A sophomore’s history of philosophy
In a TLS review of Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A refutation of the new atheism [subscription only], Anthony Kenny has this amusing paragraph:
There is a popular master-narrative of the history of philosophy that goes like this: philosophy was started in the ancient world by Plato and Aristotle, who were not bad philosophers considering how long ago they lived. Once the Western world became Christian, however, philosophy went into hibernation for many centuries, and saw as its only task to write footnotes to Aristotle. Some of the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages were clever chaps, but they wasted their talents on logical quibbles and pettifogging distinctions. It was only when Aristotle’s metaphysics was thrown over in the Renaissance that philosophy got into its stride again, and renewed its connection with scientific inquiry. Descartes showed that the way to understand the material universe was to treat it as a conglomeration of purposeless material objects operating according to blind laws: there was no need for Aristotle’s final causes. While Descartes was a rationalist, a succession of philosophers writing in English, from Hobbes to Hume, showed that it was sensory experience, not reason that was the basis of all our knowledge. Kant and his German Idealist followers introduced a degree of obfuscation into philosophy, from which Continental philosophy has never totally recovered. But in Britain and American in the twentieth century, philosophy re-emerged into the daylight with the logical empiricism of brilliant minds like A.J. Ayer.
Feser rightly rejects this entire story.
What an apt summary of a prevalent subtext. I’m honestly not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Nice. Thanks. Now I can stop worrying that I’m failing to understand something important.
Before raising three cheers, read the rest of the review.
I read the whole review and found nothing that would suggest fewer than three cheers for the paragraphs quoted.
Have I read this text wrong? As I read it Kenny is *rejecting* the view he is presenting. The view he is presenting is the typical Anglo-American version of the history of philosophy.
Kenny is one of the very foremost English philosophers/public intellectuals of today. His back ground is scholastic. Having been a student of Lonergan, he is unlike most of the English philosophers of the day, in that he actually knows Thomas, Aristotle, and other worthies who are highly regarded in intellectual RCC circles. He’s no longer a believer (last I read he’s an agnostic), but he’s still a Thomist, and, in fact, is one of the main reasons that the scholastics are starting to be taken seriously again.
Ann: Yes, Kenny is rejecting the history of philosophy he describes, one which is widely shared, however. Kenny was a student of Lonergan in Rome perhaps a decade before I was, and I remember how upset Lonergan was when he learned that Kenny had not only left the priesthood but had lost his faith. In this review, he writes: “But though Feser offers decisive criticisms of the arguments for atheism, his own forceful arguments for theism, I have maintained, are less than conclusive. The default position, after as before the debate, is surely one of agnosticism. We must confess that where the existence of God is concerned, we do not know one way or the other.”
Could someone write a correct history of philosophy of about the same length (200 words) so we know why Anthony Kenny and Edward Feser are right to reject the popular master narrative? I have Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy, which I do hope to read some day, but a 200-word account would be quicker.
Well, David, some might begin with Tertullian’s question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Then, they would tell you that true philosophy only begins with faith, and that through faith we transcend what can be known philosophically. They would then add a layer of mystical contemplation of beliefs that are at best arbitrary, and often incoherent. This contemplation would lead to further insights that no philosopher could ever hope to achieve. While they will insist that faith and reason do not conflict, they will also tell you that the only really interesting stuff comes through faith alone.
Not sure how many words that is, but I confess that I encounter it too often among Christian academics. You will, no doubt, not be surprised to learn that I do not myself affirm the above position.
David, just to let you know that Joe Pettit’s summary is no better as a history of the relations between faith and reason than the history of philosophy that Kenny satirizes. And no, I can’t offer a 200-word account. It might take 200 words to mention in all the figures omitted from the master-narrative.
Interesting that Kenny would be reviewing a book on the (not so) new atheism. To my mind the really intriguing conversation would be between people like Kenny and the scripture scholar Bart Ehrman, on the one hand, and intelligent converts to faith and belief in the mold of CS Lewis, on the other. Debates between Dawkins/Hitchens and their self-appointed opposers tend to play out along fairly predictable lines. But in a new “court of the Gentiles,” one could have, on one side, those like Kenny and Ehrman who arrived at their non-belief after years of personal and scholarly investment in the position of faith, and, on the other side, people who argue for belief after perhaps an equally personal and scholarly commitment to non-belief. Then you would have people on both sides who in some sense would comprehend the positions of their interlocutors “from the inside,” as it were, and presumably with a degree of sympathy. This is certainly not the case with Ditchkens and their usual counterparts. What would such a conversation look like? Who would be the contemporary CS Lewises to best put in a conversation with the likes of Kenny and Ehrman? Perhaps someone like the poet Mary Karr?
Fr. Komonchak,
Could we agree that the history of the relations between faith and reason has been one very different positions, rather than family debates? I think Tertullian and his decendents are of a rather distinct position. And, yes, my account made no effort to do anything more than lampoon one of the camps that I still encounter too often.
Fr. K
I only meant to suggest that someone might infer from Kenny’s critique of modern philosophy that he was a believer and a champion of orthodoxy.
Ann
Can one really be an agnostic and a Thomist?
“Could someone write a correct history of philosophy of about the same length (200 words) so we know why Anthony Kenny and Edward Feser are right to reject the popular master narrative?”
That’s like asking a contemporary physicist to answer in 200 words how they know that Newton is wrong, only in the case of philosophy it is the contemporary philosophers who don’t understand the earlier thinkers.
*Why* the earlier philosopher came to be genereally ignored includes a number of historical reasons, including 1) the sophistocation of the late medievals (few people were interested in or capabel of understanding their arguments any more than most of us are capable of understanding the contemporary physicists), 2) most of the Protestant reformers (especially Luther) couldn’t stand the scholastics for theological reasons, and 3) science emerged and attracted the interest of many of the best minds who previously would have gone into philosophy. Add to that the emergence of the philosophical rigidity of the official Church of a sosrt that even the middle ages didn’t have, and you can see why the Church intellectuals became objects of scorn amongst the Protestants and scientifically inclined.
Not a history but even better (in 722 words) – - an answer to the question “Were the greatest philosophers theists or atheists?” along with a ranking of philosophical giants from all periods. BTW Feser and Vallicella (the author of this post) often link to one another.
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1. Plato (c. 429-347 BC) 2. Aristotle (384-322 BC) 3. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) 4. René Descartes (1596-1650) 5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) 6. Socrates (c. 470-399 BC) 7. Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) 8. David Hume (1711-1776) 9. Epicurus (341-270 BC) 10. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) 11. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) 12. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) 13. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) 14. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) 15. Karl Marx (1818-1883) 16. Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970) 17. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) 18. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) 19. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) 20. Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994)
Here are my criteria in order of importance: 1. Truth of the philosopher’s conclusions 2. Belief in reason’s power to discover some of the ultimate truth 3. Rigor of argumentation 4. Appreciation of the limits of reason 5. Depth and centrality of the problems addressed 6. Breadth and systematicity of vision 7. Originality 8. Long-term influence
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http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/07/were-the-greatest-philosophers-theists-or-atheists.html
Mr. Pettit: Yes, the history of relations between faith and reason is a very rich and complex one, alternating between the extremes of fideism and rationalism, a history that is found in microcosm in a dramatic tension in any believer’s own mind and heart.
I don’t have time to read all the notes, but the “history of philosophy” is, alas, what many folks get in philosophy these days, especially in public universities. It brought a smile of recognition to my face and a desire to read some Lonergan and more Charles Taylor!
As an example of a non-reductionist history of philosophy, here is a (long) quotation from an early section of Aristotle’s On the Soul. Before he begins his own dialectic process, he recounts earlier philosophers on the question of the nature of the soul.
For our study of soul it is necessary, while formulating the problems of which in our further advance we are to find the solutions, to call into council the views of those of our predecessors who have declared any opinion on this subject, in order that we may profit by whatever is sound in their suggestions and avoid their errors.
The starting-point of our inquiry is an exposition of those characteristics which have chiefly been held to belong to soul in its very nature. Two characteristic marks have above all others been recognized as distinguishing that which has soul in it from that which has not-movement and sensation. It may be said that these two are what our predecessors have fixed upon as characteristic of soul.
Some say that what originates movement is both pre-eminently and primarily soul; believing that what is not itself moved cannot originate movement in another, they arrived at the view that soul belongs to the class of things in movement. This is what led Democritus to say that soul is a sort of fire or hot substance; his ‘forms’ or atoms are infinite in number; those which are spherical he calls fire and soul, and compares them to the motes in the air which we see in shafts of light coming through windows; the mixture of seeds of all sorts he calls the elements of the whole of Nature (Leucippus gives a similar account); the spherical atoms are identified with soul because atoms of that shape are most adapted to permeate everywhere, and to set all the others moving by being themselves in movement. This implies the view that soul is identical with what produces movement in animals. That is why, further, they regard respiration as the characteristic mark of life; as the environment compresses the bodies of animals, and tends to extrude those atoms which impart movement to them, because they themselves are never at rest, there must be a reinforcement of these by similar atoms coming in from without in the act of respiration; for they prevent the extrusion of those which are already within by counteracting the compressing and consolidating force of the environment; and animals continue to live only so long as they are able to maintain this resistance.
The doctrine of the Pythagoreans seems to rest upon the same ideas; some of them declared the motes in air, others what moved them, to be soul. These motes were referred to because they are seen always in movement, even in a complete calm.
The same tendency is shown by those who define soul as that which moves itself; all seem to hold the view that movement is what is closest to the nature of soul, and that while all else is moved by soul, it alone moves itself. This belief arises from their never seeing anything originating movement which is not first itself moved.
Similarly also Anaxagoras (and whoever agrees with him in saying that mind set the whole in movement) declares the moving cause of things to be soul. His position must, however, be distinguished from that of Democritus. Democritus roundly identifies soul and mind, for he identifies what appears with what is true-that is why he commends Homer for the phrase ‘Hector lay with thought distraught’; he does not employ mind as a special faculty dealing with truth, but identifies soul and mind. What Anaxagoras says about them is more obscure; in many places he tells us that the cause of beauty and order is mind, elsewhere that it is soul; it is found, he says, in all animals, great and small, high and low, but mind (in the sense of intelligence) appears not to belong alike to all animals, and indeed not even to all human beings.
All those, then, who had special regard to the fact that what has soul in it is moved, adopted the view that soul is to be identified with what is eminently originative of movement. All, on the other hand, who looked to the fact that what has soul in it knows or perceives what is, identify soul with the principle or principles of Nature, according as they admit several such principles or one only. Thus Empedocles declares that it is formed out of all his elements, each of them also being soul; his words are:
For ’tis by Earth we see Earth, by Water Water,
By Ether Ether divine, by Fire destructive Fire,
By Love Love, and Hate by cruel Hate.
In the same way Plato in the Timaeus fashions soul out of his elements; for like, he holds, is known by like, and things are formed out of the principles or elements, so that soul must be so too. Similarly also in his lectures ‘On Philosophy’ it was set forth that the Animal-itself is compounded of the Idea itself of the One together with the primary length, breadth, and depth, everything else, the objects of its perception, being similarly constituted. Again he puts his view in yet other terms: Mind is the monad, science or knowledge the dyad (because it goes undeviatingly from one point to another), opinion the number of the plane, sensation the number of the solid; the numbers are by him expressly identified with the Forms themselves or principles, and are formed out of the elements; now things are apprehended either by mind or science or opinion or sensation, and these same numbers are the Forms of things.
Some thinkers, accepting both premisses, viz. that the soul is both originative of movement and cognitive, have compounded it of both and declared the soul to be a self-moving number.
As to the nature and number of the first principles opinions differ. The difference is greatest between those who regard them as corporeal and those who regard them as incorporeal, and from both dissent those who make a blend and draw their principles from both sources. The number of principles is also in dispute; some admit one only, others assert several. There is a consequent diversity in their several accounts of soul; they assume, naturally enough, that what is in its own nature originative of movement must be among what is primordial. That has led some to regard it as fire, for fire is the subtlest of the elements and nearest to incorporeality; further, in the most primary sense, fire both is moved and originates movement in all the others.
Democritus has expressed himself more ingeniously than the rest on the grounds for ascribing each of these two characters to soul; soul and mind are, he says, one and the same thing, and this thing must be one of the primary and indivisible bodies, and its power of originating movement must be due to its fineness of grain and the shape of its atoms; he says that of all the shapes the spherical is the most mobile, and that this is the shape of the particles of fire and mind.
Anaxagoras, as we said above, seems to distinguish between soul and mind, but in practice he treats them as a single substance, except that it is mind that he specially posits as the principle of all things; at any rate what he says is that mind alone of all that is simple, unmixed, and pure. He assigns both characteristics, knowing and origination of movement, to the same principle, when he says that it was mind that set the whole in movement.
Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held soul to be a motive force, since he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron.
Diogenes (and others) held the soul to be air because he believed air to be finest in grain and a first principle; therein lay the grounds of the soul’s powers of knowing and originating movement. As the primordial principle from which all other things are derived, it is cognitive; as finest in grain, it has the power to originate movement.
Heraclitus too says that the first principle-the ‘warm exhalation’ of which, according to him, everything else is composed-is soul; further, that this exhalation is most incorporeal and in ceaseless flux; that what is in movement requires that what knows it should be in movement; and that all that is has its being essentially in movement (herein agreeing with the majority).
Alcmaeon also seems to have held a similar view about soul; he says that it is immortal because it resembles ‘the immortals,’ and that this immortality belongs to it in virtue of its ceaseless movement; for all the ‘things divine,’ moon, sun, the planets, and the whole heavens, are in perpetual movement.
of More superficial writers, some, e.g. Hippo, have pronounced it to be water; they seem to have argued from the fact that the seed of all animals is fluid, for Hippo tries to refute those who say that the soul is blood, on the ground that the seed, which is the primordial soul, is not blood.
Another group (Critias, for example) did hold it to be blood; they take perception to be the most characteristic attribute of soul, and hold that perceptiveness is due to the nature of blood.
Each of the elements has thus found its partisan, except earth-earth has found no supporter unless we count as such those who have declared soul to be, or to be compounded of, all the elements. All, then, it may be said, characterize the soul by three marks, Movement, Sensation, Incorporeality, and each of these is traced back to the first principles. That is why (with one exception) all those who define the soul by its power of knowing make it either an element or constructed out of the elements. The language they all use is similar; like, they say, is known by like; as the soul knows everything, they construct it out of all the principles. Hence all those who admit but one cause or element, make the soul also one (e.g. fire or air), while those who admit a multiplicity of principles make the soul also multiple. The exception is Anaxagoras; he alone says that mind is impassible and has nothing in common with anything else. But, if this is so, how or in virtue of what cause can it know? That Anaxagoras has not explained, nor can any answer be inferred from his words. All who acknowledge pairs of opposites among their principles, construct the soul also out of these contraries, while those who admit as principles only one contrary of each pair, e.g. either hot or cold, likewise make the soul some one of these. That is why, also, they allow themselves to be guided by the names; those who identify soul with the hot argue that sen (to live) is derived from sein (to boil), while those who identify it with the cold say that soul (psuche) is so called from the process of respiration and (katapsuxis). Such are the traditional opinions concerning soul, together with the grounds on which they are maintained.
Mirror of Justice reprinted the post from Fr. Komonchak above, and a MOJ commenter supplied this link to a helpful video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiZt79UKUFQ
Philosophy Now is reports that Feser is going to co-edit a series on scholastic philosophy and mathematical logic. Interesting, given that the mathematical logicians are usually very high-powered brains. Nice to see them appreciating the old very high-powered brains.
”Scholastics Attempt a Comeback
“Do you want to know the number of angels who can dance on the top of an iPod? Scholasticism was the dominant philosophical approach for much of the Middle Ages, with major thinkers including William of Occam and Thomas Aquinas. ‘Scholastic’ has since come to denote a nitpicking, overly-academic style. However Ontos, the international publisher in philosophy and mathematical logic, has just announced a new series of books under the heading Contemporary Scholasticism. The publicity material says that the series will provide a forum for the growing community of philosophers who are interested in applying insights drawn from Aristotelian and scholastic traditions to current philosophical debate. The series will be edited by Edward Feser and Edmund Runggalier.
Oops — here’s the reference.
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue85/News_July_August_2011
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