In my last post, I examined Edward Feser's case for universals (and thus formal causes) and concluded that, while it is a strong case, it is not rationally unavoidable and can be answered. In this post, I'll discuss final causes, and explain why I think there is little reason to believe in the kind of final causes Feser needs to make his case for natural law.
Feser's case for final causes is spread throughout the book (and is discussed in many places on his blog), but the basic gist of it that the only way to make sense of why A regularly causes B is to say that A is inherently "directed toward" B as a goal. As Feser puts it:
But there is no way to make sense of these regularities apart from the notion of final causation, of things being directed toward an end or goal. For it is not just the case that a struck match regularly generates fire, heat, and the like; it regularly generates fire and heat specifically, rather than ice, or the smell of lilacs, or the sound of a trumpet. It is not just the case that the moon regularly orbits the earth in a regular pattern; it orbits the earth specifically, rather than quickly swinging out to Mars and back now and again, or stopping dead for five minutes here and there, or dipping down toward the earth occasionally and then quickly popping back up. And so on for all the innumerable regularities that fill the universe at any moment. In each case, the causes don’t simply happen to result in certain effects, but are evidently and inherently directed toward certain specific effects as toward a “goal.” As we saw when we first looked at Aristotle’s notion of final causality, this doesn’t mean they are consciously trying to reach these goals; of course they are not. The Aristotelian idea is precisely that goal-directedness can and does exist in the natural world even apart from conscious awareness (Kindle Locations 2208-2217).
Now, this may in fact be correct. It is certainly a better alternative to Hume's theory - the theory that there are simply successions of events, and that causation and regularity are simply things we project onto our experience of reality in order to make sense of things. Hume's theory is notorious for raising insurmountable skepticism about the reliability of induction and (therefore) the reliability of science itself; if causation is simply the succession of one event by another without any necessary connection between the two, then any event might in principle follow any other, and the regularities we see in the laws of nature could break at any moment. Final causes surely make causation and the laws of nature much more intelligible - at the very least, they are a serious contender for a comprehensive theory of causation.
The problem for Feser here is that the need to invoke final causes is much more limited than his conclusions require. He claims that (for example) the reason opium causes sleep is because it is inherently "directed toward" causing sleep specifically; unless we say that opium is inherently "directed toward" causing sleep as a final cause, we cannot make sense of why it does in fact cause sleep rather than something else or nothing at all. But in fact we can make sense of why opium causes sleep - chemistry and biology have already done the job. Feser anticipates this objection, saying that the chemical facts are only the mechanism by which opium manifests its inherent powers and achieves its final cause. But once the chemical facts are in place, the appeal to the final cause of opium becomes superfluous - given the facts about the chemistry of opium and the chemistry of the human brain, the fact that opium causes sleep falls out as a logical consequence. To put it technically, the fact that opium causes sleep logically supervenes on the facts about chemistry. We may have to appeal to final causes anyway to explain why the facts of chemistry hold, but we do not need to appeal to them directly in order to explain why opium causes sleep.
But do we need to appeal to final causes at the level of chemistry? The thing is... we probably don't. There is good reason to believe that, just as the fact that opium causes sleep logically supervenes on the facts about chemistry, the facts about chemistry logically supervene on the facts about basic physics. There is good reason to believe that, once the facts about basic physics are put in place, the facts about chemistry (as well as biology) logically follow. To see why, note that the laws of physics are supposed to be universal; they are supposed to apply to every particle in the entire universe equally, without exception. Unless acted on by a non-physical force (if any exist), the behavior of particles, even in interaction with each other, is not supposed to change - if it did, then the laws of physics would have been violated. So all of the dynamics of the material world (absent non-physical influences) should be explicable in terms of particle physics, including the behavior of composite objects. It follows, then, that the facts of chemistry and biology - which deal with structure and dynamics at the level of composite objects - should be logically supervenient on the facts about particle physics: given the facts about particle physics, the fact that opium causes sleep should be logically necessary. We may need to appeal to final causes to explain the laws of physics - and I think a good argument could be made for this - but to appeal to them at the level of chemistry or biology would simply be superfluous.
To be fair, Feser has addressed this issue in a blog post before, admitting that the position that formal and final causes exist only at the level of physics is a position that an opponent could logically take. But he claims that final causes (and thus formal causes too) must exist at the levels of chemistry and biology as well, as there are causal powers at those levels that are not reducible to the causal powers of fundamental particles. Being a layman who is not an expert in philosophy of chemistry or philosophy of biology, I will have to respectfully disagree with Feser's view. I submit that, if there are indeed causal powers at the level of chemistry and biology that are not logically supervenient on dynamics at the level of particle physics, then the laws of physics have been violated - something which Feser himself denies is possible when he dismisses Cartesian dualism in Chapter 5 (more on that later). To be sure, there are causal properties that are conceptually irreducible to those found in physics - to redescribe reproduction or metabolism at the level of physics would result in a complete loss of meaning - but to say that they are ontologically irreducible (that is, logically non-supervenient on physics) would be to commit oneself to the idea that many of the laws of particle physics no longer apply when particles are arranged in certain formations. And it is ontological reducibility that we are concerned with here; if chemistry and biology are logically supervenient on physics, then the appeal to final causes at those levels is superfluous regardless of whether or not they are conceptually reducible to physics.
So it seems that formal and final causes - the core of Aristotelian metaphysics - are not needed above the level of basic physics in order to make the world intelligible. In my next post, I will discuss the consequences this has for Feser's cases for hylomorphic dualism and natural law morality.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Review of The Last Superstition, Part 2
This would be part 2 of my review of The Last Superstition. Last time, we took a quick look at the general logical structure of the book, without actually evaluating any of the arguments within it. In the remaining posts in this series, I will attempt to evaluate these arguments and determine if Feser's case is successful.
To recap: Feser starts by arguing for realism about universals. He then moves into Aristotle's metaphysics, arguing that the existence of change entails the distinction between actuality and potentiality, that the existence of universals entails formal causes, and that the existence of causation entails final causes. He then argues that this combination - actuality and potentiality, formal and final causes - entails the existence of God, the immortality of the soul (specifically, hylomorphic dualism), and natural law morality. He then argues that the mechanical philosophy that denies formal and final causes is incoherent and reduces itself to absurdity, thereby giving both a positive and a negative argument for Aristotelianism.
Now, this seems all fine and dandy on the face of it. Feser is certainly a very competent philosopher, and I agree with his thesis that Aristotelianism is just as defensible today as it ever was. His case certainly needs to be taken seriously, especially by anyone who wants to defend modern secular morality from the conservative, religious morality of natural law. But I do not think that Feser's conclusions are rationally unavoidable. In fact, I will argue that Feser needs a very specific formulation of Aristotelianism to be true in order for many of his arguments to go through, and that this formulation (which is presented in the book) faces some problems.
As stated before, Feser begins by arguing for realism about universals. He gives 9 arguments for realism - 5 direct arguments, 2 arguments against nominalism, and 2 arguments against conceptualism. Now, for some universals - like mathematical entities or propositions - I think these arguments work well in establishing realism. But Feser needs more than just those kinds of universals to be real - what he needs, in order for his case for hylomorphic dualism and natural law to go through, is for complex biological forms - like "dog", "squirrel", "frog", and "human" - to be real, mind-independent universals. Otherwise, an individual dog (ignoring consciousness for the moment) is very plausibly nothing more than a collection of elementary particles, with "dog" being an organization that we project onto the particles, similar to us seeing a meaningless ink splotch as the letter "A". I will argue that conceptualism, at least about universals for composite biological entities, is perfectly defensible, and that Feser's arguments against it don't quite hold up.
Surprisingly, only a few of Feser's arguments for realism apply to biological universals. The first of these goes like this:
1. The “one over many” argument: “Triangularity”“redness,”“humanness,” etc., are not reducible to any particular triangle, red thing, or human being, nor even to any collection of triangles, red things, or human beings. For any particular triangle, red thing, or human being, or even the whole collection of these things, could go out of existence, and yet triangularity, redness, and humanness could come to be exemplified once again. They also could be, and often are, exemplified even when no human mind is aware of this fact. Hence triangularity, redness, humanness, and other universals are neither material things nor collections of material things, nor dependent on human minds for their existence (Kindle Locations 925-930).
On first glance, this argument seems sound. At least the first part, which argues against nominalism, seems correct. But a conceptualist would not grant that universals (at least biological ones) are "instantiated" when no human mind is aware of this fact. For whether or not something even counts as instantiating the universal "dog" in the first place, the conceptualist would argue, depends on whether we decide that it counts. What is there objectively is a collection of particles; the concept "dog" is something we apply to it in order to make sense of it. Additionally, our concept "dog" is actually a set of arbitrarily-chosen properties; had we chosen different properties as relevant for classification, objects that we now count as dogs may or may not have still counted as such, or we may not have even had the category "dog" at all. So while this argument may hurt the nominalist, it does nothing to hurt the conceptualist.
The second, third, and fourth arguments are about mathematics and propositions, which as I said before are not relevant to the kinds of formal causes Feser needs to make his case. The fifth argument goes like this:
5. The argument from science: Scientific laws and classifications, being general or universal in their application, necessarily make reference to universals; and science is in the business of discovering objective, mind-independent facts. Hence to accept the results of science is to accept that there are mind-independent universals. Science also makes use of mathematical formulations, and since (as noted above) mathematics concerns a realm of abstract objects, to accept the results of science thus commits one to accept that there are such abstract objects (Kindle Locations 946-950).
Again, this argument, on the face of it, seems logically airtight. But I would challenge the idea that science, above the level of basic physics, is really in the business of discovering facts that are entirely mind-independent. The fact is that the higher sciences, like biology, exist because of human interests; in principle, science could describe the entire universe in terms of particle physics, but because humans have special interest in (what we see as) biological systems, we have the science of biology, which operates within the framework of our biological concepts. And whatever facts hold about the physical world given these biological concepts, hold because of the facts about the physical world describable by physics. Again: in principle, science could describe the entire universe in terms of particle physics, but because of human interests, we find it convenient to describe certain parts of the universe in terms of "cells", "reptiles", "mammals", "plants", and other concepts that we project onto the physical world to make sense of it. This, at least, is what the conceptualist would say.
Feser gives 2 arguments against nominalism, which, as far as I can tell, are sound (at least against "traditional" versions of nominalism; trope theory may or may not be able to answer them). But then he gives 2 arguments against conceptualism, which are very closely related. The first of them goes like this:
8. The argument from the objectivity of concepts and knowledge: When you and I entertain any concept – the concept of a dog, say, or of redness, or of conceptualism itself for that matter – we are each entertaining one and the same concept; it is not that you are entertaining your private concept of red and I am entertaining mine, with nothing in common between them. Similarly, when we each consider various propositions and truths, we are entertaining the same propositions and truths. So, for example, when you think about the Pythagorean theorem and I think about the Pythagorean theorem, we are each thinking about one and the same truth; it is not that you are thinking about your own personal Pythagorean theorem and I am thinking about mine (whatever that would mean). So, concepts (and thus universals) and propositions do not exist only in the mind, subjectively, but independently of the mind, objectively (Kindle Locations 985-992).
The ninth argument says roughly the same thing, but extends it a bit:
9. The argument from the possibility of communication: Suppose that, as conceptualism implies, universals and propositions were not objective, but existed only in our minds. Then it would be impossible for us ever to communicate. For whenever you said something – “Snow is white,” say – then the concepts and propositions that you expressed would be things that existed only in your own mind, and would thus be inaccessible to anybody else. Your idea of “snow” would be entirely different from my idea of “snow,” and since your idea is the only one you’d have any access to, and my idea is the only one I’d have access to, we would never mean the same thing whenever we talked about snow, or about anything else for that matter. But this is absurd: we are able to communicate and grasp the same concepts and propositions. Hence these things are not subjective or mind-dependent, but objective, as realism claims (Kindle Locations 992-999).
I do think that these arguments have something to them. But they don't quite prove what they may, at first glance, seem to. What these arguments prove, at best, is that our concepts - like "dog", "cat", "squirrel", "elephant", etc. - exist in some sense independently of any individual mind. What they do not prove is that these concepts existed as mind-independent universals before any mind thought of them. It is entirely possible that they were indeed invented by us in order to make sense of the material world, and that they occupy a "third realm" beyond the material world and the world of the mind. In fact, philosopher of science Karl Popper believed something much like this. But if universals like "dog", "cat", "squirrel", and "elephant" only exist because we decided to invent them, then they are not "objective" in the way that is needed to establish that individual dogs, cats, squirrels, and elephants have objective "essences" or "forms" over and above the parts that compose them. And without that, the cases for hylomorphic dualism and natural law fall apart.
Besides Feser's arguments not quite holding up, there are positive reasons to think that biological universals like "dog" are arbitrary concepts that we invented rather than objective "essences" that are instantiated in nature. As mentioned before, properties like "dogness" actually refer to a collection of properties: there are certain properties that, if exemplified by a particular, make that particular a dog. As Aristotelians would say, there are certain "essential properties" that make something a dog, along with some "accidental properties" that individual dogs will have that are not essential to them being a dog.
But why choose this particular collection of properties as essential, rather than some other properties? Why classify based on these properties, specifically? It seems that we have simply chosen certain properties as relevant for classification, and created a taxonomy based on them. Had we chosen different properties as relevant for classification, we may have ended up with radically different categories. And in that case, the categories we have - like "dog", "cat", "squirrel", and "elephant" - cannot be objective universals. The properties that make up these categories may in fact be objective universals (although that could be contended as well), but the categories themselves are arbitrary and dependent on our whims. And this is true regardless of whether or not, as Karl Popper would likely hold, these categories turn out to exist in a "third realm" of abstract concepts that we have invented.
So much for formal causes at the level of biology, then. In my next post, I'll tackle final causes, and show why I think they are problematic (at the macro level) as well.
To recap: Feser starts by arguing for realism about universals. He then moves into Aristotle's metaphysics, arguing that the existence of change entails the distinction between actuality and potentiality, that the existence of universals entails formal causes, and that the existence of causation entails final causes. He then argues that this combination - actuality and potentiality, formal and final causes - entails the existence of God, the immortality of the soul (specifically, hylomorphic dualism), and natural law morality. He then argues that the mechanical philosophy that denies formal and final causes is incoherent and reduces itself to absurdity, thereby giving both a positive and a negative argument for Aristotelianism.
Now, this seems all fine and dandy on the face of it. Feser is certainly a very competent philosopher, and I agree with his thesis that Aristotelianism is just as defensible today as it ever was. His case certainly needs to be taken seriously, especially by anyone who wants to defend modern secular morality from the conservative, religious morality of natural law. But I do not think that Feser's conclusions are rationally unavoidable. In fact, I will argue that Feser needs a very specific formulation of Aristotelianism to be true in order for many of his arguments to go through, and that this formulation (which is presented in the book) faces some problems.
As stated before, Feser begins by arguing for realism about universals. He gives 9 arguments for realism - 5 direct arguments, 2 arguments against nominalism, and 2 arguments against conceptualism. Now, for some universals - like mathematical entities or propositions - I think these arguments work well in establishing realism. But Feser needs more than just those kinds of universals to be real - what he needs, in order for his case for hylomorphic dualism and natural law to go through, is for complex biological forms - like "dog", "squirrel", "frog", and "human" - to be real, mind-independent universals. Otherwise, an individual dog (ignoring consciousness for the moment) is very plausibly nothing more than a collection of elementary particles, with "dog" being an organization that we project onto the particles, similar to us seeing a meaningless ink splotch as the letter "A". I will argue that conceptualism, at least about universals for composite biological entities, is perfectly defensible, and that Feser's arguments against it don't quite hold up.
Surprisingly, only a few of Feser's arguments for realism apply to biological universals. The first of these goes like this:
1. The “one over many” argument: “Triangularity”“redness,”“humanness,” etc., are not reducible to any particular triangle, red thing, or human being, nor even to any collection of triangles, red things, or human beings. For any particular triangle, red thing, or human being, or even the whole collection of these things, could go out of existence, and yet triangularity, redness, and humanness could come to be exemplified once again. They also could be, and often are, exemplified even when no human mind is aware of this fact. Hence triangularity, redness, humanness, and other universals are neither material things nor collections of material things, nor dependent on human minds for their existence (Kindle Locations 925-930).
On first glance, this argument seems sound. At least the first part, which argues against nominalism, seems correct. But a conceptualist would not grant that universals (at least biological ones) are "instantiated" when no human mind is aware of this fact. For whether or not something even counts as instantiating the universal "dog" in the first place, the conceptualist would argue, depends on whether we decide that it counts. What is there objectively is a collection of particles; the concept "dog" is something we apply to it in order to make sense of it. Additionally, our concept "dog" is actually a set of arbitrarily-chosen properties; had we chosen different properties as relevant for classification, objects that we now count as dogs may or may not have still counted as such, or we may not have even had the category "dog" at all. So while this argument may hurt the nominalist, it does nothing to hurt the conceptualist.
The second, third, and fourth arguments are about mathematics and propositions, which as I said before are not relevant to the kinds of formal causes Feser needs to make his case. The fifth argument goes like this:
5. The argument from science: Scientific laws and classifications, being general or universal in their application, necessarily make reference to universals; and science is in the business of discovering objective, mind-independent facts. Hence to accept the results of science is to accept that there are mind-independent universals. Science also makes use of mathematical formulations, and since (as noted above) mathematics concerns a realm of abstract objects, to accept the results of science thus commits one to accept that there are such abstract objects (Kindle Locations 946-950).
Again, this argument, on the face of it, seems logically airtight. But I would challenge the idea that science, above the level of basic physics, is really in the business of discovering facts that are entirely mind-independent. The fact is that the higher sciences, like biology, exist because of human interests; in principle, science could describe the entire universe in terms of particle physics, but because humans have special interest in (what we see as) biological systems, we have the science of biology, which operates within the framework of our biological concepts. And whatever facts hold about the physical world given these biological concepts, hold because of the facts about the physical world describable by physics. Again: in principle, science could describe the entire universe in terms of particle physics, but because of human interests, we find it convenient to describe certain parts of the universe in terms of "cells", "reptiles", "mammals", "plants", and other concepts that we project onto the physical world to make sense of it. This, at least, is what the conceptualist would say.
Feser gives 2 arguments against nominalism, which, as far as I can tell, are sound (at least against "traditional" versions of nominalism; trope theory may or may not be able to answer them). But then he gives 2 arguments against conceptualism, which are very closely related. The first of them goes like this:
8. The argument from the objectivity of concepts and knowledge: When you and I entertain any concept – the concept of a dog, say, or of redness, or of conceptualism itself for that matter – we are each entertaining one and the same concept; it is not that you are entertaining your private concept of red and I am entertaining mine, with nothing in common between them. Similarly, when we each consider various propositions and truths, we are entertaining the same propositions and truths. So, for example, when you think about the Pythagorean theorem and I think about the Pythagorean theorem, we are each thinking about one and the same truth; it is not that you are thinking about your own personal Pythagorean theorem and I am thinking about mine (whatever that would mean). So, concepts (and thus universals) and propositions do not exist only in the mind, subjectively, but independently of the mind, objectively (Kindle Locations 985-992).
The ninth argument says roughly the same thing, but extends it a bit:
9. The argument from the possibility of communication: Suppose that, as conceptualism implies, universals and propositions were not objective, but existed only in our minds. Then it would be impossible for us ever to communicate. For whenever you said something – “Snow is white,” say – then the concepts and propositions that you expressed would be things that existed only in your own mind, and would thus be inaccessible to anybody else. Your idea of “snow” would be entirely different from my idea of “snow,” and since your idea is the only one you’d have any access to, and my idea is the only one I’d have access to, we would never mean the same thing whenever we talked about snow, or about anything else for that matter. But this is absurd: we are able to communicate and grasp the same concepts and propositions. Hence these things are not subjective or mind-dependent, but objective, as realism claims (Kindle Locations 992-999).
I do think that these arguments have something to them. But they don't quite prove what they may, at first glance, seem to. What these arguments prove, at best, is that our concepts - like "dog", "cat", "squirrel", "elephant", etc. - exist in some sense independently of any individual mind. What they do not prove is that these concepts existed as mind-independent universals before any mind thought of them. It is entirely possible that they were indeed invented by us in order to make sense of the material world, and that they occupy a "third realm" beyond the material world and the world of the mind. In fact, philosopher of science Karl Popper believed something much like this. But if universals like "dog", "cat", "squirrel", and "elephant" only exist because we decided to invent them, then they are not "objective" in the way that is needed to establish that individual dogs, cats, squirrels, and elephants have objective "essences" or "forms" over and above the parts that compose them. And without that, the cases for hylomorphic dualism and natural law fall apart.
Besides Feser's arguments not quite holding up, there are positive reasons to think that biological universals like "dog" are arbitrary concepts that we invented rather than objective "essences" that are instantiated in nature. As mentioned before, properties like "dogness" actually refer to a collection of properties: there are certain properties that, if exemplified by a particular, make that particular a dog. As Aristotelians would say, there are certain "essential properties" that make something a dog, along with some "accidental properties" that individual dogs will have that are not essential to them being a dog.
But why choose this particular collection of properties as essential, rather than some other properties? Why classify based on these properties, specifically? It seems that we have simply chosen certain properties as relevant for classification, and created a taxonomy based on them. Had we chosen different properties as relevant for classification, we may have ended up with radically different categories. And in that case, the categories we have - like "dog", "cat", "squirrel", and "elephant" - cannot be objective universals. The properties that make up these categories may in fact be objective universals (although that could be contended as well), but the categories themselves are arbitrary and dependent on our whims. And this is true regardless of whether or not, as Karl Popper would likely hold, these categories turn out to exist in a "third realm" of abstract concepts that we have invented.
So much for formal causes at the level of biology, then. In my next post, I'll tackle final causes, and show why I think they are problematic (at the macro level) as well.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Review of The Last Superstition, Part 1
I just finished reading Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and while I found myself disagreeing with a good portion of it, it was still an interesting and thought-provoking read. In what follows, I want to briefly summarize my impressions of the book and discuss some of the arguments given in it.
The introduction to the book sets out Feser's agenda, and makes his philosophical (and political) opinions clear. Feser is a follower of the classical metaphysical project set out by Plato and carried forward by Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and as a result he has quite a bit to say about modern society. As he makes clear throughout the book, his strong opinion is that abandoning Aristotelianism was the worst mistake made in the history of Western thought, and that we have been on a downward spiral ever since. He thinks that modern society is intellectually bankrupt and morally depraved, the most obvious examples of which are modern problems in philosophy and the widespread acceptance of "immoral" acts such as abortion, euthanasia, and sodomy. He clearly thinks secularism is a cultural abomination, and wants nothing less than a return to Aristotelianism and to the deeply religious and conservative lifestyle entailed by it that we had during the Middle Ages.
This is some pretty radical stuff, so one would hope Feser has some good arguments to support it. Whether or not these arguments are any good is what I will tackle in the rest of this series. In this post, I simply want to give a brief summary of the book and its overall logical structure.
Chapter 2
In this chapter, Feser gives a history lesson in ancient Greek philosophy. Starting with the pre-Socratics, he explains what the fundamental issues were for the Greek philosophers, and ultimately works his way up to Plato. He explains Plato's theory of Forms - the idea that universals like triangularity, redness, and humanness (his examples) are abstract objects existing in a third realm beyond time and space. Feser explains the difference between realism (the view that universals, numbers, and propositions are real and mind-independent), nominalism (the view that they are not real), and conceptualism (the view that they are mind-dependent), and gives 9 arguments for why realism must be true: 5 of which are direct arguments for realism, 2 of which are arguments against nominalism, and 2 of which are arguments against conceptualism.
Feser then moves on to Aristotle's metaphysics. First, he explains Aristotle's theory of actuality and potentiality. Parmenides, one of the pre-Socratics, claimed that change was impossible because something can't come from nothing. Aristotle rebutted Parmenides by saying that besides the way something actually is, there are ways it could potentially be, so that change comes from potentiality rather than nothing. Next, Feser explains Aristotle's distinction between form and matter. A blue rubber ball, for example, is a composite of matter (the rubber it is made of) and form (the form of a blue, round, bouncy object). A form, as in Plato's view, is a universal, albeit not one that exists in a "third realm" (Aristotle thought universals only existed in the objects that instantiated them).
Finally, Feser explains Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes: the material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. The material and formal causes of an object are its matter and form, the efficient cause is that which brought it into existence, and the final cause is the goal toward which it is directed. For most objects, the final cause is completely unconscious; for example, a heart's final cause is to pump blood, even though it does not consciously seek to do so.
Chapter 3
With Aristotle's metaphysics out of the way, Feser moves on to the logical implications of these metaphysics. In Chapter 3, he focuses primarily on the existence of God, giving three arguments for why God has to exist given Aristotle's metaphysical system.
The first argument, called "The Unmoved Mover", goes (very roughly) as follows. If, for example, a stick is pushing a rock, there must be something pushing the stick as well; namely, a hand. But the hand is being pushed by the arm, and the arm is being pushed by muscles, and the muscles are being pushed by electrical impulses, and so on. Each member of the chain is actualizing the potential for change of the member after it. But that means that there must be a first member of the chain somewhere - something that can actualize a potential without itself needing to be actualized. This entails the existence of an Unmoved Mover: a being who is purely actual with no untapped potentials for change. From this, all the classical divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) fall out as a result.
The second argument, called "The First Cause", goes (again, very roughly) as follows. Everything in the physical universe, it seems, is only contingently existent; it may not have ever existed, or it may conceivably go out of existence at any point. This applies to everything in the universe as well as to the universe itself. Just because you know the essence of something, does not mean that that thing exists; you could know the essence of what a unicorn is, but no actual unicorns exist. So why do things exist, and what keeps them in existence from moment to moment? Something has to put essence and existence together. But then that thing's essence and existence need to be joined by something else, and so on to infinity. There must be a first member of the chain - something whose essence and existence are the same. Again, all the classical divine attributes fall out as a result.
The final argument, "The Supreme Intelligence", goes very roughly as follows. Everything in nature has a final cause, a goal toward which it is directed. The final cause of an acorn is a grown tree, for example - the goal of being a grown tree is what causes the acorn to grow into a tree. But if that tree does not yet exist in nature, how can it cause the acorn to grow? The answer is that the tree - the final cause of the acorn - must exist as a goal in someone's mind. And so it is with everything else in the universe. There must be a Supreme Intellect outside the universe that directs everything in the universe toward its final cause - and again, all the divine attributes fall out as a result.
Chapter 4
In this chapter, Feser focuses his attention on two other issues related to Aristotle's metaphysics: the soul and natural law.
According to Feser (and Aristotle and Aquinas), the soul is the form of a living thing. There are three gradations in souls. The vegetative soul, which all living things have, simply allows the organism to perform the bare minimum of what living things can do (like reproduce, metabolize, etc.). The sensitive soul, which only animals and humans have, allows the organism to have sensations and to move itself in response to these sensations. And the rational soul, which only humans have, allows us to grasp abstract concepts and reason on the basis of them.
While the vegetative and sensitive souls depend on matter for their operations, the rational soul carries out operations that cannot possibly depend on any bodily organ. In grasping abstract concepts, the intellect temporarily contains a form, which (if the intellect were a bodily organ) would turn the intellect into the object whose form it contained. So the intellect, unlike the senses, does not depend on matter, and thus the human soul can continue to operate while separated from the matter of the body. And since the intellect is immaterial, it must have had an immaterial origin - namely, God. Although Feser does not use this term in the book, this view of the soul is commonly known in the philosophy of mind as hylomorphic dualism.
The section on natural law is perhaps the most radical part of the book. Natural law, as developed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and the rest of the Scholastics, is a moral theory based on formal and final causes. Under Aristotelianism, since everything has a nature or essence (form) that is an instantiation of a universal, each object can exemplify this universal to a different degree. The better something exemplifies its universal, the "better" that thing is (objectively). And since each thing's nature or essence entails certain goals (final causes) toward which it is directed, there are certain behaviors that are objectively "good" or "bad" depending on how well they conform to that thing's nature. Since humans have intellect and will, we are morally obligated to act in accordance with our nature, hence the term "natural law".
This moral theory has extremely radical consequences, at least relative to our moral intuitions today. For example, it entails that, since the final cause of our sexual organs is procreation, any act (such as sodomy, masturbation, or contraception) that actively goes against the goal of procreation is objectively immoral, and people (such as homosexuals) who have urges to engage in these immoral acts are objectively disordered. In fact, according to natural law, humans are directed toward not just procreation, but procreation in large numbers - that is, having quite more than just a few children - and toward marriage in order to keep stable families. Since sex is intended only to happen when procreation will (likely) occur, and procreation is intended to happen within marriage so that a stable family will result, it follows that sex outside of marriage is immoral under natural law.
Natural law also entails that being irreligious is a serious moral vice. Since the intellect was created specially by God and is oriented toward knowing God, living a life in service to God and teaching your children to know and love God is morally obligatory. Hence, the kind of secular culture we have in the West these days is, under natural law, morally depraved. Again, these are very radical conclusions, and if we are to accept them, we had better make sure they are built on indestructable foundations. Feser spends the rest of the chapter discussing the definition of faith - which, in the traditional Christian tradition, has meant holding on to the deliverances of reason in spite of emotional challenges - and the problem of evil, which Feser claims is solved by the prospect of enjoying the presence of God in the afterlife.
Chapter 5
In this chapter, Feser traces the descent of the modernists. The history of modern thought traces back to John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who argued against the mainstream Thomistic wisdom on the grounds that God should be able to act outside of what is intelligible by us, and thus rejected the essentialism and realism about universals that Thomas Aquinas and his peers accepted. The early modern philosophers, then, rejected a version of Aristotelianism that had been corrupted by Scotus and Ockham, and not the "real thing".
Additionally, Feser claims that the moderns' rejection of Aristotelianism was politically-motivated rather than motivated by actual arguments. Motivated by the this-worldliness of the Renaissance and wanting to decrease the Catholic Church's influence on everyday life, the early modern philosophers sophistically rejected Aristotelianism with bad arguments and arbitrary stipulations (such that formal and final causes were to be ignored), and the result was (according to Feser) a slow descent into intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
Feser claims that all of the "traditional" problems of philosophy (such as the mind-body problem, the problem of induction, the problem of free will, etc.) are the result of the abandonment of Aristotelianism, and that the only solution to them is a return to it. For example, since modern philosophy mathematized nature and removed things like sensory qualities, consciousness, purposes, etc. from it, it necessarily made the mind in its entirety immaterial, but without the conception of the soul as the form of the body, the interaction between mind and body necessarily became one of efficient causation rather than formal causation, resulting in the infamous interaction problem. And according to Feser, abandoning Aristotelianism destroyed the possibility of any rational foundation for morality, resulting in the anarchy and madness we (supposedly) have today.
Chapter 6
In the final chapter of the book, Feser talks about eliminative materialism - the belief that the human mind does not exist - and argues that it is the inevitable result of the abandonment of Aristotelianism. He criticizes materialist explanations for the mind in terms of "computation" or "algorithms", showing that they all implicitly presuppose the existence of Aristotelian formal and final causes. He says that, if you believe the human mind exists, you have to either accept Cartesian dualism (along with the interaction problem) or admit that Aristotle was right all along.
Feser argues that final causes are ubiquitous throughout nature, and are presupposed by science in nearly every area. In biology, researchers help themselves to teleological language all the time, and all of the attempts made to reduce teleological language to talk about efficient causation has failed. In lower-level science, certain chains of causation (such as the rock cycle) are said to have a certain significance, which can only be made sense of in terms of final causality. And at the lowest level, the laws of nature themselves are intelligible only when interpreted in terms of final causes.
Feser ends the book by saying that, even if the reader doesn't think Aristotelianism is rationally unavoidable, he or she must admit that it is at the very least just as defensible today as it ever was. He gives a few reasons why this has not been recognized; one of them is simply ignorance about what the Scholastics actually said. But the main reason, according to Feser, is that Aristotelianism entails a worldview diametrically opposed to modern secularism, and that secularists simply cannot bring themselves to entertain that worldview as a possibility.
I have (very, very briefly) summarized the main, general points in this book. This post is no substitute for reading the book itself; the arguments as I have presented them are extremely abridged and nowhere near as powerful as in the book itself. I urge readers to go read this book before reading my next post, so that you can more fully appreciate what I'll be commenting on. In my next post, I will be giving my evaluation of the arguments in the book, and what I ultimately think about the strength of the book's position.
The introduction to the book sets out Feser's agenda, and makes his philosophical (and political) opinions clear. Feser is a follower of the classical metaphysical project set out by Plato and carried forward by Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and as a result he has quite a bit to say about modern society. As he makes clear throughout the book, his strong opinion is that abandoning Aristotelianism was the worst mistake made in the history of Western thought, and that we have been on a downward spiral ever since. He thinks that modern society is intellectually bankrupt and morally depraved, the most obvious examples of which are modern problems in philosophy and the widespread acceptance of "immoral" acts such as abortion, euthanasia, and sodomy. He clearly thinks secularism is a cultural abomination, and wants nothing less than a return to Aristotelianism and to the deeply religious and conservative lifestyle entailed by it that we had during the Middle Ages.
This is some pretty radical stuff, so one would hope Feser has some good arguments to support it. Whether or not these arguments are any good is what I will tackle in the rest of this series. In this post, I simply want to give a brief summary of the book and its overall logical structure.
Chapter 2
In this chapter, Feser gives a history lesson in ancient Greek philosophy. Starting with the pre-Socratics, he explains what the fundamental issues were for the Greek philosophers, and ultimately works his way up to Plato. He explains Plato's theory of Forms - the idea that universals like triangularity, redness, and humanness (his examples) are abstract objects existing in a third realm beyond time and space. Feser explains the difference between realism (the view that universals, numbers, and propositions are real and mind-independent), nominalism (the view that they are not real), and conceptualism (the view that they are mind-dependent), and gives 9 arguments for why realism must be true: 5 of which are direct arguments for realism, 2 of which are arguments against nominalism, and 2 of which are arguments against conceptualism.
Feser then moves on to Aristotle's metaphysics. First, he explains Aristotle's theory of actuality and potentiality. Parmenides, one of the pre-Socratics, claimed that change was impossible because something can't come from nothing. Aristotle rebutted Parmenides by saying that besides the way something actually is, there are ways it could potentially be, so that change comes from potentiality rather than nothing. Next, Feser explains Aristotle's distinction between form and matter. A blue rubber ball, for example, is a composite of matter (the rubber it is made of) and form (the form of a blue, round, bouncy object). A form, as in Plato's view, is a universal, albeit not one that exists in a "third realm" (Aristotle thought universals only existed in the objects that instantiated them).
Finally, Feser explains Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes: the material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. The material and formal causes of an object are its matter and form, the efficient cause is that which brought it into existence, and the final cause is the goal toward which it is directed. For most objects, the final cause is completely unconscious; for example, a heart's final cause is to pump blood, even though it does not consciously seek to do so.
Chapter 3
With Aristotle's metaphysics out of the way, Feser moves on to the logical implications of these metaphysics. In Chapter 3, he focuses primarily on the existence of God, giving three arguments for why God has to exist given Aristotle's metaphysical system.
The first argument, called "The Unmoved Mover", goes (very roughly) as follows. If, for example, a stick is pushing a rock, there must be something pushing the stick as well; namely, a hand. But the hand is being pushed by the arm, and the arm is being pushed by muscles, and the muscles are being pushed by electrical impulses, and so on. Each member of the chain is actualizing the potential for change of the member after it. But that means that there must be a first member of the chain somewhere - something that can actualize a potential without itself needing to be actualized. This entails the existence of an Unmoved Mover: a being who is purely actual with no untapped potentials for change. From this, all the classical divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) fall out as a result.
The second argument, called "The First Cause", goes (again, very roughly) as follows. Everything in the physical universe, it seems, is only contingently existent; it may not have ever existed, or it may conceivably go out of existence at any point. This applies to everything in the universe as well as to the universe itself. Just because you know the essence of something, does not mean that that thing exists; you could know the essence of what a unicorn is, but no actual unicorns exist. So why do things exist, and what keeps them in existence from moment to moment? Something has to put essence and existence together. But then that thing's essence and existence need to be joined by something else, and so on to infinity. There must be a first member of the chain - something whose essence and existence are the same. Again, all the classical divine attributes fall out as a result.
The final argument, "The Supreme Intelligence", goes very roughly as follows. Everything in nature has a final cause, a goal toward which it is directed. The final cause of an acorn is a grown tree, for example - the goal of being a grown tree is what causes the acorn to grow into a tree. But if that tree does not yet exist in nature, how can it cause the acorn to grow? The answer is that the tree - the final cause of the acorn - must exist as a goal in someone's mind. And so it is with everything else in the universe. There must be a Supreme Intellect outside the universe that directs everything in the universe toward its final cause - and again, all the divine attributes fall out as a result.
Chapter 4
In this chapter, Feser focuses his attention on two other issues related to Aristotle's metaphysics: the soul and natural law.
According to Feser (and Aristotle and Aquinas), the soul is the form of a living thing. There are three gradations in souls. The vegetative soul, which all living things have, simply allows the organism to perform the bare minimum of what living things can do (like reproduce, metabolize, etc.). The sensitive soul, which only animals and humans have, allows the organism to have sensations and to move itself in response to these sensations. And the rational soul, which only humans have, allows us to grasp abstract concepts and reason on the basis of them.
While the vegetative and sensitive souls depend on matter for their operations, the rational soul carries out operations that cannot possibly depend on any bodily organ. In grasping abstract concepts, the intellect temporarily contains a form, which (if the intellect were a bodily organ) would turn the intellect into the object whose form it contained. So the intellect, unlike the senses, does not depend on matter, and thus the human soul can continue to operate while separated from the matter of the body. And since the intellect is immaterial, it must have had an immaterial origin - namely, God. Although Feser does not use this term in the book, this view of the soul is commonly known in the philosophy of mind as hylomorphic dualism.
The section on natural law is perhaps the most radical part of the book. Natural law, as developed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and the rest of the Scholastics, is a moral theory based on formal and final causes. Under Aristotelianism, since everything has a nature or essence (form) that is an instantiation of a universal, each object can exemplify this universal to a different degree. The better something exemplifies its universal, the "better" that thing is (objectively). And since each thing's nature or essence entails certain goals (final causes) toward which it is directed, there are certain behaviors that are objectively "good" or "bad" depending on how well they conform to that thing's nature. Since humans have intellect and will, we are morally obligated to act in accordance with our nature, hence the term "natural law".
This moral theory has extremely radical consequences, at least relative to our moral intuitions today. For example, it entails that, since the final cause of our sexual organs is procreation, any act (such as sodomy, masturbation, or contraception) that actively goes against the goal of procreation is objectively immoral, and people (such as homosexuals) who have urges to engage in these immoral acts are objectively disordered. In fact, according to natural law, humans are directed toward not just procreation, but procreation in large numbers - that is, having quite more than just a few children - and toward marriage in order to keep stable families. Since sex is intended only to happen when procreation will (likely) occur, and procreation is intended to happen within marriage so that a stable family will result, it follows that sex outside of marriage is immoral under natural law.
Natural law also entails that being irreligious is a serious moral vice. Since the intellect was created specially by God and is oriented toward knowing God, living a life in service to God and teaching your children to know and love God is morally obligatory. Hence, the kind of secular culture we have in the West these days is, under natural law, morally depraved. Again, these are very radical conclusions, and if we are to accept them, we had better make sure they are built on indestructable foundations. Feser spends the rest of the chapter discussing the definition of faith - which, in the traditional Christian tradition, has meant holding on to the deliverances of reason in spite of emotional challenges - and the problem of evil, which Feser claims is solved by the prospect of enjoying the presence of God in the afterlife.
Chapter 5
In this chapter, Feser traces the descent of the modernists. The history of modern thought traces back to John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who argued against the mainstream Thomistic wisdom on the grounds that God should be able to act outside of what is intelligible by us, and thus rejected the essentialism and realism about universals that Thomas Aquinas and his peers accepted. The early modern philosophers, then, rejected a version of Aristotelianism that had been corrupted by Scotus and Ockham, and not the "real thing".
Additionally, Feser claims that the moderns' rejection of Aristotelianism was politically-motivated rather than motivated by actual arguments. Motivated by the this-worldliness of the Renaissance and wanting to decrease the Catholic Church's influence on everyday life, the early modern philosophers sophistically rejected Aristotelianism with bad arguments and arbitrary stipulations (such that formal and final causes were to be ignored), and the result was (according to Feser) a slow descent into intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
Feser claims that all of the "traditional" problems of philosophy (such as the mind-body problem, the problem of induction, the problem of free will, etc.) are the result of the abandonment of Aristotelianism, and that the only solution to them is a return to it. For example, since modern philosophy mathematized nature and removed things like sensory qualities, consciousness, purposes, etc. from it, it necessarily made the mind in its entirety immaterial, but without the conception of the soul as the form of the body, the interaction between mind and body necessarily became one of efficient causation rather than formal causation, resulting in the infamous interaction problem. And according to Feser, abandoning Aristotelianism destroyed the possibility of any rational foundation for morality, resulting in the anarchy and madness we (supposedly) have today.
Chapter 6
In the final chapter of the book, Feser talks about eliminative materialism - the belief that the human mind does not exist - and argues that it is the inevitable result of the abandonment of Aristotelianism. He criticizes materialist explanations for the mind in terms of "computation" or "algorithms", showing that they all implicitly presuppose the existence of Aristotelian formal and final causes. He says that, if you believe the human mind exists, you have to either accept Cartesian dualism (along with the interaction problem) or admit that Aristotle was right all along.
Feser argues that final causes are ubiquitous throughout nature, and are presupposed by science in nearly every area. In biology, researchers help themselves to teleological language all the time, and all of the attempts made to reduce teleological language to talk about efficient causation has failed. In lower-level science, certain chains of causation (such as the rock cycle) are said to have a certain significance, which can only be made sense of in terms of final causality. And at the lowest level, the laws of nature themselves are intelligible only when interpreted in terms of final causes.
Feser ends the book by saying that, even if the reader doesn't think Aristotelianism is rationally unavoidable, he or she must admit that it is at the very least just as defensible today as it ever was. He gives a few reasons why this has not been recognized; one of them is simply ignorance about what the Scholastics actually said. But the main reason, according to Feser, is that Aristotelianism entails a worldview diametrically opposed to modern secularism, and that secularists simply cannot bring themselves to entertain that worldview as a possibility.
I have (very, very briefly) summarized the main, general points in this book. This post is no substitute for reading the book itself; the arguments as I have presented them are extremely abridged and nowhere near as powerful as in the book itself. I urge readers to go read this book before reading my next post, so that you can more fully appreciate what I'll be commenting on. In my next post, I will be giving my evaluation of the arguments in the book, and what I ultimately think about the strength of the book's position.
Friday, June 6, 2014
Introduction
This would be my first post on my new blog, and in it I want to just go over what this blog is for and what's going to be on it.
Basically, this blog will be primarily a way for me to clear my head of philosophical issues that are bugging me. Ever since about May of 2012, I've been preoccupied on and off with philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind. I used to have a blog on here under a different name where I would discuss philosophy, but I cleared it and abandoned it because I didn't want people who knew me from other places to find it (plus the fact that I thought I was done with philosophy and no longer needed the blog). But I made this new blog just in case I wanted to come back, and since this stuff is bugging me again I decided to start writing stuff on it like I used to on my old blog.
Just to be clear: Posts will most likely NOT be regular here. This is just an outlet for me to organize my thoughts on these things, and if I'm not really thinking much about them for a while, there won't be any posts. So don't expect regular updates; there may be times when I'm posting every day and times when I don't post for 3 months. It all depends on what I'm thinking about at the time.
So enjoy the blog - hopefully you'll get something out of it.
Basically, this blog will be primarily a way for me to clear my head of philosophical issues that are bugging me. Ever since about May of 2012, I've been preoccupied on and off with philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind. I used to have a blog on here under a different name where I would discuss philosophy, but I cleared it and abandoned it because I didn't want people who knew me from other places to find it (plus the fact that I thought I was done with philosophy and no longer needed the blog). But I made this new blog just in case I wanted to come back, and since this stuff is bugging me again I decided to start writing stuff on it like I used to on my old blog.
Just to be clear: Posts will most likely NOT be regular here. This is just an outlet for me to organize my thoughts on these things, and if I'm not really thinking much about them for a while, there won't be any posts. So don't expect regular updates; there may be times when I'm posting every day and times when I don't post for 3 months. It all depends on what I'm thinking about at the time.
So enjoy the blog - hopefully you'll get something out of it.
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