From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical Essays in Philosophy

From Empedocles to Wittgenstein

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From Empedocles to Wittgenstein Historical Essays in Philosophy

Anthony Kenny

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Sir Anthony Kenny 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–955082–1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface Many years ago I had ambitions to make an original contribution to philosophy, in particular to the philosophy of human action. I hoped definitively to resolve the questions concerning free will and determinism and I planned, after due diligence, to formalize the logic of practical reasoning. With these goals in mind I published two volumes: Action, Emotion and Will (1963) and Will, Freedom and Power (1975). There was to have been a third volume, Power, Tendency and Action. But somehow the trilogy was never completed, and the grand projects never accomplished. During my academic career I have been lucky to have known many of the finest philosophers of the last half-century: Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, Elizabeth Anscombe, Van Quine, Donald Davison, and several others. This was a great privilege, but it had its downside. I soon realized that all of these had much finer minds than mine, and I could not hope to compete with them as an original philosopher. I decided that the best use of my talents was to become a historian of philosophy and to do my best to help others to reach up to the great minds of the past. Accordingly, instead of publishing further philosophical monographs I began to write studies of earlier thinkers. Some of these were brief popular introductions, such as pamphlets on Aquinas, Wyclif, and Thomas More in the Past Masters series. Others were targeted at undergraduate audiences, such as a Random House textbook on Descartes and Penguin volumes on Frege and Wittgenstein. Others aimed to be original contributions to scholarship, including three volumes on Aristotle and two on Aquinas. I found that I enjoyed working on long-dead philosophers much more than keeping up with the current philosophical periodicals. In 2001 when I retired from a university career I was asked by Oxford University Press to write a four-volume history of

vi preface western philosophy from Thales to Derrida. Each volume was to be 125,000 words long and one volume was to be delivered in each year from 2003 to 2006. The OUP contract gave me a wonderful opportunity, over a period of five years, to map out for myself and others the intellectual history of 2,500 years. The volumes were duly submitted and were published between 2004 and 2007. The task had been a daunting one. During the latter half of the twentieth century two one-man histories of philosophy had dominated the field. One was Bertrand Russell’s one-volume Brief History; the other was the ten-volume history by the Jesuit Father Copleston. Each had its virtues and vices: Russell’s was brilliant but historically unreliable; Copleston’s was impeccably judicious, but uniformly pedestrian. Ideally, a historian of philosophy should be able to read like Copleston and write like Russell. Sadly, I could do neither: I could not match the exhaustive scholarship of Copleston, nor could I imitate the incomparable style of Russell, which won him the Nobel Prize for literature. I settled on a modest goal: to be more accurate than Russell and more entertaining than Copleston. I am sometimes asked what I learnt from these five years of historical research. At the top level, my judgement of the very greatest philosophers has not changed since I started writing. Now, as then, I would list as my six greats Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and Wittgenstein. However, at a lower level, my opinion of certain philosophers was significantly altered. There were some philosophers whom I had not previously admired whom I came to appreciate greatly—to mention only four, Plotinus, Abelard, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger. I have also been asked whether any great philosopher went down in my estimation as I got to know him better. The serious answer is no, though I came to realize that some of the things that I and others had thought were original in Descartes were in fact commonplaces of late medieval philosophy. But that did not alter my opinion that he was one of the greatest philosophers: he gave to the world at large what had been the preserve of a scholastic elite.

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Having completed the four volumes I continue to think, as I did when I started on the first one devoted to ancient philosophy, that Plato and Aristotle are the greatest philosophers there have ever been. However, I puzzled for a long time over which of them was the greater. I now think I have the solution to the question. Plato was the greater of the two as a philosopher—indeed the greatest philosopher ever—because he really invented the subject out of whole cloth. His dialogues are still among the finest introductions to the subject because he wrote in ordinary language before any technical philosophical terms had been invented. And he had no real predecessors in what we now think of as philosophy, though before him there had been inspirational gurus like Heraclitus and madmen of genius like Parmenides. But if Plato is the greatest philosopher, Aristotle is the greatest all-round genius. He did not invent philosophy, he invented science. It was not just that he was a great pioneer in biology, zoology, psychology, and other sciences: he was the originator of the whole idea of a scientific discipline. If we think of science as a cooperative empirical investigation conducted in research institutes provided with a library, and passed on to later generations through a curriculum of courses, then we are thinking of something that first happened in Aristotle’s circle. In writing the volumes of my history, I had a twofold readership in mind. Some readers are interested in the history of philosophy principally because of the light it sheds on the people and societies of the past. Other readers study the great dead philosophers in order to seek illumination on themes of current philosophical interest. To cater for the first I offered in the earlier chapters of each volume a chronological survey of the thinkers of its period. To cater for the second I offered thematic chapters showing in what way the period in question had contributed to the discussion of particular philosophical topics of abiding importance. In both the chronological and the thematic chapters I had in mind an audience of second- or third-year undergraduates. But in the course of writing I frequently had to take up positions

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on controversial issues of historical philosophy, which could only be justified to a scholarly audience by much ampler discussion. From time to time an invitation to lecture, or to contribute to a Festschrift, gave me an opportunity to present a fuller justification of some of my conclusions. It is these essays, on the margin of the global history, that form the substance of the present volume. In the main they are concerned with four of my six favourite thinkers, namely Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein. The first essay began life as a response to Professor Sarah Broadie’s presentation on Plato’s Intelligible World at the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society in 2004; it was published in that year in vol. 78 of PASS. The second essay, not hitherto published, was a contribution to a symposium on Empedocles on the island of Mykonos, organized by Dr Apostolos Pierris. The next two chapters are substantially revised versions of responses to Prof. T. Irwin and Prof. John Cooper at a 2002 symposium on ancient philosophy held at University College London whose proceedings were published as Plato and Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Robert Heinaman (Ashgate, 2003). ‘Practical Truth in Aristotle’ is a contribution to a forthcoming Festschrift for Jonathan Barnes. The chapter on the reception of Aristotle’s Categories by the Latin Fathers was written for a colloquium in Geneva in 2002; it has been published only in French, in Les Cat´egories et leur histoire, ed. O. Bruun and L. Corti (Vrin, 2005). Of the four chapters on Aquinas, the first, which has not been published, was delivered to a meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York in 2003. The second and third are revisions of papers presented at the 2005 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in Denison, Ohio, at which I was presented with the Aquinas medal; both have been published, in their original form, in the 2007 proceedings of the Association. The fourth draws on review articles written for the Times Literary Supplement. Two of the chapters on Wittgenstein were delivered to conferences whose proceedings have now been published: ‘Philosophy

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states only what everyone admits’, in E. Ammereller and E. Fischer (eds.), Wittgenstein at Work (Routledge, 2004); ‘The Wittgenstein Editions’, in A. Pichler and S. Saatela (eds.), Wittgenstein, the Philosopher and his Works (University of Bergen, 2005). The third chapter, ‘Cognitive Scientism’, is a contribution to a forthcoming Festschrift for Peter Hacker. Most of the essays reprinted here were delivered to and published for audiences of professional scholars. The final two, however, were from the outset intended for a wider public. ‘Knowledge, Belief and Faith’ was the annual lecture of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 2007, and has been published in Philosophy, 82: 381–97. ‘The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Belief’ was the tenth annual Athenaeum lecture and has been published by the Athenaeum as a separate item. The bibliography simply details modern works quoted in the text of the essays. It does not include ancient, medieval, and classic works that have gone through many editions and which have their own standard method of citation. I am grateful for permissions to reprint these papers and I have a special debt to Peter Momtchiloff, Robert Heinaman, Ben Morison, Michael Baur, Rupert Shortt, John Hyman, Ted Honderich, Edwin Pritchard and Nadiah Al-Ammar.

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Contents Abbreviations 1. Seven Concepts of Creation

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2. Life after Etna: Empedocles in Prose and Poetry

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3. Virtue and the Good in Plato and Aristotle

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4. Aristotle’s Criteria for Happiness

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5. Practical Truth in Aristotle

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6. Aristotle’s Categories in the Latin Fathers

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7. Essence and Existence: Aquinas and Islamic Philosophy

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8. Aquinas on the Beginning of Individual Human Life

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9. Thomas and Thomism

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10. Aquinas in America

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11. ‘Philosophy states only what everyone admits’

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12. Cognitive Scientism

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13. The Wittgenstein Editions

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14. Knowledge, Belief, and Faith

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15. The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Belief

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Bibliography Index

213 215

List of Abbreviations BB CQ CSM DK DL EE GD HMSO LW MM NE OC PASS PG PI PL RPP ScG ST TMOC TMOT Z

Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books The Classical Quarterly Descartes’s works, trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Weidmann, 1951) Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers (Loeb, 1972) Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics Dawkins, The God Delusion Her Majesty’s Stationery Office Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Aristotle, Magna Moralia Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Wittgenstein, On Certainty Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Patrologia Latina Wittgenstein, Remarks on Philosophical Psychology Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Theism Wittgenstein, Zettel

1 Seven Concepts of Creation In Plato’s account of creation in the Timaeus a number of features can be singled out as significant. (1) The cosmos—the ordered universe in which we live—is to be accounted for as a whole. (2) The cosmos is supremely beautiful and good. (3) The cause of the cosmos is non-physical, intelligent, good, and divine, i.e. God. (4) God worked on pre-existent matter. (5) God was copying an eternal paradigm. Professor Broadie, who identifies these features in her article ‘Plato’s Intelligible World’ (PASS 78 (2004), 6–79) offers two further theses, which are more controversial. One concerns proposition (4) and the other concerns proposition (5). The first thesis is this. It is important for Plato, Broadie maintains, that the Demiurge should work on pre-existent matter. Otherwise there would not be a sufficient distinction in creation between the cause and the product. In the biblical account of creation there is a sharp distinction between the creator and the created because the creator is divine and the creature is not. But for Plato ‘the empirical cosmos, even though a made thing and a perceptible one, is literally itself a god, an appellation it shares with the god who made it from matter’. Pre-existent matter is therefore an essential part of the narrative if creation is not to collapse into some kind of pantheism, in which ‘either the cause-entity has evolved into what we were calling the product ... or the cause-entity constitutes the product’.

2 seven concepts of creation The second thesis is about the eternal paradigms to which the Demiurge ‘looks’. Broadie offers two different interpretations of their nature. On one interpretation, the paradigms are samples. A human being, asked to produce a shuttle, might look at an existing shuttle and do his best to copy it. In such a case, the paradigm is a sample of a shuttle; and it is itself a perfectly good shuttle with a life of its own. On the other hand, the shuttle maker might start from first principles, work out what a shuttle is, and how best it can perform its function, and thus design it from scratch. Here there is no pre-existing sample, only the working out of an answer to a question. Broadie suggests that Plato wants us to think of the Demiurge’s paradigms in the second of these ways. ‘The eternal paradigm (on that interpretation) is the right answer to a ‘‘What is ... ?’’ question. I should therefore be happy to call it a quiddity.’ Thinking of paradigms as quiddities rather than samples, Broadie concludes, saves us from having to take on an overpopulated neo-Platonic world of hyperreal intelligibles. Broadie is well aware that there are a number of passages in Plato to which a neo-Platonist could appeal in order to defend the idea that the paradigms of the Timaeus are not just quiddities but actual samples. In this chapter, however, I do not wish to explore that avenue; rather I wish to make a comparison between the Platonic account in the Timaeus and the biblical concept of creation. I will also explore the way in which that concept was developed and modified by Christian philosophers in the medieval and early modern period. The book of Genesis contains not one but two accounts of creation. The one which comes later in our texts (beginning at verse 5 of chapter 2) is commonly regarded as more primitive, the work of the Yahwist contributor to the pentateuch. The account may well be earlier than the Timaeus. It begins thus: At the time when Yahweh God made earth and heaven there was as yet no wild bush on the earth nor had any wild plant yet sprung up, for Yahweh God had not sent rain on the earth, nor was there any man to till the soil. However, a flood was rising from the earth and watering all

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the surface of the soil. Yahweh God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being.

There follows the story of the making of Eden, the four rivers, the creation of animals, and the creation of woman from the rib of the sleeping Adam. Here it is not clear whether the existence of the dry dusty earth precedes the activity of God; the text can be read either way. The rising flood seems a phenomenon independent of God’s activity. With regard to the creation of man, God seems to be given a Pygmalion-like role. Rather than being guided by an eternal paradigm, God seems to act in an experimental way. He tries out the various animals to see whether they are fit companions for Adam, and finds that nothing less than Eve will fit the bill. The other account of creation, in the first chapter of Genesis, is usually attributed to a late, priestly, author. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water. God said ‘let there be light’ and there was light. God saw that light was good.

There follows the creation, day by day, of heaven, earth, sea, plants, sun and moon, birds, fish, land animals, and finally humans. In this narrative God is presented as a clearly transcendent being who creates merely by uttering commands. The opening words ‘In the beginning’ were seized on by exegetes to show that the world had not existed for ever, but had—like the cosmos of the Timaeus—been brought into existence at a point in time. The order of creation differs from that in the earlier narrative: the wet precedes the dry and the other animals precede the first man. As in the Timaeus the beauty and order of the cosmos is emphasized. At the end of each day God sees that what he has made is good. Finally God says ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves.’ These mysteriously plural selves are the only paradigm to appear in the Genesis narrative.

4 seven concepts of creation It is the absence of paradigms, in fact, that is the most obvious difference between the Platonic and the Mosaic narratives. With regard to numbers (2), (3), and (4) of the theses we have identified, the two accounts are fairly easily reconcilable. What of the first thesis, ‘the cosmos is to be accounted for as a whole’? Here, I think, there is a very important difference. Plato thinks of the cosmos as itself alive: like any other animal it must be treated as a whole and the nature and functions of its parts can only be explained in terms of the nature and function of the whole. For the biblical tradition, by contrast, the cosmos is not itself a living being, but is the habitat of many independent living creatures. This is true not only of Genesis but of the much more poetic accounts of creation to be found in the Psalms (8 and 103) and in the book of Job (chapters 38–9). In the book of Job, every element and every species seems to have its own direct relationship to God. God taunts the complaining Job: Does the hawk take flight on your advice when he spreads his wings to travel south? Does the eagle soar at your command To make her eyrie in the heights?

But in Job no less than in the Timaeus, God in creating the world seems to work on pre-existent elements. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me, since you are so well informed! Who decided the dimensions of it, do you know? Or who stretched the measuring line across it? What supports its pillars at their bases? Who laid its cornerstone? (38: 4–6)

God is the great architect, not yet the creator out of nothing. So too in the book of Wisdom, where there may even be a direct reference to the unformed matter of the Timaeus. Speaking of the wickedness of the idolatrous Egyptians, the author says to God ‘Your all-powerful hand did not lack means—the hand that from

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formless matter created the world—to unleash a horde of bears or savage lions upon them’ (11: 18). It is in the Book of Proverbs that the Bible comes closest to the Platonic idea of an intelligible world that provides archetypes for creation. There, in the eighth chapter, a (female) personified Wisdom sings a paean of self-praise. ‘Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works ... the deep was not, when I was born, there were no springs to gush with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills I came to birth.’ It was in accordance with this wisdom that God created. ‘I was by his side, a master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence.’ Only at the very end of the Old Testament do we meet with the idea of creation out of nothing. In the second book of Maccabees seven brothers are martyred by King Antiochus for refusing to eat pork. Their mother looks on while six of them are sadistically killed. When asked to persuade the sole surviving son to abandon his resistance, she says: My son have pity on me. I carried you nine months in my womb and suckled you three years, fed you and reared you to the age you are now. I implore you, my child, observe heaven and earth, consider all that is in them, and acknowledge that God made them out of what did not exist, and that mankind comes into being in the same way. Do not fear this executioner. (2 Macc. 7: 27)

Henceforth creation ex nihilo was the fundamental Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy. Theologians glossed ex nihilo as ex nihilo sui et subiecti to reject both the idea that the world is somehow spun out of God’s own essence and the idea that it was made out of non-divine preexistent matter. As Broadie has emphasized, the first idea is equally rejected by Plato; but the second point marks a definite break between the Timaeus and what was henceforth the mainstream western religious tradition. Nonetheless, the Timaeus retained over centuries a great influence on philosophical concepts of creation. It is an exaggeration

6 seven concepts of creation to say that western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato; but in many areas of philosophy it remains true to this day that Plato drew up the philosophical agenda. So far as concerns creation, the Timaeus set the following questions for centuries of investigation. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

What is the nature of the creator? What, if anything, was prior to the creator’s activity? What, if anything, was the blueprint for creation? Why did the creator create? What entities were created? When did creation take place?

For two millennia, the answers to these questions were debated by philosophers. Many different answers were given and accordingly we find, in the history of philosophy, not one, but at least seven different concepts of creation. The first great Christian philosopher, Augustine, did his best to reconcile Plato and the Bible. He was willing to accept that the universe was created out of formless matter, but he asked what was meant by ‘formless’. If what was meant was something absolutely devoid of all forms, then it was as good as nothing. But if it was merely something comparatively formless, it must, in its turn, have been created out of nothing. ‘Even if the universe was created out of some formless matter, this very matter was created from something that was wholly nothing’ (De Vera Religione, 18. 15). Augustine accepted also that in creating the world God was guided by paradigms. However, he considered it impious to suggest that God, in creating, should look to anything outside himself—even to a set of ideas in a Platonic heaven. Consequently, he identified the Platonic forms with Ideas in the divine mind. From all eternity God sees in his own essence all possible limited quiddities as reflections of himself. These are the divine ideas, which are certain archetypal forms or stable and unchangeable reasons of things, which were not themselves formed but are contained in the divine mind eternally and are always the same. They neither arise nor pass away,

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but whatever arises and passes away is formed according to them. (De Ideis, 2)

Augustine, as is well known, was interested in the problems involved in the notion of a world created in time. What was God doing before the world began? He solved that problem by saying that when the world was not created there was no before and after. However, there were arguments in Aristotle to the effect that the world must have existed for ever. And even in the Timaeus, though the world as we know it had a beginning, there remained the question whether the initial unformed matter had existed for ever. And certainly the paradigm Ideas had existed for ever. It was common ground among medieval Christian writers that nothing other than God had existed for ever. Augustine had solved the Platonic problem by placing Ideas in the mind of God, and he had taken little interest in the Aristotelian problem. He did, indeed, separate the issue of creation from the issue of the world’s duration, pointing out that something could be eternal and nonetheless be caused: an eternal footprint left in eternal sand by an eternal foot, perhaps. Other Christian writers, such as John Philoponus, tried to prove, arguing against Aristotle but using the Aristotelian principle that an actual infinite was impossible, that the world must have had a beginning. Philoponus was followed by much later Christian philosophers, such as Bonaventure, and more immediately by the Islamic philosophers of the Kalam. After the reception of Aristotle in the Latin West, however, it became the majority view, ably propounded by Aquinas, that philosophy could prove neither that the world had a beginning nor that it had existed for ever. Because of the Genesis narrative it must be accepted that the world began, but that was a matter of faith, not reason. Another issue discussed by medieval philosophers derives from a famous passage in the Timaeus, but it was commonly raised in Aristotelian terms. What is the final cause of the creation? Why did God create? Many neo-Platonic and Muslim philosophers gave the answer that for God creation was not a matter of choice but

8 seven concepts of creation of necessity. The world emanated from God in the way that light shines out from the sun. Among Christian philosophers the pseudo-Dionysius originated the slogan Bonum est diffusivum sui; goodness is self-expansive. Others spoke as if God created by necessity, but by a necessity that was not metaphysical but moral. God, said Augustine, would have been mean (invidus) if he had not created. He was taking his cue from Timaeus 29e1. ‘[The cause] was good, and in what is good there is never any grudging (φθονος) on any topic; and being devoid of anything like that he desired that everything should be, so far as possible, like himself.’ Medieval scholastics in general regarded creation as a free, unconstrained act of God. All agreed that he was free not to create, and most (but not Abelard) agreed that if he was going to create at all, he was not constrained to create any particular world (not even the best of all possible worlds). But if creation was a free act, then a further question arose: what was the motive of that action? Aquinas’s answer became classic: ‘Ad productionem creaturarum nihil aliud movet Deum nisi sua bonitas, quam rebus aliis communicare voluit secundum modum assimilationis ad ipsum’ (ScG 2. 46). Nothing other than his own goodness moved God to produce creatures: he wanted to share that goodness with others to the extent that they could resemble him. A position close to Aquinas’s teaching on the nature and motive of creation is beautifully expressed in Beatrice’s speech in Dante’s Paradiso, 29. 13–36: Non per aver a s´e di bene acquisto, ch’esser non pu`o, ma perch´e suo splendore potesse, risplendendo, dir ‘subsisto’ In sua eternit`a, di tempo fuore, fuor d’ogni altro comprender, come i piacque s’asperse in nuovi amor l’eterno amore N´e prima quasi torpente si giacque ch´e n´e prima n´e poscia procedette lo discorrer di Dio sopra quest’acque

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Forma e materia, congiunte e purette usciro ad esser che non avea fallo come d’arco tricorde tre saette.... Concreato fu ordine e construtto a le sustanze; e quelle furon cima del mondo in che puro atto fu prodotto pura potenza tenne la parte ima; nel mezzo strinse potenza con atto tal vime che gi`a mai non si divima.1

Here we have creation as free and unconstrained, but motivated by the desire to communicate love. The neo-Platonic comparison with the shining of the sun is maintained, but without the notion of necessitation. The ‘splendour’ which says ‘I subsist’ is, of course, the creature, not God; ‘splendore’, the Dante commentators tell us, is always reflected light. God has no need of a cogito. There is no pre-existent matter: matter, form, and being are all created simultaneously. The pure acts who exist at the summit are the angels or intelligences: Dante, like Aquinas, rejects the universal hylomorphism of Bonaventure which regarded angels as composed of form and matter (spiritual matter, whatever that may be). But Dante appears to depart from ¹

Not that his proper good might be increas’d which cannot be, but that his sheen might of itself, in shining back, say ‘I subsist’ shrined in his own eternity, above all time, all limits, as it pleased him, shone unfolded in new loves the eternal Love. Nor before lay he, as with nothing done; for ere God moved upon these waters, know that of ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ there was none Simple and mixed did form and matter go forth to a being which had no defect like to three arrows from a three-stringed bow.... Concreate and stablished with the substances was order; some were made pure act, and heaven as summit of the world appointed these pure potency the lowest place was given midway was potency with act clinched fast by such a rivet as may ne’er be riven. (Trans Bickersteth)

10 seven concepts of creation Aquinas in thinking that prime matter, formless matter, can exist on its own. Aquinas follows Augustine in locating in the divine mind the paradigms on which creatures are modelled: they are the divine Ideas. Because God is a simple undivided being, these ideas are not really distinct from his essence, and they do not depend in any way upon his will. Creation according to the ideas is free, but not the existence of the ideas in the first place. In medieval philosophy after Aquinas, two developments occurred: the paradigms were given a degree of independence from the divine essence, and the scope of the divine will was expanded. Henry of Ghent took up a position quite close to the Timaeus. He was inspired by Avicenna; I do not feel competent to decide whether he had interpreted Avicenna rightly or wrongly. The Avicennan concept, as understood by Henry, goes as follows. Prior to creation there are everlasting essences with actual being (esse essentiae). When God creates he confers a new kind of being (esse existentiae). Duns Scotus objected that simply adding existence to an essence that was already there was something quite different from creation. ‘Creation is production from nothing. If a stone already had true real being—esse verum reale—then when it is produced by [God’s] efficient causal power it is not produced from nothing’ (Lectura, 1. 36). Scotus himself, however, believed that ideas have a kind of reality that is distinct from God’s essence. It was, he admitted, a pretty low level of being: an esse diminutum. But in compensation for giving the ideas an independent reality, however flimsy, he set much narrower limits to their content than Aquinas had done. This appears most dramatically in the field of ethics. For Aquinas the entire decalogue is part of the natural law, flowing from the divine essence and governed by the ideas; it followed that God was not free to dispense from any of the ten commandments. Scotus much restricted the scope of natural law, confining it essentially to the command to love God himself. Beyond that God’s freedom to command is absolute. The divine will expressed in the later commands of the decalogue—the prohibitions on

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murder, adultery, theft, and lying—is a free will of God, not at all constrained by his essence. These developments—the reification of the paradigms of creation and the expansion of the scope of divine freedom—reach their climax, after the medieval period, with Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths. This doctrine is expressed in a guarded form in the fifth meditation, but is expounded much more fully in Descartes’s correspondence. Let me remind you of a few key passages from his letters to Mersenne in the 1630s. The mathematical truths that you call eternal, have been established by God and depend on him entirely as much as all other creatures. (CSM 3. 23) You ask me by what kind of causality God established the eternal truths. I reply: by the same kind of causality as he created all things, that is to say, as their efficient and total cause. For it is certain that he is no less the author of creatures’ essence than he is of their existence; and this essence is nothing other than the eternal truths. I do not conceive them as emanating from God like rays from the sun; but I know that God is the author of everything and that these truths are something and consequently that he is their author. (CSM 3. 25)

I have argued in several places that Descartes’s account places the eternal truths in a Platonic or Meinongian heaven, quite separate from the divine essence or the human mind.² Recently a number of authors have contested this view. Some have attributed to Descartes a conceptualist position: the eternal truths exist only in human minds, according to which, for Descartes, God’s creation of numbers and figures would simply consist in his creation of minds containing the ideas of numbers and figures.³ Such conceptualism, while it draws support from one text in the Principles (1. 49), seems to me impossible to reconcile with what Descartes says elsewhere—indeed with the very notion of an eternal truth. ² See, for instance, ‘The Cartesian Circle and the Eternal Truths’, in A. Kenny, The Heritage of Wisdom (Blackwell, 1987), 147–64. ³ Cf. Vere Chappell, ‘Descartes Ontology’, Topoi, 16 (1997), 111–27.

12 seven concepts of creation With more plausibility it has been suggested that what God does when he creates the eternal truths is to give them objective being in his own mind. This brings Descartes much closer to his scholastic predecessors, even though none of them ever suggested that the truths of mathematics were free creations of God. I continue, however, to maintain that Descartes’s position is much more Platonist than that. I have no doubt that the eternal truths have objective being in God’s mind. So does everything, given that God is omniscient. But whatever is created is (for Descartes) really distinct from the creator. Therefore the eternal truths cannot be located anywhere in God, for within Him there are no real distinctions. So for Descartes, as for Plato, the quiddities are eternal entities distinct from God; only for Descartes, unlike for Plato, they are the object of a special, pre-cosmic, divine act of creation. This hectic tour of the centuries has left us, as I promised, with not one but seven concepts of creation. We have the Platonic concept, the Mosaic concept, the Augustinian concept, the Avicennan concept, the Thomist concept, the Scotist concept, and the Cartesian concept. Each concept is differentiated from the others by giving a different set of answers to the six questions that I identified as set to candidates by Plato’s Timaeus. I want to end this chapter with a brief discussion of a recent revisiting of one of the Timaeus issues. Professor Norman Kretzmann devoted the last years of his tragically shortened life to the writing of two volumes of philosophical commentary on Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles. Kretzmann’s commentary was probing and sympathetic; in the end, on almost all points, he either agreed with Aquinas or thought his opinions deserved serious consideration. On only one issue he disagreed, head on, with the teaching of the Summa. This was the issue of God’s freedom in creating. Both in The Metaphysics of Theism (OUP, 1997) and The Metaphysics of Creation (OUP, 1999) Kretzmann defended the view that God’s creation of the world was not free, but necessary. In his earlier book he set himself the following question. ‘The existence of an absolutely perfect being and nothing else at all

seven concepts of creation

13

seems unquestionably the best of all possible worlds, so what could motivate God to choose to create anything at all?’ Aquinas’s answers to this question, he says, are unconvincing. Utility, conceived of as widely as possible, seems entirely unavailable as the motivation for God’s volition that there be things other than himself (TMOT, 221). Aquinas’s conceptions of God, goodness, creation, and choice entail a necessitarian explanation and there is an inconsistency in the notion of goodness that is unmanifested, never shared, even though united with omnipotence. Kretzmann is at one with pseudo-Dionysius. God is perfect goodness itself, and goodness is essentially—from its nature and its definition—diffusive of itself and of being. ‘Doesn’t it follow that the volition to create is a consequence not of God’s free choice but of God’s very nature?’ God does indeed have free choice in creation, but this is confined to the selection of which possibilities to actualize. God’s will is necessitated as regards whether to create, but he is fully free as regards what to create (TMOC, 225). I do not wish to take issue on one side or the other of this debate between Aquinas and Kretzmann. I merely draw attention to it as showing the lasting vitality of Plato’s Timaeus. The most recent philosophical monograph on creation, by one of the most intelligent and erudite of twentieth-century philosophers, still feels the need to address the question that Augustine took from Plato: if God had not created the world, would he have shown himself to be a skinflint?

2 Life after Etna: Empedocles in Prose and Poetry There is a familiar passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1147a20, b12) in which the incontinent person, who does what he says he ought not to do, is compared to a drunken man reciting the verses of Empedocles. Scholars are undecided why Empedocles comes into the picture here. Is it because he was himself a champion of temperance, or is it because his verses are so difficult to construe? Either way, we are clearly meant to envisage a person reciting poetry that he does not really understand. I mention the passage only to introduce an apology. This chapter does not attempt a serious study of the fragments of Empedocles, and in presenting it to the learned world, I feel very much in the position of Aristotle’s drunken άκρατης. I crave the reader’s indulgence. The item in the ancient tradition about Empedocles that has fascinated writers through the ages is the story of his final leap into Etna. The fourth-century Platonist Heraclides of Pontus tells us that a woman, who had been in a trance for forty days without pulsation or breathing was kept alive and restored to health by Empedocles. In celebration of this remarkable cure, according to the third-century writer Hermippus—who gives the woman’s name as Pantheia—Empedocles invited eighty people to a sacrificial banquet on the property of Peisianax (a citizen of Syracuse). Heraclides continues the story thus: after the feast, the remainder of the company dispersed and retired to rest, some under the trees in the adjoining field, others wherever they chose,

life after etna 15 while Empedocles himself remained on the spot where he had reclined at table. At daybreak all got up, and he was the only one missing. A search was made, and they questioned the servants, who said they did not know where he was. Thereupon someone said that in the middle of the night he heard an exceedingly loud voice calling Empedocles. Then he got up and beheld a light in the heavens and a glitter of lamps, but nothing else. (DL 8. 68)

Among the guests at the banquet was Pausanias, the friend to whom Empedocles had dedicated his poem On Nature. He sent out a party of searchers, Heraclides tells us, but ‘later he bade them take no further trouble, for things beyond expectation had happened to him and it was their duty to sacrifice to him since he was now a god’. The first surviving narrative of the final tableau, in which Empedocles climbs Etna and jumps into the crater, derives from the early second-century historian Hippobotus, now known only as a source for Diogenes Laertius. We are told that Empedocles’ motive was to persuade people that he had become a god: presumably he wished them to think that he had been assumed into heaven. But, Hippobotus says, the truth was discovered because one of his bronze slippers was thrown up in the flames. We are told that Pausanias objected to this: but it remains unclear from the citation in Diogenes Laertius whether the objector was the original Pausanias, or a character named after him in a dialogue of Heraclides, and also whether the objection was to the tale of the slipper, or to the entire Etna story (DL 8. 69). The whole story was already known to, and firmly denied by, Timaeus of Tauromenium (d. c.264), the most reliable historian of Greek Sicily. Timaeus knew Heraclides’ narrative, and found it implausible: if Pausanias had really wanted people to believe in the divinity of Empedocles, he would have set up a statue or shrine to him (DL 8. 71). Alternative traditions placed Empedocles’ death in Megara or in the Peloponnese (DL 8. 67, 71). But the Etna tradition was supported by one Diodorus of Ephesus, and much more importantly by Strabo, who included the story of the slipper in his guide to Etna (6. 274, DK 31 A 16).

16 life after etna The Latin tradition begins with Horace who in his Ars Poetica defends the right of a poet to commit suicide. Siculique poetae narrabo interitum. deus immortalis haberi dum cupit Empedocles, ardentem frigidus Aetnam insiluit. fit ius liceatque perire poetis. (460 ff.)

Before Horace, Lucretius had mentioned Empedocles as a poet, in the same breath as giving a description of Etna, but he does not tell the story of the mortal plunge (1. 730). In early Christian Latin tradition Empedocles is referred to infrequently, but he appears occasionally as a paradigm of pagan blasphemous arrogance. Thus he is denounced for his arrogance four times in Tertullian (PL 1. 530, 532, 533; 2. 702). A millennium later he cuts a similar figure in Abelard. In medieval scholasticism, however, Empedocles is treated seriously as a philosopher, and the legend of his death falls into the background. Albert the Great, who knew of him through commenting on Aristotle, does not rise to the bait of denouncing him. St Thomas Aquinas refers to him 235 times, but always as the author of the theory of love and strife and the four elements. He comments on his reputation as a poet, but never introduces the story of his frantic death. This reticence seems to have lasted through the Renaissance. Empedocles does not appear in Marlowe’s Faustus, though such a Luciferian figure might have seemed an appropriate familiar for Faustus. Shakespeare does not mention Empedocles, and Montaigne, while he refers to him seven times (on feasting and building, and on whether the soul is blood) never mentions the story of Etna. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, when addressing the question ‘whether a man in extremity of grief may make away himself’ lists Empedocles among a schedule of distinguished suicides. (He also records Empedocles as curing desperate melancholy with music.) But it was Milton who fixed Empedocles’ death in the

life after etna 17 imagination of English readers, in lines of Paradise Lost that echo Horace’s Ars Poetica. In a census of those inhabiting Satan’s dominions, including the builders of Babel and similar sinful groups, Milton says: Others came single; he who to be deemed A god, leapt fondly into Aetna flames, Empedocles. (3. 469–71)

It was in the Romantic and Victorian period that the legend of Empedocles engendered the greatest literary interest. In English literature the most sustained presentation of the legend is the Empedocles on Etna of Matthew Arnold, the great poet of Victorian religious doubt. It is a dramatic poem in two acts, first published (anonymously, with other of Arnold’s poems) in 1852. The structure of the drama follows the legend as related, from various sources, in Diogenes Laertius; the whole of it takes place in the day that succeeds the banquet on the estate of Peisianax. Empedocles and Pausanias are the two main characters; they are joined by a third, Callicles, a young Catanian harp player, who besides taking part in the dialogue supplies the role of a chorus. The first act contains two scenes, first a cool morning in a forest below Etna, and then the upper slopes of the volcano at noon. The single scene of the second act takes place in the evening, on the summit of Etna. At the opening of the play we meet Callicles resting by a rock on the upward path. Slipping out of Peisianax’s banquet the previous night, he saw Empedocles in a litter ready to depart; he now waits for the mules that Empedocles has sent on ahead. Pausanias, ascending, catches up with Callicles, and tries to send him home: Empedocles is moody and wants solitude. But Callicles is too fascinated to depart, recalling his long infatuation with the sage. I could watch him with his proud sad face, His flowing locks and gold-encircled brow And kingly gait, for ever; such a spell

18 life after etna In his severe looks, such a majesty As drew of old the people after him In Agrigentum and Olympia, When his star reign’d, before his banishment, Is potent still on me in his decline (1. 1. 59–66)

Here, Arnold may have had in mind a passage from Favorinus recorded by Diogenes Laertius. ‘He wore a purple robe and a circlet of gold, with slippers of bronze and a Delphic wreath. He had thick hair, and a train of boy attendants. He was solemn of countenance, of unshaken gravity. When he appeared thus in public and the citizens encountered him they recognized in him the stamp of royalty’ (DL 8. 73). No doubt Arnold imagined Callicles as having been one of the train of boy attendants. In the play, Pausanias instructs Callicles to hide in a rocky cleft and make music. While they wait for Empedocles he tells the story of the woman in the trance. Thou hast heard all men speaking of Pantheia The woman who at Agrigentum lay Thirty long days in a cold trance of death And whom Empedocles called back to life ... He could stay swift diseases in old days, Chain madmen by the music of his lyre Cleanse to sweet airs the breath of poisonous streams, And in the mountain-chinks inter the winds. (1. 1. 108–11, 115–18)

For his knowledge of Empedocles Arnold relied largely on Karsten’s Philosophorum Graecorum Veterum ... Operum Reliquiae (Amsterdam, 1838) from which he took copious notes. The healing of diseases, the cleansing of streams, and the stilling of the winds are all in Diogenes Laertius (8. 58, 70, 60). Arnold represents Callicles as an enthusiastic admirer of Empedocles, but disdainful of the superstitious admiration which

life after etna 19 surrounds him. When Pausanias says that he is hoping to learn from Empedocles on Etna the secret of the miracle of Pantheia, Callicles replies: Bah! thou a doctor! Thou art superstitious. Simple Pausanias, ’twas no miracle! Pantheia, for I know her kinsmen well, Was subject to these trances as a girl ... (1. 1. 123–6)

Pausanias reports Empedocles as lonely and dispirited, because a swarm of sophists has taken over the schools of philosophy. Again Callicles contradicts him The sophists are no enemies of his; I hear, Gorgias, their chief, speaks nobly of him As of his gifted master and once friend ... Tis not the times, tis not the sophists vex him There is some root of suffering in himself. (1. 1. 146–51)

At this point Empedocles comes into sight, Callicles hides, and the first scene ends. In the second scene, Pausanias repeatedly asks Empedocles to tell him the story of Pantheia and to reveal to him his spells. ‘Spells?’ says Empedocles— Mistrust them Mind is the spell which governs earth and heaven. Man has a mind with which to plan his safety Know that, and help thyself ... . . . . . . . . . Be not, then, fear’s blind slave! Thou art my friend; to thee All knowledge that I have, All skill I wield are free ... Ask not what days and nights In trance Pantheia lay,

20 life after etna But ask how thou such sights May’st see without dismay. (1. 2. 25–9, 102–10)

This is a highly sanitized version of fragment 111, addressed to the original Pausanias. All the potions there are that ward off ills and old age You shall learn, since for you alone will I fulfil them all. You will halt the energy of the untiring winds which blast The earth with their gusts and wither the fields, And again, if you want, you will bring back compensatory winds. After dark rain you will make dry heat, seasonable for men, And after the dry heat of summer, to nourish the trees, You will make streams, which flow through the aither. And you will bring out of Hades the energy of a man who has died. (DK 31 B 111)

The greater part of scene 2 is taken up by a solemn song of Empedocles, some 350 lines long. Each stanza consists of five lines: the first four are a pair of split hexameters, rhyming ABAB, while the final line of each stanza is a full hexameter, rhyming with the final line of an adjacent strophe. Typical are the following two stanzas, in a passage in which Pausanias is urged to lower his expectations of life and realize that human beings have no right to happiness. We mortals are no kings For each of whom to sway A new-made world up-springs, Meant merely for his play; No, we are strangers here; the world is from of old. In vain our pent wills fret, And would the world subdue Limits we did not set Condition all we do; Born into life we are, and life must be our mould. (1. 2. 176–87)

life after etna 21 There are other existences, that clash with human life. The lightning fires love to play, the stream seeks an unimpeded way; streams will not divert themselves to avoid drowning a just man, nor lightnings change their course to leave room for his virtues. Nature, with equal mind Sees all her sons at play; Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away; Allows the proudly-riding and the foundering bark. (1. 2. 257–61)

The chant that Arnold gives Empedocles resembles more often the thought of Lucretius, with whom it was a constant theme that the Gods have not arranged the world for human benefit (e.g. De Rerum Natura, 2. 67, 5. 155). This is no accident. In 1849 Arnold resolved to write a substantial work about Lucretius, of whom he had been a fan since his schooldays. His list of proposed poems for that year is headed ‘Chew Lucretius’. The chewing went on for many years, indeed until 1882; but the great work never appeared. A few isolated fragments survive, but most of the work went instead into the drama on Empedocles. Unable to bear our woes like adults, Empedocles continues, we behave like children who beat the ground when they fall and hurt themselves. So, loath to suffer mute We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear; With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily. (1. 2. 277–81)

But it is not just to have someone to blame that we invent gods: we would reverse the scheme ourselves have spun And what we made to curse

22 life after etna We now would lean upon And feign kind Gods who perfect what man vainly tries. (1. 2. 312–16)

Having failed to find rapture here on earth we hope to find with the gods the joy that here we look for in vain. But it is foolish to think that happiness, which has escaped us so often here, may not do just the same elsewhere. We should not fly to dreams, but should moderate our desires and realize that we have ample cause for contentment. Is it so small a thing To have enjoy’d the sun To have lived light in the spring To have loved, to have thought, to have done To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes That we must feign a bliss Of doubtful future date And while we dream on this Lose all our present state And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose? (1. 2. 397–46)

Once again we are reminded of Lucretius (3. 931 ff.). The hexameter poem, and shortly afterwards the act itself, end on the theme that humans must avoid both extravagant hope and extravagant despair. But that is not the end of the poem. In his Matthew Arnold (Allen & Unwin, 1949) Lionel Trilling comments perceptively: Thus the noonday Empedocles. But it is to his friend, the simple minded physician Pausanias, that Empedocles gives his advice; he himself cannot take it. He himself cannot support a life limited to reconciliation and compromise; he yearns for the absolute, and his own resolution is to flee from clocked and circumstantial existence by flinging himself into the crater of Etna. It is not entirely a suicide of escape. The act is done in ecstasy and is, as it were, the affirmation of human desire by mingling with the All and mingling with the elements. (p. 88)

life after etna 23 Pausanias is sent down with the message that Empedocles will return to the city ‘either tomorrow or some other day | in the sure revolutions of the world’. When the second act opens, in the evening of the day, we see Empedocles by the volcano’s summit Alone! On this charr’d blacken’d melancholy waste Crown’d by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth Round which the sullen vapour rolls—alone! (2. 1–3)

He expounds his weariness with the world. He cannot live with other men nor yet in solitude. The only friends he has left are the four elements he canonized: earth, air, fire, and water. Prosperolike, he lays aside the panoply of his godlike status among humans. Lie there, ye ensigns Of my unloved preeminence In an age like this! Among a people of children, Who thronged me in their cities Who worshipped me in their houses And asked not wisdom But drugs to charm with But spells to mutter— All the fool’s armoury of magic!—Lie there My golden circlet My purple robe. (2. 109–20)

Next, he divests himself of his poetic tools: ‘lie thou here, my laurel bough’. He laments that he hates being alone, and hates poetic solitude. ‘Only death’, we are told, ‘can cut his oscillations short, and so | bring him to poise. There is no other way.’ Arnold’s philosopher in this final act is much closer to the historic Empedocles. He recalls the happy time he spent with Parmenides, on whose poem he modelled his own On Nature.

24 life after etna And yet what days were those, Parmenides! When we were young, when we could number friends In all the Italian cities like ourselves, When with elated hearts we join’d your train Ye sun-born Virgins, on the road of truth Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were closed and dead to us; But we received the shock of mighty thoughts On simple minds with a pure natural joy. (2. 235–43)

The final stanzas of the poem are both the finest on their own aesthetic terms, and the closest to the verses of the historical Empedocles. We are constantly reminded of Fragment 115, the decree of necessity and the thrice ten thousand years of wandering to which Empedocles condemned the fallen. To the elements it came from Everything will return— Our bodies to earth Our blood to water Heat to fire Breath to air They were well born, they will be well entomb’d But mind? ... But mind, but thought— If these have been the master part of us— Where will they find their parent element? Who will receive them, who will call them home? But we shall still be in them, and they in us, And we shall be the strangers of the world, And they will be our lords, as they are now; And keep us prisoners of our consciousness, And never let us clasp and feel the All But through their forms and modes and stifling veils.... . . . . . . . . . . . still thought and mind Will hurry us with them on their homeless march

life after etna 25 Over the unallied unopening earth, Over the unrecognising sea; while air Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth, And fire repel us from its living waves. And then we shall unwillingly return Back to this meadow of calamity This uncongenial place, this human life; And in our individual human state Go through the sad probation all again, To see if we will poise our life at last, To see if we will now at last be true To our own only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world ... . . . . . . . . . . . O ye elements I know— Ye know it too—it hath been granted me Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved. I feel it in this hour. Leap and roar, thou sea of fire! My soul glows to meet you. Ere it flag, ere the mists Of despondency and gloom Rush over it again, Receive me, save me. (2. 331–8, 344–54, 358–72, 403–16)

Arnold’s dramatic poem did not have an altogether happy reception when it was published. One of his closest friends was Arthur Hugh Clough, who had been his contemporary, and briefly his tutor, at Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1840s. Empedocles’ happy memories of companionship with Parmenides resemble the later evocation of youthful comradeship in Arnold’s elegy Thyrsis, written in mourning for Clough’s early death in 1862. But when Empedocles on Etna appeared Clough did not let friendship stand in the way of a severe notice of the poem (North American Review, 1853). Most of the review consists of a bald summary.

26 life after etna Empedocles, the sublime Sicilian philosopher, the fragments of whose moral and philosophical poems testify to his genius and character—Empedocles, in the poem before us, weary of misdirected effort, weary of imperfect thought, impatient of a life which appears to him a miserable failure, and incapable, as he conceives, of doing anything that shall be true to that proper interior self— being one with which we are one with the whole world, wandering forth, with no determined purpose, into the mountain solitudes, followed for a while by Pausanias, the eager and laborious physician, and at a distance by Callicles, the boy-musician, flings himself at last, upon a sudden impulse and apparent inspiration of the intellect, into the boiling crater of Etna; rejoins there the elements. The music of the boy Callicles, to which he chants his happy mythic stories, somewhat frigidly perhaps, relieves, as it sounds in the distance, the gloomy catastrophe.

Clough preferred Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult to ‘the high, and shall we say, pseudo-Greek inflation of the philosopher musing above the crater, and the boy Callicles singing myths upon the mountain’. The only moral he could find to either story is ‘the deceitfulness of knowledge and the illusiveness of the affections, the hardiness and roughness and contrariousness of the world, the difficulty of living at all, the impossibility of doing anything—voil`a tout!’ Clough’s review was dated in July 1853. In October 1853 Arnold wrote the preface to the first edition of poems to appear under his own name. He omitted the Empedocles drama from this edition. I have done so, not because the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had in my own opinion failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus, having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and

life after etna 27 feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail.

Arnold feels that his representation has not been unsuccessful; and if we are to believe Aristotle any accurate representation carries its own interest. But, Arnold continues, if the representation be a poetical one, more than this is demanded. It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader, that it should convey a charm and infuse delight. Empedocles on Etna fails this test: it does not produce Joy. Where suffering finds no vent in action, where a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope of resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done, we have a situation that is inevitably morbid and in whose description there is inevitably monotony. Reading the poem today one may feel that both Clough and the repentant Arnold underestimated the interest of its best parts. But there is no denying that what it communicates is the situation and sentiment of Arnold himself rather than of the historical Empedocles. However, defenders of Arnold may claim a certain affinity between the two men. Empedocles, part magus and part scientist, was, like Arnold, poised between two worlds, one dead, one struggling to be born. In this chapter we have encountered Empedocles the arrogant blasphemer, and Empedocles the world-weary sceptic. We may conclude with a brief encounter with a third character: Empedocles the prince of fools. In his Essays of Elia Charles Lamb gave Empedocles an honoured place in his ‘All Fools Day’. But it was left until 1892 for George Meredith, who had read Arnold’s drama and found it underwhelming, to have the last word on Empedocles the pompous idiot. He leaped, with none to hinder Of Aetna’s fiery scoriae In the next vomit-shower, made he A more peculiar cinder

28 life after etna And this great doctor can it be He left no saner recipe For men at issue with despair? Admiring even his poet owns While noting his fine lyric tones The last of him was heels in air.

3 Virtue and the Good in Plato and Aristotle Professor T. H. Irwin, in a recent paper (‘Glaucon’s Challenge: Does Aristotle Change his Mind?’ in R. Heinaman (ed.), Plato and Aristotle’s Ethics, Ashgate, 2003) attributes to Plato the following nine theses: (1) The Conditional Thesis. Non-moral goods and evils are only conditionally good and bad; they are good when used virtuously, bad when used viciously. (2) The Sufficiency Thesis. Virtue is necessary and sufficient for happiness. (3) The Non-instrumental Thesis. Virtue is to be chosen for its own sake, not only for its consequences. (4) The Stability Thesis. One ought always to stick to virtue, no matter the cost. (5) The Comparative Thesis. For happiness, virtue is to be chosen over all other goods. (6) The Composite Thesis. The good includes more than one choiceworthy goods. (7) The Comprehensive Thesis. The good includes all choiceworthy goods. (8) The Dominance Thesis. In happiness, virtue trumps all other goods. (9) The Eudaimonist Thesis. If I have sufficient reason to be just rather than unjust, I must be happier by being just rather than by being unjust.

30 virtue and the good in plato and aristotle Irwin enquires to what extent Aristotle concurs with these propositions. He begins his enquiry with a full treatment of the Magna Moralia, which he regards as a report of an early course of Aristotle’s, worthy of being treated as seriously as if it was an authentic work of the master. He then investigates the Eudemian Ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics, in that order. He comes to the conclusion that over his lifetime Aristotle changed his mind about the Comparative Thesis and the Dominance Thesis. It is in the NE, he maintains, that Aristotle shows the most evident sympathy with Plato’s own position, while in the MM both these propositions are ignored. Professor Irwin’s paper is rich and stimulating and forces one to think hard about Aristotle from unfamiliar angles. I agree with a very great deal of what it contains. But I must admit that I am a little uncomfortable with the structure of the paper. Essentially, Irwin offers Aristotelian answers to Platonic questions. It is not always easy to match an answer to a question, and following Irwin’s discussion can feel like trying to take the measure of an Aristotle wearing an ill-fitting suit. One problem concerns the central concept of virtue. ‘Virtue’ in Irwin’s Platonic texts is not often arete; the quotations are more likely to concern particular virtues such as justice and temperance. Aristotle might well give different answers to the questions put if ‘justice’ were substituted for ‘virtue’ in their formulation. This is partly because he made a systematic distinction between moral and intellectual virtues, and placed a special emphasis on the latter. Admittedly, in the middle books of the Republic, justice includes some pretty heady intellectual activity; but most of the Platonic texts on which Irwin relies concern moral virtue. More important than the distinction between moral and intellectual virtues in Aristotle is the distinction between virtue as a state on the one hand, and the exercise or use of virtue on the other. The distinction between possession and use goes back to a passage in Plato’s Euthydemus (280b7–d7)—but there what is in question is the possession and use of external goods, not of virtue. By contrast, in all three of the Aristotelian ethical treatises, happiness is identified not with the having of virtue, but with the

virtue and the good in plato and aristotle 31 exercise of virtue. This is in my view the most significant advance in Aristotle’s theory. In NE 1. 8 Aristotle, having said that the human good is ‘activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’, goes on to relate this definition to those offered by others. With regard to those who define it as virtue, or a virtue, he says, ‘It makes no little difference whether we place the supreme good in possession or in use, in state (εξις) or in activity’ (1098b31–4). It is the view of all three treatises that the mere possession of virtue, as opposed to its exercise, does not amount to the supreme good for human beings.¹ The terminology used to contrast the possession and the exercise of virtue differs, however, in the NE from the other two treatises. Virtuous behaviour, as contrasted with the mere possession of virtue, in the NE is by preference described as a person’s ‘activity in accordance with virtue’; in the EE and (to a lesser extent) the MM it is described as a ‘use of virtue’. The contrast is striking, but I do not believe that it denotes a difference of substance between the treatises.² The importance of the distinction means that we have a complicated task in giving Aristotelian answers to Irwin’s Platonic questions. When the word ‘virtue’ appears in the question we may have to give two different answers, one related to the possession of virtue, the other to the exercise of virtue. Aristotle’s answers to the Platonic questions will often need bifurcation. ¹ NE 1099a1 ff.: ‘the state may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the activity cannot’. NE 1176a33–5: ‘[happiness] is not a state; for if it were it might belong to someone who was asleep throughout his life, living the life of a plant, or again, to someone who was suffering the greatest misfortunes’. NE 1153b19–21: ‘Those who say that the victim on the rack or the man who falls into great misfortunes is happy if he is good are, whether they mean to or not, talking nonsense.’ EE 1219b9 ff.: ‘We crown the actual winners, not those who have the power to win but do not win ... This clears up the difficulty sometimes raised—why for half their lives the good are no better than the bad, for all are alike when asleep; the cause is that sleep is an inactivity, not an activity of the soul.’ MM 185a10: ‘That [happiness] is an activity can be seen also from the following consideration. For supposing someone to be asleep all his life, we should hardly consent to call such a man happy.’ ² Statistics of usage for the NE and the EE are given in my The Aristotelian Ethics (OUP, 1978), 68.

32 virtue and the good in plato and aristotle Bearing this distinction in mind, I will now give my own answers to Irwin’s Platonic questions, but I will reverse his order of tackling the treatises, and I will start with the NE, and then move to the EE and to the MM. The chronological sequence that will probably come naturally to most people here is neither Irwin’s order nor mine, but rather EE, NE, MM. I am not putting my own ordering forward as a chronological one, for I believe the relationships between the ethical writings in the corpus are too complicated to be explained by a simple temporal sequence. I am simply adopting another approach to the detection of differences of doctrine between the treatises. It is, of course, only if we regard the differences between the treatises as being due to chronology that we can regard the differences as being evidence of a change of mind. In considering the individual texts I will concentrate on their treatments of happiness, not magnanimity and self-love.

The Nicomachean Ethics I will first set out the Nicomachean position in respect of the Platonic theses enunciated earlier.³ (P2) Is virtue sufficient for happiness? Virtue itself is not: the virtuous man may be asleep or overtaken by disaster. The exercise of the appropriate virtue, however, is not only sufficient for happiness: it is what happiness consists in.⁴ (P3) Is virtue choiceworthy for its own sake? Yes: both virtue itself (1097b2–4) and also virtuous actions (1176a6–9). (P4) Should virtue be stuck to at all costs? It is hard to give a precise answer, because of the vagueness of ‘stuck to’. But we can point to the following relevant passages, which support a positive answer. There are some actions one must never do (1107a14–18). ³ Like Irwin, I find no answer to the question whether the NE accepts P1 (the conditionality of goodness). ⁴ This is so whether one regards Aristotle as holding an inclusive view of happiness (it consists in the exercise of all the virtues) or a dominant view (it consists in the exercise of the virtue of Sophia).

virtue and the good in plato and aristotle 33 Virtuous actions are the most stable thing in human life, and the happy person will always by preference do and contemplate what belongs to virtue (1100b12–20). (P5) Is virtue the choice most productive of happiness? Since happiness consists in the exercise of virtue, no one can be happy without virtue, which is a necessary condition for its exercise. But the mere possession of virtue is not sufficient for happiness, if the exercise is obstructed (e.g. by illness, or by the lack of necessary means, or grave misfortune). A virtuous person who, because of one of these impediments, is not in a position to choose virtuous actions ceases to be happy. However, such a person will never become wretched because he will never do anything wicked (1100b30–1101b8). (P6) Is the supreme good composite? In my view, it is not. The supreme human good that is happiness, for the NE, consists in philosophical contemplation and that alone.⁵ It is true that at 1101a14–17 Aristotle says: Why then should we not say that he is happy who is active in accordance with perfect virtue, and is sufficiently endowed with external goods, not for some chance period, but through a perfect life?

Some have taken this as indicating that the endowment of external goods is an element constitutive of happiness.⁶ But this passage is not a definition of happiness—it is a thesis about the happy person. At any given time a happy person will be doing many other things (e.g. digesting and breathing) besides the activity, or activities, that constitute his happiness. The wise man will need the necessities of life, but it is not in the use of them, but in the exercise of his mind that his happiness consists (1177a28–33, b19–24). (P7) Is the supreme good comprehensive? It is complete and self-sufficient, but that does not mean that it includes all goods worth choosing for their own sake. ⁵ I have argued for this in many places, notably in The Aristotelian Ethics, 190–214, Aristotle on the Perfect Life (OUP, 1992), 86–93, and Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition (OUP, 2001), 17–31. ⁶ E.g. John Cooper, in ‘Aristotle on the Goods of Fortune’, Philosophical Review, 94 (1985), 173–96, an article I have discussed on pp. 40–2 of my Aristotle on the Perfect Life.

34 virtue and the good in plato and aristotle (P8) Is virtue the dominant component in happiness? Virtue itself is not; it is insufficient for happiness. But the exercise of the appropriate virtue is not only the dominant but the sole component of happiness. (P9) Are all reasons for action premissed on the pursuit of happiness? Yes, on the face of it: ‘it is for the sake of [happiness] that we all do everything else’ (1102a2). However, there is room for discussion about the appropriate interpretation of ‘for the sake of’ in this and similar passages. So, once we pay attention to the distinction between virtue and its exercise, we can tease out, from the NE, answers to the questions set us by Irwin; but in several cases, as we have seen, the answer is neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but ‘distinguo’. If we turn to the EE, however, matters become more complicated, but also, in certain ways, clearer.

The Eudemian Ethics One clarification introduced in the EE is an explicit distinction between the constituents of happiness and the necessary conditions of happiness. We must first define for ourselves without haste or presumption in which of our possessions the good life consists, and what are the indispensable conditions of its attainment ... Some people take as elements of happiness things that are merely its indispensable conditions. (1214b16, b26)

Among those proleptically condemned by the EE we must include, I think, the author of the MM, who appears to regard external goods as part of happiness; we must also include a number of modern authors. Their error, according to the EE, is parallel to that of someone who thought that meat eating and walking after dinner were parts of, and not just necessary conditions of, bodily health. Keeping in mind this distinction, as well as the one between virtue and its exercise, (which is emphasized in 1218a30–8) let us question how far the EE subscribes to the nine theses.

virtue and the good in plato and aristotle 35 (P1). Are goods other than virtue only conditional goods, whose goodness depends on their proper use? The EE answers by a distinction: they are good by nature, but good for individual people only conditionally. The goods people compete for and think the greatest—honour, wealth, a wonderful body, fortune and power—are naturally good, but may be hurtful to some because of their dispositions: neither a foolish nor an unjust nor an intemperate person would get any good from making use of them. (1248b26–31)

(P2) Is virtue sufficient for happiness? As in the NE, virtue by itself is insufficient to be the supreme good, the reason now given being that an activity is better than a state, and therefore happiness, which is the best thing in the soul, must be not so much the best state of the soul, as the best activity of that best state (1218a31–5). (P3) Is virtue choiceworthy for its own sake? Here again Aristotle explicitly distinguishes between virtue and virtuous action, though he gives a positive answer in each case. Among goods, he says, those that are chosen for their own sake are ends. Some ends, like health and strength, are merely good; but some ends are not merely good but noble. A good is noble if it is an object of praise. Into this class fall both the virtues (justice and temperance, for instance) and the actions to which they give rise (1248b18–24). But there is an important difference, in the EE, between the choiceworthiness of virtue and the choiceworthiness of virtuous action. Every good person chooses virtuous actions for their own sake (i.e. because they are virtuous, and not because of their consequences). But among good people some choose virtue because of the non-moral goods that result from virtue: Aristotle calls these people Laconians. Other good people choose not just virtuous actions for their own sake, but virtue itself for its own sake. These people, Aristotle says, are not just good, but noble, καλοικαγαθοι.⁷ ⁷ The subtlety of Aristotle’s argument at this point has been well expounded by Sara Waterlow Broadie in her Ethics with Aristotle (OUP, 1991), 376 ff., which I followed in Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 9 ff.

36 virtue and the good in plato and aristotle (P4) Should virtue be stuck to at all costs? As in the NE, Aristotle insists that there are some acts that are in themselves wicked (1121a22). (P5) Is virtue the choice most productive of happiness? To answer this question, I turn to the Disputed Books, which I regard as belonging with the EE. There we learn (1153b19–21) that the good man on the rack is not happy; but this does not mean that by giving up virtue he could be more happy, because he would then not be in a position to exercise virtue, and it is in this alone that happiness consists. (P6) Is the supreme good composite? There is an important difference here between the EE and the NE. In the EE, I believe (and in the Disputed Books), the supreme good is composite: it consists in the exercise of all the virtues, and not just in the philosophic contemplation of the intellect.⁸ (P7) Is the supreme good comprehensive? Not if being comprehensive means including, in addition to the exercise of virtue, also the natural goods—the απλως αγαθα or prima-facie goods—which are in the gift of fortune. These are, up to a point, necessary conditions for happiness, but not constituents of it—though of course the virtuous use of them may be part of happiness, for instance the use of wealth in the expression of liberality. (P8) Is virtue the dominant component in happiness? As in the NE, the answer to this falls out immediately from the thesis that happiness consists solely in the exercise of virtue. (P9) Are all reasons for action premissed on the pursuit of happiness? There is, I think, a difference between the eudaemonism of the NE and the EE. The NE seems to state eudaemonism as a fact about human nature; the EE seems to propose it as a desirable human attitude (or perhaps, rather, a desirable gentlemanly attitude). ‘We must enjoin everyone that has the power to live according to his own choice to set up for himself some aim ⁸ I have argued this in The Aristotelian Ethics, 191–200, 206–14 and in Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 93–102.

virtue and the good in plato and aristotle 37 of noble living,—whether honour, or reputation, or wealth, or culture—to keep his eye on in all of his actions.’ In several ways the EE formulation seems to me preferable. Factual eudaemonism seems a false thesis about human nature and ‘keeping an eye’ on the supreme good seems a more reasonable programme than always ‘acting for the sake of’ happiness. Exhortatory eudaemonism, unlike factual eudaemonism, is compatible with the recognition, in the third of the common books, of the existence of incontinent people (i.e. most of us) who act for the sake of pleasure now and then without necessarily thinking it will contribute to our overall happiness (1146b23–45).

The Magna Moralia With regard to the MM I will be briefer, merely noting points where I disagree with Irwin. (P1) Are goods other than virtue only conditional goods? The MM’s answer is similar to that of the EE: office, wealth, strength, and beauty are goods, but they are not choiceworthy without qualification, because they can be used ill (1183b28–31; 1184a3). Irwin sees this as a disagreement with Plato, since in the Euthydemus we are told that wealth, health, and beauty are in themselves worthless. But the reason that the MM gives for saying that they are genuine goods—namely that their worth is to be judged by the good person’s use of them—is one which would surely commend itself to the mature Plato. (P2) Is virtue sufficient for happiness? Irwin argues that the MM denies this, since it says that if we are happy we lack nothing else and that the best we are seeking is not a simple thing (1184a11–14; 33–4).⁹ But the suggestion that happiness includes also non-moral goods seems to go counter to the statement repeated several times in chapter 4 of the first book that happiness consists in living in accordance with the virtues (1184b27, 30, 36, 39). ⁹ Irwin bases his claim also on the long argument about ‘counting together’, 1184a15–39. I will have occasion to comment on this passage in the next chapter.

38 virtue and the good in plato and aristotle (P3) Is virtue choiceworthy for its own sake? Irwin claims that the MM gives a positive answer to this; but the passage he cites (1184b1–6) merely says that virtue, as one of the goods of the soul, belongs to the best class of goods. The MM comes nearer to a positive answer when it says that justice and the other virtues are everywhere and everyhow choiceworthy (1184a2). (P4) Should virtue be stuck to at all costs? I believe the MM would say yes, but like Irwin I find it difficult to give chapter and verse. (P5) Is virtue the choice most conducive to happiness? Irwin thinks the MM leaves this question open; but this is because he thinks that happiness includes goods other than the exercise of virtue, which I contest. (P6 and P7) Is happiness composite and comprehensive? Irwin credits the MM with a positive answer to both questions. I believe that like the EE, the MM accepts that happiness is composite, in the sense that it involves the exercise of more than one virtue (1184b37) but not that it is comprehensive in the sense of including all nonmoral goods. The good man will not be corrupted by wealth and power, but there is no reason to believe that their possession will constitute part of his happiness (1208a3). Not even all activities of the soul are part of happiness (1135a35) (P8) Is virtue the dominant element in happiness? Irwin believes that the MM takes no account of this principle, but for my part I can see no difference between the MM and the EE on this point. (P9) Are all reasons for action premissed on the pursuit of happiness? Irwin believes that the MM’s treatment of self-love shows that it rejects eudaimonism, but he is prepared to give this up if some other passage supports eudaimonism. I have been unable to find such a passage.

Aristotle’s Development I conclude with a brief note on Aristotle’s philosophical biography. I find the treatment of happiness in the EE superior to that in

virtue and the good in plato and aristotle 39 the NE. The NE is an easier read, but the EE (even if we leave the Disputed Books out of consideration) is philosophically more sophisticated. (1) A clear distinction is made between constituents and necessary conditions of happiness. (2) An inclusive conception of happiness is more credible than a dominant one. (3) Exhortatory eudaimonism is preferable to factual eudaimonism. (4) The subtle distinction between the good person and the καλοσκαγαθος adds a degree of philosophical reflection absent from the NE. However, the differences between these two treatises may be explained by differences of audience or editor, rather than chronology, and in any case I am unconvinced that our NE existed as a single whole in Aristotle’s lifetime. With regard to the Magna Moralia, I do not find it possible to take it seriously as an authentic work of Aristotle. The crawling pace of its myopic pedantry seems a whole world away from the cavalier intellectual charge of Aristotle in full tilt. I continue to think that it is most likely to be a student’s notes of a course closely resembling the EE.

4 Aristotle’s Criteria for Happiness In Plato’s Philebus Socrates argues that happiness cannot be identified either with pleasure nor wisdom: only a mixed life involving both would be a life worth choosing. He bases his argument on the premiss that the supreme good must be both final (τελειον) and self-sufficient (αυταρκες). This passage, as several scholars have pointed out, is a key to understanding important passages of Aristotle’s Ethics, and in particular to the concepts that Aristotle extracts as criteria for eudaimonia. In my book Aristotle on the Perfect Life I translated ‘‘τελειον’’ as ‘perfect’ in order to be neutral between two different translations suggested by different paraphrases of the word given by Aristotle in different places. The translation ‘final’ (or, as some have it, ‘supreme’) appears to fit some passages better, while the translation ‘complete’ seems preferable in other contexts.¹ In an important recent paper (‘Plato and Aristotle on Finality and (Self )-Sufficiency’, in R. Heinaman (ed.), Plato and Aristotle’s Ethics (Ashgate, 2003)) Professor John Cooper shows us a way of avoiding the choice between the two translations. In the appropriate context, he argues, they will always for Aristotle be equivalent in reference, if not exactly in sense. To be unqualifiedly τελειον in the sense of ‘final’ is to be ultimately choiceworthy (cf. 1097a33–4), never chosen as a means ¹ Final: NE 1097a28–34; 1098a18 (1) EE 1249a16. Complete: NE 1097b7; 1098a18(2); 1100a4; 1177b24–5; EE 1219a35–9.

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to an end or as a constituent of a larger whole. But if something is final it is also self-sufficient (αυταρκες, 1097a8), that is to say it is something that, ‘isolated on its own, makes life choiceworthy and lacking in nothing (1097b14–15)’, that is to say, lacking in nothing that is needed for choiceworthiness. That the two criteria must coincide can be shown thus. Suppose that the ultimately choiceworthy life did not contain all that was needed for choiceworthiness. Then it could not be ultimately choiceworthy, because it could be chosen as a constituent of a larger whole that contained in addition the missing elements. On the other hand, suppose that a life that contained all that was needed for choiceworthiness was not the ultimately choiceworthy good: in that case it could not contain all that is needed for choiceworthiness: since there must be something left out in order to make something else the ultimately choiceworthy life. So if we try, in the consideration of lives, to separate perfection in the sense of finality from perfection in the sense of completion, we get a reductio ad absurdum. The relationship between the two criteria is very well brought out by Cooper’s discussion.² The coincidence of the two meanings of ‘‘τελειον’’, however, occurs only when we are discussing lives: it cannot be taken for granted when the adjective is attached to some other noun. Since Aristotle’s prime interest is in defining ευδαιμονια, the perfect life, this point may seem unimportant. But in his definition of ευδαιμονια he makes use of the notion of perfect virtue (NE 1100a4, 1102a6; EE 1219a39, 12349a16). In the case of virtue, choiceworthiness and completeness do not coincide: virtue can be something τελειον but it is not something ultimately choiceworthy in the way that ευδαιμονια is (1097b1–5). For some decades there has been much discussion of the Nicomachean definition of ευδαιμονια as ‘the activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues in ² I am glad to see that Cooper does not now regard it as established that Nicomachean eudaimonia is an inclusive rather than a dominant activity. He is now willing to consider that for Aristotle the human good is some single activity, a contemplative one.

42 aristotle’s criteria for happiness accordance with the best and most perfect virtue’ (1098a16–18). This definition sets a problem about the relationship between books one and ten of the NE. Both books set out an account of happiness as the ultimate goal of a successful life, the end at which a happy person aims in everything he does. In what does happiness consist? Is it a dominant, monistic end, such as philosophical contemplation (theoria)? Such is the most natural reading of book ten. Or is it a comprehensive end, a set of intrinsically valuable goods, including most notably the activities of the moral virtues? Such is a just possible reading of book one, and it is preferred by many scholars, principally in order to avoid the conclusion that all intrinsic goods derive their value from the contribution they make to philosophical theorizing. Besides being implausible in itself, this conclusion seems in conflict with Aristotle’s clear teaching that morally virtuous actions must be chosen for their own sakes. If we make a roll call of scholars who have debated the question since 1974, we can list eleven that support an inclusivist interpretation, and only three for the monistic reading. In a recent remarkable book Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2004) Gabriel Richardson Lear presents an interpretation of the crucial texts that is original, plausible, and illuminating. Her solution to the problem rests on a simple but extremely fruitful insight: that one way in which X can be for the sake of Y is by being an approximation to Y. (Thus, to use an example which Lear does not use, we might say that kissing is for the sake of sex, even though not all kissing leads to sex, and kissing is worth doing for its own sake.) So, in Aristotle’s system, morally virtuous activity is for the sake of contemplation by being an approximation to it. The way in which it approximates to it is that it resembles it in being a mode of grasping truth, truth being the essential good that marks out rational humans from other animals. The first step in this analysis is to reject the inclusivist interpretation of ευδαιμονια in favour of the monistic one. In book

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one as well as in book ten there is ample evidence that Aristotle thinks of happiness as a single dominant end. I have long argued that ‘most perfect virtue’ in the crucial NE passages does not mean ‘most complete virtue’ or ‘all the virtues’, as many scholars have maintained. To be sure, ευδαιμονια is only one ingredient of the life of the happy person—many other things go on in his life beside the contemplation in which ευδαιμονια consists. But it is a controlling or dominant ingredient, which gives shape to the whole of his life, and for this reason Aristotle is from time to time content to equate happiness with living well and with the happy life as a whole. Lear shows how problems about the relationship between the intrinsic value of virtuous action and the monistic end arise only if we make the false assumption that when X is choiceworthy for the sake of Y this means either that X is a means to Y or that X is a constituent of Y. Allowing approximation to Y as being a form of being choiceworthy for the sake of Y dissolves the problems here. The second step is to distinguish between human desires and human ends. Human desires do not determine what the human good and telos is. An end, or ‘that for the sake of which’, is not, as such, an object of desire. Health, for instance, is the telos of the medical art; but the doctor’s desires may be focused not on the health of his patient but on the money he will make by treating him. So in proposing that philosophical contemplation is ‘that for the sake of which’ morally virtuous actions are performed, Lear is not committed to the implausible thesis that every virtuous person has an explicit desire for philosophical contemplation. The way in which eudaimonia causes the goodness of the happy life is not necessarily as a goal consciously pursued, but as a final cause—and we know from Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics that final causes can operate in ways other than by being objects of desire. ‘In addition to taking an instrumental means to an end and constituting an end, Aristotle recognizes in his scientific treatises a third way of acting for the sake of an end. Indeed it is central to his account of the first heaven’s relationship to

44 aristotle’s criteria for happiness the Prime Mover. In the Metaphysics Aristotle calls this acting for an end as an object of love. Less poetically, we can call it approximating, imitating, or emulating an end. The telos is not just similar to its subordinate goods, it sets the standards of success for them ... Essentially perishable creatures, for example, cannot be immortal, but they can approach immortality to some extent by procreating’ (Happy Lives, 85). But this does not mean that rabbits intend to be like the divine when they fill the garden with bunnies. The third step is to exhibit the way in which acts of moral virtue are approximations to acts of theoretical contemplation. Lear does this in two stages, first making the point in general, and then illustrating it with respect to three particular virtues: courage, temperance, and greatness of soul. The general thesis rests on the treatment of theoretical and practical wisdom in book six of the NE. We are told in that book that there are two parts of the rational soul, both of whom have as their function to deliver truth. The output of the theoretical part of the soul is truth about the unchanging and necessary aspects of the universe. The output of the deliberative part of the soul is practical truth, that is to say, truth in accordance with right desire. The output of correct practical deliberation is the exercise of the moral virtues. No less than a philosopher, therefore, a person exercising practical wisdom (an upright politician, for example) is engaged in an activity whose excellence is truthfulness. We can go so far as to say, Lear believes, that the practically wise person (the φρονιμος) is engaged in a kind of contemplation (θεωρια τις). Book ten of the NE sets out two happy lives: a superior life of contemplation, and a second best life in accordance with the practical virtues. Having laid the foundations that we have seen, Lear has no difficulty, in the fourth and final part of her argument, in expounding this teaching without recourse to the implausible thesis of the inclusivist interpreters according to which these are two aspects of the same life rather than two competing alternatives. Here, she maintains, the key concept is that of leisure. The virtues of the political life—whether in wartime or in peacetime—are

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exercised under pressures of various kinds. But, for Aristotle, unleisurely activity is choiceworthy only for the sake of leisure. The value of morally virtuous action is that it expresses the agent’s orientation to the good, which finds its supreme form only in leisure. It is in the leisurely activity of philosophical contemplation that human beings most approximate to the divine life. But even the philosopher, in the exercise of the best and most perfect life, must from time to time desist from contemplation to undertake activities required by the moral virtues, such as the defence of family and fatherland, and the entertainment of friends and guests. I have one, minor, complaint. A crucial step in Lear’s argument depends on passages from book six of the NE. But book six of the NE is also book five of the Eudemian Ethics. According to the majority of scholars the EE was in fact the original home of this book. (Whether it was placed with the NE material by Aristotle or by a later editor is not a matter of similar agreement.) Lear accedes to this consensus, and yet in interpreting the book she follows a stubborn tradition in ignoring its original EE context, preferring to relate it to NE texts and Platonic antecedents. Attention to the EE could have assisted Lear’s enterprise in several ways. Of many possible examples, let me give just three. (1) The notion of truth (το αληθες) has an important role in Lear’s argument for the assimilation between theory and practice. But it is in the EE, not the NE, that truth is a key notion. (The evidence for this is presented in my The Aristotelian Ethics, 141.) In the NE, outside the originally Eudemian books, αληθεια is the name of the virtue of candour, not of the good grasped by reason. (2) In an illuminating treatment of the doctrine that moral virtue is concerned with the fine (the noble), Lear complains that Aristotle does not say anything informative about το καλον in the NE. But in the last book of the EE there is an analysis of the difference between two ethical characters, the αγαθος and the καλοσκαγαθος, which casts great light on the issue she discusses. (3) In urging that the activities of the great-souled man are intimations of θεωρια, Lear admits to a difficulty in bringing the

46 aristotle’s criteria for happiness worship of the gods within this rubric. But in the final chapter of the EE the ultimate standard of the moral life is provided precisely by ‘the service and contemplation of God’. There is a similar neglect of the EE in the article by Cooper which I discussed in the earlier part of this chapter. This leads him to omit Aristotle’s final answer to the Philebus question, which is that φρονησις and pleasure are, as properly understood, not in competition with each other as candidates for happiness. The exercise of the highest form of φρονησις is the very same thing as the truest form of pleasure; each is identical with the other and with happiness. To reach this conclusion Aristotle needs three of his characteristic theses: (1) that happiness is virtuous activity; (2) that the intellectual virtues are superior to the moral ones; (3) that pleasure is identical with the activity enjoyed. The argument, I shall maintain, is most forcefully set out in the Eudemian Ethics (including the Disputed Books), but I see no difference of substance on this issue between that treatise and the Nicomachean. In the NE the ground is already laid in the eighth chapter of the first book, the chapter where the ενδοξα are reconciled to the definition of happiness as ενεργεια κατ’ αρετην. The following passage is significant (1099a8–16). Their life is also in itself pleasant. For pleasure belongs to the soul, and everyone who is called a lover of X finds X pleasant: a horse is pleasant to a horselover, and a drama to a drama-lover, but in the same way just deeds to the lover of justice and in general virtuous deeds to the lover of virtue. Now most people’s pleasures clash with each other because they are not naturally pleasurable; but for those that love what is noble it is the naturally pleasurable things that are pleasant: namely, actions expressive of virtue, which are pleasurable for such people as well as in themselves. Their life has no need of pleasure as an additional ornament: it has its pleasure in itself.

It is the mark of the genuinely virtuous person to take pleasure in his virtuous deeds, rather than doing them painfully or grudgingly. Now happiness consists of the best, most virtuous, activities (or the best one of these best activities). So happiness is the pleasantest

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of all things—in accordance with a famous inscription at Delos (1099a17–31). The Philebus dichotomy is already undercut, but a number of things are left unclear. We are not yet told what is the relation between Plato’s φρονησις and the virtues whose exercise is pleasant. Though pleasure is no mere ornament, we are not yet told its precise relationship to pleasant activity. And while we may agree that a genuinely virtuous person finds virtuous activity pleasant, we are not here given reason to believe that this pleasure is greater than pleasure taken in other activities—unless it be that concentration on virtue is less likely to lead to a clash between competing pleasures. However, when happiness comes to be finally identified with philosophical contemplation in book ten, one of the reasons we are given is that contemplation is the pleasantest of virtuous activities. The very pursuit of philosophy provides unmixed and stable pleasures, and the contemplation that results from success in the pursuit is even more exquisitely delightful (1177a22–7). ‘Pleasure’ is not to be thought of as a good or bad thing in itself: the pleasure proper to good activities is good and the pleasure proper to bad activities is bad (1175b27). This doctrine leaves it open for the pleasure of the best activity to be the best of all human goods. This last doctrine is stated explicitly only in one of the Disputed Books: If certain pleasures are bad, that does not prevent the best thing from being some pleasure—just as knowledge might be, though certain kinds of knowledge are bad. Perhaps it is even necessary, if each state has unimpeded activities, that whether the activity (if unimpeded) of all our states, or that of some one of them is happiness, this should be the thing most choiceworthy; and this activity is a pleasure. (1153b7–11)

The problem with book ten of NE is that the long discussion of pleasure that introduces it leaves most readers uncertain whether pleasure is identical with, or supervenient to, the activity enjoyed.³ ³ In The Aristotelian Ethics, 233–8, I have argued that there is, in the end, no real difference of substance between the treatments of pleasure in the two treatises; but the

48 aristotle’s criteria for happiness But the corresponding (Eudemian) discussion in the third of the disputed books is unambiguous that pleasure is to be identified with (unimpeded) activity. The unimpeded activity of (one or more) virtues, which is identical with the greatest good, is also identical with the greatest virtue. Aristotle’s definitive resolution of the Philebus problem is most clearly set out in the Eudemian Ethics. Unlike the NE, the EE regards happiness as the exercise of all the virtues, not just of a single dominant virtue: it includes the exercise of the moral virtues, and of both the intellectual virtues, wisdom and understanding, that correspond together to Plato’s φρονησις.⁴ In his final book, having earlier established that happiness is the exercise of perfect virtue, Aristotle explains that perfect virtue is καλοκαγαθια (1249a18).⁵ He continues thus: Pleasure has already been discussed: what kind of thing it is, and in what sense it is a good; and how things which are pleasant simpliciter are noble simpliciter, and things which are good simpliciter are also pleasant. But there cannot be pleasure except in action: and so the truly happy man will also have the most pleasant life. (1249a18–21)

The backward references are to the context we have just discussed and to the Eudemian book on friendship. Things that are pleasant simpliciter are noble simpliciter because what most rightly deserves to be called pleasant is that which the wise man calls pleasant; and to him it is good and noble things that are pleasant (1235b36–1236a7). Things that are good simpliciter are also pleasant, because it is natural goods that are good simpliciter and these are naturally pleasant: this natural pleasure is nature’s road to virtue (1237a5–9). notorious ‘bloom on the cheek of youth’ passage (1174b23–32) has led many people to believe that the NE refuses to identify pleasure and activity. ⁴ See my Aristotle on the Perfect Life, 19–22. ⁵ The perfection of the virtue of a Eudemian καλοσκαγαθος is both final and complete: final, because he, unlike the Laconian, chooses not only virtuous action, but virtue itself, for its own sake; complete, because his happiness consists in the exercise of all the virtues (not just contemplation).

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Thus, for the ideally virtuous person the concepts ‘good’, ‘pleasant’, and ‘noble’ coincide in their application. If what is pleasant for a man differs from what is good for him, then he is not yet perfectly good but incontinent; if what is good for him does not coincide with what is noble for him, then he is not yet καλοσκαγαθος only αγαθος. For the nobly virtuous person the natural goods of health and wealth and power are not only beneficial but noble, since they subserve his noble virtuous activity. So, for him, goodness, nobility, and pleasantness coincide. The bringing about of this coincidence is the task of ethics (1237a3). But whereas something can be καλον or αγαθον whether it is a εξις or an ενεργεια (1248b35–7, b23–4) it is only an ενεργεια or πραξις that can be pleasant. So it is in the noble activities of the good man that the highest pleasure is to be found, and that pleasure, goodness, and nobility meet. We met earlier, in considering NE book one, the inscription from Delos: 5άλλιστον τὸ δικαιότατον, λῷστον δ’ ὑγιαινειν. ἥδιστον δ`ε πὲφυχ’ οὗ τις ἐρᾷ το τυχεˆιν. In the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle takes this text and puts it at the beginning of the book as a challenge. He will set out to prove that ευδαιμονια alone is the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things. In the final book the challenge is met. The noble activities of the good man are the activities of perfect virtue in which happiness consists. But it is in these noble activities that pleasure, goodness, and nobility meet. So Aristotle has carried out the promise of his first paragraph to show that happiness combines the three superlatives—noblest, best, and pleasantest—of the Deliac inscription.

5 Practical Truth in Aristotle In 1965, having been newly appointed a philosophy tutor at Balliol, I was assigned to teach the Nicomachean Ethics to Jonathan Barnes, then in his final year of Literae Humaniores. One week I assigned as a topic ‘Practical Truth’, with special reference to chapter 6. 2 of the Ethics. The essay he handed in was one of the best I ever encountered in a dozen years of Greats tutoring: I was so impressed that I asked him if I could keep it. Its theme was that Aristotle had no concept of practical truth: that was a fiction foisted on him by commentators. Sadly, I can no longer find the essay among my papers, so I cannot refresh my memory of the arguments it contained. However, in Barnes’s recently published Locke lectures On Truth etc the index contains no entry for practical truth, and there is no reference in the Index Locorum to NE 6. 2. So I conclude that the John Locke lecturer is in agreement with the fourth-year undergraduate: there is no such thing as practical truth. When I set the essay topic I was much influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe’s paper ‘Thought and Action in Aristotle’, published in J. R. Bambrough’s collection New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (Routledge, 1965). That paper concluded: What does Aristotle mean by ‘practical truth’? He calls it the good working, or the work, of practical judgement; and practical judgement is judgement of the kind described, terminating in action. It is practical truth when the judgements involved in the formation of the ‘choice’ leading to action are all true; but the practical truth is not the truth of those judgements. For it is clearly that ‘truth in agreement with right

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desire’ which is spoken of as the good working or the work of practical intelligence. That is brought about—i.e. made true—by action since the description of what he does is made true by his doing it, provided that a man forms and executes a good ‘choice.’ ... The notion of truth or falsehood in action would quite generally be countered by the objection that ‘true’ and ‘false’ are senseless predicates as applied to what is done. If I am right there is philosophy to the contrary in Aristotle ... these predicates apply to actions (praxeis) strictly and properly and not merely by an extension and in a way that ought to be explained away.

I have since come to believe that Anscombe’s interpretation is mistaken. There are, however, at the present day authoritative commentators who credit Aristotle with a theory of practical truth. Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe in their commentary of 2002 (OUP) say, ‘This strange notion of practical truth is central for Aristotelian ethics. If Aristotle cannot make it plausible he should either abandon the principle that truth is the proper work of rational thought or the doctrine that practical wisdom is an excellence of reason’ (p. 362). More recently still, Gabriel Richardson Lear in her Happy Lives and the Highest Good (Princeton UP, 2004) makes the notion of practical truth the keystone of her endeavour to reconcile the contemplative account of happiness in NE 10 with the emphasis on moral virtue in the earlier books. She maintains that for Aristotle the way in which morally virtuous activity is ‘for the sake of contemplation’ is that it is an approximation to it. It approximates to it in that it resembles it by being a mode of grasping truth, truth being the essential good that marks out rational humans from other animals. Among those who attach importance to practical truth in this way there is no agreement about who or what is the bearer of this truth. For Anscombe, the bearer is an action; for Lear, it is a person, for Broadie and Rowe it is the mind. Anscombe is surely wrong about this: nowhere does Aristotle describe a πραξις, a piece of conduct, as true. While there are, as Lear points out, verbs and adjectives that attribute truthfulness to human beings, the plain adjective αληθες is not one of them. Broadie and Rowe say

52 practical truth in aristotle ‘Truth, true etc. in this chapter connote, not a semantic property of propositions, but a property which the mind has when it is in the best relation to the objects in the domain it is addressing’ (p. 362). This too seems to me inadequate. Certainly Aristotle had no conception of the modern notion of a proposition as a timeless abstract entity: but rather than say broadly that truth is a property of the mind, we should say that it is a property of certain states and activities. To specify which particular states and actions, we need to look closely at what Aristotle has to tell us about προαιρεσις in this chapter. But first, a few words on translation. There is no satisfactory, or even conventionally agreed, English equivalent of the Greek word. (This may tell us something about the concept itself: as Anscombe asks, ‘If it had been a winner, like some other Aristotelian concepts, would not ‘‘prohaeretic’’ be a word as familiar to us as ‘‘practical’’ is?’) For different reasons ‘choice’ (Anscombe, Ross) ‘decision’ (Broadie and Rowe, Irwin), ‘purpose’ (Kenny¹) fail to fill the bill. In this chapter I will use ‘resolution’. I do not suggest this is the best translation of the Greek word in all contexts, but it has two merits. One is that a προαιρεσις is, among other things, the resolution of an inner debate. The other is that a new year’s resolution seems to be about the closest thing in everyday life to the kind of decision that Aristotle describes as προαιρεσις. The second problem that this chapter presents for the translator is the expression ‘‘λογος ενεκα τινος’’, translated by Anscombe as ‘reason with a view to something’ by Irwin as ‘reason that aims at some goal’ and by Rowe and Broadie ‘thought for the sake of something’. The literal meaning is ‘a for-the-sake-ofwhat account’, i.e. the account that one would give of what one was doing if one was asked ‘For the sake of what are you doing this?’ The natural way of putting the question in English is ‘why are you doing this?’ but we cannot simply call such ¹ A. Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (Duckworth, 1979).

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questions ‘why’ questions, since the English ‘why?’ can also seek for a causal explanation, corresponding to the Greek δια τι. So I will adopt an archaic usage, calling such questions ‘wherefore?’ questions, and translate ‘‘ου ενεκα’’ as ‘the wherefore’. Wherefore-reasoning includes, but is not exhausted by, means-end reasoning. Finally, there is the question how to translate ‘‘πραξις’’. The standard translation is ‘action’, but this is too broad. Right at the start of the chapter Aristotle tells us that brute beasts have no share in praxis: but non-human animals surely are capable of action. Henry V, urging his troops once more unto the breach, bade them imitate the action of the tiger. Moreover there are human actions, such as drawing a conclusion from a theoretical syllogism, which would not count as praxis. ‘Conduct’, therefore, seems the most appropriate translation. With these preliminaries, we can approach the crucial passages. The origin of conduct—its efficient, not its final cause—is resolution; and the origin of resolution is desire plus whereforereasoning (1139a1–33). Not every piece of conduct originates in resolution (novices in virtue do good πραξεις without προαιρεσις, and incontinent people behave badly without any resolution to do so: 114a15–20; 111b13). Nor does every resolution result in action. Once again the incontinent man provides a counter-example—the weak incontinent, who deliberates well but does not abide by his deliberation (1150b20). Nonetheless, resolution is par excellence the origin of conduct, and no conduct can be fully good unless it originates from a good resolution. Aristotle draws a parallel between the two elements that enter into resolution, namely desire and wherefore-reasoning. What assertion and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in the case of desire: so that since moral virtue is a state which finds expression in resolution, and resolution is deliberative desire, therefore, if the resolution is to be a good one both the reasoning must be true and

54 practical truth in aristotle the desire must be right—and the latter must pursue just what the former asserts. This, then is the kind of thought and the kind of truth that is practical. (1139a21–7)

The parallel between the cognitive and the affective operations of the mind is clear enough. Asserting is saying ‘yes’ to a statement, pursuit is saying ‘yes’ to a proposal or course of action. The adjective of commendation appropriate to a piece of reasoning (a λογος) is ‘true’, the adjective of commendation appropriate to a desire is ‘right’. We might say that correctness in assertion is truth while correctness in desire is rightness. For the resolution itself, Aristotle uses neither of these adjectives, instead he uses ‘‘σπουδαιος’’ one of his favourite words for ‘good’ as applied to human beings. There is no problem about the conclusion that if the resolution is to be good, the two elements involved in it must both be correct: bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu. The puzzling feature of this passage is the remark that the desire must pursue what the reasoning asserts. Surely this is not a unique requirement proper to a good resolution, but something necessary if there is to be a resolution at all. A desire for fish plus an expert knowledge of bee-keeping will not produce any action or any resolve. But Aristotle is making a stronger point: the assertion that is the conclusion of the reasoning, and the pursuit which is the upshot of the desire are one and the same thing, the very same resolve. As he puts it when he sums up the discussion, resolution can be thought of either as thought qualified by desire, or desire qualified by thought (1139b4–5). If resolution is a form of thought, does that mean that it can, like other thoughts, be described as true or false? If so, we would have, in the case of a sound resolution, a clear-cut instance of practical truth. But Aristotle in NE 3, in the course of distinguishing resolution from belief, says that whereas beliefs are classified as true or false, resolutions are divided rather into good and bad (1111b34). And EE 1226a4 says flatly ‘a resolution is neither true nor false’. So perhaps we should ask whether the two formulations—thought

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qualified by desire, and desire qualified by thought—stand on the same level as each other. Aquinas raised this question in his commentary on the passage, and the answer that he gives is persuasive. Because choice is the origin of conduct, and the originators of choice are appetite and reason (i.e. intellect or mind) which are, via choice, the originators of conduct, it follows that choice is appetitive intellect—that is to say essentially an act of the intellect in its function of regulating appetite—or choice is intellectual appetite—that is to say essentially an act of appetite in so far as it is directed by intellect. But the latter is truer, as is clear from the relevant objects. For the object of choice is good and evil, just like the object of appetite; its object is not the true and the false, which is the province of the intellect. (In X Ethic, L vi c. 2 Spiazzi 1137)²

So we do not locate practical truth in the resolution any more than in the action. Where then is it? Immediately after introducing the notion, Aristotle goes on to say In the case of thought that is theoretical and neither practical nor productive the ‘well’ and the ‘badly’ consist in truth and falsehood (for that is the function of any thought-faculty); but in the case of the faculty of practical thinking it is truth in accordance with right desire.

I take it that the ‘it’ towards the end of that quotation is ‘the ‘‘well’’ ’, not ‘the truth’ or ‘the function’. What Aristotle is telling us is that for the good operation of the faculty of practical reasoning mere truth is not enough; we need truth in concord with right desire. He is not denying that there could be true practical reasoning without right desire; only, such reasoning would not be the faculty operating as it should. ² Quia enim electio principium actus, et electionis principia sunt appetitus et ratio sive intellectus aut mens, qua mediante electione principia sunt actus, consequens est, quod electio sit intellectus appetitivus, ita scilicet quod electio sit essentialiter actus intellectus, secundum quod ordinat appetitum, vel sit appetitus intellectivus ita quod electio sit essentialiter actus appetitus, secundum quod dirigtur ab intellectu. Et hoc verius est: quod patet ex obiectis. Objectum enim electionis est bonum et malum, sicut et appetitus; non autem verum et falsum, quae pertinent ad intellectum.

56 practical truth in aristotle Well, what would be a case of practical truth in the absence of right desire? To answer this we have to do what Aristotle does not do in this dense chapter, and give some concrete examples. Elsewhere in the ethical treatises, and in the De Motu Animalium and the De Anima, Aristotle is quite generous with examples of practical reasoning. Most of them are unhelpful, however, in enabling us to construct examples of correct and incorrect προαιρεσις. There are two reasons for this. The first is that most of what commentators call ‘practical syllogisms’ in Aristotle’s texts are not examples of ethical reasonings (reasoning aimed at good conduct) but technical reasonings (designed to effect a product, whether an end such as health, or victory, or something tangible like a cloak or a house). Aristotle regularly distinguishes between πραξις and ποιησις, and the examples he frequently gives of the deliberations of medical men are instances of the latter. They are not really practical syllogisms at all—we should rather call them technical or productive syllogisms (since ‘poetical syllogisms’ would not quite do). In 6. 2 Aristotle adverts explicitly to the distinction between conduct and product. Practical thought governs productive thought: for whoever produces something produces it for the sake of an end: the product itself is not an end in an unqualified sense, but an end only relative to a particular consequent and antecedent. A piece of conduct, on the other hand, is an end, for doing well is the end par excellence and this is what desire aims at. (1131b1–5)

I see no reason to say, as Anscombe does, that the outcome of a doctor’s deliberations will not be a resolution unless it is part of his overall design for the pursuit of a good life. Sure, it will not be a good resolution unless it is embedded in a good life, but that does not mean that it will not be a resolution at all. Aristotle does indeed tell us that resolution cannot exist without intellect and thought and moral character; but the moral character need not be fully-fledged virtue or vice. A man’s resolutions will reveal his

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character—but it may show him to be brutish, foolish, continent or incontinent, rather than virtuous or vicious. The second reason why Aristotle’s own examples are unhelpful is that in the cases where he does consider ethical reasoning—as in the treatment of incontinence in NE 7—he concentrates on only one of the moral virtues, namely temperance. Temperance, of its nature, is most commonly expressed in negative resolutions—don’t smoke, leave your neighbour’s wife alone, and so on. So if we are to provide plausible examples of positive resolutions which answer to the recipe given in 6. 2, we will have to invent them for ourselves. At 1144a29–b1 Aristotle tells us ‘Those syllogisms which contain the starting points of acts to be done run ‘‘since the end, the highest good, is such and such’’.’ It is this passage, mistranslated, which is the origin of the misbegotten expression ‘practical syllogism’. What Aristotle means here is that the initial premiss in a piece of practical reasoning is a conception of the good life. A correct conception of that life will include a true appreciation of the moral virtues that are necessary to it. It will generate chains of reasoning such as the following: A man who is courageous will volunteer for an expedition that is dangerous and strategically important. This expedition is dangerous and strategically important. So I’ll volunteer. A man who is honest declares a conflict of interest when his private benefit clashes with his official duty. There is such a clash here. So I will make the conflict public. In such cases we have a universal statement and a particular statement, followed by a resolution. (In real life the chain of reasoning might well be much longer, setting out for instance the reasons why the expedition is strategically important, or why interest and duty pull in opposite directions.) The final utterance, beginning ‘So’, is the resolution: it is to be evaluated as good or bad, not as true or false; but obviously it will only be good if the previous statements are true. The ‘right desire’ which is necessary

58 practical truth in aristotle if this is to be an instance of good practical reasoning is the desire for courage or honesty. If that is so, what would be a case of truth unaccompanied by right desire? We might think, perhaps, of the clever strategies of an evil man (142b19); but they are not a case of practical truth at all, because the vicious man is not in possession of the correct universal. The intemperate man thinks that the good life is the incessant pursuit of pleasure; the democratic politician wrongly believes that goods should be distributed equally among all citizens. Such cases, for Aristotle, are examples of ‘error in the προαρεσις’ (NE 110b31). Such would be the case of Paris’s resolution to seduce Helen. There is a good deal of truth in his reasoning, ‘Sex with her would be very pleasant’ (true), ‘She’ll come away with me if I ask her’ (true). But his ‘so I’ll go for it’ is bad, not good, because his resolve is based on the false universal premiss ‘The aim of life is to have the best possible sex’. If we want an example of ethical truth without right desire, we have to distinguish between types of desire. First, there is the desire to have a good life: this, if Aristotle is right, is universal among human beings. It is only when mediated through a particular conception of the good life that this develops into the varied lower-level desires (e.g. for the particular virtues) which eventually find expression in resolution and action. In the case of our first example above, there is the natural desire for a good life, the virtuous desire for courage, and the good resolution expressed in ‘So I’ll volunteer’. There would be truth without right desire in the case of a person who reasoned only like this: A man who is courageous will volunteer for an expedition that is dangerous and strategically important. This expedition is dangerous and strategically important. So a courageous man would volunteer. There is nothing wrong with this man’s reasoning: he just lacks any enthusiasm for courage. (Perhaps his background thought is

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‘Thank God I’m not a courageous man’.) Now would the truth of his reasoning be, for Aristotle, practical truth? It seems natural to say that his conclusion is simply theoretical: it has no consequences in action. But for Aristotle theoretical reasoning has to be about the universal and unchanging, which this is not. I think we have to answer by making a distinction. It is truth that is a product of practical reasoning; but it is not truth that leads to a practical resolution. And because it leads to no good resolution, it is not an example of the good functioning of practical reasoning. Note that the case we have just been considering is not a case of incontinence. The incontinent weakling does draw the practical conclusion ‘So I’ll volunteer’. It is just that at the crucial moment his courage fails him and he cannot bring himself to raise his hand. The incontinent does possess practical truth: he has correct reasoning and right desire, and draws the right conclusion. The fact that he does not act on his resolve does not falsify his reasoning; his failure to volunteer does not make ‘So I’ll volunteer’ a falsehood, because it was a resolve, not a prediction. The error is in the performance, not in the resolution. Aristotle speaks as if the resolution follows from the premisses of a piece of practical reasoning. ‘One premiss is universal, and the other concerned with particular objects of perception; and when the two are brought together into a unity, the soul must at once affirm the conclusion’ (1147a27). The truth of a piece of wherefore-reasoning, therefore, will include not only the truth of the premisses, but the validity of the argument. The nearest English equivalent to ‘‘αληθες’’ so understood, is ‘sound’. In non-practical reasoning, a conclusion follows from premisses if it cannot but be true when the premisses are true. This is the criterion of a valid theoretical argument. But a resolution, we have argued, is not a truth: so the notion of ‘following from’ and the criterion for the validity of a piece of reasoning must be something different. The function of ordinary reasoning is to transmit truth from premisses to conclusion. In practical reasoning, not only is truth to be preserved as we proceed from premisses to resolution,

60 practical truth in aristotle but also goodness. For in the case of practical inference the goal of the reasoning is the good, just as in the case of theoretical reasoning the goal is the true. The rules of valid argument in the theoretical mode are designed to ensure that in reasoning one will never pass from something that is true to something that is not true. If there are rules for practical inference they must ensure that the inference conforms to a pattern that will never lead from a project that is good to one that is not good. Just as the truth of the premisses is communicated to (or as Aristotle would say, causes) the truth of the conclusion in a valid theoretical argument, so the goodness of the initial practical premiss (the desire for a good life) is communicated to the conclusion, which is the resolution to act appropriately. Aristotle never succeeded in setting out rules for valid practical reasoning, though the De Motu Animalium makes clear that he fondly hoped that they would turn out to have a close resemblance to his theoretical syllogistic. That hope was delusory because practical reasoning has a special feature: defeasibility. Theoretical reasoning is not defeasible: that is to say, the addition of a new premiss cannot invalidate a previously valid inference; a conclusion that follows from a set of premisses will follow from any larger set that includes them. The same is not true of practical reasoning. A course of action which may be reasonably estimated as good on the basis of a particular set of premisses may cease to be reasonable if further premisses (e.g. about the unintended consequences of the action) are brought into the picture. This defeasibility of practical reasoning has prevented not only Aristotle, but every subsequent logician, from presenting a satisfactory formulation of practical inference. In conclusion, I return to the initial debate between Anscombe and Barnes. I believe that Barnes was right to reject Anscombe’s claim that the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ apply to actions ‘strictly and properly and not merely by an extension and in a way that ought to be explained away’. Of course a man may be true or false to his word, but that is a different matter. On the other hand, I

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would maintain that Anscombe was right that ‘practical truth’ in Aristotle differs from plain truth. It differs because it signifies the soundness of practical reasoning, which rests on criteria different from those for the soundness of theoretical reasoning. What these criteria are must still be left, all these centuries later, as an exercise for the reader.

6 Aristotle’s Categories in the Latin Fathers The Latin Church Fathers of the fourth century had reason to be interested in Aristotle’s categories, or at least in the category of substance, in the period between the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), which formulated the relationship between the Son and the Father in the Christian Trinity. Nicaea (in the Latin version of Hilary of Poitiers) declared that the Son was ‘natum ex patre unigenitum, hoc est de substantia patris, deum ex deo, lumen ex lumine, deum verum de deo vero, natum, non factum, unius substantiae cum Patre (quod Graece dicunt homoousion)’. Constantinople (in the version of Dionysius Exiguus) described the Son as ‘natum ex patre ante omnia saecula, deum verum de deo vero, natum non factum, consubstantialem Patri’. With minor modifications these formulations provided the basis for the Creed recited liturgically in many Christian churches every Sunday. The Latin word substantia corresponds to the Greek ousia, which is the word used for the first of Aristotle’s categories. After the council of Nicaea many divines objected to the word homoousion to describe the Son’s relation to the Father, since it seemed to them to imply that the Son and the Father were not really distinct entitites. In Aristotelian terms, this would be the case if the ousia in question was first substance, but not if it was second substance. It is unlikely, of course, that the Fathers of Nicaea were familiar with the Aristotelian treatise. The point is simply that an acquaintance with the text would have provided a simple solution to the

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theological complexities that bedevilled the post-Nicene era. But at least in the Latin church the opportunity seems to have been missed. Hilary of Poitiers, who laboured to convince the West that the Nicene formula was orthodox, shows no interest in the distinction between first and second substance, and no evidence of familiarity with Aristotle. There was one Latin writer, however, who was both acquainted with Aristotle’s Categories and was a defender of the Nicene formulation against the semi-Arians who preferred the word ‘homoiousion’ to express the Son’s relation to the Father. Marius Victorinus was a Roman rhetorician of distinction whose conversion to Christianity is described in one of the set-pieces of Augustine’s Confessions (8. 2. 3). In his commentary on Cicero’s De Inventione he says: Aristoteles ait res omnes, quae in dictis et factis et in omni mundo aguntur decem esse: quorum rerum nomina ponemus. Prima substantia est, deinde quantitas, qualitas, ad aliquid, ubi, quando, situs, habere, facere, pati ... Harum prima, ut diximus, substantia vocatur. Reliquae novem in substantia sunt, quae accidentia vocantur ut puta, membrana substantia est: accidunt autem ei crocum scriptura et cetera, cum interea et substantia res sit et ea quae accidunt res sint ... Hic rem substantiam illam ponamus: quae dum solus est, patet omnibus accidentibus sed cum ab una accidenti fuerit occupata, iam in se incidentem aliam non admittit, put puta, lana alba res est, sed substantia. Haec res patet multis accidentibus, potest enim lana illa aut russea fieri aut veneta aut nigra. Sed si unum colorem in se susceperit, iam in se colorem alium non admittit. (Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores, 183)

This shows an acquaintance with the principal contents of the Categories. But according to Cassiodorus, Victorinus actually translated and commented on the Aristotelian text.¹ Cassiodorus’ testimony is accepted by some scholars, and rejected by others; but even the scholars who accept it dismiss Victorinus’ translation as lost without ¹ ‘Isagogen transtulit Victorinus orator; commentaque eius quinque libris vir magnificus Boethius edidit. Categorias item transtulit Victorinus, cuius commentum octo libris ipse quoque formavit’ (Institutes, 2.18, ed. Mynors p. 128).

64 the categories in the latin fathers trace. After all, Cassiodorus himself, when he quotes passages of the Categories, uses Boethius’ translation.² After his conversion, Victorinus wrote treatises in defence of Nicene orthodoxy against his Arian friend Candidus, and also a short tract De Homousio Recipiendo which is printed in the eighth volume of Migne’s patrology. These writings are largely concerned with scriptural argument, but there are also passages which draw on Aristotelian terms and concepts, and which show an acquaintance with, though not a mastery of, the distinction between first and second substance. The following text, for example, is accurate only if ‘substantia’ is understood as first substance. ‘[E]sse Graeci ousian vel upostasin dicunt: nos uno nomine latine substantiam dicimus. Et ousian Graeci pauci et rari, upostasin omnes. (PL 8, 11138)’ Nicene orthodoxy, while affirming that Father and Son shared a single ousia, agreed that they were two hypostases. Arguing against the semi-Arians, on the other hand, Victorinus has this to say: Impii et illi rursus, qui dicunt homoiousion esse filium patri. Substantia enim secundum quod substantialis est, non est alia, ut sit similis ad aliam, eadem enim est in duobus et non est similis, sed ipsa; sed alia cum sit, non quo substantia est similis dicitur, sed secundum quamdam qualitatem. Impossibile ergo et incongruum homoiousion esse aliquid.

This argument works only if ‘substance’ is understood as meaning second substance. If the same substantial predicate applies to two things (e.g. to Peter and Paul, who are both men) it is wrong to say that their substances are alike: it is not two humanities, but one and the same humanity, to be found in each of them. If two things are alike, it must be in respect of some quality, not in respect of the substantial predicate that makes them the kind of thing they are. We will return to Victorinus later: but I turn next to his admirer Augustine, the most famous reader of the Categories among ² Minio Paluello accepted Cassiodorus’ claim (CQ 39 (1945), 63–74) and he was followed by Chadwick, Boethius (OUP, 1981), 116. Hadot, Marius Victorinus (Paris, 1971), 197 and O’Donnell, Augustine’s Confessions (OUP, 1992), ii. 265 reject it.

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the Latin fathers. In the fourth book of the Confessions we read: What good did it do me that at about the age of twenty there came into my hands a work of Aristotle which they call the Ten Categories? My teacher in rhetoric at Carthage, and others too who were reputed to be learned men, used to speak of this work with their cheeks puffed out with conceit, and at the very name I gasped with suspense as if about to read something great and divine. Yet I read it without any expositor and understood it. I had discussions with people who said they had understood the Categories only with much difficulty after the most erudite teachers had not only given oral explanations but had drawn numerous diagrams in the dust. They could tell me nothing they had learnt from these teachers which I did not already know from reading the book on my own without having anyone to explain it. The book seemed to me an extremely clear statement about substances, such as man, and what are in them, such as a man’s shape, what is his quality of stature,³ how many feet, and his relatedness, for example whose brother he is, or where he is placed, or when he was born, or whether he is standing or sitting, or is wearing shoes or armour, or whether he is active or passive, and the innumerable things which are classified by these nine genera of which I have given some instances, or by the genus of substance itself. What help was this to me when the book was also an obstacle? Thinking that absolutely everything that exists is comprehended under the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes. I thought them to be in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty. By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body. My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss. (Confessions, 4. 16. 28–9, trans. Chadwick, OUP, 1991) ³ This seems a slightly odd translation of ‘figura hominis, qualis sit, et statura, quot pedum sit’: ‘what kind of figure a man has, and how many feet tall he is’ would be more natural. Augustine is thinking of whether a man is handsome or not: the reference is picked up in the discussion of God’s beauty and greatness in the next paragraph.

66 the categories in the latin fathers There has been considerable discussion of the question what translation Augustine was using. According to Minio-Paluello, Varro (116–27 bc) was the first translator of Aristotle’s text into Latin. This is on the basis of a passage in Martianus Capella where the lady dialectic says ‘Marci Terentii prima me in latinam vocem pellexit industria’ (xxx). However, it seems rash, on the basis of this alone, to conclude that Varro translated the entire organon, and no trace of or allusion to his translation is to be found. Quintilian (c. ad 35–c.95) seems to have been acquainted with Aristotle’s work, and lists the categories in his Institutio Oratoria (3. 6. 22): Ac primum Aristoteles elementa decem constituit, circa quae versari videatur omnis quaestio: ουσιαν, quam Plautus essentiam vocat (neque sane aliud est eius nomen Latinum), sed ea quaeritur ‘an sit’: qualitatem, cuius apertus intellectus est: quantitatem, quae dupliciter a posterioribus divisa est, quam magnum et quam multum sit: ad aliquid, under ductae tralatio et comparatio: post haec ubi et quando: deinde facere pati habere (quod est quasi armatum esse, vestitum esse): novissime κεισθαι, quod est compostum esse quodam modo, ut iacere stare. (p. 146, ed. Winterbottom, Oxford Classical Texts (OUP, 1970))

There is no evidence, however, that Quintilian himself made a translation, and indeed his discussion suggests that there was no agreed Latin version of key terms in his time. No satisfactory source has in fact been proposed for Augustine’s acquaintance with the Categories.⁴ Whatever was the text in which Augustine read the Categories, he made frequent use of its teaching in dealing with theological matters. We can draw some examples from his writing on the Trinity. In general, he rejects the application of accidental categories to the Godhead. We must think of God as ‘sine qualitate ⁴ O’Donnell (Augustine’s Confessions, ii. 265) seeks a solution from the order in which the categories are listed: Augustine gives quality as the first accident, whereas Aristotle gives quantity. But the only conclusion he reaches is this: ‘On the evidence of the order, therefore, A. is in the tradition from Porphyry and Calcidius (and leading to Boethius); fully neo-Platonic (and for that matter Porphyrian more than Plotinian).’ He does not point out that Augustine’s ordering is already there in Quintilian.

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bonum, sine quantitate magnum, sine indigentia creatorem, sine situ praesentem, sine habitu omnia continentem, sine loco ubique totum, sine tempore sempiternum, sine ulla sui mutatione mutabilia facientem nihilque patientem’ (De Trinitate, 5. 1. 2). However, God is without doubt a substance, Augustine agrees. Moreover, in controversy with Arians Augustine makes appeal to the special category of relation. Some Arians argued as follows. Whatever is said or thought of God is in substance, not accident. So to be unbegotten belongs to the substance of the Father, and to be begotten to substance of Son. Hence there is a difference in substance between the Father and the Son. To deal with this, Augustine introduces the Aristotelian notion of relation. ‘Begotten’ is a relational predicate, and so is ‘unbegotten’, because negations belong in the same category as what they negate. This is spelt out in the seventh chapter of De Trinitate V. Velut cum dicimus ‘homo est’ substantiam designamus. Qui ergo dicit: ‘non homo est’, non aliud genus praedicamenti enuntiat sed tantum illud negat. Sicut ergo secundum substantiam aio: ‘Homo est’, sic secundum substantiam nego cum dico: ‘Non homo est’, et cum quaeritur, quantus sit, et aio: ‘Quadripedalis est’, id esst quattuor pedum, qui dicit ‘Non quadripedalis est’ secundum quantitatem negat ... Et omnino nullum praedicamenti genus est secundum quod aliquid aiere volumes nisi ut secundum idipsum praedicamentum negare convincamur si praeponere negativam particulam voluerimus.

‘Unbegotten’ is, therefore, in the category of relation, as ‘begotten’ is. But the category of relation is not the same as the category of substance; one who is begotten is different from one who is unbegotten, the difference is not a difference in substance. Like Marius Victorinus, Augustine has some difficulty in relating Greek to Latin terminology. Should the Greek ousia be translated ‘essentia’ or ‘substantia’? Some writers prefer ‘essentia’ and regard ‘substantia’ as the equivalent of hypostasis, but Augustine confesses that he is not sure what the difference is between the two Greek words. The common Greek formula for the Trinity ‘mia ousia, treis hypostaseis’ sounds odd if rendered into Latin as ‘una essentia,

68 the categories in the latin fathers tres substantiae’ since ‘essentia’ and ‘substantia’ are often treated as synonymous. He opts finally for saying that there is one essence or substance, and three persons (De Trin. 5. 9). Among the texts printed by Migne among the works of Augustine (PL, 32) there is a work entitled Decem Categoriae attributed, by most of the manuscripts, to Augustine himself. The attribution goes back to Alcuin, who in about 790 edited the work and dedicated it to Charlemagne.⁵ From the time of the Maurist editors, modern scholars have been unanimous in rejecting this attribution, and following them I shall refer to the author of the treatise as pseudo-Augustine. The text was edited by MinioPaluello in the first volume of the Aristoteles Latinus, pp. 133–75. The work is neither exactly a version of, nor a commentary on, the Categories, but a paraphrase that contains substantial portions of translated text. It is a work of original intelligence that captures Aristotle’s sense reasonably accurately (usually if not always) without slavishly following his diction or passively reproducing his examples. The author also adds interesting developments—which may be his own, or may derive from Themistius, whose influence he acknowledges—of which we may give a few examples. Pseudo-Augustine asks which of three things form the subject matter of Aristotle’s text: things that exist, things that are in the mind, or things that are said. His answer is that the treatise is principally concerned with things in the mind, but the treatment of these necessarily involves a discussion of things that exist and things that are said (p. 137). Of the things that exist, some are known by the senses, others by the mind alone. What is detected by the senses, pseudo-Augustine says, is called ‘substance’ (usia), what is changeable and investigated by the mind is called ‘accident’ (p. 139). This is a very interesting remark, running counter to a view common later that the accidental ⁵ Alcuinus Magister a partibus scythiae nostras deveniens has cathegorias ab Aristotle Greco sermone editas et post ab Augustine latinis litteris elucidatas karolo regi francorum cum his versibus destinavit. See Minio-Paluello, Aristoteles Latinus, I. 5.

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forms of things were obvious to the senses, while the substantial form could be detected only by the intellect. Again, pseudo-Augustine remarks perceptively that there is a problem about the category of quality, since the notion of quality seems to be applicable within a number of other categories: we can speak of a learned man, a white surface, a proud father, a dark place, a warm month, and so on. In this context, he also interests himself in the relationship of adverbs to the categories (p. 159). The content of the treatise is sufficiently interesting to make it worth pursuing the question of its authorship. I will do so at the conclusion of this chapter, but first I will complete my brief survey of the use of the Categories in the Latin Fathers. The most significant figure in the story is, of course, Boethius, but I will pass over him since he has been fully discussed by other authors. Cassiodorus (c. ad 490–c.585) in his Institutiones, after discussing Porphyry’s Isagoge has this to say: Sequuntur Aristotelis Categoriae sive praedicamenta, quibus mirum in modum per varias significantias omnis conclusus est sermo; quorum organa sive instrumenta sunt tria. Organa vel instrumenta categoriarum sive praedicamentorum sunt tria: aequivoca univoca denominativa: aequivoca dicuntur quorum nomen solum commune est, secundum nomen vero substantiae ratio diversa, ut animal homo et quod pingitur. Univoca dicuntur quorum et nomen commune est, et secundum nomen discrepare eadem substantiae ratio non probatur, ut animal homo atque bos. (p. 113, ed. Mynors)

Cassiodorus lists the ten categories as follows: substantia, quantitas, ad aliquid, qualitas, facere, pati, situs, quando, ubi, habere. He gives a clear account of the difference between first and second substance. Substantia est, quae proprie et principaliter et maxime dicitur, quae neque de subiecto praedicatur neque in subiecto est, ut aliqui homo vel aliqui equus. Secundae autem substantiae in quibus speciebus illae, quae principaliter substantiae primo dictae sunt, insunt atque clauduntur, ut in homine Cicero. (p. 113)

70 the categories in the latin fathers Cicero, along with Hortensius, was also given as an example of a first substance by pseudo-Augustine (p. 135). The series of Latin fathers who made use of the Categories is concluded by Isidore of Seville, who discusses the work in his Etymologies 2. 26. His chapter on the Aristotelian text is largely a mosaic of borrowings from previous writers. The first sentence is almost a verbatim quotation of the passage from Cassiodorus quoted above. He then inserts two sentences from Martianus Capella before returning to Cassiodorus’ text to distinguish between first and second substances. At the end of the chapter he borrows from pseudo-Augustine to draw a distinction between various types of accident. Ex his novem accidentibus tria intra usiam sunt, quantitas et qualitas et situs. Haec enim sine usia esse non possunt. Extra usiam vero sunt locus, tempus et habitus; intra et extra usiam sunt relatio, facere et pati. (2. 26. 13 = Ps-Aug, 144)

Isidore gives as an example of a sentence utilizing all the categories: Augustine, a great orator, the son of so-and-so, standing in the temple today and wearing a crown, is tired out by disputing. I turn in conclusion to the question of the authorship of the pseudo-Augustinian Decem Categoriae. First, I suppose, one should consider for a moment whether the Maurist rejection of its authenticity can be called into question. After all, in our own time, the De Dialectica, long considered spurious, has been returned to the canon and edited by Darrell Jackson (Reidel, 1975). However, a convincing argument against the genuineness of the Decem Categoriae is that, unlike the De Dialectica, it is not mentioned in the Retractationes. No author ever took so much care as Augustine did to see that his Nachlass was handed over intact to posterity. I see no reason, therefore, to deny to pseudo-Augustine the attribution of recent centuries. The question is: who is pseudo-Augustine? Several indications in the Decem Categoriae make clear that the work was written in the fourth century. The author is a contemporary and admirer of Themistius (317–88). When he

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assigns mental ideas as Aristotle’s subject matter, the author adds ‘ut erudito nostrae aetatis Themistio philosopho placet’ (p. 137), and at the end of the treatise he acknowledges his debt to ‘Themistii nostra memoria egregii philosophi magisterium’ (p. 175). In the course of his discussion of the category of ‘situs’ the author goes out of his way to praise one Agorius ‘quem ego inter doctissimos habeo’ (p. 162). On the basis of this last text scholars for a long time identified the author as Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, (c. ad 320–c.384), an anti-Christian philosopher and senator who is credited by Boethius with translating Themistius’ paraphrase of Aristotle’s Analytics.⁶ But Henry Chadwick is surely right to say that, on the contrary, ‘unless one resorts to the desperate expedient of seeing this remark as an interpolation from a marginal note by an early reader, this text must decisively disprove the old opinion’.⁷ Chadwick prefers the hypothesis put forward in 1945 by MinioPaluello (CQ 39: 63–74) that the author’s name was Albinus, corrupted in transmission to Augustinus. On the basis of this conjecture, and on the strength of the acknowledgement to Themistius in the envoi of the treatise, Minio-Paluello entitled his edition of the Decem Categoriae ‘A-I Paraphrasis Themistiana’. There were, indeed, several members of the Albini family in the circle of Agorius, the most plausible of whom, as a candidate author, would be Ceonius Rufus Albinus, the consul of 335, who was a writer on dialectic.⁸ However, unless this man lived for a considerable time after his consulate, he is unlikely to have written the treatise, because in 335 Themistius was only 18 and Agorius 15, and both, as we have seen, are mentioned with respect. Instead of Agorius and Albinus I would like to propose for consideration as a candidate author Marius Victorinus. Here the chronology presents no difficulties. Victorinus was converted to Christianity, after a distinguished rhetorical career, in about 354; ⁶ J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca III (1793), 211; Schanz/Hosius, Gesch.d. rom Litt IV 2 (1920), 412, 414; G. Pfligersdorffer, Wiener Studien, 65 (1970), 131–7. ⁷ Boethius (OUP, 1981), 114. ⁸ The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OUP, 1996), 50.

72 the categories in the latin fathers he would have been well placed to write, in his later pagan or early Christian days, a treatise such as the Decem Categoriae. He could well have met Themistius when the latter visited Rome in 357. As we have seen, Cassiodorus tells us that Victorinus translated and commented on the Categories, and it is surely not too hardy a speculation to suggest that the text of Victorinus that has gone missing is identical with the paraphrase that lacks an author. Given that the word ‘ens’ was coined by Victorinus it might not be unreasonable to quote in support of the conjecture ‘entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem’.⁹ Several features of the Decem Categoriae suggest that it was written by a grammarian or rhetorician rather than a dialectician. The stock examples of individuals are not philosophers like Socrates and Hippias but orators like Hortensius and Cicero. From time to time the author digresses to enlarge on points of diction, for instance to rebuke those who say ‘mulier habet maritum’, rather than ‘mulieri est vir’ (p. 168). On the crucial philosophical issue of the difference between first and second substance the text seems considerably confused (pp. 134–5). Victorinus’ treatment of the categories in his commentary on Cicero resembles the mixture of independent imagination and uncertain philosophical footwork characteristic of pseudo-Augustine. So far as I am aware, no close comparison has been made between the style of pseudo-Augustine and that of Victorinus. A superficial glance does not suggest any close resemblance between the two. On the other hand, there are considerable and obvious differences between the rhetorical works of Victorinus and his Christian works of anti-Arian polemic. As Augustine was well aware, a close study of the Bible can have a drastic effect on one’s Latin style. The hypothesis that Victorinus was responsible for the Categories would also provide a solution to two problems we have already ⁹ To be sure, there is some uncertainty about the manuscript tradition of the passage in Cassiodorus, and on the basis of this Hadot (Marius Victorinus, 197) denies that Victorinus made a translation of the Categories. But I see no reason to prefer his conjectural reconstruction of the text to that printed in Mynors’s edition.

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encountered. No satisfactory answer has been given to the question: in what version did Augustine encounter the Categories around the year 374? May it not have been in the Decem Categoriae if that had been produced by Victorinus a decade or two earlier? It is by that name that Augustine refers to Aristotle’s treatise. Again, may not the reason that the work was attributed to Augustine himself have been that it was found after his death among his own papers? It would not be surprising if he possessed, in his library at Hippo, a version of a text he utilized, written by a fellow African whom he much admired. This of course is all conjecture: but it is a conjecture which, I submit, deserves further study.

7 Essence and Existence: Aquinas and Islamic Philosophy The topic of this chapter presents a problem right at the outset. Neither Thomas Aquinas nor any Islamic philosopher spoke English, and it is not a trivial matter to decide what are the appropriate English translations of their technical terms. In the topic proposed, for instance, ‘existence’ is no doubt intended to be equivalent to esse, the infinitive form of the Latin verb for ‘to be’, and I shall interpret the first part of my task as being to discuss the relationship between essentia and esse in Aquinas. I shall, initially, leave the word esse untranslated because it has multiple meanings in Aquinas’s writing. It is possible to disambiguate these meanings by giving them different English paraphrases, and I have tried to do so in my book Aquinas on Being (OUP, 2002) where I claim to have identified twelve different senses in which Aquinas used the word. In this chapter I shall concentrate only on two of these, which I shall render as ‘existence’ and ‘being’. My initial point is simply that it is misleading and tendentious to use any one English word (e.g. ‘existence’) to correspond to the Latin esse. Later in the chapter, I will make some remarks about the analogous problem concerning the terminology of Islamic philosophers, in particular Ibn Sina. Aquinas’s first systematic treatise on esse is in his early work De Ente et Essentia. The Latin words which give the treatise the title, De Ente et Essentia, are related to the verb esse, since ens is

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the present participle of the verb, and essentia is an abstract noun formed from it. I shall speak in English of essence, since essentia, though it has more than one sense, does not present the same systematic ambiguity as esse does. Ens I shall translate as ‘Being’ with a capital B, reserving the lower case ‘being’ as the equivalent of one important sense of esse. In a central passage of On Being and Essence Aquinas writes as follows. Whatever [belongs to a thing and] is not part of the concept of an essence or quiddity is something that arrives from outside and is added to the essence; because no essence can be conceived without the elements which are parts of the essence. But every essence or quiddity can be conceived without anything being understood with respect to its esse; for I can understand what a human being is, or what a phoenix is, and yet be ignorant whether they have esse in the nature of things. Hence it is clear that esse is different from essence or quiddity, unless there is something whose quiddity is its esse; and there could be only one such primal thing.¹

This passage is one of the most discussed in all of St Thomas’s writings: it is the best-known argument for the famous doctrine attributed to him, known as ‘the real distinction between essence and existence’. Though, as I have argued, it is a mistake systematically to translate esse as existence, the context makes it clear that it is indeed existence that Aquinas has in mind here. I can know what a phoenix is, without knowing whether there are any such things as phoenixes in reality (‘in the nature of things’). I know that a phoenix is an Arabian bird of gorgeous plumage that has a lifespan of 600 years, after which it burns itself to ashes, and then emerges with renewed youth to live through another cycle. I can know this without knowing whether there is any such ¹ Quidquid enim non est de intellectu essentiae vel quidditatis, hoc est adveniens extra, et faciens compositionem cum essentia; quia nulla essentia sine his quae sunt partes essentiae intelligi potest. Omnis autem essentia vel qudditas potest intelligi sine hoc quod aliquid intelligatur de esse suo: possum enim intelligere quid est homo vel phoenix, et tamen ignorare an esse habeat in rerum natura: ergo patet quod esse est aliud ab essentia vel quidditate. Nisi forte sit aliqua res cuius quidditas sit ipsum suum esse; et haec res non potest esse nisi una et prima.

76 essence and existence thing in existence as a phoenix. In fact, I have a pretty shrewd idea that there is no such thing, and I suspect St Thomas did too; but there is nothing in the concept of phoenix which I have just enunciated to show whether there is or is not such a thing. If this is what is meant by the real distinction between essence and existence, then the thesis is quite unproblematic. Note, however, that just as esse here unproblematically means existence, so ‘essence’ here has a simple and unproblematic meaning. ‘The essence of F’ here means simply ‘The meaning of the word ‘‘F ’’ ’. Later in his life, St Thomas used regularly to make a sharp distinction between the meaning of F (which I know by knowing language) and the essence of F (which it takes scientific study to ascertain). When he says, however, that I understand the essence of phoenix, he can only mean that I know what the word ‘phoenix’ means; he cannot mean that I have made a scientific study of phoenixes, as there aren’t any around for me to study. I know the essence of phoenix in the sense that I have a concept of phoenix, the concept which is exhibited in my mastery of the use of the word. In these terms, the doctrine of the real distinction may be expressed thus: I can grasp a concept without knowing whether the concept is instantiated. Other formulations can be put forward which make substantially the same point in ways which some philosophers may find more congenial. I can understand a predicate without knowing whether it is true of anything; I can use the expression ‘is a phoenix’ without knowing whether anything is a phoenix. Philosophers in the scholastic tradition have long argued about whether the distinction here established is a real or only a notional distinction. It is not always clear what exactly is meant to be the difference between a real and a notional distinction, but it seems safe to assume that there is only a notional and not a real distinction where one and the same object is identified by two different concepts. Thus, for instance, there will be a notional, but not a real, distinction, between the morning star and the evening star, or between the square of 2 and the square root of 16. On the other

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hand, there will be a real distinction between the planet Mars and the planet Venus, and between the square root of 9 and the cube root of 16. It seems clear that Aquinas’s phoenix argument establishes something other than a mere conceptual distinction. The only objection to Aquinas’s teaching on essence and existence, as we have explained it, is that ‘real distinction’ seems too weak a way of marking the difference. It conjures up a picture of a metaphysical fissure between two entities. It may suggest that A’s essence and A’s existence provide two different answers to a single question, whereas of course they are answers to questions of totally different kinds. The query ‘Is there a real distinction between essence and existence?’ should bring us up short like the question ‘In ten green bottles is there a real distinction between the tenness and the greenness?’ But in fairness to Aquinas we should remember that he himself often draws attention to the radical difference between the question ‘what is an A?’ (quid sit) and ‘is there an A?’ (an sit). Whether or not its formulation is confusing, the thesis seems to be true and important. It is when the doctrine is employed to mark a fundamental difference between creatures and God that it becomes more difficult to comprehend. For it seems that in the same way as I can have a concept of phoenix without knowing whether there are phoenixes or not, so I can have a concept of God without knowing whether there is a God or not. Atheists, after all, have a concept of God; otherwise they wouldn’t know what it was they were denying when they deny that God exists. So if the phoenix argument is supposed to prove a real distinction between essence and existence, there seems to be a real distinction in the case of God as well as in the case of creatures. Moreover, if esse here is existence, what are we to make of the doctrine that Aquinas goes on to expound (4. 113–19) that God is subsistent esse? There seems to be an absurdity in saying of anything that its essence is pure existence; an absurdity that was well brought out, many years ago, by Peter Geach in a dialogue which he imagined between a theist and an atheist.

78 essence and existence Theist: Atheist: Theist:

There is a God. So you say: but what sort of being is this God of yours? Why I’ve just told you: There is a God, that’s what God is.

I believe that Geach’s criticism is effective in disposing of the notion of subsistent existence; but (as Geach himself says) there may be ways of understanding the idea that God is his own esse which do not involve the nonsensicality just exposed.² Let us therefore consider more closely the relation between the Latin verb esse and the English expressions which correspond to it. The Latin verb can be used to indicate existence, as the English verb ‘to be’ can in such sentences as ‘there is a virus which causes pneumonia’ or ‘there are sea-going mammals’ or ‘Caesar is no more’. The Latin verb can be used as the grammatical predicate to indicate the existence of what corresponds to the subject term, as in ‘Deus est’, which in modern English is most naturally translated as ‘There is a God’. The corresponding use of ‘is’ on its own in English is rare and archaic. It can, however, be found from time to time in the King James Bible, as in Hebrews 11: 6: ‘he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.’ Again, in Wordsworth’s poem, we read ‘she lived unknown, and few could know | when Lucy ceased to be’. Existence itself, as the examples above illustrate, can be attributed in more than one way. When we use ‘exists’ in a way corresponding to the English ‘there is a ...’ or ‘there are’ construction, we are saying that there is something in reality corresponding to a certain description or instantiating a certain concept: for instance ‘black swans exist’ or ‘there are plants which devour insects’. We might call this ‘specific existence’: it is the existence of something corresponding to a certain specification, something exemplifying a species, for instance, such as the insect-eating plant. But when we say ‘Julius Caesar is no more’ or ‘Julius Caesar no longer exists’ we are not talking about a species, we are talking about a historic ² G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Blackwell, 1961), 87.

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individual, and saying that he is no longer alive, no longer among the inhabitants of the universe. We might call this ‘individual existence’. The Latin verb esse can be used to indicate either kind of existence. Thus ‘Deus non est’, literally ‘God is not’ could be used to assert either that there is no such thing as God (God is and always has been a mere fiction of human imagination) or that God is no more—i.e. that God is dead in the quite literal sense that the creator of the world has passed away (a possibility entertained by a character in one of Hume’s dialogues). Philosophers in recent centuries who have considered existence have concentrated on specific existence, and since the time of Frege it has been customary to cast statements of specific existence in the ‘There is a ... ’ form. For logical purposes a sentence of the form ‘Fs exist’ is rewritten with the aid of a quantifier as ‘There is at least one x such that x is F’ or more simply ‘Something is F’. An advantage of this form is that it makes more perspicuous the import of negative existential propositions such as ‘extra-terrestrial intelligences don’t exist’. If we take this as a straightforward subjectpredicate sentence we seem to get into a muddle: for if the sentence is true there isn’t anything in the universe for the subject expression ‘extra-terrestrial intelligences’ to refer to, and so it is obscure what we are predicating non-existence of. Whereas if we say ‘There is no x such that x is an extra-terrestrial intelligence’ or ‘nothing is an extra-terrestrial intelligence’ that problem disappears. Since Kant many philosophers have quoted with approval the slogan ‘existence is not a predicate’. Here again it is important to distinguish between specific and individual existence. It is correct to say that statements of specific existence are not to be regarded as predications about any individual. Statements of individual existence, on the other hand, are genuine predications about what their subject-term stands for: as in ‘The Great Pyramid still exists, but the Pharos of Alexandria does not’. Now let us ask whether, if someone says that God’s essence is existence, it is specific or individual existence that is in question.

80 essence and existence The fact that the doctrine is supported by the phoenix argument suggests that Aquinas had specific existence in mind; but as Geach has shown, if interpreted as referring to specific existence the thesis is an absurdity. Statements of specific existence can be rephrased in terms of the quantifier: so if God is pure existence, then ‘God’ must be equivalent to ‘For some x, x ... ’—a quantifier with a bound variable attached to no predicate. So understood, the thesis reduces God to an ill-formed formula. Shall we ask, therefore whether we can make sense of the essence = existence doctrine if we interpret existence not as specific but as individual existence? It can certainly be argued that individual existence is essential to God in a way in which it is not in the case of creatures. Animals may die, and mountains may be swallowed up in an earthquake; but God cannot cease to exist. Whatever Hume may fantasize, a God who could cease to exist would not be a real God. Furthermore, a being, however grand, who had come into existence at some time in the past would not be God. If there is ever a God, there is always a God. However, the fact that everlasting existence is an essential attribute of Godhead does not mean that there is, in fact, a God. Interpreted in this way, the doctrine that existence is essential to God can be cheerfully endorsed by an atheist. If there were a God, the atheist may agree, he would indeed enjoy everlasting existence. But there isn’t a God, the atheist maintains, there just isn’t anything in the universe that exists for ever. All of us can agree that Homer’s gods were by definition immortal: but the immortal ones, happily, were only a myth. For that matter our friend the phoenix is in its own way immortal; but there isn’t any such thing as a phoenix. Moreover, there is a difference between saying that existence is essential to God and saying that in God essence and existence are identical. Everlasting existence might be part of the essence of God, without being the whole of it. The thesis that in God essence is existence makes it sound as if we know the answer to the question ‘What is God’s essence?’—namely, existence. It sounds more respectful, as well as more plausible, to say that we do not

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know what God’s essence is, but we do know that whatever it is, it must entail everlasting existence. If we make a distinction between individual and specific existence, we should also make a corresponding distinction between universal and individual essences. Aquinas believed not just that there were universal essences, such as humanity, he also believed that there were individual essences, e.g. the humanity of Peter. Indeed, the individual essences were real in a way that universal essences were not. A passage from the commentary on the Sentences reads as follows: Of the things which are signified by names there are some which are extra-mental in respect of their whole complete esse: these are complete entities such as a man or a stone. Others have no extra-mental counterpart, such as dreams and chimeric imaginings. But there are some cases where the formal element of a concept is the work of the mind even though they have an extra-mental foundation in reality; such is clearly the case with universals, for humanity is something in reality, but in reality it does not have the property of universality, since outside the mind there is no humanity that is common to many.³

If we ask, therefore, whether an essence such as humanity is or is not real, Aquinas will reply: universal humanity is not real, real humanity is not universal. There are as many real humanities as there are real human beings: a human essence is individuated by its possessor. In creatures, Aquinas tells us, the numerical multiplicity of essences is consequent on the multiplicity of the things which have the essences. (The technical term which he uses for the things which have the essences is ‘supposits’, a supposit being the thing for which the subject-term of a sentence stands for.) The example ³ Eorum quae significantur nominibus ... quaedam sunt quae secundum esse totum completum sunt extra animam; et huiusmodi sunt entia completa, sicut homo et lapis. Quaedem autem sunt quae nihil habent extra animam, sicut somnia et imaginatio chimaerae. Quaedam autem sunt quae habent fundamentum in re extra animam sed complementum rationis eorum quantum ad id quod est formale, est per operationem animae, ut patet in universali. Humanitas enim est aliquid in re, non tamen ibi habet rationem universalis, cum non sit extra animam aliqua humanitas multis communis. 1 Sent. 19. 5. MM 486.

82 essence and existence he gives is that the humanity of Socrates is numerically different from that of Plato.⁴ (In ‘Socrates is a man’ the man Socrates would be, in Aquinas terminology, the supposit.) So, in the real world, we have Socrates and Socrates’ humanity, and Plato and Plato’s humanity; there is not, in the real world, any humanity common to both Socrates and Plato. For Aquinas, being human is one form of being, just as being metal or being divine is another form of being. He is fond of quoting an Aristotelian slogan: Vita viventibus est esse: for living things to be is to be alive. Aquinas believed that in statements of individual existence ‘S is’ was equivalent to ‘S is P’ where ‘P’ is a predicate in the Aristotelian category of substance—e.g. ‘Lucy is no more’ = ‘Lucy is no longer a human being’. Generalizing, if ‘F’ gives the essence of x, then for x to continue to be is for x to continue to be F. So for God to exist (if we have in mind individual existence) is the same thing as for God to be God: by existing he as it were exhibits or exercises his essence (whatever that may be). We are now in a position to draw a clear distinction between existence and being. Let us reserve the word ‘existence’ to mark specific existence, that is to say the instantiation of a concept, which in modern philosophy would be indicated by a sentence with an existential quantifier. And let us use ‘being’ for what we have just been calling individual existence, namely, the continuing possession of an individual essence. Armed with this distinction, what are we to make of Aquinas’s thesis that in God essence and esse are the same, while in creatures they are distinct? It seems that if we take esse as existence, then in God no less than in creatures there is a real distinction, but if we take esse as being, then there is no real distinction in creatures any more than in God. Can we say that Fido’s essence and Fido’s being are distinct? If a real distinction between A and B means that ⁴ In omnibus enim creaturis ita est quod ad multiplicationem suppositorum sequitur multiplicatio essentiae secundum numerum, sicut alia humanitas est numero in Socrate et Platone. In 1 Sent. 2. 1. 4 (MM 73).

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we can have one without the other, then it seems that the answer must be in the negative. For a dog to go on being is simply for it to go on being a dog, and for a human being to continue to exist is for it to go on possessing its human nature or essence. Peter’s continuing to exist is the very same thing as Peter’s continuing to possess his essence; if he ceases to exist he ceases to be a human being and vice versa. But would Aquinas agree with the statement we have just made? Some philosophers have believed that there are individualized essences of non-existent beings; that long before Adam and Eve were created there were already such things as the essence of Adam and the essence of Eve, and that the creation of Adam and Eve consisted precisely in God giving existence to these essences. In this case there will be a real distinction between essence and existence in Adam, since Adam’s essence can be around when Adam does not exist. Someone who thinks in this way will regard the relation of existence to essence as being exactly parallel to that of form to matter or accident to substance; all three cases will be in the same way instances of the actualization of a potentiality. And that is indeed how Aquinas speaks in De Ente et Essentia, when discussing the nature of angels or pure intelligences. Whatever receives something from another is in potentiality with respect to it; and what is received in it is its actuality. Therefore the form or quiddity, which is an intelligence, is in potentiality with respect to the esse which it receives from God; and that esse is received in the manner of an actuality. Thus there is actuality and potentiality in the intelligences, though not form and matter.⁵

Later in life, however, Aquinas was quite clear that creation does not involve the actualization of any pre-existent potentiality. In his long treatment of creation in the De Potentia there is no ⁵ Omne autem quod recipit aliquid ab alio est in potentia respectu illius, et hoc quod receptum est in eo est actus eius; ergo oportet quod ipsa quidditas vel forma quae est intelligentia sit in potentia respectu esse quod a Deo recipit, et illud esse receptum est per modum actus; et ita invenitur potentia et actus in intelligentiis, non tamen forma et materia. (4. 147–54)

84 essence and existence suggestion that creation is the actualization of individual preexistence essences. Indeed, Aquinas states explicitly: when esse is assigned to a quiddity, not just the esse but the quiddity is created, because before it has esse it is nothing at all outside the mind of the creator.⁶ Just as he insisted against Plato that there cannot be any actualization without individuation (whatever exists in the world is individual, not universal) so too he insisted against the essentialists that there can be no individuation without actualization (only what actually exists can be identified, individuated, counted). But once this is made clear, then the real distinction between essence and being in creatures appears unintelligible, or at best vacuous. One of Aquinas’s most resolutely anti-Platonic statements comes in question forty-five of the first part of the Summa Theologiae. The fourth article of the question insists that the proper object of creation, the things that actually get created, are self-subsistent substances, not forms. Creation is one way of coming into being. What coming into being amounts to depends on what being is. So those things properly come into being and are created, which properly have being. And those are subsistent objects ... That to which being properly belongs, is that which has being—and that is a subsistent thing with its own being. Forms, and accidents, and the like, are not called beings because they themselves are, but because by them something else is what it is. Thus whiteness is only called a being because by it something is white. That is why Aristotle says that an accident not so much is as is of. So, then, accidents and forms and the like, which do not subsist, are rather co-existent than existent, and likewise they should be called concreated rather than created. What really gets created are subsistent entities.⁷ ⁶ Ex hoc ipso quod quidditati esse attribuitur, non solum esse, sed ipsa quidditas creari dicitur, quid antequam esse habeat nihil est, nisi forte in intellectu creatoris. (3. 5. ad 2 (P, 66)) ⁷ Creari est quoddam fieri, ut dictum est. Fieri autem ordinatur ad esse rei. Unde illis proprie convenit fieri et creari, quibus convenit esse. Quod quidem convenit proprie subsistentibus: ... Illi enim proprie convenit esse, quod habet esse; et hoc est subsistens in suo esse. Formae autem et accidentia, et alia huiusmodi, non dicuntur entia quasi ipsa sint, sed quia eis aliquid est; ut albedo ea ratione dicitur ens, quia ea subjectum est album. Unde, secundum Philosophum, accidens magis proprie dicitur entis quam ens. Sicut igitur

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The passage as quoted is admirable as a statement of forthright Aristotelianism as against any Platonic reification of forms, whether substantial or accidental. But in that very passage, in a sentence which I deliberately omitted, Aquinas divides the subsistent entities, which alone really have being and are created, into two classes: complex material substances, on the one hand, and separated substances on the other. But separated substances—angelic spirits and the like—are, as understood by Aquinas, forms that are not forms of anything, and his way of conceiving them seems open to all the objections an Aristotelian would make against a Platonist. It seems difficult to render Aquinas’s teaching coherent in passages such as this, save by saying that he is an Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven. The thesis that in God alone essence and being are identical is regularly linked by Aquinas with the thesis that God is pure actuality. It is not difficult to make a contrast between God, so conceived, and creatures like ourselves whose life is one of constant change. I am no longer what I once was; there are many things I will be that I am not yet; much that I could have done I did not do, and I never will do everything that is in my power to do. Each period of my life is distinct from every other, with its own limitations and its own context. Nothing of the kind could be said of God: for him no petty pace creeps on from day to day. Even the immortals of Greek legend were able to combine the power of youth and the wisdom of age. God’s life is not a life cycle; his existence is not fragmented; he has no history. Considerations of this kind, no doubt, lie behind the insistence that God is pure actuality. The question is whether this is well expressed by saying that his essence is his esse. If his essence was other than his esse, Aquinas says, then his essence would be in potentiality to his esse. Is this so? On Aquinas’s view, my essence is other than my esse: but is it in potentiality to it? Certainly not, accidentia et formae, et huiusmodi, quae non subsistuent, magis sunt coexistentia quam entia; ita magis debent dici concreata quam creata. Proprie vero creata sunt subsistentia. (1a. 45. 4, c.)

86 essence and existence if esse is existence: it is not as if, before ever I was conceived, my essence was there waiting for me to pop into existence and actualize it. But even if we take esse as equivalent to life (taking our cue from the slogan vita viventibus est esse) it does not seem that my essence is in potentiality to esse. My essence is not something that can possess or not possess my life: my life and my essence run entirely parallel. For me to go on living is for me to go on being the human being that I am. So, once again, Aquinas’s thesis about essence and esse seems to fail so far to make the distinction he wants between creatures and the creator. Aquinas’s account of being, as opposed to existence, is highly mysterious. In different texts he seems to take different stances with regard to the question ‘What is God’s essence?’ Sometimes (as in 1a. 2. 2 ad 2) he says that we do not know the answer to the question: God’s essence eludes us. This seems sensible modesty, though it is less modest than it appears, because Aquinas has such high standards of what knowledge is that it turns out that the essences of at most few things are known to us.⁸ At other times he seems to suggest that we do know the answer to the question: God’s essence is esse. And we may indeed ask what it is that we know when we know the truth of the affirmative proposition ‘God is’. ‘Is’, Aquinas says, is here the copula; but it cannot be a mere copula or the sentence is incomplete, lacking a predicate. If it is doing duty for both copula and predicate, then what corresponds to the predicate must be the divine esse. And must we not grasp this if we are to know that the whole subject-predicate statement is true? In the case of God’s essence Aquinas drew a distinction between the quiddity and the meaning of a word: we do not know what God is, but we know the meaning of the noun ‘God’. Perhaps he might wish to draw a similar distinction in the case of God’s esse: we do not understand God’s esse but we know the meaning of the verb ‘is’. The difficulty is that Aquinas in different places explains ⁸ See e.g. 1a. 29, 1 ad 3; 1a. 77, 1 ad 7.

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the meaning of the verb in different and inconsistent ways, and that none of the ways in which he explains it seems to make sense of the idea that esse could be the essence of anything. There is no room in this chapter to list the eight or so different accounts Aquinas gives of ‘is’ considered as a predicate. But whatever this mysterious predicate signifies, it is clear that it belongs to God whether He exists or not. Even if we deny the existence of God, then, according to the theory of pure being, what we are denying is the existence of something possessing the absolute predicate. And when we affirm the existence of God, we are affirming that something in reality does possess this unique characteristic. Being enters into the quiddity of God as it does into the quiddity of phoenix, with this difference, that being is the only thing which enters into the quiddity of God, so that it can be said to be identical with it. But this being is something quite different from actual existence: it enters into the quiddity of God whether or not there is such a thing as God. Once this is appreciated, the On Being and Essence argument from phoenixes to the real distinction between essence and esse can be seen to be fatally flawed. Indeed, in his later writings Aquinas ceased to make use of it. This may have been due to his reflexion on Anselm’s argument to show that the existence of God is self-evident. Aquinas maintained that the proposition that there is a God is self-evident in itself, but not to us. To show that the proposition is self-evident in itself, he appealed, in an early consideration of the issue in the De Veritate, to the special nature of God’s esse. Esse is not in its perfection an element in the concept of any creature ... but in God his esse is an element in the concept of his quiddity, because in God what he is and esse are the same, as Boethius and Dionysius say, and the answer to the question ‘is he?’ and ‘what is he?’ are the same, as Avicenna says.⁹ ⁹ Hoc autem quod est esse, in nullius creaturae ratione perfecte includitur ... Sed in Deo esse suum includitur in eius quidditatis ratione, quia in Deo idem est quid esse et esse, ut

88 essence and existence For this argument to work esse must mean ‘existence’, and not being. Moreover, it leads to the absurd conclusion, pilloried by Geach, that the answer to the question ‘What is God?’ is ‘There is one’. However, in order to show that the existence of God is not self-evident to us, Aquinas makes the very different suggestion that the answer to the question ‘What is God?’ is something that we simply do not know. Because the quiddity of God is not known to us, therefore so far as we are concerned the proposition that there is a God is not self-evident but in need of demonstration. But in our heavenly home, where we will see his essence, the existence of God will be better known to us than the principle of non-contradiction is in our present life.¹⁰

Later in the same disputation the following argument is put forward: It is not possible to know of something that it is, unless what it is is already known. But in the present life we cannot know of God what he is. Therefore his esse is not known to us; therefore it is not self-evident either that God is.¹¹

This is a highly interesting argument. The disputant who presents it makes a distinction between God’s being (Dei esse) and there being a God (Deum esse). This seems to be just the distinction that we have found lacking in Aquinas’s previous discussions of the topic. Development of this distinction would have enabled him to avoid some of the confusions we claim to have detected in the arguments for the identity of essence and esse in the Godhead. However, in his response, Aquinas does not advert further to the distinction between the two. dicit Boethius et Dionysius; et idem est an est et quid est, ut dicit Avicenna; et ideo per se et secundum se est notum. (10. 12c. (S, 220)) ¹⁰ Sed quia quidditas Dei non est nobis nota, ideo quoad nos Deum esse non est per se notum, sed indiget demonstratione. Sed in patria, ubi essentiam eius videbimus, multo amplius erit nobis per se notum Deum esse, quam nunc sit per se notum quod affirmatio et negatio non sunt simul verae. (Ibid.) ¹¹ Non potest sciri de aliquo ipsum esse, nisi quid ipsum sit cognoscatur. Sed de Deo in praesenti statu non possumus cognoscere quid est. Ergo eius esse non est nobis notum; ergo nec Deum esse est per se notum. (10. 12. 4 in contra (S, 219))

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In the Summa contra Gentiles, as in On Truth, Aquinas distinguishes between things that are self-evident in themselves and things that are self-evident to us. ‘In the absolute’, he says, ‘that there is a God is self-evident, since the very thing that God is is his esse. But because we cannot conceive in our minds the very thing that God is, it remains unknown so far as we are concerned.’¹² In itself God’s existence shines out; but our feeble minds are like owls blinking in the sunlight. Once again, we meet the confusion between being and existence. If the esse which is the very same thing as God is equated with being rather than existence, then, for all we know, God, the fullness of being, may not exist. If the esse which is the very same thing as God is equated with existence, rather than being, then not only is God’s existence not self-evident, it is inconceivable, since we cannot conceive that very thing that God is. If the answer to the question ‘Is there a God?’ is the same as the answer to the question ‘What is God?’ then since we do not know what God is, we do not know whether there is one. However, though in discussing whether the existence of God is self-evident Aquinas seems to accept the identity of these two questions,¹³ he qualifies his acceptance when, in chapter twelve of the same book, he comes to consider, and to reject, the contrary hypothesis that God’s existence is unprovable. Those who maintain this, he says, sometimes do argue that since reason cannot achieve knowledge of what God is, it equally cannot prove that God is. But this, he now says, depends on a misinterpretation of the doctrine that essence and esse are the same in God. This thesis is to be understood of the esse by which God is self-subsistent, which is no less unknown to us than his essence is. But it is not to be ¹² Simpliciter quidem Deum esse per se notum est: cum hoc ipsum quod Deus est, sit suum esse. Sed quia hoc ipsum quod Deus est mente concipere non possumus, remanet ignotum quoad nos. (1. 11. 66) ¹³ The third argument for self-evidence includes this passage: [Dei] esse est sua essentia, ac si idem sit quod respondetur ad questionem quid est et ad quaestionem an est. (1. 10. 62) This is not queried when, in the next chapter, Aquinas responds to this argument.

90 essence and existence understood of the esse which signifies the composition of the intellect. For that God exists is the subject of proof when as a result of demonstrative reasons our mind is led to form the kind of proposition about God by which we express that God is.¹⁴

This important passage casts both new light and new darkness. It is the clearest recognition we have yet met in Aquinas of a distinction between being and existence: between the being of God on the one hand, which is equivalent to the life of God, which is something which here below we can have no inkling of; and on the other hand the existence of God, which is a matter of fact that we can establish by mundane methods of proof. If, having distinguished between the two, a present-day philosopher wanted to bring out the relationship between the two, he could do it by using a quantifier and a predicate. God exists = For some x, there is an x which has divine being. This is not, however, what St Thomas does. Instead he says that the esse of existence, the esse which answers the question an sit? is the copula which indicates the intellectual composition expressed in positive and negative propositions. This introduces a new puzzling feature in his account. On the face of it neither ‘est’ in ‘Deus est’ nor ‘exists’ in ‘God exists’ is a copula: for a copula is what links subject and predicate, and in those sentences there is no predicate to be linked to the subject. And indeed in this context, as elsewhere, Aquinas regularly treats ‘Deus est’ as a subject-predicate sentence, with ‘est’ as the predicate.¹⁵ So Aquinas’s solution to the problem that has hitherto troubled us leaves us with a further problem unresolved. ¹⁴ Hoc intelligitur de esse quo Deus in seipso subsistit, quod nobis quale sit ignotum est, sicut eius essentia. Non autem intelligitur de esse quod significat compositionem intellectus. Sic enim esse Deum sub demonstratione cadit, dum ex rationibus demonstratives mens nostra inducitur huiusmodi propositionem de Deo formare qua exprimat Deum esse. (1. 12. 78) ¹⁵ For instance, 1. 10. 62, cum dicitur Deus est, praedicatum vel est idem subiecto, vel saltem in definitione subiecti includitur.

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As Aquinas grew older, not only did he maintain that God’s essence was the same as his esse, but he insisted with ever more emphasis that God himself was the very same thing as his essence or nature. Already in the De Ente et Essentia, he had drawn a contrast between simple substances whose essence is pure form and compound substances whose essence involves both matter and form. From this he drew two consequences. First, whereas a compound substance is not the same thing as its essence—a human being is not his quiddity—the essence of a simple substance is the very same thing as the substance itself, for there is nothing in the substance except the form, no extra element to receive the form. Second, whereas in the case of compound substances there can be several entities of the same kind, individuated from one another by their matter, in the case of simple substances there can only be one individual of each species.¹⁶ This means that whereas in the case of human beings, Tom, Dick, and Harry are three individuals of a single species, if angels are disembodied intelligences then Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael must be as different from each other as a horse, a dog, and a cat are. So too in the Summa Theologiae he tells us that in things that are composed of matter and form there is a difference between the essence and the supposit (i.e. what has the essence). Socrates is not the same thing as Socrates’ humanity, because Socrates consists of a particular chunk of matter and has a number of individual characteristics which are no part of what make him a man. Socrates’ colour, weight, and so on are part of Socrates but are not part of Socrates’ humanity. There is more, then, to Socrates than his humanity—his humanity is only a part of him, a ‘formal part’ as Aquinas says.¹⁷ Here, then, there is room for a distinction to be found in the creatures which is not in the Godhead: Socrates is ¹⁶ Quot sunt ibi individua, tot sunt ibi species, ut Avicenna expresse dicit. (4. 66) ¹⁷ Hae carnes et haec ossa et accidentia designantia hanc materiam, non concluduntur in humanitate. Et tamen in eo quod est homo includuntur: unde id quod est homo habet in se aliquid quod non habet humanitas. Et propter hoc non est totaliter idem homo et humanitas: sed humanitas significatur ut pars formalis hominis. (ST 1a. 3. 3c)

92 essence and existence not identical with his essence, because he is more than his essence, whereas in God there is nothing that is not essential to him. Where there is no composition of matter and form, Aquinas says, where therefore forms are individuated by themselves and not by matter, the forms are themselves subsistent supposits. Since God is not composed of matter and form, God is his own divinity and his own life, and anything else that can be predicated of him. It is striking that in this passage Aquinas links the identity of supposit and essence immediately to the absence of hylomorphic complexity. What he says implies that not only is God identical with his own essence, but so too are any created spirits there may be. God is his own godhood or deity, but likewise Michael is his own Michaelhood, and Gabriel is identical with Gabrielity. This comes as a surprise to readers of the parallel passage in the Summa contra Gentiles, where it seems most natural to take the identity between supposit and nature as something that is peculiar to God. In a number of influential writings Gottlob Frege made a sharp distinction between objects (which were referred to by proper names) and concepts (which were expressed by predicates). In On Concept and Object, for instance, he wrote that what is asserted about a concept can never be asserted about an object, and if we attempt to do so we produce nonsense. Existence, or instantiation, is a property of a concept: to say that there is a square root of 4 is to say that the concept, square root of 4 is not empty, is instantiated. But the sentence ‘there is Julius Caesar’, he maintained, is neither true nor false but senseless.¹⁸ When Aquinas says that God is the same thing as his own divinity is he asserting the identity of a concept with an object? God, surely, is an object; divinity, surely, is a concept, since ‘divinity’ is the abstract noun formed from the predicate ‘is divine’. So if Frege is right to see an unbridgeable chasm between concepts and objects, has not Aquinas fallen into nonsense? ¹⁸ ‘Concept and Object’, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Blackwell, 1980), 50–1.

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Peter Geach, an admirer of both Aquinas and Frege, regards Aquinas’s pair of terms ‘supposit’ and ‘form’ as corresponding to Frege’s ‘object’ and ‘concept’. But he denies that Aquinas’s theory commits him to absurdity. To see this, let us return to the ordinary forms or essences in the material world: the wisdom of Socrates, for instance, that no one will claim to be identical with Socrates. We must distinguish, Geach says, between a form in itself (the reference of the predicate ‘is wise’ or of the phrase ‘the wisdom of ... ’) and an individualized form (Socrates’ wisdom, as opposed to Plato’s). ‘Wisdom’ tout court means nothing in heaven or earth; wisdom is always wisdom-of-something. When Aquinas tells us that God is wisdom itself, Deus est ipsa sapientia, he is not meaning that God is that of which the noun ‘wisdom’ is a proper name; for the Platonists are wrong in thinking that there is such an object, and Aquinas says they are wrong. But we can take it to mean that ‘God’ and ‘the wisdom of God’ are two names of the same thing, and this interpretation does not make Aquinas guilty of the impossible and nonsensical attempt to bridge the distinction previously expounded.¹⁹

Of course expressions such as ‘God’, ‘the wisdom of God’, and ‘the power of God’ are not all equivalent to each other: in Fregean terms they have the same reference, but a different sense; in Aquinas’s terms, the difference between them is not in what is signified but in our mode of signifying. I think Aquinas is not so easily acquitted of confusion. Aquinas says not only that ‘God is God’s wisdom’ but also ‘God is wisdom itself’. Even if the first formula can be acquitted of Platonism, the matter is not so clear with the second formula. The ease with which Aquinas passes from the non-Platonic to the Platonic formula suggests that he was not as aware of the significant difference as a philosopher influenced by Frege would be. The problem returns in even more troubling form when we consider the thesis that God is God’s being. ¹⁹ ‘Form and Existence’ in A. Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Macmillan, 1969), 39.

94 essence and existence In the Summa contra Gentiles Aquinas introduces a new formulation of the divine simplicity. In chapter twenty-two of the first book, it is stated thus: God’s essence is his being (suum esse). In the following chapter, however, it is stated thus: God’s essence is being itself (ipsum esse). At this point, the gulf between God and other things becomes clearer. My essence may be difficult to distinguish from my life: but my essence is certainly not pure being. But the notion of pure being is surely impossible to make sense of except on the basis of the Platonism from which Geach sought to excuse Aquinas. For pure being is nothing other than the Platonic idea of being. Towards the end of his life, Aquinas modified some of his teaching on the basis of his closer study of Aristotle during the period when he was writing commentaries on William of Moerbeke’s translations of the Philosopher. In the fifth lecture of the commentary on Metaphysics Book 7, corresponding to the sixth chapter of the Greek text, Aquinas follows the arguments by which Aristotle seeks to answer the question whether a thing is or is not identical with its quiddity. Aristotle’s main concern is to reject the Platonic answer that the quiddity of something, what makes it the kind of thing it is, is some quite separate Idea or Form. But having dealt with the Platonists, Aristotle has an argument to show that even if a thing’s quiddity is conceived in a non-Platonic manner, the thesis that it is distinct from the thing itself leads to absurdity. Aquinas paraphrases his argument thus: A horse is a thing which has the quiddity of horse. If this is a different thing from the horse, let us call it A. A, too, then, is a thing, and, it will have a quiddity other than itself, just as the horse did. Thus the quiddity of the horse will have another quiddity which is absurd.... If someone says that the quiddity of the quiddity of the horse is the very same substance as the quiddity of the horse, what stops us from saying from the outset that there are some things that are their own quiddity?²⁰ ²⁰ Equus est quaedam res habens quod quid erat esse equo. Quod quidem si sit alia res ab equo, habeat haec res quoddam nomen, et vocetur A. A ergo, cum sit quaedam res,

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If we are to avoid an infinite regress, we must say that things like men and horses are identical with their own quiddity. How can Aquinas agree to this, since we have seen him so often say that it is a property unique to God to be identical with his own essence? In the final sections of his lecture he explains how the Aristotelian thesis is to be reconciled with his own. The key point is to remember that the quiddity is what is signified by the definition: A definition is predicated of what is defined, and so the quiddity must be predicated of what is defined. So the quiddity of a human being is not humanity, because humanity is not predicated of a human, but mortal rational animal. For if you ask ‘What is a human?’ you do not get the answer ‘humanity’ but the answer ‘a mortal rational animal’. However, humanity is the formal principle of the quiddity.²¹

We have here an interesting change of terminology: often previously Aquinas was happy to say that in a sentence like ‘Peter is a man’ humanity was predicated of Peter. We have also a new distinction: Peter’s humanity, which has hitherto been regarded as identical with his essence, is now distinguished from his quiddity. It remains, however, that which makes him a human, and it remains distinct from Peter. Humanity is not altogether the same as the human being, because it denotes only the essential principles of the human and excludes all the accidents. For humanity is what makes a human a human; but none of the accidents of a human being are what makes a human a human, so all the accidents of a human are excluded from the signification of humanity.²² habebit quod quid erat esse, alterum a se, sicut equus; et ita huic, quod est equo esse, erit aliud quod quid erat esse: quod patet esse absurdum.... Et si aliquis dicat quod quid est esse quidditatis equi, est ipsa substantia, quae est quidditas equi, quid prohibet statim a principio dicere, quod quadem sunt suum quod quid erat esse? (In VII Met. 5. 1374) ²¹ Cum definitio praedicetur de definito, oportet quod quid est esse de definito praedicari. Non igitur est quod quid est esse hominis humanitas quae de homine non praedicatur, sed animal rationale mortale. Humanitas enim non respondetur quarentibus quid est homo, sed animal rationale et mortale. Sed tamen humanitas accipitur ut principium formale eius, quod est quod quid erat esse. (In VII Met. 5. 1378) ²² Humanitas autem pro tanto non est omnino idem cum homine, quia importat tantum principia essentialia hominis, et exclusionem omnium accidentium. Est enim humanitas qua

96 essence and existence Peter differs from his humanity in this, that Peter contains all his accidents, whereas his humanity does not. Peter is the whole, Aquinas says, humanity is only a part of him. We are left, therefore, in creatures, with a new distinction between their quiddity and their essence. The difference between creatures and the creator is no longer that only God is his own quiddity: it is rather that in the case of God there is no difference between the concrete quiddity and the abstract essence (1380). But despite the new terminology, the kernel of the distinction is the same as it was in the Summa Theologiae. The distinction between essence and existence in creatures is that creatures contain, in addition to their essence, a set of individuating accidents. If this is so, then the distinction between God and creatures is more clearly made in terms of the distinction between substance and accidents, rather than in terms of a distinction between essence and existence. An admirer of Aquinas will have long ago become impatient with the criticisms I have been making of his treatment of being. I have pointed out that he attaches different meanings to esse in different places, and that none of the senses which he gives the word renders intelligible the notion that in God essence and esse are identical. But surely, I will be told, Aquinas himself insists that the nature of God is incomprehensible, that no term can be used of God in the same sense as it is used of creatures, and that any predicate which we use in describing God will be at best analogical. Aquinas makes clear that when we say that God is wise, and Socrates is wise, we are not making a mere pun, nor are we equivocating. When we talk of God’s wisdom we are using words not univocally, or equivocally, but analogically. Will not the doctrine of analogy similarly clarify Aquinas’ teaching on the divine esse? I believe not. The theory of analogy applies to predicates, and it is an explanation of the way in which analogical terms enjoy a peculiar semantic status (single dictionary entry, but diverse mode homo est homo: nullum autem accidentium hominis est, quo homo sit homo, unde omnia accidentia hominis excluduntur a significatione humanitatis. (In VII Met. 5. 1379)

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of application). But it is difficult to find in Aquinas a consistent use of ‘is’ as a predicate which answers to all his requirements upon it. And the problems which we have encountered have been problems not of semantics but of syntax. The difference between ‘is’ as copula, ‘is’ as existential quantifier, ‘is’ as variable, and ‘is’ as mysterious predicate are not at all comparable to the difference between ‘healthy’ when it precedes ‘dog’ and ‘healthy’ when it precedes ‘dog-food’. Having offered a philosophical criticism of Aquinas’s teaching on essence and esse I wish to end by putting a historical question. Are the teachings I have expounded already to be found in the writings of Ibn Sina (or Avicenna, as I shall follow Aquinas in calling him), and how far are those writings open to similar criticisms? Undoubtedly, the De Ente et Essentia is heavily influenced by Avicenna. In the very first lines of his prologue, Aquinas quotes Avicenna as saying (implausibly) ‘Being and Essence are the first things grasped by the intellect’; this is taken to show the importance of conceiving them correctly. Again in the De Veritate Avicenna is quoted as saying that in the case of God, the answer to the question ‘is he?’ and ‘what is he?’ are the same. Later, however, Aquinas took issue with Avicenna on a number of matters: notably, he objected to Avicenna saying that esse was something added on to an essence like an accident, rather than being constituted by the elements of the essence (In IV Met. 2. 558). In the Latin version of Avicenna, Liber de Philosophia Prima sive scientia divina (ed S. van Riet) the Arabic word ‘Anniya’ which corresponds to the English ‘existence’ is rendered ‘anitas’—a coinage, it seems, of Gerard of Cremona. Clearly anitas is meant to be what answers to the question ‘an est?’—‘is there a ... ?’ just as quidditas is what answers to the question ‘quid est?’—‘what is a ... ?’ In several places in the Latin Avicenna (e.g. Met. 8. 1 and in the De Anima, 66) we are told that in the first being, and in him alone, the anitas is the same as the quidditas. We have already rehearsed the objections to the thesis that in the case of God what answers the an question is the same as

98 essence and existence what answers the quid question: most obviously that since we do not know what God is, then on this account we cannot know either whether he exists or not. But the exact significance of the doctrine in Avicenna depends on whether or not he believed that in creatures there were pre-existence essences, so that the essence of Adam pre-existed the existence of Adam, and the creation of Adam was simply the giving of existence to the pre-existing essence. This is sometimes said by commentators in Aquinas, but I have been unable to verify it for myself on the basis of my own reading of the Latin Avicenna. As a philosopher who knows no Arabic I hope some day to meet an Arabist who is sufficiently interested in philosophy to be able to inform me on the topic.

8 Aquinas on the Beginning of Individual Human Life When did I begin? When does any individual human being begin? At what stage of its development does a human organism become entitled to the moral and legal protection which we give to the life of human adults? Is it at conception, or at birth, or somewhere between the two? In this chapter I will discuss the question in general terms, but I will pay particular attention to Aquinas’s account. I will contrast his position with the one currently adopted by most Catholics, and then I will present my own answer to the question, which is midway between the Catholic one and the Thomist one. The three alternatives—at conception, at birth, or between—do not in fact exhaust the possibilities. Plato, and some Jewish and Christian admirers of Plato, thought that individual human persons existed as souls before the conception of the bodies they would eventually inhabit. This idea found expression in the Book of Wisdom, where Solomon says ‘I was a boy of happy disposition: I had received a good soul as my lot, or rather, being good, I had entered an undefiled body.’ Clement of Alexandria records an early Christian notion that the soul is introduced by an angel into a suitably purified womb. Aquinas rejects this position in 1a 118. 3, where he discusses whether human souls were created at the beginning of the world. He argues against it in three stages. First, if a soul existed perfectly well before being embodied, then a human being would be only an ens per accidens. Second, if it is natural for a soul to be united to a

100 aquinas on the beginning of human life body, God in creating a bodiless soul would be making something imperfect, just as if he were to make human beings without legs. But if someone says that it is not natural for a soul to be united to a body, then, third, there would be no good reason for it ever to be so united, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Aquinas is surely right to reject these fantasies, and they have little relevance to any contemporary moral debate. But in addition to those who thought that the individual soul existed before conception, there have been those who thought that the individual body existed before conception, in the shape of the father’s semen. Onan, in Genesis, spilt his seed on the ground; in Jewish tradition this was seen not only as a form of sexual pollution but an offence against life. Aquinas, in the Summa contra Gentiles, in a chapter on ‘the disordered emission of semen’ treats both masturbation and contraception as a crime against humanity, second only to homicide. Such a view is natural in the context of a biological belief that only the male gamete provides the active element in conception, so that the sperm is an early stage of the very same individual as eventually comes to birth. Masturbation is then the same kind of thing, on a minor scale, as the exposure of an infant. The high point of this line of thinking was the bull Effraenatam of Pope Sixtus V (1588) which imposed an excommunication, revocable only by the Pope himself, on all forms of contraception as well as on abortion. But the view that masturbation is a poor man’s homicide cannot survive the knowledge that both male and female gametes contribute equally to the genetic constitution of the offspring. And, as we shall see, Aquinas himself seems to have had second thoughts. At the other extreme are those who maintain that it is not until some time after birth that human rights arise. In pagan antiquity infanticide was very broadly accepted. No sharp line was drawn between infanticide and abortion, and as a method of population control abortion was sometimes regarded as inferior to infanticide, since it did not distinguish between healthy and unhealthy offspring.

aquinas on the beginning of human life 101 In our own time a number of secular philosophers have been prepared to defend infanticide of severely deformed and disabled children. They have based their position on a theory of personality that, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, goes back to John Locke. Only persons have rights, and not every human being is a person: only one who, as Locke puts it, ‘has reason and reflection, and considers itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and different places’. Very young infants clearly do not possess this degree of self-awareness, and hence, it is argued, they are not persons and do not have an inviolable right to life. Defenders of infanticide are still, mercifully, very few in number. It is more common for moralists to take the rejection of infanticide as a starting point for the evaluation of other positions. Any argument that is used to justify abortion, or IVF, or stem-cell research must undergo the following test: would the same argument justify infanticide? If so, then it must be rejected. The central issue, then, is to record, and decide between, the three alternatives from which we began: should we take individual human life as beginning at conception, at birth, or at some point in between? If the correct alternative is the third one, then we must ask further questions. What, in the course of pregnancy, is the crucial moment? Is it the point of formation (when the foetus has acquired distinct organs), or is it the point of quickening (when the movements of the foetus are perceptible to the mother)? Can we identify the moment by specifying a number of days from the beginning of pregnancy? Some familiar texts from the Bible suggest that we should opt for conception as the beginning of the individual life of the person. ‘In sin did my mother conceive me’ sang the Psalmist (51: 5). Job cursed not only the day on which he was born but also ‘the night that said ‘‘there is a man-child conceived’’ ’ (3: 3). Since 1869 it has been the dominant position among Roman Catholics, but for most of the history of the Catholic Church it was a minority view. It has been much less common to regard personality and human rights as beginning only at the moment of birth. But one important

102 aquinas on the beginning of human life rabbinic text allows abortion up to, but not including, the time when a child’s head has emerged from the womb. Some Stoics seem to have taught that the human soul was received when a baby drew its first breath, just as it departs when a man draws his last breath. Through most of the history of Western Europe, however, the majority opinion has been that individual human life begins at some time after conception and before birth. In the terminology that for centuries seemed most natural, the ‘ensoulment’ of the individual could be dated at a certain period after the intercourse that produced the offspring. Among Christian thinkers the general consensus was that the human soul was directly created by God and that it was infused into the embryo when the form of the body was completed, which was generally held to occur around forty days after conception. Thomas Aquinas held a particularly complicated version of this consensus position. He did not believe that individual human life began at conception; the developing human foetus, for him, does not count as a human being until it possesses a human soul, and that does not happen until some way into pregnancy. For him the first substance distinct from the mother is the embryo living a plant life with a vegetative soul. This vegetable substance disappears and is succeeded by a substance with an animal soul, capable of nutrition and sensation. Only at an advanced stage is the rational soul infused by God, turning this animal into a human being. His fullest account is given in 1a. 118. 1, when he is discussing the origin of the sensitive soul in individual human beings. This soul, he tells us, is neither directly created by God nor directly caused by a human father: it is the result of an active power inherent in the father’s semen. This power, he says, is a motion of the father’s soul, a motion whose vehicle is the white bubbly spirit contained in the semen. This spirit also contains heat deriving from the heavenly bodies, thus verifying the Aristotelian dictum ‘man and the sun begets man’.

aquinas on the beginning of human life 103 In perfect animals that are generated by copulation, the active power is in the semen of the male, as Aristotle tells us. The matter of the fetus is what is given by the woman. In this matter there is, right from the outset, a vegetative soul, not in second act but in first act in the way that the sensitive soul is in people who are asleep. When it begins to draw nourishment, then it comes into actual operation. By the power that is in the male semen this matter is transformed until it reaches the actuality of a sensitive soul. It is not that the actual power that was in the semen turns into a sensitive soul—that would make the begetter and the begotten one and the same.... But once a sensitive soul has been produced in the begotten in respect of its main parts, the soul of the offspring begins to operate to complete its own body by means of nutrition and growth.¹

The whole process of development, according to Aquinas, is supervised by the father’s semen, which he believed to remain present and active throughout the first forty days of pregnancy. For this biological narrative Aquinas claimed, on slender grounds, the authority of Aristotle. He added to Aristotle’s account a crucial element: after the sensitive soul has brought the body to an appropriate stage of perfection, then an intellectual soul is infused directly by God. This soul is in no way caused by the father’s semen. On the topic of abortion, Aquinas has remarkably little to say directly, mentioning it at most thrice in the vast expanse of his corpus. His relevance to the contemporary debate centres on his teaching about the origin of human life. He is not an ally of those at the present time who claim that human life begins at conception. The developing human foetus does not count as a human ¹ In animalibus perfectis, quae generantur ex coitu, virtus activa est in semine maris, secundum Philosophum in libro de Generat. Animal; materia autem foetus est illud quod ministratur a femina. In qua quidem materia statim a principio est anima vegetabilis, non quidem secundum actum secundum, sed secundum actum primum, sicut anima sensitiva est in dormientibus. Cum autem incipit attrahere alimentum, tunc iam actu operatur. Huiusmodi igitur materia transmutatur a virtute quae est in semine maris, quousque perducatur in actum animae sensitivae; non quod ipsamet vis quae erat in semine, fiat anima sensitiva, quia sic idem esset generans et generatum.... Postquam autem per virtutem principii activi quod erat in semine, producta est anima sensitiva in generato quantum ad aliquam partem eius principalem, tunc iam illa anima sensitiva prolis incipit operari ad complimentum proprii corporis, per modum nutritionis et augmenti. (1a. 118. 1 ad 4)

104 aquinas on the beginning of human life being until it possesses a human soul, and this does not occur until pregnancy is considerably advanced. Aquinas clearly believed that late abortion (even if caused unintentionally) was homicide. A person who strikes a pregnant woman, he says, will not be excused from homicide. But at an earlier stage abortion, on his account, is wrong only for the same reason as masturbation and contraception: it is the destruction of an individual that is potentially a human being. The theory of three successive entities at different stages of pregnancy, each with its own soul, does not seem entitled to any great respect. It is too closely linked to the idea that only the male is the active cause of the human generative process, and to the theory that the intellectual soul must be divinely infused because it is immaterial. The theory obscures the fact that there is an uninterrupted history of development linking conception with the eventual life of the adult. In his book Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature² Robert Pasnau emphasizes the discontinuity Aquinas sees in the development of the foetus. It is not a human being, he says, until it has developed its brain and sensory systems to the point where it can support the distinctive intellectual capacities of a human being. What quite does this mean? Surely a child can only exercise these capacities after learning language. Does this mean that infanticide, no less than first-trimester abortion, can be absolved from the charge of murder? Aquinas can reject this, Pasnau believes, only on the basis of a controversial empirical claim, namely that at some point around mid-gestation a foetus begins to engage in conceptual cognitive activity. I am very doubtful whether Aquinas ever made such a claim; but Pasnau is surely right to believe that it is a very implausible one. He offers Aquinas a fall-back position. Perhaps what Aquinas is doing is simply, out of a cautious respect for human life, placing ² (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 105–20.

aquinas on the beginning of human life 105 its beginning at the point where the foetus conceivably has the potential for conceptualization. ‘His policy is like that of a union that protects all of its members, apprentice and skilled craftsman alike.’ Our own respect for human life, Pasnau believes, should lead us to endorse something like Aquinas’s account. Few I think, whether pro-life or tolerant of abortion, will find Pasnau’s account here convincing. It is surely the potential for, not the actuality of, intellectual activity that makes the late-term foetus and the newborn entitled to the respect due to human life. It is possible to accept this while agreeing with Aquinas that there is not an unbroken continuity of substantial identity between the moment of conception and the full development of the foetus. If we turn from Aquinas to other Christian thinkers, a survey of the history of the topic makes it abundantly clear that there is no such thing as the Christian consensus on the timing of the origin of the human individual.³ There was, indeed, a consensus among all denominations until well into the twentieth century that abortion was sinful, and that late abortion was homicide. There was no agreement whether early abortion was homicide. However those who denied that it was homicide still regarded it as wrong because it was the destruction of a potential, if not an actual, human individual. There was again no agreement whether the wrongfulness of early abortion carried over into the destruction of semen prior to any conception. Even within the Roman Catholic Church, different Popes can be cited in support of each option. The question at issue is often posed in the confused form ‘When does life begin?’ If this means ‘At what stage of the process between conception and birth are we dealing with living matter?’ the answer is obvious: at every stage. At fertilization egg and sperm unite to form a single cell: that is a living cell just as the egg and sperm were themselves alive before their fusion. But this is clearly not the question which is relevant to the moral status of the ³ Such a survey has been carried out with great care by David Albert Jones in his book The Soul of the Embryo (Continuum, 2004), to which I am greatly indebted for much historical information.

106 aquinas on the beginning of human life embryo: worms and rosebuds are equally indubitably alive, but no one seeks to give their lives the protection of the law. So perhaps we should reformulate the question: ‘When does human life begin?’ Here too the answer is obvious but inadequate: the newly formed conceptus is a human conceptus, not a canine or leonine one, so in that sense its life is a human life. But equally the sperm and the ovum from which the conceptus originated were human sperm and human ovum; but no one nowadays wishes to describe them as human beings or unborn children. If asked, ‘When does life begin?’, we must respond with another question, ‘When does the life of what begin?’ Sometimes the question is formulated not in terms of life, but in terms of animation or personhood. Thus it is asked ‘When does the soul enter the body?’ or ‘When does an embryo become a human person?’ Modern discussions of the morality of abortion or of the status of the embryo often shy away from these questions, regarding them as matters of theology or metaphysics. Thus the Warnock Committee, whose report on human fertilization and embryology paved the way in England for the legalization of experimentation on embryos, observed that some people thought that if it could be decided when an embryo became a person it would also be decided when it might, or might not, be permissible for scientific research to be undertaken upon embryos. The committee did not agree. Although the questions of when life or personhood begin appear to be questions of fact susceptible of straightforward answers, we hold that the answers to such questions in fact are complex amalgams of factual and moral judgements. Instead of trying to answer these questions directly we have therefore gone straight to the question of how it is right to treat the human embryo.

A philosopher writing on these matters cannot evade, as a politician or a committee may do, the question of personhood. It is indeed a metaphysical question when personhood begins: that does not mean that it is an unanswerable question, but that it is a question for the metaphysician to answer. To answer it we must

aquinas on the beginning of human life 107 deploy concepts that are fundamental to our thinking over a wide range of disciplines, such as those of actuality and potentiality, identity and individuation: and these are the subject matter of metaphysics. The question about personhood is also the same as the question about life, rightly understood. For ‘when does life begin?’ must mean ‘When does the life of the individual person begin?’ The question is a philosophical one, but in order to answer it one does not need to appeal to any elaborate philosophical system, or appeal to quasi-theological concepts such as the soul. As so often in philosophical perplexity what is needed is not recondite information, or elaborate technicalities, but reflection on truths which are obvious and for that reason easily overlooked. If a mother looks at her daughter, six months off her twentyfirst birthday, she can say with truth, ‘If I had had an abortion twenty-one years ago today, I would have killed you.’ Each of us, looking back to the date of our birthday, can say with truth ‘If my mother had had an abortion six months before that date, I would have been killed.’ Truths of this kind are obvious, and can be formulated without any philosophical technicality, and involve no smuggled moral judgements. Taking this as our starting point, however, it is easier to find our way through the moral maze. Let us consider first foetuses, and then embryos. Those who defend abortion on the grounds that foetuses are not human beings or human persons are arguing, in effect, that they are not members of the same moral community as ourselves. But truths of the kind that we have just illustrated show that foetuses are identical with the adult humans that are the prime examples of members of the moral community. It is true that a foetus cannot yet engage in moral thinking or the rational judgement of action that enables adults to interrelate morally with each other. But neither can a young child or baby, but this temporary inability does not give us the right to take the life of a child or a baby. It is the long-term capacity for rationality that makes us accord to the child the same moral protection as

108 aquinas on the beginning of human life the adult, and which should make us accord the like respect to whatever has the same long-term capacity, even before birth. To be sure, there can be goodness or badness in human actions with regard to beings that are not members of the human moral community. Those who believe in God do not think of him as on terms of moral equality with us, and yet regard humans as having a duty towards him of worship. Non-human animals are not part of our moral community, and yet it is wrong to be cruel to them. But the moral respect we accord to children, and, if I am right, should accord to foetuses, is something quite different to the circumspection proper in our relation with animals. For the individual that is now a foetus or a child will, if all goes well, take its place with us, as the animal never will, as an equal member of the moral community. As Kant might say, it will become a fellow-legislator in the kingdom of ends. I have claimed it as an obvious truth that a foetus six months from term is the same individual as the human child and adult into which, in the natural course of events, it will grow after birth. This seems true in exactly the same sense as it is true that the child is the same individual as the adult into which it will grow, all being well, after adolescence. But if we trace the history of the individual from the foetus back towards conception, then matters cease to be similarly obvious. Many people do not seem aware of the difficulty here. In 1985 in the UK the report of a committee chaired by Mary Warnock recommended the legalization of experimentation on pre-implantation embryos; the committee’s recommendation was put into effect by the Human Embryology and Fertilization Act of 1990. In a parliamentary debate triggered by the report of the Warnock Committee one Member of Parliament, Sir Gerald Vaughan, had this to say in opposition to experimentation on embryos. It is unarguable that at the point of fertilization something occurs which is not present in the sperm or the unfertilized ovum. What occurs is the potential for human life—not for life in general, but life for a specific

aquinas on the beginning of human life 109 person. That fertilized ovum carries the structure of a specific human being—the height, the colour, the colour of his or her eyes, and all the other details of a specific person. I do not think that there can be any argument against that. The fact that the embryo at that stage does not bear a human form seems to me to beg the issue and to be quite irrelevant. It carries the potential, and, just as the child is to the adult human, so the embryo must be to the child.

Sir Gerald concluded that human rights were applicable to an embryo from the first moment of conception. It is undoubtedly true that in the conceptus there is the blueprint for ‘the structure of a specific human being’. But to establish the conclusion that an embryo has full human rights, a different premiss is needed, namely, that the conceptus contains the structure of an individual human being. A specific human being is not an individual human being. This is an instance of a very general point about the difference between specification and individuation. The general point is that nothing is ever individuated merely by a specification of its properties, however detailed or complete this may be—as it is in the case of the DNA of an embryo. It is always at least logically possible that there should be two or more individuals answering to the same specification; any blueprint may be used more than once. Two peas in a pod may be as alike as you please: what makes them two individuals rather than one is that they are two parcels of matter, not necessarily that they differ in description. In the case of human beings the possibility of two individuals answering to the same specification is not just a logical possibility: it is a possibility that is realized in the case of identical twins. For this reason an embryo in the early days after fertilization cannot be regarded as an individual human being. The single cell after fusion is totipotential, in the sense that from it develop all the different tissues and organs of the human body, as well as the tissues that become the placenta. In its early days a single embryo may turn into something that is not a human being at all, or something that is one human being, or something that is two people or more.

110 aquinas on the beginning of human life It is important to be on guard here against an ambiguity in the word ‘identical’: there is a difference between specific identity and individual identity. Two things may be identical in the sense that they answer to the same specification, and yet not be identical in the sense that they are two separate things, not a single thing. When we say that Peter and Paul are identical twins we mean that they are alike in every specific respect, not that they are a single individual. Between an embryo and an adult there is not an uninterrupted history of a single individual life, as there is linking foetal life with the present life of an adult. There is indeed an uninterrupted history of development from conception to adult; but there is equally an uninterrupted history of development back from the adult to the origination of each of the gametes that fused at conception. But this is not the uninterrupted history of an individual. For each of the gametes might, in different cicumstances, have fused to form a single conceptus, and the conceptus might, in different circumstances, have turned into more or less than the single individual that it did in fact turn into. Of course, all development, if it is to proceed, depends on factors in the environment: an adult may die if diseased and a child may die if not nourished, just as an ovum will die if not fertilized and an embryo will die if not implanted. But though children and adults may die, they cannot become part of something else or turn into someone else. Foetus, child, and adult have a continuous individual development that gamete and embryo do not have. The moral status of the embryo and the question whether its destruction is homicide was and is important, because if it is not, then the rights and interests of human beings may legitimately be allowed to override the protection that by common consent should in normal circumstances be extended to the early embryo. The preservation of the life of the mother, the fertilization of otherwise barren couples, and the furthering of medical research may all, it may be argued, provide reasons to override the embryo’s protected status.

aquinas on the beginning of human life 111 The line of argument I have outlined was found convincing in the United Kingdom not only by the Warnock committee but also by the later Harries committee.⁴ These committees made a significant contribution to the debate by offering a terminus ante quem for the origin of individual human life—one which was much earlier in pregnancy than the forty days set by the preReformation Christian consensus. Experimentation on embryos, they thought, should be impermissible after the fourteenth day. The Warnock committee’s reasons were well summarized in the House of Commons by the then Secretary of State for Health, the Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke. A cell that will become a human being—an embryo or conceptus—will do so within fourteen days. If it is not implanted within fourteen days it will never have a birth.... The basis for the fourteen day limit was that it related to the stage of implantation which I have just described, and to the stage at which it is still uncertain whether an embryo will divide into one or more individuals, and thus up to the stage before true individual development has begun. Up to fourteen days that embryo could become one person, two people, or even more. (Hansard, vol. 73, col. 686)

This ethical reasoning is rejected by those Catholics who insist that individual human life begins at conception. An embryo, from the first moment of its existence, has the potential to become a rational human being, and therefore should be allotted full human rights. To be sure, an embryo cannot think or reason or exhibit any of the other activities that define rationality: but neither can a newborn baby. The protection that we afford to infants shows that we accept that it is potentiality, rather than actuality, that determines the conferment of human rights. Undoubtedly, whatever Aquinas may have thought, there is an uninterrupted history of development linking conception with the eventual life of the adult. However, the line of development from ⁴ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology (chaired M. Warnock) (HMSO, 1984); Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Stem Cell Research (chaired R. Harries) (HMSO, 2002).

112 aquinas on the beginning of human life conception to foetal life is not the uninterrupted history of an individual. In its early days, as Kenneth Clarke indicated, a single zygote may turn into something that is not a human being at all, or something that is one human being, or something that is two people or more. Foetus, child, and adult have a continuous individual development which gamete and zygote do not have. To count embryos is not the same as to count human beings, and in the case of twinning there will be two different human individuals each of whom will be able to trace their life story back to the same embryo, but neither of whom will be the same individual as that embryo. Those who argue for conception as the moment of origin stress that before fertilization we have two entities (two different gametes) and after it we have a single one (one zygote). A moment at which one entity (a single embryo) splits into two entities (two identical twins) is surely equally entitled to be regarded as a defining moment. It is true that in the vast majority of cases twinning does not actually take place; but surely the strongest element in the Catholic position is the emphasis it places on the ethical importance of potentiality. It is the potentiality of twinning, not its actuality, that gives reason for doubting that an early embryo is an individual human being. In my view, the balance of the arguments lead us to place the individuation of the human being somewhere around the fourteenth day of pregnancy. But there are two sides to the reasoning that leads to that conclusion. If the course of development of the embryo gives good reason to believe that before the fourteenth day it is not an individual human being, it gives equally good reason to believe that after that time it is an individual human being. If so, then late abortion is indeed homicide—and abortion becomes ‘late’ at an earlier date than was ever dreamt of by Aquinas. Since most abortion in practice takes place well after the stage at which the embryo has become an individual human being, it may seem that the philosophical and theological argument about

aquinas on the beginning of human life 113 the moment of ensoulment has little practical moral relevance. That is not so. If the life of an individual human being begins at conception, then all practices which involve the deliberate destruction of embryos, as whatever stage, deserve condemnation. That is why there had been official Catholic opposition to various forms of IVF and to scientific research involving stem cells. But if the embryo, in its earliest days, is not yet an individual human being, then it need not necessarily be immoral to sacrifice it to the greater good of actual human beings who wish to conceive a child or reap the benefits of medical research.

9 Thomas and Thomism In 1879 Pope Leo XIII did two remarkable things. He published the encyclical Aeterni Patris commending the study of St Thomas Aquinas, and in the same year he appointed as Cardinal John Henry Newman. These two actions, in the eyes of many, gave two contradictory signals. In elevating Newman, who had been close to the inopportunist party at the Vatican Council, and had been an object of suspicion to the Curia of Pio Nono, Pope Leo was taken by many to indicate a more liberal attitude to the modern world. On the other hand, by giving St Thomas Aquinas a newly privileged position in the Catholic Church, the Pope seemed to be taking Catholicism back to the Middle Ages. In fact, as even the most secular philosophers are now coming to admit, the importance of Aquinas as a philosopher far transcends the medieval context in which he wrote; just as Plato and Aristotle have a permanent influence not just on students of Greek antiquity but on philosophers in every age who struggle with problems of ethics and metaphysics. In my own view, the philosophy of St Thomas was and is far superior to that of the eclectic scholasticism which Leo XIII wished it to replace in Catholic Europe, and also to the British empiricist tradition in which John Henry Newman was educated and whose colouring he retained in the writings of his Catholic days, even in his philosophical masterpiece The Grammar of Assent. There is no doubt, however, that one of the things that Leo XIII found attractive in the works of St Thomas was precisely the historical context in which they were conceived: the age whose

thomas and thomism 115 stage was set by Leo’s hero Pope Innocent III. The middle ages were, for him, far preferable to the modern age, whose errors Thomas’s ghost was to refute. The Saint, Leo said ‘by himself refuted the errors of preceding times, and provided invincible weapons for the refutation of errors that were ever to be springing up in days to come’. In our own more ecumenical days, Pope John Paul in Fides et Ratio presented a less pugnacious philosopher, who is commended for ‘undertaking a dialogue with the Arabic and Jewish thinkers of his time’. All those who study Aquinas are indebted to Pope Leo for the stimulus which his encyclical gave to the production of scholarly editions of the Summa and of other works. But the promotion of the Saint as the official philosopher of the Church had also a negative effect. It closed off the philosophical study of St Thomas by non-Catholic philosophers who were repelled by someone whom they came to think of as simply the spokesman of a particular ecclesiastical system. The problem was aggravated when in 1914 Pius X singled out twenty-four theses of Thomist philosophy to be taught in Catholic institutions. When I first approached the study of philosophy fifty years ago there were two philosophers whose works were most inexpensive to buy: St Thomas Aquinas and V. I. Lenin. Editions of the former were available with a heavy subsidy from the Spanish government of F. Franco, and of the latter with a heavy subsidy from the government of the Soviet Union. The secular reaction to the canonization of St Thomas philosophy was summed up by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy. ‘There was little of the true philosophical spirit in Aquinas: he could not, like Socrates, follow an argument wherever it might lead, since he knew the truth in advance, all declared in the Catholic faith. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy but special pleading.’ It is not in fact a serious charge against a philosopher to say that he is looking for good reasons for what he already believes in. Descartes, sitting beside his fire, wearing his dressing gown,

116 thomas and thomism sought reasons for judging that that was what he was doing, and took a long time to find them. Russell himself spent much energy seeking proofs of what he already believed: Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that 1 and 1 make 2. We judge a philosopher by whether his reasonings are sound or unsound, not by where he first lighted on his premisses or how he first came to believe his conclusions. Hostility to Aquinas on the basis of his official position in Catholicism is thus unjustified, however understandable, even for secular philosophers. But there were more serious ways in which the actions of Leo XIII and Pius X did a disservice to Thomas’s philosophical reputation in non-Catholic circles. The official respect accorded to Aquinas by the church has meant that his insights and arguments have frequently been presented in crude ways by admirers who failed to appreciated his philosophical sophistication. Even in seminaries and universities the Thomism introduced by Leo XIII often took the form of textbooks and epitomes ad mentem Thomae rather than a study of the text of the Saint himself. In three years’ study of philosophy at the Gregorian University in the 1950s the only text of St Thomas offered to the undergraduates was the juvenile De Ente et Essentia. Since the second Vatican Council St Thomas seems to have lost the pre-eminent favour he enjoyed in ecclesiastical circles, and to have been superseded, in the reading lists of ordinands, by lesser more recent authors. This was deplored by Pope John Paul in his encyclical Fides et Ratio. It remains to be seen whether his recall to the study of Aquinas in Catholic institutions of higher education has had the desired effect. On the other hand, the devaluation of St Thomas within the bounds of Catholicism has been accompanied by a re-evaluation of the Saint in secular universities in various parts of the world. In the universities of Oxford and Cambridge—and not only in the Dominican convents there—it is possible to identify seven or eight holders of senior posts who have published studies of Aquinas in recent years. In the United States one can almost speak

thomas and thomism 117 of a renaissance of Thomism—not a confessional Thomism, but a study of Thomas that transcends the limits not only of the Catholic Church but of Christianity itself. In the English-speaking world at the present time it is possible to distinguish four different schools among admirers of Aquinas. First, there are the conservatives who continue to work in the neo-scholastic tradition of Gilson and Maritain, albeit in a chastened and less triumphalist form. A doughty exponent of this school of thought is Ralph McInerny, who has sought to make Thomism accessible in many works, and whose recent Gifford lectures presented a popular defence of traditional natural theology in its relation to theoretical and practical reasoning. Second, there are the transcendental Thomists who combine close and sympathetic appreciation of the writings of St Thomas with a respect for the importance of the critical insights of Immanuel Kant. Prominent leaders of this line of thought were the Jesuits Joseph Mar´echal and Peter Hoenen, and at the present time the school is represented above all by followers of the late Bernard Lonergan SJ. Third, there are those who follow an agenda drawn from postmodernism, among whom are the members of the theological movement that styles itself ‘Radical Orthodoxy’. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock are vociferous proponents of this tendency, which has gained influence in the Church of England. Finally, there are several philosophers in the analytic tradition, who seek to interpret Aquinas in the light of recent currents of thought in philosophy of language and mind. There is more than one kind of analytical philosophy, and the renewed interest in Thomas is to be found particularly among those who practise it under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, rather than in the more positivist and scientistic form now predominant in the USA. Wittgenstein like Aquinas stands at the opposite pole of philosophy from the Cartesian tradition which sees epistemology as the basic philosophical discipline and private consciousness as the fundamental datum of epistemology.

118 thomas and thomism There is by now an impressive corpus of works of this socalled analytical Thomism. Some of the leading practitioners are Catholics, such as Peter Geach and John Finnis; some indeed, like the late Herbert McCabe, were members of St Thomas’s own Dominican Order. But there have been other influential writers of this school who—like Norman Kretzmann—have never been Catholics or—like Alasdair McIntyre—have held varying religious allegiance. I find that I am myself from time to time described as an analytical Thomist. I am happy to be called a Thomist if that means a person who admires and studies St Thomas. But I have never been a Thomist if a Thomist is a paid-up member of a particular philosophical party. I first met Thomism in the scholastic manuals of the Gregorian university in Rome, and took an instant and lasting dislike to it. It was Bernard Lonergan, at the end of my Roman course, and Peter Geach and Herbert McCabe in Oxford, who taught me to distinguish between Thomas and Thomism. There are some Thomists who so swear by the words of the Saint that they resent any criticism of him and will not accept any contradiction of him (unless it comes from a Pope, as when Pius IX defined the immaculate conception). Such an entrenched position is sometimes called ‘citadel Thomism’. I believe that it represents a misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy. The student of philosophy is not called on to subscribe to one or other philosophical ‘ism’, but rather, in the light of the varied teachings of the great philosophers of the past, to make up her own mind on each philosophical issue that presents itself. Philosophy is such a difficult subject that to achieve a consistent overall philosophical Weltanschauung has proved beyond the reach of even the greatest geniuses such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. A fortiori, we lesser mortals cannot help but be eclectic. I regard Aquinas as ranking, as a philosopher, with the greatest geniuses of the discipline, but I think that our engagement with him, as with them, must be critical as well as reverent. In a number of books I have tried to present his thought in a manner that shows

thomas and thomism 119 its relevance to the issues that occupy philosophers working in the contemporary analytic tradition. There are those who argue that the conceptual world of the thirteenth century was so different from that of the twentieth century that any attempt at such bridge building is bound to fail. I disagree: I think that philosophy is perennial in the sense that many of the conceptual problems that we confront today are the very same problems as those that faced Plato and Aristotle. Other issues are as it were the descendants of the ancient issues, and can best be understood by tracing their provenance. Aquinas’s thought, I believe, is just as relevant to the twenty-first century as Aristotle’s thought was to the thirteenth century. And the best way for us to write about Aquinas is the way in which he wrote about Aristotle: stating his views as clearly and sympathetically as possible, showing their connection with current concerns, and contesting them politely but firmly if they appear to be erroneous. Of course much that was written by ancient and medieval philosophers has been superannuated by the progress of science, but there remains a substantial corpus that is as relevant today as ever. Those of us who call ourselves philosophers today can genuinely lay claim to be the heirs of Plato and Aristotle. But we are only a small subset of their heirs. What distinguishes us from the other heirs of the great Greeks, and what entitles us to inherit their name, is that unlike the physicists, the astronomers, the medics, the linguists, we philosophers pursue the goals of Plato and Aristotle only by the same methods as were already available to them. Aquinas stands in a similar relation to today’s philosophers. His philosophy of nature has been antiquated, in great part, by the swift progress of natural science since the Renaissance. His philosophy of logic and language has been enormously improved on by the work of logicians and mathematicians in recent centuries. But his writings on metaphysics, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics are still as rewarding to read as anything written on those topics by philosophers between his age and ours.

120 thomas and thomism Much writing on ethics in contemporary Anglophone philosophy draws its ultimate inspiration from Jeremy Bentham. On the one hand it is consequentialist: no form of action is absolutely ruled out as immoral, for a sufficiently imposing end may justify the most abhorrent of means. On the other hand it is sensationalist: the ultimate criteria of right and wrong are pain and pleasure, conceived as private experiences. It follows that animals belong to the same moral community as humans, because they like us can feel pain and pleasure. Foetuses, however, do not, since they are incapable of feeling either. Aquinas’s ethics stands in splendid contrast to this noxious utilitarianism. While the calculation of consequences has its place in his system, this is within a framework which rules out certain actions as absolutely forbidden. It is rationality, not sensation, that is the mark of human beings, so that animals form no part of our moral community. A creature’s potentialities, no less than its experiences, are relevant to the evaluation of its moral worth, and they should be our guide in deciding how to treat a foetus. Only Aquinas’s fellow Christians can endorse the whole of Aquinas’s ethical system, with its emphasis on theological as well as moral virtues. But his treatment of the moral virtues, and his analysis of human actions and intentions, commends itself to secular as well as to religious readers. This is unsurprising, since much of the ethical parts of the Summa Theologiae read like a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics of the pagan Aristotle. When we turn from Aquinas’s ethics to his metaphysics we encounter a mixture of precious insight and damaging confusion. There run through his works two grand Aristotelian principles. The first is that there is no actualization without individuation; the second is that there is no individuation without actualization. The first principle is anti-Platonic; the second, anachronistically, we can call anti-Leibnizian. These principles seem to me to be fundamental to any sound ontology, and they are key elements of Aquinas’s philosophy of creation.

thomas and thomism 121 But if Aquinas is an Aristotelian on earth, he is a Platonist in heaven. I argued in Aquinas on Being (2002) that the idea of God as pure Being is vulnerable to all the arguments that can be brought against Plato’s theory of Ideas, and that the distinction between essence and existence embodies a deep philosophical confusion between different senses of the verb ‘to be’. That book, not unnaturally, attracted a hail of criticism from citadel Thomists. In conclusion I would like to draw attention to a splendid example of a critical Thomism entirely free of any sectarian deformation of the kind that Russell feared and hated. I am thinking of the American philosopher, Norman Kreztmann, who taught for most of his professional life at Cornell University in upstate New York. Kreztmann was brought up a Lutheran, and was descended from a long line of Lutheran Pastors going back to the age of Luther himself. But he lost his Lutheran faith at university and for most of his life was an atheist. A few years before his death he seems to have recovered a belief in the existence of God, but it was a philosophical belief that did not involve adherence to any church. Kretzmann devoted most of his teaching to medieval philosophy—initially to the logic of the late Middle Ages. He published an edition of the sophisms of Richard Kilvington. At Cornell he founded a veritable school of medieval philosophy, and he was the principal editor of the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. About a decade before his death he began to take a profound interest in the study of Thomas Aquinas, and undertook a critical commentary on the Summa contra Gentiles. Three years after the commencement of this work he was diagnosed as suffering from a lethal cancer—multiple myeloma. The doctors gave him a year to live. In fact, he survived for a further seven years, and up to the last days of his life he continued to work on his commentary. Two volumes were completed and published, and a substantial part of a third remained unpublished at his death: the published volumes were entitled The Metaphysics of Theism and The Metaphysics of Creation. The work is of a

122 thomas and thomism high standard, and would do great credit to a man in perfect health. A few weeks before his death, while talking to him on the telephone, I congratulated him on his stoical attitude while under sentence of death. ‘You are treating your illness very philosophically’, I said. ‘Of course’, he replied, ‘I have a Ph.D. in that subject.’

10 Aquinas in America The twenty-first century is proving fertile in philosophical studies of Aquinas in English. Two of the most interesting have come from the United States: Robert Pasnau’s Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (CUP, 2002) and Eleonore Stump’s Aquinas (Routledge, 2003), the latest addition to the series The Arguments of the Philosophers, now thirty years old. The striking thing about recent studies is that the Aquinas who emerges from each of them is so different from the Aquinas in any of the others. There is a great difference between Aquinas as seen by Pasnau and Aquinas as seen by Stump, even though both of these authors were pupils, at Cornell, of the same teacher—the much lamented Norman Kretzmann. The possibility of very divergent interpretations is inherent in the nature of Aquinas’s Nachlass. The Saint’s output was vast—well over eight million words—and most of us nowadays are able to read Latin only at about the same pace as he wrote it. Any modern study of his work, therefore, is bound to concentrate only on a small portion of the surviving corpus. Even if one concentrates—as scholars commonly do—on one or other of the great Summae, the interpretation of any portion of these works will depend in part on which of many parallel passages in other works one chooses to cast light on the text under study. Especially now that the whole corpus is searchable by computer, there is great scope for selectivity here. Secondly, though Aquinas’s Latin is in itself marvellously lucid, the translation of it into English is not a trivial or uncontroversial matter. Stump well says ‘Aquinas ... makes use of Latin terms

124 aquinas in america whose English equivalents are common terms in contemporary philosophy; but the meanings of the Latin terms and their English equivalents are not invariably identical.’ This is, if anything, an understatement: for ‘not invariably’ one might well read ‘almost never’. Thirdly, in the case of a writer such as Plato or Aristotle, it is often possible for an interpreter to clear up ambiguities in discussion by concentrating on the concrete examples offered to illustrate the philosophical point. But Aquinas—in common with other great medieval scholastics—is very sparing with illustrative examples, and when he does offer them they are often secondhand or worn out. A commentator, therefore, in order to render the text intelligible to a modern reader, has to provide her own examples, and the choice of examples involves a substantial degree of interpretation. Finally, any admirer of Aquinas’s genius wishes to present his work to a modern audience in the best possible light. But what it is for an interpreter to do his best for Aquinas depends upon what he himself regards as particularly valuable in the contemporary world. Should he be brought into accord with recent papal teaching? Or should one try to make him as like Wittgenstein as possible? Or should one try to reconcile his physics, physiology, and psychology with the most recent issues of the Scientific American? These factors explain why equally learned and scrupulous scholars can find such different teachings in St Thomas. They also, fortunately, make it possible for a reviewer to praise a study of Aquinas while disagreeing fundamentally with the interpretations offered. Both of these books, in contrasting ways, are remarkable achievements, whether or not one accepts their interpretative strategies. Pasnau’s book is a study of fifteen questions in the first part of the Summa Theologiae, qq. 75–89, which he calls Aquinas’s Treatise on Human Nature. It may seem odd to base a philosophical study on a text that is a work of theology. This is easy to justify by pointing out that amid theological discussions Aquinas often engages in

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analysis within the bounds of what we now call philosophy. But Pasnau goes further and claims that ‘philosophy today actually has more in common with medieval theology (that is, theology as then practised) than it does with medieval philosophy (that is, the part of the arts curriculum that was referred to as philosophy in the medieval university)’. Thus medieval theology, not medieval philosophy, is the closest medieval precursor to the core subjects of modern philosophy. In practice, Pasnau makes full use, in an exemplary way, of both the theological and the philosophical works in the corpus. His book is structured round the Summa not because it is the summit of Thomas’s achievement, but because it is a summary of his system. In his close reading of individual passages of the Summa he draws on the often more subtle treatments of the same topics to be found in the Disputed Questions and in the Commentaries on Aristotle. In the first section of his book Pasnau gives a lucid exposition of Aquinas’s thesis that the human soul is a subsistent form, and takes pains to set out what lies behind Aquinas’s use of the weasel word ‘subsistent’. He shows how Aquinas’s account differs from the dualism of Plato in holding that the capacity for sensation is an essential part of being human, and differs from the dualism of Descartes in holding that sensation is impossible without the body. For Aquinas, Pasnau argues—controversially but correctly—sensation is a wholly corporeal activity. In the case of the intellect, however, Aquinas rejects materialism on the basis that thought is an activity impossible for a corporeal agent. Pasnau is not alone in finding his arguments to this effect unacceptably weak. Nonetheless, Pasnau argues, Aquinas’s account of the soul is an internally coherent doctrine: it is not simply an ad hoc combination of the Aristotelian theory of matter and form with the Christian doctrine of the soul’s survival of death. This defence is supported by a novel account of the Aristotelian theory. While most exponents of Aristotle will say that the material world is full of substances composed of matter and form, Pasnau maintains that at the level of

126 aquinas in america experience the only true substances are living beings. Moreover, he maintains—with only minimal support from either Aristotle or Aquinas—material substances do not contain matter but are organized bundles of actuality (whatever that may mean). The second, central, section of the book is entitled ‘Capacities’. It deals principally with human sensation and with human freedom, but it also extracts illuminating material from Aquinas’s discussion of the abstruse question whether the soul’s capacities are identical with its essence. The teleological elements in Aquinas’s account are well brought out, and related to his theory of the appetites of natural agents. The book gives an admirably clear and convincing account of the cluster of concepts connected with voluntary agency: rational choice, free decision, weakness of will. Aquinas’s account of the rooting of freedom in reason shows him to be a compatibilist, that is to say, a philosopher who sees no necessary contradiction between free choice and determinism. ‘Perhaps we too’ Pasnau says ‘do not escape the chains of causal necessity. But if we are determined, we are determined by our own beliefs and values, not simply by the brute design of nature and the happenstance of events. This difference, for Aquinas, makes all the difference.’ The third and final section of the book, entitled ‘Functions’, deals with the operation of the intellect, and the mind’s relation to reality. Pasnau sets out Aquinas’s distinction between the agent intellect and the possible intellect, and does his best to make sense of his mysterious account of abstraction. Aquinas’s generally empiricist account of human knowledge, he maintains, is tempered by his appeal to a form of divine illumination. This leads to an interesting, if debatable, conclusion: Aquinas represents the end of a long tradition in Western philosophy. All the great philosophers had seen no way to explain the workings of mind without appealing to the supernatural ... at least until the end of the thirteenth century when John Duns Scotus would propose a thoroughly naturalistic account of the workings of the mind ... Scotus’s thoroughly

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naturalistic account of the human intellect represents a turning-point in the history of philosophy.

Pasnau presents, and ably defends, some of Aquinas’s more surprising theses about the mind: for instance, that we have no direct access to our own minds, and that the intellect has no immediate understanding of its own nature. Sometimes he saddles Aquinas with untenable philosophical baggage, such as a belief in mental acts that take place in a mysterious medium somewhere between the realm of conscious thought and behaviour and the physical system of the brain. This is not so much because of the demands of Aquinas’s text as because of Pasnau’s own questionable philosophy of mind. The book ends with a chapter devoted to the survival of the soul after death, which gives due emphasis to Aquinas’s insistence that a disembodied soul is not a human person. Even though Abraham’s soul survives, Aquinas believed, Abraham does not. But Pasnau qualifies this doctrine. ‘When I die, I cease to exist, as a whole, but part of me continues to exist, and hence I partly continue to exist.’ But for both Aquinas and Pasnau the important issue is to establish whether one and the same person can both die and be resurrected at the last day. Pasnau believes that a careful analysis of the notion of personal identity can enhance the plausibility of the resurrection. Pasnau’s general approach to Aquinas is a balance of respectful admiration and critical caution: the appropriate attitude to take towards a great philosopher of the past. When he believes that Aquinas has erred, he is never afraid to say so, and he does not downplay unfashionable parts of Aquinas’s system such as the role assigned to angels in the management of the world. Yet, as the book progresses, he shows a tendency to be too charitable to his subject. He perseveres in trying to make sense of some of Aquinas’s less successful projects—such as his theory of phantasms—when it might have been wiser to give up. The over-indulgence is particularly noticeable in the chapter on life after death, where some arguments are waved through that deserve more severe scrutiny.

128 aquinas in america In Eleonore Stump’s book, too, there is much to admire and something to criticize. It is a work of devotion and careful scholarship, and it takes great pains to relate Aquinas’s thought to contemporary currents of thought in American philosophy. Stump knows the major texts of Aquinas very well, and is skilled at digging out illuminating parallel passages in unlikely places. Like Aquinas himself, Stump is careful to present fairly, lucidly, and as strongly as she can the objections to the position that she finally adopts. To remedy the lack of examples in the original texts, she provides narratives that are always detailed and vivid. These are sometimes cloyingly domestic, but at other times they make good use of contemporary biographical and scientific material. There is one fundamental ambiguity in Aquinas’s thinking that lies at the root of the philosophical disagreements among his commentators. Aquinas is best known as the man who reconciled Christianity with Aristotelianism; but, as Stump well says ‘Thomas absorbed a good deal of Platonism as well; more than he was in a position to recognize as such.’ Whereas many modern commentators, such as Geach, take Aquinas’s Aristotelianism seriously and disown the Platonic residues, Stump commonly sides with the Platonic Thomas against the Aristotelian Thomas. The motive for this seems to be theological: such an approach makes it easier to accept the doctrines that the soul survives the death of the body, and that God is pure actuality. Aquinas himself, in fact, was an Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven. After an introductory overview of the Saint’s life and thought, Stump offers two introductory chapters on metaphysics, concentrating particularly on the doctrine of matter and form and the relationship between being and form. These chapters were perhaps not well placed at the beginning of the book, since they must be among the most difficult for a modern reader to digest. Indeed, the particular version of hylomorphism Stump presents will be found uncongenial even by many informed Thomists.

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After these introductory chapters, the book follows the structure of the Summa Theologiae. Chapters three to five deal with the nature of God: his simplicity, his eternity, and his knowledge. They derive, as Stump explains, from work done jointly with Kretzmann, and they are among the best chapters in the book, full of patient and detailed conceptual analysis. Particularly interesting is the chapter on the notion of divine eternity—though it is only by a question-begging definition of simultaneity that Stump avoids the difficulty that if the whole of eternity is simultaneous with every moment of time, every moment of time must be simultaneous with every other. The second part of the book is devoted to the nature of human beings. It covers much of the same ground as Pasnau’s book, and suffers by the comparison. The best chapter here is the seventh, on the foundations of knowledge. Stump is often anxious to place Aquinas in terms of some fashionable taxonomy—in this case, is he a foundationalist? an externalist? a reliabilist?—but she commonly concludes, correctly, that his thinking is too complex to be caught between the shears of a false dichotomy. Aquinas’s philosophy of mind receives poor treatment because Stump’s own philosophical psychology is defective. She imagines the mind as an internal apparatus, a spiritual machine whose processes are commonly available to consciousness, but may sometimes go too fast to be observed, or may go totally underground. Despite a ritual renunciation of Descartes, she clearly has a thoroughly Cartesian concept of consciousness. This philosophy of mind is then wished on to Aquinas, commonly by means of tendentious translations which ignore the author’s own excellent warning that English transliterations of medieval Latin terms rarely mean the same as their originals. A key concept here is that of actuality. Aquinas often speaks of actus of the intellect and will. Stump commonly translates this as ‘act’ or ‘activity’, and understands these actus as being episodes in one’s introspectible history. But actus covers actualities of various kinds: for Aquinas being blue or being square is as much an actus as

130 aquinas in america kicking a ball is, and similarly the ability to play chess is as much an actus intellectus as saying to oneself ‘Q-R6 is the best move for me to make’. Failure to appreciate this leads Stump to give an incredible account of Aquinas’s theory of human action, according to which every voluntary bodily movement is preceded by five sets of paired acts of intellect and will, each act clearly being conceived by her as an episode in one’s inner life. Stump does not seem to have given sufficient weight to Aquinas’s investigation of different forms of actuality and potentiality, and to the subtlety of his analysis of mental dispositions. In the course of her defence of the notion of atemporal divine knowledge she writes ‘There are mental activities that do not require a temporal interval or viewpoint. Knowing seems to be the paradigm case. Learning, reasoning, inferring take time, but knowing does not.’ True, knowing does not take time, but that is not because knowing is atemporal, but because knowing is not an activity at all but a habitus. Knowing is not atemporal—one can ask ‘how long have you known this?’—but knowing has the temporal characteristics of a state, not an episode. The study of medieval philosophy of mind has been much hampered in recent years by the widespread use of the words ‘cognition’ and ‘cognize’. The Latin words cognitio and cognoscere are used in a variety of contexts by Aquinas to mean very different things: sense perception as well as intellectual understanding; knowledge by description as well as knowledge by acquaintance; acquiring concepts as well as making use of them. Careful attention to context is needed to see how the words should be translated into English in particular cases. But too many medievalists, finding the going tough at this point, have abandoned translation for transliteration. The pseudo-verb ‘cognize’ looks like an episode verb: and so all kinds of different cognitive acts, activities, and states are all made to look like something of which there could be a mental snapshot. The retreat to transliteration not only fosters intellectual confusion; it produces some very ugly English. There is something very unappetizing about the

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‘intellectually cognized appetibles’ that we are told are the objects of the will. Stump’s account of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind offers us too little, too late, on the crucial topic of his understanding of the Aristotelian principles sensus in actu est sensibile in actu and intellectus in actu est intellectum in actu. She spends time criticizing Joseph Owens’s implausible reading ‘you are the things perceived or known’ but she does not mention Bernard Lonergan’s masterly interpretation of the dicta, which throws great light on Aquinas’s theory of mind. Her own account makes St Thomas guilty of the naive representationalism that the Aristotelian slogans were meant to rule out. In the ninth chapter, on freedom, the notion of the mind as a spiritual mechanism is once again pressed into service. The will is conceived as a switch in this mechanism, and many of the historic problems about the relationship between freedom and determinism can be resolved if we realize that this switch has not just two positions, but three: pro, con, and off. For decades scholars of Aquinas have laboured patiently to show that Aquinas’s actus voluntatis are not vulnerable to the devastating criticisms of volitions made in Ryle’s Concept of Mind. If Stump’s account is adequate, then their work has been a waste of time. Like everybody else, Stump finds it difficult to reconcile Aquinas’s Aristotelian account of the soul as form of the body with his Christian belief in the possibility of the survival of a disembodied soul between death and resurrection. She works hard on this problem, but she has a short way with those who have difficulty with the very notion of an immaterial mind. ‘An argument for the impossibility of an immaterial mind’, she writes, ‘would be in effect an argument against the existence of God, and so far no one has produced such an argument that has garnered any substantial support.’ Such a bland assertion that the ball is in the other person’s court, such a pre-emptive grab for the default position, is a philosophical tactic usually more typical of atheists than of theists. In this case, it has the effect of dispensing the author from treating of the

132 aquinas in america Five Ways or other proofs of the existence of God, an omission surprising in a book on Aquinas. Aquinas, while believing that a disembodied soul was possible, more than once insisted that such an entity would not be a human being. ‘My soul is not me’, he said in his commentary on the Corinthians. Stump tries to draw the sting out of this by citing the modern philosophers who believe that a human being is capable of existing when she is only a brain in a vat. She adopts a distinction between identity and constitution: if she were reduced to that situation, she would be constituted only by the vatted brain, but she would not be identical with it. In the same way, she says, for Aquinas a human being is capable of existing when she is composed of nothing more than a form, even without its being the case that she is identical to the form. I find it difficult to make sense of the notion of identity operative here. The third part of Stump’s book is entitled ‘The Nature of Human Excellence’. This deals with the moral philosophy of the second part of the Summa Theologiae. Given the wealth of material to be found there, any commentator is bound to be selective. Stump rightly insists that in Aquinas’s ethical system virtue plays a much more fundamental role than law, and her strategy is to devote one chapter to a representative moral virtue, one to a representative intellectual virtue, and one to a representative theological virtue. The virtues chosen are justice, wisdom, and faith. Though justice is not, in fact, a typical Aristotelian moral virtue, as Aristotle himself makes clear, the tenth chapter which is devoted to it is one of the most rewarding in Stump’s book. She focuses on two issues: one, the contrast between an ethics of justice and an ethics of care; the other, the application of Aquinas’s teaching on fraternal correction to the role of dissidents in modern society. There is much here that is original and valuable, and the chapter contains some of the best examples of Stump’s use of detailed contemporary narrative to illustrate philosophical points.

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If justice is not a typical moral virtue, wisdom is even more tricky as an example of intellectual virtue. In Aristotle sophia is the highest of the intellectual excellences, and its exercise is the prime constituent of human fulfilment. But sophia is not naturally described in modern English as a virtue, and the Greek word that corresponds to the English word ‘wisdom’ is phronesis, the virtue of the practical intellect. Sapientia in Aquinas corresponds to Aristotle’s sophia, but not entirely. Like Aristotle’s sophos the sapiens is a person who enjoys the correct Weltanschauung, but in this world view God is given a greater role by Aquinas than by Aristotle. Moreover, for Aquinas, the achievement of this overall understanding of God and the world is, in Aquinas, more explicitly related to the operation of the will. This makes it more natural to call sapientia a virtue—though it remains true that ‘wisdom’ is better reserved as a translation for the virtue of practical reason, in Latin prudentia. The role of the will at this point in Aquinas’s system calls for a discussion of the degree to which belief is voluntary. Stump devotes several careful pages to this question, but once again her discussion is marred by her image of the mind as a spiritual mechanism. ‘Believing or refraining from believing can be a free basic action’, she writes. But believing is not an action at all, any more than knowledge is. Here Stump’s belief in episodes of knowing and believing makes her task harder for herself; it hampers her defence of Aquinas’s (correct) thesis that belief can be voluntary. The best of the chapters in this section of the book is the one on faith. Stump exhibits her fair-mindedness by stating very clearly and candidly the objections to treating faith as a virtue. Is religious belief based on wish fulfilment? How can an act of will produce certainty? Is there not something inappropriate about obtaining intellectual assent as a result of the will’s being drawn to goodness rather than by the intellect’s being moved by the evidence. In attempting to answer these questions, Stump shows once again her ability to illuminate philosophical points by detailed narrative examples.

134 aquinas in america From chapter thirteen, on Grace and Free Will, the book takes a highly theological turn. Already the chapter on faith included a substantial treatment of the controversy between Augustine and the Semi-Pelagians. Part four of the book, ‘God’s Relationship to Human Beings’ contains three chapters, one on the Incarnation, one on the atonement, and one on providence and suffering. In the first two of these chapters, theology—dogmatic theology, not natural theology—takes over altogether. It is true that doctrines such as the Trinity and the Incarnation forced Aquinas to think very deeply about such concepts as nature and personality, and that the doctrine of transubstantiation led him into careful analysis of the relationship between substance and accidents in material objects. But Stump treats Aquinas’s theological concerns at far greater length than would be needed if the purpose were merely to harvest the philosophical reward from Aquinas theological ponderings. The latter part of the book seems to belong not so much to a series on the arguments of the philosophers, but to one on the arguments of the theologians. The book ends, however, with an admirable chapter on providence and suffering. Here the treatment is rich and sensitive and draws rewardingly on St Thomas’s commentary on the book of Job, a text little studied by philosophers. After the excursus into revealed theology in the previous chapters, readers will find themselves here on the philosophically familiar ground of the problem of evil. Stump is a more thoroughly committed Thomist than most recent writers have been. She is very unwilling to allow that he has got anything wrong, or that some of his views have been superannuated by the progress of science. Very rarely she rebukes him—for instance, for not accepting that the brain is the organ of the mind. Ironically, on this issue, I believe Aquinas is right and Stump is wrong. Aquinas was an intellectual giant, and those of us who try to interpret him to a twenty-first century audience are like Lilliputians

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trying to tie him down with our own conceptual netting. It is not to be wondered if we all have different perspectives on this gigantic figure, and find it hard to recognize the descriptions of him given by our colleagues working from different angles.

11 ‘Philosophy states only what everyone admits’ In philosophy we do not draw conclusions. ‘But it must be like this!’ is not a philosophical proposition. Philosophy only states what everyone admits. (PI §599)

This is one of Wittgenstein’s most important statements about the nature of philosophy. Commentators seem reluctant to take it at its face value. Peter Hacker comments on the first sentence: ‘It does not mean that there are no arguments in philosophy, or that no definitive conclusions can be drawn from them, e.g. that solipsism and idealism are incoherent, or that a private language is unintelligible.’¹ Garth Hallett comments on the third sentence: ‘[T]o appear plausible this too must be recognized as prescriptive, not descriptive. The trouble is that even the concluding words may have to be read ‘‘which everyone ought to admit’’.’² Hallett is right, of course, that Wittgenstein is talking about philosophy as correctly understood, not philosophy as mismanaged and misunderstood by bad philosophers. But he is talking about what everyone actually admits, and not what everyone ought to admit. To affirm that good philosophy states only what everyone ought to admit is close to tautology. However, it must be admitted ¹ Wittgenstein, Meaning and Mind (Blackwell, 1990), 329. ² A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Cornell UP, 1977), 567.

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that ‘everyone’ in Wittgenstein’s text means ‘everyone, when not philosophizing’. Against Hacker, I think Wittgenstein is seriously maintaining that strictly speaking there are no arguments in philosophy, and that philosophical methods lead to no conclusions. If it is possible definitively to dispose of philosophical errors such as solipsism and idealism, or the belief in private objects, this is achieved by methods that resemble the cure of a delusion rather than the deduction of a theorem. I think, therefore, that the passage deserves fuller treatment than it has been given by these commentators. In context, it is a warning against hypostatizing feelings, where there are no feelings, as an explanation of our thoughts. But, as both commentators recognize, this is a particular application of a general conception of philosophy enunciated more fully in sections 126–8, where they deal more fully with Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. (PI §126) If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to discuss them, because everyone would agree to them. (PI §128)

Section 126 obviously corresponds to the first part of §599 (‘In philosophy we do not draw conclusions’) and §128 to the final part (‘Philosophy only states what everyone admits’). There are good reasons why commentators should seek to soften the force of these sections and their application in §599. Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice does not seem to accord with his description of the role of philosophy: he frequently makes statements that do not look at all like things that everyone admits. Certainly, the Investigations contains many passages which anyone other than Wittgenstein would call arguments; and from time to time Wittgenstein, himself, refers to his own procedures as arguments (e.g. PG pp. 75, 227; PI §40 and §140; often in the Blue and Brown Books). Nonetheless, I believe Wittgenstein meant his remarks to be taken quite seriously. However, before explaining what I think he meant, I wish to compare my chosen

138 philosophy states what everyone admits text from the Investigations to a parallel passage in the Tractatus, namely, 6. 53: The right method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.

In the Investigations the right method in philosophy consists in saying nothing except what everyone admits—this too, I shall maintain, will be something that has nothing to do with philosophy. ‘What everyone admits’ now replaces ‘propositions of natural science’ (or ‘the totality of true propositions’, 4. 11). In the Investigations as in the Tractatus, the nearest thing that there is to proof in philosophy is the demonstration to a metaphysician that he has failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. The demonstration, of course, now takes a different form: it consists of showing that he is using a sign without the support of any language game. (Either he has taken a sign from an existing language game and used it outside the network within which alone it has sense; or he has purported to invent a new sign without appropriately embedding it in a new game.) Why, then, does Wittgenstein say that philosophy does not make deductions or draw conclusions? There are, I believe, two reasons, corresponding to two different tasks that Wittgenstein assigns to philosophy. First, there is the negative, therapeutic task of philosophy: the resolution of philosophical problems by the dissolution of philosophical illusion. Second, there is the more positive task of giving us an overview of the actual working of our language. (The two tasks, of course, overlap.) In neither activity is there any room for deduction, for the drawing of conclusions from premisses in accordance with logical rules. The negative philosophical task is the destruction of philosophical illusion, the castles in the air built by bad philosophers. This

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is the task that Wittgenstein describes as the turning of latent nonsense into patent nonsense (§464). The reason why there is no room for deduction here is that the philosopher’s dogma is not a genuine proposition from which other things might follow, but only a piece of nonsense in disguise. As was said in the Tractatus, it is impossible to judge a piece of nonsense (5. 5422): it is equally impossible to make a piece of nonsense a premiss in an argument. For that reason, I think Hacker is wrong to believe that Wittgenstein admits the possibility of argument in philosophy. Hacker claims that, for instance, it follows from the private language argument that idealism and solipsism are misguided philosophies. But he does, of course, recognize the problem here. It follows, he adds in a footnote, ‘not by deductive inference! Solipsism and idealism are not false but nonsense!’ (Wittgenstein, Meaning and Mind, 478). But that point is too important to be left as an afterthought, and we may well be puzzled about what kind of following this is. A reason why one might think that there is room for argument even in Wittgensteinian therapy is that the philosophical treatment of a problem may well involve the use of words like ‘so’, ‘therefore’, and ‘because’, which are characteristic of genuine inference. But that is due to the demands of the therapeutic procedure. The misguided philosopher believes that his dogma is a genuine proposition. To cure him of that illusion we have to humour him: we have to take his pseudo-proposition seriously by treating it as if it were a genuine proposition and drawing consequences from it. Of course these consequences will themselves be pseudo-propositions and only pseudo-consequences. The purpose of this operation is not to lead the patient to a conclusion that he will recognize as false, so that he will have to give up his premiss. It is, rather, to bring him to realize the illusory nature of his original claim, and thus make him cease to wish to persevere with it. It is literally a reductio ad absurdum, not the reduction to self-contradiction that goes by that name in logic textbooks. The therapeutic procedure is not, however, a mere incantation. It must obey the laws of logic. What ‘follows from’ the

140 philosophy states what everyone admits pseudo-proposition must be what would really follow from it if it were a genuine proposition. To the non-Wittgensteinian philosopher—and in particular to the philosopher whose intellecual malaise is being treated—it does, indeed, appear to be an argument. A commentator, therefore, who uses expressions such as ‘the private language argument’ need not necessarily be in error about Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy. Philosophy, as has been said, has for Wittgenstein a positive as well as a negative task, namely that of presenting an overview of the use of language. But conclusions are not drawn in the course of the positive task, any more than they are in the course of the negative task. But the reason is a different one, a reason that is alluded to in §128: if one tried to advance theses in philosophy it would never be possible to discuss them, because everyone would agree to them. This is the only context, in the Nachlass, in which the word ‘thesis’ is used. In the school of philosophy in which I received my own first training, ‘theses’ were very important. A textbook of a philosophical subject would be divided not into chapters but into theses. A thesis in an epistemological text, for instance, ran like this: ‘The human intellect forms universal concepts of objects of sense experience.’ The statement of the thesis would be followed by an explanation of the terms in it, a list of adversaries, a deductive proof, and a set of answers to objections. The list of adversaries to that particular thesis was a long one, including nominalists (Roscellinus, Hobbes, and British empiricists) and conceptualists (Ockham and Kant). I do not know how widespread this method of teaching philosophy was in continental universities in the early part of the twentieth century. However, it is well known that Waismann tried to express the Wittgensteinian philosophy of the early 1930s in a set of theses.³ Wittgenstein at once enunciated the principle enshrined in §128. ‘Wenn es Thesen der Philosophie g¨abe, so d¨urften sie zu keinen Diskussionen Anlass geben. Sie m¨ussten ³ F. Waismann, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, ed. B. McGuinness (Blackwell, 1967).

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n¨amlich so abgefasst sein, dass jedermann sagt: Ja, ja, das ist ja selbstverst¨andlich.’ (See also §§108, 215.) Genuine philosophical theses have no adversaries. Aristotle laid it down that in a genuine demonstration the premisses must be better known than the conclusion. If Wittgenstein is right that the theses of philosophy must be things that are self-evident and incontestable, then there can be no Aristotelian demonstrations in philosophy. This is because any would-be conclusions will be as well known as any premisses that could be offered in their support. Section 127 gives the reason why theses in philosophy must be truisms. ‘The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.’ These reminders are reminders of the obvious: of aspects of things that we do not notice because they are always before our eyes (§129). The theses of philosophy are, I believe, reminders of the obvious truths that we are tempted to overlook. They are what replace the ‘propositions of natural science’ in the Tractatus account of philosophical method. Like them, they have nothing to do with philosophy in the sense that they have no philosophical content. They do not contain any information that is not well known to the non-philosopher. In several places, Wittgenstein seeks to illuminate this account of philosophy by invoking Plato and Augustine. In MS 110. 131–2 he writes: Ich kann doch am Schluss nicht mehr sagen als jeder weiss. Ich kann doch nur: auf das aufmerksam machen, was jeder weiss, d.h. sofort als wahr zugibt. (Das sokratische Erinnern an die Wahrheit.) (After all, in the end I cannot say more than everyone knows. I can only: point that out of which everyone knows, i.e. what everyone will immediately admit as true. ( The Socratic reminding of the truth.))

In PI 436, and in several different contexts, he cites Augustine’s Confessions (11. 22): Manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et eadem rursus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum.

142 philosophy states what everyone admits ( These things are utterly commonplace and everyday, deeply obscure, and their discovery is new.)

Neither authority is, in fact, saying the same thing as Wittgenstein. Plato’s Socrates sees not just philosophy, but all scientific knowledge, as being a matter of remembering. Augustine’s familiar items, such as time, elude us not because of their everyday simplicity, but because they have mysterious hidden natures. Wittgenstein can say both that what is hidden is of no interest to us (§126) and also, a moment later, that the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden (§128). The first passage uses ‘hidden’ in Augustine’s sense (hidden in spite of being familiar), and the second in Wittgenstein’s special sense (hidden because familiar). I now want to ask how far Wittgenstein’s practice matches his theory. How far do the sections we have been expounding present an accurate description of the philosophical procedure of the Investigations? Does Wittgenstein’s philosophy only state what everyone admits? Does it never draw conclusions from an argument? I believe that the passages we have been considering give an accurate, but incomplete, account of Wittgenstein’s general philosophical practice at the time when he was working on the Investigations. This can be illustrated from the discussion of thought and thinking that begins at section 318. There, Wittgenstein explores and explodes a number of philosophical errors about the nature of thinking. One error attacked is the idea that thought is a mental process accompanying spoken sentences. ‘Thinking’, Wittgenstein says, ‘is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking’ (§339). Is this not a philosophical thesis, the conclusion of an argument? Wittgenstein at once rejects this interpretation of his remark. ‘Am I acquainted with incorporeal processes, then, only thinking is not one of them? No; I called the expression ‘‘an incorporeal process’’ to my aid in my embarrassment when I was trying to explain the meaning of the word ‘‘thinking’’ in a primitive way.’

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‘Thinking is an incorporeal process’ is not a false statement, an error to be denied. The sentence can even be used to express, in a clumsy and misleading way, a recognition of the difference between the grammar of ‘eat’ and ‘think’. What is rejected is a pseudo-proposition, the expression of a misleading imagination. When, in another passage, Wittgenstein rejects talk of an inner process of remembering, he is not denying anything, only setting his face against a futile philosophical picture (§306). If Wittgenstein is successful he persuades the reader to join him in rejecting the idea that thinking and remembering are inner, incorporeal, processes. He does not persuade by offering reasons, though it is rational, not unreasonable, for the reader to accept his persuasion. Wittgenstein proceeds not by presenting arguments for a negative conclusion, but by assembling reminders of the obvious. These reminders include the philosophical statements that, once uttered, are assured of universal assent. But they are also of several other types: many of them are not statements at all, but questions, or commands, or jokes. It is, indeed, remarkable how little of Wittgenstein’s text consists of statements of any kind. If we take, as a sample chosen more or less at random, sections 501–30 of the PI, we find that they contain 105 sentences. Less than half of these (43) are in the indicative mood at all: 35 sentences are questions, 17 are quotations (sentences for discussion), and 10 are commands (usually to carry out a thought-experiment). Of the indicative sentences many simply set the stage for an example, or expand upon targeted quotations. What, then, are the theses in philosophy that Wittgenstein has in mind, the statements that everyone admits? I suggest the following as examples. Cheese does not grow or shrink without a cause (§143) Dogs do not talk to themselves (§357) If I say falsely that something is red, then it isn’t red (§429) Nothing could induce me to put my hand into a flame (§472)

144 philosophy states what everyone admits A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face (§583) When I raise my arm, my arm goes up (§621) These are all truisms that are, on the face of it, devoid of philosophical content. What makes them philosophical is that they are presented in the course of the treatment of a philosophical problem. That they are being used as philosophical may often be brought out by an unusual emphasis. Thus, the sentence in §429 is best translated ‘If I say falsely that something isn’t red, then all the same red is what it isn’t.’ In spite of §599, such truisms of everyday are not the most important method that Wittgenstein uses in the clearing up of philosophical confusion. A technique much more often employed is the drawing of distinctions. If someone says that sensations are private, the first step in enlightening him is to propose two different paraphrases of ‘private’, in §246 and §253. To clarify the concept of thinking, we distinguish between instantaneous understanding (§§319–26), thoughtful utterance (§§327–39), talking in one’s head (§§344–8), and so on. Someone who wants to say something metaphysical about thought may well be cured of his wish by being reminded of the many different ways in which ‘think’ is used. Again, if we want to get clear about an emotion, like fear, we need to make a distinction between its object and its cause (§476). And again, we can understand a sentence in two very different senses of ‘understand’ (§531). Another favoured method of achieving philosophical clarity is to draw a comparison between different human activities that provide the context of language games, so that the learner is assisted in seeing the similarities and the differences between them. Thus, ‘Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think’ (§527). For this purpose, of course, Wittgenstein often invents imaginary language games. These are not approximations to an explanation of language, but ‘objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities’ (§130).

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Philosophical confusion, we might say, happens when the imagination takes over the role of the intellect. We have a picture of how a word is used, and the picture conflicts with our understanding of the word, which is expressed in our actual use of it. Wittgenstein’s method of dealing with this is to give the imagination enough rope to hang itself. The vague and confused and ultimately nonsensical picture we have is to be painted in concrete detail, which will make its nonsense patent. The antiprivate-language ‘argument’ is a paradigm of this kind of treatment. According to Wittgenstein, ‘There is no such thing as a private language’, is not a philosophical conclusion. If ‘p’ is nonsense, then ‘not-p’ is nonsense too. ‘There is no such thing as private ostensive definition’, is nonsense no less than, ‘There is such a thing as private ostensive definition.’ One cannot avoid the difficulty here by saying ‘It is wrong to speak of ‘‘private ostensive definition’’.’ That is not a statement about those three sounds. Why should I not use them to mean ‘Three blind mice?’ It purports to be a statement about those words used in the way that the private linguist uses them. But, of course, there is no such way; and that is the point of the ‘argument’ about private language. But you are not giving anyone any information when you tell him there is no such thing as a private language. That is why it is not the conclusion of an argument. However, the kinds of technique that I rehearsed in previous paragraphs show that while it may be true that philosophy consists in assembling reminders of the obvious, it is a very incomplete account of the method of PI to say that it only states what everyone admits. There are many other methods employed besides the statement of the kinds of truisms I have listed. Moreover, there are many statements in the text that are not at all truisms to which everyone would say ‘Ja, ja, selbstverst¨andlich.’ Here are a few examples. The meaning of a word is its use in the language (§43) Essence is expressed by grammar (§371)

146 philosophy states what everyone admits You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language (§384) It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact (§445) Something can look like a sentence which we understand, and yet yield no sense (§513) These are very like the kind of thesis proposed by Waismann and discouraged by Wittgenstein. They are quite different from the truisms I listed above. First, they are explicitly about language. On the face of it, they are substantive statements of linguistic philosophy. Second, they are not likely to be uncontested. The ordinary person, to be sure, is unlikely to say ‘no, no’. She is more likely to be puzzled by them than to contradict them. But they are likely to be contradicted by many a philosopher: and if they are themselves true statements, then their contradictions cannot be the nonsense that is Wittgenstein’s paradigm of wrongheaded philosophy. I find it difficult to reconcile statements of this kind with the account of philosophy we have been considering. The account, as I remarked earlier, resembles that given in the Tractatus. At 4. 112 we are told: Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’ but rather in the clarification of propositions. Notoriously, there is a problem about how one reconciles the actual propositions of the Tractatus with the description here given. I do not wish to enter into that problem, but simply to point out that the account of 4. 112 remains true within the account of philosophy given in the Investigations. ‘Elucidations’ is quite a good word to cover the truisms, questions, distinctions, comparisons, etc. that make up more than 90 per cent of the text of the Investigations. It is only the few statements of the kind we have just illustrated

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that clash with 4. 112 in the way that almost every proposition of the Tractatus does. Though I have tried my best to do so I do not believe that it is, in the end, possible to reconcile Wittgenstein’s account of philosophy with the entirety of his philosophical activity in the Investigations. Others will, perhaps, be more successful in reconciling his theory with his practice. Those who find it impossible to make the reconciliation will be forced in the end to make a choice between accepting his theory and following his practice. If one gives priority to the theory, then perhaps the simplest method of effecting some kind of reconciliation is to look on the Waismann-like theses of the Investigations as momentary yieldings to a form of philosophical expression which he had long rejected in theory, and to a great extent grown out of in practice. The sentences in question are, of course, among the most quoted ones of the Investigations. Nonetheless, it might be claimed, nothing would be lost if they were all excised from its text, and there would be a substantial gain in consistency. On the other hand, one might give priority to the practice, and write off the theory. The metaphilosophy, it might be claimed, is an inadequate account even of Wittgenstein’s own philosophy: it is more obviously inadequate as an account of the best practice of the philosophers of the past. It is no surprise if Wittgenstein’s account of the nature of philosophy should turn out to be one of the weakest parts of his philosophizing: the same is true of the greatest philosophers from Plato and Aristotle onwards. If we discard Wittgenstein’s account, we can treat philosophical statements, in accordance with tradition, as being bearers of truth values: as being either necessarily true or necessarily false. We can then treat philosophical arguments, including Wittgenstein’s own, as perfectly genuine arguments proceeding in accordance with normal logical rules. For my part, I find it hard to decide between these alternatives; sometimes I am tempted by the one, and sometimes by the other. I wish to conclude not by arguing in either direction, but by drawing attention to the fact that Wittgenstein’s own thought

148 philosophy states what everyone admits on the nature of philosophy was fluid, and did not remain fixed in the pattern of the remarks in the Big Typescript and in the Investigations. Shortly before his death, when writing the notebooks that became On Certainty, he became more and more interested in propositions of the kind that I listed earlier as reminders of the obvious, and less concerned to make the grammatical generalizations that are difficult to reconcile with his second-order remarks. But the tension remained to the end. Such statements as ‘humans have brains in their skulls’ and ‘the earth existed long before my birth’ and ‘if someone’s arm is cut off it will not grow again’, began to exercise him as occupying a middle ground between grammatical propositions and empirical propositions. In §401 he asks what the relation is between these certain propositions, propositions that ‘stand fast’ for us, and the language games that give meaning to our utterances. He replies: Propositions of the form of empirical propositions, and not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language).

He goes on immediately: In this remark the expression ‘propositions of the form of empirical propositions’ is itself thoroughly bad.

He could not hide from himself that there were more things in his philosophy than could be confined within his metaphilosophy.

12 Cognitive Scientism Once upon a time it was easy to classify propositions. There were analytic propositions, true in virtue of their meaning, and there were synthetic propositions that contained information about the world. All analytic propositions were known a priori; empirical propositions, known a posteriori, were all synthetic. Out of respect for Kant philosophers would enquire whether any propositions were synthetic a priori but commonly the question was raised only to be answered in the negative. In the latter part of the twentieth century the tidy dichotomy—analytic a priori vs synthetic a posteriori—came under attack from two opposite directions. In 1951 Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ sought to undermine the analytic/synthetic distinction, replacing it with a continuum of propositions of varying degrees of entrenchment in the web of our beliefs. In 1969 there appeared Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, which drew attention to an important class of propositions which appeared to be neither analytic nor empirical. Instead of two packages of propositions, we were offered either a single package or three packages. Quine denied that analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy or necessity, and he rejected the idea that a sentence was synthetic if it could be verified or falsified by experience. It is not single sentences, he argued, but whole systems—which include mathematics and logic as well as geography and history—that are verified or falsified. ‘Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body ... A conflict with experience at the periphery

150 cognitive scientism occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements.’¹ We cannot single out a class of analytic statements which remain true whatever happens; no statement—not even a law of logic—can be totally immune to revision. Wittgenstein, by contrast, explored the no man’s land between the analytic and the synthetic—propositions such as ‘motor cars don’t grow on trees’ and ‘a man cannot live if his head is cut off’ (OC 273–4, 279). Such propositions seem very different from the theorems of a priori disciplines such as logic and mathematics, and yet it would be foolish to try to verify or falsify them by empirical research. ‘Propositions of the form of empirical propositions’, Wittgenstein wrote (later preferring the expression ‘statements about material objects’) ‘and not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts’ (OC 401). Such propositions, as he put it, stand fast for us.² Though Wittgenstein increased, while Quine reduced, the number of classes of propositions, the two philosophers agree on many points. Wittgenstein, like Quine, was a holist. ‘Our knowledge’, he wrote, ‘forms an enormous system. And only within this system has a particular bit the value we give it’ (OC 410). He came close to saying that there was no sharp boundary between propositions of logic (rules) and empirical propositions (OC 319–20). And, like Quine, he raises the question whether there are any propositions that are immune to revision in the face of new facts. ‘Would it be unthinkable’, he asks, ‘that I should stay in the saddle however much the facts bucked?’ (OC 616) But whereas Quine says that unexpected facts might force us to redistribute truth values across the field of our knowledge, Wittgenstein’s response is ‘Certain events would put me into a position in which I could not go on ¹ From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953), 140. ² The trichotomy that Wittgenstein introduced into the classification of propositions is not easy to reconcile with his second-order remarks on the nature of philosophical theses, as I have complained in my paper ‘Philosophy states only what everyone admits’ (ch. 11 in this volume).

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with the old language game’ (OC 617). A proposition, on this view, would not change from true to false; but we might give up using it. To adapt an example Wittgenstein gives elsewhere: I weigh something, and announce the result. But if it later transpires that successive weighings of the same object, on various scales, produce wildly irregular readings, then I do not declare the earlier measurement was wrong; rather, I give up any trust in the language game of assigning weights. Hesitantly, Wittgenstein was prepared to agree that ‘any empirical proposition can be transformed into a postulate—and then become a norm of description’ (OC 321). There can also, we may note, be change in the other direction—as is shown by the proposition ‘no man has ever been on the moon’ which Wittgenstein notoriously gave as an example of something that stands fast for us. ‘If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it’ (OC 208). Nowadays, of course, it is a matter of straightforward empirical inquiry to ascertain how many men have been on the moon. These features bring out the similarities between the teachings of Quine and Wittgenstein.³ But despite these resemblances, the two philosophers have a quite different conception of the nature of philosophy. For Quine and his followers there is a continuum between science and philosophy, between physics and metaphysics, between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind. For Wittgenstein, science and philosophy are two totally different activities, science being concerned with information and explanation, philosophy with description and understanding. The distinction was something that Wittgenstein upheld constantly throughout his life, right from his insistence in the Tractatus (4. 112) that philosophy was not a body of doctrine but an activity of clarification. ³ Other resemblances have been usefully catalogued in Peter Hacker’s Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 1996), 189–93.

152 cognitive scientism In the Blue Book Wittgenstein wrote ‘Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness’ (BB 18). Later, he wrote that the essential mark of metaphysics was its obliteration of the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations (Z 458). A particular sentence might be used at one time to express a rule and at another to state a fact; but since it is the use, rather than the sequence of words, that is significant, this does nothing to call in question the radical difference between the two kinds of investigation. If this is so, then Quine’s form of holism is, for Wittgenstein, metaphysical in the bad sense: it is an attempt to do philosophy with the methods of science. At the present time scientistic metaphysics is most prevalent in the study of the mind: many neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers champion a programme of cognitive science whose goal is precisely to amalgamate the philosophy of mind with the scientific investigation of the brain. Philosophical practitioners of cognitive science often explicitly identify themselves as Quineans, just as critics of the programme take their stand on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience by Max Bennett and Peter Hacker (Blackwell, 2003) is the most significant contribution to philosophy of mind in recent years. It examines thoroughly and carefully the pretensions of cognitive science to have superannuated philosophical psychology. It shows how the writings of some of the most prominent proponents of the new discipline are infected throughout with philosophical confusion. Those who scorn our ordinary concepts of thought, intention, and reasons as relics of a folk psychology, are engaged, as Bennett and Hacker show, in sawing off the branches on which any scientist exploring the neurological basis of the mind must have to sit. Bennett and Hacker’s book demonstrates that the insights of Wittgenstein, so far from being antiquated by recent developments, remain of the

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utmost importance in the philosophy of mind. In this chapter I simply wish to express—in slightly different language—my agreement with the conclusions of Bennett and Hacker, and then to enter a modest demurrer to one of Wittgenstein’s more arresting proposals. Contemporary investigation of the nature of the human mind customarily starts with a renunciation of Cartesian dualism. This is so, whether the investigator is Quinean or Wittgensteinian. Wittgenstein himself rarely mentions Descartes—one of the few exceptions is a passage in the Blue Book (p. 69) where he says that misunderstanding of the use of ‘I’ creates the illusion that we use this word to refer to something bodiless, which has its seat in our body. ‘In fact’, he continues, ‘this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said ‘‘Cogito ergo sum’’ .’ But Wittgenstein’s argument against private ostensive definition is, in effect, the most thoroughgoing critique of Cartesianism ever propounded. Cognitive scientists, on the other hand, while rejecting the dualist idea of the mind as a separate substance, retain many of Descartes’s crucial assumptions. In the first place, they accept Descartes’s demarcation between the mental and the material. For Aristotelians before Descartes the mind was the faculty, or set of faculties, that set off human beings from other animals. Dumb animals and human beings shared certain abilities and activities: dogs, cows, pigs, and humans could all see and hear and feel, they had in common the faculties of sensation. But only human beings could think abstract thoughts and take rational decisions; they were marked off from the other animals by the possession of intellect and will, and it was these two faculties that essentially constituted the mind. Intellectual activity was in a particular sense immaterial, whereas sensation was impossible without a material body. For Descartes and for many others after him the boundary between mind and matter was set elsewhere. It was consciousness, not intelligence or rationality, that was the defining criterion of the mental. The mind, viewed from this standpoint, is the realm

154 cognitive scientism of whatever is accessible to introspection: the mental includes not only human understanding and willing, but also human seeing, hearing, pain, and pleasure. This conception of the mind, though I call it Cartesian, should not be regarded simply as an aberration of continental philosophy: it was shared by the British empiricists, and it is shared today by many Anglo-American philosophers and scientists. Cognitive scientists not only accept that consciousness is the mark of the mental; they also accept a Cartesian/empiricist notion of what consciousness is. Consciousness is considered as an object of introspection: something we can observe when we look within ourselves, something that has a purely contingent connection with its expression in speech and behaviour, something to which we ourselves have direct access, but which others can learn of only indirectly, through accepting our verbal testimony or making causal inferences from our physical behaviour. ‘Consciousness’, in the writings of such theorists, acquires a special sense. Without any philosophical commitment one can use the word as a general term to cover those faculties and activities, such as the senses and sensation, that are peculiar to humans and animals. But in the Cartesian tradition the word is intended to stand for some feature, directly observable only by introspection, that is common to all those activities, and in virtue of which alone they are entitled to be called ‘conscious activities’. Such a usage is open to many objections, the chief of which is that there is no such common feature. Some recent philosophers have tried to identify such a feature as the possession of a ‘qualitative feel’: if something is an object of consciousness then there is a certain way in which it feels like to have it. In the tenth chapter of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience Hacker and Bennett have definitively disposed of the myth of the qualitative feel as a universal feature of consciousness. What does a non-Cartesian account of the mind look like? If the mind is not a substance, what is it? The mind is a capacity. (That, as Wittgenstein would say, is a grammatical remark.) The mind is a comprehensive ability to acquire abilities. It is the capacity to

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acquire linguistic and symbolic skills, which are themselves abilities of a certain kind. Abilities and capacities are individuated by their possessors and their exercises, but they are distinct from both. The possessor of an ability is what has the ability: in the case of the mind, the human being whose mind it is. It is I, and not my mind, who know English and am exercising this ability in writing this chapter. An ability is a more or less enduring state, while the exercise of an ability will be a datable event or process. The mind lasts a lifetime while its exercises are our thoughts and projects and the other items of our mental lives. A capacity is clearly something distinct from its possessor and from its exercise, but it must also be distinguished from a third thing, which we may call its vehicle. Consider the capacity of whisky to intoxicate. The vehicle of this capacity to intoxicate is the alcohol that the whisky contains: it is the ingredient in virtue of which the whisky has the power to intoxicate. The vehicle of a power need not be a substantial ingredient like alcohol which can be physically separated from the possessor of the power, though it is in such cases that the distinction between a power and its vehicle is most obvious (one cannot, for example, weigh the power of whisky to intoxicate as one can weigh the alcohol it contains). Take the less exciting power which my wedding ring has of fitting on my finger. It has that power in virtue of having the size and shape it has, and size and shape are not modal, relational, potential properties in the same way as being able to fit on my finger is. They are not the power, but the vehicle of the power. A vehicle is something concrete, something that can be located and measured. An ability, on the other hand, has neither length nor breadth nor location. This does not mean that an ability is something ghostly: my front-door key’s ability to open my front door is not a concrete object, but it is not a spirit either. The notion of a vehicle, as I have explained it, is an extension of Aristotle’s exploration of the differences between actuality and potentiality. The vehicle of a power is the abiding actuality in virtue of which a substance possesses a potentiality which finds

156 cognitive scientism expression in transitory exercises. This underlying actuality may be an ingredient, or a property, or a structure. The identification of the actuality provides an explanation of the possession of the power or active potentiality. Moli`ere mocked at physicians who explained that opium put people to sleep because it had dormitive power. The statement was philosophically correct, but medically vacuous. The connection between a power and its exercise is not a causal one like that linking smoking and cancer. The job of the physicians was to look for the vehicle of the power, not to hypostatize the power itself, treating it as a substance in its own right. The vehicle was identified when the soporific ingredient of opium was discovered to be morphine. The following question may be raised. Pure morphine puts people to sleep just as opium does, so surely their soporific powers have the same vehicle. It would seem to follow that in the case of morphine the agent and the vehicle are one and the same thing. This would in effect reproduce the quack pharmacology at a lower level—only, now it is the morphine rather than the opium that has the dormitive power. Such an objection rests on a misunderstanding of the Aristotelian framework. Actualities and potentialities are, for Aristotle, stratified. Something that is a potentiality with respect to a particular exercise may itself be an actuality of a more primitive potentiality. Aristotle’s favourite example is the knowledge of a language. This is a potentiality, exercised in the actual, episodic, use of the language. But it is itself an actuality, a skill acquired on the basis of the underlying human, species-specific, capacity for language learning. The same system of stratification can be applied to the vehicles of powers. Morphine is the vehicle of opium’s dormitive power because it is the abiding ingredient that explains opium’s ability to put people to sleep. But it is not its own vehicle precisely because ‘morphine always contains morphine’, while true, provides no explanation of its soporific qualities. To discover the vehicle of these powers, one has to move to a different level, to morphine’s

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molecular structure and its relationship to the anatomy of the animal brain.⁴ In every age philosophers have been tempted to blur the distinctions between powers and their exercises and their vehicles. There is a perennial tendency to reduce potentialities to actualities. There are two kinds of reductionism: one reduces abilities to their exercises, the other reduces abilities to their vehicles. Hume, who said that the distinction between a power and its exercise was frivolous, was an exercise-reductionist. Descartes, who identified the powers of bodies with their geometrical properties, was a vehicle-reductionist. Philosophical errors about capacities show up particularly vividly when they occur in the philosophy of mind. Applied in this area, exercise-reductionism is behaviourism: the attempt to identify mind with its particular exercises in behaviour. Applied in this area, vehicle-reductionism becomes materialism: the reduction of our mental capacities to the parts and structures of our bodies in virtue of which we possess them, and in particular to our brains. The identification of mind and brain is a category mistake, because the brain is a material object and the mind is a capacity. The mind is the capacity to acquire intellectual abilities. The possessor of human mental capacities is neither the mind nor the brain but the human being. ‘Only of a human being’, Wittgenstein wrote, ‘and what resembles (behaves like) a human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’ This does not mean that Wittgenstein is a behaviourist: he is not identifying experience with behaviour, or even with dispositions to behave. The point is that what experiences one can have depends on how one can behave. Only someone who can play chess can ⁴ When, many years ago, I introduced the notion of vehicle I said that the connection between a power and its vehicle could be either necessary or contingent: ‘It is a conceptual truth’, I wrote, ‘that a round peg has the power to fit into a round hole’ (Will, Freedom, and Power (Blackwell, 1975), 10). To allow that the relationship between vehicle and power could be anything but an empirical matter was an error, and inconsistent with other things I have repeatedly said elsewhere.

158 cognitive scientism feel the desire to castle; only a being that can discriminate between light and darkness can have visual experiences. The relation between experiences of certain kinds, and the capacity to behave in certain ways, is not a merely contingent connection. Wittgenstein made a distinction between two kinds of evidence that we may have for the obtaining of states of affairs, namely symptoms and criteria. Where the connection between a certain kind of evidence and the conclusion drawn from it is a matter of empirical discovery, through theory and induction, the evidence may be called a symptom of the state of affairs; where the relation between evidence and conclusion is not something discovered by empirical investigation, but is something that must be grasped by anyone who possesses the concept of the state of affairs in question, then the evidence is not a mere symptom, but a criterion of the event in question. Such is the relation between scratching and itching, between crying and pain. Exploiting the notion of criterion enabled Wittgenstein to steer between the Scylla of dualism and the Charybdis of behaviourism. He agreed with dualists that particular mental events could occur without accompanying bodily behaviour; on the other hand he agreed with behaviourists that the possibility of ascribing mental acts to people depends on such acts having, in general, a behavioural expression. If it is wrong to identify the mind with behaviour, it is even more mistaken, according to Wittgenstein, to identify the mind with the brain. Such materialism is in fact a grosser philosophical error than behaviourism because the connection between mind and behaviour is a more intimate one than that between mind and brain. The relation between mind and behaviour is a criterial one, something prior to experience; the connection between mind and brain is a contingent one, discoverable by empirical science. Any discovery of links between mind and brain must take as its starting point the everyday concepts we use in describing the mind, concepts which are grafted on to behavioural criteria.

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It is conceivable that when my skull is opened after my death it will be found to contain nothing but sawdust. Of course it would be astonishing, nay miraculous, if this were to be the case. But if per impossibile it happened it would not cast any doubt on my having had a mind, known various languages, and written a number of books. This shows that the relationship between mind and brain is not a conceptual one. Aristotle, no mean philosopher of mind, had a wildly erroneous notion of the nature of the brain. Wittgenstein gives ‘I have a brain’ as an example of a proposition that stands fast and cannot be doubted. ‘Everything speaks in its favour, nothing against it. Nevertheless it is imaginable that my skull should turn out empty when it was operated on’ (OC 4; cf. also OC 118, 159). It is not just a strange coincidence that every man whose skull has been opened had a brain. ‘I am sure that my friend hasn’t sawdust in his body or in his head, even though I have no direct evidence of my senses to that effect’ (OC 281). Developments in the philosophy of mind since Wittgenstein have shown that it is possible to combine the errors of materialism with those of dualism. One of the standard dualist misunderstandings of the nature of the mind is the picture of mind’s relation to body as that between a little person or homunculus on the one hand, and a tool or instrument or machine on the other. This misunderstanding is compounded if we assign the role of homunculus to the brain, identifying it, as materialists do, with the mind so conceived. What is wrong with the homunculus fallacy? In itself there is nothing misguided in speaking of images in the brain, if one means patterns in the brain, observable to a neurophysiologist, that can be mapped onto features of the visible environment. What is misleading is to take these mappings as representations, to regard them as visible to the mind, and to say that seeing consists in the mind’s perception of these images. The misleading aspect is that such an account pretends to explain seeing, but the explanation reproduces exactly the puzzling features it was supposed to explain. Peter Hacker and Max Bennett prefer to call the fallacy ‘the mereological fallacy’—they point out that it is a fallacy that can be

160 cognitive scientism committed in connection with a mechanism like a clock no less than in connection with an animal such as a human being. We called the mistake ‘mereological’ because it involves ascribing to parts attributes that can intelligibly be ascribed only to the wholes of which they are parts. A form of this error was pointed out around 350 bc by Aristotle, who remarked that ‘to say that the soul is angry is as if one were to say that the soul weaves or builds. For it is surely better not to say that the soul pities, learns or thinks, but that a man does these. (De An. 408b12–15) ... Our primary concern was with the neuroscientific cousin of this, namely the error of ascribing to the brain—a part of an animal—attributes that can be ascribed literally only to the animal as a whole ... In Aristotelian spirit we now observe that to say that the brain is angry is as if one were to say that the brain weaves or builds. For it is surely better to say not that the brain pities, learns or thinks, but that a man does these. Accordingly, we deny that it makes sense to say that the brain is conscious, feels sensations, perceives, thinks, knows or wants anything—for these are attributes of animals, not of their brains.⁵

Sometimes cognitive scientists write as if the relation between mind and brain was that the mind made inferences from events in the brain and nervous system. This is a form of the homunculus fallacy, and it was explicitly rejected by Wittgenstein. ‘An event leaves a trace in the memory: one sometimes imagines this as if it consisted in the event’s having left a tract, an impression, a consequence in the nervous system. As if one could say: the nerves too have a memory. But then when someone remembered an event, he would have to infer it from this impression, this trace. Whatever the event does leave behind in the organism, it isn’t the memory’ (RPP 1. 220). When something is recorded on a tape, the alteration in the tape is not a memory, and when the tape is played it is not remembering. Not all cognitive scientists go so far as explicitly to identify the mind with the brain, but all seek a parallelism between mental and physical events. Wittgenstein rejected this. ‘Nothing seems more ⁵ Neuroscience and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2007), 131–2.

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possible to me’, he wrote, ‘than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in either the physiological or the nervous systems which corresponds to a particular thought, or a particular idea, or memory’ (LW 1. 504). The history of the mind is not a history of events in the way that the history of the body is. A thought does not have temporal parts as the utterance of a sentence does. Of course, there are such things as mental events and processes—hitting on an idea, or reciting a nursery rhyme in the imagination—but such events and processes are what they are because of the abilities from which they issue and which provide their background. The true task of neuroscience is to investigate the vehicles of mental abilities. It is in this investigation that the scientific advances of the last century have been achieved. But we may pose a fundamental question. Is it the case that every mental ability does have a physical vehicle? We might think that this is something certain—a certainty parallel to our knowledge that we do not have sawdust in our heads. But Wittgenstein does not agree. No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought processes from brain processes ... It is perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them. I saw this man years ago: now I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? ... Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concept of causality then it is high time it was upset. (Z 608–10; cf. RPP 903–6)

So Wittgenstein is willing to countenance a case of a causality between psychological phenomena unmediated physiologically. He is anxious to say that this does not amount to the ‘admission of the existence of a soul alongside the body, a ghostly, spiritual nature’ (RPP 906). The entity that does the associating, thinking, and remembering is not a spiritual substance, a` la Plato and Descartes,

162 cognitive scientism but a corporeal human being. But this passage seems to envisage the possibility of an Aristotelian soul or entelechy, which operates with no material vehicle, a formal and final cause to which there corresponds no mechanistic efficient cause. Since the time of Galileo it has been a presumption of science that every power has a vehicle, that to every potentiality for the future there corresponds a present actuality. It is this presumption that Wittgenstein is here calling in question. He is undoubtedly correct that there is nothing conceptually incoherent in the idea of a capacity existing without a material vehicle, but one must ask whether, and if so when, it can be reasonable for science simply to give up the quest for a vehicle. I share the queasiness about this passage that is widespread even among Wittgenstein’s admirers. Much of history suggests that scientific progress is made by enquiring into the vehicles of capacities, rather than by treating capacities such as dormitive powers as the basic building blocks of science. Maybe Wittgenstein is right that, in Aristotelian terms, there may be formal and final causes in the absence of efficient and material ones. Perhaps there can: but one cannot help worrying whether Wittgenstein may here be adopting towards contemporary neuroscientists the attitude that Renaissance Aristotelians adopted to Galileo.

13 The Wittgenstein Editions In his will of 29 January 1951, Wittgenstein bequeathed to Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Georg Henrik von Wright ‘all the copyright in all my unpublished writings; and also the manuscripts and typescripts thereof to dispose of as they think best’. These heirs were to publish ‘as many of my unpublished writings as they think fit’ and were to share the royalties and other profits equally between themselves. During the decade following Wittgenstein’s death the heirs, who acted as literary executors, did valuable service in publishing promptly serviceable editions and translations of the Philosophical Investigations and selections from other writings. Recent critical work has shown that the edition of what appears as Part 1 was substantially sound. More controversial, however, was the decision to include, as Part 2, MS 144, without any written warrant from Wittgenstein. The editors no doubt felt that it would be misleading, in the first publication of the philosopher’s post-Tractatus thoughts, to conceal that after the completion of the Investigations (Part 1) his thoughts on some crucial issues were taking a different turn before he died. The Untersuchungen appeared with an en face translation by Elizabeth Anscombe. This has recently been subject to some criticism, but I must record my opinion that it was a very remarkable achievement. In substance it is extremely faithful to Wittgenstein’s German: when a new en face edition was in preparation by Blackwell I was invited to propose emendations, and could produce less than a score. It is true that it is not consistent in its translation

164 the wittgenstein editions of semi-technical terms, such as Erkl¨arung and Bezeichnung, and it is also true that it often differs from the translations suggested by Wittgenstein himself in his notes on an earlier translation by Rush Rhees. But there are often good reasons for the inconsistencies, and Wittgenstein’s own English suggestions are not those of a native speaker of the language. The Anscombe translation is fluent and readable and has been universally accepted as if it contained the ipsissima verba of Wittgenstein. I can think of no other English translation of a philosopher—not Jowett’s Plato, nor Kemp Smith’s Kant—that has achieved such canonical status in the philosophical world. The vivid lucidity of the translation is the more remarkable given that Anscombe’s style, when she was writing in her own name, was often crabbed and opaque. Von Wright was prevented by illness from taking part in the editing of the Investigations, and had no part in the controversial decision to include a second part. He was involved, however, in the subsequent publication of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics; something which, by 1969, appears to have slightly embarrassed him. Since this book consists of selections from Wittgenstein’s writings, it occupies, he then wrote, ‘a unique and perhaps not altogether happy, position’ among the other publications from the Nachlass. These appeared at intervals during the 1950s and 1960s: the Blue and Brown Books (1958), Notebooks 1914–16 (1961), Philosophische Bemerkungen (TS 209) (1965), and Zettel (1967). In summer 1967 that part of the Nachlass which was known to exist in England was temporarily collected at Oxford and microfilmed for Cornell University, under the supervision of von Wright and Norman Malcolm. Later in the same year copies of papers in the Austrian part of the Nachlass were filmed at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York. It then became possible to purchase copies of these microfilms and many universities throughout the world acquired them. However, the standard of photography was poor, the collection was incomplete, and parts of the manuscripts were omitted, in particular the coded passages of Wittgenstein’s diaries.

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After the Cornell microfilming, Wittgenstein’s heirs gave all their originals of the Wittgenstein papers to Trinity College, Cambridge, to be kept in the Wren Library. By a deed of trust of 5 May 1969, while the papers themselves were given to Trinity, the copyright in the papers was given to a new set of trustees. These trustees were to consist, initially, of the original heirs, henceforth to be called ‘the beneficiaries’. New trustees could be appointed by the beneficiaries, and the trustees were to hold the copyrights and royalties on trust for the beneficiaries while they survived, and after the death of the last of them hand over to Trinity College. In a supplement to the Philosophical Review in 1969 von Wright provided the first full description and catalogue of the Nachlass: thenceforth the manuscripts and typescripts have been known by the numbers given them in that article. He announced the forthcoming publication of The Big Typescript (TS 213) under the title Philosophische Grammatik and of On Certainty. ‘With the publication of these posthumous works’, he felt able to say, ‘the full body of Wittgenstein’s philosophy has been made accessible to the public.’ It could, I think, fairly be said that at the conclusion of the 1960s an era in the reception of Wittgenstein came to an end. The main elements of his philosophy were available to the intellectual community, and if his philosophical insights were not to have the worldwide impact that they deserved, that was because of—hopefully ephemeral—changes in philosophical fashion, not because of the inaccessibility of the essential texts. However, interest began to grow in Wittgenstein’s biography and his intellectual development, and gradually it was realized that the state of the Nachlass was not such that the early editions could be regarded as uncontroversial and unquestionable representations of his definitive thought. Matters were brought to a head with the publication of the Big Typescript by Rush Rhees, under the title Philosophische Grammatik in 1970. It was at this point that, for the first time, I myself became involved in the dissemination of the Nachlass: for I was commissioned to prepare the English translation

166 the wittgenstein editions of the Grammatik, which appeared in 1974, and that brought me into close contact with Rhees’s editing methods. Rhees has been widely criticized; for instance Professor Hintikka, in his influential article on the Nachlass, ‘An Impatient Man and his Papers’ (Synth`ese, 87 (1991), 183–201) has this to say: The only half-way conventional book Wittgenstein left behind is TS 213, the Big Typescript. Rhees was supposed to edit it, but he ended up doing something quite different ... Rhees assembled a medley of materials, from different sources, which was never intended by Wittgenstein to go together, and which are sometimes lifted out of an important context.

This is a little unfair. Certainly, Rhees did not publish the Big Typescript. But Wittgenstein, as soon as he had finished it, began tinkering with it, adding, cutting, transposing. It is not certain that Wittgenstein never intended the passages chosen by Rhees to go together, but the text Rhees published, on the basis of a certain stage of Wittgenstein’s revision, is only one of many possible orderings that could claim Wittgenstein’s authority. The main objection is that Rhees’s published text gives no indication at all of the amount of editorial activity that lay behind it. Cuts are made silently, and transpositions merely hinted at; important material in the Typescript is simply omitted. In the course of translating Rhees’s text I drew up a full account of the editorial decisions he had made, along with their justification, when there was one, in Wittgenstein’s papers. I wished to put this as an introduction to the English version. But Rhees forbade this on the ground that it would ‘come between Wittgenstein and the reader’. In my opinion, it would, on the contrary, have made clear just how much had already taken place between Wittgenstein and the reader, as a result of Rhees’s editing. But of course I had to accept Rhees’s decision. Eventually I published my account as a separate piece, entitled ‘From the Big Typescript to the Philosophical Grammar’ in a Festschrift for von Wright. Relations between Rhees and myself were thereafter strained. I was sorry about that: he had been helpful to

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me when I was translating, and despite his unfortunate possessiveness and protectiveness in relation to the Nachlass he undoubtedly had a keen insight into Wittgenstein’s ways of thought. By the mid-1970s many felt that a complete and definitive text of the Nachlass should be considered. In 1965 von Wright had found in Vienna a hitherto unknown MS of the Tractatus which differed in several ways from the final published version. In 1971 he and a number of colleagues published it in facsimile, with a printed German text and an en face English translation, with a number of typographical devices to mark differences from the canonical text. The volume was handsome, and informative for scholars in the way that none of the previously published Wittgenstein texts had been. But it gave an indication of how arduous and expensive a complete, conventional, critical edition of the Nachlass would be. In April 1997 a symposium was held in T¨ubingen, attended by philosophers, linguists, and computer experts from Germany, England, Italy, France, Finland, and Canada, as well as the publishers, Blackwell of Oxford and Suhrkamp Verlag of Frankfurt. The conference made those attending it aware that Wittgenstein’s texts presented problems almost without parallel among twentiethcentury writers. Apart from the ten years after the First World War when he had abandoned philosophy, Wittgenstein wrote incessantly, corrected and amended constantly, dictated to pupils and friends, destroyed, restored, rearranged, repeated himself, crossed out, crossed out the crossings out. He wrote paragraphs and remarks, often seemingly unconnected, because he felt that his thoughts became crippled if he tried to force them in any single direction against their natural inclination. He left behind blocks of thoughts and insights that he failed, after repeated attempts, to assemble into a complete philosophical edifice. The problems were well illustrated by the Big Typescript, as I had discovered when following in the footsteps of Rhees. It had its origin in a series of small notebooks, which were revised in the form of volumes of manuscripts, further revised in the form

168 the wittgenstein editions of a typescript, which was cut up and rearranged and then further revised several times. The text thus exists on six or more separate levels, and any full critical edition would have to discriminate between each textual level and show how the thought evolved. The symposium marked the beginning of a new phase in Wittgenstein studies, by defining the extent of the problem and by the realization that the appropriate first step to a complete edition must be the establishment of a computerized database (the word was still so unfamiliar to the general public as to appear in inverted commas in the early reports of the symposium). The creation of the database had been entrusted, since 1975, to a team under the direction of Dr Michael Nedo and Professor H. J. Heringer of T¨ubingen, Brian McGuinness and Joachim Schulte, both then at Oxford, and Marino Rosso of Florence. Financial support came, initially, from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The project began with high hopes. At the time I wrote, in a contribution to the Times Literary Supplement, ‘By the mid 1980s it is hoped that the philosopher who once said that the only response to certain philosophical problems was silence will be represented by some fourteen volumes of 500 pages each, which will contain every word of philosophy he ever committed to paper. Perhaps only then will it be possible to assess his contribution to philosophy justly and in full.’ Sadly, the project proved abortive. Though about half the Nachlass was transcribed into a computer, not one volume of text was published during the lifetime of the project. The collaborators quarrelled, and the T¨ubingen Wittgenstein archive was dissolved. In his final report Heringer said that Nedo ‘was incapable of directing such a project in an organizationally serious or personally responsible manner’. After the dissolution of the T¨ubingen project, Professor Heringer handed over a substantial amount of material to a new venture in Norway, the Norwegian Wittgenstein project. Nedo moved from T¨ubingen to Cambridge. He and Ms Isabelle Weiss began a new project for a complete transcription of the posthumous writings into a database.

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In 1981 the three trustees applied to the Fonds zur Forderung der wissensschaftlichen Forschung, an Austrian government research foundation, for support for the Nedo project. The FWF in 1982 funded a twelve-month pilot programme. Application was made for further support, for the computing expenses, to the British Academy. The philosophy section of the Academy (of which I was then chairman) refused support on the grounds that it did not wish to take part in the quarrel between the former T¨ubingen partners. Despite renewal of funding for two further years, Nedo did not produce any publishable text. Von Wright began to have serious doubts about Nedo’s capacity to produce a Gesamtausgabe. Anscombe continued to support applications to the FWF and it is possible that her recommendations were taken to represent the unanimous opinion of the trustees until in 1987 von Wright wrote to dissociate himself. Eventually, in 1989, a substantial grant was made by the FWF, at the request of all the trustees, on the basis of a transcript of MSS 105–6, which was produced for their inspection in 1988. In 1989 Rhees died. For some time the trustees had been giving thought to the future of the Nachlass after their death, and each had privately nominated a successor: Anscombe nominated Anselm M¨uller of Trier, Rhees nominated Peter Winch, and von Wright nominated myself, though these nominations were not for some time communicated to the persons involved. Soon after Rhees’s death, Peter Winch became a trustee, and in Spring 1990, I was invited to join the trust, von Wright having decided that he would wish me to do so before he had ceased to be a member of the board. From this point, the proceedings of the trustees became more formal, with roughly annual meetings minuted by a secretary, who from 1991 until his death was Winch. The responsibilities of the trustees had recently been affected by a change in English law. Hitherto, copyright in unpublished materials had been perpetual. An Act of 1988 limited its duration to fifty years from the author’s death. With respect to those who had

170 the wittgenstein editions died before the implementation of the act, including Wittgenstein, copyright was extended to seventy years from 1 August 1989. One of my first duties as a trustee was to join the other three, on 4 May 1990, in a meeting with representatives of Blackwell’s to discuss the possibility of a new edition of all Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings. The minutes read as follows: Those present agreed that such an edition was, in principle, desirable. The material involved, if published in its entirety, would result in circa 30 substantial printed volumes. There was some discussion abut whether these volumes should encompass the quite considerable overlap and duplication between discrete notes and texts or whether they should be reduced to circa 15 more selective volumes. The tendency of the meeting was to prefer the latter option, suggested by Professor Kenny.

Issues discussed were: should the edition be German only, or bilingual en face. How were royalties to be divided? Should subsidies be sought? It was proposed that the trustees should form an overarching supervisory board, to which there should report an executive board with a central scholar at its head, possibly Joachim Schulte. The item discussed at greatest length was the relationship of the proposed edition to the work already being done by Michael Nedo. The minutes read: The first volume of his transcription was discussed in some detail and analysed by editorial and production experts at Blackwell. At issue were: (i) the format of the existing Nedo project which Blackwell feels too large to be conveniently published in book form and which Nedo feels adamant could not be changed; (ii) the working structure of any such edition and the levels of responsibility and command in such a system; (iii) deadline and incentives for completion. It was felt that the benefits of collaborating with Nedo were considerable in terms of taking advantage of very sophisticated and, as far as the meeting was able to gauge, intellectually sound work. The disadvantages were administrative and, to some extent, political.

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The suggestion of collaboration between Blackwell and Nedo was taken no further. After this meeting Blackwell’s production staff expressed great reservations about being able to work in the manner proposed by Nedo. Accordingly the trustees had to decide, separately, on the Blackwell plan for a complete edition and on the publication of the work done by Nedo. After the meeting the trustees sent Nedo an ultimatum. They agreed to continue his permission to work on the Wittgenstein MSS and to continue their support for his grant (from the FWF) on conditions which included the following: Within one year (i.e. before 4th May 1991) you are to produce, in a form ready for publication, volumes 107, 108, 208 and 210 according to the numbering in the von Wright catalogue. If those volumes have not been produced in satisfactory form by that time you will take no further part in the production of the Gesamtausgabe of Wittgenstein’s works.

Given the constant failure to produce camera ready copy, some of the trustees began to doubt whether, as Nedo claimed, substantial transcription had actually taken place. On their behalf, early in 1991 I inspected his office in Trinity College, Cambridge, and saw the 10,000 or more pages of computer print-out. So far as I could tell on brief inspection the transcriptions were of high quality. However, in spite of repeated questioning of Nedo, both in private and later before the other trustees, I was unable to obtain from him a satisfactory account of the reasons for delay. So far as I could ascertain, he had spent his time designing software for formatting the pages to be published according to his own taste. When he had started working, in 1977, desktop publishing was in the future; but by 1990 it appeared to me that there were many commercially available packages that would enable a novice to produce camera ready copy as satisfactory, from either the aesthetic or the scholarly point of view, as Nedo’s output. May 1991 came and went and no volumes appeared. The trustees severed all communication with Nedo as editor of a possible Gesamtausgabe but agreed that they would support publication of

172 the wittgenstein editions the two volumes Nedo had prepared in 1987/8 (MSS 105–6, Philosophische Bemerkungen) and enquire whether Springer Verlag would undertake publication. They also agreed to support such further transcribed material as he would have ready in publishable form by the end of 1991. At that date Nedo must return all material to the Wren Library and must give up his office in Trinity. He did so, but once again no volumes were presented before the predefined date. During the 1980s, another abortive project had been proceeding simultaneously. In 1981, as recorded, material from T¨ubingen had been moved to Norway. In 1981 a number of Norwegian scholars banded together to establish a Norwegian Wittgenstein Project, to put together a computer-readable text of the Nachlass. This project transcribed about 3,000 pages, with funding from Norwegian universities, councils, and foundations. However, those responsible failed to apply for copyright clearance from the trustees, believing that it was not necessary for publication in machine-readable form. When belatedly approached, the trustees refused their support, and the project came to a halt in 1987. However, at long last the story took a hopeful turn. In 1989 Claus Huitfeldt drew up plans for a Wittgenstein Archive at the University of Bergen. This too was to have as its goal a complete machine-readable version of the Nachlass. But the new project was punctilious in its relation with the trustees (who now included Peter Winch and myself ). In June 1990 the University of Bergen gave financial support to the archives for a trial period of three and a half years. At their meeting of May 1991 the trustees agreed in principle to permit Huitfeldt to produce a facsimile CD-ROM of the Nachlass. In March 1992 an agreement was signed between the trustees and the University of Bergen. The university was given permission to copy and make machine-readable transcripts of the Nachlass and to make those available to scholars in Bergen. It was also given exclusive permission to distribute and sell machine-readable transcriptions and machine-readable facsimiles

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of the Nachlass, including the diaries and the coded passages, under three conditions. First, satisfactory financing of the project was to be assured; second, the parties were to reach agreement on the sharing of royalties; third, the parties were to agree on a publisher for the machine-readable texts. The trustees were also favourably impressed by the sample transcriptions Huitfeldt submitted, and wrote to him ‘that they are hopeful that the work at Bergen may eventually serve as a basis for the preparation of a printed Gesamtausgabe’. The conditions laid down by the trustees did not take long to fulfil. After a favourable report from an independent evaluation committee, the University of Bergen agreed to continue funding the project until 1997. The trustees agreed that they would not charge royalties on the first 200 copies of the CD-ROM. Oxford University Press was chosen as publisher, and in 1993 a contract was signed between OUP and Bergen, with the approval of the trustees, for the publication of a CD-ROM facsimile, to contain the entire Nachlass, including the coded passages. It was hoped that the facsimile would be published late in 1995. Meanwhile, in December 1992 this complicated story took an unexpected twist. Nedo presented the trustees with six volumes of text ready for the printer. This placed the trustees in a difficult position. In the light of past experience they did not wish to cooperate further with Nedo in the production of a Gesamtausgabe; on the other hand it seemed harsh to forbid the publication of the result of such long periods of work. In the event they decided that while they would take no initiative in publishing these texts, they would not stand in the way of their publication. In 1993 the trustees authorized a contract between Nedo and Springer-Verlag of Vienna for the publication of Wittgenstein MSS 105–14 and typescripts 208–13, that is to say, manuscripts and typescripts from 1929 up to and including the ‘Big Typescript’ of 1933. Rights of electronic publication were explicitly excluded, and the trustees minuted that Nedo’s work should not be regarded ‘as constituting part of any possible future Collected Edition of

174 the wittgenstein editions the Wittgenstein Nachlass’. The trustees resolved that the FWF should be told that any further support they might wish to give to the editing of Wittgenstein’s papers should usefully be applied to the Bergen project. (Despite this collective resolution of the trustees, Professsor Anscombe shortly afterwards supported a further application to the FWF.) Since then several volumes have appeared of the Wiener Ausgabe. After an introductory volume written by Nedo, the two volumes that had been essentially ready since 1978 appeared in 1994, and four further volumes by 1998. Most recently, in 2000 there appeared the volume containing the Big Typescript. Unlike Rhees, Nedo has published the typescript exactly as produced, without taking account of the annotations and emendations. Two further volumes are promised which will take account of the reworking of the Big Typescript. These will be volumes 12 and 13 of the Wiener Ausgabe. When they have appeared (plus volumes 6, 7, 9, and 10 which have been held up), the Trustees’ permission to Nedo to publish Wittgenstein texts will come to an end. Publishers’ blurbs say ‘an extension of the edition is intended’. Such an extension, however, has not been agreed with the trustees, and any such agreement would have to wait on an eventual decision about a possible hard-copy Gesamtausgabe founded on the Bergen database. During the 1990s, therefore, there were two projects engaged in the dissemination of Wittgenstein’s unpublished papers. Rather confusingly, each of the projects, one based in Bergen and one in Cambridge, called itself ‘the Wittgenstein archive’. The Cambridge papers, from 1994, were located in a concrete-and-glass house designed and owned by Colin St John Wilson, architect of the new British Library, a student and admirer of Wittgenstein’s architectural work. But of course the originals of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts are elsewhere, principally in Trinity College, Cambridge, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The Bergen project modified and developed during the last years of the century. Initial difficulties with permissions from the three

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libraries took some time to overcome, and OUP encountered technical difficulties by 1995. It was then hoped to publish the facsimile CD-ROM in 1997; but by the time 1997 came it had been decided not to publish the facsimile separately, but to publish it in four volumes each consisting of one or more disks containing facsimile, diplomatic transcript, and normalized transcript. Publication was complete by 2000, and the edition has sold widely. The death of Peter Winch in 1997 was a great blow to the trustees: he had served them as a devoted secretary, and had been skilful in conducting the difficult tripartite negotiations both with Nedo and Springer, and with Bergen and OUP. One of his last acts was to prepare a second edition of Culture and Value, the English version of Vermischte Bemerkungen. This included the publication of Wittgenstein’s only known poem. At the same time as it appeared, Haymon Verlag, by permission of the trustees, published Wittgenstein’s diaries of 1930/2 and 1936/7. These diaries were the property of Herr Johannes Koder, and along with them von Wright discovered the earliest version of Part 1 of the Philosophische Untersuchungen. This has very recently been published, along with four other stages of composition of that work, in a Kritisch-genetische Edition by Joachim Schulte, assisted by Eike von Savigny, building on earlier work by von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Suhrkamp, 2001). The book also gives a definitive history of the genesis and status of the material published in 1951 as Part 2 of the Investigations. In 1996 Elizabeth Anscombe was involved in a serious car accident and suffered injuries to the head. In succeeding years she suffered occasional periods of disorientation, and this sometimes made it difficult to conduct the business of the Wittgenstein Trust, to such a point that in the two years before her death in 2000 no meeting of the trust was held. This was doubly sad in view of the enormous contribution she had made during her lifetime to the reception and understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The trustees in 2001 were G. H. von Wright, plus Nicholas Denyer,

176 the wittgenstein editions Peter Hacker, Joachim Schulte, and myself. We continued to hold the copyrights on trust for the sole surviving heir until on his death they were handed over to Trinity College, Cambridge, in accordance with the trust Deed of 1969. Fifty years after Wittgenstein’s death, everything that he had written had become available to scholars. Only ten years earlier the learned world had virtually despaired of such an outcome. In 1991 Hintikka wrote, ‘There is a veritable scholarly industry of books and papers on Wittgenstein going on unremittingly, oblivious to the critical importance of the notebooks and other unpublished materials for the interpretation of Wittgenstein, which will be subject to a sharp re-evaluation in the light of the literary remains.’ Moreover, as long as the coded passages were excluded from publication, great importance was attached to them by those more interested in Wittgenstein’s sexuality than in his philosophy—though Ray Monk, in his 1993 biography, by publishing all the passages with a sexual content demonstrated the wildly exaggerated nature of this curiosity. The situation has now drastically changed. I wish to end by reflecting on the story with a view to seeking advice from interested parties with respect to decisions that remain to be taken for the future. The learned world has had a long wait for the complete publication of Wittgenstein’s work. The most disquieting part of the story I have told is the gap of some seventeen years between Nedo’s original involvement with the Gesamtausgabe project and the appearance of the first volumes of the Wiener Ausgabe. To the extent that the trustees supported Nedo’s funding applications, and gave him a virtual monopoly of editorial access to the texts, they must share the responsibility for this delay. I do not know enough about events in T¨ubingen in the latter half of the 1970s to assign responsibility for the breakdown of the project: there are others who can speak with much greater authority. By 1987, however, when Nedo had spent a further five unproductive years in charge of a second publishing project, it was surely time—as

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von Wright saw—for the trustees to break off relations with him. That they did not was of course principally the responsibility of Professor Anscombe, who continued to retain confidence in him, and frequently presented her fellow-trustees with a fait accompli. When I myself became a trustee one of my main concerns was to try—with only partial success—to bring about a clean break between the trust and Nedo. Shortly before her death Anscombe wrote to me that the trustees’ decision to continue with Nedo had been vindicated by the eventual publication of the Wiener Ausgabe volumes. I do not believe that is correct. The volumes that have been published have, indeed, contained accurate transcriptions and appropriate critical annotation: to this extent the doubts expressed at T¨ubingen about Nedo’s scholarly competence have proved unfounded. But still no reason has been given why it should have taken so long, and cost such enormous sums of money, to bring this scholarly output to production. The page layout, on which Nedo spent so much time and to which he attaches almost mystical significance, seems to me no more conducive to the study of Wittgenstein than others which could have been produced at a fraction of the cost. The lack of running heads makes the text difficult to consult, and the unwieldy size of the volumes makes them unsuitable for desk use: they would be more at home on a coffee table or a gospel lectern. The Schulte critical-genetic edition of the Untersuchungen is, to my mind, a far superior example of how a critical Wittgenstein should appear in hard copy. It is aesthetically as attractive as Nedo’s volumes, and was far less expensive to produce and is far easier to consult. If there is to be a full critical edition of the Nachlass, in printed form, that and not the Wiener Ausgabe is the model to be followed. But now that Bergen and Oxford University Press have produced on CD-ROM the entire Nachlass in facsimile and two kinds of transcription, is there really a case for an authorized Gesamtausgabe in hard copy? The repetitive nature of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts,

178 the wittgenstein editions with so many texts existing in multiple drafts, makes them, in my own view, more suitable for study in electronic form than in hard copy. The existing CD-ROMs are, indeed, not perfect, and it would be good to have an electronic edition not tied to a particular search engine. But in my view an improved electronic edition is a more realistic goal than a multi-volume hard copy edition.

14 Knowledge, Belief, and Faith The nature of knowledge and its relation to certainty, belief, and doubt has been a philosophical topic ever since philosophy began. Philosophers in ancient Greece established a number of truths about knowledge. (1) Knowledge can only be of what is true. (2) A belief is only knowledge if it can appeal to some kind of warrant. (3) One who claims knowledge must have a resolute commitment to the proposition claimed to be known. If I claim to know something, then I exclude the possibility of being at some later time rightly converted to a different view. Ancient philosophers, however, tended to demand too high a level of warrant for knowledge. Lurking behind much ancient epistemology was a fundamental logical fallacy. ‘Whatever is knowledge must be true’ may be interpreted in two ways. (1) Necessarily, if p is known, p is true (2) If p is known, p is necessarily true. (1) is uncontentiously true; but if (2) is taken as equivalent to it then only necessary truths can be known. Such a position is suggested from time to time by passages in Plato and Aristotle. From Augustine onwards philosophers of various schools agreed that in addition to knowledge of necessary truths there was also knowledge of contingent, empirical matters. For a truth to be known it did not need to be self-evident: it could also be evident to the senses. However, a modern epistemological fallacy took the place of the ancient one. Descartes and Locke thought that the way something struck one could guarantee its truth: Descartes spoke

180 knowledge, belief, and faith of ‘clear and distinct perception’, and Locke spoke of an ‘evident lustre’ attaching to certain propositions. But there is no purely internal method of discovering which of one’s beliefs deserve the name of knowledge. The best one can hope for is to acquire proficiency in attaching the right degree of commitment to each belief. It is important for human beings to strike the right balance in belief. One can err by believing too much or believing too little. The person who believes too much suffers from the vice of credulity; the person who believes too little is guilty of excessive incredulity or scepticism. If you believe too much your mind will be cluttered with many falsehoods; if you believe too little you will be deprived of much valuable information. Let us call the virtue which stands in the middle between scepticism and credulity the virtue of rationality. It was Aristotle who first shewed us that virtues stand in a mean, that is to say that each virtue is flanked by two opposing vices. Aristotle did not himself identify any virtue which had belief as its field of operation. That is because he focused his attention on those mental conditions, such as knowledge and understanding, that have only truth as their object. Because only what is true can be known, there was no need for Aristotle to identify a virtue which was possessing just the right amount of knowledge: one cannot—in any literal sense—know too much. But belief, as Aristotle well knew, is a state of mind that may be true or false. If p is false, then I do not know that p, however much I may think I do; but a belief of mine may be false and yet remain a perfectly genuine belief. There is room, then, for a virtue that determines the mean of belief. Plato in the Theaetetus offered a definition of knowledge as a true thought with a logos. He found himself unable, however, to explain what was this logos that turned true belief into knowledge. However, his definition began a tradition of defining knowledge as justified true belief. This definition was classical over millennia, but in the last century a number of philosophers have cast doubt on this traditional definition.

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Peter Geach once wrote to me, ‘Belief is a disposition, expressed in acts of judgement, though not only that way.... [It] is verbally expressed in assertion, which answers to acts of judgement.... Knowledge differs from belief by being a capacity not a disposition. No added factor can turn true belief into knowledge: the Theaetetus problem is a pseudo-problem.’ There is indeed knowing how as well as knowing that, so that one cannot define knowledge tout court as a kind of belief. But knowing that p does involve believing that p: that is to say, it involves a similar disposition to judge and assert that p. ‘I know that p but I don’t believe that p’ is absurd. However, a true belief that p is not sufficient to constitute knowledge that p. I may believe that p, but be quite ready to change my mind if evidence turns up that not-p. But if I claim to know that p, I have a much stronger commitment to the truth of p. I am claiming that nothing should make me change my mind about it. No doubt I realize that I may, at some future date, change my mind; but so long as I am claiming knowledge I am claiming that I would be wrong to do so. Of course, we often claim to know that p, and later find out that p is false. That shows that we did not ever know that p, however strongly we thought we did. I cannot then say ‘I knew that p, but p was false’; rather, I say, ‘I was certain that p, but p was false’. Certainty involves the same degree of commitment as knowledge—I cannot say ‘I am certain that p, but p is false’, However, the concept of certainty does not have the same conceptual link to truth as the concept of knowledge. In this chapter I want to address the general epistemological problem of the nature of knowledge, certainty, and belief. But I want to take, as a focus for discussion one particular topic of belief, namely belief in God. I want to consider how far such belief is reasonable. As a text on which to hang the discussion I will take Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006; henceforth GD). I find myself in agreement with perhaps 90 per cent of what Dawkins says, and I shall have little to say about the

182 knowledge, belief, and faith areas of our agreement. But because of the 10 per cent difference between us I end up in quite a different position with regard to the rationality of religion. Though, like Dawkins, I am not myself a believer, I take a much more tolerant view than he does of the possibility that religious belief may be reasonable. I differ from him, that is to say, about the relationship between faith and reason. It is wrong to make too stark and simple a contrast between faith and reason. Indeed in these days of post-post-modernism it is often the proponents of faith who are loudest in their defence of the rights of reason. Faith and reason are sometimes presented as two contrasting sources of information about religious matters. Thus a Christian theologian might maintain that there are some truths about God (e.g. that he is omnipotent) that can be discovered by unaided reason, while there are others (e.g. that there are three persons in a single God) that cannot be attained without the grace of faith. But at least since St Thomas Aquinas there has been a traditional Christian teaching that while some truths are not attainable by pure reason, no revealed doctrines are contrary to reason and faith is itself a reasonable frame of mind. Later in this chapter I shall address the distinction between natural theology (the work of unaided reason) and religious faith (which is claimed to be the work of grace). For the present, like Dawkins, I will lump the two together as ‘belief in God’. Let me begin by saying that I am in accord with Dawkins in rejecting traditional philosophical arguments for the existence of God, whether ontological, cosmological, or experiential. I believe that critics of the ontological argument, from Aquinas to Frege, have shown that it fails to establish the existence of God. If it were valid, then ‘God exists’ would be an analytic proposition: ‘exists’ would be a predicate that was tacitly contained in the subject ‘God’. But as Kant insisted, all statements of real existence are synthetic, and ‘exists’ is not a predicate at all. Abelard in the twelfth century and Frege in the nineteenth century urged us to rephrase statements of existence so that ‘exists’ does not even look

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like a predicate. ‘Angels exist’ should be formulated as ‘some things are angels’. This has the advantage that it does not make it appear that when we say ‘Angels do not exist’ we are first positing angels and then rejecting them. However, this is not a final solution of the ontological argument, because the question may be raised about what counts as something. Does our quantifier range over possible as well as actual objects? If so, then, following the lead of some recent theist philosophers, we may argue thus. A necessary being is one that exists in all possible worlds. So defined, a necessary being must exist in our world, the actual world. Our world would not exist unless it were possible; so if God exists in every possible world, he must exist in ours. I believe that the framework of this argument, the apparatus of possible worlds, is philosophically incoherent, though I must admit that it is accepted by many atheist as well as theist philosophers. I believe that Kant was right to insist that whether there is something in reality answering to a concept of mine cannot itself be part of my concept. A concept has to be determined prior to being applied to reality, otherwise we have nothing definite to try out on the world. That there is a God cannot be part of what we mean by God. (Still less can it be all that we mean by God, as is contended by those who tell us that God’s essence is existence.) I also agree with Dawkins that God’s existence cannot be established by appeal to experience. If there is a God with the attributes ascribed to him by western theism then he cannot be the subject of any cognitive activity analogous to the operation of our senses. We cannot have a sixth sense that detects that God is here and not there, as we can see that something is red at one end and not at another, or which detects that God was here a moment ago and is not now, as we can hear a noise that suddenly stops. The whole context within which talk of sense experience makes sense is lacking in the case of an alleged sensus divinitatis. Aquinas’s famous five ways are given a swift dispatch by Dawkins. I think that he misdescribes them in some ways; but even if Aquinas is given a lot more rope, I agree that he hangs himself in the end.

184 knowledge, belief, and faith Nearly forty years ago I wrote a book to that effect (The Five Ways, Routledge, 1969). However, one of Aquinas’s proofs, the fifth way, deserves further treatment. It resembles the argument from design, Kant’s physico-theological proof. Its case is that the ordinary teleology of non-conscious agents in the universe entails the existence of an intelligent universal orderer. In considering this argument we must begin by recognizing that there is a difference between design and purpose. Design differs from purpose because design is purpose preceded by an idea: a thought, or blueprint, in somebody’s mind. If the world is designed, then there was a precedent idea in the mind of the creator—what, in the fourth Gospel, is called the logos or Word. In our kind of mind, the idea that precedes an artefact is not anything simple or timeless, but something that gets built up by research and experiment. The argument from design can only establish its conclusion if it is possible for there to be a quite different kind of mind: a divine, extra-cosmic, simple, and eternal mind. That, to my mind, is the greatest difficulty with the argument. If we are to attribute intelligence to any entity—limited or unlimited, cosmic or extra-cosmic—we have to take as our starting point our concept of intelligence as exhibited by human beings: we have no other concept of it. Human intelligence is displayed in the behaviour of human bodies and the thoughts of human minds. If we reflect on the actual ways in which we attribute words such as ‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘think’, ‘design’, ‘control’ to human beings, we realize the immense difficulty there is in applying them to a putative being which is immaterial, ubiquitous, and eternal. With a degree of anthropomorphism we can apply mentalistic predicates to animals, computers, institutions; to organisms that resemble us or artefacts that are our creations; but there are limits to anthropomorphism, and an extra-cosmic intelligence appears to me to be outside those limits. It is not just that we do not, and cannot, know what goes in God’s mind; it is that we cannot really ascribe a mind to a God at all. The language that we use to describe the contents of human minds operates within a web of links with

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bodily behaviour and social institutions. When we try to apply this language to an entity outside the natural world, whose scope of operation is the entire universe, this web comes to pieces, and we no longer know what we are saying. Most critics of the argument from design—particularly since Darwin—quarrel not with the conclusion but the premisses of the argument. They object to the appeal to the apparent existence of teleology in the world around us. In the course of history teleology has received drastically different treatments by different great philosophers. One of Aristotle’s four causes was the final cause, the end, the purpose, the good to be achieved by some action. Aristotle, more than any other philosopher, emphasized the importance of teleology in the world; but he was no supporter of the argument from design, because he was well aware of the distinction between design and purpose. The budding of a rose and the building of a spider’s web were no less teleological than human activities; but Aristotle knew better than to attribute consciousness to roses and spiders. Teleology, for him, was a basic fact about the cosmos, and no extra-cosmic designer was needed to explain it. It was Aquinas who formulated the argument from purpose to design. Things without awareness, he argued in the fourth way, do not tend towards a goal unless directed by something with awareness and intelligence, in the way that an arrow is aimed by an archer. The ultimate designer, the arch-archer, we call God. Descartes revolutionized philosophy by expunging teleology altogether. He eliminated, outside the human realm, purpose as well as design. Final causation, he thought, was a piece of scholastic nonsense. He rejected the explanation of gravity in terms of attraction between bodies, on the grounds that this postulated in inert entities knowledge of a goal or terminus. With Darwinism we return to the position of Aristotle: the world contains purpose but not, outside the human realm, design. It is sometimes thought that Darwinism gave the final death blow to teleology; but that is the opposite of the truth. Darwinian scientists

186 knowledge, belief, and faith have not given up the search for final causes. On the contrary, contemporary biologists are much more adept at discerning the functions of structures and behaviour than their ancient, medieval, or Cartesian predecessors. Darwin agreed with Aquinas against Aristotle that teleology was not a basic fact, but something needing explanation. His achievement was to make teleological explanation respectable by offering, in natural selection, a recipe for translating it into a naturalistic explanation that made no call on design. Natural selection, however, cannot be offered as the sole and sufficient explanation of the history of the universe. When neoDarwinians offer to explain the entire cosmos, I find difficulties at three main points: the origin of language, the origin of life, and the origin of the universe. Language is conventional, that is to say it is governed by rules. Being rule governed is being different from being governed by causal laws. Rules differ from such laws in several ways. Rules may be broken; not so causal laws, short of a miracle. To be governed by a rule you must be conscious of it at least to the extent that you are aware of any breach of it. But there is no need for you to be aware of being governed by a causal law: the planets know nothing of Kepler’s laws. The problem with an evolutionary account of language is this. Explanation by natural selection of the origin of a feature in a population presupposes the occurrence of that feature in particular individuals of the population. Natural selection might favour a certain length of leg, and the long-legged individuals in the population might outbreed the others. But for that kind of explanation of features to be possible, it must be possible to conceive the occurrence of the feature in single individuals. There is no problem in describing a single individual as having legs n metres long. But there is a problem with the idea that there might be a single human language user. It is not easy to see how the human race may have begun to use language because language-using individuals outbred the nonlanguage users. This is not a difficulty in seeing how spontaneous

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mutation could produce a language user; it is the difficulty of seeing how anyone could be described as a language-using individual at all before there was a community of language users. Of course, there are animal systems of communication that have some similarity with human language, and human pets can respond to names and obey commands. But human language is separated by a gulf from the communicative abilities of other animals. The essential logical feature of human language is not that it contains nouns and verbs, but rather that it contains negation, conditionality, quantification, and modality. It is the words ‘not’, ‘if’, ‘some’, and ‘therefore’ that are the marks of rationality; and there are no animal equivalents of these. If it is difficult to see how language could originate by natural selection, it is even more difficult to see how life could originate that way. However successful natural selection may be in explaining the origin of particular species of life, it clearly cannot explain how there came to be such things as species at all. That is to say, it cannot explain how there came to be true breeding populations, since the existence of such populations is one of the premisses on which explanations in terms of natural selection rest as their starting point. This is a point which is accepted, and indeed stressed, by Dawkins in his recent book. The origin of life, he says, is a question for chemists, and he is no chemist. The chemists haven’t been able to replicate the origin of life, but maybe they will soon. In the meantime, Dawkins is happy to accept that it came about by a lucky chance: after all, if there are a billion billion planets, then the odds are a billion to one that life will have started on a billion of them, of which the earth is one. But then he turns to the ten million different species of life on our plant, each well adapted to a particular way of life, and asks Could we get away with the ‘huge number of planets’ argument to explain all these separate illusions of design? No we could not, repeat not. Don’t even think about it. This is important, for it goes to the heart of the most serious misunderstanding of Darwinism. It doesn’t matter how

188 knowledge, belief, and faith many planets we have to play with, lucky chance could never be enough to explain the lush diversity of living complexity on Earth in the same way as we used it to explain the existence of life here in the first place. The evolution of life is a completely different case from the origin of life. (GD 138)

To explain the origin of life, Dawkins invokes a planetary version of the anthropic principle. He states it thus. We exist here on Earth. Therefore, the earth must be the kind of planet that is capable of generating and supporting us, however unusual, even unique, that kind of planet is. However small the minority of planets with just the right conditions of life may be, we necessarily have to be on one of that minority, because here we are thinking about it. (GD 135)

On the face of it, the planetary conditions for our support are immensely improbable and call for explanation. No, says this anthropic principle, far from being improbable they are necessary; and necessary truths call for no explanation. We need to look more closely at the use of ‘necessary’ here. There are at least two senses of the word ‘necessary’. Something is metaphysically necessary if it follows from necessary truths. But there is also epistemic necessity, which is the counterpart of epistemic possibility. P is epistemically possible when we can say ‘for all we know to the contrary p may be the case’. If not-p is not epistemically possible, then p is epistemically necessary. Something may be epistemically necessary without being metaphysically necessary: as I write it is epistemically necessary, but not metaphysically necessary, that George W. Bush is President of the USA. The anthropic principle argues from the epistemic necessity of conditions favourable to human life to their metaphysical necessity. The anthropic principle is usually presented in a cosmic rather than a planetary version. Martin Rees has listed six fundamental constants that are believed to hold throughout the universe. If any one of these differed very slightly from its actual value life in the universe would be impossible. How are we to explain this

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fine tuning? It is here that the anthropic principle is invoked: the constants had to have that value or we would not be here to calculate them. Dawkins is aware of the difficulty here, and borrows from John Leslie the analogy of a man sentenced to death by firing squad. It is just possible that all ten men of the firing squad will miss their victim. With hindsight the survivor who finds himself in a position to reflect upon his luck can cheerfully say ‘Well, obviously they all missed or I wouldn’t be here thinking about it.’ ‘But he could still,’ Dawkins says, ‘forgivably, wonder why they all missed.’ I suggest that the word ‘forgivably’ should be replaced by ‘most reasonably’. Dawkin’s answer to the puzzle is that (as Rees maintains, in company with Giordano Bruno) there are many universes; the laws and constants of any one universe are by-laws. ‘The anthropic principle’, as Dawkins puts it, ‘kicks in to explain that we have to be in one of those universes (presumably a minority) whose by-laws happened to be propitious to our eventual evolution and hence contemplation of the problem’ (GD, 145). Dawkins is in fact offering two different answers to the problem. The anthropic principle says there is nothing to be explained— there was not improbability in the case, but necessity. The multiverse thesis says that there is indeed something to be explained, and it is to be explained by a priori probability. This can be done if we simply call into existence billions of universes—all, ex hypothesi, inaccessible to scientific inquiry. The first explanation is a fallacy, resting on confusion between epistemic and metaphysical necessity. The second explanation is a piece of metaphysical speculation (in Rees no less than in Bruno). Its only merit seems to be that it provides an alternative to intelligent design. So far we have been discussing the kind of universe we have. But why is there a universe of any kind? The most fundamental reason of postulating an extra-cosmic agency of any kind is surely the need to explain the origin of the universe itself. Most philosophical arguments for the existence of God are only sophistications of the

190 knowledge, belief, and faith cry of the simple believer ‘God must exist, else where did the world come from?’ It is wrong to say that God provides the answer to the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ As Bede Rundle has shown in an engaging book with that title (OUP, 1999), that question is ill-conceived; the proposition ‘there is nothing’ cannot be given a coherent sense, and therefore there is no need to ask why it is false. It is not the existence of the universe that calls for explanation, but its coming into existence. At a time when philosophers and scientists were happy to accept that the universe had existed for ever, there was no question of looking for a cause of its origin, only of looking for an explanation of its nature. But when it is proposed that the universe began at a point of time measurably distant in the past, then it seems perverse simply to shrug one’s shoulders and decline to seek any explanation. We would never, in the case of an ordinary existent, tolerate a blithe announcement that there was simply no reason for its coming into existence, and it seems irrational to abandon this principle when the existing thing in question is all pervasive, like the universe. If only an intelligent creator were conceivable, he would surely be a more persuasive solution to the problem. My reaction to the difficulty of either proving or disproving God’s existence is agnosticism: to say that we do not know either way. Often, both theist and atheist philosophers, instead of offering arguments, adopt a strategy that might be called grabbing the default position—that is, a tactic of throwing the burden of proof on the opponent. But it is agnosticism that is the true default position. A claim to knowledge needs to be substantiated, ignorance only has to be confessed. Moreover, a claim to know that God exists, or a claim to know that God does not exist, is an absolute commitment. The profession of doubt is no such thing. Dawkins is contemptuous of agnosticism, and prefers atheism. He believes that he has an argument to disprove God’s existence. A designer God, he maintains, cannot be used to explain organized complexity, because any God capable of designing anything

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would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right (GD 109). He calls this argument ‘The Ultimate Boeing 747 argument’, in tribute to Fred Hoyle who once said that the probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. God, according to Dawkins is the ultimate 747. A traditional theist would say that Dawkins’s argument misrepresented the notion of God in two ways. First of all, God is as much outside the series complexity/simplicity as he is outside the series mover/moved. He is not complex as a protein is, nor for that matter is he simple as an elementary particle is. He has neither the simplicity nor the complexity of material objects. Secondly, he is not one of a series of temporal contingents, each requiring explanation in terms of a previous state of the universe: unchanging and everlasting, He is outside the temporal series. What calls for explanation is the origin of the organized complexity that is to be explained. But God had no origin and is neither complex nor organized. The principle that what is complex must be designed by what is even more complex is a metaphysical principle because it is meant to apply outside the world of science as well as within it. As a metaphysician myself I have no objection to the use of metaphysical principles. But is this one valid? Even on earth is it true that a designer must be more complex than his creation? Is it metaphysically impossible for a human to design a computer containing more bytes than there are cells in the human brain? This, it may be objected, is an inappropriate comparison; but doesn’t that show that even at this level the notion of complexity is not a simple notion, and there are various kinds of complexity. In particular, since design is purpose preceded by an idea, we need to consider the notion of complexity as applied to thinking. A thought, or idea, does not have the same complexity as its expression in a written design or blueprint would have. A thought does not have spatial or temporal parts in the way that the sentence

192 knowledge, belief, and faith that expresses it has. A thought is a unified whole, and is not made up of a succession of parts in the way that a sentence is made up of successive words. Even in our mundane world, therefore, there is reason to doubt Dawkins’s principle. However, Dawkins addresses the question not only at the metaphysical level. Elsewhere he claims that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other. A universe with a supernaturally intelligent creator, he says, is a very different kind of universe from one without. He agrees that the difference is not easy to test in practice but whether God exists is a scientific question to which one day we may know the answer and in the meantime we can say something about the probabilities (GD 48). He sets up a spectrum of probabilities, between opposite certainties. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

I know there is a God I do not know but strongly believe I am uncertain but inclined to believe I think God’s existence and non-existence equiprobable I am uncertain but inclined to be sceptical I think God’s existence is very improbable I know there is no God.

Dawkins places himself in category 6, as de facto atheist. He could equally well be described as an agnostic, if an agnostic is, as its etymology suggests, someone who does not know whether there is a God or not. Interestingly, Aquinas in his treatment of faith (Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae. 2. 1) sets up exactly the same spectrum. He calls (1) scientia, (2) opinio, (3) suspicio, (4) dubitatio; which we may translate as (1) knowledge, (2) conviction, (3) guess, (4) doubt.¹ ¹ Actuum enim ad intellectum pertinentium quidam habent firmam assensionem absque tali cogitatione [= weighing up of alternatives] sicut cum aliquis considerat ea quae scit vel intelligit: talis enim consideratio iam est formata. Quidam vero actus intellectus habent quidam cogitationem informem absque firma assensione: sive in neutram partem declinent, sicut accidit dubitanti; sive in unam partem magis declinent sed tenentur aliquot levi signo,

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The scales given by Aquinas and Dawkins are an interesting way of classifying different degrees of commitment to a proposition, but they are inadequate to provide a total classification of epistemic states. States of mind are to be distinguished along not one but three axes: degree of commitment, conformity to the facts, type of warrant. Thus, for example, knowledge differs from certainty not by degree of commitment, but by the fact that knowledge is only of the truth but certainty can be false. Again, in talking of certainty we must distinguish first, second, and third person. Contrast ‘I am certain that p but p is false’, ‘You are certain that p but p is false’, ‘It is certain that p but p is false’. We must take into account not only commitment and veracity, but warrant. John Locke says we should not entertain any proposition with greater assurance than the evidence it is built on will warrant. ‘Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain, receives not truth in the love of it, loves not truth for truth-sake, but for some other by-end’ (Essay on Human Understanding, 4. 16). John Henry Newman contested this, and showed that knowledge need not be based on evidence. I may be justifiably certain of something and yet there may be no evidence for it because it is itself more certain than anything that could be offered in evidence. We laugh to scorn the idea that we had no parents though we have no memory of our birth; that we shall never depart this life, though we can have no experience of the future; that we are able to live without food, though we have never tried; that a world of men did not live before our time, or that the world has no history. (Grammar of Assent, 117)

Wittgenstein, following Newman, identified a set of propositions of which we are certain, but where our certainty is not based on evidence and is not the result of any enquiry. He gave as examples ‘the earth has existed for many years past’, ‘cats do not grow on trees’, ‘human beings have forebears’. He was not willing to say sicut accidit suspicanti; sive uni parti adhaereant, tamen cum formidine alterius, qod accidit opinanti.

194 knowledge, belief, and faith that we knew such propositions, but he said that they stood fast in our picture of the world; they had a fundamental role which was not the result of, but prior to our methods of inquiry and evidence gathering (On Certainty, passim). In a number of works Alvin Plantinga has argued that belief in God may be regarded as basic in this way: a person may be within her epistemic rights in believing in God without having any proof or evidence of God’s existence. Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and was confronted by God, asking why he had not believed in him. ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.’ If Newman, Wittgenstein, and Plantinga are right, Russell’s answer does not deserve a pass. Plantinga thinks that belief in God can be as basic an item in someone’s noetic structure as the belief that other people have minds. I don’t myself accept that belief in the existence of God can rightly occupy a basic role comparable to the existence of other people, but rather than explain why I think that, I want to make a distinction long overdue between simple belief in God’s existence, and actual religious faith. Faith, as I understand it, is the acceptance of the testimony of a sacred text or of a religious community. The two, in fact, go together, because if the sacred texts are taken as guides to practical life, their authority is inseparable from the authority of the religious officials whose role is to interpret them. In the JudaeoChristian tradition for instance the very notion of ‘the Bible’ as a single entity depends on the various authorities throughout our history who have established the canon. However impressive individual books may be, to see them as elements of a single revelation containing some or all of the other books is already tacitly to accept a religious authority that defines the canon. One might gather together the works of Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Thucydides into an epitome of Greek thought. The anthology would share a common cultural tradition and cohere as well or ill as the Bible does. But we would not treat it as a single book, to be treated differently from all

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other books, because there has never been a Hellenic rabbinate or episcopate to canonize such a collection. The common characteristic of faith in almost all religious traditions is its irrevocability. A faith which is held tentatively is no true faith. It must be held with the same degree of certainty as knowledge. In some traditions the irrevocability of faith is reinforced by the imposition of the death penalty for apostasy, which is the abandonment of faith. Aquinas, from whom I have drawn my account of religious faith, notes that it does not fit into the categorization of mental states which he, anticipating Dawkins, set out. ‘The state which is belief involves a firm adhesion to one side of the question. In this a believer is in the same position as someone who has knowledge or understanding; and yet his assent is not warranted by any clear vision, so that in that respect he resembles someone who doubts, guesses, or is convinced.’² Faith, then, resembles knowledge in being irrevocable, but differs from it in being a commitment in the absence of adequate evidence. This is well brought out by Newman. He says that the grounds on which faith is accepted—the evidence for there having been a revelation, for the divine authority of books or teachers—is a matter of conjecture, not of knowledge. ‘It starts from probability, yet it ends in peremptory statements ... It believes an informant admits doubt, yet accepts his information without doubt.’ It is religious faith, rather than theistic belief, that is the main target of Dawkins’s book. ‘What is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument ... Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise’ (GD 308). ² Sed actus iste qui est credere habet firmam adhaesionem ad unam partem, in quo convenit credens cum sciente et intelligente; et tamen eius cognitio non est perfecta per manifestam visionem, in quo convenit cum dubitante, suspicante, et opinante.

196 knowledge, belief, and faith It is too much to say that faith requires no justification: many religious people offer arguments not just for belief in God but for their particular creed. What is true is that the kinds of arguments they offer cannot be claimed to have anything like the degree of warrant that would justify the irrevocable commitment of faith. It is true that faith brooks no argument, not in the sense that the faithful are unwilling to offer responses to criticisms, but that no argument will make a true believer give up his faith, and this is something he is resolved on in advance of hearing any argument. Some years ago I expressed an opinion similar to Dawkins’s complaint. ‘Faith’, I wrote, ‘is not, as theologians have claimed, a virtue, but a vice, unless a number of conditions can be fulfilled. One of them is that the existence of God can be rationally justified outside faith. Secondly, whatever are the historical events which are pointed to as constituting the divine revelation must be independently established as historically certain’ (What is Faith (OUP, 1992), 57). It is a particular difficulty for the rationality of faith that there are so many alleged revelations that conflict with each other. One thing we know for certain is this: if any sacred text is literally true, then most are literally false. Of course, the incompatibility between conflicting revelations leaves it open as a logical possibility that just one of them is true while all the others are false. This is certainly not a possibility that can with decency be ruled out a priori by someone who believes that just by existing in this universe we are defeating odds of a billion to one. It seems to me, however, that if there is any truth in any religious revelation it is more likely that each of them is a metaphor for a single underlying truth that is incapable of being expressed in literal terms without contradiction. In this way religion would resemble poetry rather than science. To say that religious language is not literal, and to say that different religious creeds therefore do not contradict each other, is not to say that all religions are of equal worth. The mode of utterance of Shakespeare and that of William McGonagall is poetic in each case; that does not mean that the writings of each of them

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display an equally valuable insight into human nature. But the fact that theological language cannot be literal provides a reason for toleration in religion. That is to say, theological propositions cannot contradict each other in the straightforward way in which empirical propositions do. Hence, there is not the head-on clash between different theologies, and different religions, which has been used to justify the persecution and killing of one religious group by others. Dawkins’s book suggests that all those who believe in God are unreasonable in so doing. I disagree. Those who claim to know that there is a God, I have agreed, are making a claim that is not justified; but so too are those who claim to know there is no God. But a belief in God, falling short of certainty, is not open to the same objection. A belief may be reasonable, though false. If two oncologists tell you that your tumour is benign, then your belief that it is benign is a reasonable belief even if, sadly, it is false. In the case of many people in many cultures, I maintain, religious belief, even if false, may well be reasonable. (So, too, may tentative, non-dogmatic atheism.) But I think belief in God reasonable only if it is based on considerations available to all humans: not if it is claimed on the basis of a special message to oneself or to the group that one belongs to. Because I think belief in God can be reasonable I think Dawkins is wrong to object to bringing up children in belief in religion. The education of children is impossible without narrative and ceremony, and growing up is a matter of knowing what to discard and what to maintain. I doubt if Dawkins objects to telling children about Santa Claus; it does not lead to an adult society of bigoted Santaclausians. Many intellectual Christians, as they mature, abandon other bits of the Christmas story: I know priests in good standing who do not believe that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Disbelieving in religious narratives, however, does not necessarily mean discarding them: it means, as I suggested earlier, removing them from the history section of one’s mind into the poetry section. I agree with Dawkins that faith, as an irrevocable

198 knowledge, belief, and faith commitment, is not reasonable when given to a false proposition. But I see nothing unreasonable in believers having the degree of commitment to their church, synagogue, or mosque that they might have to a political party or social community. It is the degree of commitment involved in faith, rather than its religious object, that is what is really objectionable; and the history of nazism, fascism, and communism made this abundantly clear in the last century. Not all fanaticism is religious fanaticism, and I found unconvincing Dawkins’s attempt to show that Hitler was a closet Catholic. In answer to the question whether religious people are better or worse than non-religious people, a friend of mine gave a sage answer. ‘Religion’, he said, ‘makes nice people nicer and makes nasty people nastier.’ When arguing, a moment ago, that religious language should be treated as metaphorical I mentioned that metaphorical propositions do not contradict each other in the way that bigots believe. But of course much religious language is in the imperative mood; even if propositions don’t contradict each other, commands certainly can. The question then arises, how should one deal with commands emanating from a religious position that one believes to be literally false. This is a practical, political question, not a merely philosophical one. Like Dawkins I believe that the state owes no special respect to religious beliefs as such. Religious conscientious objectors should be treated on equal terms with atheist objectors who oppose a war on moral grounds: general pacifism has no priority over qualified pacifism. Religious bodies, in order to obtain tax exemption as charities, should be under an obligation to prove public benefit—that is, benefit that can be assessed as such by other than co-religionists. On the other hand, it may be said that one of the great benefits that religion has conferred on the human race is that it has instilled into people’s hearts the idea that the governments they live under are not the supreme arbiters of right and wrong: that

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there is an authority superior even to the most omnicompetent totalitarian government. A world in which everyone believed that there was no moral authority superior to their rulers would not necessarily be preferable to a world in which everyone saw rulers as answerable to God. Of course, there can be a world which is worse than either: a world in which rulers believe they have a special message from God authorizing their policies in peace and war.

15 The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Belief It was a great honour to be invited to join the distinguished company of those who have given the Athenaeum lectures since their inception in 1998. The club’s talk dinner committee showed great perspicacity in choosing, as the overall theme of the lecture series, ‘The Unity of Knowledge’. This is a broad and fertile topic that can be approached in a variety of ways, as previous lectures have amply demonstrated. There is, in my view, a special unity peculiar to knowledge—and not only scientific knowledge. Belief on the other hand—and not only religious belief—leaves room for exuberant diversity. Knowledge is single, belief is multiplex. There are two reasons for this difference between knowing and believing. One reason is philosophical, the other is historical; one reason is necessary, the other is contingent. Already in ancient Greece philosophers reflected on the relationship between knowledge and belief, and they established a number of theses about knowing and believing. (1) Knowledge can only be of what is true; belief may be true or false. (2) For a true belief to count as knowledge it must be supported by some kind of warrant, such as evidence or argument. (3) Knowledge, unlike belief, involves a resolute commitment to the proposition claimed as known. Let me expand briefly on these cardinal principles. From the thesis that knowledge is only of what is true there follows immediately the unity of knowledge. Truth is single: two

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contradictory propositions cannot both be true together. Truth is absolute: there is no such thing as merely relative truth. Correspondingly, two contradictory propositions cannot both be known. Beliefs, however, may and do frequently contradict each other. This constitutes a philosophical, necessary distinction between knowledge and belief. There is, however, a second, contingent reason why knowledge is single and belief multiplex. Human beings may err by believing too much or by believing too little. If we are to avoid credulity and scepticism we need to acquire and exercise the virtue of rationality: the virtue which enables one to strike the right balance in matters of belief. If all human beings possessed to the full the virtue of rationality then belief would have the same kind of unity that knowledge has: but sadly, of course, every one of us falls short of the ideal of rationality. This is the second reason, a contingent and historical reason, why belief is multiplex, and lacks the simplicity of knowledge. Let us focus, to illustrate this, on religious belief. It is conceivable in the abstract that the whole human race should at some time in the future adopt, or should have at some time in the past adopted, one single religion. Christians, for much of their history, aimed to convert all nations to Christianity and sent missionaries worldwide for that purpose. Some Islamists at the present time believe that the world will only have peace when everyone has converted to Islam. But we all know that as a matter of historical fact there are many different religions. Moreover, the tenets of the different religions contradict each other. Because of the contradictions we know that at least some religious beliefs are false. Religion cannot therefore attain to the unity that is enjoyed by science. The epistemological problems of the nature of knowledge and belief are best illuminated by discussion of a particular belief. Several times in the past I have sought to do so by discussing belief in the existence of God. In this chapter I want to focus the philosophical light upon a different belief: belief in an afterlife. The two beliefs are of course quite distinct: it is possible to believe

202 unity of knowledge, diversity of belief in God and yet to deny human immortality. Such seems to have been the state of mind of many of the writers of the Hebrew Bible. Once, having read Paul Johnson’s book The Quest for God, I complained to him that he had lumped together the existence of God and a human afterlife, as if belief in one had to go with belief in the other. His characteristically robust response was that he had no interest in a God he was never going to meet. Throughout the ages there have been those who claimed to know that humans could look forward to an afterlife. Philosophers have thought they could offer knock-down arguments to prove immortality: foremost among these was Plato. In Plato’s dialogue Crito Socrates is asked on the point of death whether he has any instructions for his burial. He tells his executor to please himself about the funeral; he should remember that only the body is buried, and not the soul which is to go to the joys of the blessed. In another dialogue, the Phaedo, Plato offers a number of arguments to show that the human soul not only survives death, but after death is better off than during life. The starting point of his discussion is the conception of a human being as a soul imprisoned in a body. True philosophers, Plato says, care little for bodily pleasures like food and drink and sex, and they find the body a hindrance rather than a help in philosophic pursuits. ‘Thought is best when the mind is gathered into itself, and none of these things troubles it—neither sounds nor sights nor pain, nor again any pleasure—when it takes leave of the body and has as little as possible to do with it.’ So philosophers in pursuit of truth keep their souls detached from their bodies. But death is the separation of soul from body: hence a true philosopher has throughout his life in effect been craving for death. In several places Plato argues, and in this he has had many followers throughout the centuries, that if the mind can know universal ideas and eternal truths, that is to say eternal and changeless entities, then it must itself be an immortal entity that can survive the death of the body. To get this conclusion he seems to need the assumption that like can only be known by like. This

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assumption seems to be true only if it concerns the content of the knowledge, and not the mode of knowing. The Platonists have never provided any good reason for thinking that there cannot be fugitive acquaintance with unchanging objects and temporary grasps of eternal truths. There seems no more reason to deny mortal knowledge of immortal verity than to deny the possibility of a picture in fireworks of the Rock of Gibraltar. Though Plato places his arguments for immortality in the mouth of Socrates, it is difficult to be sure what the historic Socrates truly thought about the soul and the mind. In his final speech in his Apology Socrates appears to be agnostic about the possibility of an afterlife. Is death, he wonders, a dreamless sleep, or is it perhaps a journey to another world to meet the glorious dead? ‘We go our ways,’ he tells his audience of Athenians, ‘I to die and you to live: which is better, no one knows but God.’ Just as Plato thought that he knew beyond peradventure that the soul survives death, so, a century later, Epicurus was certain that the soul was as mortal as the body. The ideas of Epicurus find their finest expression in the long philosophical poem of his Roman disciple Lucretius, the De Rerum Natura. The goal of Lucretius’ discussion of the mind and the soul is to prove that they are both mortal, and thus to take away the grounds on which people fear death. Water flows out of a smashed vessel: how much faster must soul’s tenuous fluid leak away once the body is broken! The mind develops with the body and will decay with the body. The mind suffers when the body is sick, and is cured by physical medicine. These are all clear marks of mortality. Lucretius concludes with one of the most eloquent passages in all Latin poetry: Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum Quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.... Scire licet nobis nil esse in morte timendum Nec miserum fieri qui non est posse neque hilum Differre an nullo fuerit iam tempore natus, Mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit.

204 unity of knowledge, diversity of belief This passage received a magnificent translation from John Dryden: What has this bugbear, death, to frighten man, If souls can die, as well as bodies can? For, as before our birth we felt no pain, When Punic arms infested land and main When heaven and earth were in confusion hurled, For the debated empire of the world, Which awed with dreadful expectation lay, Sure to be slaves, uncertain who should sway: So, when our mortal frame shall be disjoined, The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind, From sense of grief and pain we shall be free; We shall not feel, because we shall not be. Nay, ev’n suppose when we have suffered fate The soul could feel in her divided state What’s that to us? For we are only we When souls and bodies in one frame agree ... Since a man who is not feels not woe (For death exempts him and wards off the blow Which we, the living only, feel and bear) What is there left for us in Death to fear? When once that pause of life has come between Tis just the same as we had never been.

In the Christian Middle Ages St Thomas Aquinas accepted some Platonic arguments to show that the human soul was immaterial and immortal. But he agreed with Lucretius that a disembodied soul was not the same thing as the person whose soul it had been. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians ‘if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable’ (1 Cor. 15: 19). St Thomas, in commenting on this passage, wrote: A human being naturally desires his own salvation; but the soul, since it is part of the body of a human being, is not a whole human being, and my soul is not I; so even if a soul gains salvation in another life, that is not I or any human being.

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Personal survival, for Aquinas, was only guaranteed if there was eventually to be a resurrection of the body. But this was not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief—of faith. One of the articles of the creed is ‘I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’. So for medieval Christianity the hope of a personal afterlife was a matter of belief and not of knowledge. The most vivid expression of Christian attitudes to death in this period is in Thomas of Celano’s ‘Dies irae’, familiar I am sure to you either through the liturgy in church or in the concert hall in the settings of Mozart and Verdi. It is a masterpiece of Latin verse worthy to be set beside Lucretius’ great poem. Dies irae, dies illa Solvet saeclum in favilla Teste David cum Sybilla. Quantus tremor est futurus Quando judex est venturus Cuncta stricte discussurus! Tuba mirum spargens sonum Per sepulcra regionum Coget omnes ante thronum Mors stupebit et natura Cum resurget creatura Judicanti responsura Liber scriptus proferetur In quo totum continetur Unde mundus judicetur Judex ergo cum sedebit Quidquid latet apparebit Nil inultum remanebit Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? Quem patronum rogaturus? Cum vix justus sit securus

206 unity of knowledge, diversity of belief It is difficult to find a good verse translation of the ‘Dies irae’ to match Dryden’s version of Lucretius. The best I have found is by Sir Walter Scott, in the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’. His rendering begins The day of wrath, that dreadful day When heaven and earth shall pass away What power shall be the sinner’s stay? How shall he meet that dreadful day?

That is all very well, but it lacks the hammer punch of the Latin, which derives from the triple feminine rhymes in each stanza. It is, of course, the feminine rhymes that present enormous obstacles to a translator into English verse; and I cannot claim to have overcome those obstacles in the version I offer of the next six verses. Every mortal quakes and trembles As the great assize assembles. Just or guilty, none dissembles. Fear in every heart instilling Hear the trumpet’s final shrilling Summon willing and unwilling. Death’s and nature’s laws reversing Bodies from their graves emerging Answer to the summons’ urging. All men’s deeds, sublime or sordid, Are in one great book recorded Ready for the final audit. With this judge there’s no concealing His inquest is all revealing His doom admits of no appealing. Whose help can save me from damnation When the holiest in creation Are not certain of salvation?

The terror evoked in the ‘Dies irae’ is appropriate in a Catholic tradition according to which nobody knows, until after their death,

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whether they are going to heaven or to hell. But in some Protestant traditions the faithful, even in this life, are assured of salvation and can look forward to the afterlife with confidence. Against such a background death is not something to be dreaded but to be welcomed. This tradition finds fine artistic expression in some of Bach’s works, notably ‘Komm, s¨usser Tod’, and a number of his cantatas. Though for most Christians hope or dread of an afterlife has been a matter of faith, the Platonic tradition of seeking proofs of immortality did not die out. In his philosophy Ren´e Descartes made a sharp distinction between mind and body. In the Sixth Meditation he says that he knows that if he can clearly and distinctly understand one thing without another, that shows that the two things are distinct, because God at least can separate them. Since he knows that he exists, but observes nothing else as belonging to his nature other than that he is a thinking thing, he concludes that his nature or essence consists simply in being a thinking thing. Thus he, his real self, is really distinct from his body and can exist without it. In considering this argument I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Descartes is confusing ‘I can clearly and distinctly perceive A without clearly and distinctly perceiving B’ with ‘I can clearly and distinctly perceive A without B’. But whether or not he was guilty of this elementary fallacy, his account of the human soul was decisively exposed as complete delusion by Immanuel Kant. That does not mean, however that Kant rejected belief in a future life. He accepted it as a postulate of practical reason. In the present life, he argued, happiness is clearly not proportioned to virtue: so if we are to be motivated to behave well, we must believe that the balance will be redressed in another life elsewhere. The refutation of a priori psychology, Kant claimed, is a help, not a hindrance, to faith in an afterlife. ‘For the merely speculative proof has never been able to exercise any influence upon the common reason of men. It so stands upon the point of a hair, that even

208 unity of knowledge, diversity of belief the schools preserve it from falling only so long as they keep it unceasingly spinning round like a top.’ In the nineteenth century most philosophers abandoned any attempt to offer rational proofs of the immortality of the individual soul. Some turned to seek an empirical proof of immortality. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, sought physical evidence for the survival of the individual after death. Many of the finest minds of the time became involved in this attempt to put immortality onto a scientific basis. The great American philosopher William James died of heart disease in 1910. On his deathbed in Cambridge, Mass., he asked his brother, the novelist Henry James, to remain close at hand for six weeks to receive any messages he could send him from beyond the grave. No messages are recorded. The empirical quest for an afterlife went out of fashion among scientists in the twentieth century, partly because so many of the nineteenth-century spirit manifestations were shown to be fraudulent. We must admit, I think, that neither philosophy nor science can give us an assurance of any personal immortality, and we must accept our ignorance about an afterlife. We are back in the position of the pagan king of Mercia who figures in an unforgettable passage of Bede’s ecclesiastical history. He is told by his senior councillor: The present life of men on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers. Entering at one door, and leaving by another, while it is inside it is untouched by the wintry storm; but this brief interval of calm is over in a moment, and it returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing from your sight. Man’s life is similar; and of what follows it, or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.

None of us really knows that there is a life after death, or, if there is one, what it will be like. The multiplicity of conceptions of the afterlife, both popular and philosophical, is a prime example of the variety of belief. I hope I have given ample illustration of this, even though I have restricted myself to western sources and have left unexplored the rich tapestry of oriental religion and myth.

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Some have seen the uncertainty about an afterlife as a defining feature of the human condition. Animals have no conception of survival; beings higher than ourselves, if there are any, might have clear assurance of their immortality. The Spanish philosopher Unamuno wrote, in a voluminous passage that I abbreviate: The absolute certainty that death is a complete and definitive and irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness, or contrariwise, the absolute certainty that our personal consciousness continues beyond death in whatever condition—either of these certainties would make our life equally impossible. In the most secret recesses of the spirit of the man who believes that death will put an end to his personal consciousness a vague shadow lurks, a shadow of the shadow of uncertainty, and while he tells himself ‘There’s nothing for it but to live this passing life, for there is no other’ at the same time he hears, in this most secret recess, his own doubt murmur ‘Who knows?’ Likewise, in some recess of the soul of the true believer who has faith in a future life, a muffled voice, the voice of uncertainty, murmurs in his spirit’s ear ‘Who knows?’ How, without this uncertainty, could we ever live?

Each of us will have formed our own belief on a topic that is no less important than it is baffling. But not all beliefs are on the same level, and one must ask which beliefs are the most rational. For my own part, I find the balance of argument to favour Epicurus rather than Plato. Unlike many of my friends, I do not look forward to any afterlife. If one is a Cartesian philosopher and regards the soul as a self-standing entity temporarily and contingently linked to a body, then one may consistently believe in immortality. But I reject Cartesianism and think that I am a mortal rational animal. My mental life is so bound up with the movements and behaviour of my body—my eyes, tongue, lips, hands, and so on—that I find it very hard to conceive that it can survive the death of that body. Of course Christian tradition has held out hope of an eventual universal resurrection: but a body resembling mine a millennium hence would not be my body. Unless one believes in the possibility of a disembodied soul in the interim, there is nothing to link that resurrection body with the mortal one in which I now live.

210 unity of knowledge, diversity of belief Descriptions of the condition of resurrected bodies (which are rarely offered by modern Christians, but which are amply provided by Augustine and Aquinas) make them appear not only to be unidentifiable with particular mundane individuals, but even to belong to some species quite different from the human race. Some people are disturbed by the thought that at their death they will be annihilated. For myself I find it no more disconcerting to accept that in the future the world will continue in my absence than to accept that for millions of years previously it got on very well without me. It is rather the possibility of continuing after death that I find troubling. It is not just that annihilation would be vastly preferable to the torments of the damned so lovingly described by Dante; it is that even painless perpetuity would be appalling. The delights of heaven have often been hymned, but rarely convincingly described. Typical is the hymn of Isaac Watts. There is a land of pure delight Where saints immortal reign; Infinite day excludes the night And pleasures banish pain There everlasting spring abides And never withering flowers Death, like a narrow sea, divides This heavenly land from ours.

But throughout history there has been a paradox in the Christian attitude to death. If heaven is a land of pure delight, and death is the only passage to it, then surely one should congratulate, rather than commiserate with, a friend who has discovered he has a terminal disease. If death leads to the assignation of an eternal fate, then it is incomparably more important than any event in life. But Christians have rarely accepted these consequences of the teaching of the faith about the four last things: death, judgement, hell, and heaven. One notable exception was a former headmaster of the Benedictine school of Ampleforth. At a headmasters’ conference the heads of different schools were asked what their schools were

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preparing the boys for. Service to the nation, said one; successful careers in business, said another. ‘And what do you prepare the boys for at Ampleforth?’ ‘Death’, was the answer. Christian equivocation about the afterlife is reflected in the very prayer most commonly used in blessing the departed: ‘May they rest in peace, and may perpetual light shine upon them.’ Everlasting peace is a consummation devoutly to be wished: but perpetual light sounds like a torture out of Guantanamo. In the nineteenth century philosophers and poets began to question whether even a painless afterlife was really desirable. The typical idea of heaven, said Matthew Arnold, is of a perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all round, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant. ‘That this conception of immortality cannot possibly be true, we feel, the moment we conceive it clearly. And yet who can devise any conception of a future state of being, which shall bear close examination better?’ The issue was addressed, more soberly, by John Stuart Mill in one of his Essays on Theism. While admitting that in the appalling conditions of early nineteenth-century England the only hope of happiness that many had was to imagine it in another life, he went on: It is not only possible but probable that in a higher, and above all, a happier condition of human life, not annihilation but immortality may be the burdensome idea; and that human nature, though pleased with the present, and by no means impatient to quit it, would find comfort and not sadness in the thought that it is not chained through eternity to a conscious existence which it cannot be assured that it will always wish to preserve.

Mill’s thought was given poetic form by A. C. Swinburne. From too much love of living From hope and fear set free We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever That dead men rise up never

212 unity of knowledge, diversity of belief That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

George Bernard Shaw expressed a similar thought with malicious Irish wit. At every classical concert you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They are almost all English.

The one tragic certainty that we have about death is that it involves the parting of friends. Death is the separation of loved ones from each other. If one believes in an afterlife the separation may be only temporary. On the eve of his execution Sir Thomas More wrote from the Tower of London to his daughter Margaret ‘Farewell my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven.’ For those who do not expect to survive death, the parting is permanent and so more grievous. Dr Johnson told Mrs Thrale that we should not lament the death of our friends. ‘We must either outlive our friends you know, or our friends must outlive us; and I see no man that would hesitate about the choice.’ Johnson was not here indulging in a macho competition of longevity. What he meant was this. The death of a friend brings grief to the survivor, and each of us should prefer to shoulder that burden himself rather than cast it upon friends. Few I think can summon up the fortitude of Dr Johnson. More suitable to our condition is the simple couplet of Emily Dickinson, to whom I will give the last word. Parting is all we know of heaven And all we need of hell.

Bibliography Anscombe, G. E. M., From Parmenides to Wittgenstein (Blackwell, 1981). and Geach, P. T., Three Philosophers (Blackwell, 1961). Bennett, M., and Hacker, P., Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003). Neuroscience and Philosophy (Columbia UP, 2007). Broadie, S., Ethics with Aristotle (OUP, 1991). and Rowe, C., Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (OUP, 2002). Chadwick, H., Boethius (OUP, 1981). Dawkins, R., The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006). Geach, P. T., and Black, M., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Blackwell, 1980). Hacker P. M. S., Wittgenstein, Meaning and Mind (Blackwell, 1990). Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 1996). Hadot, P., Marius Victorinus (Paris, 1971). Hallett, G., A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Cornell UP, 1977). Harries, R., Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Stem Cell Research (HMSO, 2003). Heinaman, R., ed., Plato and Aristotle’s Ethics (Ashgate, 2003). Jackson, D., Augustine’s De Dialectica (Reidel, 1975). Johnson, P., The Quest for God (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996). Jones, D. A., The Soul of the Embryo (Continuum, 2004). Kenny, A., The Five Ways (Routledge, 1969). Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (Duckworth, 1979). Aquinas on Being (OUP, 2002). Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Macmillan, 1969). The Aristotelian Ethics (OUP, 1978). Aristotle on the Perfect Life (OUP, 1992). Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition (OUP, 2001). The Heritage of Wisdom (Blackwell, 1987). What is Faith? (OUP, 1992). Will, Freedom and Power (Blackwell, 1975).

214 bibliography Kretzmann, N., The Metaphysics of Theism (OUP, 1997). The Metaphysics of Creation (OUP, 1999). Lear, G. R., Happy Lives and the Highest Good (Princeton UP, 2004). Newman, J. H., An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (OUP, 1985). O’Donnell, J., Augustine’s Confessions (OUP, 1992). Pasnau, R., Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (CUP, 2002). Quine, W. V. O., From a Logical Point of View (Harvard UP, 1953). Rundle, B., Why is there something rather than nothing? (OUP, 1999). Russell, B., History of Western Philosophy (Allen & Unwin, 1961). Stump, E., Aquinas (Routledge, 2003). Trilling, L., Matthew Arnold (Allen & Unwin, 1949). Warnock, M., Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology (HMSO, 1984). Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1953). Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (Routledge, 1921). Remarks on Foundations of Mathematics (Blackwell, 1959). Blue and Brown Books (Blackwell, 1958). Zettel (Blackwell, 1967). Philosophical Grammar (Blackwell, 1974). On Certainty (Blackwell, 1969). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman (Blackwell, 1982).

Index a priori vs a posteriori 149 Abelard 16, 182 abortion 100, 103, 105, 107, 112 actuality vs potentiality 85, 112, 129–30, 155 Adam 83 afterlife 127, 131–2, 201–212 agnosticism 190–2 Agorius 71 Albert the Great 16 analogy 96–7 analytic vs synthetic 149 angels 83, 91–2, 127, 183 animals 108, 120, 187 anitas 97 annihilation 210 Anscombe, G.E.M. 50–1, 56, 60–61, 163–4, 175–7 anthropic principle 188–9 anthropomorphism 184 approximation 42 Aquinas, Thomas 7–10, 16, 55, 74–100, 102–5, 111–12, 114–122, 182–5, 192, 195, 204–5 arguments 137–40 Aristotle vii, 14, 29–73, 84, 120, 133, 160, 180, 185 Categories 62–73 Magna Moralia 30, 37–9 Eudemian Ethics 30, 34–7, 45–9 Nicomachean Ethics 30, 32–4, 41–5 Arnold, Matthew 17–27, 211 Augustine 6–8, 64–8, 73, 141–2, 179 Avicenna 10, 87, 97–8 Bach, J.S. 207 Barnes J, 50–61 Bede, Venerable 208 behaviourism 157–8 being 10, 74–98 belief 179–181, 200–208 Bennett, Max 152–4, 159–60 Bentham J. 120 Bergen university 172–3 birth 101

Blackwell’s 170 Boeing 747 argument 191 Bonaventure 7, 9 brain 158–9 British Academy 169 Broadie, Sarah 1–2, 35n, 51 Callicles 17–19 canon 195 Cassiodorus 63, 69 certainty 181 Chadwick, Henry 65 chance 187–8 character 56 Christmas 197 Clarke, Kenneth 111–2 Clement of Alexandria 99 Clough, A.H. 25–6 cognition 130 cognitive science 152–62 commitment 193, 198 compatibilism 126 complexity 191 conception 101 conduct 53–5 conscientious objection 198 consciousness, 153–4 Constantinople, Council of 63 constitution vs identity 132 contraception 100 Cooper, John 40–1, 46–9 Copleston, Frederick vi copula 90 copyright 169–70 cosmological constants 188 courage 58–9 creation 1–13, 83–5 ex nihilo 5 credulity 180 criterion vs sympton 158 Dante 8–10 Darwin, Charles 185–6 Dawkins R. 181–99

216 index Deliac inscription 49 Demiurge 1 Descartes R. vi, 11–12, 115–6, 153, 179, 207 design vs purpose 184 design, argument from 184 desires 43, 53–4 determinism 131 Dickinson, Emily 212 Dies Irae 205–6 Diogenes Laertius 15, 17–18 distinction, real vs notional 76–7 dormitive power 156 dualism 153 Duns Scotus 10

Hacker P. 136–9, 151–4, 159–60 Hallett, Garth, 136 happiness 20–22, 29–49 Harries committee 111 Henry of Ghent 10 Heraclides 14–15 Heringer H.J. 168 Hermippus 14 Hintikka, J. 166, 176 holism 150 Homoousion 62–4 homunculus 159 Horace 16 Huitfeldt, Claus 172 Hypostasis 64

education 197–8 elements 24–5 elucidations 146 emanation 8 embryo 102–13 Empedocles 14–28 Epicurus 203 esse 74–5 essence 74–98 individual vs universal 81 essentia 74–5 eternal truths 11 Etna 15, 23–8 eudaimonism 29, 36 existence 74–98 specific vs individual 78–9

Ibn Sina see Avicenna identity, specific vs individual 110 illumination 126 incontinence 59 incorporeal processes 142 individuation vs specification 109 infanticide 100, 107 intelligence 184 Irwin, T. 29–39 Isidore 70 IVF 113

faith 133, 192–99 Favorinus 18 finality 40–9 Finnis, John 118 firing squad 189 foetus 102–113 Frege, Gottlob 92–3, 182–3 Galileo 162 gametes 100, 112 Geach, Peter 77–8, 93, 118, 181 Genesis 2–4 Gibraltar, Rock of 203 God 2–13, 77–98, 181–99 Gorgias 19 grace 133

James, William 208 Job 4 John Paul II 116 Johnson, Paul 202 Johnson, Samuel 212 Jones, David Albert 105 justice 132 kalokagathia 35, 48 Kant, Immanuel 79, 108, 149, 182–3, 207–8 knowledge 179–208 Kretzmann, Norman 12–13, 118, 121–2, 129 Lamb, Charles 27 language 186–7 language games 138, 141 Lear, Gabriel 42–6 Lenin V.I. 115 Leo XIII 114–5

index 217 life 82, 105–6, 187–8 Locke, John 101, 180, 193 Lonergan, B. 117 Lucretius 16, 21–2, 203–4 Maccabees 5 Marius Victorinus 63–4, 71–3 masturbation 100 materialism 157–8 matter 6 McCabe, H. 118 McInerny, R. 117 Meredith, George 27 mereological fallacy 159–60 metaphor 196–7 metaphysics 106–7, 120, 138, 191 metaphilosophy 147–8 Mill, John Stuart 211 Milton, John 16–17 mind 154–8 Minio-Paluello, L. 68, 70 More, Sir Thomas 212 morphine 156 multiverse 188–9 natural selection 186–7 necessary truths 179 necessity, metaphysical vs epistemic Nedo, Michael 168, 170–1, 173–7 neuroscience 152–4, 161 Newman, John Henry 114, 193, 195 Nicaea, Council of 63 nobility 45 nonsense 146 nothing 190 Onan 100 ontological argument 182 Ousia 62, 64, 67–8 Ovum 106 Pantheia 14, 18 paradigms 2, 6, 10 Paris 58 Parmenides 23 Pasnau, Robert, 104–5, 123–7 Pausanias 15, 17, 19 Peisianax 14, 17 Philoponus, John 7 philosophy 136–48

phoenix 75–7, 80 Pius X 115 Plantinga, A. 194 Plato vii, 1–6, 40, 46–8, 99, 141–2 Crito 202 Phaedo 202 Philebus 40–6 Theaetetus 180–1 Timaeus 1–6, 12–13, 29–30 Platonism 83, 93–4, 120–1, 128 pleasure 46–7 possible worlds 183 practical inference 60 Praxis 51–5 predicate 79 pregnancy 101 private language argument 140, 145 Prohairesis 52–5 Psalms 4 pseudo-propositions 139–140 psychical research 208 qualitative feels 155 quantifiers 79–80, 82, 97, 183 quiddity 75, 86, 93–5 Quine, W.V.O. 149–50 Quintilian 66 rationality 153–4, 180, 201 reductionism 157 Rees, Martin 188 religion 182–99, 201–212 reminders of the obvious, 141–3, 148 resolution 52–5 resurrection 205, 209–10 Rhees, Rush, 163, 165–7 Russell, Bertrand vi, 115

Santa Claus 197 scepticism 180 Schulte, Joachim 168, 170, 175, 177 science vs philosophy 151 Scott, Sir Walter 206 Scotus see Duns Scotus self-evidence 88–9 self-sufficiency 40–9 semen 102 sensation 125 sense vs reference 93 Shaw, G.B. 212

218 index Sixtus V 100 Socrates 203 soul 99–100, 161 Sperm 106 Springer-Verlag 173 state vs activity 130 stem cells 113 Stump, Eleonore 123, 128–34 subsistence 125 substance 63, 67–8 supposit 81 Swinburne A.C. 211 syllogisms, practical vs technical 56–8 syntax vs semantics 97 teleology 185–6 Tertullian 16 Themistius 68, 70 therapeutic philosophy 138–40 theses 137, 140, 147 thinking 142 Thomism 114–122 thought 191–2 Timaeus 15 toleration 197 Trilling, Lionel 22

Trinity 62–3, 66–8 Trinity College, Cambridge 165, 171 truisms 143–4 truth 44–6, 50–61 Tubingen project 167–8 twinning 109–10 Unamuno, M. 209 Varro 66 vehicles 155–162 virtue 29–39 state vs activity, 30–1 von Wright, G.H. 163–5, 169, 175–6 Waismann F. 140 Warnock Committee 106–9 Watts, Isaac 210 Wilson, Colin St J. 174 Winch, Peter 169, 175 Wisdom, book of 4–5, 99 Wittgenstein L. 117, 136–78, 193–4 Wordsworth 78 zygote 112