Maverick Philosopher – Page 591 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

This is proving to be a fascinating topic. Let's push on a bit further.

Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence and intentional existence.

According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.

My concern over the last few days has been the exact ontological status of the CN.

This morning, with the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated earlier:

A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.

B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete singulars and mental acts.

C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of LEM) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.

D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.

(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits — to put it anachronistically — all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up with Meinongian monkey on his back.

Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.

Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):

Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.

Socrates est rationalis, quia home est rationalis, et no e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)

Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.

Now this obviously implies that the CN humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meioningian route or we say that CNs exist in the mind of God. Kenny:

Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; theitrs, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)

This may seem to solve the problem I raised. CNs are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.

The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. One ought to be forgiven for thinking that solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture. But this is a separate can of worms.

Giving Thanks for C. S. Lewis

Here. I forgot to mention yesterday that another notable Jack died on 22 November 1963. Aldous Huxley also died on this date.

Lukáš Novák on Common Natures

The following is a comment by Dr. Novak on an earlier post about Stanislav Sousedik's Thomist theory of predication. That post has scrolled off into archival oblivion, so I reproduce the comment here and add some comments in blue.

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What is, for me, most striking about Bill's troubles with Sousedík's elaboration of the Thomistic theory of predication is first, that he seems to spell out precisely the questions that I regard as the most fundamental ones in all this business, and second, that these are precisely the questions that had stirred the development of the more and more elaborate late-scholastic theories of universals (or predication, for this is one and the same problem for the scholastics). In this comment, I will try just to sketch the direction in which I think the answers can be found; perhaps to elaborate on some points later.

BV: I am encouraged by LN's judgment that I have stumbled upon the most fundamental questions despite my lack of deep familiarity with late Scholasticism.

Now the core problem of course is the problem of common natures. I am afraid that there is a slight misunderstanding about the meaning of this term, and Sousedík's choice of his term – "absolute subject" – just makes it worse. It is common to talk of a common or "absolute" nature as though it were an entity or item beside universals and individuals, indeed, "jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein". Truly it seems absurd to postulate such an entity which clearly violates the principle of excluded middle.

However, despite the manner of talk of the scholastics and of Sousedík, one must resist considering an "absolute nature" as an item or entity. There is no such entity called "absolute nature". There are particulars which exist really, and there are universals which exist intentionally. And they have something in common — the "objective content" which exists both really, as individualised and
identified with the particular(s), and intentionally, as abstracted and universalised, as a universal. This "something in common" is called the "common nature", but it is not something over and above the universal or the particular. We should not say – and we do not say, properly – that there is some "absolute nature". The nature can only be absolutely considered, that is, considered under a kind of "second order abstraction" – viz. under abstraction from the fact whether it is or is not considered under abstraction from individuality.

BV: I note that LN uses 'item' and 'entity' interchangeably. That is not the way I use the terms. For me, an entity is anything that has being or existence, anything that has esse. 'Nonexisting entity' is therefore a contradiction in terms. My use of 'item,' however, is ontologically noncommital. Accordingly, 'nonexisting item' is not a contradiction in terms. I am pleased to find that I use the term in exactly the same way that Daniel D. Novotny does in his paper, "Scholastic Debates About Beings of Reason" in Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag, 2012), p. 26. 'Item' as I use it is the most inclusive term in the philosophical lexicon. Anything to which one can refer, anything that one can single out in thought, anything that can be counted as one, whether it exists or not, is an item. Nonexistent objects, impossible objects, incomplete objects — all are items.

Now the common nature, the nature considered absolutely, i.e., considered apart from both real existence and intentional existence and from the accidents that accrue to it when it exists either really (in things) or intentionally (in the mind), is clearly not an entity, but it is an item. Or so I maintain. It is not an entity because it has neither esse naturale nor esse intentionale. Here LN and I agree. But it is an item because we have singled it out in thought and are talking about it. After all, the common nature is not nothing. It is a definite item. Take felinity considered absolutely. It is distinct from humanity considered absolutely. It is not the felinity in my cat, nor the felinity in my mind when I think about the cat. It is a selfsame item that can exist in either way, or in both ways. And is is a different selfsame item than the common nature humanity that can exist either in particular humans or in minds or both.

LN says that the common nature " is not something over and above the universal or the particular." If this means that the common nature felinity is not an entity in addition to really existing particular cats and the intentionally existing universal, then I agree. It is not an entity because it has no mode of being. But surely the selfsame felinity that is in my cat and in my mind when I think about the cat, precisely because it is common, cannot be identical to the felinity really existing in cats or the felinity intentionally existing in minds thinking about cats. So in that sense it is indeed an item (not an entity) "over and above the universals or the particular."

The intended meaning of the saying that this "absolute nature" is neither one nor many, neither real nor intentional etc. is not that there is in fact some primitive constituent item out there devoid of all these properties. That would indeed be absurd. The meaning is that the nature – which in fact is
both many [namely according to its real existence in particulars] and one [according to its intentional existence in a universal] (note that this is not a contradiction!) — this very nature does not possess any of these two modes of being and the consequent properties "of itself", that is, necessarily, i.e.
it can be consistently grasped without them or "absolutely"; and only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that. Just like a chemist can grasp water as water, that is, according to the properties that belong to water on the basis of its chemical constitution, and disregard whether it is for example cold or hot. He would say that water as water is neither hot nor cold, even neither hot nor not-hot – without thereby necessarily postulating some item called "absolute water" over and above the individual instances of water of various temperatures.

BV: What the foregoing implies, however, is that the common nature exists only in the mind of one who abstracts both from real existence and from intentional existence. The crucial phrase is, "only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that." This implies that the common nature is only as grasped by a mind. That in turn implies that common natures have esse after all — in contradiction to the theory. It also implies that common natures are universals — again in contradiction to the theory.

In this connection it is important to note that Jacques Maritain, no slouch of a Thomist, speaks of THREE esse's. (Degrees of Knowledge, p. 129, n. 115) He calls them esse naturae [sic], esse intentionale, and esse cognitum seu objectivum. The latter mode of being is the mode of being of common natures.

My cat exists outside the mind as a concrete singular. Its mode of existence is esse naturae, or esse naturale. Now my mind, in knowing the cat, does not become a cat. So the felinity in my mind when I know the thing before me as a cat cannot exist in my mind in the same way that it exists in the cat outside my mind. Rather, it exists in the mode of esse intentionale which implies that it is abstract and universal as opposed to concrete and singular. Now suppose I abstract from both of these modes of existence. So abstracting, I focus upon the common nature. About this common nature, Maritain says that it too is "abstract and universal." (Ibid.)

The fact that Maritain speaks of a third mode of esse points up the problem I am having with common natures. What Maritain says strikes as reasonable. But it contradicts what LN says is the Thomist doctrine. The official doctrine is that the common nature is neither universal nor particular. Maritain, however, quite reasonably says that the common nature is abstract and universal.

In other words: you cannot start with "absolute natures" as some elementary items and then try to build the common-sense particulars out of them. Quite the other way around: you take the familiar particulars, then you become aware that you are able to grasp them by means of universal concepts, and then you proceed to identify what the universal concept has "taken" from the particular (its
"objective content") and what not (the properties of concepts /like being universal/ as opposed to their notes). That which the universal concept has captured of the particular is the "common nature"; it is something existing as really identified to the particular (or else it could not have been abstracted
from there) – therefore it cannot, of itself, require universality. But it is also something capable of existing as identified to a universal concept; therefore it cannot, of itself, be incompatible with universality.

So, a common nature is not some elementary ontological item, a philosophical "atom"; it is an abstraction of an abstraction.

BV: LN's phrase 'objective content' is a felicitous one. The common nature is the objective content of my subjective concept of a cat, say, but it is also to be found in the cat existing in the mode of esse naturale. Now the dispute, as I see it, is about the exact status of these objective contents or common natures. I can think of three possibilities:

A. The common nature really exists.
B. The common nature does not exist, really or intentionally, but has Meinongian Aussersein status. (This seems to be Novotny's view. See p. 34 of his article cited above.)
C. The common nature exists intentionally, not really, as an object of a double abstraction.

Now both LN and I reject (A). I opt for (B). Accordingly, my thesis is that the doctrine of common natures inherits — to put it anachronistically! — all of the problems of Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein. LN seems to be opting for (C). The trouble with(C) is that it contradicts Thomist doctrine according to which the common nature is neither universal nor particular, neither one nor many, and neither really nor intentionally existent. For on (C), the common nature, as Maritain said, is "abstract and universal." It is also one not neither one nor many, and intentionally existent, not neither really nor intentionally existent.

There is more to LN's comment, but the rest will have to be addressed in a separate post or posts.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude

The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.

Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.

Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.

Even the existence of liberals is something to be grateful for. They mark out paths not to be trodden. And their foibles provide plenty of blog fodder. For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.

He Was a Friend of Mine

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 49 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. The young Bob Dylan here offers an outstanding interpretation of the old song.

I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at that moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .

By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.

Tribal America

One of my darker thoughts is that in the end tribal allegiances trump whatever people piously imagine unites us. For a time the great American experiment worked. People assimilated under the aegis of e pluribus unum. People valued liberty over material equality. But now talk of these ideals seems quaint to a growing number. Books like Dennis Prager's latest that celebrate them may have come too late. We may have passed the tipping point toward the descent into tribalism. We shall see.

Blut und Boden shouldn't matter but it does to leftists. Here is an excerpt from my The Hyphenated American (link below):

The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive. Suppose you come from Croatia. Is that something to be proud of? You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents. It wasn't your doing. It is an element of your facticity. Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe. Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.' The Left in its perversity has it backwards. They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind. They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

A Case for Voluntary Segregation

This old entry, from about a year and half ago, has gained in relevance after Obama's reelection. Here it is again re-titled and revised.

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Another fit topic of rumination on this Independence Day 2011 is the question of voluntary segregation or balkanization. Herewith, a few very preliminary remarks.

I have been inclining toward the view that voluntary segregation, in conjunction with a return to federalism, might be a way to ease tensions and prevent conflict in a country increasingly riven by deep-going differences. We need to face the fact that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues. Among these are abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, the need for fiscal responsibility in government, the legitimacy of public-sector unions, wealth redistribution, the role of the federal government in education, the purpose of government, the limits, if any, on governmental power, and numerous others.

We need also to face the fact that we will never agree on them. These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences, in a "conflict of visions," to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.

We ought also to realize that calls for civility and comity and social cohesion are pretty much empty. Comity (social harmony) in whose terms? On what common ground? Peace is always possible if one side just gives in. If conservatives all converted to leftism, or vice versa, then harmony would reign. But to think such a thing will happen is just silly, as silly as the silly hope that Obama, a leftist, could 'bring us together.' We can come together only on common ground, only under the umbrella of shared principles. And what would these be?

There is no point in papering over very real differences.

Consider religion. Is it a value or not? Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, asa good thing, as conducive to human flourishing. Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing. Some go so far as to consider it "the greatest social evil." The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true. Nor is the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible. The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others. For example, would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square? Does Bible study tend to make us better people?

The conservative will answer no and yes respectively and will feel sure that he is right. For example, as a conservative, I find it utterly absurd that there has been any fight at all over the Mojave cross, and I have utter contempt for the ACLU shysters who brought the original law suit. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent.

As for whether sincere Bible study makes us better, isn't that obvious? Will you be so bold as to maintain that someone who has taken to heart the Ten Commandments will not have been improved thereby? If you do maintain this, then you are precisely the sort of person contact with whom would be pointless or worse, precisely the sort of person right thinking people need to segregate themselves from, for the sake of peace.

The leftist will give opposite answers to the two questions with equal confidence. There is no possibility of mediation here. That is a fact that can't be blinked while mouthing the squishy, bien-pensant, feel-good rhetoric of 'coming together.' Again, on what common ground? Under the aegis of which set of shared principles? There can be no 'coming together' with those whose views one believes are pernicious. A man like A. C Grayling holds views that are not merely false, but pernicious. He of course would return the 'compliment.'

If we want peace, therefore, we need to give each other space by adopting federalism and limiting government interference in our lives, and by voluntary segregation: by simply having nothing to do with people with whom there is no point in interacting given unbridgeable differences.

Unfortunately, the Left, with its characteristic totalitarian tendency, will not allow federalism. But we still have the right of free association and voluntary segregation. At least for the time being.

No doubt there are disadvantages to segregation/balkanization. Exclusive association with the like-minded increases polarization and fosters extremism. See here. The linked piece ends with the following suggestion:

Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue we need.

Now that is the sort of preternatural idiocy one expects from the NYT. Less civic engagement! The reason there is more civic engagement and more contention is because there is more government interference! The Tea Party movement is a prime example. The solution is less government. As I have said more than once, the bigger the government the more to fight over. The solution is for government to back off, not for the citizenry to acquiesce like sheep in the curtailment of their liberties.

You may have noticed the paradox: Civic engagement is needed to get to the point where we don't need to engage civically with people we find repellent.

At the Supermarket: I Think of Hegel’s Logic

I was cruising the booze aisle in the local supermarket yesterday in search of wines for Thursday's Thanksgiving feast. I got into conversation with a friendly twenty-something dude who worked there. I said I was looking for sweet vermouth. He thought it was used to make martinis and so I explained that martinis call for dry vermouth while the sweet stuff is an ingredient in manhattans. He then enthused about some whisky he had been drinking. I asked whether it was a scotch or a bourbon. He replied, "It's whisky." I then explained that whisky is to scotch, bourbon, rye, etc. as genus to species and that one couldn't drink whisky unless one drank scotch or bourbon, or . . . . This didn't seem to register.

But it did remind me of another twenty-something dude whose comment about the church he attended prompted me to ask what Protestant denomination he belonged to. He said. "I am a Presbyterian, not a Protestant."

These two incidents then put me in mind of a story Hegel tells somewhere, perhaps it's in the Lesser Logic. A man goes to the grocer to buy fruit. The grocer shows him apples, oranges, pears, cherries . . . . Our man rejects each suggestion, insisting that he wants fruit. He learns that fruit as such is not to be had.

The Abysmally Ignorant Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne complains:

Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).

This is an amazing confession. It shows that the man is abysmally ignorant outside his specialty. He is not wondering about the distinction between de dicto and de re, but about a Philosophy 101 distinction. It would be as if a philosopher couldn't distinguish between velocity and acceleration, or mass and weight, or a scalar and a vector, or thought that a light-year was a measure of time.

Despite his ignorance of the simplest distinctions, Coyne is not bashful about spouting off on topics he knows nothing about such as free will. Lawrence Krauss is another of this scientistic crew. And Dawkins. And Hawking and Mlodinow. And . . . . Their arrogance stands in inverse relation to their ignorance. A whole generation of culturally-backward and half-educated scientists does not bode well for the future.

David Horowitz’s Latest Reviewed

David Horowitz, red-diaper baby, knows whereof he speaks when it comes to the Left. His books are essential reading for understanding the mentality of leftists. His latest, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion, is reviewed here.

I recommend all of Horowitz's books. Radical Son, though not quite at the level of Whittaker Chambers' Witness, comes close.

You haven't read Witness? Then get to it! It is a book of high literary merit that delivers crucial insights into the human predicament.

Plantinga Reviews Nagel

I am beginning to feel a little sorry for Thomas Nagel. It looks as if the only favorable mainstream reviews he will receive for his efforts in Mind and Cosmos will be from theists. What excites the theists' approbation, of course, are not Nagel's positive panpsychist and natural-teleological suggestions, which remain within the ambit of naturalism, but his assault on materialist naturalism. As Alvin Plantinga writes in his excellent review, Why Darwinist Materialism is Wrong, "I applaud his formidable attack on materialist naturalism; I am dubious about panpsychism and natural teleology." And so Nagel's predicament, at least among reviewers in the philosophical mainstream, seems to be as follows. The naturalists will reject his book utterly, both in its negative and positive parts, while the theists will embrace the critique of materialist naturalism while rejecting his panpsychism and natural-teleologism.

Plantinga's review, like ancient Gaul, est in partes tres divisa.

In the first part, Plantinga take himself to be in agreement with Nagel on four points. (1) It is extremely improbable that life could have arisen from inanimate matter by the workings of the laws of physics and chemistry alone. (2) But supposing life has arisen, then natural selection can go to work on random genetic mutations. Still, it is incredible that that all the fantastic variety of life, including human beings, should have arisen in this way. (3) Materialist naturalism cannot explain consciousness. (4) Materialist naturalism cannot explain belief, cognition, and reason.

In the second part of his review, Plantinga discusses Nagel's rejection of theism. Apart from Nagel's honestly admitted temperamental disinclination to believe in God, Plantinga rightly sees Nagel's main substantive objection to theism to reside in theism's putative offense against the unity of the world. But at this point I hand off to myself. In my post Nagel's Reason for Rejecting Theism I give a somewhat more detailed account than does Plantinga of Nagel's rejection.

In the third part of his review, Plantina expresses his doubts about panpsychism and natural teleology. I tend to agree that there could not be purposes without a purposer:

As for natural teleology: does it really make sense to suppose that the world in itself, without the presence of God, should be doing something we could sensibly call “aiming at” some states of affairs rather than others—that it has as a goal the actuality of some states of affairs as opposed to others? Here the problem isn’t just that this seems fantastic; it does not even make clear sense. A teleological explanation of a state of affairs will refer to some being that aims at this state of affairs and acts in such a way as to bring it about. But a world without God does not aim at states of affairs or anything else. How, then, can we think of this alleged natural teleology?

Plantinga ends by suggesting that if it weren't for Nagel's antipathy to religion, his philosophical good sense would lead him to theism.

My posts on Nagel's book are collected here.

Addendum (11/19): In case you missed it, Nagel reviewed Plantinga.

Bare Particulars and Lukáš Novák’s Argument Against Them

In his contribution to the book I am reviewing, Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag, 2012), Lukáš Novák mounts an Aristotelian argument against bare particulars. In this entry I will try to understand his argument. I will hereafter refer to Professor Novák as 'LN' to avoid the trouble of having to paste in the diacriticals that his Czech name requires.

As I see it, the overall structure of LN's argument is an instance of modus tollens:

1. If some particulars are bare, then all particulars are bare.
2. It is not the case that all particulars are bare.
Therefore
3. No particulars are bare.

On the Very Idea of a Bare Particular

'Bare particular' is a technical term in philosophy the provenance of which is the work of Gustav Bergmann. (D. M. Armstrong flies a similar idea under the flag 'thin particular.') Being a terminus technicus, the term does not wear its meaning on its sleeve. It does not refer to particulars that lack properties; there are none. It refers to particulars that lack natures or nontrivial essential properties. (Being self-identical is an example of a trivial essential property; being human of a nontrivial essential property.) Bare particulars differ among themselves solo numero: they are not intrinsically or essentially different, but only numerically different. Or you could say that they are barely different. Leibniz with his identitas indiscernibilium would not have approved.

The notion of a bare particular makes sense only in the context of a constituent ontology according to which ordinary particulars, 'thick particulars' in the jargon of Armstrong, have ontological constituents or metaphysical parts. Consider two qualitatively indiscernible round red spots. There are two of them and thay share all their features. What is the ontological ground of the sameness of features? The sameness of the universals 'in' each spot. What grounds the numerical difference? What makes them two and not one? Each has a different bare particular among its ontological constituents. BPs, accordingly, are individuators/differentiators. On this sort of ontological analysis an ordinary particular is a whole of ontological parts including universals and a bare particular. But of course the particulars exemplify the universals, so a tertium quid is needed, a nexus of exemplification to tie the bare particular to the universals.

The main point, however, is that there is nothing in the nature of a bare particular to dictate which universals it exemplifies: BPs don't have natures. Thus any BP is 'promiscuously combinable' with any first-order universal. On this Bergmannian ontological scheme it is not ruled out that Socrates might have been an octopus or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy. The other side of the coin is that there is no DE RE metaphysical necessity that Socrates be human. Of course, there is the DE DICTO metaphysical impossibility, grounded in the respective properties, that an octopus be human. But it is natural to want to say more, namely that it is DE RE metaphysically impossible that Socrates be an octopus. But then the problem is: how can a particular qua particular 'contradict' any property? Being an octopus 'contradicts' (is metaphysically inconsistent with) being a man. But how can a particular be such as to disallow its exemplification of some properties? (116)

Thus I agree with LN that if there are bare particulars, then there are no DE RE metaphysical necessities pertaining to ordinary particulars, and vice versa. This is why LN, an Aristotelian, needs to be able to refute the very notion of a bare particular.

LN's Argument for premise (2) in the Master Argument Above

LN draws our attention to the phenomenon of accidental change. A rock goes from being cold to being hot. Peter goes from being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras to being knowledgeable about it. These are accidental changes: one and the same particular has different properties at different times. Now a necessary condition of accidental change is that one and the same subject have different properties at different times. But is it a sufficent condition? Suppose Peter is F at time t and not F at time t* (t* later than t). Suppose that F-ness is a universal. It follows that Peter goes from exemplifying the universal F-ness at t to not exemplifying it at t*. That is: he stands in the exemplification relation to F-ness at t, but ceases so to stand to t*. But there has to be more to the change than this. For, as LN points out, the change is in Peter. It is intrinsic to him and cannot consist merely in a change in a relation to a universal. Thus it seems to LN that, even if there are universals and particulars, we need another category of entity to account for accidental change, a category that that I will call that of property-exemplifications. Thus Peter's being cold at t is a property-exemplification and so is Peter's not being cold at t*. Peter's change in respect of temperature involves Peter as the diachronically persisting substratum of the change, the universal coldness, and two property-exemplifications, Peter's being cold at t and Peter's being not cold at t*.

These property-exemplifications, however, are particulars, not universals even though each has a universal as a constituent. This is a special case of what Armstrong calls the Victory of Particularity: the result of a particular exemplifying a universal is a particular. Moreover, these items have natures or essences: it is essential to Peter's being cold that it have coldness as a constituent. (This is analogous to mereological essentialism.) Hence property- exemplifications are particulars, but not bare particulars. Therefore, (2) is true: It is not the case that all particulars are bare.

I find LN's argument for (2) persuasive. The argument in outline:

4. There are property-exemplifications
5. Property-exemplifications are particulars
6. Property-exemplifications have natures
7. Whatever has a nature is not bare
Therefore
2. It is not the case that all particulars are bare.

Premise (1) in the Master Argument

LN has shown that not all particulars are bare. But why should we think that (1) is true, that if some particulars are bare, then all are? It could be that simple particulars are bare while complex particulars, such as property-exemplifications, are not bare. If that is so, then showing that no complex particular is bare would not amount to showing that no particular is bare.

The Master Argument, then, though valid, is not sound, or at at least it is not obviously sound: we have been given no good reason to accept (1).

Property-exemplifications, Tropes, and Accidents

But in all fairness to LN I should point out that he speaks of tropes and accidents, not of property-exemplifications. I used the latter expression because 'trope' strikes me as out of place. Tropes are simples. Peter's being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras at t, however, is a complex, and LN says as much on p. 117 top. So the entity designated by the italicized phrase is not a trope, strictly speaking. 'Trope' is a terminus technicus whose meaning in this ontological context was first given to it by Donald C. Williams.

Well, is the designatum of the italicized phrase an accident? Can an accident of a substance have that very subtance as one of its ontological constituents? I should think not. But Peter's being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras at t has Peter as one of its constituents. So I should think that it is not an accident of Peter.

I conclude that either I am failing to understand LN's argument or that he has been insufficiently clear in expounding it.

A Final Quibble

LN suggests that the intuitions behind the theory of bare particulars are rooted in Frege's mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive distinction between concepts and objects. "Once this distinction has been made, it is very hard to see how there might be a genuine case of logical de re necessity." (115) The sentence quoted is true, but as I said above, the notion of a bare particular makes no sense except in the context of a constituent ontology. Frege's, however, is not a constituent ontology like Bergmann's but what Bergmann calls a function ontology. (See G. Bergmann, Realism, p. 7. Wolterstorff's constituent versus relation ontology distinction is already in Bergmann as the distinct between complex and function ontologies.) So I deny that part of the motivation for the positing of bare particulars is an antecedent acceptance of Frege's concept-object distinction. I agree that if one accepts that distinction, then logical or rather metaphyscal de re necessity goes by the boards. But the Fregean distinction is not part of the motivation or argumentation for bare particulars.

Just what considerations motivate the positing of bare particulars would be a good topic for a separate post.

Bill O’Reilly’s Abortion Mistake

The other night Bill O'Reilly said that a fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A fetus is an actual human life.

Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let's be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.

The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition. You need to find a morally relevant difference — not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference — between the fetus and any born human individual.

Bill O'Reilly is not the brightest bulb on the marquee. And like too many conservatives, he has an anti-intellectual tendency. If I ran these simple ideas past him, he night well dismiss them with his standard Joe Sixpack "That's just theory" line. And that's unfortunate. Still, it's good to have this pugnacious Irishman on our side.

Companion post: Why are Conservatives Inarticulate?

Addendum 11/17: Alex L. writes,

Could you add an addendum to your post on Bill O'Reilly explaining why you think a fetus is a human being? To me that sounds odd — like saying that a tadpole is a frog. What makes a fetus so different from a tadpole or an acorn, that whereas an acorn is not an oak and a tadpole is not a frog, a fetus is a human?

Well, a tadpole is a frog, it is the larval stage of a frog. Of course, a tadpole is not an adult frog, but it is a frog. Morphologically, a tadpole is very different from an adult frog. It has gills not lungs, a tail not feet, etc. But there is more to it than morphology. Biologically, a tadpole is a frog.

We should also note that human beings, unlike frogs and butterflies, don't have a larval stage.

An acorn is not an oak tree. But a tadpole is a frog, and a fetus is a human being. So your last sentence is just wrong.