Marenbon on 'Aquinas's Principle' (Repost)

This is a repost from October 2007.

In a discussion in his newer introduction to medieval philosophy text, John Marenbon considers the following principle in Aquinas, which he calls 'Aquinas's Principle':

If the antecedent of a conditional contains a cognitive proposition, the consequent should be understood according to the mode of the knower, and not that of the thing known.

The illustration is the conditional,

If I understand something, it is immaterial.

This, if 'Aquinas's Principle' is used, should be understood as:

If understand something, it is immaterial according to its being understood.

To this Marenbon replies that there are plenty of conditionals with cognitive antecedents to which Aquinas's Principle does not apply. His example:

If I feel something with my touch, it is a material thing.

Of which he says, "The consequent...does not need to be qualified by a phrase such as 'according to its being touched'. It is simply true that anything I can touch must be material."

Whatever may be said of 'Aquinas's Principle', Marenbon's counterexample seems to me to be badly chosen. For while it may be simply true that anything I can touch must be material, it does not follow that anything I touch must be simply material. The natural way to understand Marenbon's conditional is to understand it as meaning,

If I feel something with my touch, it is a material thing insofar as it is touched.

For instance, there are plenty of entities that can be touched but are not simply material; for example, a university, which is material to the extent that you can touch it, but is not insofar as it is (for instance) a legal corporation. And the qualification could still be added, without significant change of meaning, for purely material things -- it's just that there would be very little point in doing so. The fact that we don't need it for practical purposes isn't an adequate reason for rejecting 'Aquinas's Principle'.

In any case, I don't see any reason to hold that Aquinas held 'Aquinas's Principle' in an unqualified way; it seems to me that Marenbon takes Aquinas's words out of context and interprets them out of that context. The natural way to read Aquinas's statement in context is to take him as saying that when the antecedent clarifies that the existence in question is existence in the soul rather than in itself, we must not then take the consequent as saying anything about existence in itself. The principle that is really doing work here is not the claim about conditionals, however, but the claim that "the existence of a thing in itself is different from the existence of a thing in the soul."

***
John Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy Routledge (New York: 2007) 253-254.

A Tumultuous Privacy of Storm

Friday there was a great big fuss about the snow we were supposed to get here in Austin; people were in a fit of anticipation over the fact that there was supposed to be an inch of it -- which is rather funny, but snow is a very occasional thing here. As it happened, we did get snow: there were a few snowflakes drifting down for about ten to twenty minutes, and that was all.

The Snow-Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Aquinas on Poetics

Sometimes we are moved towards one part of a contradiction by nothing more than a kind of regard or esteem resulting from the way something represented. This is analogous to the way in which a particular food appears disgusting when it is represented in the image of something disgusting. The art of poetry is ordered to this. For the poet's vocation is to guide us towards what is virtuous by representing it as attractive.

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Berquist, tr., Dumb Ox (Notre Dame: 2007), p. 3. What Aquinas means by 'some part of a contradiction' here is one of two mutually exclusive alternatives; and 'art of poetry' would be better translated more literally as 'poetics', which in medieval Aristotelianism (both Muslim and Christian) is one of the departments of logic (due to the fact that Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics were interpreted as dealing with special kinds of inference or reasoning). 'Vocation' is not in the original. The Latin is:

Quandoque vero sola existimatio declinat in aliquam partem contradictionis propter aliquam repraesentationem, ad modum quo fit homini abominatio alicuius cibi, si repraesentetur ei sub similitudine alicuius abominabilis. Et ad hoc ordinatur poetica; nam poetae est inducere ad aliquod virtuosum per aliquam decentem repraesentationem.

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Students and the First Way

I have been grading take-home quizzes on the history of philosophy for my intro course. One of the questions was "In Thomas Aquinas's First Way, what do you think is the weakest premise (the one that would require the most work to defend), and why?" The point of it was primarily to see if they had learned what 'the First Way' meant, but having phrased it in this roundabout way this time around, I think I got more interesting answers than I have previously (which asked for a summary of it). To some extent the answers aren't wholly surprising, and no great weight can be put on them, given that students only had had one class on the argument, which was primarily geared to simply providing a tour of the medieval scholastic approach to philosophy, and inovlved only a very light summarizing of the background for the argument. So you get some standard confusions and incoherent arguments. But, of course, that's about the level at which most people approach it, so it provided an interesting sample of the range of immediate responses people might have. That's certainly useful. (And I have to say that in some cases my students make more perceptive responses on the basis of one class than I've sometimes heard from professional philosophers; a sign, I think, of the occasional laziness of the latter.) Here are the answers from the quizzes that were turned in on time which had answers for this particular question. I have paraphrased and abbreviated pretty much all of them.


* "This cannot go on to infinity because there would be no first mover." This is begging the question; for all we know, it can go on to infinity.

* "This everyone understands to be God." Aquinas would need to be able to prove the existence of God for this to be true. The belief that God exists is not evidence that God exists.

* The idea that it is impossible for a thing to be both mover and moved, because the argument over the first mover or cause, as God, does not admit of proof.

* "Whatever is moved must be moved by another." We move and we are moved by our own will. Plenty of things move themselves.

* "This everyone understands to be God." Not everyone believes in God, and some people don't believe God is a mover.

* That the motion of the whole world and each motion within it is caused by the motion of the heavens, because he believed in geocentrism. [This may seem to come a bit out of nowhere, but it's not really the student's fault. The nice thing about take-home quizzes is that students can cite the sources they get their information from, and there was a source here.]

* The idea that an infinite number of movers is impossible. The law of conservation of energy states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it is possible for there to be an infinite number of movers.

* That nothing can be in actuality and potentiality at the same time. Something can be on fire and still have the potential to burn.

* That there must be a first mover. It seems strange to me that God just came to be, and that there was nothing that set him in motion.

* The one that attributes first motion to God. If everything that happens has to have a first cause, why does the first cause have to be God? If God is the cause of everything and everything requires a cause, what is God's cause?

Links for Thinking

* Michaël de Verteuil on Michael Cerularius

* Peter Gilbert on John Bekkos (PDF)

* Jonathan Jarrett on Saint Ermengol and medieval simony

* Cantoni and Yuchtman, Medieval Universities, Legal Institutions, and the Commercial Revolution (PDF)

Cantoni, The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation (PDF) -- I don't think this tests the Weberian hypothesis very directly at all, but it's interesting nonetheless

Acemoglu, Cantoni, Johnson, Robinson, From Ancien Régime to Capitalism (PDF)

* "Eating the Road" makes eating out easier by providing a handy flowchart. There are many delightful bits to it. (ht)

* Layman discusses Alexander and Rufus, sons of Simon of Cyrene

* An article about the years we had two Thanksgivings. Texas's reason for celebrating both was very, very Texan.

* The hundredth Philosophers' Carnival

* The 56th Carnivalesque (early modern edition)

Two Poem Drafts

Silent Stars

When you are lost in shadow and your heart is all alone
and you wander in these mazes made of cold, unyielding stone,
when death is on your doorstep, you still may see a ray
from silent stars still shining all along the Milky Way.

When cities fall and languish and the world is in despair
and truth is crowded out by all the lies that fill the air,
then let your heart take courage; you yet may find a way
under silent stars still shining all along the Milky Way.

Silent stars are shining in the endless void of night;
silent stars are shining with a quiet, constant light.
In every night of trouble, every darkness at midday,
still silent stars are shining all along the Milky Way.

Flame Upon the Sky

Flame upon the sky! Bright dawn arose, and rosy were her fingers;
although she is now gone, yet her form and presence linger
in the pools of memory, those reflections that lag and wait
so that, although the light has passed, they still will seek to sate
their thirst with forms that haunt the mind like wraiths, ghosts, shades,
reverberations of a dawn that thus can never wholly fade.
Fire in the heavens! It seems both lasting hope and looming doom,
hope in beating back the grasping of the nightly bitter gloom,
but doom, as in the judgment when before the flawless throne
we all will come to sentence, and each will stand alone.
And perhaps, through some great irony, God has made them one
and made a symbol of them both in this rising of the sun.