Continuing on with the previous posts on the Aristotelian category of habitus/echein, I was curious about what John of St. Thomas (a.k.a., John Poinsot) -- also from the seventeenth century, although unlike Sanderson in the thick of the final scholastic flowering of the Baroque period -- says on the subject. John's interpretation of the category is heavily influenced by the Summa totius logicae Aristotelis (Opusculum 48); it is regarded as spurious today, and was often thought to be such in the seventeenth century, with, however, John of St. Thomas as one of its major defenders. From his Cursus Philosophicus:
About the category of habitus. Its definition is: "what is the adjacency of bodies and those things which are about the body." For just as a thing is rendered located by its adjacent and surrounding place, and by its subjection to time, so from the vestment around it, it is said to be clothed. Hence that is false that some say: habitus is a certain mode which is in the human body, by which it is rendered apt to be vested, which does not apply to other bodies. However, this does not render a man vested, but capable of being vested rather than merely nude. But it is clear that the category of habitus takes away nudity, since it renders him vested: therefore it does not consist in that mode, which is compatible with actual nudity. On account of which habitus is drawn out of the adjacency of clothing, just as where is from place. Nor does it prevent vestment from being a substance in itself. For since its application is accidental, it makes an accidental denomination and an accidental category, just as a vessel is said to be golden or wooden denominatively; but it is not a pure extrinsic denomination, but is drawn from an adjacency in man, as where is drawn from place.
And so it is said by St. Thomas “habitus is a medium between clothing and having-clothing”, v Met., lect. xx, and 1-11, qest. XLIX, art. 1. Whence it comes that animals, even if they are covered with hair or are armed with claws, are not from them denominated as vested, because they are parts of the body. But if they are surrounded by some clothing, as a horse harnessed or armed, they are denominated by this category, as man by vestment.
The properties of these [last six] categories can easily be seen in St. Thomas’s Opusc. XLVIII, treating of each. Almost all of them are not susceptible of more and less, and do not have a contrary, save for action and passion, which have both. Habitus is also said to be susceptible of more and less not according to intensity or remission, but according to many or fewer clothings, as St. Thomas says, cited Opuscul., treatise on habit, chap. 3. However, it does not have a contrary, because it does not have intension and remission.
(My rough translation. John of St. Thomas uses two different words for clothed here, indutum and vestitum; they are used as synonyms, but I have used 'clothed' for indutum and its cognates and 'vested' for vestitum and its cognates, just to mark them in the translation.) While very briefly stated, I take it that John is here arguing for the idea that habitus is a real mode or aspect of a human being in such a way that becoming clothed changes the one who is clothed (they are no longer nude), which is due to the adjacency/adjoining.
And a little later, talking about the 'coordination' of the category (the coordination of a category, which is, I think, a term that comes from Suarez, is the system of genera under it), Poinsot says:
Habitus, which is a supreme genus, is divided by St. Thomas, Opusc. XLVIII, into arms and vestments, Arms, into offensive and defensive, each of which has various species. Vestments, into the vestment of men and of beasts, as horses are adorned with saddle, bridle, arms, etc. Vestments, into various modes of clothing according to diverse adjacencies, such as a tunic, shoe, hat, etc., which species are not taken from the material or art by which the vestments are made, but from the diverse way in which they are vested and covered. Also reduced to this category are wall ornaments, which are not properly vestments.
John of St. Thomas diverges slightly from St. Thomas's actual view as found in the Commentary on the Physics III, lect. 5, n. 14 (322); while St. Thomas does think that vestments for beasts are reduced to this category, he seems to be implying that it is not in a strict and proper sense but insofar as they 'are brought to human use' (in hominis usum veniunt). That is, in a much later vocabulary, the vestments of beasts are vestments not 'naturally' but 'morally', i.e., by human will (in something like the way, perhaps, that corporations are legal persons and so considered on the model of substances). The category is explicitly stated to be a special category for human beings. Op. 48, which is John's major influence here, says something similar, but perhaps more ambiguously:
Hence this category is only appropriate to humans. But it is true that we also vest and arm certain animals with external vestments and arms, for we vest apes and harness horses; and in this mode the category is able to pertain to them.
One way this could be read, however, is as saying that vestment applied to apes and horses is due to human beings but is nonetheless vestment in the proper sense. Given how Poinsot describes the coordination of the category, he has to be taking it to mean this when he cites it: vestments of beasts are a species of vestment and not, as seems to be the case with Aquinas in the Physics, an extended sense arising from how we use animals.
Mark K. Spencer has a very nice article on this, The Category of Habitus: Artifacts, Accidents, and Human Nature, which situates John's view in the context of the different scholastic views on how to understand the category. (I am personally inclined to think, however, that Spencer's own account of habitus, drawing from Poinsot and Joseph Owens, is both too narrow and too wide, although interestingly for the same reason: it ties the category too tightly to human use, and therefore also includes too many things that fall under human use. It's the old proper/extended problem, a serious problem in working out this category, because, again, we use this category as a model for all sorts of other things, thus leading to a huge number of metaphorical uses. Because of this, it's difficult to draw the line appropriately between proper and extended uses.)
