
Example. Suppose Socrates is on his feet, running. His being on his feet and his running are unilaterally separable in that he can be on his feet wthout running, but he cannot be running without being on his feet.
D5. Items (whether individuals or properties) I, J are weakly separable =df I, J are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable.
On the first construal of 'real distinction,' it comes to this:
D6. Items (whether individuals or properties), I, J are really distinct =df I, J are weakly separable.
My impression is that when Scotists speak of the real distinction they mean something identical to or very close to my (D6). Real distinctness is weak separability. Two items, whether individuals or properties, are really distinct if and only if they are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable. According to Alan B. Wolter ("The Formal Distinction" in John Duns Scotus, 1265-1965, eds. Ryan and Bonansea, CUA Press, 1965, pp. 45-60),
In the works of Aquinas, for example, the term ['real distinction'] seems to have two basically different meanings, only one of which corresponds to the usage of Scotus, Ockham, or Suarez. For the latter, the real distinction is that which exists between individuals, be they substances or some individual accident or property. It invariably implies the possibility of separating one really distinct thing from another to the extent that one of the two at least may exist apart from the other. (p. 46)
Second Construal of 'Real Distinction'
On a Thomist view, my essence and my existence are not really distinct on the first construal of 'real distinction' because they are mutually inseparable: neither can be without the other. This strikes me as entirely reasonable. My individual essence is nothing without existence, and there are no cases of pure existence. I am not now and never have been an existence-less essence, nor a bit of essence-less existence. And yet Thomists refer to the distinction between (indvidual) essence and existence in finite concrete individuals as a real distinction. So 'real distinction' must have a second basic meaning, one that does not require that really distinct items be either mutually or unilaterally separable. What is this second basic meaning? And how does it differ from the Scotistic formal distinction?
Seeking an answer to the first question, I turn to Feser's manual where, on p. 74, we read:
But separability is not the only mark of a real distinction. Another is contrariety of the concepts under which things fall . . . . For example, being material and being immaterial obviously exclude one another, so that there must be a real distinction between a material thing and an immaterial thing. A third mark sometimes suggested is efficient causality . . . .
In this passage, Feser seems to be saying that there is one disinction called the real distinction, but that it has more than one mark. He does not appear to be maintaining that 'real distinction' has two different meanings, one that requires separability and another that does not. On the next page, however, Feser makes a distinction between a "real physical distinction" and a "real metaphysical distinction" where the former requires separability but the latter does not. He goes on to say that for Scotus and Suarez a necessary condition of any real distinction in created things is that the items distinguished be separable: "a distinction is real only when it entails separability." (75)
The Formal Distinction
I asked: "What is the second basic meaning of 'real distinction'?" The answer I glean from Feser is that the second meaning is real metaphysical distinction, a distinction that does not require separability. Now for my second question: How does this real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction? According to Cross, "the formal distinction is the kind of distinction that obtains between (inseparable) properties on the assumption that nominalism about properties is false." (108) Feser describes it as a third and intermediate kind of disinction that is neither logical nor real. (75) Both what Cross and Feser say comport well with my understanding of the formal distinction.
Consider the distinction between a man's animality and his rationality. They are clearly distinct because there are animals that are not rational, and there are rational beings that are not animals. It is also clear that the distinction is not purely logical: the distinction is not generated by our thinking or speaking, but has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality. Is it then a real distinction? Not if such a distinction entails separability. For it is not broadly logically possible that the rationality of Socrates exist without his animality, or his animality without his rationality. Anything that is both animal and rational is essentially both animal and rational. (Whereas it is not the case that anything that is both sitting and speaking is essentially both sitting and speaking.) So the Scotist, for whom the reality of a real distinction entails separability, says that what we have here is a formal distinction, a distinction between two 'formalities,' animality and rationality, that are really inseparable but formally distinct.
My second question, again, is this: How does the real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction? In both cases, the distinction is not purely logical, i.e., a mere distinctio rationis. So in both cases the distinction has a basis in reality. Further, in both cases there is no separability of the terms of the distinction. Socrates cannot be rational without being an animal, and he cannot be an animal without being rational. Similarly, he cannot exist without having an essence, and he cannot have an essence without existing.
So what is the difference between the real metaphysical distinction (that Feser distinguishes from the real physical distinction) and the formal distinction? If I understand Feser, his view is that the formal distinction collapses into the virtual distinction, which is a logical distinction, hence not a real distinction, whereas the real metaphysical distinction is a real distinction despite its not requiring separability. But what is the virtual distinction?
The Virtual Distinction
Feser tells us that a logical distinction is virtual "when it has some foundation in reality." (73) A virtual distinction is a logical distinction that is more than a merely verbal distinction. He gives the example of a man's nature which, despite its being one thing, can be viewed under two aspects, the aspect of rationality and the aspect of animality. The distinction between the two aspects is not real but virtual. The virtual distinction thus appears to be identical to the formal distinction.
Accordingly, the difference between the real metaphysical distinction and the formal distinction is that the first is real despite its not entailing separability while the second is logical despite having a foundation in reality. I hope I will be forgiven for not discerning a genuine difference between these two kinds of distinction. Feser suggests that the difference may only be a matter of emphasis, with the Thomist emphasizing the logical side of the virtual/formal distinction and the Scotist emphasizing the real side. (76)
Should we then irenically conclude that the metaphysical real distinction of the Thomists (or, to be cautious, of Feser the Thomist) is the same as the formal distinction of (some of) the Scotists?
Essence and Existence Again
I am afraid that matters are much messier. Suppose you agree that essence and existence in Socrates are neither mutually nor unilaterally separable. Suppose you also agree that Socrates is a contingent being: he exists (speaking tenselessly) but there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. The second supposition implies that Socates does not exist just by virtue of his essence: his existence does not follow from his nature. Nor is his existence identical to his essence or nature, as it is in the ontologically simple God. So they must be distinct in reality. But — and here comes trouble — this real distinction in Socrates as between his essence and his existence cannot be a distinction between inseparable aspects. Animality and rationality are inseparable aspects of Socrates' nature; but essence and existence cannot be inseparable aspects of him. If they were inseparable, then Socrates would exist by his every nature or essence. This seems to imply that the metaphysical real distinction is not the same as the formal distinction. For the metaphysical real distinction between essence and existence requires separability of essence and existence in creatures.
Aporetic Conclusion
It looks like we are in a pickle. We got to the conclusion that the real metaphysical distinction is the same as the formal distinction. But now we see that they cannot be the same. Some may not 'relish' it, but the 'pickle' can be savored as an aporetic polyad:
1. Socrates is a metaphysically contingent being.
2. Metaphysical contingency entails weak separability (as defined above) of essence and existence.
3. Nothing is such that its essence and existence are weakly separable.
The triad is logically inconsistent.
Solution by (1)-denial. One cannot of course maintain that Socrates is metaphysically necessary. But one could deny the presupposition upon which (1) rests, namely, the constituent-ontological assumption that Socrates is compounded of essence and existence. On a relation ontology, essence-existence composition makes no sense.
Solution by (2)-denial. One could try to show that contingency has an explanation that does not require weak separability of essence and existence.
Solution by (3)-denial. One could argue that the individual essence of Socrates can be wthout being exemplified along the lines of Plantinga's haecceity properties.
Each of these putative solutions brings trouble of its own.
On animalism, I am just a (live) human animal. And so are you. But there is a reason to think that I cannot be identical to my animal body. The reason is that it will survive me. (Assume that there is no natural immortality of the soul.) Assume that I die peacefully in my bed. I went to bed, but now I don't exist: what occupies my place in the bed is a (human) corpse. A dramatic change took place in the immediate vicinity of the bed. One and the same human body went from alive to dead. This suggests that dying is an accidental as opposed to a substantial change. If I understand it, this is roughly the Corpse Objection to animalism. The objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me. Me and my body have different persistence conditions.
But there is another way to look at the situation. Me and my body have the same persistence conditions. My body will not survive me. Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change. When I die, the animal body that I am ceases to exist and one or more new bodies begin to exist. (If my death is peaceful, as opposed to, say, 'Islamic,' then only one new body begins to exist.) So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist. The change is not alterational but existential. This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive. As Patrick Toner puts it:
Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive. This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts, — there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal. When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. ("Hylemorphic Animalism" in Phil Stud, 155, 2011, pp. 65-81)
An Objection
This strikes me as problematic. Suppose dying is a substantial change and that Peter and Paul die peacefully at the same instant in the same place. Peter and Paul cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2 begin to exist. Suppose C1 is Peter's corpse and C2 is Paul's corpse. What accounts metaphysically for C1's being Peter's corpse and opposed to Paul's, and vice versa? What makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's?
Why should there be a problem? Dying is a substantial change, but it is not annihilation. (At the other end, being born is a substantial change but it is not exnihilation: no animal is born ex nihilo.) Since dying is not annihilation, a corpse comes to be when Peter dies. And since the change is substantial, not accidental, the substance Peter ceases to exist and a numerically different substance, C1, begins to exist. Now every change is a change in a substratum or subject. So what is the subject of the change when Peter dies? Answer: prime matter, materia prima. This is what all the scholastic manuals tell me.
But if prime matter underlies substantial change, and provides the continuity between Peter and his corpse, then, given that prime matter is wholly indeterminate and bare of all forms, substantial and accidental, the continuity that prime matter allows does not distinguish between the change from Peter to Peter's corpse and the change from Paul to Paul's corpse. The substratum of these two changes is the same, namely, prime matter. If so, what makes Peter's corpse Peter's and Paul's corpse Paul's? That's my problem.
This problem does not arise if dying is an accidental change. For then we can say that Peter's designated matter (materia signata quantitate) which is numerically distinct from Paul's continues in existence as Peter's corpse. We have an accidental change, a change from being alive to being dead in a particular parcel of designated matter.
Toner's Reply
Patrick Toner's reply is that designated, not prime, matter accounts for the different continuities. Peter's corpse is continuous with Peter because the same designated matter is present in Peter and his corpse, but a different parcel of designated matter is present in Paul and his corpse. The fact that the matter underlying the two changes is prime, however, does not prevent the matter from also being designated. Toner in effect rejects my assumption that the substratum of a substantial change cannot be a particular parcel of designated matter.
What I had gathered from the manuals (e.g. Feser's, p. 171 et passim) was that (i) materia prima is the subject of substantial change; (ii) materia secunda is the subject of accidental change; (iii) every change is either substantial or accidental; (iv) no change is both; (v) no change is such that its subject or substrate is both materia prima and materia secunda.
But if Toner is right, I am wrong about (v).
Toner draws on Joseph Bobik's commentary on De Ente et Essentia:
When we talk about quantified matter … we are not talking about anything other than the matter which is part of the intrinsic constitution of an individual composed substance, that matter which can also be described as prime, as designated, and as nondesignated… Thus, to talk about prime matter, quantified matter, nondesignated matter, and designated matter is to talk about the same thing, but to say four different things about it, to describe it in four different ways. To speak of quantified matter, or perhaps better of matter as quantified, is to speak of what the matters of all individual composed substances have in common, namely, that in their matters which accounts for the possibility of their matter's being divided from the matters of other individual substances; it is to speak of that which makes it possible for individual composed substances to have matter in common as part of their essence. Matter as designated presupposes, and adds to, matter as quantified; and what it adds is actual circumscription so as to be just so much. To say that matter is quantified is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out, and nothing else. To say that matter is designated is to say that it is three-dimensionally spread out and circumscribed to be just so much, just so much as is in Jack or Paul or any given individual composed substance. (148, emphasis added)
Response to the Reply
The Bobik passage implies that some one thing can be described in two different ways, as designated matter and as prime matter. But then what is the one thing that can be described in these two ways? Presumably, it is a particular parcel of designated matter, the matter of precisely Peter, say, which is numerically distinct from the matter of precisely Paul. Materia signata is matter in the concrete, and prime matter would then be an abstraction from it and from every discrete parcel of designated matter.
If prime matter is but an abstraction, how can it serve as the real substratum of any such real change as is the dying of an animal? That is a real, concrete, change. If every change is a change in something, then the something must itself be real and concrete and particular. That's one problem.
A second is that if both substantial and accidental changes are changes in a concrete parcel of designated matter, then what becomes of the distinction between substantial and accidental changes? Can every change be viewed as one or the other? Is it just a matter of the same change being described in two different ways?
This requires further development and in any case it is just the beginning of the aporetics of prime matter, something to be pursued in subsequent entries.
Conclusion
Given the extreme difficulty of the notion of prime matter, a difficulty that transfers to the notion of substantial change, I don't see that the objection I raise above has yet been adequately answered.
Perhaps Patrick Toner could tell me whether whether I understand the different uses of 'matter' in Aristotelian-Scholastic (A-S) philosophy. Here are some of the distinctions as I understand and interpret them.
1. For starters, we can and do use 'matter' to refer to material particulars, a horse, a statue, a man, and indeed any hylomorphic compound, any compound of matter (in a different sense!) and form. When we speak of the material world, we mean these material things some of which are primary substances.
2. Then there is matter as individual proximate matter: what a material thing is immediately made of. Take a nice Southwest example, a quesadilla, the individual proximate matter of which is a tortilla and some melted cheese.
3. Individual nonproximate matter. The individual proximate matter of the melted cheese is some cheese. But this cheese and its material components, while individual, are not the proximate matter of the quesadilla.
4. Matter as specific proximate matter: the various kinds of space-filling stuff. Cheese and tortillas for example.
5. Matter as matter in general. This is materia prima, prime matter, absolutely indeterminate and bare of any and all forms and, as such, pure potency to any and all forms.
On this scheme, (2) and (3) are designated matter (materia signata) while (4) is undesignated matter: the matter that can be referred to in a definition. For example, if I eat a quesadilla, the matter I consume is designated matter whereas if I define 'quesadilla,' the matter entering the definition is undesignated and inedible: 'A quesadilla is a common item of Mexican cuisine consisting of a corn or flour tortilla folded over melted cheese and sometimes other ingredients in the shape of a half-moon.'
Now what about secondary matter, materia secunda? This contrasts with materia prima. 'Secondary matter' is an umbrella term covering both (2) and (3) and (4). Or that's how I understand it. Note that proximate matter is not the same as secondary matter. The proximate matter of a meat ball is the meat (assuming it is made of meat only), but protein is part of its secondary matter without being proximate matter. The concept of proximate matter is relative; the concept of secondary matter is not.
Some changes are merely accidental or alterational. Others are substantial or existential. It is one thing for Tom to gain or lose weight, quite another for him to come to be or pass away. Alterational changes including gaining weight, shifting position, and becoming depressed. Such changes are changes in a thing that already exists and remains self-same through the change. Call that thing the substratum of the change. It does not change; what changes are its properties. In a slogan: no alterational change without unchange.
But coming-to-exist and ceasing-to-exist also count as changes. Call them existential changes. This prima facie distinction at the Moorean or datanic level between alterational and existential change leaves open three theoretical options: (a) reduce existential change to alterational change; (b) reduce alterational change to existential change; (c) maintain that they are mutually irreducible. (C) is the least theoretical of the three and the closest to the data; let's see if we can uphold it.
Now it seems obvious that existential change cannot be understood in terms of alteration of the very thing that undergoes it: before a thing exists it is simply not available to suffer any alteration, and likewise when it ceases to exist. Coming-to-be is not gain of a property, but gain of a thing together with all its properties; ceasing-to-be is not loss of a property, but loss of a thing together with all its properties. But it also seems obvious that existential change cannot be understood in terms of the alteration of anything distinct from the thing that undergoes it. Thus I don't think that the following tensed definitions of Roderick Chisholm shed any real light on coming-to-be and passing away ("Coming into Being and Passing Away" in On Metaphysics, U. of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 56):
D1 x comes into being =df There is a property which is such that x has it and there is no property which is such that x had it
D2 x has just passed away =df Something that was such that x exists begins to be such that x does not exist.
Consider the second definition first. If Zeno the cat has just passed away, then the property of being triangular, my house, and me all begin to be such that Zeno does not exist. And conversely. No doubt. But surely the real change which is the ceasing to exist of a cat cannot be understood in terms of mere Cambridge alterations in Platonica or in concreta distinct from the cat. The right-hand side of (D2) cannot figure in a metaphysical explanation of the left-hand side. It is the other way around. The real change in the cat when it ceases to exist is the metaphysical ground of the Cambridge alterational change in the house. Now suppose a cat comes into being. Then of course there is some property that it has, and every property was such that the cat in question did not have it. But again, the real change that occurs when a cat comes into existence cannot be understood in terms of Cambridge alterations of properties.
So Chisholm's definitions, though true, shed no light on the metaphysics of coming-to-be and passing-away. Real existential change cannot be understood in terms of Cambridge changes.
But if Zeno's coming to be cannot be understood in terms of (D1), why can't we say that his coming to be is just the alteration of the gametes whence he sprang? Creation (exnihilation) aside, coming to be is coming to be from something that already exists. So why not say that when a substance comes to exist it comes to exist by the alteration of an already existing substance or substances?
Consider the house of the Wise Pig. It is made entirely of bricks. It came to be from those bricks. Assume that each brick is an Aristotelian primary substance. Did a new Aristotelian substance come into existence when the assiduous pig changed a pile of bricks into a house proof against the depredations of the Big Bad Wolf? Or did nothing new come into existence? It would be reasonable to hold to the latter view and maintain that all that happened was that an alterational change occurred to the bricks. Similarly when the house is disassembles. Nothing passes out of existence. You have what you started with, a loa of bricks.
It is different with cats and people. For example, when a person dies, its body is altered in various ways; but if the person ceases to exist at death, its ceasing to exist is not identical to the person's body being altered in these ways. A rational substance ceases to exist. And the same holds when a person comes into existence either at conception or some time thereafter. This coming into being cannot be identified with the alteration of such already existent material particulars as the mother's uterus and its contents. A rational substance comes to exist. Generation and corruption, to use the not entirely felicitous Aristotelian language, are at least in some cases irreducibly existential changes. Whether or not the coming to be of the Wise Pig's brick house is an addition to being, a person's coming to be is. (On the Boethian definition invoked by scholastics, a person is a primary substance of a rational nature.)
If a person's coming to be is a change, it is an existential change. It is not an alterational change in an existing substance or in existing substances. Nor do persons spring into existence ex nihilo. Persons develop from nonpersons and in such away that the nonpersons cease to exist and the person begins to exist. But if all change requires a substratum of change that remains self-same through the change, a substratum that provides continuity and ensures that the change is a change and not a replacement, what the devil is the substratum in the case of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be? The Aristotelian-scholastic answer is prime matter. Prime matter, however, though its postulation is well-motivated by a couple or three different lines of argumentation is arguably unintelligible. Prime matter is a wholly indeterminate and wholly formless really existent stuff of which all material substances are composed. It belongs wth G. Bergmann's bare particulars and Kant's Ding an sich in point of unintelligibility or so I would argue.
Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (editiones scholasticae, vol. 39, Transaction Books, 2014) provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader’s understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader’s understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.
I thank Professor Feser for sending me a complimentary copy which arrived a couple of hours ago. So far, I have read the Prolegomenon (pp. 6-30) which is mainly a critique of scientism together with a rejection of the view of philosophy as mere 'conceptual analysis.'
Scientism is the doctrine that "science alone plausibly gives us objective knowledge, and that any metaphysics worthy of consideration can only be that which is implicit in science." (10) That is exactly what it is in contemporary discussions, although, for the sake of clarity, I would have added 'natural' before both occurrences of 'science.' Also worth noting is that scientism is to naturalism as epistemology to ontology: scientism is the epistemology of the ontological view according to which (concrete) reality is exhausted by the space-time manifold and its contents as understood by physics and the natural sciences built upon it such as chemistry and biology.
I won't repeat Feser's arguments, but they are pellucid and to my mind conclusive. The usual suspects, Lawrence 'Bait and Switch' Krauss and Alexander Rosenberg, come in for a well-deserved drubbing. Ed's prose in this book is characteristically muscular, but he keeps his penchant for polemic in check.
By the way, if you want to read a truly moronic article on scientism, I recommend (if that's the word) Sean Carroll, Let's Stop Using the Word "Scientism. Carroll thinks that the word is "unhelpful because it’s ill-defined, and acts as a license for lazy thinking." Nonsense. He should read Feser or indeed any competent philosopher's discussion of the topic.
Some hold that philosophy, because it is not science, can only be conceptual analysis. Ed makes a forking good point when he observes that this view is a variation on Hume's Fork:
The claim that "all the objects of human reason or enquiry" [Hume] are or ought to be either matters of "conceptual analysis" matters of natural science is itself neither a conceptual truth nor a proposition for which you will find, or could find, the slightest evidence in natural science. It is a proposition as metaphysical as any a Scholastic would assert, differing from the latter only in being self-refuting." (26)
Reflecting on the seeming tautology, 'What exists exists,' Jacques Maritain writes,
This is no tautology, it implies an entire metaphysics. What is posited outside its causes exercises an activity, an energy which is existence itself. To exist is to maintain oneself and to be maintained outside nothingness; esse is an act, a perfection, indeed the final perfection, a splendid flower in which objects affirm themselves. (A Preface to Metaphysics, Sheed and Ward, 1939, pp. 93-94)
This is the sort of writing, florid and French, that drives analytic philosophers crazy and moves them to mockery. But I think Maritain is here expressing an important insight. Let me see if I can explain it with as little reliance as possible on Maritain's Thomistic machinery.
1. A tautology is a logical truth, a truth true in virtue of its logical form alone. Now it certainly does seem that 'What exists exists' is true in virtue of its logical form alone. Write it like this: For any x, if x exists, then x exists. By Universal Instantiation, we get if a exists, then a exists, which is of the form, if p then p, which is equivalent to p or not-p, which is the Law of Excluded Middle.
2. On the other hand, it has been clear for a long time that 'exist(s)' is no ordinary predicate. To say of an item that it exists is not to characterize it or classify it. Existence is not a classificatory concept. It doesn't partition neutral items into two classes, the existent ones and the nonexistent ones. Pace Meinong, there are no nonexistent items. And existence certainly does not partition existing items into two classes, the existing and the nonexisting. When I say of a thing that it exists I am saying that it is not nothing. I am not saying that it is F or G, but that it is. I am pointing to its sheer being or existence.
3. The same goes for 'What exists, exists.' Although it can be used to express a tautology, it can also be used non-tautologically. Used non-tautologically, it does not say that that-which-exists is that-which-exists; it says that that-which-exists exists. In other words, it does not say, tautologically, that beings are beings; it says, non-tautologically, that beings are.
4. Somewhere in The Enneads Plotinus writes, "It is by the One that all being are beings." But there would be no need to drag The One into the picture if 'all beings are beings' is a tautology. Tautologies do not need truth-makers. Plotinus' point, of course, is that it is by the One that all beings are. They are in virtue of the One; their Being derives from the One. Whether or not that it true, we understand what is being said and we understand that 'all beings are being' is not a tautology.
5. Metaphysics targets the existence of that-which-exists, the Being of beings, the esse of entia, das Sein des Seienden. Thus metaphysics presupposes a difference between existence and the existent. But existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana once observed. (Scepticism and Animal Faith, Dover, 1955, p. 48, orig. publ. 1923.) And so the logician will try to knock the wind out of the metaphysical sails by trying to accommodate the difference between existence and what exists in some such aseptic fashion as the following:
x exists =df for some y, y = x.
Accordingly, existence is identity-with-something-or-other. 'Exists' as a load-bearing predicate gets replaced by some purely logical machinery: the particular quantifer, a bound variable, the identity sign, and a free variable. Existence for the logician is a 'thin' topic. Thin to the point of being anorexic. It is just logical bones bare of metaphysical meat.
6. Well, why not be a thin theorist? I have written a lot on this topic, so now I will be very brief. While it is of course true that everything that exists is identical to something, namely, itself, this presupposes that the things in question exist in a sense that cannot be captured by the above definition. Another way of putting the point is that the above definition is circular. For it amounts to
x exists =df for some y that exists, y = x.
If I want to know what it is for something to exist, I learn nothing by being told that it is identical to something that exists, although that is of course true.
7. Getting back to Maritain, he is right as against the thin theorists: existence is a metaphysically weighty topic. 'What exists exists' can be given a non-tautological reading. But on the thin theory, it could only amount to the tautological 'What is identical to something is identical to something.' But whether existence is a perfection, or indeed the final perfection, or rather the opposite, as Santayana and Sartre would maintain, is a further question.
8. Unfortunately, no resolute thin theorist will be persuaded by anything I or anyone says to abandon his theory. All my dialectic can do is lead the reader to a point where he either gets it or he doesn't, where he either sees it, or he doesn't. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
It's a bit like arguments over religion. If you think that religion is nothing but a tissue of childish superstitions, will I ever be able to convince you otherwise? No. For it is not a matter of analytical intelligence, but of insight, or rather, in your case a lack of insight.
"To be or not to be, that is the question." Or at least that is one question. Another is whether Hamlet, that very individual, might have been actual.
It is a mistake to conflate the fictional and the merely possible. Hamlet, for example, is a fictional individual, the central character and eponym of the Shakespearean play. Being fictional, he does not actually exist. But one might be tempted to suppose that while there is no man Hamlet in actuality, there could have been, that Hamlet is a possible individual. But far from being possible, Hamlet is impossible. Or so I shall argue.
First we need to agree on some definitions.
D1. x is impossible =df x cannot exist, i.e., x is necessarily nonexistent.
D2. x is incomplete =df there is a property P such that x is indeterminate with respect to P, i.e., it is not the case that x instantiates P and it is not the case that x does not instantiate P.
The Main Argument
1. Hamlet is an incomplete object. He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name. It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't.
2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.
Therefore
3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)
Therefore
4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)
The reasoning is correct and premise (1) is surely true. If you are inclined to reject (2), claiming that it does not hold for quantum phenomena, I will simply sidestep that whole can of worms by inserting 'macroscopic' or 'mesoscopic' or some other suitable qualifier between 'an' and 'incomplete.'
Note that Hamlet is impossible even if the properties he is ascribed in the play are members of a logically consistent set. One could say, with a whiff of paradox, that Hamlet is impossible despite the fact that his properties are compossible. His impossibility follows from his incompleteness. What this shows is that not every impossible object harbors internal contradiction. So there there are at least two types of impossibilia, those whose impossibility derives from inconsistency and those whose impossibility derives from incompleteness. To be admitted to the elite corps of the actual, one must satisfy both LNC and LEM. That the impossible needn't be internally contradictory is an insight I owe to Daniel Novotny who kindly sent me a free copy of his excellent book on the scholasticism of the Baroque era entitled, Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel (Fordham 2013). I am indebted in particular to his discussion on p. 108.
Objection: "Hamlet is possible; it is just that his actualization would have to consist in his completion. Surely God could actualize Shakespeare's Hamlet (the prince, not the play) by appropriately supplementing his property set."
Reply: Suppose God were to try to actualize Hamlet, the very same individual encountered in the play. To do so, God would have to supplement Hamlet's property set, bringing it to completeness. For only that which is wholly determinate can exist in (macroscopic) actuality. But there is more than one way to effect this supplementation. For example, if the fictional Hamlet is indeterminate with respect to whether or not he takes his eggs with hot sauce, an actual Hamlet cannot be. He either eats egggs or he doesn't, and he either takes them with hot sauce or he doesn't.
Let AH1 be hot-sauce Hamlet and AH2 non-hot-sauce Hamlet. Both are complete. Let FH be the incomplete fictional individual in the play.
We may now argue as follows.
If God brings about the actuality of both AH1 and AH2, then, since they are numerically distinct, neither of them can be identical to FH. But God must actualize one or the other if FH is to become actual. If God actualizes one but not the other, then it is possible that he actualize the other but not the the one. But then the actualization of either is contingent. Thus if God actualizes FH as AH1, then, since he could just as well have actualized AH2 as FH, the identity of FH with AH1 is contingent. But identity cannot be contingent: if x = y, then necessarily x = y. Therefore, God can actualize neither and fictional Hamlet is impossibly actual, i.e., impossible.
Here is a third consideration. It seems to be part of the very sense of the phrase 'fictional individual' that such individuals be, well, fictional, that is, irreal or unreal. Now the real includes not only the actual and the necessary, but that which is really possible albeit unactual. Thus real possibilities cannot be made up by minds and so cannot be fictional. Therefore Hamlet, as a fictional being, is not a possible being.
According to Novotny, "Suarez and other Baroque scholastic authors seem to assume without question that consistent fictions, such as Hamlet, might become real beings. This implies that Hamlet is a possible being and that therefore he is a real being. [. . .] For several reasons I do not think that a consistent fiction as such is a real possible being." (108)
I agree, and the arguments above are my way of fleshing out Novotny's misgivings.
Addendum (21 November)
The original main argument above is invalid as a commenter points out. Here is
The Main Argument Repaired
0. Necessarily, for every x, if x is a fictum of a finite mind, then x is incomplete.
0*. Necessarily, Hamlet is a fictum of a finite mind, Shakespeare's. (That very fictional individual could not have been the fictum of any other mind.)
Therefore
1. Necessarily, Hamlet is an incomplete object. He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name. It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't. (from 0, 0*)
2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.
Therefore
3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)
WARNING! Scholastic hairsplitting up ahead! If you are allergic to this sort of thing, head elsewhere. My old post, On Hairsplitting, may be of interest.
My Czech colleague Lukas Novak seems to hold that there is no mode of being that is the mode of being of purely or merely intentional objects:
. . . no problem to say that a merely intentional object O has an esse intentionale; but what is this esse? There are reasons to think that it is nothing within O: for objects have intentional being in virtue of being conceived (known, etc. . . ), and cognition in general is an immanent operation, i.e., its effects remain within its subject. It would be absurd to assume that by conceiving of Obama just now (and so imparting to him an esse intentionale) I cause a change in him! So intentional being seems to be a mere extrinsic denomination from the cognitive act, a merely extrinsic property. Consequently, objects which have only intentional being, are in themselves nothing. They do not represent an item in the complete inventory of what there is. It seems to me that it is an error (yes, I believe there are philosophical errors:-)) to assume that objects must be something in themselves in order to be capable of being conceived (or referred to).
While agreeing with much of what Novak says, I think it is reasonable to maintain that merely intentional objects enjoy intentional being, esse intentionale, a mode of being all their own, despite the obvious fact that merely intentional objects are 'existentially heteronomous,' a phrase to be defined shortly. But to discuss this with any rigor we need to make some distinctions. I will be drawing upon the work of Roman Ingarden, student of Edmund Husserl and a distinguished philosopher in his own right. I will be defending what I take to be something in the vicinity of Ingarden's position.
1. An example of a purely intentional object is a table that does not exist in reality, but is created by me in imagination with all and only the properties I freely ascribe to it. In a series of mental acts (intentional experiences) I imagine a table. The table is the intentional object of the series of acts. It is one to their many, and for this reason alone distinct from them. Act is not object, and object is not act, even though they are correlated necessarily. In virtue of its intentionality, an act is necessarily an act of an object, the italicized phrase to be read as an objective genitive, and the object, being purely or merely intentional, is dependent for its existence on the act. But although the object cannot exist without the act, the object is no part of the act, kein reeller Inhalt as Husserl would say. So, given that the act is a mental or psychic reality, it does not follow that the object, even though purely intentional, is a mental or psychic reality. Indeed, it is fairly obvious that the imagined table is not a mental or psychic reality. The object, not being immanent to the act, is in a certain sense transcendent, enjoying a sort of transcendence-in-immanence, if I remember my Husserl correctly. Of course it is not transcendent in the sense of existing on its own independently of consciousness. Now consider a really existent table. It may or may not become my intentional object. If it does, it is not a purely intentional object. A purely intentional object, then, is one whose entire being is exhausted in being an object or accusative of a conscious intending. For finite minds such as ours, nothing real is such that its being is wholly exhaustible by its being an intentional object.
My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind. But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw. Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.
2. The problem posed by purely intentional objects can be framed as the problem of logically reconciling the following propositions:
A. Some mental acts are directed upon nonexistent, purely intentional, objects. B. Anti-Psychologism: These purely intentional objects typically do not exist intramentally, for the Twardowskian reasons above cited. C. These purely intentional objects do not exist extramentally, else they wouldn't be purely intentional. D. These purely intentional objects are not nothing: they have some mode of being. E. Existential Monism: everything that exists or has being exists or has being in the same way or mode.
The pentad is logically inconsistent. One solution is to reject (D): Purely intentional objects do not exist at all, or have any sort of being, but we are nonetheless able to stand in the intentional relation to them. To this Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann view I have two objections. First, what does not exist at all is nothing, hence no definite object. Second, if intentionality is a relation, then all its relata must exist. A better solution, that of Ingarden, is to reject (E).
3. Ingarden rejects Existential Monism, maintaining that there are different modes of being. (TMB, 48) Here are four modes Ingarden distinguishes:
a. Existential Autonomy. The self-existent is existentially autonomous. It "has its existential foundation in istelf." (Time and Modes of Being, p. 43)
b. Existential Heteronomy. The non-self-existent is the existentially heteronomous. Purely intentional objects are existentially heteronomous: they have their existential foundation not in themselves, but in another. Now if existential heteronomy is a mode of being, and purely intentional objects enjoy this mode of being, then it follows straightaway that purely intentional objects have being, and indeed their own heteronomous being. If Novak denies this, then this is where our disagreement is located.
c. Existential Originality. The existentially original, by its very nature, cannot be produced by anything else. If it exists, it cannot not exist. (52) It is therefore permanent and indestructible. God, if he exists, would be an example of a being that is existentially original. But matter, as conceived by dialectical materialists, would also be an example, if it exists. (79)
d. Existential Derivativeness. The existentially derivative is such that it can exist only as produced by another. The existentially derivative may be either existentially autonomous or existentially heteronomous. Thus purely intentional objects are both existentially derivative and existentially heteronomous.
4. Now let me see if I can focus my rather subtle difference from Novak. I am sure we can agree on this much: purely intentional objects are neither existentially original nor existentially autonomous. They are existentially derivative, though not in the way a divinely created substance is existentially derivative: such substances, though derivative, are autonomous. So I think we can agree that purely intentional objects are existentially heteronomous. The issue that divides us is whether they have their own, albeit heteronomous, being. Or is it rather the case that their being reduces to the being of something else? I say that purely intentional objects have a very weak mode of being, existential heteronomy, in Ingarden's jargon. Novak denies this. Novak cites his master, the doctor subtilis, Duns Scotus:
And if you are looking for some “true being” of this object as such [viz. of the object qua conceived], there is none to be found over and above that “being in a qualified sense”, except that this “being in a qualified sense” can be reduced to some “being in an unqualified sense”, which is the being of the respective intellection. But this being in an unqualified sense does not belong to that which is said to “be in a qualified sense” formally, but only terminatively or principiatively — which means that to this “true being” that “being in a qualified sense” is reduced, so that without the true being of this [intellection] there would be no “being in a qualified sense” of that [object qua conceived]. – Ord. I, dist. 36, q. un., n. 46 (ed. Vat. VI, 289)
The idea seems to be that the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, and that it therefore has no 'true being' of its own. The purely intentional object has being only in a qualified sense. This qualified being, however, reduces to the being of the intellection. I think this reduction opens Scotus and Novak up to the charge of psychologism, against which Ingarden, good student of Husserl that he was, rails on pp. 48-49 of TMB. For if the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, then the purely intentional object has mental or psychic being — which is not the case. The object is not a psychic content. It is not the act or a part of the act; not is it any other sort of psychic reality.
Psychologism is avoided, however, if purely intentional objects are granted their own mode of being, that of existential heteronomy. Although they derive their being from the the being of mental acts, their being is not the being of mental acts, but their own mode of being. Analogy: Though created substance derive their being from God, their mode of being is their own and not the same as God's mode of being.
I have been defending the real distinction between essence and existence in contingent beings. Lukas Novak, though not rejecting the distinction, finds my arguments wanting. Here is his latest challenge to me:
1) First I will use your own weapons against you. The following triad is
inconsistent, any two propositions entail the negation of the remaining one.
Which limb do you reject?
a) Necessarily, Socrates exists iff Socrates is a man. b) Possibly,
Socrates does not exist. c) Necessarily, Socrates is a man.
Yes, the triad is inconsistent. I am tempted to reject (c). Socrates is essentially a man, but not necessarily a man. In terms of possible worlds: Socrates is a man in every possible world in which he exists, but, being contingent, he does not exist in every world. So he is essentially a man but not necessarily a man. God, by contrast, is both essentially divine and necessarily divine: he is divine in every world in which he exists, and he exists in every world.
But if I reject (c), how can I claim, as I have, that while Socrates is possibly nonexistent, he is not possibly non-human? For if S. is not possibly non-human, that is equivalent to saying that he is necessarily human, which in turn is equivalent to (c).
Novak appears to have refuted my contingency argument for the real distinction.
2) When interpreting the modalities in your two sentences, one can interpret
the implicit quantifications over possible worlds as comprising either all
possible worlds, or just the possible worlds where Socrates exists at all.
Lukas is referring to the following two sentences, the first of which I claimed is true, and the second of which I claimed is false (because Socrates is essentially a man):
A. Socrates exists & Socrates is possibly such that he does not
exist.
B. Socrates is a man & Socrates is possibly such that he is not a
man.
I say that in order that (A) be true, it must be interpreted so that
"possibly" invokes quantification over all possible worlds, not just
those where Socrates exists (because there is no possible world among those in
which Socrates exists such that Socrates does not exist in that world). On the
other hand, in order that (B) be false, the quantification implicit in the
"possibly" must be restricted to those worlds only where Socrates exists.
Because it is not true that Socrates is human in worlds where he does not exist
at all. As you yourself concede, essence without existence is just nothing, so
in a world where Socrates does not have existence, he neither has his essence,
which is humanity. Thus the different modal behaviour of the sentences is merely
apparent, it is a result of your tendency to interpret the quantification
implicit in modal terms differently when speaking about existence and about
essential predicates.
Novak's very powerful objection, in effect, is that the following are both true:
A* There are possible worlds in which Socrates does not exist
B* There are possible worlds in which Socrates is not human
and that these are the same worlds. What's more, the starred sentences are the only possible readings of my (A) and (B). Since the starred sentences are both true, my contingency argument for the distinction between individual essence and existence in Socrates fails. What I had argued is that, since Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human, his existing is not identical to his being an instance of humanity.
Novak's point could also be put as follows. In every possible world in which Socrates exists, he is human, and in every world in which he is human, he exists. Hence there is no world in which he has the one property but not the other. Existing and being human are therefore necessarily equivalent, equivalent across all possible worlds. If so, it is not the case that Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human.
I grant the necessary equivalence, but deny that one can infer the identity of existing and being human from it. Necessary equivalence does not entail identity. Triangularity and trilaterality are necessarily equivalent but non-identical.
But this doesn't settle the matter. Lukas could agree that, in general, necessary equivalence does not entail identity, but still claim that I have not given a compelling reason for thinking that existing and being a concrete instance of humanity are non-identical. After all, he is not rejecting the real distinction, but arguing that I haven't proven it.
Despite the obvious force of Novak's argument, I think there is a way of construing 'Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human' that evades the argument. Here goes.
Suppose we take 'Socrates' to refer to a concrete individual essence, one that, obviously, exists. We can say, with truth, that this essence might not have existed, that its nonexistence is possible in the sense that there is nothing in this essence to insure (entail) that it exist. But it is also true that this existing individual essence, this existing instance of humanity, could not have been anything other than an instance of humanity: it could not have been an instance of any other nature, felinity, say. The Socratic essence could not have been a feline essence. Understood in this way, it seems to me true to say that Socrates (the individual Socratic essence) is possibly nonexistent but not possibly non-human. But if it is not possibly non-human, then it is necessarily human, in which case the individual Socratic essence is to be found in every possible world.
This essence must have some ontological status, and indeed a necessary ontological status. But we have to avoid reifying it. We can say that is has a merely intentional status in those worlds in which Socrates does not exist. That is, it exists only as a divine accusative in such worlds. In such worlds the essence possesses esse intentionale but not esse reale. In those worlds in which Socrates exists, the Socratic essence posseses both esse intentionale and esse reale.
We can remove the contradiction in the original triad without hypostatizing essences by ascending to a higher viewpoint: we bring God into the picture. God is a necessary being, so all the essences that enjoy esse intentionale in his mind are necessary beings. To some of them such as the Socrates essence he superadds existence. Although it is false that, necessarily, Socrates is human, it is true that, necessarily, the Socratic individual essence includes humanity.
But then it seems that the real distinction stands and falls with the doctrine of divine creation.
