History of the Mind-Body Problem (London Studies in the History of Philosophy)

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Author: Tim Crane

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History of the Mind–Body Problem

London Studies in the History of Philosophy Series Editors: Jonathan Wolff, Tim Crane, M.W. F. Stone and Tom Pink

London Studies in the History of Philosophy is a unique series of tightly focused edited collections. Bringing together the work of many scholars, some volumes will trace the history of the formulation and treatment of a particular problem of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, while others will provide an in-depth analysis of a period or tradition of thought. The series is produced in collaboration with the Philosophy Programme of the University of London School of Advanced Study. 1 Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Jill Kraye and M.W.F. Stone 2 The Proper Ambition of Science Edited by M.W.F. Stone and Jonathan Wolff 3 History of the Mind–Body Problem Edited by Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson

History of the Mind–Body Problem

Edited by Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 2000 Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson for editorial matter; individual contributors their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data History of the mind-body problem / edited by Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson. p. cm. – (London studies in the history of philosophy ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.Mind and body–History. I. Crane, Tim. II. Patterson, Sarah, 1959 July 1– III. London studies in the history of philosophy ; v. 3 B105.M53 H57 2000 128´.2´09–dc21 ISBN 0-415-24236-3 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-47102-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-77926-6 (Adobe eReader Format)

00-042465

Contents

v

Contents

List of contributors Introduction

vii 1

T I M C R A N E A N D S A R A H P AT T E R S O N

1

The musical, the magical, and the mathematical soul

13

RAE LANGTON

2

The soul’s relation to the body: Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant and the Parisian debate on monopsychism

34

M . W. F. S T O N E

3

How Cartesian was Descartes?

70

S A R A H P AT T E R S O N

4

The emergence of the Cartesian mind

111

SUSAN JAMES

5

Intentionality or phenomenology? Descartes and the objects of thought

131

J O H N C OT T I N G H A M

6

‘A tumbling-ground for whimsies’? The history and contemporary role of the conscious/unconscious contrast

148

NEIL CAMPBELL MANSON

7

The origins of qualia TIM CRANE

169

vi

Contents

8

Beyond dispute: sense-data, intentionality and the mind–body problem

195

M . G . F. M A RT I N

Bibliography Index

232 248

Contributors

vii

Contributors

John Cottingham, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, is one of the world’s leading Descartes scholars, and one of the translators of the Cambridge edition of Descartes’ writings. He is the author of many books on Descartes, as well as a work of moral philosophy, Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge 1998). Tim Crane is Reader in Philosophy at University College London, and the author of The Mechanical Mind (Penguin 1995). He has also published a number of articles on the philosophy of mind, and edited The Contents of Experience (Cambridge 1992) and Dispositions: a Debate (Routledge 1996). He is one of the editors of London Studies in the History of Philosophy, of the Routledge International Library of Philosophy, and the Routledge Philosophical Guidebooks. Susan James is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College London. She is the author of The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge 1984) and Passion and Action (Oxford 1997). She was previously a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Rae Langton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Kantian Humility (Oxford 1999) and a number of papers on moral philosophy, metaphysics and the history of philosophy. Neil Campbell Manson is a Research Fellow at King’s College Cambridge, and presently working on the philosophy of consciousness. M.G. F. Martin is Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London and the editor of Mind. He has published many articles on the philosophy of mind (especially the philosophy of perception) and he is presently completing a book on perception.

viii

Contributors

Sarah Patterson is Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College London. She was previously assistant professor of philosophy at Tufts University, Harvard University and the University of Michigan, and she has published papers in contemporary philosophy of psychology. M.W. F. Stone is Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at King’s College London. He is the author of a forthcoming book on the history of the concept of casuistry, and a number of articles on medieval philosophy. He is one of the series editors of London Studies in the History of Philosophy.

Introduction

1

Introduction Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson

Herbert Feigl once described the mind–body problem as ‘a cluster of intricate puzzles – some scientific, some epistemological … some semantical and some pragmatic’.1 Reflection on the current debate on the mind–body problem would seem to support Feigl’s judgement: although most writers on the subject testify to the importance of the problem, many offer very different interpretations of what the problem is. For some, the problem is fundamentally a causal problem, a problem about the causal interaction between mental phenomena and the body.2 For others, the problem is an explanatory one: what kind of explanation can be given of mental phenomena, consistent with the conception of the world given to us by contemporary science? In particular, the distinctive characteristics of the mind, intentionality and consciousness, are features of which (it is claimed) current science has no adequate account, and in the case of consciousness at least, the problems in giving such an account are sometimes taken to be insuperable.3 These different conceptions of the problem tend to be accompanied by different conceptions of the cause of the problem: for some, the problem arises because of the assumption that mind and body are distinct (essentially, dualism). This assumption then demands that we explain how mental causation is possible, if mind and body are distinct things. But on other views, the problem arises from fundamentally physicalist assumptions. It is because we think that the world is completely physical in nature, that we find it hard to understand how mental phenomena (specifically subjectivity and consciousness) fit into the world so conceived. Here physicalism, the view that the world is fundamentally physical, is not the solution to the mind–body problem, but part of what poses the problem.4 Further disagreement emerges about the extent of our present understanding of the problem, and the extent to which any progress has been made. Thomas Nagel is well-known for his pessimism on this score, and has said that a solution to the mind–body problem ‘will alter our conception of the universe as radically as anything has to date’.5 Others think not only

2

History of the mind–body problem

that the solution has been found, but that it is relatively obvious. John Searle has said that the solution to the mind–body problem ‘has been available to any educated person since serious work began on the brain nearly a century ago’. This solution is that ‘mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain’.6 Yet another approach is expressed in Colin McGinn’s claim that ‘one of the peculiarities of the mind–body problem is the difficulty of formulating it in a rigorous way’. McGinn is well-known for his Nagel-like pessimism about our inability to make progress with the mind–body problem; but he also thinks that part of the problem lies in giving an adequate expression of the problem itself.7 What we have, then, in the contemporary debate, are different views of how the problem should be stated, different views of its source, and different views of its present condition and importance. It is clear, then, that the question ‘what is the relation between the mind and the body?’ and the question ‘what is the place of the mind in the physical world?’ do not raise just one or two philosophical problems. Rather, they are ways of expressing many very different kinds of concern and preoccupation. The essays in this book are attempts to understand some of these various preoccupations from a broadly historical perspective. Looking at the history of the mind–body problem in western philosophy at some distance, we can detect three very general trends of thought, or paradigms, which have dominated much discussion: the Aristotelian paradigm, the Cartesian paradigm, and the scientific materialist (or physicalist) paradigm. Each of these paradigms is touched on in this collection. Rae Langton’s essay discusses the currently live debate about the extent to which it makes sense to classify Aristotle as a functionalist. M.W.F. Stone explores one of the issues – the question of monopsychism – raised by the absorption of Aristotle’s De Anima into the philosophy of the Middle Ages. The essays by Susan James, John Cottingham and Sarah Patterson are concerned with various aspects of Descartes’ conception of mind, including the way his account of mind has been interpreted, misinterpreted and elaborated by twentieth-century thinkers. The main issue for materialist or physicalist theories of mind has been consciousness, and the last three essays in the book deal with the various issues surrounding the notion of consciousness. Neil Campbell Manson examines the nineteenth-century sources of the conscious/non-conscious contrast, Tim Crane relates the contemporary debate about the qualitative features of experience (or ‘qualia’) to the original use of the concept of qualia in early twentieth-century thought, and M.G.F. Martin gives an account of the nature of the problem of perception in the twentieth century. The essays therefore cover a wide range of themes, writers and philosophies; that all these can be brought under the heading of the mind– body problem is more evidence for Feigl’s claim about the problem.

Introduction

3

Aristotle’s De Anima is our starting point. In recent philosophy of mind, there has been intense discussion about how to understand and classify Aristotle’s conception of the soul in contemporary terms.8 Aristotle’s view, called hylomorphism, is that the soul is the form of the body’s matter. The body is ‘ensouled’ matter, the soul imposes a form on the matter of the body. Should this view be thought of as a materialist view or a dualist view, or neither? Or is it even possible to impose our contemporary classifications upon the theories of antiquity with any precision? Aristotle’s view certainly has affinities with materialism, since the whole person is in a sense ‘nothing over and above’ its matter organised in a certain way. But the view also seems to have a dualist element, since the matter needs the soul in order to be the thing it is: it would clearly be wrong to think of Aristotle as some kind of ‘reductionist’. So neither classification seems appropriate. Of course, in one sense this is hardly surprising, since it is arguable that the kinds of views which we now think of as materialist and dualist have their origins in a metaphysical climate (the scientific revolution of the early modern period) which was explicitly hostile to Aristotle’s way of thinking about substances. Some years ago, Hilary Putnam and Martha Nussbaum proposed an alternative: Aristotle’s conception of mind should be thought of as a prototype of the functionalist conception of mind pioneered (and later rejected) by Putnam in the 1960s and 1970s. According to functionalism, mental states should be thought of in terms of their characteristic causal roles: it is not essential to a mental state that it has a certain physical nature, what is essential is rather the causal role it plays in the mental life of the creature. In a much discussed paper, Myles Burnyeat rejected the Putnam/ Nussbaum interpretation.9 Burnyeat argued that Aristotle cannot be considered a functionalist not so much because of features of his conception of mind, but because his conception of matter is so different from that of today. Functionalism assumes a conception of matter as basically homogenous; everything, animate or inanimate, is at bottom made of the same kind of stuff. From the functionalist perspective, what makes one kind of object the thing it is is not the kind of matter which makes it up, but the functional or causal role which the the matter plays. Hence functionalism’s characteristic emphasis on the multiple or variable realisability of mental states: the idea that creatures with very different kinds of material or chemical constitutions could share mental states, if these different consistutions realised the same kind of causal profile. Burnyeat argued that this kind of view cannot be attributed to Aristotle, since on Aristotle’s conception, the matter out of which a living organism (or one of its organs) is made is not just contingently related to the function it performs; rather, the matter out of which a mind is made is something which is essentially capable of awareness or consciousness. Burnyeat claims that it is this mysterious – some would say ‘magical’ – conception of matter which is foreign to contemporary philosophy, making

4


it impossible to read our contemporary ideas about matter and function back into Aristotle’s conception of the soul as the form of the body. Langton distinguishes various strands in the functionalist programme, and points out that Burnyeat’s argument, if successful, applies only to a functionalism committed to physical realisation; but the bare idea of a functionalist account of mental states (‘basic functionalism’) need not be so committed. Langton argues that ultimately it is function, rather than matter, which presents an obstacle to viewing Aristotle as a functionalist: the abstract, quasi-mathematical character of functional definition poses a more serious difficulty for the interpretation than does Aristotle’s magical matter. In whatever way it might relate to contemporary discussions, the Aristotelian texts were central to the philosophy of mind in the Middle Ages, and the intense discussion of De Anima in scholastic philosophy is one of the themes of M.W.F. Stone’s paper. Stone takes as an example the debate over ‘monopsychism’ in the thirteenth century. This is the view that there is only one intellectual soul. One problem which the medieval discussions centred on was: if the soul is the form of the body, then how is this consistent with the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul? If the intellectual or rational soul is the body’s form, and Aristotelian forms do not exist without being the form of some matter, then the problem is apparent. Stone argues that the monopsychism controversy had its origins in the various attempts to reconcile Aristotle’s views on the soul with Christian theology. For the question about immortality raises another, more fundamental one: how is the intellect to be united with an individual human being? Averroes had answered this question by saying that there is only one active intellect. Siger of Brabant (c.1240–1284) followed him, at least at one stage of his career. Saint Thomas Aquinas opposed this Averroist view, and defended the more natural view that there are many intellectual souls, and what he took to be the Aristotelian view that each body has a substantial form which is its soul. But the rational soul is also an ‘immaterial form’ which has its own kind of ‘subsistence’ and this is intended to explain its immortality (more on this below). Thus Thomas attempted to combine the hylomorphism of Aristotle with the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. But, as Susan James points out in her essay, the tension between these two views remained, and the hylomorphic view was superceded by a new metaphysics of mind and matter, of which Descartes was of course one of the leading proponents. Turning to Descartes reveals various ways in which the concerns of contemporary philosophers are in certain respects distorted by historical preconceptions. One example of this can be given by looking at the standard kind of history of the mind–body problem, as it is often given in introductory books in the philosophy of mind. Readers are often introduced at first to the question, are mind and body one or two?, and then given as their first answer

Introduction

5

the Cartesian dualist answer: mind and body are distinct things. The Cartesian view is sometimes said to be the view of pre-philosophical commonsense. Sometimes Descartes’ views are introduced only to be refuted by relatively simple argument, while sometimes the force of the views is acknowledged as the reason for their dominance and perniciousness. Here Descartes’ contribution is conceived retrospectively as articulating the view of commonsense, and presenting a picture of the mind which is, though intuitively attractive, ultimately deeply flawed.10 One difficulty with this way of putting things is that the Cartesian view has to be presented as plausible and tempting, if it is to be the view which we are inclined to believe before serious philosophising has begun; but, the view has to be so indefensible as to be refuted by elementary argument. So, we are supposed to feel the intuitive pull of the idea that the mind is a nonspatial, immaterial substance with its own causal powers, but then we are told that actually, the existence of such substances is incompatible with the laws of physics. One might legitimately wonder why philosophers should need to refute such a view in the late twentieth century; and a student with no knowledge of Descartes’ actual texts might wonder why Descartes’ own contribution is so widely discussed and highly regarded. Examination of Descartes’ writings yields, however, a very different picture of his dualist philosophy, as the papers in this volume by Susan James, John Cottingham and Sarah Patterson show. Patterson’s paper contrasts the popular image of Descartes’ philosophy of mind (what James calls the ‘iconic’ Descartes) with the philosophy actually revealed by his texts, and their historical context. According to the standard conception of Descartes’ philosophy alluded to above, Descartes’ concerns were at bottom epistemological: at the heart of his philosophy is the problem of scepticism about the external world, and the Cartesian picture of the mind, as Patterson says, ‘emerges from the battle with scepticism’. For in order to refute the sceptic, on this way of thinking, Descartes adopts a conception of mind which bases knowledge on the ‘foundations’ of what is immediately given to the mind. This is the realm of the immediately knowable, that which is knowable with certainty, and this idea of the mind as a ‘private theatre’ with no essential link to the external world is supposed to be Descartes’ legacy for contemporary philosophy. The trouble with this conception, however, is that it leaves Descartes with a conception of mind and knowledge which is sensory or quasi-sensory in nature. Yet Descartes explicitly says that he is trying to escape from the scholastic and Aristotelian idea that the senses are the source of knowledge. Indeed, Descartes’ most striking innovation – the conception of the physical world as pure extension, the subject matter of a purely mathematical physics – is left out of the traditional picture of his philosophy. It is the truth of this

6


idea of a world knowable not through the senses, but through the intellect alone, which Descartes aimed to introduce to replace the Aristotelian view of substantial forms. The sceptical doubts are doubts about the ability of the senses to give us knowledge. The accompanying conception of the mind having as its sole attribute thought is introduced in the Second Meditation not as the residue of the sceptical doubt, but as the product of a reflection upon what belongs to body and what belongs to mind. Here Descartes’ aims are to establish that mind is not a mode of body, but a complete thing, a substance. The doubt distinguishes what belongs to this thing or substance from what belongs to matter. These clear and distinct concepts of thought and extension, innate in the intellect, replace the sense-based scholastic conception of the world with the Cartesian geometrical picture. However, it is well known that Descartes did not abandon everything he had learned from his predecessors. Susan James’ paper traces the sources of Descartes’ conception of mind both in his new conception of the physical world, and in what he still preserves from the Aristotelian tradition of his scholastic predecessors. One of the major issues in the high Middle Ages was how to explain the immortality of the soul within a hylomorphic framework. Aquinas answered this by saying that the intellectual capacities of the soul can operate independently of the operation of the body. While a body is needed for sensation and passion, the body plays no part in judgement or volition. So the soul has a form of activity which, as James says, ‘transcends the body altogether, and gives it the status described as subsistence’. Since the rational soul subsists, it does not die when the body does. But this raises two further questions: first, how can a genuine Aristotelian accept that the intellectual soul is an exception to the rule that matter and form must always go together? And second, how can the operations of the intellectual soul be independent of perception and sensation, if the latter are required for knowledge? James shows that Descartes answered those questions and thus in effect resolved these tensions in scholastic philosophy and theology. He answered the first question by dismissing the theory of substantial forms as un-explanatory. By defining the soul as a substance whose essential attribute is thought, Descartes removed the need to think of the intellectual soul as one kind of soul among others; so the question of the soul’s uniqueness does not arrive (as indeed it should not, from a Christian point of view). Descartes in effect answers the second question, as we noted above, by denying that the senses are the ultimate source of knowledge about the world. Descartes accepted the Thomist distinction between the capacity for will and judgement on the one hand, and the capacity for sensation and passion on the other, and he thought that the soul can only exercise its sensitive powers when united to the body (this is part of the point of his famous remark in the Sixth Meditation, that he is not lodged in his body

Introduction

7

‘like a pilot in a ship’). But the sensitive (and the vegetative/nutritive) ‘powers’ of the soul are not Aristotelian capacities, but purely mechanical operations of matter in motion. The soul, properly so-called, is an entity characterised by its thinking. And the capacity to think does not depend on the body or on perception. What Descartes takes from the Aristotelian view, then, is what James calls the ‘classification of the interior of the soul’. But his view of the relation of the soul to the body is very different from Aristotle. While Descartes solves the problem of the immortality of the soul, and rejects the conception of perception and sensation which leads to the Aristotelian problem (how does the rational soul interact with the sensitive soul?), his classification of mind and body gives him a new problem: how do states of the body interact with states of the soul? The question is particularly pressing in the case of perception, sensation and the passions: these are not states of the soul alone, but only of the soul-body union. But how exactly we are supposed to conceive of this union within the official Cartesian metaphysics is not a question which Descartes ever satisfactorily answered. John Cottingham explores further the interior of the Cartesian soul, and raises the question of the extent to which contemporary philosophers are right to attribute to Descartes the conception of the mind as a private inner theatre, populated by ‘qualia’, the irreducibly subjective properties of certain mental states (Cottingham uses the word ‘phenomenology’ to describe the study of such properties; others use the word to describe a somewhat widerranging study, applying to any aspect of how the mind appears11). Descartes is often charged with believing in such a subjective ‘realm’.12 A distinction is often made in contemporary philosophy of mind between these ‘subjective’ or ‘phenomenal’ properties or states of mind, and intentional states, states which represent the world or have ‘representational content’. Brentano believed that this intentionality, the mind’s direction upon its objects, is characteristic of all mental phenomena. One of Cottingham’s aims is to show that Descartes’ conception of mind is much closer to Brentano’s than it is to the view which puts ‘qualia’ at the centre of the mind. Descartes’ conception of an idea – as opposed to that of a thought – is the idea of something with representational content or intentionality, and the distinction between pure ideas and the confused and imprecise ideas of sense is a distinction between kinds or degrees of intentionality. Even sensory ideas have something ‘indicated to the mind’ – as it may be, in pain some damage to the body is indicated. If Cottingham is right, then Descartes is shown to be closer to contemporary intentionalist conceptions of the mind than to those who postulate ineffable qualia at the heart of our experience of the world.

8


‘Qualia’ is one of the terms in which the contemporary mind–body problem is posed. Other terms which indicate the same problem-area are: subjectivity, consciousness, the first-person point of view or perspective. Sydney Shoemaker says: In common with many other contemporary philosophers, I see the mind– body problem, not as the problem of how a nonphysical mind can interact with a physical body, but rather as the problem of how minds can be part of a fundamentally physical reality. In part this is the problem of how certain widespread ‘Cartesian’ intuitions about mind can be either explained away, i.e. shown to be illusions, or else shorn of their apparent dualist implications. More generally, it is the problem of how distinctive features of the mental – intentionality, consciousness, subjectivity etc. – can have a place in a naturalistic worldview which sees minds as a product of biological evolution and as having a physico-chemical substrate in just the way other biological phenomena do.13 Shoemaker here expresses a common view among contemporary philosophers who accept the basic assumptions of our third paradigm, the materialist or physicalist paradigm. In broad outline, the dialectic of the mind–body discussion looks like this: dualism faces the problem of how a non-physical mind can interact with the physical world; materialism (or physicalism) solves this problem by identifying the mind with something physical. But having made this identification, physicalists need to explain how something purely physical can have a conscious point of view on the world, how it can have subjectivity. The mind–body problem for materialists is the problem of explaining the place of consciousness in the material world. Of the many questions which arise here, one concerns the clarification of the idea of consciousness. And an essential part of this clarification concerns the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. This is the topic of Neil Campbell Manson’s paper. Descartes is often attributed the view that all mentality is conscious; these days, most are happy to accept in principle the idea of unconscious mentality. Where did the idea of the unconscious mind come from? What is the unconscious supposed to be, and what makes it mental? In answering these questions, Manson traces the sources of four different ideas of the unconscious in eighteenth and nineteenth century thought. The first idea is just the relatively simple idea of something which is not in one’s occurrent consciousness, something which is available for conscious inspection although not presently under focus. The second, which Manson calls the ‘psychological unconscious’, is the idea of that which is needed to

Introduction

9

explain or underpin consciousness: unconscious mechanisms, causes and conditions of consciousness, some of which are only mental in a derivative sense (i.e. because they give rise to something mental). The third is the ‘metaphysical unconscious’. Here Manson locates the views of Leibniz (often considered to be the originator of the idea of unconscious mentality, with his idea of ‘insensible perceptions’) and Schopenhauer’s idea of Will. The metaphysical unconscious may be thought of as part of an attempt to use mental or quasi-mental concepts to explain the fundamental metaphysical structure of reality. The final notion arose from the problem with reconciling psychological laws with apparently anomalous cases of mental phenomena. In these cases, unconscious mentality is used to explain these departures from law. Manson takes the examples of Sir William Hamilton’s laws of association, and Freud’s interpretation of dreams. (Thus Freud, sometimes considered the ‘discoverer’ of the unconscious, is shown to be part of a broader tradition.) Manson points out that the big difference between the discussions of mind which lead to these four conceptions and the contemporary discussions is that contemporary philosophy of mind appeals to a ‘consciousness-independent’ notion of representation. This makes it easy for contemporary thinkers to embrace the idea of unconscious mentality; their problems are with the understanding of consciousness. One way to look at the matter is as follows. Once the ‘consciousnessindependent’ idea of representation is in place, then the question arises as to how to fit consciousness into the picture of mind which this conception of representation offers. If representation is consciousness-independent, then to say that the mind is a thing which represents is not to say anything about its conscious character. (Compare Descartes, who held that thought is always conscious, and therefore did not have a consciousness-independent view of thought.) One option is to explain consciousness in terms of a different kind of thought – the ‘higher-order thought’ theories of Rosenthal and others. That is, one explains what it is to consciously think that p in terms of the higher-order thought that one is thinking that p. A more popular approach is to claim that some kinds of consciousness derive from properties which have nothing essentially to do with representation or thought: these properties are qualia. Recent discussions of qualia have, however, given rise to many controversies and puzzles, one of which is addressed in Tim Crane’s contribution to this volume. The puzzle Crane begins with may be put like this: some philosophers think that it is obvious that there are qualia, others deny their existence. But if qualia are those properties of a state of mind which make it have the conscious character it does, how can this be so? For a state of mind’s conscious character ought surely to be open to inspection by the subject of

10


that state; so a moment’s inspection of our inner lives should show whether there are qualia or not. How then can there be a substantial debate over the existence of qualia? Crane approaches this problem through a related discussion over the idea of sense-data, the supposed objects of perception. The essential idea behind sense-data theories, Crane claims, is that experience is (or seems to be) relational: something is ‘given’ or ‘presented’ to the mind in experience. The idea that sense-data are mind-dependent objects comes when we consider the impact of the arguments from illusion and hallucination (see also Martin’s paper on this point). Crane argues that if we want to preserve this view of the nature of perception, then we should adopt a conception of perception as intentional. But what about the ‘qualia’ in perception? Here one central question is whether we should think of the ‘subjective’ qualities of experience as being intrinsic non-intentional properties of experience, or whether they can be characterised in terms of the idea of intentionality. After having traced the idea of qualia from its origins in early twentieth-century philosophy to the present day, Crane claims that there is nothing in the various original motivations for qualia which require one to accept a conception of qualia as intrinsic, non-intentional properties. M.G.F. Martin’s paper also addresses the problems surrounding the idea of subjective experience, concentrating on the history of the problem of perception. Martin starts by discussing the shift which has occurred in the philosophy of perception in the twentieth century: while in the pre-war years the discussion was about sense-data and the objects of perception, in the last years of the century discussions came to be about intentionality and qualia. What is the relation between these two discussions? Martin’s paper gives an account of the reasons for this shift, and by tracing discussion back to Hume’s treatment of sense-perception, he identifies an underlying problem of perception to which all theories can be conceived as responding. His account is based on the tension between two ideas which, he claims, are at the heart of the concept of experience. The first is that experience presents its objects as mind-independent; we ‘see through’ the experience, as it were, to the objects themselves. This he calls Transparency. The second idea, which Martin calls Actualism, is that when one experiences something as having a certain property, this property is actually instantiated in some object. Both these principles are intuitively plausible, but the tension between Transparency and Actualism becomes apparent when we consider the possibility of a hallucination, where it seems that something with certain properties is in front of one, but there is nothing there. To hold onto Transparency, one might say that the experience merely represents that there is an object with certain properties in front of one; but then one must reject Actualism. On the other hand, to hold onto Actualism, one must hold that the object which

Introduction

11

instantiates the property in question is a mind-dependent object; but then one must reject Transparency. In effect, the first option is taken by contemporary intentionalist theories of experience, while the second is taken by the old-fashioned sense-data theorist. Thus Martin shows how the two debates about perception are unified. But he goes further: for it is possible to hold on to Actualism and Transparency if one rejects the idea that one is in the same kind of mental state when hallucinating as when perceiving. For then Actualism and Transparency are constraints on perception proper; and this view (which Martin calls ‘Naive Realism’) must then hold that hallucination is a completely different kind of mental state from perception proper. The fact that one cannot distinguish, ‘from the inside’, between a perception and a hallucination does not settle the debate here. For, as Martin claims, one response to the history of the problem of perception is the realisation that experiences can be deceptive, not just about the world, but about themselves.

Acknowledgements These essays arose out of a seminar on the history of the mind–body problem held at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study Philosophy Programme from 1994 to 1996. The editors are grateful to the participants in the seminar, and to the School for financial assistance. They are also grateful to Guy Longworth for his help in preparing the index.

Notes 1 ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), p.373. 2 See e.g. Keith Campbell, Body and Mind (London: Macmillan, 1971). 3 See, for example, Thomas Nagel’s famous discussion in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and the recent debate which to some extent follows Nagel’s, of which David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996) is representative. 4 See, for instance, the contrasting views of the mind–body problem taken by Jerry Fodor and Sydney Shoemaker, in the anthology edited by R.Warner and T. Szubka, The Mind– Body Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 5 Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.51. 6 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p.1. 7 Colin McGinn, ‘Can we solve the mind–body problem?’ in The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p.2. 8 Notable is the recent collection edited by Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Oskenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). For more bibliography, see the footnotes to Rae Langton’s paper. 9 Myles Burnyeat, ‘Is an Aristotelian philosophy of mind still credible? (A draft)’ in Nussbaum and Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima.

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10 For the first kind of view, see Peter Smith and O.R. Jones, The Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); for the second kind of view, see Kathleen Lennon, Paul Gilbert and Stephen Burwood, The Philosophy of Mind (London: UCL Press, 1998) and Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 11 See Gregory McCulloch, ‘The very idea of the phenomenological,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93, 1992–93. 12 See, e.g., Robert Brandom, ‘Study Guide’ to Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 13 Sydney Shoemaker, ‘The mind–body problem’ in R.Warner and T. Szubka (eds) The Mind–Body Problem, p.55.


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The musical, the magical, and the mathematical soul 1 Rae Langton

The musical soul At the beginning of his treatise on the soul, Aristotle considers the opinions of his predecessors, his avowed purpose being to ‘profit by whatever is sound in their suggestions, and avoid their errors’ (De Anima, 403b 23–4).2 One such opinion is that ‘the soul is a kind of harmony’ (407b 30). This theory appears in Plato’s Phaedo, where the relation of soul to body is compared to the relation of a lyre’s harmony and its strings. What is said of soul can equally be said of the harmony, or attunement: the attunement of a lyre and its strings is something unseen and incorporeal and very lovely and divine in the tuned lyre, while the lyre itself and its strings are corporeal bodies and composite and earthy … [S]omething of this sort is what we actually take the soul to be: our body is kept in tension, as it were, and held together by hot and cold, dry and wet, and the like, and our soul is a blending and attunement of these same things, when they’re blended with each other in due proportion.3 The harmonists imagine a musical soul: as harmony to wood and strings, so soul to body. The harmony, or attunement, is a certain arrangement, but not just any arrangement – not, for example, the arrangement possessed by the parts of a smashed lyre. The harmony is a correct arrangement, one that is present when the elements are mixed rightly, ‘in due proportion’. How are we to spell out this notion of correctness? Perhaps in terms of what the lyre is able to do: correctness is ‘aptitude for performance’, as Jonathan Barnes suggests.4 Harmony is an arrangement that gives rise to a capacity to do something: the attuned lyre will produce music in certain circumstances. Harmony, viewed this way, is not music, and not just arrangement, but arrangement that yields a capacity for music. If soul is like harmony, then to

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have a soul is likewise to be able to do something; to be in some psychological state is to be in a state that tends to do something. Thus understood, the harmonists are functionalist philosophers, if we take functionalists to be those who define a mental state in terms of its causal role, saying that a mental state is defined by a set of conditions that specify its typical causes and typical effects under a range of different circumstances.5 The lyre’s harmony will be defined by its capacity to produce certain musical effects (given certain strikings of the lyre); pain will be defined in part by its capacity to produce beliefs that one is in pain (given certain perceptions of pain), desires to avoid the cause of pain, and behaviour directed towards pain-avoidance. Souls, psychological states, are what they are in virtue of what they do. Perhaps there is ‘something sound’ in these suggestions, then – something sound by contemporary lights, and something sound even by Aristotle’s lights. The musical soul is the soul according to functionalism and, perhaps, the soul according to Aristotle. Some reservations must be expressed, to avoid anachronism. The contemporary functionalist will speak of mind rather than soul, the scope of ‘soul’ for the ancients being more generous than the scope of ‘mind’ nowadays: soul animates every living thing, whether animal or vegetable, for Aristotle. But thought is a function of life for creatures like ourselves, so ancient theories of soul and contemporary theories of mind will overlap. Aristotle talks of soul in ways that make the musical analogy, appropriate to ancient harmony theory and to contemporary functionalism alike, seem appropriate to his account as well. Soul seems to be functional organisation. Soul is form, which is to be understood in terms of function: we have a soul when we have certain capacities, the capacities to nourish ourselves, move, perceive, and think. He says, memorably, that if the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul: soul is to the animal as sight is to the eye (412b 18–19). He suggests in the same passage that if an axe were an animal, its soul would be the capacity to cut. Might he not just as well have said that if the lyre were an animal, harmony would be its soul? He seems willing to draw the harmonist’s analogy between artefacts and living creatures. An artefact is defined by what it does: a house can give shelter against destruction by wind, rain and heat (403b 5). That is what it is to be a house. Similarly, anger is defined by what it does: it is a desire for revenge, an appetite for returning pain for pain, a motive for retaliation (403a 30–1). That is what it is to be anger – or at least, that is what it is to be anger according to the definition of the ‘dialectician’. Many commentators, drawing upon such texts, have said Aristotle is a functionalist philosopher of soul. Aristotle and the functionalists are thought to chart a common course, avoiding the twin perils of dualism and reductive materialism. ‘The right view’ steers clear of both, holding that the soul ‘cannot


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be without a body, while it cannot be a body: it is not a body, but something relative to a body’ (414a 19–21).6 Hilary Putnam claims inspiration from Aristotle in an early paper championing the functionalist programme: ‘what we are really interested in, as Aristotle saw, is form and not matter.’ Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji have offered a detailed functionalist interpretation of Aristotle, and others have joined them.7 In the remainder of this section I sketch this sort of interpretation, drawing attention to some apparent common ground between Aristotle and functionalists, ancient and modern. Later I shall consider two arguments against it, and endorse one of them – so this essay defends the functionalist interpretation from one argument, but leaves it vulnerable to another. Functionalism avoids the perils of dualism and materialism through silence, not through enmity. When it defines mental states in terms of functional roles, functionalism at its most basic says nothing about what realises those roles. Basic functionalism is not materialism, it is not dualism, but it is compatible with either. The functional roles could be realised by anything from Swiss cheese to Cartesian mind-stuff, just so long as the stuff can do the work. Basic functionalism is compatible with almost any metaphysics, whether idealist, dualist or materialist.8 Its hands-off attitude is expressed by David Lewis, who says (confining his attention to experience) that the functionalist account ‘is neutral between theories – or lack of any theory – about what sort of real and efficacious things experiences are: neural states or the like, pulsations of ectoplasm or the like, or just experiences and nothing else’.9 From the perspective of functionalism, says Putnam, ‘the question of matter or soul stuff is really irrelevant to any question of philosophical … significance’.10 Mental states are defined by their causal roles, and basic functionalism says no more than this. But the harmony theorists do say more than this. They say that the lyre itself and its strings are ‘corporeal bodies’; and they say that our own bodies are put together from material elements, ‘the hot and cold, the dry and wet’. In addition to giving an account of the soul in functional terms, the harmonists offer an account of what in fact fulfils those functions. The soul is a harmony of a body. The harmony theory weds basic functionalism to physicalism. Physicalistic functionalism goes beyond basic functionalism to a second stage: it offers an account of what, in fact, fulfils the functional roles definitive of mental states. Matter, and not Cartesian mind-stuff, does the work. The causal roles which belong by definition to certain mental states belong in fact to certain physical states.11 It might be matter of quite different sorts in different sorts of beings, and here the lyre analogy is helpful once again. The same harmony might be achieved in different physical ways: in wood and string, or clay and wire. And if soul is like harmony, the same state of soul might be achieved in different physical ways: the harmony theory allows

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for multiple realisability of psychological states in different physical states. In addition, harmony supervenes on the wood and the strings: there could be no difference in the harmony without a difference in the tension or arrangement of the components. And if soul is like harmony, soul supervenes on body: there could be no difference in psychological states without a difference in physical states.12 But notwithstanding the supervenient dependence of harmony on matter, our grasp of harmony may have a kind of explanatory autonomy: the one who best understands music may not be the one who best understands wood and string. And if soul is like harmony, our grasp of mind may likewise have a kind of explanatory autonomy: the best psychologist may not be the one who best understands the nature of flesh and bone. Here again, perhaps there is ‘something sound’ in these suggestions – something sound by contemporary lights, and something sound by Aristotle’s lights too. Those commentators who find Aristotle to be a functionalist typically find him to be more than a basic functionalist. For Aristotle says that the soul is the form of the body. He adds to the functional definition of states of soul an account of what realises those states. Soul is related to body as form to matter. We can dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: ‘it is as though we were to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, or generally the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter’ (412b 6–9). A house is not simply a shelter against destruction by wind, rain and heat; it is also what the physicist describes, namely ‘stones, bricks and timbers’ (403b 6). Anger is not simply the desire for revenge, the motive for retaliation: it is also what the physicist describes, namely the ‘boiling of the blood or warm substance surrounding the heart’ (403a 31–403b 1). The dialectician’s definition is to be supplemented by what the physicist says. It is tempting to see Aristotle as pursuing the twostage strategy of the physicalistic functionalist, first identifying states of soul with certain functional roles, in the manner of the basic functionalist, and then introducing matter as the realiser of those roles. The causal roles which belong by definition to certain mental states belong in fact to certain physical states: the causal role which belongs by definition to anger belongs in fact to the boiling of blood around the heart. There is reason for supposing that Aristotle accepted multiple realisability: that he thought the capacities of the soul could be realised in different ways, just as the lyre analogy suggests. As the same harmony may exist in different sorts of musical instruments, so the same states of soul may exist in quite different sorts of matter. The analogies drawn by Aristotle himself – the shape of the wax, the sheltering ability of a house – suggest forms which can be instantiated in a variety of different things. And his explicit remarks on the capacities of the soul are in keeping with this. The capacity of absorbing food – one of the functions of living, animate things – is realised by


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roots in plants, and by mouths in animals (412b 2–3). The perceptual capacity of smell is realised in fish quite differently to the way it is realised in ourselves, since in us it involves breathing, but not in fish (421b 9–422a 6). There is reason for supposing that Aristotle thought the capacities of the soul supervene on states of the body. Whether a house is a good shelter will depend on its bricks and stone; and there could be no difference in the sheltering ability without a difference in the bricks and stones. With the soul it seems to be likewise, at least for many of its states. ‘It seems that all the affections of soul involve a body – passion, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, loving, and hating; in all these there is a concurrent affection of the body’ (403a 16). For anger, this ‘concurrent affection of the body’ is the blood boiling around the heart, and the suggestion seems to be that there would be no difference in the facts about anger without a difference in the facts about boiling blood. In support of his conclusion about the ‘involvement’ of body Aristotle cites cases of fear and anger occurring in atypical circumstances. [W]hile sometimes on the occasion of violent and striking occurrences there is no excitement or fear felt, on others faint and feeble stimulations produce these emotions, viz. when the body is already in a state of tension resembling its condition when we are angry. Here is a still clearer case: in the absence of any external cause of terror we find ourselves experiencing the feelings of a man in terror. (403a 19–24) The examples show what he takes this ‘involvement’ of body to be. In the first case, despite a typical cause for fear, no fear is felt, because of the absence of the relevant bodily state: a relevant bodily state is a necessary condition for fear. In the second case, an emotion is felt despite the absence of a fully appropriate cause, because of the presence of a relevant bodily state. In the third case (a ‘clearer case’) terror is felt despite the absence of any typical cause for it, because of the presence of a relevant bodily state. A necessary condition for fear is that there be some appropriate bodily state or other; and the presence of such a bodily state will be sufficient for the fear. Case one suggests the necessity condition; cases two and (more clearly) three, suggest a sufficiency condition. All this suggests that fear supervenes on its material basis, and anger supervenes on the blood boiling around the heart.13 Aristotle concludes the passage with an important summary of his view: ‘From all this it is obvious that the affections of soul are enmattered accounts’ (403b 24–5). The notion of an ‘enmattered account’ (logos enhulos) can be understood as the notion of a functionally defined mental state realised in, and supervening upon, states of matter.

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Notwithstanding the supervenient dependence of soul on body, our explanation of the soul’s capacities may have a kind of autonomy, just as an explanation of a lyre’s distinctive musical capacity may be quite separate from an explanation of what happens to the lyre’s wood and string. This explanatory autonomy is part of what Putnam had in mind when he hailed Aristotle as his philosophical forebear. Whatever our mental functioning may be, there seems to be no serious reason to believe that it is explainable by our physics and chemistry. No physical explanation will succeed in having the simplicity and generality that we need for psychology, but a functional explanation will. Putnam says this points to the autonomy of the mental. My conclusion is that we have what we always wanted – an autonomous mental life. And we need no mysteries, no ghostly agents, no élan vital to have it.14 Nussbaum and Putnam find just this explanatory autonomy in Aristotle, who thinks explanations in terms of soul are superior to explanations in terms of matter. [I]nasmuch as it is the presence of the soul that enables matter to constitute the animal nature, much more than it is the presence of matter which so enables the soul, the inquirer into nature is bound to treat of the soul rather than of the matter. (Parts of Animals, 641a 28–32) On this vision of Aristotle there is considerable common ground between Aristotle’s views on the soul, and the views of his harmonist predecessors and functionalist successors.15 All are musicians of the soul: all give a theory of the soul which is perfectly capturable by the harmonist’s musical analogy, according to which the soul and its states are like the harmony of a lyre – functionally defined, multiply realisable, supervenient on body, yet autonomous when it comes to the business of explanation. Given Aristotle’s avowed purpose of profiting by what is sound in the suggestions of his predecessors, together with the apparent soundness of the harmonist’s account of soul by his own lights, one might expect Aristotle to give the harmony theory a charitable reception. But no. The view is ‘absurd’ (408a 1, a 14), ‘easily refutable’ (408a 12). Aristotle’s dismissiveness is puzzling; and if the harmonists are rightly interpreted as functionalists, that dismissiveness should also be puzzling to Aristotle’s functionalist interpreters. Aristotle’s evaluation of


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the harmony theory will be an evaluation of functionalism, and one that should provoke unease. If Aristotle views the harmonists as ‘absurd’, is there not some danger that he would view his functionalist interpreters likewise? His stated reasons for finding the view absurd are not entirely satisfying. One reason is that if the soul is a harmony, there will be many souls distributed throughout the body, since there are many different harmonious arrangements (408a 16–19). This is hardly an objection: the claim was not that every harmony is a soul, but that the soul is a kind of harmony.16 Another reason is more important, and has to do with a question about the metaphysics of causation: a harmony lacks ‘the power of originating movement’, a power which everyone agrees belongs to the soul (407b 34–5). The harmony of the lyre fails to be a cause in the way that the soul is a cause. Some commentators have pointed to the special role assigned to the soul in actively holding the body together, in Aristotle’s philosophy, a role which has no parallel in the lyre.17 Others have argued that Aristotle is an emergentist about the powers of the soul: that Aristotle believes states of soul have efficacy in virtue of being states of soul. I will not be addressing here these issues in the metaphysics of causation, despite their possible significance.18 But there may be other reasons for thinking Aristotle would find uncongenial the functionalist’s account, whether ancient or modern, and hence other reasons for thinking that the soul he imagines is not, or not quite, the musical soul. Two such reasons are considered in the remainder of the paper: one deals in magic, and I shall argue (in the next section) that it is unpersuasive; the other deals in mathematics, and I shall argue (in the final section) that it is persuasive. A powerful objection has been raised by Myles Burnyeat, who says that functionalism is reductive and materialistic, too materialistic for Aristotle; he attributes to Aristotle a magical soul quite different to the soul attributed by the functionalist. There are grounds for thinking Burnyeat is wrong in his interpretation, but even if he is right, his argument is unpersuasive because it does not fully meet its functionalist target. Contrary to Burnyeat, a magical soul could be the soul of the functionalist. The final section raises an argument about mathematics, or rather about the methodology of mathematics, as Aristotle sees it, which brings a problem for functionalism that looks the opposite of Burnyeat’s: the trouble is not that functionalism takes matter too seriously, from Aristotle’s point of view, but that it doesn’t take matter seriously enough. The functionalist attributes to Aristotle an abstract conception of the soul. The musical soul is also a mathematical soul – a soul treated as if it were an object of mathematics, definable independently of matter. Although this abstract conception can seem congenial to Aristotle, there is a persuasive case for thinking Aristotle would reject it, given the difference he sees between the study of soul and the study of mathematics. Contrary to the functionalist, the mathematical soul could not be the soul of Aristotle.

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The magical soul According to Burnyeat, Aristotle’s view is mysterious and alien, he says – ‘magical’ seems just the word for it, and it has been aptly used by others.19 That magic is evident in Aristotle’s account of vision: according to Aristotle, when I see, nothing happens in the matter of my eye, says Burnyeat. If he were right, what would become of the musical soul? Imagine a lyre that produces beautiful music, though nothing happens to the wood and strings. That magical lyre would be no familiar physical lyre. Perhaps it could still be defined functionally, defined in terms of what it does; but the physical story would be gone. If Burnyeat were right, the musical analogy would need to be abandoned, or at least revised. The magical soul would at least partly displace the musical. In what follows I want to consider Burnyeat’s argument, but some disclaimers are in order. Confronted with a clash of scholarly giants, the hopes of a bystander will be modest. Ambitions will tend to the philosophical, rather than the textual. One can hope, perhaps, for the role of a spectator at Wimbledon, innocent of ability to play – but able none the less to form her own opinion about whether a player has, at any rate, returned his opponent’s serve. I will be suggesting that Burnyeat’s argument is weaker than he thinks: if his argument is quite sound, Aristotle may still be a functionalist; and if, as it seems, it is partly mistaken, Aristotle may even be a physicalistic functionalist. Burnyeat says that Aristotle’s philosophy of mind is no longer credible, contrary to his functionalist interpreters, because Aristotle’s philosophy of matter is no longer credible. Among the features of the functionalist view that Burnyeat opposes are the twin claims of multiple realisability and supervenience. This is enough to show that Burnyeat is not addressing basic functionalism – which says nothing about what mental states are realised in or supervene on – but physicalistic functionalism. He addresses multiple realisability, the thesis that psychological states, construed as functional states, ‘must be realised in some material or physical set-up, but it is not essential that the set-up should be the flesh and bones and nervous system of Homo sapiens rather than the electronic gadgetry of a computer’. And he addresses the supervenience of the mental on the physical, the thesis that ‘in any two worlds where the physical facts are the same, the mental facts are the same’.20 Burnyeat’s magical Aristotle denies both theses. Aristotle denies multiple realisability, according to Burnyeat, because he denies that the relation between animal bodies and their functions is a contingent one. According to what is sometimes called the homonymy principle, the eye which cannot see is an eye in name only, not really an eye at all. The principle applies as much to the matter of living things as to the


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living things themselves. ‘Life and perceptual awareness are not something contingently added to animal bodies in the way in which shape is contingently added to the bronze to make a statue’.21 On this understanding of Aristotle’s conception of living bodies, it makes no sense to think of matter plus some functional ability – for example, eye-jelly plus sight. When it comes to living, animate things, Aristotle’s ‘matter’ is, of necessity, functionally organised. The bodies that are in fact ensouled are also of necessity ensouled. On this understanding of Aristotle’s homonymy principle, the functional roles provide the identity conditions for the physical states: without the sight, there is no eye, nor even an eye-jelly; without the soul, there is no body; without functioning life, there is no flesh. [T]here is no such thing as face or flesh without soul in it; it is only homonymously that they will be called face or flesh if the life has gone out of them, just as if they had been made of stone or wood. (Generation of Animals, 734b 24–6) If Aristotle had believed that the firing of C-fibres realised the functionally defined mental state of pain, then on the homonymy principle he would think that C-fibres could not exist except in the brain of a living creature capable of pain. Should the creature die, the C-fibres would cease to exist (except homonymously). Burnyeat takes this to be a mysterious and alien conception of matter, a conception of matter as essentially capable of awareness. But whether or not the conception is really so mysterious, his basic argument is that Aristotle’s matter theory requires a necessary relation between matter and form; multiple realisability requires a contingent relation. Burnyeat concludes that functionalism is incompatible with Aristotle’s philosophy of matter. Aristotle denies supervenience, according to Burnyeat, because he thinks that differences in states of soul can occur without differences in states of body: in particular, visual awareness occurs without any difference in the matter of the eye-jelly. This violates supervenience, according to which there can be no difference in the facts about mental states without a difference in the facts about physical states. Since functionalism is committed to the supervenience of the mental on the physical, functionalist interpretations of Aristotle are, he says, mistaken. Burnyeat addresses the Aristotelian doctrine that in perception the eye takes on form without matter, arguing that Aristotle means that the eye takes on the form of a colour without any difference in its own matter. Sorabji had argued that for the eye to take on form without matter is for the eye jelly to become coloured, but without receiving matter from the object of vision.22 On Sorabji’s view, the eye literally becomes red when we see something red. On Burnyeat’s it does not become red, and

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indeed does not become anything at all – except aware. On Burnyeat’s interpretation, there is no physical story to the process of vision, the process in which the capacity of sight is exercised. Again, the mystery, according to Burnyeat, is in Aristotle’s deeply alien conception of matter as ‘pregnant with consciousness’, the eye pregnant with visual awareness, needing no physiological change, nothing more than confrontation with the visible, in order to see. The first thing to say about these two arguments is that they seem to be independent of each other, though Burnyeat does not present them that way. On the contrary, he suggests that ‘the details of the theory of perception’, given in the account of what goes on in the eye, are part of that same ‘alien conception of the physical’ which is a consequence of homonymy.23 The suggestion is that the two are interconnected, and in particular that homonymy undermines supervenience as well as multiple realisability. But the issues of homonymy and supervenience seem independent. One could consistently hold (a) the matter of the eye is essentially capable of sight, and there is a difference in the matter of the eye when visual awareness occurs. Conversely, one could consistently hold (b) the matter of the eye is contingently capable of sight, and there is no difference in the matter of the eye when visual awareness occurs. Applying this to anger, one could consistently hold (a’) the blood around the heart is essentially capable of playing the causal role of anger, and there is a difference in the blood when anger occurs (it boils). Conversely, one could consistently hold (b’) the blood around the heart only contingently plays the role of anger, and there is no difference in the blood when anger occurs (it doesn’t boil). A functionalist could accept Burnyeat’s homonymy principle and still affirm supervenience on Aristotle’s behalf, as in (a) and (a’). So we should treat the two arguments independently. The second thing to say about these two arguments is that even if they were granted, there is a sense in which Burnyeat’s functionalist target would remain beyond them. The musical soul is not completely displaced by the magical. Burnyeat’s arguments, if sound, are compatible with basic functionalism. If a magical lyre might be definable in functional terms, a magical soul might be likewise. The lyre analogy need not be wholly abandoned: while no longer needed to illustrate physicalistic functionalism, it may still capture the idea of functional definition. If Aristotle were willing to define mental states in purely functional terms, that would be sufficient for his being a functionalist. He would be a functionalist who pursued the first stage of the functionalist programme – the account of functional definition – and failed to pursue the second stage – the account of physical realisation. Or, better, he would be a functionalist who pursued the first stage of the functionalist programme, and then pursued a quite different, nonphysicalistic, second stage. If Aristotle were to deny the multiple realisability


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of functional states, and deny the supervenience of functional states on physical states, he would be an odd sort of functionalist, but recall the handsoff attitude of basic functionalism. It is, in Lewis’ words, ‘neutral between theories – or lack of any theory – about what sort of things’ the realisers of functional states are, or whether there is anything at all besides the functional states themselves.24 Basic functionalism is designed to be compatible, not just with (almost) any physical story, but (almost) any metaphysical story, whether dualistic, idealistic, or outright magical. So Aristotle’s matter cannot matter, however magical it may be – provided there is a functional account of states of soul. His matter theory may prevent him from being a physicalist, but that should not prevent him from being a functionalist. Bearing in mind Burnyeat’s more restricted target, let us consider his arguments, taking first of all the argument against multiple realisability. The homonymy principle generates a necessary relation between matter and form, according to Burnyeat, contrary to the contingent relation required by the functionalist thesis of multiple realisability. It is worth remarking that the homonymy principle is sometimes thought to create problems for Aristotle himself, collapsing an important distinction between what is potentially alive and what is actually alive, what is potentially enformed and what is actually enformed; so there may be good independent reasons, from an Aristotelian point of view, to seek an interpretation which allows for a looser relation between Aristotelian matter – somehow construed – and functional organisation.25 The question for us here, though, is not whether the homonymy principle creates problems for Aristotle’s metaphysics, but whether it creates problems for multiple realisability. Aristotle’s functionalist defenders seem to assume that it does, and devote their attention to attacking Burnyeat’s premise, which they argue to be an over-restrictive interpretation of homonymy. But our conclusion should be that functionalism is not vulnerable to the argument in the first place. Grant Burnyeat his premise of homonymy: it is compatible with multiple realisability. To be sure, physicalistic functionalism requires a contingent relation between matter and function, while the homonymy principle requires a necessary relation, just as Burnyeat says. But if we are careful to say just what the relations in question are, we will see that the contingent relation which functionalism requires is compatible with the necessary relation which the homonymy principle requires. The contingency required by functionalism is: this function could be fulfilled without this matter. The necessity required by homonymy is: this matter couldn’t fail to fulfil this function. The two thoughts are compatible. Recall that Burnyeat contrasts the cases of the bronze statue and the living creature, the matter/form relation being contingent in the case of the statue, but not in the case of the living thing. As Burnyeat notes, in the case of the statue the relation is contingent in two ways: the bronze might

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not have been a statue; the statue might not have been bronze. The latter illustrates the multiple realisability of statues; the former illustrates, if you like, the multiple functionality of bronze. It is the former which Burnyeat describes when he says that shape is contingently added to the bronze, contrasting it to the case of organisms, whose life functions cannot be contingently added to matter. This leaves untouched the issue of multiple realisability, whether of statues or of life functions. Homonymy does not seem to deny the multiple realisability of functions; it denies the multiple functionality of realisers. It denies that the eye-jelly could fail to have the function of sight; it does not deny that something other than eye-jelly could have the function of sight. It denies that the roots of a dead plant are roots, except in name only; it does not deny that the function of roots – namely the capacity to absorb food – can also be realised in animals. It will say that necessarily, if something is a root, it is capable of absorbing food; it will not thereby say that necessarily, if something is capable of absorbing food, it is a root. In short, the contingent relation required by functionalism is compatible with the necessary relation required by homonymy. I conclude that Burnyeat’s argument against the attribution of multiple realisability to Aristotle fails, and with it fails an important part of his argument against the functionalist interpretation. Now we turn to the argument against supervenience, based on the magical interpretation of Aristotle’s account of vision. Burnyeat is surely right to assume that supervenience is part of the physicalistic functionalism he opposes, even if it is not part of functionalism at its most basic. This is worth emphasizing, because his chief opponents seem cagey. Nussbaum and Putnam defend functionalism as plausible philosophy of mind and as plausible interpretation of Aristotle, yet in their reply to Burnyeat they at first deny supervenience, surprisingly enough. Then they change their minds and affirm it, explicitly, when they say it is ‘right’, and implicitly, when they do battle with Burnyeat’s claim that there is a difference in awareness without a difference in the eye-jelly, according to Aristotle. In rejecting Burnyeat’s claim, Nussbaum and Putnam defend supervenience, whatever they say to the contrary.26 The core of Burnyeat’s argument against supervenience is, I said, that Aristotle thinks there is a difference in awareness without any difference in the matter of the eye-jelly. It is tempting to say: without the matter undergoing any change or alteration (I use those terms synonymously), and that is indeed how Burnyeat himself puts the point. But here we run into difficulties with a special Aristotelian understanding of change, one that Burnyeat takes to play a significant role in his argument against supervenience. The difference between having a capacity without exercising it at some particular time, and exercising that capacity at another particular time, is not strictly a change,


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for Aristotle. The difference between knowing how to build a house and using that knowledge to build a house is not strictly an alteration in the builder (417b 7–9). Perception too is a capacity whose exercise is not strictly an alteration in the perceiver. The idea is that the builder and the perceiver do not ‘become other’ than they were before: the exercise of the capacities of building, and of perception, are a fulfilment of their natures, not a ‘becoming other’.27 If this is so, then becoming aware of red is not strictly a change in the subject that becomes aware. Burnyeat uses this special view of change – or rather absence of change – to argue that since, according to Aristotle, there is visual awareness without change, there is visual awareness without change in matter, and hence supervenience is violated. This special view about change does not seem to have quite the significance for the argument that Burnyeat attributes to it, I suggest. At worst, it hinders Burnyeat’s argument. In order to show a violation of supervenience, one might suppose that what is needed is a violation of the rule, ‘no mental change without a physical change’, that being a popular slogan for supervenience. If becoming aware were a change, but (as Burnyeat argues) there were no change in the eye jelly, then that supervenience rule would be violated and the argument would succeed. There would be a mental change without a physical change. But if becoming aware is not even a change, that supervenience rule is not violated. So Burnyeat’s appeal to the ‘no change’ understanding of the exercise of a perceptual capacity seems, on the face of it, to hinder his argument. It would be more helpful to Burnyeat’s case if talk of change were avoided, and the supervenience rule interpreted more broadly, as it has been above: ‘no mental difference without a physical difference’. Aristotle surely allows that there is a difference between a capacity’s not being exercised and its being exercised, so there is some kind of mental difference (whether or not it is to be called a change or alteration). The question then would be whether there is also a difference in the eye jelly (whether or not that is to be called a change or alteration). Burnyeat’s case receives little help from this special Aristotelian view about change, I’ve suggested, and my reasons were based on thoughts about supervenience. Sorabji gives a different argument for this same conclusion, and his reasons are based on thoughts about what Aristotle says.28 Perceiving is like building, says Aristotle: both are exercises of capacities that are not strictly changes in the perceiver or builder. If we consider the implications of that comparison, a magical interpretation seems implausible. When the capacity to build is exercised, the builder uses his hands, places one brick upon another, and eventually creates a house. There is an exercise of a capacity, a fulfilment of nature, that is not strictly a change in the builder; and there is also a physical alteration in the builder’s body. There is a difference that is an exercise of a capacity, and also a difference that is a change in

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matter. If perceiving is like building, then one can expect there to be a difference that is an exercise of a capacity, and a difference that is a change in matter. That perceiving is an exercise of a capacity does not seem reason for thinking there may be no physical difference in the eye – or it would be reason for thinking the builder could build without some physical difference in himself. Sorabji extends his point to a still clearer case. A rock falling from a ledge would be fulfilling its natural capacity, and moving earthwards: the first would not be a change, in Aristotle’s special sense, while the second would, even though the first could not happen (presumably) without the second. Where does this leave Burnyeat’s case against supervenience, and against the functionalist interpretation as a whole? Burnyeat took his case against supervenience to be supported by Aristotle’s special view of change; and he took it to be supported by the homonymy principle, in so far as homonymy was thought to help establish the alien nature of Aristotle’s matter theory. But his case seems to lack these two supports – the first for the reasons just given, and the second for the reasons given at the beginning of this section. The homonymy principle is independent, not just of multiple realisability, but of supervenience too. Perhaps homonymy is to be understood in a mysterious and magical way – matter as pregnant with consciousness, essentially capable of awareness. Even if it is, the magic of homonymy is independent of the magic of supervenience-denial. The soul could be magical in one way without being magical in the other. The matter of the eye might be essentially capable of sight, yet alter when visual awareness occurs (homonymy with supervenience). The matter of the eye might be contingently capable of sight, yet not alter when visual awareness occurs (no homonymy, with no supervenience). Of course, there may still be good textual reasons for thinking that Aristotle believes in a magical soul, whose states of visual awareness vary without difference in the eye-jelly. My conclusion is only that his views about homonymy, and about the exercise of capacities, do not show he believes in that sort of magical soul. If these arguments are right, then Aristotle may be a physicalistic functionalist, as Nussbaum and Putnam and Sorabji say, though his understanding of the physical may be different from any we know. But if they are wrong, and if Burnyeat is right about the magical soul, Aristotle may still be a functionalist. He would not be physicalistic functionalist, to be sure; but if idealists and dualists may be functionalists, so too may a magical Aristotle.

The mathematical soul On Burnyeat’s argument, functionalism takes matter too seriously, for Aristotle. It was suggested in the preceding section that Burnyeat is mistaken,


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that functionalism does not take matter too seriously, and that even Burnyeat’s magical Aristotle could be a functionalist. This section takes that argument further, to a point where it ceases to be a defence of functionalism (against Burnyeat), and becomes an attack. Functionalism does not take matter too seriously: indeed, functionalism does not take matter seriously enough, for Aristotle. Functionalism’s abstraction offers a persuasive reason for thinking that Aristotle would reject it. It was argued before that Burnyeat’s Aristotle could be a functionalist – provided he were willing to define mental states in functional terms. That proviso is the nub. If Aristotle refuses to say that states of soul are states definable in functional terms, that would be a blow to the functionalist interpretation. It would not then be possible to say that Aristotle pursues the first, definitional, stage of the functionalist programme, subsequently pursuing his own idiosyncratic version of the second, realisation, stage – the stage that is in any case optional as far as basic functionalism is concerned. There are reasons for thinking Aristotle does refuse this first stage. Recall again his description of ‘the right view’ of soul (given a little more fully this time): ‘the soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot be a body; it is not a body but something relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and a body of a definite kind’ (414a 19–21) The soul cannot be without a body. How are we to understand the modality of this claim? It seems to deny the contingency of the soul/body relation – though not in the way that Burnyeat identified, when describing the implications of the homonymy principle. What Burnyeat described was the idea that body is necessarily ensouled. (Dead flesh is not flesh, except in name only; a corpse is not a body, except in name only.) But when Aristotle says that the soul cannot be without body, things are the other way around. Soul is necessarily embodied. I have argued that the former, homonymy-based, necessity is compatible with functionalism – compatible with functionalism construed at its most basic, and compatible with functionalism construed as physicalistic. But what of this latter necessity? It seems more damning to the project of functionalist interpretation, because it stops it at the very starting point. Basic functionalism is the starting point, compatible with almost any metaphysical view. Physicalistic functionalism is basic functionalism wedded to the contingent fact of physicalism: the causal roles which belong by definition to certain mental states (described at stage one) belong as a matter of contingent fact to certain physical states (described at stage two). If Aristotle thinks that soul is necessarily embodied, then that first stage cannot get off the ground: soul cannot be understood in a way that allows compatibility with a variety of metaphysical views, physicalistic, dualistic, idealist, or whatever. And if the reason soul is necessarily embodied is because its definition mentions matter, things are worse still.

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Not only is there a failure of metaphysical neutrality: there is a failure of functional definition. Let us look again, a little more closely this time, at the business of definition, as Aristotle sees it. Having concluded that the affections of soul are ‘enmattered accounts’ (logoi enhuloi), Aristotle goes on to give his famous two-fold description of anger: the description given by ‘the dialectician’, according to which anger is the appetite for returning pain for pain; and the description given by ‘the physicist’, according to which anger is the boiling of the blood or warm substance surrounding the heart. It is tempting, as we saw, to interpret this in terms of functionalism’s two stages. Functional definition is given by the dialectician, and then supplemented by an account of contingent physical realisation, given by the physicist. The causal role which belongs as a matter of definitional necessity to certain mental states – as told by the dialectician – belongs as a matter of contingent fact to certain physical states – as told by the physicist. But Aristotle seems to be saying something stronger: it seems he is not talking about definition plus realisation, but about definition as such. There is a case for thinking that the very notion of an ‘enmattered account’ is not that of a functionally defined state realised in matter, but of a functional definition that mentions matter – as an alternative translation, ‘formula including matter’, perhaps makes clearer. 29 Aristotle says that when defining affections of the soul, the fact that they are ‘enmattered accounts’, or ‘formulae including matter’, has implications for their definition: their definitions ought to correspond, e.g. anger should be defined as a certain mode of movement of such and such a body (or part or faculty of a body) by this or that cause and for this or that end. That is precisely why the study of the soul – either every soul or souls of this sort – must fall within the science of nature. (403a 26–9) Anger’s definition is not given purely by its causal role – a something that is ‘by this or that cause and for this or that end’. It is also, as a matter of definition, ‘a movement of such and such a body (or part or faculty of a body)’. It is part of anger’s very definition that it is a movement of the blood around the heart. To say that someone is angry is to say that the blood around their heart is boiling, because that is part of what it means to be angry.30 That is why philosophy of soul will of necessity be part of the science of nature. The talk of body is part of the definition. This seems to be supported by what Aristotle says immediately thereafter. He raises the question of who gets the definition right, whether it is the dialectician, who restricts himself to the formal definition, or the physicist, who restricts himself to


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the material definition; and he answers, ‘Is it not rather the one who combines both?’ The right sort of definition will say that a thing is ‘that form in that material with that purpose or end’ (403b 7–8). Aristotle then draws a contrast between the theorist of soul and the mathematician. The mathematician deals with features of bodies that are ‘inseparable in fact, but are separable from any particular kind of body by an effort of abstraction’ (403b 14–15). Sphericality is separable from matter, whether bronze or wood, by an effort of abstraction; and the mathematician need not study bronze or wood in order to study sphericality. With the soul it is different. The theorist of soul cannot study its affections as if they could be abstracted from any sort of bodily thing. To remain with the dialectician’s definition of anger would be to study the soul as if it were an object of mathematics. Functionalism studies the soul as if it were an object of mathematics. Functionalism takes mental states to be ‘separable from any particular kind of body by an effort of abstraction’. The harmonists do likewise, if they take harmony to be ‘separable from any particular kind of body by an effort of abstraction’ – separable by an effort of abstraction from wood and strings, clay and wire, or whatever. Functionalism goes if anything further than the mathematician envisaged by Aristotle, taking mental states to be separable, not just from ‘any particular kind of body’, but from any body at all, mental states being in principle realisable by non-physical stuff. Functionalism’s virtue is its abstraction. Just as the mathematician gives an account of sphericality that abstracts from matter, abstracts from bronze or wood, so the functionalist gives an account of mental states that abstracts from body, abstracts from neurons or Martian hydraulics. ‘We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter’, says Putnam.31 The soul of the functionalists is a mathematical soul, and when they hail Aristotle as their philosophical forebear, they give Aristotle a mathematical soul too. Functionalism’s virtue – its abstraction – seems likely to be its vice, for Aristotle. When Putnam says that ‘what we are interested in, as Aristotle saw, is form and not matter’, his characterisation of functionalism seems more apt than his characterisation of Aristotle. Functionalism does not take matter as seriously as Aristotle would like to take matter. The functionalist plays the role of the dialectician, whose definitions of states of soul fail to mention matter at all, let alone matter of a particular kind. And the harmony theorist likewise plays the role of the dialectician, if harmony can be defined without reference to wood and strings. To be sure, functionalism in its physicalistic guise will graft its functional definitions to a physicalistic theory of what contingently realises the states so defined: but that would be like grafting geometry to a separate theory of bronze, or grafting musical theory to a theory of instrument-making. Functionalism will not say that anger

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must be embodied, any more than the mathematician will say that spheres must be bronze, or the musician that harmonies must be in instruments of wood and string. Aristotle says that anger is necessarily in a body, and in a body of a particular sort. States of soul are not like spheres, not like harmonies, but functionalism treats them as if they were. The mathematician is compared again to the philosopher of soul in Metaphysics Z. Aristotle raises the question whether the definition of man is unlike the definition of circle in requiring mention of matter, and mention of flesh and blood in particular: are flesh and blood ‘parts of the form and formula’ of man (1036b 5)? Whether Aristotle answers his question at this point is somewhat unclear, and the text is disputed.32 But there is reason for thinking his answer would not be negative. Earlier he had said that ‘man and animal’ are analogous ‘to bronze sphere in general’ (1033b 23–5), that is analogous to something whose definition mentions a particular sort of matter, just as the definition of anger does. And a little later he describes as mistaken a philosopher called Socrates the younger, who theorised about animals as if they were circles, as if ‘man can exist without the parts, in the way that circle can without the bronze’ (1036b 24). Aristotle contrasts the definition of a circle, which will not mention matter, with the definition of an animal, which will mention matter, and matter of a particular sort. Here, as in De Anima, he seems to reject the mathematician’s approach to the soul, which seems to be the approach of Socrates the younger, and, surely, the approach of the functionalist. On this interpretation of Aristotle, matter is taken so seriously that functional definitions must mention it. This appears to be accepted by Nussbaum and Putnam. They cite some of the passages just quoted and others, to show that of necessity ensouled things are material things, according to Aristotle, and that mention of matter must be given in their very definitions. They explain how Aristotle’s views here depend in part on his view about change and materiality: for Aristotle, if something is essentially a changing thing it is necessarily a material thing. That is an important fact to bear in mind in considering Aristotle’s contrast between soul and circle, if circles can be defined without mention of change, but states of soul cannot. Since the functions of living beings involve change, they involve matter. Therefore, say the authors, ‘any account that properly gives the what-is-it of such a being must make mention of the presence of material composition’. They say Aristotle rejects the view of Socrates the younger because the functional essence of a living being like an animal … does require mention of material embodiment in that its essential activities are embodied activities. Just as ‘snub’ directly imports a reference to material composition, so too does ‘perceiving creature’ – in a way that ‘sphere’ does not.33


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How can functionalism’s defenders attribute to Aristotle the view that functional definition must mention matter, if that is what functionalism denies? Their target is Burnyeat, and his magical interpretation of Aristotle. They say it is Burnyeat who makes the mistake of Socrates the Younger. That is to assimilate the mathematical to the magical, and the suggestion seems implausible. The mistake Aristotle describes seems to be that of abstraction, not that of magic, and it is the functionalist, not Burnyeat, who should plead guilty. But it is because of their focus on Burnyeat that Nussbaum and Putnam so emphasise the importance of matter to Aristotle. They think Burnyeat’s Aristotle does not take matter seriously enough, if he thinks visual awareness occurs without any happenings in the eye jelly. They want to show that Aristotle takes matter very seriously indeed. But they have proved too much, it seems. If Aristotle takes matter as seriously as they say he does – so seriously that functional definitions must mention it – then he is surely no functionalist. States of soul cannot be defined in purely functional terms. The vaunted ‘autonomy of the mental’ which Putnam claimed for functionalism cannot be claimed for Aristotle: the abstraction sought by functionalism is an abstraction shunned by its adopted hero. The functionalist may want a mathematical soul, but Aristotle, it seems, does not.

Notes 1 An ancestor of this paper benefited from Michael Frede’s generous written comments, and from discussion at a presentation at University College, London; more recent work on it was improved by helpful suggestions from Stephen Makin and Richard Holton. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Aristotle’s work henceforth are to De Anima. Quotations are from The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vols. I and II. 3 Plato: Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 85e, 86b–c. 4 Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 189. For some other useful discussions of the harmony theory see William Charlton, ‘Aristotle and the Harmonia Theory’, Aristotle on Nature and Living Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies presented to David M. Balme on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Alan Gotthelf (Pittsburgh: Mathesis, 1985), pp. 131–50; Victor Caston, ‘Epiphenomenalisms, Ancient and Modern’, Philosophical Review 106 (1997), pp. 309–93; Charlotte Witt, ‘Dialectic, Motion, and Perception: De Anima Book I’, in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, eds Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 169–83. 5 For a classic statement, see David Lewis, ‘An argument for the identity theory’ (1966), reprinted in Philosophical Papers Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 102. 6 Cf. Jonathan Barnes, ‘Philosophy of mind has for centuries been whirled between a Cartesian Charybdis and a scientific Scylla: Aristotle has the look of an Odysseus’, ‘Aristotle’s Concept of Mind’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 (1971–2), pp. 101–14, 114. 7 For some of the original statements see Martha Nussbaum, ‘Aristotle on teleological explanation’, in Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

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8 9

10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17

18

19 20

1978), pp. 59–106; Hilary Putnam, ‘Philosophy and Our Mental Life’ (1973), reprinted in Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 291–303, quotation from p. 302; Richard Sorabji, ‘Body and Soul in Aristotle’ Philosophy 49 (1974), pp. 63–89. Among the opposing camp are Howard Robinson, ‘Mind and Body in Aristotle’, Classical Quarterly 28 (1978), pp. 105–24 and Miles Burnyeat, ‘Is an Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind Still Credible? (A Draft)’, in Nussbaum and Rorty (eds) Essays, pp. 16–26. Nussbaum and Putnam reply to Burnyeat in ‘Changing Aristotle’s Mind’ (ibid., pp. 27–56), Sorabji replies in ‘Intentionality and Physical Processes’ (ibid., 195–225); Marc Cohen ably defends the functionalist interpretation in ‘Hylomorphism and Functionalism’ (ibid., pp. 57–73). Lewis, ‘An Argument’, p. 102, Putnam, ‘Our Mental Life’, pp. 291, 293 (and passim). Almost any metaphysics: some restrictions are noted by Lewis. Lewis, ‘An Argument’, p. 102. Lewis’s argument proceeds in two distinct stages, the first defining mental states in terms of their causal roles (basic functionalism), the second identifying the contingent realisers of those roles with e.g. neural states (physicalistic functionalism). Putnam, ‘Our Mental Life’, p. 295. Cf. Lewis, ‘An Argument’, pp. 100, 106. The lyre analogy essentially expresses a supervenience thesis and a thesis about multiple realisability according to Caston, ‘Epiphenomenalisms’, p. 322. This supervenience interpretation is indebted to Caston, ‘Epiphenomalisms’, pp. 332– 4. (Stephen Everson interprets the aberrant cases similarly, ‘Psychology’, Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 168–94, 186). Caston supplies extensive textual evidence supporting the attribution of supervenience to Aristotle – pace Burnyeat, who takes case three not to be anger, concluding that the passage denies supervenience, ‘Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind’, p. 23. Putnam, ‘Our Mental Life’, pp. 297 (his emphasis), 303. See also Michael Frede, ‘On Aristotle’s Conception of the Soul’, Nussbaum and Rorty, Essays, pp. 93–107, especially pp. 95–6; and Nussbaum and Putnam, ‘Changing Aristotle’s Mind’. This is partly a consequence of taking the harmony theory in an Aristotelian direction, following Barnes, who thinks that Aristotle’s ‘hasty dismissal of the [harmony] theory is a pity’, Presocratic Philosophers, p. 190; cf. Frede, ‘Aristotle’s Conception’, pp. 98–9 (Frede also emphasises some dissimilarities). Charlton, ‘Aristotle and the Harmonia Theory’, p. 133. Alan Code, ‘Aristotle, Searle and the Mind–Body Problem’, John Searle and his Critics, eds Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 105–13; Code and Julius Moravcsik, ‘Explaining Various Forms of Living’, in Nussbaum and Rorty, Essays, 129–145. Marc Cohen sees the causation question as crucial to settling the functionalist debate, in ‘Aristotle’s Hylomorphism’, ibid., pp. 57–73, 71. They may be beside the point if, for example, functionalism is compatible with emergentism, as Caston seems to suggest, in ‘Epiphenomenalisms’. He argues that Aristotle is an emergentist, and takes emergentism to be compatible with a belief in supervenience and multiple realisability, so I anticipate he would take it to be compatible with the full functionalist interpretation (assuming no other hindrances). Nussbaum and Putnam describe Burnyeat’s Aristotle this way, ‘Changing Aristotle’s Mind’, pp. 46–7. Burnyeat, ‘Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind’, pp. 17, 23. Burnyeat has other objections I do not address, e.g. about a functionalist demand for materialistic explanation (this is countered by Nussbaum and Putnam in their response).

The musical, the magical, and the mathematical soul 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29

30 31 32

33

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‘Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind’, p. 26. Sorabji, ‘Body and Soul’. Burnyeat, ‘Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind’, p. 26 Cf. Lewis’ above-quoted remark about ‘just experiences’. See e.g. J.L. Ackrill, ‘Aristotle’s Definitions of psuche’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 73 (1972–3), pp. 119–33; Bernard Williams, ‘Hylomorphism’ (1986), in Julia Annas (ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 4, pp. 189–99; Marc Cohen, ‘Hylomorphism and Functionalism’; Jennifer Whiting, ‘Living Bodies’, Nussbaum and Rorty, Essays, pp. 75–91. They deny supervenience, arguing (mistakenly) that it is incompatible with multiple realisability, and with desire-based causal explanation, ‘Changing Aristotle’s Mind’, pp. 33–4. They say supervenience is ‘right’ but ‘trivial’, while generally disparaging it, pp. 49, 51. For a helpful explanation see Sorabji, ‘Intentionality’, p. 221. Sorabji, ‘Intentionality’, p. 221. The interpretation given here draws on Barnes, ‘Aristotle’s Concept of Mind’, 106–7, where logos enhulos has the alternative translation; Deborah Modrak, Aristotle: the Power of Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 28–9; Everson, ‘Psychology’, pp. 181–3; and Nussbaum and Putnam (see below). Modrak thinks such definitions do not fit modern (analytic) functionalism (though may fit biological functionalism). Points are also raised against the interpretation by Everson, and it is rejected by Cohen, ‘Hylomorphism and Functionalism’. Cf. Barnes, ‘part of the meaning of “x is angry” [Aristotle] implies, is “the blood about x’s heart is boiling”’, ‘Aristotle’s Concept of Mind’, p. 107. Putnam, ‘Our Mental Life’, p. 291. See Cohen’s Appendix to ‘Hylomorphism and Functionalism’, to which I am indebted. He contrasts two translations, the first being at odds with the above interpretation, the second not. W.D. Ross gives Aristotle a negative reply: the question whether flesh and bones are part of the form of man is followed by ‘No, they are matter; but because man is not found also in other matters we are unable to effect the severance’. According to Montgomery Furth there is no negative reply: what follows the question is not an answer but more question: ‘Or not, but matter …?’ (Ross in The Works of Aristotle Translated into English, eds J.A. Smith and Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912–54), likewise in the Barnes revision), Furth in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Books Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Translation and Commentary (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985).) Cohen (defending functionalism) favours Ross. Nussbaum and Putnam, ‘Changing Aristotle’s Mind’, pp. 31, 32, 46. The comparison with ‘snub’ is discussed in more detail on p. 31, in connection with Metaphysics 1026a 2–3.

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2


The soul’s relation to the body: Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant and the Parisian debate on monopsychism M.W. F. Stone … in the history of philosophy the distortions of commentators can be more fruitful than fidelity. Richard Sorabji

No longer subject to a standard characterisation, the ‘mind–body problem’ is nevertheless recognisable to most contemporary philosophers in one of two quite general formulations.1 The first version takes its point of departure from that thicket of puzzles bequeathed to modern philosophy by Descartes’ suggestive characterisation of a human being as a res cogitans.2 If I am first and foremost a ‘thinking thing,’ an individual whose mind is an immaterial and non-extended substance, then I need to explain those relations which might be said to exist between my mind, so understood, and my body, when that is defined as a material, physical thing.3 In another typical formulation, the ‘mind–body problem’ does not concern the relation between the mental and the physical, since by assumption everything is now deemed to be physical. Rather, the philosophical puzzle concerns how, and by what means, the relation between the mental and the non-mental is to be explained. This version of the ‘problem’ is common to philosophers who have rejected outright the so-called dualism associated with the Cartesian tradition, and have replaced it with one or other versions of materialism.4 It is significant that these modern and contemporary philosophical problems were not recognised as such by successive generations of medieval thinkers. This was so because medieval philosophers, for the most part, thought that the relations between mind and body were uncontroversial. The reasons for this were simple enough. Debates about the mind (mens) or soul (anima) and its relation to the body (corpus), all took their cue from the idea that a human being was a unified individual. Created in the image of God (imago Dei), a human being was thought to be an integrated entity possessing an immaterial and spiritual part, the soul, and a material body.

The soul’s relation to the body

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Despite the existence of an immaterial soul within a material human being, medieval philosophers were untroubled by the relations which might be said to exist between the soul and the body. Significantly, they did not think that the human soul was ‘trapped’ in a material body, and seldom, if ever, did they court the excesses of substance dualism characterised by Gilbert Ryle as ‘the dogma of the ghost in the machine’.5 Furthermore, philosophers of the medieval period exhibited no unease on questions concerning relations between mental and non-mental phenomena. Mental states were not ‘reduced’ to physical states nor were they ‘eliminated’ in favour of processes of the brain. Medieval discussions of the soul were of an entirely different type and order from modern debates about the mind. Their difference is such that they can be neither assimilated to, nor easily compared with, contemporary discussions of the ‘mind–body problem’. Medieval theories of the soul stand on their own and are best evaluated by means of an analysis of the questions and issues that gave them weight and currency in their own times. Differences aside, the subject of the rational soul (anima rationalis) was of enduring interest to philosophers throughout the medieval period.6 The study of the soul was a part of natural philosophy. Since the materials and writings connected with the study of psychology in the Middle Ages are gargantuan, it is best to select from the profusion of authors and texts a single issue that can relate to those unfamiliar with medieval thought something of the flavour of the debates about the soul. To this end, I shall consider the once contentious issue of monopsychism, especially as that topic was debated by philosophers and theologians at the University of Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century. Monopsychism is the theory that there is only one single intellect for all human beings. Bequeathed to the history of philosophy by Neoplatonism, but more strongly associated with Arab interpretations of Aristotelian psychology, it impressed itself upon the philosophical agenda of the late 1260’s and early 1270’s. The Parisian debate over monopsychism can be said to provide a convenient window on medieval discussions of the soul, for the reason that it introduces so many of the core themes, central protagonists and innovators of high scholastic thought. In what follows, I shall attempt to make the terms of the debate tractable by means of a discussion of the distinctive contributions of two of its central characters: Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Siger of Brabant (c.1240–84). A discussion of their work will serve to illustrate not only some of the more salient aspects of late thirteenth-century psychology, but also the complex philosophical and theological issues perceived to be at stake in debates about the soul. The background to the dispute over monopsychism that would stimulate the creative efforts of both Thomas and Siger, was provided by the medieval reception of Aristotle’s account of the soul in De anima.7 Prior to that recep-

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tion, Latin Christian thought on the soul had been influenced by Augustine and by pseudo-Augustinian works like De fide ad petrum and De definitione recte fidei.8 This tradition held that the soul was an immortal spiritual substance, created for and infused into the body of each individual by God. It governed the body in this life, but it was capable of an independent existence and would be eternally punished or blessed as its actions in this world merited. It was in the soul that the human person resided. Thus, a common theme in the work of Augustine, for instance, is the definition of a human being as a soul using a body.9 Soul and body, according to this tradition were separate substances, but each soul had its own body, for which it had been created and to which it would be restored at the final Resurrection. The acquisition, translation and subsequent dissemination of a number of Islamic, Jewish and Hellenic works during the twelfth century helped to cast the study of the rational soul in a new light. These works not only occasioned a revision of the Augustinian position, but further brought to the fore problems and issues that had not been previously considered by medieval philosophers. By the time Aristotle’s De anima became generally known in the first decades of the thirteenth century in early translations by James of Venice and Michael Scot (fl. 1220),10 much of its teaching was already familiar to scholars through Latin translations of the works of Semitic authors. Of these, the work of the Christian Arab Costa Ben Luca (864–923),11 the Spanish Jew Avicebron (c.1020–c.1058 or 1070),12 the great Islamic polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980–1037), and the philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126–98), came to exert great influence on Latin Christian thinking about the soul. The teaching of these Semitic authors became known to Latin authors through works like the De anima of Dominicus Gundissalinus (fl. 1150).13 Gundissalinus sought to bring together elements from Augustine, Avicenna and Avicebron, whose works he had a hand in translating.14 Despite the eclectic nature of his De anima, Gundissalinus enjoys the merit of introducing to medieval readers the idea of universal hylomorphism, the notion that the soul is the ‘form’ of the body, which he took from Avicebron.15 By the close of the twelfth century, knowledge of the works of Semitic writers was increasing in philosophical circles. This helped to make accessible certain aspects of Aristotle’s teaching about the soul. Appreciation of that teaching, however, tended to be somewhat general as can be witnessed in remarks made on the soul by Alexander Nequam (1157–1217) in his Speculum speculationum.16 It is not until we encounter the De anima of John Blund (c.1175–d.1248), written shortly after the year 1200, that a more informed treatment of the tenets of Aristotelian psychology can be said to emerge.17 What is so significant about Blund’s treatise is that writing at the beginning of the


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thirteenth century, he identifies very clearly the basic problem that subsequent theories of the soul would have to confront. This concerns whether it is ever possible to hold simultaneously the Aristotelian idea that the soul is ‘the form of the body’ and the Augustinian notion that it is ‘a separate substance’.18 Although Blund’s understanding of Aristotle was conditioned heavily by Arabic intermediaries, he was among the first to appreciate the meaning of Aristotle’s hylomorphism and its implications for traditional teaching on the immortality of the soul.19 By the end of the 1230’s, philosophers had concluded their initial assessment of the Semitic works. Reactions to Aristotelian themes and positions, encountered therein or else by exposure to translations of the De anima, were various. Up to 1240 the majority of Latin authors were of the opinion that the Aristotelian and Augustinian theses concerning the soul’s relation to the body were mutually exclusive. For example, we find Blund admitting that the soul is the form of the body, but ever anxious to preserve the immortality of the soul, he eventually concludes that the soul possesses an accidental relationship to the body.20 This position stands in contrast to that of Alexander Nequam who thought that the soul was a distinct substance thereby denying the thesis that it was the form of the body.21 Philip the Chancellor (c.1160/1185–1236/1237),22 Alexander of Hales (c.1185–1245)23 and William of Auvergne (d.1249)24 all rejected the view that the rational soul was the form of the body, a status they assigned to the sensitive soul or to the corporeal soul. In this last group of thinkers we find a more general allegiance to the dualism associated with Augustine and his tradition. Roland of Cremona (fl. 1230) attempted to avoid the implications of Aristotle’s hylomorphism by substituting the term ‘perfection’ for ‘form’. In this way he hoped to maintain the traditional distinction of body and soul as distinct substances.25 Thus, the initial effect of the reception by Parisian Masters of Aristotelian ideas was to precipitate marked disagreement within early thirteenth century psychology. There was no clear consensus on what the human soul was or how it related to the body.26 Greater familiarity with the actual text of the De anima in the fourth and fifth decades of the thirteenth century brought with it a more systematic understanding of Aristotle’s account of the soul. This derived in large part from the fact that Aristotelian learning, having previously been subject to censure, was officially endorsed by the University of Paris.27 There, on 19 March 1255, the Arts Faculty proclaimed a new syllabus that required its members to study all the known works of Aristotle.28 A similar enthusiasm for and institutional tolerance of Aristotelian philosophy already existed at the University of Oxford.29 In the following years a spate of translations of Aristotle’s works, including a new version of De anima, were produced by William of Moerbeke (c.1215/1235–c.1286).30 Moerbeke’s literal but

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complete translations of Aristotle’s books helped to furnish medieval readers with a comprehensive picture of the different areas of Aristotle’s philosophical system. Two consequences followed immediately as a result of the University’s sponsorship of Aristotle’s philosophy. In the first place, an intellectual climate was created in which traditional theories in all areas of philosophy and the natural sciences were tested and contrasted with the new learning. In psychology, for instance, we witness a series of changes in which the study of the rational soul begins to move away from the tradition of Augustine to incorporate theories and postures that are more recognisably distilled from the De anima.31 In the second place, the widespread dissemination of Aristotle’s writings in the Universities helped to mobilise forces strongly opposed to the Stagirite. Such hostility was based on those important aspects of Aristotle’s teaching deemed antithetical to Christian theology.32 In the case of the rational soul, we find a number of theologians from 1260 onwards explicitly attacking Aristotelian psychology in these very terms. A major cause of concern was the perception that Aristotle’s account of soul seemed to preclude the idea that the soul could survive bodily death. The on-going debate about the respective merits and demerits of Aristotle’s psychology and its relation to Christian belief, provides an important backdrop to the controversy over monopsychism. For as we shall see, many of the issues that divided Siger from Thomas were issues that concerned how Aristotle’s teaching in De anima was to be interpreted, and whether that teaching could be shown to be congruous with the Christian faith. What, then, were the issues and questions that Aristotle’s readers in the Arts and Theology Faculties addressed when they read the De anima? 33 One of the pressing issues confronted by all medieval readers, and not just those in Paris, concerned the general coherence of Aristotle’s text.34 What, they asked, did Aristotle teach about the soul? What did he mean when he claimed that the soul was the ‘form’ of the body? And was the soul immortal? In seeking answers to these questions, thirteenth-century readers were not initially assisted by the equivocal nature of some of Aristotle’s remarks.35 They understood, for instance, that in the De anima, Aristotle had listed three types of soul, the vegetative, sensitive and intellective, and that he had further divided the intellect (νοt^ς) into an active element and a passive or receptive element.36 These elements became known to later commentators as the ‘agent intellect’ (νοt^ς ποιητικo´ς) and the ‘potential or possible intellect’ (νοt^ς παθητικo´ς) respectively.37 The medievals also knew that Aristotle regarded thinking (moei^m) as one of man’s essential activities and that the intellect was a part of the soul.38 Moreover, they were very struck by Aristotle’s argument that intellect is that which sets human beings apart from other animals, and that human beings are rational animals. They saw


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this argument confirmed in a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle describes intellectual contemplation as man’s ultimate perfection.39 They were also much taken by Aristotle’s stress upon the immaterial nature of thought and of the intellect which is defined as the ‘principle’ (λo´γος) of thought.40 Being immaterial, Aristotle had argued that the intellect is not generated by a substantial change of matter. In a celebrated passage in the treatise On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle states that intellect in man comes from ‘without’ (θt´qαθεν).41 Such statements, the medievals thought, could only mean that Aristotle held the intellect to be immortal. Aristotle’s medieval readers were anxious to know whether or not these points could be reconciled. It is not too difficult to see why this question was raised. Human beings, Aristotle tells us, clearly belong to the category of corruptible corporeal substances and to the genus animal. Human beings are therefore composed of matter and form, of body and soul. So, a human being is born and dies like all other animals. Thus far all seems clear. But here comes the complication. The intellect, however, is immaterial and inorganic, and being such seems to belong to another world, that of immaterial substances. These substances are eternal and simple, and each substance is unique in its species. If this is so, how then do these two very different kinds of things, material body and immaterial intellect, come together? How is such an intellect to be united with an individual human being? From whence does such an intellect come? How can it constitute a human being’s specific perfection? What becomes of it at the death of an individual human being? And, how can this immaterial substance be multiplied within one and the same species? The fact that these questions were left unresolved by Aristotle himself was to lead to many different interpretations of the core claims of De anima. The monopsychism controversy has its origins in the attempts of successive commentators, first Greek, then Arab, and finally Latin-speaking Christians, to provide answers to the questions left unanswered by Aristotle’s exposition. As mentioned above, it was the tradition of commentary associated with the Arabs, in particular the reading of De anima 3.5 by Averroes, that was to have such an impact upon the work of Thomas and Siger. However, before detailing Averroes’ distinctive solution to the problem of the agent intellect, we must first put that reading in context by outlining the attempts of earlier Greek and Arab commentators to make sense of Aristotle’s teaching on the agent intellect within the principles of hylomorphism. Among the Greeks, Alexander of Aphrodisias (c.AD 200) was the first to assert that the agent intellect was identical with Aristotle’s supreme principle and cause of the universe, the unmoved mover or ‘god’ that is a self-thinking intellect. In his own work, also known by the title De anima,42 Alexander presents two arguments that the unmoved mover, as pure self-thinking

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intellect and intelligible in its own right, is responsible for our own individual acts of thought. First, he argues that since the unmoved mover is supremely intelligible it must be the cause of the intelligibility of other things,43 and secondly, being the cause of existence for all other things, it must be the cause of being for all the objects of intellect.44 More then a century later, Themistius (c.AD 317–c.388) in his Paraphrases on the De anima of Aristotle45 rejected Alexander’s equation on the grounds that for Aristotle the agent intellect was ‘in’ the soul. He suggested that the productive intellect might be a secondary god, a suprahuman entity that is the cause activating each human being’s possible intellect.46 Themistius identified the cause of thinking with the Platonic form of the good. With regard to the agent intellect, which Aristotle compared to light, Themistius held that it was present like a ray to each mind when it is involved in thought. The highest part of the human self is therefore a compound formed of the transcendent agent intellect and the individual’s potential intellect. Unlike Aristotle and Alexander, however, Themistius claimed that the possible intellect when joined to the productive intellect constitutes the immortal aspect of human nature.47 After the Greeks, the Arab commentators Avicenna and Averroes put forward novel interpretations of how those passages concerning the intellect at De anima 3.5 were to be read. Their work would exercise a profound influence on thirteenth-century thinkers.48 Avicenna’s general account of the mind was indebted to Neoplatonism and characterised by a strong affirmation of the substantial nature of the soul and by dualism. Yet he did not disregard what Aristotle had said concerning the soul as the form of the body. Thus Avicenna distinguished between the study of the soul in itself (in se) from the study of the soul considered as ‘the principle of life’ (principium vitae). In se, the soul is a spiritual substance, which is independent from the body;49 its ontological self-sufficiency is confirmed by the fact that it can be known without reference to the body.50 In point of fact, however, Avicenna contends that the human soul is the lowest of the separate intelligences and because of this weakness it requires the human body to acquire individuation and to perform its activities.51 Animation, however, is nothing but a function of the soul, it does not characterise its nature.52 The essence of the soul is to be a substance and the animating function it performs vis-à-vis the body is accidental to its nature. Accordingly, Avicenna uses the term ‘perfection’ or ‘motor’ to describe the soul, rather than the Aristotelian term ‘form,’ because the latter has connotations that are incompatible with the essential nature of the soul as substance.53 The relationship of the soul to the body ceases to have any real meaning after death. The soul continues to live its substantial, self-subsistent


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existence in the company of the superior intelligences that are in its true realm. This spiritual substance is the real self of the human being: we are our soul.54 Averroes, in turn, tried to clarify and solve what was believed to be Aristotle’s aporiae concerning the nature of the intellect within the principles of hylomorphism. He accepted and refined the notion of the soul as the substantial form of the body. The soul is a substance in so far as it is a form and such that it is the perfection of the natural body which potentially has life.55 Averroes understood that perfection in this context meant the first principle of actuality: ‘this perfection precedes all others in the order of being, that is why it should be added to the definition that the soul is the first perfection of the natural body which potentially has life.’56 It is important to note, however, that this definition of the soul as the form of the body is analogical;57 it allows for only an imperfect understanding of the different kinds of soul (diminute facit cognoscere),58 and consequently, requires specific adjustments for each level of life, vegetative, sensitive and human. In the case of human beings, the soul that is the first principle of actuality, and the form of the body, is a highly sensitive soul that possesses among its activities imagination and cognition. This is identified by Averroes as the corruptible intellectus passibilis (νοt^ς παθητικo´ς) of De anima 430a 20–25.59 Human beings are, therefore, hylomorphic composites, subject to generation and corruption, and their substantial form is the most perfect of sensitive souls. What then is the nature of the intellect, or rather the agent intellect and the material intellects? For Averroes they are separate substances, and consequently, even if the definition of the soul can be predicated analogically of the different souls which are united to the body, it can be predicated of intellects only equivocally. This is so because the intellects do not have an ontological relation to the body, but only an operational one.60 The agent intellect is a spiritual and eternal substance. If this is the case, Averroes must explain how intellectual activity on the part of this separate and unique substance can become in some way the activity of individual human beings. Surely, one must account for the fact that human beings have at least the impression of engaging in thinking, for single intellects evidently think in different ways in different individuals. Averroes diligently attempts to account for all these facts. His central point is that the single intellect is naturally ordered toward individual human beings. It unites itself to them in their brains by making use of their cerebral images in order to abstract ideas therefrom and it uses these ideas in order to think in them. It is in this way that the activity of the single intellect takes place in different individuals, and each individual has the impression that he is thinking when in fact the intellect for the whole species thinks in him by using his images.61

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Leaving aside questions concerning the merits of Averroes’ thesis, there can be little doubt that for some medieval readers his interpretation of the agent intellect filled in a noticeable gap in Aristotle’s exposition. For this reason it is unsurprising that certain Masters of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris were won over to Averroes’ interpretation of the De anima during the decade from 1260 to 1270. Given their need for a coherent reading of the text, they saw in Averroes a means of preserving the essential meaning of Aristotle’s teaching. To them Averroes was the ‘fundamentum commentatoris’ (the best of all commentators). Another reason for Averroes’ popularity among these magisteri was that his interpretation of De anima seemed to them wholly consistent with one of the central principles of Aristotelian metaphysics; the thesis that an immaterial substance is unique within its species, separate from matter and eternal. Although we still know very little about the origins of this ‘Averroist school,’62 we have one excellent later source for monopsychism, Siger of Brabant’s Quaestiones in tertium de anima (Questions on Book III of the De anima). This work, the critical edition of which was published in 1972, can be dated at 1269. 63 The position that Siger develops coincides substantially with that of Averroes.64 The Quaestiones form a small, wellconstructed treatise, divided into four parts. In the first section (q.1) Siger considers only one question. Is the intellective principle ‘rooted’ in the same substance as the vegetative and sensitive principles?65 The problem under consideration had divided thirteenth-century thinkers for some time. Two divergent views had dominated discussion of this issue prior to Siger’s treatise. The first view admitted the existence of at least two souls in a human being: a vegetative-sensitive soul drawn from matter and natural generation; and an immaterial intellective soul. This soul was created immediately by God, either at the moment of conception, or else during the course of the development of the embryo.66 The second type of view, however, held that there was only one soul. Such a soul was defined as the principle of all activity because of its powers of operation.67 Albert the Great (1200–80) had first defended the second position in Summa de creaturis (c.1240–45),68 but he had proposed a new position in his De natura et origine animae, undoubtedly written after 1260.69 There, he argued that the intellective soul, created by God, is united to the vegetativesensitive soul that is formed in the embryo. The intellective soul constitutes with the vegetative-sensitive soul one single composite substance, a substance partly of internal origin and partly of external origin.70 This last point can serve to clarify Siger’s position in the first question of the treatise. In presenting the human soul as a composite entity he appears to embrace the first position but as we shall see things turn out to be more complicated than that. After he has stated the second view, Siger argues that the intellect, having come from ‘without’ (cf. Aristotle, On the Generation


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of Animals, 2.3. 736b 25–9), unites with the vegetative and sensitive principle. By this union the human soul itself is constituted, which is a composite soul. Here Siger seems to admit of a substantial bond between the two components of the human soul, which would imply duality of substantial forms in a human being: the intellective soul, and the vegetative-sensitive soul. But this interpretation, reminiscent of Philip the Chancellor, is ruled out by later questions in which he professes the classical thesis of Averrorism: the intellect is a single separate substance. Thus Siger argues at question 7 that the intellect cannot be the substantial form of the body. Rather, the intellect ‘perfects’ (perfecit) the body by reason of its power of operation, a power that is united to the individual’s power of operation, the imagination. Moreover, it is because the intellect is a separate substance that it is unique and eternal.71 The second part of Siger’s treatise (qq. 2–6) studies the nature of the intellect considered in itself (in se). Siger argues that if one holds Aristotle’s opinion, then the intellect is eternal and ungenerated. Among Aristotle’s Greek commentators, only Alexander of Aphrodisias had defended the opposite position. But, Siger continues, we are conscious of receiving universal forms (ideas) in ourselves. Since a material power can only grasp material objects, that is to say, individuals, the intellect is therefore an immaterial reality and cannot be generated. Ungenerated, the intellect is also incorruptible by its nature. However, since it is finite, it does not have of itself the power to exist perpetually. It owes its perpetual character to its cause, which in creating it also gives to it the capacity to endure forever. This capacity is dependent upon the divine will.72 Finally, Siger argues, the intellect is not composed of matter and form. It is composed only of genus and a specific difference.73 The third part (qq. 7–9) which considers the relation of the single intellect to the plurality of human bodies, is most important since Siger here unveils the extent of his Averroist allegiances. The intellect, he claims, perfects the body not by its substance but by its power of operation. Its union with the body is therefore by operation.74 In what does such a union consist? It is twofold. As a mover of the body the intellect moves the entire body per se and every part of the body per accidens. As the principle of intellection, the intellect is united only to the imagination (phantasia) and to its origin, the brain. As a separate substance, the intellect is unique for the entire human species. Moreover, since the intellect is incorruptible, the species is adequately represented by one single intellect, as is true of all separate substances. But its activity varies in different individuals because each individual presents to the unique intellect its own cerebral images (phantasmata).75 In the fourth and final part of Quaestiones in tertium de anima (qq. 10– 18) Siger considers the two powers of the intellect and their activity. It is here that the difficulties of the Averroist position come to the surface, and

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he addresses these with some earnestness. First of all, is the intellect passive in its activity? Siger replies that it is not passive in the way in which matter is, but it is receptive. If the intellect is receptive in potency how then does it act? By the action of the agent intellect, Siger answers, which produces ideas by abstraction from our images and informs the receptive intellect with them.76 The receptive intellect initially grasps first principles in an infallible manner, and then all else in light of these first principles. It always knows the agent intellect, but is not united to us in this higher kind of knowledge. We know of the existence of the agent intellect, Siger claims, because we have a certain experience of the fact that the receptive intellect receives abstract ideas. This reveals to us the abstractive activity of the agent intellect.77 This position prompts yet further questions that Siger proceeds to tackle. How can the agent intellect produce a multiplicity of intelligibles in an intellect that is simple, immaterial, and inorganic? How can the intellect’s activities be regarded as our own, if the intellect itself is united to us only by means of our images, which are nothing but the matter for intellection? These give rise to some spirited discussion on Siger’s part. Briefly, his reply is that the actions of the intellect become ours because the intellect has need of our brain images in order to exercise its activities. This is why Averroes shows that the union of this unique and eternal intellect with the human species, which is also unique and eternal, is more essential than its union with any particular individual.78 It is noteworthy that Siger is not satisfied with this reply. In the following section he sums up the difficulties he has encountered and presents them as threefold. How is the unique intellect united with us? How can the cognition of this intellect be diversified in different human individuals? If the intellect is a separate substance, why does it have need of corporeal images? His response to these points is based on his argument that our union with the intellect is a fact, since we are conscious of the contents of abstract thought. Since this union cannot be substantial, we must conclude that it is only by way of intellectual activity.79 There is a further reason, he thinks, which substantiates this point. Intellectual activity is realised in different ways in different individuals. This can only be explained by reason of different images present in different brains.80 But it is difficult to explain how our images can serve as a bond between ourselves and the intellect, since they cease to be images once they become ideas in the intellect. Siger finds no other explanation but the fact that the intellect is naturally united to us. It is of its nature to draw its ideas from our images.81 Siger raises a final question. Can the intellect know the particular? He explains that while the intellect cannot know a particular in forma propria, knowledge of the particular is possible because the content of a universal idea is realised in the particular.82


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Siger does, then, embrace monopsychism in his Quaestiones in tertium de anima.83 It is important to recognise, however, that he adopts this doctrine not because he is keen and eager to fly in the face of Christian teaching about the soul, but because of a sincere attempt to interpret Aristotle’s teaching ‘correctly’.84 This is why he draws on the services of Averroes. The thesis of the fundamentum commentatoris is embraced by Siger for no other reason than that he is convinced that Averroes’ reading of the texts helps us to make the best sense of Aristotle. Thus, Siger’s allegiance to monopsychism is generated by a exegetical thoroughness, accompanied by a philosophical willingness to think through those problems and issues concerning the agent intellect inherited from Aristotle’s text. By 1269 it was clear that the views of magisteri like Siger were causing a great deal of disquiet, particularly in the theology faculty. For instance, it has long been known that Bonaventure (c.1215–74) attacked some of the views held by Siger’s group in his Lenten Conferences of 1267 and 1268.85 Other Franciscan Masters of theology, most notably William of Baglione (fl. 1260) and John Peccham (c.1230–92), also put forward strong criticisms of the unicity of the intellect.86 William’s discussion of this issue, for instance, indicates that he already had first-hand knowledge of Averroes’ Commentary on the De anima.87 What emerges from the discussions of these last two Franciscan friars is the view that if distinct intellectual and spiritual powers are not present in different human individual beings, the possibility of personal survival after death is diminished.88 After Siger the next major figure in the monopsychism controversy was Thomas Aquinas. In 1270 in Paris he published a polemical treatise entitled De unitate intellectus (On the unity of the Intellect),89 in which he aimed to show that the thesis advanced by Siger and Averroes was wrong, and that it was based upon an incorrect reading of Aristotle. Thomas had sought to expose the shortcomings of the Averroist position from the beginning of his career. Thus one finds in Book II of his Commentary on the Sentences, dating around 1255, a noteworthy discussion of on the problem of the intellect in which Averroes’ monopsychism is explained and criticised at length.90 Later in his Summa contra gentiles of (1259–61),91 and the Sententia libri de anima (Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima) of (1265–68),92 the thesis of unicity of the intellect is rejected on grounds that it is in error and that it fails to secure a convincing interpretation of Aristotle. Thomas was strongly opposed to the position adopted by Siger. However, before we can detail the nature of that opposition as contained in De unitate intellectus, we must outline Thomas’ account of the rational soul and his general debt to Aristotelian psychology. Only then will we be in a position to appreciate the scope and point of his arguments.

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Thomas’ theory of the rational soul, a theory that finds its final expression in Summa theologiae,93 can be summarised as follows. A human being is a single substance, composed of matter and form. The substantial form of a human being, its rational soul, is entirely different in nature from that of lower forms, including animal souls and the souls of other living things. The human soul is an immaterial form; it is therefore subsisting, incorruptible and immortal. This idea involves an application of Aristotle’s hylomorphism, while at the same time maintaining the immaterial and subsistent character of the soul. The distinguishing feature of Thomas’ position is his attempt to combine the immortality of the rational soul with the Peripatetic idea that the soul functions as the form of the body.94 It is important to note the novelty of Thomas’ position. One only need recall the dualism of earlier Christian thinkers to appreciate the nature of Thomas’ appropriation of hylomorphism. The dualism of these philosophers was derived from Neoplatonism through the intermediary of Augustine. While the soul for Augustine is no longer in the ‘prison’ of the body, as it was for Plato and his successors, it is still a distinct substance. Thomas did not simply state the doctrine of hylomorphism, he attempted to prove its validity by showing that it was the only explanation of the soul-body relation that could do justice to the data of consciousness. To see how he did this let us return to the above thesis and flesh it out. For Thomas, a human being is one substance, that is to say, a subsistent being that is truly unified. All the data provided by experience point, he thinks, to this substantial unity. Thus, one is conscious of being a single conscious subject. Further, one is conscious of the fact that one’s body is a constituting element of one’s self and not a distinct and juxtaposed being with which one would only have more or less close relationships. Therefore, all the activities that take place in this body are really expressions of the ‘self’ of an individual person who performs various activities such as walking, speaking, breathing etc. This substantial individual is the ‘principle’ (principia) or source of all activity. The majority of these activities take place in a corporeal organ, but thinking and willing are immaterial in nature and hence inorganic activities. All of this is established, Thomas thinks, by starting from experience and is expressed in the doctrine of the activity and expansion of a finite substance. Due to this capacity this substance enters into contact with other finite substances and is thereby enriched. The substantial individual is a true hylomorphic composite. Once more we are dealing with an interpretation required by experience. Aristotle demonstrates matter-form composition of corporeal substances in different but converging ways. I will simply reiterate them here. One may start from the fact of substantial change, which is clear in the case of living beings since they are subject to birth and death. One may begin from the continuous


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change that is found in bodies by reason of their quantity, the distinctive characteristic of corporeal being, since the body is defined in terms of extension. Finally, one may start from the multiplicity of individuals within the same species, a fact that is difficult to deny at least in living beings which reproduce themselves with the same species. All of these markers that point to matter-form composition are found in human beings as well as in animals. A human being is subject to birth and death. A human being is passive in its organic activities. These activities are subject to time, the measure of continuous change. Lastly, a human being can reproduce itself within the human species, which includes countless other individuals. None of these facts could be accounted for, Thomas thinks, if the human substance were viewed as a pure form, that is, as a simple essence or substantial determination in a pure state.95 That said, Thomas thinks that the human soul is very unusual in nature, and this enables it to serve as the meeting point between the world of the corporeal and the purely spiritual. The dominant fact that controls Thomas’ view of the human soul is the idea that we are conscious of thinking. ‘It is evident that this individual man thinks’ (hic homo singularis intelligit) writes Thomas in De unitate intellectus.96 In other words, intellectual activity, which Aristotle had shown to be immaterial and inorganic, is truly an activity of the human individuals that we are. Starting from this, Thomas demonstrates that the soul must be the substantial principle of human activity, even though it is immaterial in nature. At one and the same time the soul is the form of matter and an immaterial form. By form of matter Thomas means that the soul is the unique source of all human activity, and by an immaterial form he means to say that it is a form spiritual in nature. As a consequence of this Thomas terms the soul a ‘subsisting form,’ which being such is incorruptible, immortal, imperishable, even when the other composing principle, matter, is lacking due to the destruction of the human substance through death.97 Thomas’ teaching about the rational soul carries with it an important corollary. The human soul is directly created by God at the end of a biological process that leads to the production of a new human individual. It is because of this creationist metaphysics that Thomas thinks he can escape from the impasse in which he thought Aristotle had become entwined. Aristotle, as the medievals read him, could not conceive of the coming into being of an immaterial soul in the course of time, since he held that every substance separated from matter was eternal and uncaused. For Thomas, as indeed for all other Christian thinkers, the coming into being of an immaterial substance in the course of time does not present any great difficulty, since the creative influx is a permanent causality, i.e. God, which gives being to all new entities that appear in the course of the universe’s development. In thus accounting for the origin of the soul by creation Thomas’ teaching ploughs the same furrow as his Christian predecessors.

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On returning to his teaching duties in Paris in 1268, having been in Naples and then Rome, Thomas could not but have come into contact with Siger’s thesis. Despite the principled interventions of Bonaventure in 1267 and 1268, Siger’s teaching was the talk of the Arts Faculty. Aquinas could not have ignored the protests that the actions of this group elicited from members of the Theology Faculty. It would not have been difficult for Thomas while at Saint-Jacques, the Dominican convent, to acquire the notes of students who were studying in the Faculty of Arts. He would have recognised the gravity of the situation and the twin threats posed by Averroist monopsychism to Christian orthodoxy and the good name of his beloved Aristotle. To counter these threats Thomas began to prepare a brief treatise wherein he would systematically refute the Averroist position while restricting himself to natural reason. Thomas makes no appeal to any special revelation; he simply concerns himself with exegesis and philosophical argument. The treatise was put into circulation in 1270, probably early in that year. It is known under the title De unitate intellectus, although certain manuscripts add to this contra Averroistas (against Averroes) or contra Averroistas Parisienses (against the Parisian Averroists).98 Consultation of Thomas’ treatise reveals many significant points. First of all, his exposition envisions the teaching of Averroes himself, who is often named and whose positions are frequently discussed. On the other hand, in many passages, Thomas speaks of his adversaries in the plural and here he clearly has in mind Latin followers of Averroes. Finally, he also attacks a particular Master whom he does not name. This appears first in a passage where he seems to have in mind a particular adversary.99 But this reference to a particular adversary is most evident in the treatise epilogue (§122–4) where Thomas indignantly denounces the intolerable attitude of a Master who, all the while, declaring himself to be a Christian, defends positions which are incompatible with the faith. That said, it does not seem that in this treatise Thomas uses any published works of the Averroist Masters. Certain passages betray some hesitation on his part concerning positions defended by his adversaries. Thomas does not seem to have certain and precise knowledge of their positions. Moreover, in the closing lines of his treatise Thomas reproaches his opponent for not exposing his theory to public criticism: ‘Let him not speak in corners nor in the presence of young boys (coram pueris),100 who do not know how to pass judgement concerning such difficult matters. But let him reply in writing to this treatise, if he dares!’101 How is one to reconcile all of this with the literal citations offered by Thomas in the epilogue? The problem disappears if one conjectures that he used reportationes of Siger’s courses or of those of other Averroist masters. While citing the positions collected in these reportationes, he can also denounce the teaching they echo. It is generally agreed that the epilogue of


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De unitate intellectus has in mind Siger of Brabant, as the colophon from an Oxford codex suggests.102 However, the remarks which are offensive to Christianity and which Thomas cites are not to be found in the reportationes of Siger’s Quaestiones in tertium de anima which has come down to us. These citations could be taken from a complete reportatio of the same lectures, or else from another of Siger’s courses. In any event, it is difficult to establish with certainty that the author of the De unitate intellectus had direct knowledge of the Quaestiones in tertium de anima. All that one can say is that positions defended in this reportatio are opposed to Thomas in his opusculum. One thing is clear, however, Thomas wished to refute monopsychism. Thomas’ anti-Averroistic arguments are of unusual philosophical density.103 Their component parts can be separated into an introduction (§ 1–2), the corpus of the treatise (§ 3–123), and a brief conclusion (§ 124). The Prooemium or ‘Introduction’ supplies one indication concerning the origins and extent of the Averroist movement (§ 1, 6–7). It also alludes to Thomas’ earlier writings against the teaching of the Averroists (§ 1, 12–13), and indicates that the present exposition is to be purely philosophical based on a critical exegesis of Aristotle (§ 2, 17–31). The first part of De unitate intellectus (cc. I–III, § 3–85) includes an exegetical section (cc. I–II) and a philosophical section (c. III). In the former Thomas undertakes to interpret the major passages of Aristotle’s De anima where his teaching on the intellect is presented. He attempts to show that Aristotle’s text excludes the Averroist interpretation (§ 3–36). In support of his reading of the De anima he cites a text from the Physics (2.4. 194b 9–13) in order to present more precisely the Aristotelian view of the hierarchy of forms. The human soul is the highest of the forms united to matter, since it has a power of operation, the intellect, which is not joined to a corporeal organ. It is in this sense that the intellect is said to be separate; it is not a separate substance as Averroes would have us believe (§ 27–39). Continuing his exegesis of Aristotle, Thomas rejects the arguments drawn by the Averroists from the immortality of the intellect (§ 31–43), and then those that they base on the intellect’s origin (§ 44–50). This explanation of Aristotle’s texts is followed by a complementary investigation of the Greek (§ 51–6) and Arab (§ 57–8) Peripatetic school. Thomas shows that Themistius, Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias among the Greeks, and Avicenna and Algazel among the Arabs viewed the intellect as a power of the soul, not as a separate substance. He dwells with some satisfaction on Themistius’ commentary and reproduces lengthy passages as an aid to his general argument. Thomas was the first to make use of the recent translation by William of Moerbeke, and is evidently delighted to oppose the authentic Themistius to that presented by Averroes’ commentary.104 This lengthy exegetical section ends with a celebrated con-

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clusion (§ 59) where Thomas condemns the Aristotelianism of Averroes ‘who was not so much a Peripatetic as a corrupter of Peripatetic philosophy’ (qui non tam fuit peripateticus, quam philosophiae peripateticae depravator).105 The philosophical section of the first part (c. III) includes an exposition of arguments in which Thomas advances the view that the intellective soul is man’s substantial form (§ 60–82), and then refutes objections formulated by the Averroists (§ 83–5). This more positive exposition dwells at length on the basic argument, taken from Aristotle, which turns on an undeniable datum of consciousness (§ 62, 22): hic homo singularis intelligit (this individual man thinks). Thomas shows that neither Averroes’ explanation (§ 63– 6) nor that offered by certain Averroists (§ 67–79) can account for this inescapable fact. Thomas’ criticisms of the Averroist thesis serve as an occasion for him to identify the human soul as a form of matter (forma materiae) but not a material form (forma materialis). Hence it falls between forms that are purely material and forms that are separate (§ 83–5). The second part of De unitate intellectus (cc. IV–V, § 86–123) addresses the unicity of the intellect. Thomas argues that such a thesis would lead to absurd consequences (§ 78–91). Only one intellect would exist (§ 87, 21–5) or there would be only one intelligent being in all of humanity (§ 89, 63– 73). Finally, there could only be one act of understanding with respect to one and the same object (§ 90–1). All of these consequences, he argues run counter to human experience. Further to this, the unicity of intellect is also incompatible with Aristotle’s teaching. Here Thomas completes his exegesis of De anima begun in the first part of the treatise. What is one to make of Thomas’ exegesis of Aristotle in comparison with that of Averroes? To be fair to Averroes, it is true that he endeavours to think through the consequences implicit in Aristotle’s metaphysics whenever one tries to resolve the problem of the nature of the intellect. Thomas bases his case on a description of human psychology and on the empirical data offered by Aristotle with respect to intellectual activity. The literal commentary on the texts from Aristotle in De unitate intellectus is usually faithful and quite penetrating, but it imposes on Aristotle a consistency in the development of his ideas and the acceptance of the consequences of his statements which is often absent from De anima. Averroes can be said to do the same but in the opposite direction. For example, let us compare the two with respect to one passage in De anima Book II, chap. 2, 413b 25–7. There, Aristotle writes: ‘We have no evidence as yet about thought or the power of reflection; it seems to be of a different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of being separated’.106 In saying that the intellect is an enduring reality, Aristotle goes on to oppose it to other parts of the soul


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which are corruptible. But in stating that the intellect is incorruptible, he recognises that its existence is not tied to the body and to other parts of the soul. Further to this, he does not say anything explicit in De anima about the ontological status of the intellect. Now both the Averroists and Thomas agree that, for Aristotle, the intellect survives the death of the individual human being. But within the framework of Aristotle’s metaphysics, a perpetual and immaterial reality – which is separable from the body – can only be a separate substance. Averroes in his remarks on this passage says as much.107 Thomas avoids taking this step.108 To what degree does De unitate intellectus successfully meet the differences raised by Averroism in connection with a metaphysical study of the intellect? In the dispute a number of points are common to both parties: divine causality, the universal source of being; the doctrine of potency and act with its diverse applications; the distinction between substance and accidents; and Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Further to this, both Thomas and the Averroists accept Aristotle’s biological views; the existence in man of a soul which is the substantial form of the body; the immateriality of the intellect and its transcendence with respect to corporeal activity; the existence of an agent intellect; and the doctrine of abstraction. Given these shared positions, we can determine the extent to which the debate was circumscribed. The real point at issue between the parties had to do with the nature of the intellect or of the principle of intellectual activity, its exact relationship with individual human beings, and as a consequence, its multiplication in individuals, its origin, and its future destiny. Averroes and his Latin supporters appear at first glance to have at their disposal a solution to the problem of the intellect by drawing on the idea of God’s creative causality. One would think, therefore, that the idea of a spiritual soul that is called into existence by creation, at the moment when a new biological individual member of the human species comes into being, would not be inaccessible to them. This solution escapes them, however, for the following reason. On the one hand, their excessive reliance on Aristotle’s metaphysical framework leads them to accept without reservation a dualistic view of the universe that sharply opposes the world of spiritual substances and that of corporeal substances. On the other hand, serious weaknesses in their understanding of creative causality prevent them from adopting the solution of Thomas. For the Averroists, every immediate effect of the First Cause is eternal and unchangeable. All novelty in the world of nature is to be explained by the development proper to the material universe. It seems, then, if one looks at the debate with medieval eyes, that the Averroists’ account of the appearance of new immaterial substances is no more conceivable here than in Aristotle. Thus the Averroists find themselves being carried along the same path as Stagirite himself.

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When one examines Thomas’ reaction to these same problems, one is surprised that he never addresses these concerns from the standpoint of divine causality and does not directly criticise the weaknesses of his adversaries with respect to this. Rather than combat the Averroists on this issue he adopts an entirely different tack. This concerns the relation of the intellect to ordinary psychological experience. Thomas says at § 62, 21–3: ‘For it is clear that this individual man understands. We would never inquire concerning the intellect unless we understood.’109 Starting from the datum of conscious experience, he establishes that the intellect is an operative power whose substantial principle is an immaterial reality, but at the same time a human being’s substantial soul. This principle is the intellective or human soul, the unique source of all human action. A form of matter, the human soul is not a material form. It is not pre-contained within the potentialities of matter and its appearance cannot be explained, even on the level of secondary causes by the laws of cosmic creation. It is created by God at the time of the generation of an individual human being. As a form of matter, the human soul is individuated by its relationship to this determined matter, since this relationship is essential to its constitution. For the human soul is created as the substantial form of this given human organism. Consequently, it is no more difficult to account for a multiplicity of human souls within the human species than it is to account for the multiplicity of other substantial forms. A form of matter, the human soul is also an immaterial form, which intrinsically transcends the material order. Being capable of inorganic operation, it can subsist without its body, since operation is an expression of being. Finally, being a subsistent form and independent from the conditions of matter, the human soul does not cease to subsist when the human organism is corrupted. Such is the solution proposed by the De unitate intellectus to the problem of the intellect. There, Thomas develops an argument against monopsychism which makes a direct appeal to the datum of consciousness and which is bolstered by a thorough exegesis of De anima. If Thomas had thought he had won a great victory over Siger such a success would have been seen, at least in the context of the times, remarkably short-lived. For in December 1270 the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, condemned 13 propositions and excommunicated all ‘who shall teach or assert them knowingly.’110 Among the condemned propositions was the thesis of the unicity of the intellect.111 The effect of this censure was to prove dramatic. Tempier’s intervention transformed the controversy on monopsychism from a debate concerning Aristotelian exegesis and the philosophical merits of the unicity of the intellect, to one concerned with the refutation of religious heterodoxy. True enough, thinkers such as Bonaventure had previously expressed their theological misgivings about Siger’s thesis, and even Aquinas thought the doctrine of the unicity of intellect incompatible with Christian teaching, but they had


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contented themselves with warnings against the doctrine. Neither took the unprecedented step of Tempier and advocated that those masters associated with the view be subject to condemnation. How, then, did the parties react to the censure? Thomas was to make no further contribution to the debate. Returning to Naples in 1272 he would continue with his Summa theologiae, the third part (tertia pars) of which would remain incomplete at his death. He would die on 7 March 1274 en route to the Council of Lyons. That same year would also claim the life of Bonaventure who died on 15 July. Prior to that, however, Bonaventure made one last intervention in the debate. In his Collationes in Hexaëmeron (Collations on the Six Days of Creation) of 1273,112 he can be said to have exacerbated the doctrinal dissension, by identifying the unicity of the intellect along with the eternity of world and the animation of the heavens, as three of the most dangerous errors that threaten the Christian faith.113 Siger, however, still had some years before him, and it is significant that a year before the deaths of his two great adversaries he had returned to the subject of the nature of the intellect in his De anima intellectiva (On the Intellectual Soul).114 The following year he composed his Quaestiones super liber de causis (Commentary on the Book of Causes).115 It is now widely granted that Siger did respond to Aquinas’ challenge at De unitate intellectus, §124, (‘… let him respond in writing against this treatise, if he dares!’), but in a work now lost known to us as his De intellectu.116 Should we wish to trace Siger’s response to Aquinas, we must examine his work De anima intellectiva. In the Prologue Siger states that the rational soul will be studied by means of the texts of the philosophers rather than by asserting his own opinions.117 In Chapter 3, for instance, while examining in what way the rational soul is the form and perfection of the human body, Siger notes that ‘outstanding men in philosophy, Albert and Thomas’, hold that the substance of the intellective soul is united to the body and gives being to it, but that the power of the intellective soul is separate from the body because it does not use a corporeal organ in thinking.118 After pointing out certain differences in their views, Siger criticises both of their positions for missing Aristotle’s intention and for failing to establish their points.119 In this same context, Siger acknowledges that with regard to the unicity of the intellect, he is only seeking to determine the view of the philosophers. In one passage he comments that Aristotle may have held something other than ‘the truth and wisdom’ which has been revealed to us through revelation. He goes on to interpret Aristotle as holding that the rational soul is separate from the body in its being, that is, a separate intellect, but that it is united with the body in its actions.120 In Chapter 7 Siger turns his attention to the crucial issue of numerical multiplication of the rational soul. Once again he warns us that he is examin-

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ing this question as it pertains to Aristotle and can be understood by human reason and experience. He adds that it is certain according to revealed truth (‘that truth which cannot deceive’) that rational souls are multiplied across multiple human bodies. In other words, he now acknowledges that in fact each individual human being has its own rational soul, but he only accepts this on the strength of revelation. For he also notes that certain philosophers have maintained the opposite view, and that this position seems to follow from pure philosophical speculation.121 Those elements in De anima intellectiva that reveal Siger to be less than forthright in his defence of the unicity of the intellect, and seemingly more accommodating towards the opposite opinion,122 can be said to be confirmed in Quaestiones super librum de causis. In this work, dating from c.1275– 76, Siger defends in question 26 the view that the rational soul is indeed a perfection and form of the human body, but not in such a way that we can say that the intellective power is separated. Curiously enough, in adding this qualification, Siger seems to believe that he is opposing Aquinas. For at De unitate intellectus, c. III, Thomas had written that the human soul is not said to be the form of the body in terms of its intellective power, since that is the act of no organ. Hence as regards its intellective power, Aquinas holds that the soul is immaterial, that is, receives intelligible content in an immaterial way, and that it knows itself.123 Siger takes exception to this and argues that the rational soul is the form and perfection of the body, but not in such fashion that its power is separate; rather its very substance is the act and perfection of matter as well as its power. But he also asserts that the rational soul perfects the body in such fashion that it also subsists in its own right and does not depend upon matter for its existence. In granting that the rational soul is a perfection and form of the body, his agreement with Aquinas appears much greater than his difference.124 Even more important is Siger’s discussion in question 27. There he rejects the Averoistic denial that the intellect is multiplied numerically in individual human beings. He now finds that view both heretical and irrational. A major part of his argument rests on the claim that if there were only one intellect for all human beings, when that intellect was united with one body or one matter as its form, it could not simultaneously be united with other bodies and matters. For it could simultaneously think of different objects and actually be perfected by different intelligible species at one and the same time. Yet we know from experience that different individual human beings do consistently think of different objects at one and the same time. Hence Siger concludes, echoing Thomas’ argument from consciousness, the intellect must be multiplied numerically.125 In sum, Siger has now moved away from his pre-1270 view concerning the intellect and is indeed defending a perfectly orthodox position when


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viewed by the standards of Christian belief. Moreover, he has also moved beyond the trepidation he expressed in his De anima intellectiva concerning just what human reason can determine on this topic, even though his hesitancy about what Aristotle really held on the matter remains. As regards monopsychism, had he been judged solely in terms of his Quaestiones super librum de causis, he might not have had such difficulty with Tempier and his censors.126 While our knowledge of Siger’s final years is far from clear, it is known that he and other Masters in the Arts Faculty, Bernier of Nivelles and Gosvin de la Chapelle, were cited in a document issued on November 23, 1276, to appear before the French Inquisitor in January 1277. It seems likely that Siger and these others had already departed from France before the edict could take effect, and that he went to Italy, where, it has been suggested, he was placed under some kind of house arrest but provided with a secretary. There is no indication that he was ever found guilty of the crime of heresy. Some time before November 1284, he was murdered, perhaps by his secretary.127 Yet history would add an ironic twist to Siger’s posterity since he would be later immortalised by Dante in the Divine Comedy, who places him in Paradise, no less, next to his old adversary Thomas Aquinas.128 It has even been suggested that Dante may have been aware of Siger’s moves toward a more orthodox position in his later years.129 What, if anything, does the monopsychism controversy reveal about high medieval thought about the rational soul? The first conclusion we can draw from our examination of the issues, is the esteem in which Aristotle’s De anima was held in thirteenth-century psychology. All the participants in the debate, especially Thomas and Siger, are concerned to explain and clarify the precise meaning of Aristotle’s text as it was made available to them in Latin translations. Further to this, there is a genuine attempt to relate their own readings to other interpretations derived from the tradition of Greek, Arab and Latin commentaries on De anima. Passages such as 3.5 which appear at first sight to be equivocal or opaque, are analysed and explained in terms that are perceived to be faithful to the spirit, if not always the letter, of Peripatetic psychology. In these respects, Aristotle’s De anima can be said to have provided thirteenth-century thinkers with a platform from which they speculated about the soul and its powers. What is so remarkable about their efforts is that they used this platform creatively and constructively, using the text as a means by which philosophical questions about the soul could be addressed and answered. A further prominent feature of our discussion, is the careful consideration given over by all parties to an explanation of a human being as a unified entity. Even Siger, in those days when his enthusiasm for Averroes’ thesis was at its greatest, never lost sight of that fact, and it is noteworthy that in

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his later work we find him returning to this idea with renewed vigour. For Thomas too, the unity of the human person is the central component in his philosophical anthropology. Unconvinced by Siger’s efforts to preserve this concept, he looks to the core facts of conscious experience to explain and clarify those relations that might be said to exist between an immaterial soul and a material body. The last point that may strike the reader is the absence from the monopsychism debate of recourse to revealed theology. True enough, the theologians under the patronage of Tempier were moved to mobilise their forces against what they perceived to be the threat to religious orthodoxy latent in Siger’s thesis. But this intervention occurred at the very end, and was prompted by other factors internal to the politics of the University.130 Hitherto, even dissenting parties such as Bonaventure, Baglione and Peccham all brought to bear philosophical criticism upon the claims of monopsychism, despite their evident distaste for its implications. Likewise, Thomas does not allow his disdain for monopsychism to get the better of his philosophical arguments. For him, the Averroists can be defeated on their own ground, by making appeal to natural reason as well as the teaching of Aristotle and his authentic commentators. What emerges, then, from this seemingly remote discussion on an issue which to most contemporary theorists of the mind will appear implausible and antiquated, is a picture of philosophers hard at work on constructing a picture of the soul which not only does justice to the facts of ordinary conscious experience, but one which is in keeping with the best available metaphysics and natural philosophy. Whatever one may think of the respective arguments of Siger and Thomas, one can not help being struck by their genuine concern to understand and illuminate those aspects of the mind and its relation to body which at first sight appear mysterious, suggestive or problematic. For this reason alone, their work is deserving of our time and attention.131

Notes 1 Evidence for this can be found in the most recent work of reference on the subject, R. Warner and T. Szubka (eds), The Mind–Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994). 2 See Meditation II, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 volumes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Vol. 2, p. 19. 3 For examples of recent philosophers who propose ‘solutions’ to the mind–body problem in keeping with the dualist tradition of Descartes see Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986; Revised edition, 1998); and John Foster, The Immaterial Self: A Defense of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1991).


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4 Discussion of this problem, often turns on a consideration of the merits or otherwise of ‘physicalism’. For a helpful guide to the current debate see Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind (London: Penguin, 1995), esp. chaps. 2 and 5. An interesting addition to the recent literature is Barbara Montero, ‘The Body Problem’, Nous (1999), pp. 183–200. 5 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 17. 6 While there is no general book on the study of the soul during the Middle Ages, (this is perhaps unsurprising given the size of such an undertaking), the following works provide helpful surveys of the central aspects of the debates about the mind. Most of these works cited, however, tend to concentrate on discussions from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Debates about the soul in the early and late Middle Ages are poorly served by the secondary literature. See Anton Charles Pegis, St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1934); Theodore Crowley, Roger Bacon. The Problem of the Soul in his Philosophical Commentaries (Louvain/Dublin: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie/James Duffy, 1950); Leon Spruit, Species Intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge; Volume 1: Classical Roots and Medieval Discussion, (Leiden: Brill, 1994); R.C. Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1995); J. Obi Oguejiofor, The Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul in the First Half of the Thirteenth Century (Louvain: Peeters, 1995); and Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Late Middle Ages, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The best general book on the philosophy of the period is Fernand Van Steenberghen, La Philosophie au XIIIe Siècle, Deuxième édition (Louvain: Peeters, 1991, originally published, 1966). 7 For discussions of the medieval reception of Aristotle’s philosophy see Fernand Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism, trans. Leonard Johnston (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955); and the articles by C.H. Lohr and Bernard Dod in the section, ‘Aristotle and Medieval Philosophy’, in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 43–98. 8 It is important to stress that because these texts were considered genuine works of Augustine they possessed didactic authority on matters relating to the soul. On Augustine’s role as an authority (auctoritas) at this time see my ‘Augustine and Medieval Philosophy’ in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9 Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae, 1, 27, 52. ‘Homo igitur, ut homini apparet, anima rationalis est, mortali atque terrento utens corpore’, in J.P. Migne (ed.) Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina (Paris 1844–55), (hereafter PL) Vol. 32, col. 1332; and De quantitate animae, 13, 22: ‘Nam mihi videtur [animam] esse substantia quaedam rationis particeps, regendo corpori accomodata’, PL Vol. 32, col. 1048. It is important to emphasise, however, that Augustine’s ‘dualism’ is always mitigated by his insistence that a human being is a unified psycho-physical entity. In many ways this is sufficient to distinguish his account of soul–body relations from that of modern ‘substance dualists’. 10 Michael Scot is a pivotal figure in the early medieval reception of Aristotle. Based for some years at Toledo before going to Bologna, Michael had access to the resources of Arab thought through which he became acquainted with Aristotle. Not only did he translate De anima, but also the Physica, De caelo, and De animalibus. Further to this, his impact on the philosophy and natural science of the period was yet further strengthened by his translations of works by Avicenna and Averroes. For a general discussion of Michael Scot’s career see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and

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History of the mind–body problem Experimental Science, 8 Vols, (New York: 1923–58), see Vol. 2, pp. 307–37. A more recent study is by Charles Burnett, ‘Michael Scott and the Transmission of Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen,’ Micrologus, 2, (1994), pp. 101–11. Costa ben Luca’s short treatise De differentia spiritus et animae was translated into Latin by John of Spain. The work is a philosophical-medical treatise that utilised a host of ancient sources from Plato, Aristotle, Galen, to Hippocrates and Theophrastus. Along with the Fons vitae of Avicebron it was the principal source for the medievals of the idea that the soul could only be united to the body through a mean. For an edition of the text see C.S. Barach, Costa-ben-Lucae De differentia animae et spiritus libera 2; excerpta e libro Alfredi Anglici De motu cordis. Item Costa-ben-Lucae De differentia animae et spiritus liber translatus a Johannz Hispalensi (Innsbruck, 1878). Solomon Bar Jehuda ibn Gabriol was known to the medievals as ‘Avicebron’. His work Fons vitae argued for the view that every corporeal individual consisted of a plurality of forms. This teaching was widely disseminated and known throughout the thirteenth century. See Clemens Baemuker, Avicebrolis (ibn Gebriol) Fons vitae ex Arabico in Latinum translatus an Iohannes Hispano et Dominico Gundissalino (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 1, 2–4), (Münster i. W: Aschendorff, 1892–95). J.T. Muckle, C.S.B. (ed.), ‘The Treatise of De anima of Dominicus Gundissalinus’, with an introduction by Etienne Gilson, Medieval Studies 2, (1940), pp. 23–102. Along with John of Spain, Gundissalinus is one of the important figures in the medieval Latin reception of Arab thought. He is credited with the following works of translation: Avicenna’s De anima and Metaphysics, Alagzel’s Summa theologiae philosophicae, and Avicebron’s Fons vitae. See Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, ‘Dominic Gundisalvi (Gundissalinus)’, in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 16 Vols, (New York. McGraw Hill, 1968–74); see Vol. 4, pp. 966–7. D.A. Callus, ‘Gundissalinus’ De anima and the Problem of Substantial Form’, The New Scholasticism 13, (1939), pp. 338–55. Needless to say, Avicebron took the notion of universal hylomorphism from Aristotle. Rodney M. Thompson (ed.), Alexander Nequam Speculum speculationum (Auctores Britiannici Medii Aevi, 11), (London: The British Academy, 1988). D.A. Callus O.P. and RW. Hunt (eds), Iohannes Blund Tractatus De anima (Auctores Britiannici Medii Aevi, 2), (London: The British Academy, 1970). For a detailed, if at times overstated, discussion of the tension between these different outlooks on the soul in medieval philosophy see Udo Reinhold Jeck, Aristoteles contra Augustinum: Zur Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Zeit und Seele bei den antiken Aristoteleskommentatoren, im arabischen Aristotelismus und im 13 Jahrhundert, (Bochumer Studien zur Philosophie, 21), (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: B.R. Grüner, 1994). Blund is very clear that the soul is the form of the body, he quotes Aristotle’s definition in a different wording from that of any known translation. ‘Whatever it is that moves the body by will,’ he says, ‘is the soul.’ This something is ‘the perfection of an organic body, which possesses the potentiality for life (anima est corporis organici perfectio, vitam habentis in potentia).’ De anima II, I, 15, Callus and Hunts (eds), p. 5ff. Ibid., pp. 5–6: ‘… hoc nomen ‘anima’ [s]ignifcat … substantiam sub quodam accidente in relatione ad corpus organicum in quantum ipsum anilatur et vivificatur per ispam, et gratia illius accidentis dicitur esse perfectio ipsius, eo scilicet quod ipsa ipsum animat.’ Blund’s work is discussed by Oguejiofor, The Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul …, pp. 151–68. Nequam quotes Aristotle’s definition of the soul from the De anima of John Blund. (He is not known to have used a Latin translation of Aristotle’s De anima.) He certainly


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dissents from this definition as this passage makes clear: “Anima est corporis organici perfectio, vitam habentis in potentia.” For since every perfection is from form, it seems, according to this [definition], that the soul is a form. What? Never! Every soul is a substance, but whether it is ex traduce or not caused even led Augustine to hesitate for a long time.’ (‘Anima est corporis organici perfectio, vitam habentis in potentia. Cum enim omnis perfectio sit ex forma, uidetur secundum hoc quod anima sit forma. Quid? Immo omnis amima substantia est, sed utrum ex traduce sit necne diutius hesotans est eciam ab Augustino.’) Speculum speculationum III, lxxxix,1, Thompson (ed.), p. 359. Nequam is briefly discussed by Oguejiofor, The Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul …, pp. 168–178. Philip’s doctrine of the soul in his Summa de bono was extremely influential and echoes of it can be found in succeeding writers. Briefly, Philip argued that the human soul is a compound soul; composed of three elements, two of which (the vegetative and the sensitive) are ex traduce and corruptible, while the third, the rational, is created by and immediately infused by God, and is incorruptible. These three substances, however, constitute only one soul. See Summa de bono, IV, q. 3, Nicolas Wicki (ed.), Philippi Cancellarii Parisiensis Summa de bono (Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Opera Philosophica Selecta), 2 Vols, (Bern: Francke, 1985), see Vol. II, p. 233. For further discussion of Philip see Oguejiofor, The Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul …, pp. 179–226. Alexander, the first Franciscan Professor of theology at Paris, taught that since the soul and body have disparate natures, they can be joined only by a series of means. His exaggerated dualism led him to erroneously interpret Aristotle as holding that there are two intellects in man, one immortal, the other perishable; see his Summa theologica, II, n. 374. Above all else, Alexander wished to preserve the teaching that the soul is a separate immaterial substance. Jeck, Aristoteles contra Augustinum, pp. 200–2 and Oguejiofor, The Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul …, pp. 271–83 provide a brief resumé of Alexander’s teaching on the soul. The debt to Augustine in William’s work is much more profound than in other authors of the time. Like Alexander his dualism is blatant, and he explicitly argues against the idea that the soul is the substantial form of the body, see De anima, in Opera omina (Paris/Orleans, 1674; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1963). Two important studies of William’s De anima are E.A. Moody, ‘William of Auvergne and his Treatise De anima’, in his Studies on Medieval Philosophy, Science and Logic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 1–109; and Steven Marrone, William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 55–73, and 130–4. Roland was the first Dominican regent in theology at Paris. For a discussion of his work see E. Perte, ‘La posizione di Roland da Cremona nel pensiero medievale’, Revista di Filosofia Neoscolastica 23, (1931), pp. 484–9. Extracts from Roland’s Commentary on Lombard’s Sentences can be found in Roberto Zavalloni O.F.M. (ed.), Richard de Mediavilla et la controverse sur la pluralité des forms, (Louvain: Éditions De L’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1951), pp. 386–7. Outside Paris, the situation was similar. At Oxford, Robert Grosseteste (c.1168/9–1253) rode roughshod over the De anima by ignoring completely the teaching on the soul contained there. Instead, he found a solution to the problem of human unity by suggesting an analogy with the Incarnation, which followed from his concentration on the human soul as the image of the Trinity. See De Cessatione Legalium III, I, pp. 27–8, in Richard C. Dales and Edward B. King (eds), Robert Grosseteste De Cessatione Legalium (Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi, 7), (London: The British Academy, 1986), pp. 130– 1. For a discussion of Grosseteste’s views on the soul see Marrone, William of Auvergne

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History of the mind–body problem and Robert Grosseteste, pp. 205–9; and, importantly, James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 225–368. In 1212 and 1215 there were official prohibitions against reading Aristotle’s works, that is, against making them the basis of lectures. In 1231 Pope Gregory softened these condemnations although this did not really take effect until at least 1240. See R.A. Gauthier’s preface to Sancti Thomae de Aquino, Sentencia Libri De Anima, Opera Omnia Tomus XLV, (Roma: Commissio Leonina, 1984), pp. 235*–6*. See H. Denilfe and E. Chatelin (eds), Auctarium Chartularii Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 Vols, (Paris: Delalain, 1889), Vol. 1, pp. 277–9. See D. A. Callus, ‘The Introduction of Aristotelian Learning at Oxford’, Proceedings of the British Academy 29, (1943), pp. 229–81. For a comprehensive discussion of Moerbeke’s life and achievements see J. Brams and W. Vanhamel (eds), Guillaume de Moerbeke. Recueil d’études à l’occasion du 700° anniversaire de sa mort (1286) (Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, De Wulf Mansion Centre, Series 1, Vol. 8), (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1989). Here one thinks of De homine by Albert the Great, this being the second part of his Summa de creaturis. One of the main issues that elicited the hostility of the theologians was Aristotle’s teaching in De caelo that the universe is eternal. This thesis is clearly at odds with the Judaeo-Christian view that the universe was created ex nihilo by a benevolent God. For discussion of this problem see Richard C. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World, (Leiden: Brill, 1990). Other aspects of Aristotle’s teaching that caused concern were his views on freedom and determinism in the natural order, and his equivocation concerning the immortality of the soul. These further aspects are discussed by Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West, pp. 321–70. It is important to remember that interest in Aristotle’s work was not confined to the Arts Faculty. Members of the mendicant orders, such as the Dominicans Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Franciscans like Bonaventure and Roger Bacon, had all been members at one time or other of Theology Faculty. All four of these significant intellectual figures contributed in direct ways to the dissemination of so many Aristotelian ideas. The following remarks will concern the De anima as it was read and interpreted by thirteenth-century thinkers at Paris. Questions concerning the general efficacy and accuracy of these readings and interpretations are irrelevant to the concerns of this essay. Those eager to address these questions from the perspective of contemporary ancient philosophy need look no further than Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Oskenberg Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s De anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), for a comprehensive and stimulating analysis of most issues raised by Aristotle’s text. All references to the works of Aristotle will be to the ‘Oxford translation’, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes (ed.), 2 Vols, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). De anima, 3. 5 430a 10–25, Barnes (1982), Vol. 1, p. 684: ‘Since in every class of things, as in nature as a whole, we find two factors involved, a matter which is potentially all the particulars included in the class, a cause which is productive in the sense that it makes them all (the matter standing to the former, as e.g. an act to its material), these distinct elements must be found in the soul.’ It is important to note that the active νοt^ς of De anima 3.5 was called the ‘νοt^ς ποιητικo´ς’ by later commentators and not directly by Aristotle himself. For a discussion of early attempts to make sense of Aristotle on this issue see Franz Brentano, Die Psychologie des Aristoteles (Mainz: Franz Kircheim, 1867), pp. 5–39; translated by Rolf George,


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The Psychology of Aristotle (Berkeley: University of California, 1977). A revised version of part of this work appears in Nussbaum and Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, pp. 313–41. Further discussion of the historical development of νοt^ς ποιητικo´ς can be found in Edmond Barbotin, La Théorie Aristotélicienne de L’Intellect D’Après Théophraste (Louvain/Paris: Publications Universitaires de Louvain/Vrin, 1954), pp. 152– 74. De anima, 3. 4, 429a 10ff. Nicomachean Ethics, 10, 1178a 2–8. De anima, 3.5, 412b10; cf. 415b 9–18. De generatione animalium, 2, 3, 736 b1–27, Barnes (1984), Vol. 1, p. 1143. After discussing how the matter supplied by the mother is formed by the vital heat supplied by the father so that first the vegetative soul, having existed potentially in the semen, comes into being actually, and the sensitive soul similarly comes into actual being after having existed potentially in the vegetative, Aristotle concludes that the intellective soul cannot have been generated internally. He says, ‘It remains, then, that the intellect (τo´ν νοt^ν) alone enters in, as an additional factor from outside (θt^ραθεν), and that it alone is divine (θεi^ον), because physical activity has nothing whatever to do with the activity of the intellect.’ Alexander of Aphrodisias, De anima liber cum Mantissa, Ivo Burns (ed.), (Commentaria Aristotelem Graeca, Supplementum Aristotelicum, Vol. 2.1), (Berlin: George Reiner, 1887). The Latin version of the text is contained in G. Théry, Autour du décret de 1210, II: Alexander d’Aphrodise. Aperçu sur l’influence de sa noétique (La Saulchoir, Kain: Bibliothèque Thomiste, 1926). An English translation can be found in Athanasias P. Fontinis, The De anima of Alexander of Aphrodisias: A Translation and Commentary (Washington, DC: University of America Press, 1979). See De anima, 88.24–89.8ff. For a full discussion of this and other passages relevant to the issue see Paul Moraux, Alexandre D’Aphrodise Exégète de la Noétique d’Aristote (Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de I’Université de Liège, Fascicule XCIX, (Liège/Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres/Librarie Droz, 1942), pp. 63– 142. De anima, 89. 9–19. Alexander’s work was available to medieval readers from the end of the twelfth century. A partial version of the work is attributed to Gerard of Cremona, a version that draws heavily upon Greek and Arab sources. On the attribution to Gerard see Théry, Alexander d’Aphrodise, pp. 74 and 82. This has been disputed by Edward F. Cranz, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisais’ in Paul Oskar Kristeller (ed.), Catalogus, Translationus et Commentatorium: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1961). Themisti in libros Aristotelis De anima Paraphrasis, Richard Heinze (ed.), (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, 5), (Berlin: George Reiner, 1899). Sometime in the 1260’s William of Moerbeke translated Themistius into Latin. For a critical edition of this version see G. Verbeeke, Thémistius Commentaire sur le Traité de l’ame sur D’Aristote. Traduction de Guillaume De Moerbeke (Corpus Latinum Commentarium in Aristotelem Graecorum, 1), (Leiden: Brill, 1973). Themistius’ influential comments on Aristotle are now available to English readers in Robert B. Todd (ed.), Themistius on Aristotle on the Soul (London: Duckworth, 1996). See Paraphrases, 102. 31, 36; 103. 10. Ibid., 105. 26ff. For useful discussions of the work of both Alexander and Themistius on the intellect see Octave Hamelin, La théorie de l’intellect d’après Aristote et ses commentateurs (Paris: Vrin, 1953); Paul Moraux, ‘Le De anima dans la tradition grecque quelque aspects de l’interpretation du traité de Théophraste à Themistius’, in G.E.R.

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History of the mind–body problem Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen (eds), Aristotle on Mind and Senses (Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium Aristotelicum), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 281– 324; Frederic M. Schroeder and Robert B. Todd, Two Greek Commentators on the Intellect (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990), especially the ‘Introduction’; and H.J. Blumenthal, Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of De anima (London: Duckworth, 1996), pp. 21–73, and 151–70. For a helpful exposition of the teaching of these Arab philosophers see Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Specific studies that chronicle the influence of the Arabs on medieval philosophy are: Freidrich Niewöhrer and Loris Sturlese, Averroismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance (Zurich: Spur Verlag, 1994); Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna in the Latin West (Warburg Institute, Texts and Surveys, 27), (London: The Warburg Institute, 2000); Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, (Leiden: Brill, 1998); and Jan A. Aersten and Gerhard Enders (eds); Averroes and the Aristotelian Tradition: Sources, Constitution and the Reception of the Philosophy of Ibn Rusd (1126– 1198) (Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, Texts and Studies, 31), (Leiden: Brill, 1999). Avicenna, Liber de anima sue sextus de naturalibus, S. Van Riet (ed.), 2 Vols (Avicenna Latinus), (Louvain/Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1969), Vol. V. 1, p. 80, ll. 59–60. Ibid., pp. 36–7, ll. 54–68: ‘Deinde videat si affirmat esse suae essentiae: non enim dubitabit affirmare se esse, nec tamen affirmabit exteriora suorum membrorum, nec occulta suorum interiorum nec animum nec cerebrum, nec aliquid aliud extrinsecus, sed affirmabit se esse…. Tu autem scis quod id quod affirmatur, alliud est ab eo quod non affirmatur, et concessum aliud est ab eo quod non conceditur. Et, quoniam essentia quam affirmat esse est propria illi, eo quod illa est ipsemet, et est praeter corpus eius et membra eius quae non affirmat, ideo expergefactus habet viam evigilandi ad sciendum quod esse animae aliud est quam esse corporis; immo non eget corpore ad hoc ut sciat animam et percipiat eam; si autem fuerit stupidis, opus habet converti ad viam.’ Cf. Liber de anima, V. 7, pp. 162–3. Ibid., V. 3, p. 104, ll. 22–4; p. 105, ll. 40–4; and p. 106, ll. 50–2. Ibid., I. 1, p. 15. l. 79: ‘hoc nomen (anima) est nomen huius rei non ex eius essentia.’ Cf. Ibid., pp. 26–7, ll. 27–32: ‘Hoc enim nomen anima non est inditum ei ex sua substantia, sed ex hoc quod regit corpora et refertur ad illa, et idcirco recipitur corpus in sui definitone, exempli gratia, sicut opus accipitur in defintione opificis, quamvis non accipiatur in definitione eius secundum quod est homo.’ As the animating role of the soul is merely a function which does not express its nature, it would be a serious mistake, Avicenna thinks, to try to safeguard its substantial nature by saying that the soul is a substance in the sense of being a substantial form; see ibid., p. 26, ll. 22–3: ‘Erravit igitur qui putavit hoc sufficere ad eam esse substantium sicut ad esse formam.’ Ibid., I. 1, p. 20, ll. 31–3: ‘ipsa certe non est forma materiae nec in materia: forma etenim quae est in materia, est forma impressa in illa est existens per illam.’ Cf. ll. 45– 7, and p. 22, ll. 64–71. Ibid., Vol. 2, V. 7, p. 165, ll. 90–1: ‘cognosco quod aut ipsa verissime est ego, aut ipsa est ego regens hoc corpus.’ Averrois Cordubensis, Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, F. Stuart Crawford (ed.), (Corpus Commentariorum Averrois in Aristotelem VI-I), (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1953); see Book II, 5, pp. 134–5, ll. 9–7: ‘anima est substantia secundum formam… quia substantia que est secundum formam est perfectio corporis habentis formam…’ For helpful commentary see Davidson (1992), and Richard C. Taylor, ‘Averroes on Psychology and the Principles of Metaphysics’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 36, (1998), pp. 507–23.


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56 Ibid., pp. 135: ‘necesse est ut anima sit perfectio talis corporis, idest perfectio corporis naturalis habentis vitam in potentia, secundum quod perficitur per animam.’ 57 Ibid., II, 30, pp. 173–4, ll. 13–49: ‘incepit declarae cuiusmodi sit genus acceptum in diffinitione anime, et dixit quia neque est equivocum neque univocum… Et hoc exemplum est valde simile diffinitioni anime; non est enim ex diffinitionibus equivocorum nominum… ista diffinitio non est univoca… possibile est ut iste virtutes diverse habeant unam diffinitionem universalem convenientem omnibus, sicut diffinitio figure convenit omnibus figuris et nulli appropriatur.’ That is why, after the universal definition of the soul is established, there is still a need to enquire after the specificity of each kind of soul. 58 Ibid., II. 13. p. 152, l. 9. 59 Ibid., III. 20, p. 449, ll. 173–5: ‘Et intendebat hic per intellectum passibilem formas imaginationis secundum quod in eas agit virtus cogitativa propria homini’; cf. also III. 20, p. 451, ll. 237–40: ‘quia intellectus materialis nichil intelligit sine intellectu passibili, licet agens sit et recipiens sit, sicut comprehendere colorem non est, licet lux sit et visus sit, nisi coloratum sit.’ 60 Ibid., III. 20, p. 454, ll. 313–316: ‘Et per istum intellectum quem vocavit Aristoteles passibilem diversantur homines… Et per istum intellectum differt homo ab aliis animalibus’; cf. also III. 33, p. 476, ll. 79–80: ‘Et homo non est generabilis et corruptibilis per hanc virtutem.’ 61 For further discussion of these issues see Arthur Hyman, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of the Intellect and its Interpretation by Averroes’, in Dominic O’Meara (ed.), Studies in Aristotle (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982). 62 What little that is known about the appearance of this group of magisteri is summarised by Fernand Van Steenberghen, Introduction à L’Étude de le Philosophie Médievale (Philosophes Médiévaux, 18), (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1974), pp. 531– 54; R. A. Gauthier, ‘Notes sur les Débuts (1225–1240) du premier “Averroisme”’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 66, (1982), pp. 321–74; and Bernardo Carlos Bazán, ‘On ‘First Averroism’ and its Doctrinal Background’, in Ruth LinkSalinger et al. (eds), Of Scholars, Savants and their Texts: Studies in Philosophy and Religious Thought. Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman (New York/Bern: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 9–22. 63 Bernardo Bazán (ed.), Siger de Brabant, Quaestiones in tertium de anima, De anima intellectiva, De aeternitate mundi (Philosophes Médievaux, 13), (Louvain/Paris: Publications Universitaires/Nauwelaerts, 1972). Bazán concludes that the Quaestiones in tertium anima is a reportatio dating toward the end of the first stage of Siger’s teaching career (1265–70), quite probably from the academic year 1269–70, see p. 74*. More recently, R.A. Gauthier has proposed a date of c.1265, see ‘Notes sur Siger de Brabant I’, Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 67, (1983), pp. 201–32. 64 The standard commentary on Siger is Fernand Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1977). Also worth consulting is his earlier work Les oeuvres et la doctrine de Siger de Brabant (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1938). Van Steenberghen’s last work on Siger provides a very helpful analysis of recent studies, see ‘Publications récentes sur Siger de Brabant’ in B. Mojsisch and O. Pluta (eds), Historia philosophiae medii aevi. Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters II (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: B.R. Grüner, 1991), pp. 1003– 11. Because of Siger’s reputation as a ‘philosophical rebel’ during the middle ages, books about him often tend to verge on the sensational and celebratory. Two recent books, François-Xavier Putallaz and Ruedi Imbach, Profession: Philosophie Siger de Brabant (Paris: Cerf, 1997); and Tony Dodd, The Life and Thought of Siger of Brabant,

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History of the mind–body problem Thirteenth-Century Parisian Philosopher and Theologian (Lampeter: Edwin Mellon Press, 1998), fall very much into this category, hailing Siger as a defender of philosophical freedom against a tyrannical church. On this, see below. A much more sober treatment of Siger’s work, albeit in introductory form, can be found in Hemi Krop, Siger van Brabant: De dubbele Waarheid (Rotterdam: Ambo/Baam, 1992). Utrum intellectivum radicatur in eadem animae substantia cun vegetativo et sensitivo?, see Ibid., p. 1ff. This had been the view of Alexander of Hales. Among others, Philip the Chancellor had advanced this position. Summa de creaturis, Opera omnia, Vols. XXXIV–XXXV, S. Borgnet (ed.), (Paris: Vivès, 1894), for a discussion of this work see Oguejiofor, The Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul …, pp. 345–59. See the editor’s introduction to Albertus Magnus, De natura et origine animae, tr. 1, chap. 5, In Opera omnia, Vol. XII, B. Geyer (ed.), (Cologne: Aschendorff, 1955), pp. 10–19. For a discussion of Albert’s psychology see James A. Weisheipl, ‘Albertus Magnus and Universal Hylomorphism’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 10, (1979), pp. 239–60; Nicholas H. Steneck, ‘Albert on the Psychology of Sense Perception’, in James A. Weisheipl (ed.), Albertus Magnus and the Sciences Commemorative Essays 1980 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), pp. 236–90; Ingrid CraemerRuegenberg, ‘Alberts Seelen- und Intellektlehre’ in A. Zimmermann (ed.), Albert der Grosse. Seine Werk, Seine Werk, Seine Wirkung (Miscellanea Mediaevalia, 14), (New York/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), pp. 104–15; and Jeck, Aristoteles contra Augustinum, pp. 219–34. In tertium de anima, Part III, qq. 7 and 9; cf. Part II, q. 2. See q. 5; Bazán edition, p. 17: ‘… dico quod intellectus non perpetuatur per hoc quod continue recipiat aliquid de novo a Primo, sed quia … recipit ab origine sua a Primo per quod postea in aevum perpetuatur. … dico quod Primum perpetuat intellectum voluntate sua.’ See q. 6; Bazán edition, pp. 17–22. See q. 7; Bazán edition, p. 23: ‘Intellectus perfecit corpus, non per suam substantiam, sed per suam potentiam, quia, si per suam substantiam perficeret, non esset separabilis. Averroes attendens hoc in secundo dixit: cum non utatur corpore, non potest ipsum perficere per suam substantiam, quod attendens Aristoteles dixit in secundo quod intellectus nullius corporis est ad substantiam actus, id est, nullius partis corporis, ita quod legatur transitive. Sic enim dicit alia translatio, scilicet nullius partis corporis, id est, quia non utatur ea tanquam organo, sed quia communicat operanti per illam partem sic, scilicet imaginationi.’

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See q. 9, Bazán edition pp. 25–9. See q. 10, Bazán edition, pp. 30–1. See q. 12, Bazán edition, p. 46. See q. 14, Bazán edition, p. 52: ‘Et intellectus copulatio humanae speciei essentialior est quam copulatio quae est huic individuo, propter hoc quod humana species aeterna est [et] quia intellectus [qui] ei copulatur aeternus est.’ 79 See qq. 12 and 13, Bazán edition, pp. 35–46. 80 See q. 14, Bazán edition, p. 53: ‘… tunc dico quod intellectus huic copulatur quia intentiones imaginatae: aliter enim numquam fuissent actu intellecta.’ 81 See q. 15, Bazán edition, p. 57–8:


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‘Et cum dicitur: intentiones intellectae sunt unius intellectus, dico quod, licet intentiones intellectae sint unius intellectus simpliciter in se, tamen [sunt] intellectae huius intellectus secundum quod copulatur isti et non absolute … Sed quia intelligit ex intentionibus imaginatis copulatis diversis hominibus, et diversis secundum diversitatem hominum, ideo intelligere diversifactur in diversis. … Sed dico quod anima rationalis potentialiter est copulata humanae speciei eo quod natura suae virtutis activae est agere talia, quae nobis sunt copulata.’ 82 See q. 18, Bazán edition, p. 67: ‘ Immo dico quod universale, [cum] idem sit cum suo particulari, per cognitionem universalis cognoscitur particulare, sed non (ut) est in forma propria, sed solum in universali, quia haec forma universalis vere est particularis secundum suum esse. Particulare enim aliam formam ab universali non habet.’ 83 For discussions of Siger’s monopsychism see Giambattista da Palma C., La Dottrina Sull’unita’ Dell’ intelletto in Sigieri di Brabante (Padova: Antonio Milani, 1955), pp. 35–56; G. Fioravanti, ‘Sull’ evolutionze del monopischismo di Sigieri di Brabante’, in Atti dell’ accademica delle scienze di Torino. II. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 106, (1972), pp. 407–64; Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, pp. 339–46; Putallaz and Imbach, Profession: Philosophie Siger de Brabant, pp. 27–40; and Dodd, The Life and Thought of Siger of Brabant, pp. 204–35. 84 Because of Siger’s difficulties with the Church authorities, (on this see below), and his obvious philosophical novelty, he has often been hailed in the modern period as a defender of academic freedom and an icon of anti-clericalism in the Middle Ages. The originator of this view was E. Renan who in 1852 published Averroès et l’averroïsme, (Paris: Calamann-Lévy), a work which, among other things, portrayed the Latin Averrorists of the 1260s and 1270s as champions of the causes of intellectual freedom and the integrity of philosophy. Central to Renan’s thesis was the view that Siger, a heterodox religious thinker, attempted to free himself from the conceptual constraints imposed upon him by the Christian theology of the time. As a result of these highly suggestive views, Renan’s work has helped to cast Siger as a proto-modern secular hero engaged in a bitter struggle with an antiquated and oppressive Church. Such a view continues to have some currency today, fuelled somewhat by the occasional denunciation of Siger’s views by modern day defenders of the theologians Siger was thought to oppose; see Pierre Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l’Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siècle, Second Edition (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de philosophie de l’université, 1908– 11). While Mandonnet’s less than charitable view of Siger was corrected by the judicious and fair reading of Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, these concessions have proved insufficient to placate some recent commentators such Putallaz and Imbach, Profession: Philosophie Siger de Brabant, and Dodd, The Life and Thought of Siger of Brabant, who continue to portray Siger in terms reminiscent of Renan. For examples of these tendencies see the very emotive conclusion to Putallaz and Imbach on p. 173; ‘Il mourait misérablement de la manière dont les chroniquers religieux aimaient à faire mourir les ennemis de l’Église et du pouvoir’, and Dodd’s description of Siger ‘as the first anti-clerical hero’, p. 393. If our reading of matters is correct, then we have cause to doubt these views, especially the more sensational elements in the reading of Putallaz and Imbach, since Siger’s primary motive in advancing the thesis of monopsychism appears to have next to nothing to do with championing religious heterodoxy, but comes about as a result of his concern to establish a coherent and plausible reading of the texts of Aristotle. In other words, Siger is first and foremost a medieval exegete. 85 Bonaventure’s Conferences of 1267, entitled Collationes de decem praeceptis, in Opera omnia, Ten Volumes (Quarrachi: Collegium Bonaventura, 1882–1902), see Vol. V, pp.

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History of the mind–body problem 507–32. In Conference II he denounces as errors which follow from the improper use of philosophical investigation the eternity of the world, the unicity of the intellect, and the denial that something mortal can attain immortality. For his Lenten Conference of 1268, see Collationes de septem donis Spiritus Sancti, in Opera omnia, V, pp. 457–98. There in Conference IV he warns Christians against over evaluating philosophical learning and in Conference VII singles out a number of philosophical errors including the unicity of the intellect, see p. 497. See William of Baglione ‘Utrum anima ex sua natura sit hoc aliquid’ in Ignatius Brady, ‘Background to the Condemnation of 1270: Master William of Baglione, O.F.M.’, Franciscan Studies (1970), pp. 5–48. For Peccham see his Quaestiones tractatus de anima, these being a series of disputed questions on the soul which date from Parisian regency (1269–71), and his treatise on the soul, Tractatus de anima. For editions of these works see P. Hieronymus Spettmann O.F.M. (ed.), Johannis Pechami Quaestiones Tractatus de Anima (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 1, pp. 5– 6), (Münster i. W: Aschendorff, 1918); and P. Gaudentius, O.F.M. (ed.), Tractatus de anima Ioannis Pecham (Biblioteca di Studi Francescani, 1), (Florence: Quarrachi, 1948). See Brady, ‘Background to the condemnation of 1270 …,’ p. 33. See Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century, pp. 120–32. The critical edition of this work can be found in Volume 43 of Leonine edition of Thomas’ works, Sancti Thomae De Aquino, Opera omnia, tomus XLIII (Roma: Editori Di San Tommaso, 1976). Recently two excellent editions, with introduction, commentary and translation, of the De unitate intellectus have appeared in English and French. The first of these is edited by Ralph McInerny, Aquinas Against the Averrosists: On There Being Only One Intellect (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), the second is edited by Alain De Libera, Thomas D’Aquin: Contre Averroès (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). De Libera’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 9–73, provides an excellent discussion of the central issues of the monopsychism debate. See Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book 2, Dist. 17, q. 2, a. 1. This early work dates from Aquinas’ first stay in Paris 1252–59. Summa contra gentiles, II, 59. This work was begun during Aquinas’ first stay in Paris 1252–59, and completed during his stay at the priory of San Domenico in Naples in 1260–61. See III, lect. 1, sec. 2, these being Thomas’ comments on De anima 429a 20–429b 5. Aquinas’ commentary on De anima was written at Rome during 1267–68. This commentary was preceded in 1265–66 by Thomas’ other work of psychology, Quaestiones disputata de anima, (Disputed questions on the Soul), in which he had argued for the soul’s immortality. Summa theologiae, Ia, qq. 75–81. It is important to remember that Thomas wrote the Prima pars (this being the first part of the Summa) before he returned to Paris in 1268. Therefore, his views on the soul were quite settled prior to his dispute with the Averrorists. For the details of Thomas’ life at this time see J.P. Torrell O.P., Initiation à Saint Thomas d’Aquin: Sa Personne et Son Oeuvre (Paris/Fribourg: Éditions du Cerf/ Éditions Universiatires Fribourg Suisse, 1993), pp. 207–60. For general commentary on Aquinas’ account of the soul see Norman Kretzmann, ‘Philosophy of Mind’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 128–59; and Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993). The most complete study, however, is by Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (London: Darton, 1967). See Summa theologiae, Ia, qq. 75–8. See §62, 27ff.


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97 See Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 75, aa 2 and 6. 98 Further to this, Codex 225 of Corpus Christi College Oxford includes this valuable colophon: Haec scripsit Thomas (ms. taliter) contra magistrum Sigerum de Brabantia (ms. Brabantia) et alios plurimos Parisius in philosophia regentes anno Domini 1270. 99 ‘Quarendum est autem ab eo qui hoc ponit, primo, quid sit hoc singulare quod est Socrates… Et quantum ex sua positione videtur, hoc tertium accipiet.’ But it should be noted that Thomas then immediately changes to the plural, ‘Procedamus ergo contra eos…’ 100 It is worth noting that the reference to ‘young boys’ is not simply a piece of defamatory rhetoric on Thomas’ part. Most students would enter the Arts Faculty in their early teens and would have engaged in study there well into their late adolescence and beyond. For a discussion of University life at this time see L.J. Bataillon O.P., ‘Les conditions de travail des maîtres de I’Université de Paris au XIIIème siècle’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 67, (1983), pp. 417–32. 101 De unitate intellectus, § 124: ‘non loquantur in angulis nec coram pueris qui nesciunt de tam ardius iudicare, sed contra hoc scriptum rescribat, si audet!’ 102 This is the view of most commentators, especially Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, McInerny, Aquinas Against the Averrosists, and De Libera, Thomas D’Aquin: Contre Averroès. 103 My interpretation of De unitate intellectus is indebted to different elements in the following works: Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, pp. 347–60; Gérard Verbeke, ‘L’unité de l’homme: saint Thomas contre Averroès’, in his collection D’Aristotle À Thomas D’Aquin: Antécedents de la penséé moderne (Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, De Wulf-Mansion centre, Series 1, 8), (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), pp. 539–68; McInerny, Aquinas Against the Averrosists, pp.164–211; and De Libera, Thomas D’Aquin: Contre Averroès, pp. 9–73. 104 G. Verbeeke. ‘Themistius et le ‘De unitate intellectus’ de S. Thomas’, Revue philosophique de Louvain 53, (1955), pp. 141–64. 105 De unitate intellectus, II, §59: ‘Hec autem premisimus, non quasi volentes ex philosophorum auctoritatibus reprobare suprapositum errorem; sed ut ostendamus quod non soli Latini, quorum verba quibusdam non sapiunt, sed etiam Greci et Arabes hoc senserunt, quod intellectus sit pars vel potentia seu virtus anime que est corporis forma. Unde miror ex quibus Peripateticis hunc errorem se assumpsisse glorientur, nisi forte quia minus volunt cum ceteris Peripateticus rectae recte sapere, quam cum Averroes oberrare, qui non tam fuit Peripateticus quam philosophiae peripatetice depravator.’ 106 Barnes (ed.), (1984), Vol. 1, pp. 658–9. 107 See Averroes, De anima, II, comm. 21ff. 108 See De unitate intellectus, § 8–9. 109 De unitate intellectus, § 62, 21–3: ‘Manifestum est enim quod hic homo singularis intelligit; numquam enim de intellectu quereremus nisi intelligeremus.’ 110 See Chartularii, I, pp. 486–7. 111 Other condemned propositions which can be found in Siger’s works are: that the world is eternal; that there never was a first human being; and that the separated soul cannot suffer from corporeal fire in the afterlife. For further discussion see Edouard-Henri Weber, La Controverse de 1270 a L’Université de Paris et son Retentissement sur la Pensée de S. Thomas D’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1970); John F. Wippel, ‘The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 in Paris’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7, (1977), pp. 169–201; Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, pp. 74–9, and La Philosophie au XIIIe Siècle, pp. 411–13. For contrasting views on the extent of intellectual freedom in the medieval university see William J. Courtenay, ‘Inquiry and Inquisition: Academic Freedom in Medieval Universities’, Church History 58, (1989), pp. 168–81; and Luca

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History of the mind–body problem Bianchi, ‘Censure, Liberté et Progrès Intellectuel à L’Université de Paris au XIIIe Siècle’, Archives D’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 63, (1999), pp. 45–93. Opera omnia, Vol. V. For further discussion of Bonaventure’s last assault on Siger and the Averroists see Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, pp. 102–14, and Jeck, Aristoteles contra Augustinum, pp. 274–9. In Bazán edition. Antonio Marlasca (ed.), Les Quaestiones Super Librum de Causis de Siger de Brabant (Philosophes Médiévaux, 12), (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1972). For further discussion of Siger’s activities at this time see Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, pp. 80–102. We have some knowledge of this work owing to the testimony of the Renaissance philosopher, Agostino Nifo (1469/1470–1538). In this treatise, Siger’s thought had developed somewhat although he still defended the unicity of the intellect. See B. Nardi, Sigieri di Brabante nel pensiero del rinascimento italiano (Roma: Edizioni Italiana, 1945), pp. 17–24, and 46–7; and Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, pp. 360– 4. For a recent discussion of this work and of Nifo’s testimony see Carlos Steel, ‘Siger of Brabant versus Thomas Aquinas on the Possibility of Knowing Separate Substances’ in A. Speer and K. Emory Jr (eds) Nach der Verurteilung von 1277: Die Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts (Miscellenea Medievalia, 28), (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 211–31. De anima intellectiva, Prologous, Bazán edition, p. 70: ‘Cum anima sit aliorum cognoscitiva, turpe est ut se ipsam ignoret. Sed ipsam enim ignorans, quomodo de aliis fida putabitur? … exposcentibus amicis, eorem desiderio pro modulo nostrae possibilitatis satisfacere cupientes, quid circa preadicta sentiendum sit secundum documenta philosophorum probatorum, non aliquid ex nobis asserentes, preasenti tractatu proponimus declarare.’ Ibid., Chap. III, Bazán edition, p. 81: ‘Per quem autem modum anima intellectiva sit unita corpori, et separata ab eodem, dicunt praecipui viri in philosophia Albertus et Thomas quod substantia animae intellectiva unita est corpori dans esse eidem, sed potentia animae intellectivae separata est a corpore, cum per organum corporeum non operetur.’ Ibid., Chap. III, Bazán edition, pp. 81–2. Ibid., Chap. III, Bazán edition, pp. 82–8. Ibid., Chap. IV, Bazán edition, pp. 101–8. Earlier in this century Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l’Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siècle, argued that Siger’s less heterodox views in his later works were a simple cover to prevent him from enduring yet further condemnation. More recently, however, scholars have been more inclined to accept Siger’s sincerity, see Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, while Putallaz and Imbach, Profession: Philosophie Siger de Brabant, continue to pedal the old Renan thesis that Siger was a victim of ecclesiastical power. Cf. Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 76, a. 1, ad 1, where Aquinas explains Aristotle’s reference to the intellect as ‘separate’ as meaning that it is not the power of a corporeal organ. See Quaestiones super librum de causis, q. 26, Marlasca, Les Quaestiones Super Librum de Causis de Siger de Brabant, p. 106. Ibid., pp. 111–12 for his rejection of the Averroistic position and pp. 112–13 for his argument in support of numerical multiplication of human intellects. That said, even if Siger could extricate himself from charge of heterodoxy on the basis of his teaching about the intellect, he would have still have had to address other charges


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of heterodoxy deriving from his views on the eternity of the world. However, recent research has done much to dispel any lingering doubts about his unorthodox theological opinions, see Armand Maurer, ‘Siger of Brabant and Theology’, Medieval Studies 50, (1988), pp. 257–78. On these events see Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, pp. 141–4, and 159– 76. Dante, Paradiso, Canto 10: ‘This last, from whom they look will pass to me, Conceals a spirit deep in meditation — So deep, that death for him came all to slowly. It is the eternal light of Siger, Who, when he lectured in the street of straw, Could syllogise unpalatable truths.’ See Bruno Nardi, Sigieri Di Brabante Nell Divina Commedia (Prescia: Spiante, 1912). For more recent speculations on this issue see A. Zimmermann, ‘Dante hatte doch Recht. Neue Ergebnisse der Forschung über Siger von Brabant’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 75, (1967–68), pp. 206–17; R.A. Gauthier, ‘Notes sur Siger de Brabant II: Siger en 1272–75. Aubry de Reims et la scisson des Normands’, Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 68, (1984), for a different interpretation; and Van Steenberghen, La Philosophie au XIIIe Siècle, p. 339, n. 63, for remarks critical of Gauthier. See Wippel, ‘The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 in Paris’, for a discussion of the tensions at Paris during 1270. I am very happy to dedicate this essay to Professor Richard Sorabji on his retirement from the Department of Philosophy, King’s College, London. He will be sorely missed.

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3


How Cartesian was Descartes?1 Sarah Patterson

Introduction How Cartesian was Descartes? My question may seem perverse. If ‘Cartesian’ is simply the adjective derived from Descartes’ name, the adjective meaning of or pertaining to Descartes, how could Descartes’ views fail to be Cartesian? Certainly, the word ‘Cartesian’ is frequently used with this meaning, to indicate that the views so labelled are views held by Descartes. But then my question arises: to what extent are the views labelled as Cartesian an accurate reflection of the views actually held by Descartes? A number of views are labelled Cartesian, and different views are labelled Cartesian by different people, so some focus is needed if we are to make progress in answering the question. In general philosophical discussion, ‘Cartesian’ perhaps occurs most frequently in combination with ‘scepticism’, or with ‘dualism’. Seeking a certainty which is proof against any doubt, Descartes begins the Meditations with sceptical arguments designed to show ‘What can be called into doubt’, and goes on to discover ‘The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body’.2 Having called the very existence of the familiar material world into doubt, he finds certainty in his knowledge of the contents of his own mind, and concludes that he as a mind cannot be a part of the material world. A new form of scepticism, scepticism about the external world, and a new conception of mind, the Cartesian mind, emerge from the Cartesian quest for certainty. The Cartesian mind is divided from the material world both epistemologically and metaphysically, and this division creates distinctively Cartesian problems: the epistemological problem of reconnecting the mind to the world – the problem of the external world – and the metaphysical problem of re-connecting the mind to the body – the mind– body problem. This picture of Descartes’ contribution to philosophy should be familiar, at least in outline. In asking how Cartesian Descartes was, I am asking how accurate the picture is as an interpretation of Descartes. I begin in the first two sections by sketching this Cartesian interpretation of Descartes in a


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little more detail.3 Since the Cartesian interpretation centres on the Meditations – in fact on the first two Meditations – this text will be the main focus of these sections. Then I shall argue against the Cartesian interpretation, marshalling support for a very different interpretation of Descartes’ project which places it in the context provided by Descartes’ other writings and by the Aristotelian views he opposed.

Cartesian scepticism: the problem of the external world According to the Cartesian interpretation, the key to Descartes’ thought, the starting point from which all his other views originate, is the pursuit of certain knowledge. In the opening paragraph of the First Meditation, Descartes speaks of ‘the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice I had subsequently based upon them’. In view of the doubtful nature of his beliefs, he resolves ‘to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations’.4 This last remark signals a key feature of the Cartesian quest for certain knowledge, the belief that knowledge is based on foundations.5 These foundations are to be identified by pressing sceptical doubts as far as possible, in order to identify claims which are immune to the most radical doubt, and can therefore serve as a basis for certain knowledge. Descartes begins his pursuit of this strategy in the First Meditation. Noting that ‘whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses’, he presents progressively stronger reasons for doubting the testimony of the senses. First he notes that the senses sometimes deceive. But this first level of doubt does not provide a reason to doubt all that we learn through the senses, if we can distinguish favourable and unfavourable conditions of perception:6 although the senses occasionally deceive us with respect to objects which are very small or in the distance, there are many other beliefs about which doubt is quite impossible, even though they are derived from the senses – for example, that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on. Again, how could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine?7 But he finds a reason to doubt these very beliefs when he remembers that he dreams: How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events – that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire – when in fact I am lying undressed in bed!… As I think about this carefully, I see

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History of the mind–body problem plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.8

This second level of doubt calls in question the beliefs untouched by the thought that the senses sometimes deceive. If there are never any sure signs to show that I am not dreaming, it seems I have a reason to doubt all my sense-based beliefs. But there is a distinction to be made here between having a reason to doubt any such belief and having a reason to doubt all of them. Bernard Williams points out that we cannot infer from ‘the distributive proposition that any given [perceptual] judgement may be mistaken’ to ‘the collective claim that they all may be’.9 That is why the step to the third level of doubt is ‘a new step, marked by a new development – the introduction … of the malin génie, the “malicious demon”, “of the highest power and intelligence, who devotes all his efforts to deceiving me”,’ so that ‘the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement’.10 With the Evil Demon, Descartes has invented the problem of proving the existence of the external world. If I am deceived by the Evil Demon, then ‘all supposedly perceptual judgements are false, and ... the external world, the supposed object of all such judgements, may not exist at all’.11 This ‘hyperbolical’ doubt, generated by the possibility that all our perceptions are false at once, ‘poses in an absolutely general way the problem of the existence of the external world’.12 Burnyeat contrasts this radical doubt with the ancient sceptics’ use of conflicting perceptual appearances to suspend judgement about how things really are, or are in themselves: honey appears bitter to me and sweet to you, we have no reason to say that how it appears to me is the way it really is, nor that how it appears to you is the way it really is; so we cannot say how it really is. The existence of a real thing, honey, is not called into question by this argument: ‘It is one and the same external thing, honey … which appears thus and so and which has a real nature that the skeptic is unable to determine’.13 By contrast, the existence of external things is precisely what Descartes does find reason to doubt in contemplating the possibility of deception by an Evil Demon. And as Burnyeat also stresses, this doubt about the existence of the external world includes doubt about the existence of one’s own body: ‘I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things’.14 Descartes not only calls the existence of the external world into question, he makes his own body part of the external world.

The Cartesian mind Having raised this radical doubt about the veridicality of the perceptual experiences on which his former beliefs rested, how does Descartes propose


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to find foundations for knowledge which are proof against it? Burnyeat remarks that ‘it is not surprising, if Descartes thinks he has found examples of knowledge and truth which lie beyond the reach of the traditional sceptical arguments, that these examples should turn out to be truths which an ancient sceptic would hardly have recognised as truths at all’.15 In the Second Meditation Descartes finds that his certainty of his own existence and of his states of mind, including his sensory perceptions, is proof against the wiles of the demon. Not only is he certain that he exists, he is also certain that it is one and the same I who doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands some things, who affirms that this one thing is true, who denies everything else, who desires to know more, who is unwilling to be deceived, who imagines many things even involuntarily, and is aware of many things which apparently come from the senses[.] Are not all these things as true as the fact that I exist [?] … For example, I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But I am asleep, so all this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term is simply thinking.16 Burnyeat comments on this passage that ‘subjective truth has arrived to stay, constituting one’s own experience as an object for description’.17 Descartes’ discovery marks what McDowell calls the recognition of ‘how things seem to a subject as a case of how things are’.18 According to the Cartesian interpretation, this passage marks a crucial moment both in Descartes’ search for certainty and in the history of philosophy. It is crucial to the search for certainty because it marks the discovery of the incorrigibility of claims about one’s own perceptions or experiences. So long as I make claims only about my own experiences, so long as I claim only that I seem to perceive certain things, I cannot be wrong. Even if I am subject to the Demon’s illusions, it is still true that things seem or appear to me to be a certain way. Descartes has found a secure foundation on which to reconstruct his knowledge, and he has also initiated the project of attempting to derive knowledge of the external world from knowledge of one’s own perceptions.19 Descartes’ version of this project has not found favour. He relies on his proof of a benevolent God to rout the Evil Demon and guarantee his transition from knowledge of his own perceptions to knowledge of the external world. Williams sees Descartes’ historical position encapsulated in the fact that although ‘his first certainties are found, in a new way, in subjective consciousness’, his road back from these subjective certainties to knowledge of the external world ‘goes over a religious bridge’. The collapse of this bridge meant that philosophy after Descartes was left stranded in the regions of scepticism and subjective idealism.20

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The passage is also regarded as crucial because it marks the emergence of a distinctively Cartesian conception of mind as a realm where there is no possibility of deception, where things appear as they are and are as they appear.21 The mind is transparent to itself, an inner realm which is infallibly ‘knowable through and through’.22 The conception of the mind introduced in the Second Meditation is, in effect, the mirror image of the conception of the external world introduced in the First Meditation. The external world is just what I can always be wrong about and never be sure about; the mind is just what I can never be wrong about and always be sure about. As Brandom puts it, on the Cartesian conception ‘the mind is the realm of what is known immediately, not just in the sense of noninferentially, but in the stronger sense that its goings-on are given to us in a way that banishes the possibility both of ignorance and of error’.23 The immediacy of our access to mind makes the world external to it seem even more inaccessible by comparison, reinforcing the failure of Descartes’ religious route out of the First Meditation doubt. This interpretation of Descartes’ contribution is summed up in this quotation from an introductory text: There is a strong tradition in philosophy which holds that we start from knowledge of our own sensory states and build up from there. Descartes never questioned his beliefs about how things seemed to him at the time; he asked instead how he could know other things, such as the existence of God or of a material world … There is in fact a sceptical tendency in foundationalism of this sort, just because it leads us to see as problematic everything other than our knowledge of our sensory states; it acknowledges the danger that we might be unable to construct the superstructure which the foundations are intended to carry.24 Rorty’s summary of the new ‘veil-of-ideas’ scepticism – made possible, he claims, by ‘the Cartesian mind’ – makes the acknowledgement explicit: ‘Given that we shall never have certainty about anything but the contents of our own minds, how can we ever justify an inference to a belief about anything else?’25

Cartesian dualism: mind without body How does Descartes’ dualism, his claim that mind is an immaterial substance distinct from body, fit into the Cartesian interpretation of his project? We can make a start on this question by recalling Burnyeat’s point that ‘Descartes’ own hands and body take over the center of the stage’ at both the second and third levels of the First Meditation doubt.26 In introducing the Evil Demon,


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Descartes contemplates not only the possibility that ‘all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement’, but also the possibility that he does not have ‘hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses’.27 So in presenting reasons for doubting the existence of the external world, Descartes is presenting reasons for doubting the existence of his own body; his own body has become part of the external world. By contrast, Burnyeat argues, in ancient sceptical discussions ‘external’ simply means external to oneself, the cognitive subject, the embodied person.28 But when in the Second Meditation Descartes finds that his certainty of his own existence is proof against the Evil Demon doubt, he discovers too that he is a thinking thing who can be certain of his own existence even though external things, including his body, are chimeras: ‘I know for certain both that I exist and at the same time that … everything relating to the nature of body could be mere dreams’.29 And this provides a route to dualism: the envisaged possibility of himself, a mind, existing in the absence of any external bodies (including his own) shows that his mind cannot be identical to any body, given the premise that such an identity could not be contingent. Thus Williams, for example, interprets Descartes as saying ‘“I might not have a body, even though everything seems as it does”,’ and concluding from this that he could exist disembodied, and hence is not his body.30 In dissociating the mind from the external world the Evil Demon doubt also dissociates it from the body, and thereby shows that they are distinct. In fact, dualism can appear simply as a metaphysical reflection of the epistemological gulf between mind and world; if mind is ‘defined by its epistemic status’31 as what is infallibly known to itself because it appears as it is and is as it appears, how could such a tract of reality ‘possibly be a region of the familiar material world?’32 The corollary of the invention of Cartesian scepticism, or the problem of the external world, is the invention of the Cartesian mind as the immaterial repository of subjective appearances.

Summary and prospectus Let me summarise the view of Descartes I have been sketching. Descartes’ chief aim is to attain certainty by finding foundations for knowledge which are proof against the most radical sceptical doubt. This is the Evil Demon doubt, which calls the existence of the external world into question by raising the possibility that all his perceptual experiences are deceptive. Descartes discovers that his knowledge of his existence and of the perceptual experiences themselves survives this doubt, and seeks to rebuild his knowledge of the external world on this secure foundation. His claim that the mind is immaterial derives from his certainty that he could exist as a mind with the thoughts and experiences he has, even if no external material world exists.

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According to this perspective, the Cartesian mind emerges from Descartes’ battle with scepticism about the external world, a battle which results in a retreat to a subjective realm of thought and experience which is both better known than the external world of bodies and metaphysically distinct from it. This picture is a neat and appealing one; but how accurate is it? The Cartesian interpretation leaves Descartes with a conception of mind as the repository of perceptual appearances and of the external world as the repository of the familiar objects we used to believe those appearances revealed to us. The central problem is that of somehow deriving our lost certainties about the familiar external world from our newfound certainties about our own perceptual states. Perceptual experiences figure both as paradigmatic states of mind and as the foundation for knowledge of the world of bodies. This interpretation distorts Descartes’ conception of mind and of our knowledge of bodies, while leaving his conception of body itself completely invisible.33 Far from being paradigmatic of the mental, sensory perception is a mode of thought inessential to a thinking thing.34 Descartes has no interest in deriving old certainties about the familiar external world from claims about perceptual states. He aims instead to replace the old certainties with a new conception of body as extended substance, known by the intellect via an innate geometrical idea of corporeal nature; the senses can no longer serve as the primary source for our understanding of corporeal things. From Descartes’ perspective, the conceptions of mind, body and knowledge issuing from the Cartesian interpretation are too sensory – just his objection to the views he aimed to overthrow. This should not be surprising, given the kind of scepticism it sees as motivating Descartes’ project. While ancient scepticism questioned claims about the nature of external things, radical Cartesian scepticism questions their very existence. Naively, we think we know the external world through perceptual experience. The First Meditation proposes that there might be no external world – our experiences might be the work of the Evil Demon. The Second Meditation points out that, even so, we would be certain of our perceptual experiences. Here begins the task of deriving knowledge of the external world from knowledge of perceptual experience. This picture of Descartes’ project naturally brings perceptual experiences to the centre of attention, both as inhabitants of the newly emerging Cartesian mind and as objects of newly recognised Cartesian knowledge.35 Descartes is cast either as defending our perceptual knowledge of the external world against the sceptical onslaught, or as trading it for more certain knowledge of our own perceptual states. Either way, the external world recedes into the distance, figuring merely as that which is difficult or impossible to know. The new discoveries are all on the side of the mind; indeed, how could a project which questions the very existence of the external world issue in any discoveries about it?


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The Cartesian interpretation depicts Descartes’ project as a search for certainty shaped by scepticism about the external world. According to the interpretation I shall defend, Descartes’ mechanistic conception of the material world is the driving force behind the Meditations, and his project is to lay foundations for his new physics in a way which demonstrates its compatibility with religion.36 He uses sceptical doubts strategically to counteract common sense and Aristotelian preoccupation with sensory perception and prepare the way for a purely intellectual understanding of body, mind and God, based on innate ideas. Before arguing for this interpretation of Descartes, it may be helpful to summarise it in a way which contrasts it with the Cartesian picture. According to this alternative interpretation, Descartes’ chief aim is to provide metaphysical and epistemological foundations for his mathematical physics; sceptical doubts are used chiefly as a strategic device. He uses sceptical arguments to raise separately doubts about the senses and about innate ideas as sources of knowledge. His response to these doubts is intended to show that though we are misled by sensory appearances, innate ideas of thought and extension, given to the intellect by God, provide a foundation for knowledge of the truth about the created world. His dualism derives not from the possibility of mind existing without body, but from the claim that thought and extension are attributes of distinct substances.

Descartes’ use of scepticism: withdrawal from the senses In the Synopsis of the First Meditation, Descartes says that in it ‘reasons are provided which give us possible grounds for doubt about all things, especially material things, so long as we have no foundations for the sciences other than those which we have had up till now’.37 And the opening paragraph of the Meditations speaks of the necessity of demolishing everything completely and starting again ‘right from the foundations’. According to the Cartesian interpretation, such remarks signal Descartes’ aim of finding foundations for knowledge which are absolutely certain. But a letter written in the year in which the Meditations were published indicates a concern with a different kind of foundations: … I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not say so, because those who favour Aristotle would perhaps have more difficulty in approving them. I hope that those who read them will imperceptibly [insensiblement] become accustomed to my principles, and recognise the truth in them before they notice that they destroy those of Aristotle.38

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Descartes hopes that his Meditations on First Philosophy will convert his readers to the principles underlying his physics, principles which conflict with the Aristotelianism of the Schools.39 This hope sheds new light on his need to demolish everything and start again right from the foundations if he is ‘to establish something lasting in the sciences’.40 In a well-known passage in which he compares philosophy to a tree, Descartes likens the first part of philosophy, metaphysics, to the roots, the second part, physics, to the trunk, and the other sciences to the branches which bear the fruit beneficial to humanity.41 To establish something lasting in the sciences we need the foundations or roots of a new metaphysics, a new first philosophy; only then can we discover the true principles of material things and develop the second part of philosophy, physics. First philosophy contains ‘the principles of knowledge, including the explanation of the principal attributes of God, the non-material nature of our souls and all the clear and distinct notions that are in us’.42 These principles, then, are the new foundations contained in the Meditations. But what are the old foundations on which the sciences have previously been based, the principles of Aristotle? The Synopsis of the First Meditation says that it provides ‘possible grounds for doubt about all things, especially material things, so long as we have no foundations for the sciences other than those we have had up till now’.43 And when, in the First Meditation itself, he decides to go straight for the principles on which all his former beliefs rested, he declares that ‘whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses’.44 So far, then, the sciences have been founded on the senses. Descartes takes the view that the senses are the principles of knowledge to be the received view, originating in childhood45 and codified in the philosophy of Aristotelian Scholasticism.46 Aquinas, for example, states that ‘the Philosopher proves that knowledge is from the senses’.47 To understand the role of sceptical doubt in Descartes’ project, we must understand something of the Aristotelian principles of knowledge he seeks to supplant. I shall focus on the views of Aquinas, central to Descartes’ early philosophical education at La Flèche. For Aquinas, human knowledge is rooted in the senses in virtue of the place of the human soul in the order of creation. Aquinas holds that ‘everything understood is apprehended by some likeness [of the thing] within him who understands it’.48 The likeness may be present as exemplar (as cause) or as image (as effect). The likenesses of creatures exist as exemplars only in the mind of God, who is the cause of creatures.49 The likenesses in the minds of angels are images or effects, but they are derived not from the creatures themselves but directly from God; angels are naturally (that is, of their nature) equipped with likenesses or intelligible species of all the things they can know.50 The lowest intellectual beings, human souls, are not natur-


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ally equipped with intelligible species. Human souls, being the forms of bodies, must derive the likenesses through which they understand from bodies and through bodies, rather than directly from God; ‘otherwise, they would be united to bodies in vain’.51 So Aquinas states that the human soul ‘is not naturally endowed with the knowledge of truth, as the angels are, but has to gather knowledge from individual things by way of the senses’.52 The senses receive the likenesses or forms of individual corporeal things without the matter, as the wax receives the form of a seal, and they are retained by the imagination as phantasms. To apprehend the universal nature existing in these individual things, the intellect must abstract its likeness, the intelligible species, from the phantasms.53 The senses provide the crucial link between the intellect and its objects; hence the slogan nihil est in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu (nothing is the intellect unless it was first in the senses). Not only is the intellect dependent on the senses as a source of the phantasms from which intelligible forms are abstracted, but whenever the intellect understands it must make use of a phantasm, because the proper object of human knowledge is a nature existing in corporeal matter.54 Since it belongs to a universal nature – say, the nature of a horse – to be in an individual horse, the nature can only be apprehended completely and truly as existing in the individual; and we apprehend the individual through the senses and imagination. So without some use of the senses we can neither learn anything new … nor bring before our understanding any intellectual knowledge already possessed. Whenever the intellect actually regards anything there must at the same time be formed in us a phantasm, that is, a likeness of something sensible.55 Because of this, ‘suspension of the senses necessarily involves a hindrance to the judgement of the intellect’.56 Descartes rejects this account of the objects of human intellectual knowledge and of the dependence of the human intellect on the senses. The objects of intellectual understanding cannot be universal natures, such as the nature of a horse, existing in individual corporeal things; there are no such natures in the universe of Descartes’ physics. His metaphysics recognises only finite thinking substances (minds), extended substance (body), and infinite thinking substance (God). The variety in corporeal things, including the variety in living things, is due not to the different natures by which different parcels of matter are informed, but to the shapes and motions of the parts of matter itself.57 The senses do not receive forms or likenesses from individual corporeal things, nor provide the intellect with its source of intelligible species. First, the senses do not receive likenesses from corporeal things at all. There

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are no ‘intentional forms’ flitting through the air from the object to the sense organ; motions from the object set the sense organs in motion, and the resulting motions in the brain give rise to sensations in the mind.58 Sensations of colour, warmth, and so on are modes of mind, and no qualities resembling them exist in bodies.59 Second, the human intellect is not dependent on the senses as the source of its ideas, but is supplied by God with innate ideas of thought and extension.60 For Descartes, human knowledge is founded not on the senses but on ‘the clear and distinct notions that are in us’.61 Like the angels, human souls are naturally equipped with ideas of all that they can understand, but the images derived from the senses cloud our mental vision and prevent us from perceiving them clearly.62 Rather than holding that acts of understanding must employ phantasms, images in the corporeal imagination, Descartes regards the use of such images as the chief obstacle to clear understanding.63 Despite the fact that we have innate ideas of the soul and God, many are convinced that there is some difficulty in knowing God, and even in knowing what their soul is. The reason for this is that they never raise their minds above things which can be perceived by the senses: they are so used to thinking of things solely by imagining them (a way of thinking specially suited to material things) that whatever is unimaginable seems to them unintelligible. This is sufficiently obvious from the fact that even the scholastic philosophers take it as a maxim that there is nothing in the intellect that has not previously been in the senses; and yet it is certain that the ideas of God and the soul have never been in the senses.64 Descartes attributes Scholastic abstractionism to a habit of thinking in images, a habit originating in childhood, when the mind ‘never exercised its intellect on anything without at the same time picturing something in the imagination’. As a result, the mind ‘took thought and extension to be one and the same thing, and referred to the body all the notions which it had concerning things related to the intellect’.65 The confusion of mind with body resulting from reliance on images produces such conceptual hybrids as the substantial forms and real qualities of Aristotelian physics:66 The earliest judgements which we made in our childhood, and later on the influence of the traditional philosophy, have accustomed us to attribute to the body many things which belong only to the soul, and to attribute to the soul many things which belong only to the body. So people commonly mingle the two ideas of body and soul when they construct the ideas of real qualities and substantial forms, which I think


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should be altogether rejected. If you examine physics carefully, you can reduce all those things in it which fall under the province of intellectual knowledge into very few kinds, of which we have very clear and distinct notions…67 From Descartes’ perspective, Aristotelian science is founded on a metaphysics rooted in childhood prejudices. But these prejudices are deep-rooted, and can be eradicated only by breaking the habit of relying on the senses and imagination. ‘In metaphysics’, Descartes writes, nothing takes more work than perceiving the primary notions clearly and distinctly … because they conflict with many prejudices of the senses to which we have been accustomed from our earliest years, they cannot be perfectly known without concentrating and meditating intensely, and drawing the mind away from the senses as much as is possible.68 Only the meditator who succeeds in drawing the mind away from the senses and sensory images can learn to exercise pure intellectual vision and thus perceive the innate primary notions clearly and distinctly. Distinguishing the primary notions clearly is a prerequisite for correct judgement; Descartes tells Mersenne that, ‘we have to form distinct ideas of the things we want to judge about, and this is what most people fail to do and what I have mainly tried to teach in my Meditations’.69 The best way to form distinct ideas is to explain in detail ‘the falsehood or uncertainty to be found in all the judgements that depend on the senses and the imagination, so as to show in the sequel which judgements depend only on the pure understanding, and what evidence and certainty they possess’.70 Descartes confesses that he dared not do this in the Discourse, though the omission made his argument obscure, because he was writing in the vernacular and was afraid that weak minds might be led astray by the doubts he would have to propound.71 But in the Latin Meditations he includes what he had omitted from the Discourse – ‘the strongest arguments of the sceptics to show that there is no material thing of the existence of which one can be assured’ – in order ‘to accustom the reader to detach his thought from sensible things’.72 According to the Aristotelian view, an intellect detached from the senses and from sensible things is disabled. Aquinas explains that ‘in the present state of life, whatever we understand we know through comparison with natural sensible things. Consequently it is not possible for our intellect to form a perfect judgement while the senses are suspended, through which sensible things are known to us’.73 Descartes intends to show that by drawing the mind away from the senses, by turning the intellect away from phantasms

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and towards innate ideas, the meditator can attain a clear and distinct perception of the primary notions of metaphysics for the first time. The strategy of the Meditations, the strategy of attaining knowledge by withdrawing the mind from the senses, constitutes a sustained attack on the Scholastic account of cognition and the central role it assigns to the senses and imagination. The attack begins with the sceptical arguments of the First Meditation. As we have seen, these are necessary in order to withdraw the meditator’s mind from the senses and from sensible things; according to the Synopsis, the greatest benefit of the First Meditation doubt is that ‘it frees us from all prejudices, and provides a very easy route by which the mind may be led away from the senses [a sensibus abducendam]’.74 The first fruit of this detachment from the senses is a clear understanding of the nature of the intellect. Descartes defends his presentation of sceptical arguments on the grounds that he wanted to ‘prepare my readers’ minds for the study of things related to the intellect, and help them to distinguish them from corporeal things; and such arguments seem to be wholly necessary for this purpose’.75 If confusion of mind and body and reliance on the senses are not just Aristotelian but habitual, originating in childhood, we can see why the doubts of the First Meditation would be needed to clear the ground before the foundations of Descartes’ physics can be laid.76 No preoccupation with scepticism and indubitability is needed to explain why he should start the Meditations by speaking of ‘the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice I had subsequently based upon them’. Descartes’ project of setting the sciences on new foundations takes a specific form. He aims to undermine and remove the habitual (and Scholastic) sensory understanding of matter and material understanding of mind. Our reliance on the senses as sources of ideas and guides to the nature of the world around us, originating in childhood and enshrined in the Aristotelian account of cognition, is to be replaced with his own view that God has supplied our intellect with innate ideas of thought and extension (the essences of mind and matter respectively). The innate idea of geometrical extension forms the basis for a mechanical physics which gives clear mathematical explanations of natural phenomena.77 The innate idea of thought forms the basis for an understanding of the soul as a mind or intellectual nature capable of independent existence. The Aristotelian universe of a diversity of substantial forms joined to matter is to be replaced by the Cartesian universe of two distinct substances, thinking mind and extended matter.

The structure of the First Meditation The previous section marshalled support for the view that Descartes’ goal in beginning the Meditations with sceptical arguments is not to attain certainty,


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but to lay new metaphysical foundations for his new physics. But how do the specific sceptical doubts of the First Meditation aid Descartes in replacing habitual and Aristotelian assumptions with his own principles? One of the most important tasks of the First Meditation is to question the deep-seated assumption that the senses are the source of knowledge, and thereby accustom the meditator to withdraw the mind from the senses. Withdrawal from the senses serves two closely related functions for Descartes. First, it enables the meditator to distinguish the basic notions of metaphysics, thought and extension, hitherto obscured by sensory images. Second, it enables the meditator to recognise that true knowledge derives not from the senses but from the intellect, stocked with innate ideas by God; the senses play a subordinate role. In this section I analyse the doubts of the First Meditation in the light of Descartes’ goal of challenging habitual and Aristotelian assumptions and of introducing his own innatist alternative, making comparisons with the Cartesian interpretation in the process. Descartes begins by looking for reasons to distrust the senses, but the first he finds – the fact that the senses sometimes deceive – cannot shake his faith that he is sitting by the fire holding a piece of paper, or that he possesses hands and a body; it would be madness to doubt something so obvious.78 This response reflects the childhood prejudice that nothing is more certain than one’s own body; it will be overturned in the Second Meditation, with the realisation that mind is better known than body.79 But before the meditator can know his own mind, he must be persuaded to entertain doubts about his own body. It is here that the dreaming doubt is introduced. Descartes recalls being convinced that he was sitting by the fire when he was asleep in bed, and reflects that there are no sure signs to distinguish being awake from being asleep. What is the sceptical challenge to the senses here? According to the Cartesian interpretation discussed earlier, the thought is that if there are no certain signs to tell whether one is dreaming or waking on any given occasion, then no experience can be trusted.80 This challenge might be disconcerting to the naive meditator, but it does not question the assumption that waking experiences are veridical and dream experiences are not; the challenge is simply to find a way of telling in which camp a particular experience belongs. An alternative interpretation, championed by Margaret Wilson, reads the dreaming doubt as posing a more radical challenge: on what grounds does the meditator regard waking (that is, sensory) experience as veridical, when it is so similar to dream experience? Descartes stresses the fact that dreams can be just as convincing as waking experience, even though what they convince us of is false. This being so, what feature of waking experience shows that it presents us with the truth? Descartes describes the challenge as so disconcerting that it stupefies him; and given his views about the developmental origins of faith in the senses, Descartes could expect his readers to find this challenge difficult to meet. The received view is that ordinary sensory

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perception occurs when our senses receive the likenesses of external objects. (‘External’ here need mean no more than ‘external to the perceiver’.) But Descartes depicts this belief as grounded only in the fact that our sensory experience is lively, vivid and not under the control of our will.81 Since these are features shared by dream experience, the naive meditator may well be at a loss to explain why he believes that he receives the likenesses of external objects in waking experience but not in dream experience.82 The challenge posed by dreaming persuades the meditator to suspend belief in what he perceives; perhaps he is not extending his hands, perhaps indeed he has no hands to extend. But to do this is not to relinquish all faith in experience as a guide to reality, for even dream experience must surely have some basis in real objects: ‘the visions which come in sleep are like paintings, which must have been fashioned in the likeness of things that are real’.83 So even if I am only dreaming that I am extending my hands, at least such things as hands must be real; just as painters can only jumble up the limbs of animals they have seen, so I can only dream about kinds of things that I have seen.84 This analogy with painting is certainly the obvious response for an Aristotelian reader to make; Aquinas describes dreams as imaginary pictures formed or co-ordinated from phantasms, the forms or likenesses received by the senses and retained in the imagination or phantasia.85 In other words, the basic elements from which dream images are composed are the likenesses of corporeal originals, from which they are derived through sensation. On the Aristotelian view the imagination, like the intellect, is ultimately dependent on the senses for the materials through which it represents; one might say that nihil est in phantasia nisi prius fuerit in sensu.86 This empiricist orientation is reflected in Descartes’ first response to the idea that he may be dreaming.87 But the analogy between dreams and paintings is now developed in a way which subverts this empiricist conception of dreams. Descartes reflects that painters can depict something so new that only the colours used in the composition need be real. He concludes that such things as hands may in fact be imaginary; it is certain simpler and more universal things, as it were the real colours from which we form all the images of things that occur in our thought, that must be real.88 I interpret this shift in the analogy as a shift from an empiricist to an innatist conception of dreaming. What painters can depict is constrained not by what they have seen, but by what can be seen; the only constraints are those intrinsic to the medium itself. Applied to cognition, the lesson is that what we can depict in thought (the range of images that occur in our thought) is constrained not by our prior experience, but by the constraints intrinsic to thought itself – the concepts innate in the mind. The simple and universal things Descartes mentions are ‘corporeal nature in general, and its extension; the shape of extended things; the quantity,


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or size and number of these things; the place in which they may exist, the time through which they may endure, and so on’.89 Any thing we can think of we must conceive of as having corporeal nature, extension, shape, size, and as capable of existing in place and time. Of course this is not Descartes’ own view, since it ignores the fact that we have an innate capacity to conceive of immaterial things; but it does suggest the elements of the innate idea of matter on which our understanding of mathematics is based. Whether or not the analogy introduces the idea that our grasp of the simple and universal aspects of material things is innate, it is certainly used to introduce the idea that mathematical knowledge remains certain even if we are dreaming. Descartes remarks that arithmetic, geometry, and other subjects of this kind, which deal only with the simplest and most general things, regardless of whether they exist in nature or not, contain something certain and indubitable. For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three added together are five, and a square has no more than four sides. It seems impossible that such transparent truths should incur any suspicion of being false.90 A third level of doubt is needed to call the meditator’s knowledge of these transparent mathematical truths into question. It is here that Descartes raises the possibility that his creator has given him a deceitful nature. He recalls that ‘firmly rooted in my mind is the long-standing opinion that there is an omnipotent God who made me the kind of creature that I am’.91 The thought that God would not let me be deceived ‘every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square’, because he is said to be supremely good, is met with the thought that he does allow me to be deceived sometimes, though this would seem to be equally foreign to his goodness. Those who seek to evade the argument by denying the existence of so powerful a God are reminded that ‘since deception and error seem to be imperfections, the less power they assign to the author of my origin, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time’.92 With this, the meditator admits defeat: ‘I have no answer to these arguments, but am finally compelled to admit that there is not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised’.93 According to the Cartesian interpretation outlined earlier, the move from the second to the third stage of doubt marks the transition from distributive doubt to collective doubt – the move from the possibility that any one of our perceptual judgements might be false to the possibility that they might all be false, and that ‘the external world, the supposed objects of all such judgements, may not exist at all’.94 One worry about this interpretation is that Descartes’ summing-up at the final stage of the doubt, ‘there is not one of

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my former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised’, suggests distributive rather than collective doubt. A more significant worry is that the Cartesian interpretation makes the second and third stages differ in scope but not in subject-matter; both concern perceptual beliefs about external objects, which is why the third and final stage of collective doubt targets the very existence of the external world. But in fact Descartes’ third stage of doubt is specifically introduced to target judgements about a new subjectmatter, mathematics, judgements which survive the dreaming doubt because they ‘deal only with the simplest and most general things, regardless of whether they are in the nature of things or not’.95 Given Descartes’ view that truths of mathematics are independent of the existence of material things, a doubt which targets knowledge of the existence of material things does not thereby call knowledge of mathematical truths into question.96 As we have seen, Descartes creates doubt about mathematical judgements by raising the possibility that he has been created with a nature that makes him go astray in cases where he thinks he has perfect knowledge. Given Descartes’ view that ideas of extension and number are innate – a view prefigured, I have suggested, by the painting analogy – it would be natural for him to cast doubt on the reliability of his mathematical judgements by raising questions about the origin of the notions he possesses by nature.97 His creator could have made him such that the ideas innate in him lead him into error rather than to the truth; as Descartes puts it in the Third Meditation, ‘some God could have given me a nature such that I was deceived even in matters which seemed most evident’.98 According to the interpretation outlined here, the doubt based on dreaming and the doubt about his creator play very different roles in preparing the ground for the foundations of Descartes’ physics. His physics is based on an innate intellectual understanding of matter as pure extension, rather than on a sensory grasp of matter as possessed of sensible qualities such as colour and hardness. He uses the dreaming doubt to question the credentials of sensory perception as a source of knowledge of material things. These doubts about the reliability of sense-perception will in large measure be sustained rather than removed in the succeeding Meditations. The credentials of senseperception are examined in the Third Meditation and again in the Sixth Meditation, where Descartes discovers that he has habitually misused sensory perceptions by treating them as reliable touchstones for immediate judgements about the essential nature of external bodies.99 By using a separate doubt, based on worries about the origin of his nature, Descartes can raise a separate question about the credentials of truths that are transparent to the native understanding, including the mathematical truths central to his physics. If he is to lay secure foundations for his mathematical physics in the clear


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and distinct perception of innate ideas, it is vital that our creator, the source of these ideas, should be shown not to be a deceiver. This interpretation of the second and third stages of the First Meditation doubt diverges from the Cartesian interpretation in representing them as targeting sensory and intellectual ideas of body respectively. But there is also a divergence over the role of the Evil Demon. On the Cartesian interpretation, the Evil Demon is introduced to raise the possibility that the external world does not exist and thereby provide a reason to doubt all sensebased beliefs at once – the third level of doubt about the senses. On the interpretation I have been defending, the third level of doubt is a doubt about Descartes’ creator, about the origin of his nature; the Evil Demon plays no part. And in fact, Descartes does not introduce the Evil Demon as a ground for doubt in the First Meditation. Having raised the worry that there are no sure signs to distinguish waking experience from dream experience, and the worry that my nature may be such that I deceive myself even in matters of arithmetic and geometry, his aim of finding a reason for doubt in all his opinions is achieved: ‘I have no answer to these arguments, but am finally compelled to admit that there is not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt cannot be raised; and this is not a flippant or illconsidered conclusion, but is based on powerful and well thought-out reasons’.100 He now has reason to doubt, or withhold assent from, all his former opinions: ‘So in future I must withhold my assent from these former beliefs just as carefully as I would from obvious falsehoods …’101 But this resolution is difficult to adhere to; he finds that ‘my habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite my wishes, they capture my belief, which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom’.102 This is to be expected, given that the prejudices and habits Descartes seeks to demolish are deep-seated and long-standing, originating in childhood and enshrined in philosophical tradition. To counteract ‘the habit of confidently assenting to these opinions’, he conceives the plan of turning his will in completely the opposite direction and deceiving himself ‘by pretending for a time that these former opinions are uttely false and imaginary’.103 By pretending that his habitual opinions are false, he will ensure that he does not assent to opinions he has seen reason to doubt. The supposition of deception by an evil demon is introduced in order to put this plan into effect, as a device which will counter-balance the weight of preconceived opinion and counteract the distorting influence of habit on his judgement. In the Fifth Replies, Descartes compares this procedure to bending a curved stick in the opposite direction in order to straighten it; a bias in one direction can only be corrected by introducing a bias in the opposite direction.104 The existing bias, of course, is towards the senses; by turning the mind away from the senses and from sensible things and towards

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ideas of thought and extension innate in the intellect, the meditator will learn to judge correctly.105 Descartes also compares his procedure to that of astronomers and geometers who suppose lines drawn around the Earth or added to given figures; they know that ‘it is often useful to assume falsehoods … in order to shed light on the truth’.106 Similarly, the fiction of deceit by an evil demon is a falsehood which serves to withdraw the mind from the senses and allow the reader to recognise the truth of Descartes’ principles. Not surprisingly, the first assumptions Descartes asks the reader to make concern things perceived through the senses. He resolves to suppose that ‘the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams’ and that he has no ‘hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses’.107 Note that his body is not included among ‘external things’; his body is a focus of attention not because it is now part of the external world, but because his first task is to replace his old conception of himself as a corporeal thing with a new understanding of himself as a mind.108

Descartes on the nature of mind According to the Cartesian interpretation, the Second Meditation marks the fulfilment of Descartes’ goal of securing a kind of certainty that is proof against the strongest sceptical doubt. This certainty is found in his knowledge of his own mind. Even if the external world is a delusion, he cannot be wrong in his claims about his experiences: ‘I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But I am asleep, so all this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false …’109 This discovery marks ‘one of Descartes’ signal innovations’ – his definition of the mind ‘by its epistemic status, as what is best known to itself by falling within the reach of the subject’s incorrigibility and local omniscience’.110 The title of the Second Meditation – ‘The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body’ – appears to lend support to this view of the Cartesian mind as defined by its epistemic status.111 If Descartes’ goal is not to achieve certainty but to lay metaphysical foundations for his physics, as I have been arguing, why should he seek to emphasise the mind’s knowledge of itself? Descartes’ synopsis of the Second Meditation provides a clue. He writes that in this Meditation, the mind uses its own freedom and supposes the non-existence of all things about whose existence it can have the slightest doubt; and in so doing the mind notices that it is impossible that it itself should not exist during this time. This exercise is also of the greatest benefit, since it enables the mind to distinguish without difficulty what belongs to itself, i.e. to an intellectual nature, from what belongs to the body.112


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Descartes describes the cogito as valuable not because it refutes sceptical doubt, but because it enables us to distinguish an intellectual nature from a corporeal one. As we have seen, he believes that the habit of thinking of things by imagining them, originating in childhood and codified in the Scholastic theory of cognition, leads to an habitual confusion of mind and body issuing in the Aristotelian notion of substantial form. The goal of the Second Meditation is to undo these habits and to teach the meditator to distinguish what belongs to mind from what belongs to body, as Descartes explains in the Second Replies: All our ideas of what belongs to the mind have up till now been very confused and mixed up with the ideas of things that can be perceived by the senses … So I thought I would be doing something worthwhile if I explained how the properties or qualities of the mind are to be distinguished from the qualities of the body. Admittedly, many people had previously said that in order to understand metaphysical matters the mind must be withdrawn from the senses; but no one, so far as I know, had shown how this could be done. The correct, and in my view unique, method of achieving this is contained in my Second Meditation … Protracted and repeated study is required to eradicate the lifelong habit of confusing things related to the intellect with corporeal things, and to replace it with the opposite habit of distinguishing the two … I think that was the best justification for my devoting the whole of the Second Meditation to this topic alone.113 Descartes’ ‘unique method’ for distinguishing ideas of what belongs to mind from ideas of what can be perceived by the senses is introduced immediately after the cogito. Now he knows that he exists, he must ‘be on guard against carelessly taking something else to be this I’ – on guard, that is, against simply re-adopting his old prejudices. His method for avoiding this is to review his original beliefs about what he is, and to discard any which can be weakened by doubts about the senses and about corporeal things.114 Obviously this procedure is tailor-made for eradicating the habit of confusing the qualities of mind with the qualities of body; the corporeal elements in his former conception of himself will be dislodged by doubts about the senses and what they perceive. Descartes’ survey of ‘what I formerly thought I was’ provides a map of the confusions and errors he seeks to eradicate. He believed first that he had a body, and second that he was nourished, moved about, sensed and thought, acts he attributed to the soul. To the extent that he thought about the nature of the soul, which was not much, he imagined it as something tenuous permeating his body. By contrast, he thought he knew the nature of body distinctly,

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understanding bodies to be solid things with determinate shape and location, perceivable by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell, and movable by contact.115 This mixture of common prejudices and traditional Aristotelian views mistakes not only the nature of the soul and of body, but also how, and how distinctly, they are known. The nature of the soul is considered difficult to know, because the soul is difficult to imagine; the nature of body is easy to know, because bodies can be perceived by the senses. Descartes aims to refute these views in the course of the Second Meditation. By its close the meditator will not only have gained a clear understanding of the nature of the mind, and have begun to develop a clear grasp of the nature of body, but will also have learned that mind is more easily known than body, and that each is known not by sensation or imagination but by the intellect. The Second Meditation methodically challenges Descartes’ original beliefs in the order in which he lists them. He raises first the issue of what he is (‘What shall I now say that I am?’), then the issue of the nature of the soul (‘I am not some thin vapour which permeates the limbs’), and finally the issue of the nature of body (‘Let us consider … the bodies which we touch and see’).116 Which of his original beliefs about himself can he affirm if he is being deceived by an evil demon, as he decided to suppose at the end of the First Meditation? He cannot affirm that he has a body or any of the attributes of body, nor that he is nourished, that he moves, or that he senses, since all these require a body; only the attribute of thought cannot be subtracted from his conception of himself. Descartes in effect subtracts acts attributed to the soul but occurring in the body to conclude that he is a thinking thing – ‘a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason, words whose meaning I have been ignorant of until now’.117 This procedure undoes a significant element of the habitual and Aristotelian confusion of what belongs to mind with what belongs to body. The Aristotelians regard the human intellectual soul as the form and principle of life of the body; it is the principle of nourishment, locomotion and sensation as well as of understanding.118 For Descartes, the sole attribute of the soul is thought; the vital functions, including nutrition, are purely mechanical processes belonging to the body alone.119 Sensing conceived of in the Aristotelian way, as an operation of the soul performed by means of corporeal organs, succumbs to doubts about corporeal things.120 Descartes will divide sensation into a mental component or mode of thought, and a mechanical component occurring in the body. But the recognition of a kind of sensing which is an act of the mind alone can only occur after he has realised firstly that he is a thinking thing, and secondly that nothing relating to corporeal things is at all relevant to his knowledge of himself as a thinking thing. This second realisation occurs in an important transitional passage in which Descartes challenges the habit of thought that makes the nature of the soul


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seem difficult to grasp – the habit of thinking of things by imagining them.121 Descartes claims that his method of subtracting any claim weakened by doubt about corporeal things means that his knowledge of his nature cannot depend on images or anything relating to the nature of body: ‘If the I is understood strictly as we have been taking it [sc. as a thinking thing], then it is quite certain that knowledge of it does not depend on things of whose existence I am as yet unaware; so it cannot depend on any of the things which I invent in my imagination’.122 He explains why this is certain in the Seventh Replies: ‘It is transparently clear that the already acquired knowledge of a thing which is recognised as existing does not depend on the knowledge of that which we have not yet recognised as existing; for the very fact that something is perceived to belong to an existing thing necessarily implies that it is perceived to exist’.123 In other words, if his knowledge of what a thinking thing is depended on knowledge of bodies, it would bring with it knowledge of the existence of bodies. So he goes on to stress in the Second Meditation that his knowledge that he exists does not force him to recognise the existence of body: ‘Yet now I know for certain both that I exist and at the same time that all … images and, in general, everything relating to the nature of body, could be mere dreams’.124 Descartes concludes that imagining – ‘contemplating the shape or image of a corporeal thing’ – can only obstruct the mind’s knowledge of itself: ‘none of the things that the imagination enables me to grasp is at all relevant to this knowledge of myself which I possess, and the mind must therefore be most carefully withdrawn [avocandam] from such things if it is to perceive its own nature as distinctly as possible’.125 Descartes is now in a position to identify acts of imagining and sensing which are acts of mind, acts of the same thinking thing that understands and wills; a thing that thinks is ‘a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and senses’.126 He can affirm that he possesses these qualities even as he doubts the existence of corporeal things: The fact that it is I who am doubting and understanding and willing is so evident that I see no way of making it any clearer. But it is also the case that the I who imagines is the same I. For even if, as I have supposed, none of the objects of imagination are real, the power of imagination is something which really exists and is part of my thinking. Lastly, it is also the same I who senses, or is aware of bodily things as if through the senses. For example, I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But I am asleep, so all this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; it is what is properly called sensing in me, and taken in this sense it is just thinking.127

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Here we arrive at the discovery accorded such significance by the Cartesian interpretation – the discovery of subjective truth, of the infallibility of claims about subjective appearances. But from the perspective of Descartes’ method for distinguishing qualities of mind from qualities of body, his certainty that he seems to see even if he is dreaming marks the discovery of a conception of sensing as an act of thought, the act of a thinking thing. Sensing as the Aristotelians conceive it is defined in relation to material things; it is the reception of the forms of material things by means of a corporeal organ. One cannot affirm that one does this without affirming the existence of material things. Sensing (and imagining) as Descartes conceives of them can be affirmed without requiring the existence of material or sensible things that are imagined or sensed, as the quoted passage emphasises. But sensing and imagining are defined in relation to thought, of which they are modes; as emphasised in the Sixth Meditation, imagining and sensing can exist only in a thinking thing because ‘there is an intellectual act included in their essential definition’.128 For the Aristotelians, by contrast, sensation and imagination can exist in the absence of intellectual powers, as they do in animals. Descartes challenges not only the Aristotelian account of the nature of human soul, but also the Aristotelian account of how the soul knows its nature. To see how he does this, we need to look briefly at the Aristotelian account of how the soul knows itself. 129 Aristotelian teaching on the intellectual soul’s knowledge of itself is dictated by the principle that our intellect has material and sensible things for its proper object.130 The human intellect knows first the nature of a material thing, and only second its own act by which the object is known. As Aquinas puts it, the intellect understands a stone (the first act) and understands that it understands a stone (the second act, parasitic on the first).131 In this way, Socrates can perceive that he has an intellectual soul because he perceives that he understands; ‘the mere presence of the mind’ suffices for it to know itself. This is how an intellect can come to know of its own existence: ‘our mind knows itself through itself inasmuch as it knows that it is. For, by the very fact that it perceives itself to act, it perceives that it exists; and since it acts through itself, it knows through itself that it exists’.132 But this does not suffice for knowledge of what the soul is, universal knowledge of the nature of the human mind. ‘A careful and subtle inquiry’ is needed to discern the essence of the soul and how it differs from other things.133 This is to be expected; knowledge of a nature is knowledge of something common to many things, and can be gained only by investigating what distinguishes things with this nature from things with other natures.134 Though these two kinds of knowledge which the intellect can have of itself differ in the ease with which they can be acquired, both start from


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knowledge of the act of the intellect: ‘the intellect knows itself, not through its essence, but by its act’.135 The act of the human intellect, understanding, has as its object the nature of a material thing. This means that the intellectual soul’s knowledge of itself is dependent on its knowledge of material things. In the case of the mind’s perception of its own acts, the mind can perceive them only when they occur, only when it actually understands the nature existing in a material thing: ‘it understands itself according as it is made actual by the species abstracted from sensible things’.136 In the case of the mind’s knowledge of its own nature, an account of its powers requires an account of its acts, and this requires an account of the acts’ objects, since acts are distinguished according to the objects to which they are directed.137 So the human intellect proceeds from knowledge of objects to knowledge of acts, and only thence to knowledge of powers or faculties and of essence.138 As John Carriero has pointed out, the Second Meditation reverses this order of inquiry by proceeding from knowledge of the mind’s essence, thought, to knowledge of its various acts of doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, and so on.139 As a result, Descartes’ conception of the soul’s knowledge of its own nature departs from Aquinas’ in at least three ways. First Descartes, unlike Aquinas, holds that the mind’s presence to itself suffices not only for the mind’s knowledge of its own existence, but also for its knowledge of its own nature. The mind can discover its essence, faculties and operations simply by reflecting on its perception of itself. Second, and consequently, no laborious enquiry is required to know the mind’s nature; nothing is easier for the mind to know than itself.140 Third, this understanding of the nature of mind can be attained without positing the existence of any sensible material thing. Descartes severs the mind’s understanding of its own nature from the two kinds of dependence on material things attributed to it by Aquinas. For Aquinas, the mind’s very perception that it understands, its presence to itself, depends on sensory contact with material things. For Descartes, the mind’s knowledge that it thinks owes nothing to sensory contact with exterior material things; its idea of thought, its understanding of what thought is, is innate in it.141 Furthermore, the mind need not perceive existing material things, or investigate their nature, in order to distinguish its various acts and faculties. As we have seen, Aquinas holds that the faculties or powers of the soul must be distinguished by their objects; the correct account of the nature of the soul is conditioned by the correct account of the nature of the things known by the soul.142 We have already seen Descartes affirm that he possesses the powers of imagining and sensing even though he doubts the existence of the objects of imagination and sensation. In the final phase of the Second Meditation, in which he considers ‘the bodies which we touch and see’, he seeks to show that mere reflection on the type of conception provided by the faculties of sensation, imagination, and

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understanding will suffice to distinguish them. It is worth pausing over this as a clear illustration of the way in which the method of the Meditations reverses the method of the Aristotelians; rather than arguing from the nature of material things to the nature of the soul, Descartes argues from the nature of the soul to the nature of material things.143 Descartes’ method involves consideration of a particular material thing, the piece of wax. This might at first appear to be a capitulation to Aristotelian method; if we must investigate the nature of a material object to understand the nature of the mind, is Aquinas not vindicated? But this objection misunderstands Descartes’ method. What he investigates is not the nature of the wax, but the way in which it is perceived by sensation, imagination, and intellect. Descartes considers first how distinctly the senses know the wax, then how distinctly it is grasped by the imagination; the mind or intellect is not explicitly mentioned until the limitations of the other two modes of perception have been revealed. It has, however, been active throughout; the shortcomings of sensation and imagination are demonstrated by comparing what can be sensed and imagined with what the nature of the wax is understood to be. It is the intellect that understands that the wax persists through changes in the features grasped by the five senses, and that it can persist through more changes in extension than the imagination can encompass. So Descartes can conclude not only that the wax is known by the intellect alone, but also that it has always been perceived by an act of the intellect: And yet, and here is the point, the perception I have of it is a case not of vision or touch or imagination – nor has it ever been, despite previous appearances – but of purely mental scrutiny; and this can be imperfect and confused, as it was before, or clear and distinct as it is now, depending on how carefully I concentrate on what the wax consists in.144 By reflecting on its own conception of the wax, and comparing it with what the senses and the imagination reveal, the intellect attains a new understanding of what the wax is (something extended), how it is known (by being understood), and how intellectual understanding differs from sensation and imagination. This new understanding marks the first step towards a new conception of the role of the three faculties in knowledge of bodies, a conception which is not explictly filled out until the Sixth Meditation. The intellectual understanding of bodies as extended outstrips anything the senses and imagination can provide, so it cannot be arrived at by abstraction from materials provided by the lower faculties.145 Instead, the intellect is equipped by nature with an innate understanding of extension which is the basis for its understanding of the nature both of particular bodies and of body in


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general. (Recall that for Aquinas, the senses grasp particular things while the intellect grasps universal natures.) The colours, sounds, smells, tastes, warmth, hardness, and so on perceived by the senses are useful to inform the mind of what is beneficial or harmful for the preservation of the mind– body composite, but they are sensations or thoughts, not modes of extension, and cannot be attributed to bodies.146 The meditator’s former imperfect and obscure intellectual perception of the wax, wrongly referred to the senses, is obscure because it confuses the notion of the wax as something extended with a notion of it as possessing colour, smell, and so on. Such a perception cannot be clear and distinct because it does not distinguish what belongs to body (extension) from what belongs to mind (thought, of which sensations of colour are modes).147 Descartes’ ‘investigation of the nature of the wax and of the means by which it is known’ yields a new understanding of the nature of body and of the faculties of the soul. The starting point of the investigation is the meditator’s insistence that corporeal things which can be imagined and sensed are known with more distinctness than the mind, which cannot. But the meditator discovers that ‘even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone’; they are known not because they are touched or seen but because they are understood.148 It transpires that the mind is able to understand its own nature and the nature of bodies in the same way – through an idea innate in the intellect, rather than through species derived from sensible things.149 Descartes’ investigation of the nature of the mind and the means by which it is known is complete.

Descartes’ dualism: mind distinct from body I have been arguing that the goal of the Second Meditation is not to provide a foundation for knowledge in the incorrigibility of claims about subjective appearances, but to show the meditator how to distinguish what belongs to an intellectual nature from what belongs to a corporeal one. But how does the Second Meditation contribute to Descartes’ argument for dualism? According to the Cartesian interpretation, it provides a thought-experiment in which Descartes envisages himself existing with all his thoughts and experiences while nothing physical exists; and this thought-experiment shows that he cannot be identical to anything physical. There are several reasons to doubt this interpretation. First, Descartes explicitly acknowledges in the Second Meditation the possibility that he, a thinking thing, may in reality be identical with one of the material things he is supposing not to exist: ‘Yet may it not be the case that these very things which I am supposing to be nothing, because they are unknown to me, are in reality identical with the I of which I am aware? I do not know, and for the

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moment I shall not argue the point’. ‘Here’, he comments in the Second Replies, ‘I wanted to give the reader express warning that at that stage I was not yet asking whether the mind is distinct from the body, but was merely examining those of its properties of which I can have certain and evident knowledge’.150 Second, Descartes’ dualism is a dualism of thinking substance and extended substance. To Aristotelian eyes, the claim that matter is subsistent is far more striking than the claim that the intellectual soul is subsistent. To argue for this dualism he must argue for the separate existence of extended substance as well as of thinking substance. Hence he says in the Synopsis of the Second Meditation that before we can argue that mind and body are distinct we need ‘a distinct concept of corporeal nature … developed partly in the Second Meditation itself, and partly in the Fifth and Sixth Meditations’, as well as a clear and distinct concept of the soul.151 But if the Cartesian thought-experiment yields any dualist conclusion at all, it would seem to be the non-identity of oneself, a thinking thing, with any part of the external world. It provides no particular reason to regard the external world as material, let alone material in Descartes’ sense of extended. Finally, it is doubtful that Descartes could consistently argue to dualism from the possibility of his existing with all his thoughts and experiences in the absence of anything physical. As is revealed in the Sixth Meditation, his experiences of pain, hunger, thirst and so on teach him that he has a body, so his not having a body would be inconsistent with the goodness of God.152 In view of these problems, there is good reason to seek an alternative to the Cartesian interpretation of Descartes’ argument for dualism. As we have seen, the Synopsis stresses the importance of distinct conceptions of intellectual and corporeal nature; once God’s guarantee is in place, we can conclude that ‘all the things that we clearly and distinctly conceive of as different substances (as we do in the case of mind and body) are in fact substances which are really distinct one from another’.153 Indeed, he explains to Arnauld that ‘there is no one who has ever perceived two substances by means of two different concepts without judging that they are really distinct’.154 I have argued that the chief goal of the Second Meditation is to teach the meditator to form distinct concepts of mind and body by distinguishing the concept of thought from the concept of extension. But even if we grant that we perceive mind and body through different concepts, it remains to be shown that they are substances, things capable of independent existence. Marleen Rozemond has drawn attention to the importance of the notion of a complete thing for the understanding of Descartes’ reasoning here.155 Descartes first introduces this terminology in the First Replies. Caterus had objected to Descartes’ argument for the real distinction on the grounds that things which are formally distinct, in the sense that they can be conceived apart from one another, need not be really distinct. God’s justice


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and God’s mercy, for instance, can be formally distinguished, but cannot exist apart. In reply, Descartes explains how a formal distinction differs from a real one: … the distinction between the motion and shape of a given body is a formal one. I can very well understand the motion apart from the shape, and vice versa, and I can understand either in abstraction from the body. But I cannot have a complete understanding of the motion apart from the thing in which the motion occurs, or of the shape apart from the thing which has the shape; and I cannot imagine there to be motion in something which is incapable of possessing shape, or shape in something which is incapable of motion … By contrast, I have a complete understanding of what a body is when I think that it is merely something having extension, shape and motion, and I deny that it has anything which belongs to the nature of a mind. Conversely, I understand the mind to be a complete thing, which doubts, understands, wills, and so on, even though I deny that it has any of the attributes which are contained in the idea of body. This would be quite impossible if there were not a real distinction between the mind and the body.156 Descartes claims that an understanding of a body as something having extension but not thought provides a complete understanding of what a body is, while an understanding of the mind as something which thinks but is not extended is an understanding of it as a complete thing. He explains in the Fourth Replies that he takes ‘a complete understanding of something’ and ‘understanding something to be a complete thing’ to have the same meaning. So he is saying that he understands a mind which thinks and is not extended to be a complete thing, and that he understands a body which is extended and does not think to be a complete thing. He also explains that by a ‘complete thing’ he simply means ‘a substance endowed with the forms or attributes which enable me to recognise that it is a substance’.157 Substances are complete things because, unlike modes, they depend on nothing else (apart from God) for their existence.158 Modes, by contrast, are incomplete and cannot exist without other things; for example, shape cannot exist without extension – it is a mode of extension. We cannot have a complete understanding of shape apart from the extended thing which has shape. This is shown by the fact that although we can think of shape without paying attention to extension, we cannot conceive of shape while denying that it has extension.159 But we can conceive of a thing which thinks, which doubts, understands, wills, and so on, while denying that it has extension; and we can conceive of a thing which is extended, with shape and motion, while denying that it thinks. This shows that our ideas of a thinking thing and of

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an extended thing are ideas of complete things, things that do not depend on anything else (apart from God) for their existence. In short, they are ideas of substances, substances which are distinct because they are conceived through different concepts. Obviously this form of argument relies heavily on a correspondence between our ideas of things and the things themselves; it presupposes that things we conceive of as complete in themselves are in fact complete in themselves, in that they do not depend on anything else for their existence. In view of this, it is not surprising that the argument cannot be completed until we have discovered that our creator is perfect and thereby affirmed the truth of what we clearly and distinctly perceive. Given this sketch of Descartes’ argument for dualism, what does the Second Meditation contribute to it? Descartes says in the Fourth Replies that the mind can be perceived distinctly and completely (that is, sufficiently for it to be considered as a complete thing) without any of the forms or attributes by which we recognise that body is a substance, as I think I showed quite adequately in the Second Meditation. And similarly a body can be understood distinctly and as a complete thing, without any of the attributes which belong to the mind.160 The method of the Second Meditation is to purify the mind’s conception of itself by subtracting everything capable of being weakened by the supposition that corporeal things do not exist. In this way Descartes develops an understanding of the nature of mind which does not include or depend on anything belonging to the nature of body. In contrast to Aquinas, who makes the mind’s knowledge of itself dependent on its knowledge of sensible things, for Descartes the mind can come to know its own nature without depending on any images derived from sensible things. This is just a consequence of the fact that for Aquinas the intellect is dependent on the senses for its ideas, while for Descartes it possesses ideas of thought, God and extension which are connatural to or innate in it. But this difference between Aquinas’ and Descartes’ theories of knowledge gives Descartes an advantage when it comes to arguing that the human soul is a substance capable of existing on its own. To see why this is so, we need to see how Aquinas argues that the human soul can exist apart from the body. Aquinas holds that the intellectual soul is incorporeal and self-subsistent. As we have seen, his method dictates that an account of the nature of the soul is to be derived from an account of its objects, and the proper object of human knowledge is a nature existing in corporeal matter. The intellectual soul, then, is capable of understanding all corporeal natures by receiving their forms. No corporeal thing could receive all such forms because it would


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have a determinate corporeal nature of its own, and it would be unable to receive that form. This means that the intellect cannot itself be corporeal, nor understand by means of a corporeal organ. So the intellectual soul has an operation, understanding, in which the body does not share. But ‘only that which subsists in itself can have an operation in itself’; so the human intellect must be subsistent and incorporeal.161 Aquinas argues that the intellectual soul is subsistent, and can exist apart from the body, on the grounds that it has a distinctive operation of understanding which cannot take place in a body. But here a problem arises: it is not obvious how the soul separated from body can perform its distinctive act of understanding. Unlike the angelic intellect, the human intellect possesses no innate species; it can receive the forms through which it understands only by abstracting from phantasms received by the corporeal senses and retained by the corporeal imagination. (‘It is not naturally endowed with the knowledge of truth, as the angels are, but has to gather knowledge from individual things by way of the senses’.162 ) Although understanding is not dependent on the body in the sense of taking place in it, it is dependent on the body as the source of intelligible forms. So even if the human soul can subsist apart from the body because its operation of understanding does not take place in a body, it seems that the soul cannot actually perform that operation without corporeal phantasms from which intelligible species can be derived. As Aquinas puts the problem, if the separated soul understands, this must be by means of some species. But it does not understand by means of innate species, because it has none such, being at first like a tablet on which nothing is written. Nor does it understand by species abstracted from things, for it does not then possess the organs of sense and imagination which are necessary for the abstraction of species … Therefore the soul apart from the body understands nothing.163 Aquinas acknowledges the difficulty of this problem, which, he says, stems from ‘the fact that the soul united to the body can understand only by turning to the phantasms’.164 As we saw, ‘for the intellect to understand actually its proper object, it must of necessity turn to the phantasms in order to perceive the universal nature existing in the individual’.165 He resolves the problem in the only way he can: by claiming that the soul understands in different ways when it is united to the body and when it is separated from it. When it is united to the body it must turn to corporeal phantasms to understand; when it is separated from it, it turns to pure intelligibles. But he continues to insist that the first, and not the second, is the way of understanding that is natural to the soul.166 Indeed, it is because it is natural to the

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soul to understand through phantasms that union with the body is natural to the soul, and separation from it is not. To hold the contrary view would be absurd; then union of the soul and body would not be for the soul’s good, ‘for evidently it would understand worse in the body than out of it’.167 As one might expect, Descartes shows some sympathy with the view that the soul understands worse in the body than out of it. He remarks that the mind of an infant ‘has in itself the ideas of God, of itself and of all such truths as are called self-evident … I have no doubt that if it were released from the prison of the body, it would find them within itself’.168 When asked by Gassendi what kind of ideas the soul would have of God and itself if it had remained within the body without the senses functioning, he replied that provided we suppose that in thinking it received not just no assistance from the body but also no interference from it, the mind would have had exactly the same ideas of God and itself as it now has, with the sole difference that they would have been much purer and clearer.169 Indeed, Burman reports Descartes as asserting bluntly that ‘the body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking, and this was especially true in youth’.170 But whatever his views on this issue, Descartes is explicit in holding that the faculties of sensation and imagination are not essential to the mind, which can exist without them. He tells Gibieuf that these faculties do belong to the soul because they are species of thoughts, but that they belong to it only in so far as it is joined to the body, ‘because they are kinds of thought without which one can conceive the soul in all its purity’.171 He conceives the soul thus in the Sixth Meditation, where he says that he ‘can clearly and distinctly understand myself as a whole without these faculties’.172 Given that the mind can be understood as a complete thing without the faculties of sensation and imagination, it is capable of existing without them (and presumably does so when separated from the body).173 For Descartes the human intellect can be understood as a complete thing even though it lacks sensation and imagination because the human intellect is equipped by nature with innate ideas; it is not dependent on the senses or imagination for ideas, so lack of these faculties does not deprive it of anything it needs in order to understand. The consideration of the piece of wax shows that even the nature of a particular material thing is perceived not by the senses or by the imagination but by the intellect, which understands it through an idea of extension which cannot have been derived from the other faculties. For Aquinas, by contrast, the separated soul which lacks sense and imagination is incomplete in the sense of lacking what it needs in order to understand in the way that is natural to it; as Aquinas puts it, ‘the phantasms are wanting


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to which it may turn’.174 Unlike the Aristotelian intellectual soul, the Cartesian intellectual soul is self-sufficient, and that makes it easier to understand how it can be subsistent.

Conclusion I have contrasted two different approaches to Descartes’ Meditations. According to the Cartesian interpretation, the driving force in Descartes’ thought is the search for a certainty proof against any doubt, a search which leads to the discovery that ‘subjective things are the most certain’, as Russell put it.175 This discovery marks the transformation of the mind into a subjective realm which is transparent to itself, but divided both epistemologically and metaphysically from the external world of bodies. According to the alternative interpretation I have been developing, the driving force in Descartes’ thought is the desire to provide new metaphysical and epistemological foundations for his mathematical physics. This project involves a transformation of received Aristotelian and common sense opinion on the nature of corporeal things, the nature of the soul, and the way in which the soul knows itself and the world. Corporeal things (including living bodies) become configurations of extended substance, the soul becomes a thinking substance, and the soul’s understanding of the world is based not on sensory images but on ideas innate in the intellect. Doubt is used not to split off a realm of infallibly known subjective appearance, but to correct erroneous and confused prejudices deriving from preoccupation with the senses. The Second Meditation leads us away from the senses to distinct conceptions of what belongs to an intellectual nature (thought) and to a corporeal nature (extension). In so doing, it leads us to our first appreciation of what it is to have a clear and distinct intellectual perception rather than an obscure and confused sensory perception. This intellectual perception of the natures of mind and body exploit ideas which are innate in the mind itself, rather than derived from the senses. For Descartes, the mind is self-sufficient in the sense that it is not dependent on the body for its existence or for the basic ideas which allow it to understand itself, God, and matter. This independence of mind from body underwrites Descartes’ case for the possibility of the soul’s existing after the death of the body. Descartes’ physics is founded not on a sensory conception of matter, but on a clear and distinct innate idea of matter as geometrical extension. Matter, extended substance, is not dependent for its existence or its properties on soul-like substantial forms; physical phenomena (including life) can be explained as a result of parts of matter moving according to the laws of motion established by God. Descartes is often credited with giving philosophy a subjective turn, of placing mind at the centre of philosophical attention. But the subjective turn

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we see in Descartes is not an attempt to ground knowledge of the external world in infallible knowledge of subjective appearances, still less a retreat to the inner realm in the face of insurmountable scepticism about the outer world. It is a turn within, to clear and distinct concepts of thought and extension innate in the intellect, which will allow us to replace our erroneous sense-based image of the world with the geometrical image of Cartesian physics.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this material were presented to audiences at UCL, University College of St. David’s, University of Kent at Canterbury, Sussex University, Birkbeck College and the University of Birmingham. I am grateful to those present for helpful questions and comments, and in particular to Jennifer Hornsby, Miranda Fricker and Martin Stone. I owe a special debt to John Carriero for first introducing me to the interpretation of Descartes in his historical context. Work on this material was supported in part by grants from Birkbeck College and from the AHRB research leave scheme. 2 These are the titles of the First and Second Meditations respectively. 3 I shall add detail to my sketch of the Cartesian interpretation by referring to specific discussions. This should not be taken to imply that the authors I cite agree in their aims or in their overall interpretation of Descartes. I select from their work to build up a composite portrait of an interpretative approach based on the premise that Descartes’ overriding concern is to attain a certainty immune to scepticism about the external world. 4 CSM II 12, AT VII 17; emphasis added. ‘CSM’ citations refer by volume and page number to The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–85). ‘AT’ citations refer by volume and page number to Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery (revised edition, Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76). Where a translation differs from CSM, it is my own. 5 Austin, for example, states that ‘The pursuit of the incorrigible is one of the most venerable bugbears in the history of philosophy. It … was powerfully re-animated by Descartes, and bequeathed by him to a long line of successors … In the case before us, which descends directly from Descartes, there is an added complication in the form of a general doctrine about knowledge … that it has foundations’. See his Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 104–5. 6 This point is made by Myles Burnyeat in ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy: What Descartes saw and Berkeley missed’, (Phil. Review 91 (1982), pp. 3–40), pp. 34–5, and by Barry Stroud in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 8–9. 7 CSM II 12–3, AT VII 18. 8 CSM II 13, AT VII 19. 9 Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 54. 10 Descartes, p. 6; CSM II 15, AT VII 22. 11 Williams, Descartes, p. 54. 12 Burnyeat, ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, p. 37. 13 Burnyeat, ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, p. 29. 14 CSM II 15, AT VII 23. See Burnyeat, ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, p. 32. 15 Burnyeat, ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, p. 38.


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16 CSM II 19, AT VII 28–9. 17 Burnyeat, ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, pp. 38–9. 18 See his ‘Singular thought and the extent of inner space’ in J. McDowell and P. Pettit (eds), Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 148. McDowell points out that this recognition permits ‘a novel response to arguments which conclude that we know nothing from the fact that we are fallible about the external world’; we can refute the conclusion by pointing to our knowledge of ‘these newly recognised facts about subjective appearances’ (ibid.). Obviously this way of refuting the sceptic concedes that we do not know the external world; it is an expression of what McDowell describes as ‘the characteristically Cartesian willingness to face up to losing the external world, with the inner for consolation’ (p. 149). 19 Robert Brandom, for example, states that ‘Descartes and his tradition claimed that looks-F talk, with which it is possible to form a class of statements about which subjects are incorrigible, is a foundation of knowledge…This view is the essence of Descartes’ foundationalism…The possibility accordingly arises of reconstructing our knowledge by starting out only with knowledge of this sort – knowledge of how things look, seem, or appear – and building up in some way to our knowledge (if any) of how things really are (outside the realm of appearance)’. See Brandom’s Study Guide to Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind by Wilfrid Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 136–7. 20 Williams, Descartes, p. 162. 21 See Brandom, Study Guide, p. 137. 22 See McDowell, ‘Singular thought …’, p. 151. The notion of the mind as a realm in which appearance and reality coincide (Brandom’s interpretation) is distinct from the notion of the mind as a self-contained realm about which there are no facts other than those infallibly knowable by the mind itself (McDowell’s interpretation). These two interpretations also yield different accounts of the elusiveness of the external world. I group them together for the purpose of building up a composite picture of the Cartesian interpretation. 23 See Brandom, Study Guide, p. 121. 24 Jonathan Dancy, Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 66–7. Compare Thomas Reid’s pronouncement in 1764 that ‘Des Cartes’ system of the human understanding, which I shall beg leave to call the ideal system … hath some original defect; that this scepticism [sc. about the existence of a material world] is inlaid in it, and reared along with it’ (Inquiry and Essays, edited by R. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), pp. 10–11. 25 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 140 and p. 94n. 26 ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, pp. 35–7. 27 CSM II 15, AT VII 23. 28 ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, p. 29. 29 CSM II 19, AT VII 28. 30 Descartes, p. 118. 31 Brandom, Study Guide, p. 126. 32 McDowell, ‘Singular thought …’, p. 154. 33 In my view, Descartes does not conceive of the external world (what is outside the mind) as a realm that is metaphysically or epistemologically unified. Extended things exist outside the mind, but so does God, and we know about God and extended things in different ways. 34 Sixth Meditation, CSM II 54, AT VII 78. 35 Compare McDowell’s remark that ‘the epistemological context in which, on this [sc. Burnyeat’s] account, the inner realm is first recognised makes it natural that the first of

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History of the mind–body problem its inhabitants to attract our attention should be perceptual experiences’ (‘Singular thought …’, p. 148). In my view the Discourse on the Method (1637), the Meditations (1641), and the Principles of Philosophy (1644) were all published with the same end in view – that of promoting acceptance of the physics first laid out in The World, which Descartes suppressed in 1633 on hearing of the condemnation of Galileo. But I shall not defend this view here. CSM II 9, AT VII 12; emphasis added. CSMK 172, AT III 297–8. ‘CSMK’ citations refer by page number to The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. III, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For interpretations of the Meditations in the light of Descartes’ aim of putting forward principles underlying his physics, see Daniel Garber’s ‘Semel in vita: The scientific background to Descartes’ Meditations’ in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, edited by A.O. Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) and John Carriero’s ‘The First Meditation’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987), pp. 222– 48. As Garber notes, Étienne Gilson (Études sur le Rôle de la Pensée Mediévale dans la Formation du Système Cartesien, Paris: Vrin, 1975) and Margaret Wilson (Descartes, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) offer similar readings. CSM II 12, AT VII 17. CSM I 186, AT IXB 14. CSM I 186, AT IXB 14. CSM II 9, AT VII 12; emphasis added. CSM II 12, AT VII 18, In childhood the mind is naturally reliant on the senses for the preservation of the body, but acquires numerous prejudices (rash judgements resulting from uncritical reliance on the senses) which it comes to regard as ‘known by the senses … and … utterly true and evident’ (Principles I.71, CSM I 219, AT VIIIA 36). Polyander, the unlettered meditator of Descartes’ unfinished dialogue The Search for Truth, expresses the common view when he asks, ‘Is there anyone who can doubt that things that are perceivable through the senses – by which I mean those which can be seen and touched – are much more certain than all the others?’ (CSM II 407, AT X 510). Henceforth I shall use ‘Aristotelianism’ and its cognates to refer to Scholastic Aristotelianism, rather than to the views of Aristotle himself. ST I 84.6. ‘ST’ references are to Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, cited by part, question, article number, and sometimes objection (ad.) or reply (resp.ad.) number. I quote from the translation in Basic Writings of Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945). ST I 55.2.ad.1. ST I 55.2.ad.1. ST I 55.2. The angels ‘received from God the species of things known together with their [sc. the angels’] intellectual nature’. ST I 55.2. Compare ST I 75.6.ad.3: ‘To understand through a phantasm is the proper operation of the soul by virtue of its union with the body’. ST I 76.5. In DA 553. ‘In DA’ references are to Aquinas’ Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, cited by section number. I quote from the translation by K. Foster and S. Humphries (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951). ST I 84.7. In DA 791. ST I 84.8.


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57 According to Principles II 23, ‘All matter existing in the entire universe is one and the same’, and ‘All the variety in matter, all the diversity of its forms, depends on motion’ (CSM I 232, AT VIIIA 52). 58 CSM I 153, AT VI 85; CSM II 295, AT VII 437. 59 ‘Pain and colour and so on are clearly and distinctly perceived when they are regarded merely as sensations or thoughts. But when they are judged to be real things existing outside our mind, there is no way of understanding what sort of things they are’ (Principles I 68, CSM I 217, AT VIIIA 33). cf. CSM II 297, AT VII 440. 60 ‘It is in our own soul that we must look for these simple notions. It possesses them all by nature, but it does not always sufficiently distinguish them from each other, or assign them to the objects to which they ought to be assigned’ (CSMK 219, AT III 66–7). 61 CSM I 186, AT IXB 14. 62 ‘The senses often impede the mind in many of its operations, and in no case do they help in the perception of ideas. The only thing that prevents all of us noticing equally well that we have these ideas is that we are too occupied with perceiving the images of corporeal things’ (CSM II 258, AT VII 375). References to this abound in the Meditations and Replies, e.g. ‘my mental vision is blinded by the images of the things perceived by the senses’ (CSM II 32, AT VII 47); ‘intellectual vision…in the pure form which it attains when freed from the senses; for sensory appearances generally interfere with it and darken it to a very great extent’ (CSM II 115, AT VII 163). 63 Descartes stresses that he does not mean by ‘idea’, ‘images of material things depicted in the corporeal imagination’, and that he chose it as the most appropriate term because it was used for the forms of perception belonging to the divine mind, though God has no corporeal imagination (phantasia) (CSM II 127, AT VII 181; see also CSMK 185, AT III 393–4). His choice of terminology reflects the contrast between the Scholastic account of cognition, with its central role for phantasms, and his own innatist view. 64 Discourse IV, AT VI 37, CSM I 129. The Aristotelian slogan is also mentioned in the Sixth Meditation. Reviewing his naive pre-meditative state, Descartes says that he easily convinced himself that ‘I had nothing at all in the intellect which I had not previously had in sensation’ (CSM II 52, AT VII 75). 65 AT VII 441, CSM II 297. Descartes adds that once he had carefully distinguished the ideas of mind and body, he found that he himself had constructed the ideas of real qualities and substantial forms out of the more basic ideas of mind and body (CSM II 298, AT VII 443). Given that he regards ideas of thought and extension as innate in the human mind, Descartes must be able to give some explanation both of why the distinction between mind and body is so rarely recognised, and of how the confused ideas which take its place originate. 66 Descartes’ favourite example of such a confused idea is the notion of heaviness, conceived of as a real quality which impels bodies downwards. Though it is supposed to be corporeal, it is conceived of using the notion given us for conceiving the manner in which the soul moves the body (Letter to Elizabeth, CSMK 219, AT III 668). Descartes writes in the Sixth Replies that ‘what makes it especially clear that my idea of heaviness was taken largely from the idea I had of the mind is the fact that I thought that heaviness carried bodies towards the centre of the earth as if it had some knowledge of the centre within itself. For this surely could not happen without knowledge, and there can be no knowledge except in a mind’ (AT VII 442, CSM II 298). 67 Letter to de Launay, CSMK 188, AT III 420–1. 68 CSM II 111, AT VII 157. 69 CSMK 165. ‘The principal aim of my metaphysics is to show which are the things that can be distinctly conceived’ (Descartes to Mersenne, CSMK 154, AT III 192); ‘all

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History of the mind–body problem human knowledge consists solely in clearly distinguishing these [primitive] notions and attaching each of them only to the things to which it pertains’ (Descartes to Elizabeth, CSMK 218, AT III 665). CSMK 53, AT I 350. He tells a correspondent that ‘I was afraid that this introduction would look at first as if it were designed to bring in scepticism, and would disturb weaker minds, especially as I was writing in the vernacular’ (CSMK 56, AT I 353–4). CSMK 55, AT I 353. ST I 84.8. AT VII 12, CSM II 9. CSM II 121, AT VII 172. Descartes adds that he introduced the sceptical arguments so that he could reply to them, and so that he could show that the truths he later propounded were firm enough to be unshaken by these metaphysical doubts. He certainly uses the fact that clear and distinct intellectual perceptions are resistant to these doubts to demonstrate their firmness as foundations for the sciences; but that is not to say that Descartes’ overriding aim is the pursuit of certainty. ‘Although it is true that doubt does not on its own suffice to establish any truth, it is still useful to prepare the mind in order to establish the truth at a later date; and this was my sole aim in employing it’ (Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies, CSM II 270, AT IXA 205). ‘I freely acknowledge that I recognise no matter in corporeal things apart from that which the geometers call quantity, and take as the object of their demonstrations, i.e. that to which every kind of division, shape and motion is applicable. Moreover, my consideration of such matter involves absolutely nothing apart from these divisions, shapes and motions; and even with regard to these, I will admit as true only what has been deduced from indubitable common notions so evidently that it is fit to be considered as a mathematical demonstration. And since all natural phenomena can be explained in this way, as will become clear in what follows, I do not think that any other principles are either admissible or desirable in physics’ (Principles II 64, CSM I 247, AT VIIIA 78–9). CSM II 13, AT VII 18. The catalogues of his previous beliefs in the Second and Sixth Meditation both give first place to the conviction that he has a head, hands, arms, and so on (CSM II 17, AT VII 26; CSM II 51–2, AT VII 74). One problem with this way of reading the challenge, pressed by Margaret Wilson, is that it appears to saddle Descartes with a quest for ‘certain signs’ by which one can tell whether one is dreaming or waking on any given occasion, even when one is dreaming (Descartes, p. 27). Such a quest is unlikely to be successful, and Descartes shows no interest in it; see his reply to Hobbes (CSM II 137, AT VII 196). CSM II 52, AT VII 75. Here I echo Descartes’ retrospective description of the dreaming doubt in the Sixth Meditation: ‘every sensory experience I have ever thought I was having while awake I can also think of myself as sometimes having while asleep; and since I do not believe that what I seem to perceive in sleep comes from things located outside me, I did not see why I should be any more inclined to believe this of what I think I perceive while awake’ (CSM II 53, AT VII 77). The Third Meditation also connects dreaming with the origin of what I seem to perceive; Descartes says that he has always thought that when he is dreaming, ideas are produced in him without any assistance from external things (CSM II 27, AT VII 39). The First Meditation analogy between paintings and dreams explicitly raises the issue of the origin of what I seem to perceive in sleep, reflecting this conception of the difference between dreams and waking experience.

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CSM II 13, AT VII 19. CSM II 13, AT VII 19–20. ST II.ii 173.3. Of course the imagination, like the intellect, can perform operations on the likenesses it receives. Aquinas notes that both intellect and imagination depend on the senses at In DA 791. CSM II 13–4, AT VII 20. CSM II 14, AT VII 20. CSM II 14, AT VII 20. CSM II 14, AT VII 21. CSM II 14, AT VII 21. CSM II 14, AT VII 21. Williams, Descartes, p. 54. CSM II 14, AT VII 20. Knowledge of corporeal nature insofar as it is the subject of pure and abstract mathematics is achieved in the Fifth Meditation (the title of which refers to the essence of material things), while knowledge of the existence of corporeal things is not gained until the Sixth Meditation (the title of which refers to the existence of material things). I am persuaded of this by John Carriero, ‘The First Meditation’, pp. 238–9. CSM II 25, AT VII 36. CSM II 57, AT VII 83. CSM II 14–5, AT VII 21–2. CSM II 14–5, AT VII 21–2. CSM II 15, AT VII 22. CSM II 15, AT VII 22. CSM II 242, AT VII 349. The comparison may seem disingenuous, if one thinks that Descartes intends to end up with a bias against the senses. But though Descartes subordinates the senses to the intellect, they play an indispensable part in physics, and he does believe that one can go too far in the direction marked out in the Meditations. He reportedly remarked to Burman that devoting too much time to the Meditations and to metaphysical questions ‘draws the mind too far away from physical and observable things, and makes it unfit to study them’, when physical studies are desirable because they would yield abundant benefits for life (CSMK 346, AT V 165). CSM II 242, AT VII 349. CSM II 15, AT VII 23. Burnyeat emphasises the fact that Cartesian doubt makes one’s body part of the external world because he regards Descartes’ scepticism as methodologically motivated, while the ancient sceptic’s motivation is practical (‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, pp. 30– 1). The ancient sceptic seeks a way of life that will bring him happiness; Descartes is engaged in a project of Pure Enquiry, seeking only to raise the truth-ratio among his beliefs (Williams, Descartes, p. 46). Obviously this conception of Descartes’ project is very different from that defended here; the project of laying metaphysical foundations for physics is not a project of pure enquiry. CSM II 19; AT VII 29. This is the passage singled out by Burnyeat, ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy’, pp. 38–9. The quotations are from Brandom, ‘Study Guide’, p. 121 and p. 126. Though the fact that Descartes added the second part of the title so that people would not think he intended to prove the immortality of the soul in the Second Meditation cautions us not to overestimate its significance (CSMK 172, AT III 297). CSM II 9, AT VII 12.

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113 CSM II 94, AT VII 130–1. 114 ‘I will therefore go back and meditate on what I originally believed myself to be … I will then remove [subduco] anything capable of being weakened, even minimally, by the reasons brought forward …’ (CSM II 17, AT VII 25). This is the method likened in the Seventh Replies to the procedure of emptying out a basket of apples, examining them, and putting back only those observed to be sound. ‘My purpose was not to continue to believe all my former opinions concerning myself, but to re-adopt any beliefs which I perceived to be true, reject any that were false, and reserve for subsequent examination any that were uncertain’ (CSM II 324, AT VII 481). 115 CSM II 17, AT VII 26. 116 The first two quotations are from CSM II 18, AT VII 26, the last from CSM II 20, AT VII 30. 117 CSM II 18, AT VII 27. 118 Aquinas writes that ‘the first thing by which the body lives is the soul … the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding’ (ST I 76.1). 119 ‘One of the most notable points in my Meditations is that I refer nutrition to the body alone, not to the mind or to that part of man which thinks’ (CSM II 321, AT VII 477). ‘As for movement and sensation, I refer them to the body for the most part, and attribute nothing belonging to them to the soul, apart from the element of thought alone’ (CSM II 243, AT VII 351). 120 Aquinas insists that ‘one cannot sense without a body’ (ST I 76.1). Descartes writes, ‘Sensing? This surely does not occur without a body, and besides when asleep I seemed to sense many things which I afterwards realised I did not sense’ (CSM II 18, AT VII 27). 121 Recall Descartes’ remark in the Discourse that ‘many are convinced that there is some difficulty … in knowing what their soul is. The reason for this is that they never raise their minds above things which can be perceived by the senses: they are so used to thinking of things solely by imagining them (a way of thinking specially suited to material things) that whatever is unimaginable seems to them unintelligible’ (AT VI 37, CSM I 129). 122 CSM II 18–9, AT VII 27–8. 123 CSM II 350, AT VII 515. 124 CSM II 19, AT VII 28. 125 CSM II 19, AT VII 28. 126 CSM II 19, AT VII 28. 127 CSM II 19, AT VII 29. 128 CSM II 54, AT VII 78. In this passage Descartes makes the important point that although sensing and imagining can exist only in a thinking thing, a thinking thing can exist without sensing and imagining. 129 On this topic, see John Carriero, ‘The Second Meditation and the essence of the mind’, in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, edited by A.O. Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). 130 ST I 87.1. 131 ST I 87.3. 132 Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book III, ch. 46 (SCG III.46). I quote from Pegis (ed.), Basic Writings of Thomas Aquinas. 133 ST I 87.1; see also SCG III.46. 134 The comparative aspect of knowledge of natures is illustrated by Aquinas’ practice of explicating the nature of the soul by comparing animate with inanimate things (ST I 75.1), comparing the human soul with animal and plant souls (ST I 78.1), and comparing


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the human intellect with divine and angelic intellects. His discussion of how likenesses come to be in the different kinds of intellect (ST I 55.2) provides an example of the last comparison; his discussion of how human, angelic and divine intellects know their own acts of understanding (ST I 87.3) provides another. ST I 87.1. ST I 87.1. Compare ‘the process of self-knowledge has to start from the exterior things whence the mind draws the intelligible concepts in which it perceives itself’ (In DA 308). ST I 77.3; In DA 305. As John Carriero points out, Aquinas himself argues in this way when he concludes that intellectual acts cannot take place in a corporeal organ because they have as their object forms which are universal and therefore immaterial. See ‘The Second Meditation and the essence of the mind’, p. 211. In DA 308. ‘The Second Meditation and the essence of the mind’, pp. 204–5. CSM II 23, AT VII 34. See e.g. Third Meditation, CSM II 26, AT VII 38 and CSM II 35, AT VII 51. In a wider sense, of course, this is true of Descartes; his own conception of the soul and how it knows is conditioned by his account of the physical universe. But that conception itself entails that the soul possesses an innate understanding of intellectual and corporeal nature, and it is this that he attempts both to demonstrate and to exploit in the Meditations. Carriero stresses this point; see ‘The Second Meditation and the essence of the mind’, p. 216. CSM II 21, AT VII 31. ‘As our imagination is tightly and narrowly limited, while our mind has hardly any limits, there are very few things, even corporeal things, which we can imagine, even though we are capable of conceiving them’ (CSMK 186, AT III 395). The limitations of the imagination are mentioned in the Sixth Meditation, where Descartes points out that we cannot form distinct images of a chiliagon and of a myriagon (CSM II 50, AT VII 72), and in the Conversation with Burman, where he says that it is hard for most people to form distinct images of figures with more than six sides (CSMK 345, AT V 162–3). As one would expect from the discussion of the wax, he maintains that these limitations do not affect the study of physics because it employs an intellectual conception of body: ‘One might perhaps think that the entire science which considers only sizes, shapes and movements, would be most under the sway of our imagination. But those who have studied it at all deeply know that it rests not at all on the phantasms of our imagination, but only on the clear and distinct notions of our mind’ (CSMK 186, AT III 395). CSM II 57, AT VII 83. ‘It happens in almost every case of imperfect knowledge that many things are apprehended together as a unity, though they will later have to be distinguished by a more careful examination’ (CSM II 300, AT VII 445). CSM II 22, AT VII 34. Of course differences remain between the mind’s knowledge of itself and its knowledge of bodies; the mind can know that it exists merely by perceiving its own acts, whereas it knows that bodies exist only through sensation. The mind can also perceive its own particular modifications (particular thoughts), but must make use of the senses to perceive particular modifications of matter (particular bodies). CSM II 93, AT VII 129. CSM II 9, AT VII 13.

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152 CSM II 55–6, AT VII 79–81. Stephen Yablo (‘The real distinction between mind and body’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplement 16, p. 169 n. 14) is one of the few advocates of a Cartesian-style interpretation of the argument for dualism to note this problem. 153 CSM II 9, AT VII 13. 154 CSM II 159, AT VII 226. 155 See Marleen Rozemond, ‘Descartes’ case for dualism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (1995): 29–63, a paper to which I am much indebted. 156 CSM II 86, AT VII 120–1; emphasis added. 157 CSM II 156, AT VII 222. 158 Principles I.51, CSM I 210, AT VIIIA 24. 159 Letter to Gibieuf, CSMK 202, AT III 475. 160 CSM II 157, AT VII 223. 161 ST I 75.2. 162 ST I 76.5. 163 ST I 89.1.ad.3. The objection also argues against memory and divine infusion as sources of species by which the separated soul might understand. Aquinas’ reply counters the argument against divine infusion. 164 ST I 89.1. 165 ST I 84.7. 166 As a consequence of this, the separated soul has only a general and confused knowledge of natural things (ST I 89.3), unlike the knowledge of them acquired in earthly life by inquiry, which is proper and perfect (ST I 89.3.resp.ad.4). 167 ST I 89.1. 168 CSMK 190, AT III 424. 169 CSM II 258, AT VII 375; emphasis added. 170 CSMK 336, AT V 150. Caution is needed here, as Descartes’ views are complex. The quoted passages concern the mind’s understanding of God and itself, immaterial beings which can be conceived only by the intellect. He tells Regius that when it is a matter of understanding immaterial things the mind cannot be helped by the body, only hindered by it (CSMK 183, AT III 375). But Descartes writes that though extension, shapes and motions can be known by the intellect alone, they can be known much better by the intellect aided by the imagination, which involves the body (CSMK 227, AT III 691) – a view prominent in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind. However, this may hold true only as long as the soul is united to the body. Principles I.73 (CSM I 220, AT VIIIA 37) states that the mind’s difficulty in attending to what is not present to the imagination may be due to the nature the mind has as a result of of being joined to the body, or to habits acquired as a result of childhood immersion in the body. 171 CSMK 203, AT VII 479. 172 CSM II 54, AT VII 78. This point is stressed by Marleen Rozemond, ‘The role of the intellect in Descartes’ case for the incorporeity of mind’, in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, edited by S. Voss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 105. 173 Descartes tells More that ‘human minds separated from body do not have sense [sensum] properly so called’ (CSMK 380, AT V 402). 174 ST I 89.1. 175 The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 18. McDowell draws attention to this passage in ‘Singular thought …’, p. 146 n. 19.


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The emergence of the Cartesian mind Susan James

In the vast contemporary literature on Descartes there remains a gap between the figure studied by scholars and the one who appears in textbooks. The first is often treated historically and placed in the context of seventeenthcentury intellectual debate. The second is an icon, the father of modern philosophy and the creator of a set of deeply formative questions. Accounts of this iconic Descartes generally emphasise both the sharp division he imposes between a material body and an immaterial soul, and the consequent problem of explaining how the two are related. He thus appears as an advocate of an implausible view, who nevertheless articulated the interesting question of what it would be like to provide a satisfactory analysis of the connection between body and mind. Because such accounts normally take for granted Descartes’ analysis of the borderline between these two entities, they rarely pause to consider how it was arrived at and, by failing to address this question, unselfconsciously reinforce a modern assumption that the mind just is the realm of the mental, that thinking is what it does, and that this is a platitude around which philosophy has always been organised. To put the point differently, iconic accounts direct attention away from the history of the mind, effacing the fact that the Cartesian conception of it was an innovation, aspects of which have since become so generally accepted as to be almost invisible. Scholars interested in the historical Descartes are, of course, keenly aware of what distinguishes his interpretation of mind and body from that of his predecessors, and of features of the interpretation that caused its progenitor difficulty. In this essay I shall not attempt to enter into the numerous debates surrounding these themes. Rather, drawing on the excellent research that has recently begun to reveal their complexity, I shall aim to show in broad outline what was novel about Descartes’ conception of the mind, and what pressures led him to interpret it as he did.1 I shall then indicate some of the ways in which his position diverges from the view still standardly attributed to him, and indeed from the wholehearted metaphysical dualism to which

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he aspired. The Cartesian interpretation of the mind or soul was developed as a response to certain philosophical and scientific questions and developments and, like all major conceptual innovations, confronted a number of problems. A grasp of these difficulties will help us to appreciate the character of Descartes’ view and to understand its successes and failures.

The Aristotelian soul For Descartes, as for almost all his contemporaries, a distinction between body and soul was a condition of the everlasting life promised to Christians in the New Testament. Belief in the soul’s immortality was an article of faith required by the Catholic Church, one of a group of doctrines reinforced in the early sixteenth century by the Fifth Lateran Council which had reiterated that the human soul is immaterial and immortal, that it is the form of the body, that each human being possesses a soul, and that the soul is directly created by God.2 Since these tenets continued to shape philosophical thinking throughout the early modern period, it is not surprising that Descartes should have posited some division between body and soul. It is, however, more surprising that he should have characterised the difference between them as he did, partly because his account diverges significantly from the Aristotelian conception that was generally accepted during his lifetime. Although Descartes claimed that his account of the soul served to establish by reason what was known by faith, thereby according entirely with the doctrines of the Catholic Church, 3 he nevertheless departed decisively from orthodox and influential aspects of Aristotelianism, and in doing so articulated a novel conception of the mind. The extent to which Catholic doctrine was shaped by Aristotelian philosophy is evident in the Fifth Lateran Council’s claim that the soul is the form of the body.4 Following a lead taken by earlier generations of philosophers who had provided Christianised interpretations of Aristotle’s works, Catholic doctrine is here formulated in terms of the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. This definition is part of a limited consensus about the nature of the soul which largely endured throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and continued to set the terms of a range of philosophical debates. It existed, however, alongside wide divergences of opinion within the Aristotelian tradition, many of which were tolerated by the Church.5 To understand Descartes’ relation to the crowded arena of Scholastic philosophy it is helpful to bear in mind that he was educated at the Jesuit College of La Flèche. The Jesuit Order was formally committed to the primacy of Thomism, so much so that its Ratio Studiorum instructed teachers to follow Aristotle so far as his views were compatible with the orthodox faith, and to adhere in particular to the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, the


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Ratio goes on, must be spoken of with respect and followed as often as is proper, and teachers who depart from his works must do so gravely and reverently.6 Jesuits writing in the seventeenth century were by no means slavish in their adherence to these instructions, but it is reasonable to infer that Descartes would as a student have received a thorough training in Aquinas’ philosophy and the debates surrounding it. However, even if the niceties of these disputes engaged the young Descartes, he lost interest in many of them later in life, once he had come to regard Aristotelian philosophy as profoundly mistaken. As he explained in 1640 in a letter to Mersenne, ‘I do not think that the diversity of the opinions of the scholastics makes their philosophy difficult to refute. It is easy to overturn the foundations on which they all agree, and once that has been done, all their disagreements over detail will seem foolish.’7 To get a sense of the foundations that the Cartesian analysis of the soul is designed to overturn, one can begin by considering the Thomist position. The analysis of living things offered by Aquinas and his followers is firmly rooted in the Aristotelian distinction between matter and substantial form, between the ‘stuff’ out of which a creature is made and the essential powers and properties that make it what it is and distinguish it from creatures of other kinds. Aristotle had argued that a creature comes into existence when its form inheres in matter and continues in existence as long as its matter and form are united. Moreover, the form of a living thing, and the power which makes it into something that is alive, is the soul.8 The view that all living things are composites of body and soul was taken over by Aquinas, who relied on it, as Aristotle had done, both to individuate kinds, and to explain generation and corruption. In addition, he adopted Aristotle’s broad classification of the powers possessed by living things of different types.9 In his De Anima, Aristotle had ranked living organisms according to the number of powers they manifest, starting with the powers of nutrition and reproduction.10 These capacities for self-maintenance and replication belong to all creatures and are attributable to what came to be known as the nutritive or vegetative soul. While all living things possess nutritive souls, some, such as plants, possess only nutritive souls, with the result that their capacities are comparatively limited. This differentiates them from animals, or creatures with sensory powers, which perceive, experience sensations and appetites, feel emotions, and imagine, and are able to do so because they possess sensitive souls.11 A dog, for instance, can digest and reproduce by virtue of its nutritive powers, but is also capable of perceiving, remembering and so on because it has a sensitive or sensible soul. Finally, moving to the third tier of this hierarchy, human beings have a further range of powers. As Aristotle puts the point, humans are able to make true and false judgements by virtue of the fact that they possess intellectual or rational souls.12 This

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tripartite classification merged easily with a Christian conception of God’s creation. Aquinas and other Scholastic commentators simply insert the Aristotelian view that there are three increasingly complex types of living things into a hierarchy running from inanimate objects, through plants, animals, human beings and angels to God. The lowest living things are plants, possessing only the powers deriving from the nutritive soul. Above them are ranks of creatures with ever-increasing powers, culminating in God himself, whose powers are infinite.13 Alongside this smooth accommodation, however, Christian interpreters encountered various features of Aristotle’s account that fitted less easily with the Church’s insistence on the immortality of the human soul, and with its claim that a single soul is possessed by each individual person. Aquinas upheld these doctrines in the face of what he regarded as the mistakes of some of his predecessors: against the interpretation of Aristotle propounded by Averroes, that there is just one intellectual soul, he argued that each person has a soul of their own; and against the view that body and soul cannot be divided, associated with Alexander of Aphrodisias, he held that, in the case of humans, the two are separable.14 Finally, turning to the singleness of the soul, he rejected the possibility that humans have three souls – vegetative, sensitive and rational – in favour of the claim that they have just one rational soul, capable of exercising all three sets of powers. Analogously, the sensitive souls of animals include the powers to digest and reproduce.15 Although each human has one soul, responsible for all the powers that make him or her a living being, the capacities that distinguish human souls are the intellectual ones. Aquinas identifies two such powers (one apprehensive, the other appetitive) and describes them in considerable detail. Echoing Aristotle’s view that the intellect desires to know and understand,16 Aquinas takes up the idea that apprehension is a cognitive power to know both the natures of things, including material things in the external world, and individual entities.17 However, he also allows that the acquisition of this sort of knowledge depends on the sensitive powers. Only when the sensitive soul has stored and sorted sensory perceptions into what Aquinas calls phantasms is the power of the intellectual soul known as ‘the agent intellect’ able to convert them into so-called intelligible species – entities that can be the subject matter of cognition.18 And only once the passive intellect is presented with intelligible species is it able to perceive them and perform various operations on them. By comparing, compounding, dividing and so forth, the rational soul makes judgements and acquires knowledge which goes beyond the information it receives from its sensible counterpart.19 The second of the intellect’s powers, the will, is one manifestation of a trait possessed by all creatures and usually described as inclination or appetite. By virtue of their forms, living things are inclined to behave in


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certain ways; for example, the vegetative souls of certain plants incline them to turn towards the light, and the sensitive souls of animals incline them to flee from predators. Humans, too, have what are known as natural and sensitive appetites; but they also possess a rational appetite, the capacity to direct their own thoughts, and to act on their judgements by voluntarily moving their bodies. In attempting to reconcile Aristotle’s account of the soul with an orthodox Christian conception of its immortality, Aquinas faced a difficulty. If the soul and body together constitute a living thing, its death must surely involve the destruction of both components; but in that case, how can the soul be immortal? He responds that, unlike the sensitive and nutritive powers, the intellectual ones do not involve the body. While a sensitive power such as sight can only function with the help of a particular organ, our intellectual capacities can operate independently of any bodily part. The intellectual soul relies on the sensitive soul, and thus on the body, for the data it transforms into intelligible species; but the body plays no part in judgement and volition, its characteristic operations. This step allows Aquinas to infer that the rational soul is unique in manifesting a form of activity which transcends the body altogether, and on this basis he awards it an independent status described as subsistence. Because the rational soul subsists, it does not perish with the rest of a human being (the body, nutritive powers and sensitive powers) but survives its death.20 The Thomist synthesis aspired to hold together an eclectic range of commitments, and to weave them into a philosophically and theologically satisfying position. Following Aristotle, it aimed to show that the union of body and soul is deep. Because some powers of the soul can only be exercised by the soul-body composite, the soul can only exercise these aspects of its nature when joined to a body. Furthermore, each human being has only one soul. Since a living thing is a composite of soul and body, a creature with more than one soul would be more than one living thing; and this is plainly not the case for human beings.21 Finally, Aquinas focused on the powers that distinguish humans from other terrestrial beings in order to argue that the rational soul can function independently of the body, and thus that human souls, unlike those of animals and plants, are immortal. Aquinas’ work helped to establish an analysis of the body, the soul, and the relation between them which formed part of an extremely successful and long-lived research programme. As well as remaining central to the Jesuit curriculum, the Thomist synthesis became part of Scholastic normal science, so that Aquinas’ arguments and conclusions were taken up in a host of philosophical and theological treatises. His analysis of immortality, for instance, is regularly cited as the standard view, and the main lines of his interpretation of the soul recur in the textbooks Descartes read at school, as

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well as in those to which he referred during the 1640s.22 Alongside its enormous influence, however, Thomism brought to light a sequence of problems which continued to trouble Scholastic philosophy, and remained the objects of protracted controversies.

Aristotelian problems During Descartes’ lifetime, Aristotelianism was regularly subjected to two interconnected types of criticism, one directed at the metaphysical framework around which it was organised, the other bearing on its relation to Christian doctrine. At the heart of the latter criticism was a set of doubts about the success of Aquinas’ attempt to vindicate both an Aristotelian conception of the soul and the soul’s immortality, doubts which focused on the difficulty of reconciling the claim that the soul is immortal with the claim that it is the substantial form of the body. Although both claims were required by faith, critics of Aristotelianism pointed to a tension between them. According to the Aristotelian account of living things, the soul is the substantial form of the body and, since form and matter are inseparable, can only exercise its powers as part of a soul-body composite. To secure the immortality of the human soul, Scholastic writers were forced to make an exception of it, for instance by arguing as Aquinas had done that the rational soul is able to exercise its powers independently of the body. How, though, is such an exception to be explained? And how is it compatible with the Scholastic conception of what the soul is – namely the substantial form of the body? A parallel and related set of questions was raised by the generally accepted view that form and matter could explain generation and corruption. If the genesis of a living thing occurs when its substantial form and matter are united, and its death consists in the destruction of both these components, how is immortality possible? Once again, it can only be guaranteed by making the rational soul an exception to the general principle, thereby undermining the universal scope of Aristotelian metaphysics. Alongside these difficulties, the Thomist synthesis was further unsettled by a number of reservations about the coherence of Aquinas’ claim that the intellectual soul can function independently of the body. The powers of the sensitive soul, it was universally agreed, can only operate in the soul-body composite; and the intellectual soul depends for its operation on the phantasms of the sensitive soul. How, then, can the operations of the intellectual soul be independent of the sensitive soul, as Aquinas claims? How could an isolated intellectual soul ever acquire the materials needed to make judgements or form volitions? These arguments were forcefully presented early in the sixteenth century by Pietro Pomponazzi, who used them as evidence for two striking


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conclusions. First, the Thomist case for the immortality of the soul does not accord with what Aristotle himself had said. Second, its inconclusiveness indicates that the soul’s immortality cannot not be known by reason and so must be known by faith alone.23 The suggestion that faith might deliver one conclusion and reason a contrary one was, of course, deeply troubling to the Church, and the Fifth Lateran Council duly rejected it.24 The position of Pomponazzi and his followers, the so-called secular Aristotelians, and that of his orthodox opponents, the Christian Aristotelians, set the terms of a debate which reverberated throughout Descartes’ lifetime.25 As well as giving rise to theological disputes, the commitment of Scholastic Aristotelianism to substantial forms was a source of grave philosophical difficulties, and Descartes is one of a number of seventeenth-century philosophers who voice profound reservations about the view that one can appeal to substantial forms in order to explain the properties of the natural world. Substantial forms, he writes in a letter to Regius, were introduced by philosophers solely to account for the proper actions of natural things, of which they were supposed to be the principles and bases … But no natural action at all can be explained by these substantial forms, since their defenders admit that they are occult, and that they do not understand them themselves. If they say that some action proceeds from a substantial form, it is as if they say that it proceeds from something they do not understand; which explains nothing.26 This is a curious set of claims. After all, philosophers had been discussing substantial forms for centuries, confident that they knew what they were talking about. How could they have been deceived, and how could it turn out that the explanations they had offered were empty? The substantial form of a creature was specified, as we have already seen, by listing its powers or faculties. Rather than trying to describe the substantial form directly, one gave an account of the behaviour in which the form was manifested. While the form itself remained, as Descartes says, occult in the sense of concealed, Aristotelians nevertheless appealed to the powers associated with it to explain individual events or types of phenomena. For example, one might appeal to the human power of imagination to account for our ability to dream, or to explain how a particular dream came about. This, however, is where Descartes’ objection enters. Unless we can say more about what a substantial form is or does, invoking it fails to contribute anything to our explanations, which appeal only to powers. Moreover, if we ask how a substantial form is related to its powers, or what it is about a particular form that gives rise to those particular powers, the Aristotelian will have nothing persuasive to say. It is because substantial forms do no more than create an

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illusion of explanation that ‘they are good for nothing apart from blinding the wits of the young …’27 Moreover, talk of powers or faculties is, in the view of Descartes and many of his contemporaries, equally suspect, since it, too, is often nothing more than glorified redescription. As Antoine Arnauld puts this objection, it is a mistake to pretend to have explained some unknown effect, or an effect which is very poorly understood, by describing its cause with the general term ‘faculty’; for example, when one says that a magnet attracts iron because it has a particular faculty, or that fire changes bodies into glass by a natural faculty. The principal abuse involved in the use of these terms is that, before one knows what being attracted to a magnet is in iron or, in respect of sand, being turned into glass by fire, one dodges by saying that the magnet and the fire each have this faculty.28 As Arnauld also points out, the same problem arises when mental capacities such as understanding or willing are awarded the status of faculties distinct from the soul itself. To attribute our volitions to the faculty of the will does not help us to understand how they occur, and amounts to little more than the tautologous claim that the will wills.29 Arnauld’s choice of example reflects the existence of a sequence of attempts within Aristotelianism to clarify the nature of the soul’s powers and their relation to the soul itself. One aspect of this problem revolved around the question of how distinct powers could communicate with one another. How did sensory perception issue in passion within the sensitive soul, or nutrition produce growth in the vegetative one? How did one group of powers interact with another, as when the senses impinged on the intellect? Scholastic replies, couched in convenient metaphorical terms, were regularly dismissed or ridiculed in this period and the need for a more satisfying type of answer was widely recognised.30 A second aspect of the problem focussed on a long-standing debate about the nutritive and sensitive powers of the soul and their dependence on particular parts of the body. This issue was generally referred back to Aristotle’s question ‘whether the whole soul is present in the whole body and in each of its parts’.31 Aristotle’s claim had been influentially discussed by Aquinas, who had defended the existence of a ‘real distinction’ between the soul and its powers or faculties, and had argued that certain powers (such as sight) operated through, and were located in, particular organs. It had also been explored by Ockham, who had arrived at the rival view that the differences between the sensitive powers were attributable to the differences between bodily organs. Although the organic soul was located in the whole body and each of its parts, distinctions between bodily organs ensured that a particular function could only be performed in certain places,


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so that only the eyes could see and only the ears could hear. In the seventeenth century the debate between these two schools was still alive. However, while the Thomist position continued to be advocated, the Ockhamist view gained ground to a point where the argument was sometimes held to have been won. It began to be taken for granted, at least in certain circles, that the way to enquire into the faculties and actions of the organic soul was to learn about the organs and parts of the body.32 For both theological and philosophical reasons, then, disatisfaction with Aristotelian philosophy was expressed in a widespread debate about substantial forms and their faculties or powers. Although substantial forms were still widely invoked, and indeed fiercely defended, many philosophers had come to regard them as superfluous. ‘Up to now’, Descartes explains, we have certainly not rejected [substantial forms] absolutely; we merely claim that we do not need them in order to explain the causes of natural things. We think, moreover, that our arguments are to be commended especially on the ground that they do not in any way depend upon uncertain and obscure assumptions of this sort. Now, in such matters, saying that one does not wish to make use of these entities is almost the same as saying one will not accept them; indeed, they are accepted by others because they are thought necessary to explain the causes of natural effects. So we will be ready enough to confess that we do wholly reject them.33 The explanations favoured by Descartes and other mechanists were designed to provide answers to the very questions that troubled Aristotelianism, and to overcome what were seen as structural weaknesses in the Aristotelian approach. Rather than specifying a substantial form by means of a long list of powers, and then appealing to each power to explain a particular range of phenomena, mechanists relied on a small number of theoretical terms, each with a broad explanatory range. It was in the light of this more comprehensive form of explanation that Scholastic Aristotelian accounts of the world came to seem empty, and even obfuscatory.

The Cartesian soul Descartes is alert to the philosophical and theological vulnerabilities of Aristotelianism, and to the need to resolve them in a manner that both accords with Catholic doctrine and is rationally persuasive. His own philosophy takes up several aspects of Thomism and incorporates them into a novel conception of the distinction between the body and mind. It retains Aquinas’ view that the human soul can will and make judgements independently of the body. In

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addition, it remains indebted to the tripartite nature of the Aristotelian soul, insofar as it treats each of its three groups of powers in a different way. Descartes’ first step is to argue that the vegetative or nutritive powers do not belong to the soul at all but are to be explained in purely bodily terms. Drawing on developments within medicine, as well as on broadly Ockhamist developments within Aristotelianism, he takes trouble to show that these capacities can be mechanically analysed as the effects of the motions of bodily parts of various shapes and sizes. In his Traité de l’homme (written between 1629 and 1633), and still more in La Description du corps humain (written in 1647–48), Descartes offers elaborate, physical interpretations of digestion, respiration and growth in human beings. For example, he maintains that the speeds with which different parts of the body move cause the various solid or fluid parts, in rubbing against one another, to become larger or smaller, and to behave in different ways, depending on the particular constitution of each body. When one is young, for example, because the fibres which make up the solid parts are not joined to one another very firmly and the channels along which they then flow are quite large, the movement of these filaments is not as slow as when one is old, and more matter is attached to their roots than is detached from their extremities, which results in their becoming longer and stronger; and their increase in size is the means by which the body grows.34 As Descartes loves to emphasise, these operations of living bodies are to be explained in the same terms as the workings of clocks and other machines. The claim that the functions traditionally attributed to the nutritive soul can be explained by the dispositions of the body was not entirely unprecedented.35 It had far-reaching implications, however, because it breached an entrenched boundary between animate and inanimate things. Whereas Aristotelianism had maintained a sharp division between living, ensouled creatures on the one hand and inanimate ones on the other, Cartesianism proposes that some of the distinctive functions of living things have nothing to do with the soul, and thus that living things (including humans) are in certain respects continuous not only with the inanimate natural world of rocks and rainbows, but also with the artificial world of clocks, mills or bellows.36 Viewed from one angle, this is an exhilarating shift, but viewed from another it is threatening. By chipping away at the powers of the soul, Descartes awakened in some of his contemporaries an anxiety as to how far this type of argument might go, and whether it might not issue in an unacceptable materialist account of human beings.37 Their disquiet was rendered more urgent by the second step in Descartes’ transformation of the soul – his


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claim that the powers normally attributed to the sensitive soul are also entirely mechanical, so that all living things other than humans can be regarded as complex, organic machines.38 The qualifying clause by which humans are excluded from this judgement is somewhat obscured by the fact that, in his Traité de l’homme, Descartes provides his readers with an elaborate account of the physical causes of sensation, memory, perception, passion, dreaming, imagination and action in what he described as an homme machine. This imaginary creature (a human body without a soul, illustrated in the treatise as a human figure) responds as humans do to the whole range of sensitive stimuli. So although humans are in fact more than machines by virtue of the fact that they possess souls, their bodies, like those of animals, work on wholly mechanical principles. To appreciate the significance of these claims, it is helpful to contrast them with Aquinas’ account of the workings of the sensitive soul in animals, and especially with the process by which an animal perceives an external object as pleasant or painful, and responds to it.39 Taking the example of a sheep fleeing from a wolf, Aquinas describes a complex sequence of events which begins when the sheep receives the sensible form of a wolf by using its common sense to integrate information provided by each of its five individual senses. From an assortment of smells, sights, sounds and so on, it assembles a sensible form which it retains in its imagination. Before it can flee, however, the sheep must not only apprehend an object of a certain shape, size and smell but must apprehend it ‘as its natural enemy’. The sheep does this, Aquinas argues, by using an estimative power which enables it to perceive an intention – itself some sort of idea of the wolf as enemy – stored in its memory. And it is the perception of the intention that causes it to flee. While this process is conscious, it works simply by a power that Aquinas labels aestimatio naturalis. The sheep has no control over the intentions accompanying its sensory perceptions, or over its responses to them. When it sees a wolf, it simply recollects an intention of it as a natural enemy and runs away. Like the responses of Aquinas’ sheep, those of Descartes’ homme machine are ‘automatic’. But they are explained in radically different styles that illustrate the gulf between Aristotelianism and the mechanical philosophy. In place of the Scholastic language of powers, Descartes offers us particles in motion; and where Aquinas appeals to aestimatio naturalis to account for the sheep’s flight, Descartes explains it in terms of the passage of animal spirits from one part of the body to another. Underlying this difference is the absolutely crucial fact that Aquinas does, and Descartes does not, attribute the process in question to the soul. To explain the nutritive and sensitive functions of an automaton, Descartes asserts, ‘it is not necessary to conceive of any vegetative or sensitive soul, or any other principle of movement or

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life, other than its blood and its spirits which are agitated by the heat of the fire that burns continuously in the heart, and which is of the same nature as those fires that occur in inanimate bodies.’40 Descartes’ analysis deprives animals of souls, and while it does not have the same effect on humans, it nevertheless imposes significant limits on the soul’s functions which are now confined to the erstwhile rational powers and exercise only limited control over the body. The soul plays no part in our involuntary movements, which are entirely caused by the disposition of our corporeal organs; and ‘even those movements that are called “voluntary” proceed principally from this disposition of the organs, for they cannot have been produced without it, no matter how much we will it, and even though it is the soul which determines them.’41 These aspects of Descartes’ scaling down of the soul are complemented by several further implications. For Aristotelians, the presence of the soul is what distinguishes living from inanimate things, so the claim that animals do not have souls is tantamount to the claim that they are not alive. Descartes breaks this connection when he argues for the conclusion that, rather than being alive by virtue of possessing souls, the life of animals consists in the fact that their bodily parts move in certain ways. At the same time, his view carries implications for the nature of death. While an Aristotelian would argue that an animal dies when its soul or substantial form is destroyed, Descartes contends that death occurs when the parts of a body stop moving. Although all these movements cease in the body when it dies and the soul leaves it, it should not be inferred from this that it is the soul that produces them, but only that the body’s no longer being able to produce them and the soul’s leaving it are due to the same cause.42 Finally, by denying souls to animals Descartes cuts through the Scholastic debate about why it is that some souls (human ones) are immortal, while others (animal ones) are not. Since only humans possess souls, the way lies open to the conclusion that all souls are immortal. If we ask what functions of the Aristotelian soul survive Descartes’ reorganisation, we are left with the rational soul, and with the powers that are taken within the Scholastic tradition to distinguish humans from other living things. When Descartes comes to describe the soul, he develops a strand of argument to be found in De anima.43 He defines it, that is, as possessing a single power – the capacity to think – which manifests itself in individual thoughts. When he comes to distinguish the different kinds of thoughts, however, he follows a well-worn path created by generations of Scholastic authors. Thoughts are first divided into actions and passions, after which volitions are classified as actions and perceptions as passions.44


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Continuing to subdivide along familiar lines, Descartes next separates perceptions into two types. On the one hand, the soul perceives its own thoughts, including its volitions, ‘for it is certain that we cannot will anything without thereby perceiving that we are willing it.’45 On the other hand, the soul perceives three kinds of bodily events, namely sensory perceptions, sensations, and passions in the sense of affections, such as joy or anger.46 In positing actions and passions, Descartes imposes a distinction which does roughly the same work as Aquinas’ division between the soul’s apprehensive and appetitive powers. Like the Aristotelians, he reasons that, since humans are capable of thinking about and responding to the external world, a rational soul must possess some capacity to receive information about the body to which it is united and about the environment which it inhabits. And because he shares the Aristotelian view that the soul is acted on when it receives information or perceives, he classifies this capacity as passive. At the same time, Descartes retains the Aristotelian conviction that our capacities to form judgements and initiate bodily motion are in our own power, and are manifestations of the will. Precisely because we can control them, these capacities are actions, and it is by virtue of the soul’s activity that we are able both to acquire knowledge and to act.47 At one level, then, the map of the interior of the Cartesian soul resembles that of the rational Aristotelian one; it contains the same types of thoughts, classified in a comparable fashion. However, the boundaries of the two are entirely different. Whereas Aristotelians picture the rational soul surrounded by the sensitive and vegetative powers of the soul-body composite, Descartes sees it as an isolated territory connected only to the body. Our familiarity with this latter image testifies to the power of Descartes’ philosophy, and to the success of a transformation which established the mind as the realm of the mental and as responsible for our capacity to think. But this aspect of Cartesianism was not immediately accepted, and to get a sense of the challenges it faced we need briefly to consider how it dealt with the disputes set out earlier in this essay about the nature of the Aristotelian soul.

Cartesian solutions Descartes’ account of the soul is, as his contemporaries plainly perceived, an attempt to do without substantial forms. Instead of conceiving of the soul as the form of the body, he argues that it is a substance whose existence depends only on God. Relying on the arguments rehearsed in the Meditations, he contends that the existence of the human soul is independent of the human body and that, by virtue of its status as a substance, the soul is indestructible.48 Although Descartes recognises two kinds of substance apart from God – soul or thinking substance and body or corporeal substance – he introduces

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a significant asymmetry between them. Whereas God has created many thinking substances or human souls, he has created only one extended substance, and has endowed it with a certain quantity of motion which in turn differentiates individual material bodies. While each soul or mind is a distinct substance, directly created by God and incorruptible, and while corporeal substance as a whole shares these features, the same cannot be said of particular corporeal bodies. They are destructible ensembles of physical parts which emerge out of matter and are destroyed again, and this is as true of human bodies as of stones or animals. This metaphysical framework yields a not unfamiliar picture of human beings as composite entities, yet offers solutions to a number of familiar problems. By introducing a sharp and substantial divide between body and soul, and by characterising it as a divide between the material and immaterial, the corruptible and the incorruptible, Descartes aims to overcome many of the obstacles standing in the way of the conclusion that the soul is immortal. Where Aristotelians could only accommodate human immortality by making exceptions to the rules that form cannot exist without matter, and that form and matter perish together, Descartes faces no such problems. The body dies when its motions cease, at which point the matter of which it is composed gradually goes to make other bodies; but the incorruptible soul continues to exist. Moreover, where Aristotelians had to explain why human souls do not perish in the same way as those of animals, the Cartesian view holds that human souls are the only souls there are. Descartes is keen to emphasise the orthodox implications of this position. In an energetic reply to objections raised by Fromondus, he explains that his theory ‘involves such an enormous difference between the souls of animals and our own that it provides a better argument than any yet thought of to refute the atheists and establish that human minds cannot be drawn out of the potentiality of matter’.49 Some years later, in response to Voetius, he points to the dangers lurking within the theory of substantial forms. ‘It is the view which affirms substantial forms which allows the easiest slide to the opinion of those who maintain that the human soul is corporeal and mortal.’50 Descartes’ way of resolving these religious issues follows principally from his metaphysical division between thinking and corporeal substance, but his response to other standard difficulties owes more to his novel analysis of the soul’s powers. As we have seen, the Cartesian soul is able to will and perceive like its Aristotelian counterpart, so that it might seem natural to describe these capacities in Aristotelian terms as powers of faculties. Descartes would then face the question: how do these faculties interact with one another? Although he occasionally speaks of the powers of the soul,51 he is generally opposed to ‘identifying the different functions of the soul with persons who play different, usually mutually opposed roles’,52 and


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insists that, rather than possessing diverse powers, the soul has a single power to think. This unifying move would answer the question directly were it not for the fact that there are various kinds of thinking, and we can still ask how they relate. Descartes responds by classifying perceptions, volitions, passions and so on as modes of thinking, manifestations of one power of the soul which, according to its different functions, ‘is either called pure intellect, or imagination, or memory, or sense perception’.53 The force of this argument seems to rest on the view that, once particular states of the soul are defined as modes, the problem dissolves; while it is not clear how one power of the soul, such as the power to see, can interact with another, such as the power to remember, we can comprehend interactions between different modes of thought. How, though, is this supposed to help? Descartes’ answer depends on his view that all thoughts are conscious. If I cannot have a thought without being aware of it, I can always bring one thought to bear on another, of which I am similarly aware, and all my thoughts will be mutually accessible. So although Aristotelianism can offer no coherent account of interaction between powers of the soul, Descartes’ transformation yields a novel answer to the problem. By limiting the powers of the soul to those that can plausibly be characterised as thoughts, and assuming that our thoughts are conscious, he generalises this insight to produce a soul which is unified and selftransparent. At the same time, this conception reshapes the old debate about the soul’s location. By expelling the sensitive and nutritive powers and redefining them as bodily processes, Descartes sweeps away a puzzle which continued to exercise Aristotelian philosophers. There is no longer any need to ask how the sensitive powers of the soul are related to the physical organs through which they operate, or how the sensitive powers of the soul are related to the soul itself. Other issues are less easily resolved, however, and although the Cartesian definition of the soul as an incorporeal substance ensures that it is not located in space, the question of how such a soul can unite with the body remains so perplexing that the old problem emerges in a new guise. This reformulated problem is partly theological. The Aristotelian view that a living thing is a unity made up of form and matter served to sustain the conception of humans as individual entities composed of body and soul on which the Catholic Church insisted. The Cartesian analysis, by contrast, seemed to weaken this unity. As some of Descartes’ supporters and some of his opponents enquired, what sort of bond can hold together a human being composed of two substances, each of which is able to exist without the other?54 Descartes is sensitive to these doubts and emphasises at various points that, as long as the body is alive, soul and body remain firmly united. Going beyond his famous remark that the soul is not in the body as a pilot in a ship, he reassures his readers

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History of the mind–body problem that the soul is really joined to the whole body, and that we cannot properly say that it exists in one part of the body to the exclusion of the others. For the body is a unity which is in a sense indivisible because of the arrangement of its organs, these being so related to one another that the removal of any one of them renders the whole body defective. And the soul is of such a nature that it has no relation to extension, or to the dimensions or other properties of the matter of which the body is composed: it is related solely to the whole assemblage of the body’s organs.55

One can read passages like this as attempts to establish that the Cartesian account of the unity of the person is as strong, or even stronger, than its Aristotelian rival. Furthermore, as Descartes argues in reply to Voetius, it offers a superior analysis of the soul’s immortality, thus dispelling the threat of mortalism. The image of a complete though non-spatial intermingling of body and soul is offset, in Descartes’ oeuvre, by his philosophical hypothesis that the body communicates with the soul at the pineal gland, and that the motions of the gland cause the thoughts we classify as sensory perceptions, sensations and passions.56 A number of Descartes’ contemporaries regarded these as two of his less persuasive claims, but for our purposes they are among the most interesting. As we have seen, Aristotelian psychology was dogged by a debate about the strange blend of dependence and independence obtaining between the sensitive and rational souls. The intelligible species in the rational soul were the product of sensitive phantasms; but the subsistent rational soul could operate by itself. As the first of these claims is an obstacle to establishing the second, Descartes offers a solution to the problem by sweeping it away; the capacity of the soul to think does not depend on the body. It reenters, however, as we want to explain the full extent of our thoughts. While some kinds of thinking may bear no relation to the body, our perceptions and sensations seem to depend on it, so the Aristotelian problem (how does the sensitive soul interact with the rational one?) recurs in a new Cartesian form (how do states of the body interact with states of the soul?). Common to these problems is a preoccupation with the boundary between the material and the immaterial – between the corruptible and incorruptible powers of the soul, or between material and immaterial substances. Descartes shares with Aristotelianism the belief that some human functions straddle this border. Where his Aristotelian rivals argue that phantasms in the sensitive soul are among the causes of intelligible species in the rational one, Descartes holds that the motions of the animal spirits and the pineal gland cause sensations, sensory perceptions and passions, so that a feeling of anger, for example, is an experience of a particular bodily movement. And where the Aristotelians believe that rational judgements can cause states of the sensitive


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soul which result in action, Descartes, too, argues that bodily actions can be caused by judgements of the soul. However, the metaphysical framework of Cartesianism makes these exchanges particularly hard to accommodate. Aristotelians, after all, are committed to the view that a human possesses a single soul with both rational and sensitive powers and their very definition of the soul assumes that these operations flow across or encompass the boundary in question. Descartes, by contrast, places the soul and the body on opposite sides of a sharp, substantial division, across which they then have to negotiate. This transformation imposes an explanatory demand that Cartesianism is unable to meet. Although Descartes analyses sensations, perceptions and passions into corporeal and non-corporeal elements, he concedes that they ‘cannot be referred to the soul alone or to the body alone’.57 For example, a sensory perception contains two elements, a physical process culminating in a particular movement of the pineal gland and a distinctive kind of thought; since both components are necessary, the thought can only occur in a soulbody composite. Here we see Descartes replicating part of the structure of the Aristotelian soul, and inheriting some of the problems associated with it. Where Aristotelians encounter difficulties stemming from the connection between the sensitive and rational souls, Cartesians find that certain phenomena transgress the metaphysical assumption that states of the world can be divided into two sorts and allocated to thinking or extended substance. States such as sensory perceptions and passions cannot be classified either as modes of extension or as modes of thought, but have to be classified as both. This fact blurs the dividing line between substances and also introduces a division within the category of thought, a fissure between the thoughts that can be had by an independent mind, and those that can be had by a mind united to a body. Since only the first kind accord with the requirements surrounding Descartes’ claim that the mind is a substance, a tension arises between his claim that the mind is distinct from the body, and his understanding of what it is to think. Contemporary philosophers do not on the whole share Descartes’ view that all our thoughts are conscious, but they generally agree with his claim that states of which we are conscious, whether sensations, judgements, desires or our awareness of the movements of our limbs, are states of the mind or soul. Furthermore, a Cartesian notion of the boundary around the soul is widely accepted. By general consensus, digestion and growth are not kinds of thinking, nor are the physical processes which cause sensory perceptions or memories. This conception of the soul, I have argued, has not always existed and was first fully articulated by Descartes in response to the philosophical and theological problems I have described. In many cases, his solutions to these difficulties were radical and met with strong opposition.

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Some of Descartes’ contemporaries seem to have remained unconvinced that he had given an adequate account of the unity of body and soul, and it is arguable that it was partly for this reason that his works were placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1663. Many others frankly rejected his claim that an immaterial soul and a material body could communicate at the pineal gland, together with much of what this implied. Despite these criticisms, however, the Cartesian conception of the mind or soul as the locus of an eclectic assortment of thoughts survived and flourished, so that its emergence remains a deeply formative moment in the history of modern philosophy.

Notes 1 Recent work on this topic includes G.P. Baker and K.J. Morris, ‘Descartes Unlocked’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy I.1 (1993), pp. 5–27; J. Cottingham, ‘Cartesian Dualism: theology, metaphysics and science’ in J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 236–58; C.F. Fowler, Descartes on the Human Soul: Philosophy and the Demands of Christian Doctrine (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999); Marleen Rozemond, Descartes’ Dualism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 2 Concilium Lateranense V, Apostolici regiminis, in Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 Vols (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), Vol. 1, p. 605. 3 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Dedicatory Letter to the Sorbonne in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, 3 Vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), Vol. II, pp. 3–6. (Henceforth CSM.) 4 Concilium Lateranense V, Apostolici regiminis. 5 Domenico Ferraro, ‘L’Uso della Auctoritates nella Seconda Scolastica’ in Guida Canziani and Charles Zarka (eds), L’Interpretazione nei Secoli XVI e XVII (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1993), pp. 83–101. 6 Ratio Studiorum in E.A. Fitzpatrick, St. Ignatius and the Ratio Studiorum (New York: McGraw Hill, 1933); Roger Ariew, ‘Descartes and Scholasticism’ in J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 58–90. 7 Letter to Mersenne, 11 Nov, 1640, CSM III 156. On the relations between Descartes’ philosophy and the Aristotelian doctrines required by the Jesuits’ Ratio Studiorum, see Roger Ariew, ‘Descartes and Scholasticism’, pp. 64–9. 8 Aristotle, On the Soul in J. Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 Vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. I, 413 a 2. 9 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae ed. and trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 30 Vols (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1964–80), 1a. 77.3. 10 Aristotle, On the Soul, 416a 19. 11 Aristotle, On the Soul, 413b 1. 12 Aristotle, On the Soul, 429a 10 13 Aquinas, Summa, 1a 75 6; 1a 79 2. 14 Aquinas attacked the Averroist position, principally as it had been expounded by Siger of Brabant, in De Unitate Intellectus. See Jan A. Aertsen, ‘Aquinas’ philosophy in its historical setting’ in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge


15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

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Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 24–7. On later Jesuit attitudes to these views see C.P. Fowler, Descartes on the Human Soul, op. cit., pp. 73–4. Aquinas, Summa 1a 76 3; 76 4; 77.6. Aristotle, Metaphysics in J. Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 Vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. II, 980 b 22. Aquinas, Summa, 1a 79 3–1a 81 4. On Aquinas’ philosophy of mind, see Norman Kretzmann, ‘Philosophy of mind’ in Norman Kretzmann and Eleanore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, pp. 128–59. Aquinas, Summa, 1a 85 1, ad. 1. Aquinas, Summa, 1a 85 5c. Aquinas, Summa, 1a 75 2c. See also Kretzmann, ‘Philosophy of mind’, pp. 131–4. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Liber II, cap. 58. For an account of the textbooks from which Descartes would have been taught at La Flèche, and his later investigations of scholastic philosophy, see R. Ariew, ‘Descartes and Scholasticism’, pp. 73–6. In the early 1640s, Descartes mentioned to Mersenne that he had looked again at the works of various Aristotelians, including Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophica quadrapartita, first published in 1609 and Charles d’Abra Raconis, Summa totius philosophiae, first published in 1617. For the letter in which Descartes mentions Eustachius, see CSM III, 156. For the letter about Raconis see C. Adam and P. Tannery (eds), Oeuvres de Descartes, revised edition, 12 Vols (Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76), III 251. On Descartes and Eustachius see Leslie Armour, ‘Descartes and Eustachius a Sancto Paulo: Unravelling the Mind–Body Problem’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy I.2 (1993), pp. 1–21. Pietro Pomponazzi, ‘On the Immortality of the Soul’ (1516). Translated by W. H. Hay, revised by J.R. Randall, and annotated by P.O. Kristeller, in E. Cassirer (ed.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 280–381. On Pomponazzi see Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Intellective Soul’ in Charles Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 500–7. Pomponazzi’s approach to Aristotle’s texts was shared by a number of Italian Aristotelians interested primarily in medicine. See Charles Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 83. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 1, pp. 605–6. See Fowler, Descartes on the Human Soul, pp. 87–96. Letter to Regius, Jan. 1642, CSM III, 208. Letter to Regius, Jan. 1642, AT III 500. Antoine Arnauld, Vraies et Fausses Idées in Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld, Docteur de la maison et société de Sorbonne, 43 Vols (Paris: S. D’Arnay, 1775–83), xxxviii. 291. Quoted in Desmond M. Clarke, Occult Powers and Hypotheses: Cartesian Natural Philosophy under Louis XIV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 168. Arnauld, Vraies et Fausses Idées. See for example Descartes, Letter to Regius, May 1641, CSM III 181. Aristotle, On the Soul, 413b 11–15. On the scholastic debate about the real distinction see Katherine Park, ‘The organic soul’ in C. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds), The Cambridge History of Reniassance Philosophy, pp. 477–8. Late Scholastic writers continued to position themselves in this debate. See for example Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, A Compendium of Philosophy in Four Parts, Third part, treatise I, discourse 2, question 4, in R. Ariew, J. Cottingham and T. Sorell (eds), Descartes’ Meditations. Background Source Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 85–6.

130 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57

History of the mind–body problem See K. Park, ‘The organic soul’, pp. 479–80. Descartes, Letter to Regius, January 1642. CSM III 208. Descartes, Description of the Human Body, Part III, in Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The World and other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 184. On views of this sort held by humanists during the sixteenth century, see K. Park, ‘The organic soul’, pp. 479–84. Descartes, Treatise on Man in S. Gaukroger (ed.), The World and other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 99, 107. See for example the letter from Fromondus to Plempius for Descartes, 13th Sept. 1637. AT I 403. For Descartes’ reply see CSM III 61–6. Descartes, Discourse on the Method, CSM I 139–41. Aquinas, Summa, 1a 78 4. Descartes, Treatise on Man, p. 169 in the Gaukroger edition. Descartes, The Description of the Human Body, Gaukroger edition, p. 171. Descartes, The Description of the Human Body, Gaukroger edition, p. 171. Aristotle, On the Soul, 429 a 10 – 430 a 10. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul 17–19, CSM I 335. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul 17–19, CSM I 335. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul 23–25, CSM I 337. See Susan James, Passion and Action. The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 87ff. On the incorruptibility of the soul see Fowler, Descartes on the Human Soul, pp. 240–8. Descartes, Letter to Plempius for Fromondus, October 1637, CSM III 62. Descartes, Letter to Regius, January 1642, CSM III 207. See for example Descartes, The Passions of the Soul 68. CSM I 352. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul 47, CSM I 344. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Rule 12. CSM I 42. Reservations on this topic were expressed by Arnauld, Gassendi, Princess Elizabeth and Regius, among others. See Arnauld, Fourth Set of Objections, CSM II 143; Gassendi, Fifth Set of Objections, CSM II 233–8; Descartes, Letter to Regius, December 1641, CSM I 200; Descartes, Letter to Princess Elizabeth, May 1643, CSM III 217–20. On these and other interlocutors see Fowler, Descartes on the Human Soul, pp. 340–409. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul 30, CSM I 339. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 31–2, CSM I 340. Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, I 48. CSM I 208–9.

Intentionality or phenomenology?

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Intentionality or phenomenology? Descartes and the objects of thought John Cottingham

Descartes, according to a widespread conception, is seen as having set a distinctive stamp on the mind–body problem. By taking the mind to be something privately accessed by each individual, he made its relationship to the public world of science a matter for prolonged philosophical puzzlement. But for many contemporary philosophers of mind, the long tangle of problems stemming from the supposed ‘privacy’ of the mental is at last reaching its end, and the focus of debate has shifted back to a quite different aspect of the mind, discussed by philosophers long before Descartes,1 and later made famous by Brentano,2 namely its intentionality. Intentionality, that property of mental states in virtue of which they are directed at, about, or of, certain objects,3 is not normally thought of as a topic on which Descartes had much to say. However the ‘aboutness’ or representative nature of mental states turns out to play a crucial role in his philosophy. I shall argue that it is central to his view of the mind, so central as to elbow to the edge the ‘private’ or subjective aspect that has long been taken to be the distinctive feature of the ‘Cartesian’ approach to the mental. In this paper, which falls into five parts, I shall start (in the first two, mainly exegetical, sections) by examining how Descartes characterises the objects of thought from the epistemologically austere starting point of the Meditations; it will emerge that his account is by no means as immersed in subjectivity and privacy as is often supposed. This result will be reinforced in the last three sections (which I hope will have some relevance to recent debates in philosophy of mind), where the main focus will be on the special problems posed by Descartes’ account of sensory ideas. Some philosophers nowadays believe that our experience of colours and pains is characterised by a certain distinctive phenomenology, accessible only to the subject. Since this approach to an important subclass of mental phenomena is often labelled ‘Cartesian’, it is of some interest to see whether Descartes himself adopted it. I shall argue that despite intermittent tendencies towards a proto-Nagelian subjectivism, Descartes’ dominant approach is firmly objectivist: some

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aspects of the relevant phenomena are dealt with by scientific reductionism, others by a conceptual or language-based approach in terms of intentional content.

Preliminaries: ideas, psychology and logic The solitary perspective of the Cartesian meditator has given rise to some distorted conceptions of Descartes’ view of the mind and its objects. The first is the complaint, often repeated in various guises, that Descartes ‘privatised’ or ‘psychologised’ the mind and its objects, paving the way for a suspect Lockean or Humean conception of ideas as psychological episodes of some kind. If, however, we look at Descartes’ own use of the term ‘idea’, we find instead that he is frequently closer to Plato than to Locke: ‘idea’, as he employs the term, is often a formal rather than a psychological notion.4 In defining the term, Descartes distinguishes a thought (‘that which is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it’) from an idea, which is ‘the form of any given thought’(forma cujuslibet cogitationis, Second Replies, AT VII 160: CSM II 28). When I think of something (a triangle, say) my consciousness is, of course, modified in a certain way: according to Descartes this involves a subjective psychological episode of some kind, but it also involves something more objective – an idea’s informing or giving form to the mind (mentem informare, loc. cit.). There seems to be a tolerably clear distinction in Descartes between what we should nowadays call the psychological and the logical point of view. Considered from the psychological point of view, the nature of an idea is ‘such that of itself it requires no reality except what it derives from my thought of which it is a mode, i.e. a manner or way of thinking’ (Third Meditation, AT VII 41: CSM II 28). But considered from a logical point of view, it has a certain representational content: ‘considered simply as modes of thought, there is no inequality among my ideas – they all appear to come from within me. But in so far as ideas are considered as representing different things, they differ widely [in that some contain more ‘objective reality’ or representational content, than others]’ (AT VII 40: CSM II 28). Cartesian ideas are in some respects more like publicly accessible concepts than private psychological items: two people could not be said to have the same thought, since a thought is a (private) mental item or mode of consciousness; but they could be said to have the same idea in so far as their thoughts have a common representational content.5 As far as the ontological status of Cartesian ‘ideas’ is concerned, Descartes’ position seems to allow him to take an attractive middle course between psychologizing ideas on the one hand, and reifying them on the other. An idea is not a simple private impression, or purely subjective modification of consciousness, since ideas, in virtue of their representationality or ‘about-


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ness’, may be said to have a certain content, and that content (though Descartes does not quite put it this way) is intersubjectively accessible. However, ideas are not made into wholly independent entities, in extreme Platonic style, since they turn out to be a way of talking about the formal or representational aspects of my thought. This last point needs clarifying. In the centuries preceding Descartes, scholasticism had developed out of a continual three-cornered tension between Platonic, Aristotelian and Christian thinking. Plato’s notion of ideas as real, eternally existing objects had appealed to Christian writers seeking an eternal world beyond this transitory earthly life; but consistent with their monotheistic metaphysics they were reluctant to allow them independent status, and located them as eternally existing archetypes in the mind of God. This was the line taken by Augustine (De diversis questionibus lxxxiii 46), and it also appears in Aquinas (Sententiae I 36, 2, 1). But Aquinas was also, of course, strongly influenced by the anti-Platonic arguments of Aristotle concerning universals; and this led him to resist construing an idea as an object really distinct from its instantiations: thus for Aquinas the intellect has the power to abstract a universal concept from its particular manifestations, but the idea is the ‘means of cognition’ (id quo intelligitur) rather than a separate object of cognition (id quod intelligitur) (Summa theologiae I, 5, 2).6 These tensions partly explain a certain fuzziness (deliberate or not) in Descartes’ view of the ontological status of ideas – a legacy which led to the protracted and inconclusive debate between Arnauld and Malebranche later in the seventeenth century. Except among his fellow Oratorians, Malebranche’s insistence on reverting to the Augustinian solution of placing ideas in the mind of God was widely regarded as little more than a curiosity; in Locke’s scathing phrase, ‘Tis is an opinion that spreads not, and is like to die of itself or at least do no great harm.’7 But Malebranche’s development of the Cartesian model has distinct advantages as against the privatising tendencies of its Lockean alternative.8 I shall return to some further important aspects of the Malebranchian line in discussing sensory ideas, below.

What are ideas about ? As we have seen, ideas in Descartes are associated with the representational powers of the mind. An idea is certainly not an image or picture,9 but in one respect it is, says Descartes, like a certain sort of picture (veluti quamdam imaginem), since it is of something.10 But of what? Descartes’ typical answer, most notably in the Third Meditation, is that ideas are of things (rerum) or ‘as it were of things’ (tanquam rerum).11 But the word ‘thing’ here emphatically does not mean an actually existing object in the world, as the famous presentation of the ontological argument in the Fifth Meditation makes crystal

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clear: I have innumerable ideas of things (rerum) which ‘even if they perhaps exist nowhere outside me cannot be said to be nothing, since they have their own true and immutable natures’ (AT VII 64: CSM II 45). When he was asked to comment on this passage in his interview with Frans Burman in 1648, Descartes is reported to have observed that everything that can be clearly and distinctly conceived is a true entity (verum et reale ens).12 Thus the objects of mathematics are real and true entities, just as much as those of physics, even though they are not actualised. When we think about triangles, our thought is about divinely generated objects (albeit not actualised objects), the properties of and relations between which we clearly and distinctly perceive.13 Ideas, in short, are objects of understanding which are independent of the vagaries of human psychology because they are grounded in the divine being or, as we might nowadays say, located in objective ‘logical space’.14 Now for two interesting complications. The first is that representations may be clear or fuzzy. The great struggle for the Cartesian meditator is, of course, to render our ideas clear and distinct. Because of the imperfection of the human intellect, and the interference effects generated by our bodily condition, many of our ideas may be like photographs that are fuzzy, and include extraneous shadows and haloes which do not properly belong to the objects represented. The task is to lop off these indistinct and confused elements (often supplied by the confusing deliverances of the senses), until we are left with a representation which is distinct – which contains only what is clear and open to the attentive mind. The paradigm here is the famous discussion of the wax in Meditation Two. We start from a confused and unsatisfactory representation, clouded by preconceived opinions and fluctuating sensory impressions. But by systematically eliminating this overlay of dross, and reducing our conception to what is detected by the scrutiny of the intellect alone (solius mentis inspectio, AT VII 31: CSM II 21), we can arrive at a representation of a pure extended object, mathematically describable. At the conclusion of this Cartesian process, our idea will conform properly to the thing – the true and immutable essence of extended substance. The second complication is more troubling. Some of our ideas have what Descartes in the Third Meditation calls ‘material falsity’, and he defines this by saying that materially false ideas ‘represent a non-thing as a thing’ (non-rem tanquam rem representant, AT VII 43). Sensory ideas (of heat and cold, for example) are like this. We might be tempted to construe this as a failure to refer to anything actually existing – like the bogus Victorian photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden, beloved of Lewis Carroll: the photo has a representational content, but there is nothing in the world which corresponds to the representatum. But this cannot be what Descartes means; actual external existence is not in question at this stage of the Meditations, and in any case, the ‘reality’ of the things represented by authentic ideas (e.g. of


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triangles) has nothing to do with actual existence. The problem about sensory ideas is, it seems, not just that there is nothing external corresponding to heat and cold, but that the ideas have no genuine representational content at all. In the scholastic jargon which Descartes employs, they lack ‘objective’ reality. But then Descartes’ description of them, namely that ‘they represent non-things as things’, looks singularly inept: how can they have a representational character if there is no representational content? To say the least, the divorce between representative character and objective reality is (as Margaret Wilson once remarked) ‘an embarrassment’.15 Descartes’ way of putting the matter is clearly not a very happy one. But perhaps what he is saying can be compared to something like this. I start with a set of photographic negatives. Some are fuzzy and indistinct, full of blotches, blemishes and hazy overlays, but after suitable editing, lopping and developing, they yield images with genuine objective reality or representational content. Such is my idea of the lump of wax. But others, though they at first sight may appear to have some sort of representational content, turn out, at the end of the developing process, to yield photographs which are entirely blank – there is just nothing represented. Perhaps this is not an incoherent notion in itself. A linguistic analogue might be this: someone could advance a string of propositions which they initially take to present an account of, say, causation, capable of truth or falsity. And as a result of philosophical analysis and argument, they might come to defend the theory as true, or discard it as false. But a third possibility is that they come on reflection to realise that the theory is so confused as to be wholly empty of content: they might end up admitting ‘I now just do not know what I was initially trying to say’. There is nothing to put in the album but a blank print. Even if it is internally coherent, however, this account does not cohere with what Descartes elsewhere wants to say about sensory ideas. For when he moves away from the pure metaphysics of the disembodied thinking self, and turns to the organic life of the embodied human being, he does, I believe, want and need to maintain that sensory ideas, so far from being quite blank, so far from being ‘about nothing’, as it were, do indeed have a certain crucial sort of intentionality. It is to the Cartesian theory of sensory ideas, and its implications for his theory of the mind, that I turn in the remaining three sections of this paper.

Sensory ideas In a letter to Mersenne written in 1641, Descartes distinguishes two classes of ideas, the ideas of pure mind (idées de pur esprit), and ideas which are ‘phantasms’ attributable to the senses and the imagination (AT III 395: CSMK 186). The latter are thoroughly confusing and misleading for the purposes

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of metaphysics and mathematical physics, but extremely beneficial for the health and safety of the human being, the mind–body composite (most of Meditation Six is devoted to explaining this). All the ideas relating to what Locke was later to call ‘sensible qualities’ come into this latter category – the ideas relating to the external senses such as those of colour and taste and smell, and the ideas relating to the internal senses, e.g. of pain. What sort of intentionality, if any, do these sensory ideas possess? As later developed by Malebranche, the answer seems to be: none. Malebranche firmly distinguishes between the mental phenomena he calls sentiments,16 which are purely subjective and lack any intentionality (do not have representational content), from what he calls ideas in the strict sense; the latter involve objects of cognition – abstract items which exist over and above any subjective mode of consciousness. Please distinguish, Malebranche insists in the Dialogues on Metaphysics (1687), between mere acquaintance and cognitive content: ‘Je vous exhorte à vous accoutumer a reconnaître la difference qu’il y a entre connaître et savoir, entre nos idées claires et nos sentiments toujours obscurs et confus’.17 A plausible rationale for the underlying thought here is that intentionality is closely associated with language: an idea in the strict sense (what Descartes calls an ‘idea of pure mind’) has a linguistically expressible content, and in virtue of this it enables us to arrive at a representation of real objects, including, for example, triangles and God – objects which fall under the rubric of extended or thinking substance. We can formulate propositions describing these substances, and characterising their essential attributes and the various modes of those attributes. Sensory phantasms, by contrast, are mere internal sensations lacking anything that could be called propositional content. Both Malebranche and – sometimes – Descartes talk about them in a way which suggests they are characterised merely by a distinctive phenomenology: beyond that, any attempt to say what they are ‘about’ falters and tails off into mere gesturing. Compare, in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes’ awkwardly hesitant and wholly non-cognitive talk of pain as that ‘curious I know-not-what sensation’ (iste nescio-quod doloris sensus). Note the socalled ‘strong’ demonstrative iste, rather than the more neutral hic or ille; in Latin this is often used as a kind of ‘shuddering’ or pejorative demonstrative (non est iste amicitia sed mercatura says Cicero: ‘that [shuddering] is not friendship but a commercial transaction’). Descartes goes on in the same passage to talk of hunger as a nescio-quae vellicatio ventriculi – an ‘I-knownot-what tugging in the stomach’. The ‘nescio-quae’ (je ne sais quelle, in French) conveys more than just imprecision: the sense is that there is something here that defies cognitive description, that eludes linguistic representation. It calls to mind (may even conceivably be the source for) Hegel’s later account of ‘sense-certainty’ as a mere particular given, some-


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thing too particular and unmediated to serve as a basis for anything that could be called knowledge, something that is Das Unwahre, Unvernunftige, bloss Gemeinte (‘untrue, irrational, simply gestured at’).18 What Hegel is suggesting (I think) is that though we may think we ‘mean’ something when we point to a sensory datum, there is nothing that can coherently be expressed in language. All this impinges in a fairly crucial way on the famous thesis of Franz Brentano that intentionality is the hallmark of the mental. If sensory ideas lack intentionality, we would be forced to modify Brentano’s thesis, or at least expand it to a disjunctive list, in the manner, for example, of Richard Rorty, who argues that for something to be classed as mental it must fall into one or other of two domains, the intentional or the phenomenological.19 Mental states, according to this view, include both propositional states such as beliefs and desires, which are about something, and raw feels or sensations, which are mental in virtue of being present to consciousness in a certain characteristic way, despite the fact that (in some cases at least) they lack any intentional content.20 It might seem from our analysis so far that Descartes’ view of the mind corresponds pretty much to the schema canvassed by Rorty: we have pure ideas (Malebranche’s ideas proper), which have representational content, expressible in language, and are about something; and we have sensory ideas (Malebranche’s sentiments) which have a characteristic phenomenology, but which are not about anything, and which are not associated with any cognitive content expressible in language. Well, perhaps that is Descartes’ view. But in the final two sections of this paper I want to underline the philosophical problems that beset such a view, and to argue that Descartes is in a position to offer a different and arguably better account.

Beyond phenomenology One of philosophy’s principal tasks, now as in the seventeenth century, is to explore how mental phenomena can be integrated into the rest of our conceptual scheme. But if sensations are characterised in raw phenomenological terms, unrelated to our linguistic and cognitive capacities, yet implying mental activity which goes beyond mere physiological and behavioural response, they risk becoming mysterious sui generis items beyond the reach of scientific or philosophical understanding. From the scientific point of view, if they are accessible only from a subjective perspective, then they either turn out to be ‘nomological danglers’, or – even if they can somehow be correlated with physiological or functional properties – their intrinsic character remains beyond the reach of scientific understanding. Moreover, there are also serious difficulties on the conceptual side: familiar Wittgensteinian arguments against private meaning pose intractable problems for

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the notion of sensory items as ‘semantic danglers’, identifiable only by a mysterious process of internal baptism (‘I name thee “Hunger”’). Descartes himself was by instinct an integrator, and if we interpret the strange, seemingly isolated world of his metaphysical meditations in the light of the rest of his philosophy, we discover a far richer and more integrated account of the nature of sensations. In the essay on Optics (La Dioptrique) published with the Discourse on the Method in 1637, one of Descartes’ targets is the popular construal of ideas as images, which inclines us to think that the representational powers of the mind must operate via the construction of something quasi-pictorial. The pictorial model might seem nice and simple, but it is not as straightforward as it looks: ‘engravings consist simply of a little ink placed here and there on a piece of paper’, but manage thereby to ‘represent to us forests, towns, people and even battles and storms, and although they make us think of countless different qualities, it is only in the case of shape that there is any real resemblance’. But in any case, representation can be achieved in the absence of anything which is remotely pictorial: ‘We should recall that our mind can be stimulated by many things other than images – by signs and words, for example’ (AT VI 112: CSM I 165). What Descartes is unmistakably telling us here is that representation need not imply resemblance: and this in turn allows room for the possibility that a mental item can have intentionality, can be about something, even though there is nothing in its intrinsic qualities to yield anything like a transparent match between representans and representatum. The problem, he notes in the Optics, is to discover how brain events can ‘enable the soul to have sensory awareness of all the various qualities of the object to which they correspond, not to know how they can resemble those objects.’ Descartes, like Locke and many other early modern philosophers, often stresses that our ideas of colour, say, do not resemble anything in external objects. But what the passages from the Optics show is that this need be no bar to their having intentional content. And the more closely one looks at what Descartes says about sensory ideas, the more it emerges that they are indeed representational. They involve something’s being ‘indicated to the mind’ (menti exhibere, Sixth Meditation, AT VII 88, line 9). When the foot is damaged, there arises in the soul a sensory idea which indicates that something untoward is happening in the foot, and which has the function of ‘stimulating the mind to do its best to get rid of the cause of the pain’ (loc. cit.). Now this kind of idea is not like the clear and distinct perceptions of the intellect: it does not represent certain patterns of extended substance – it does not, so to speak, give us a computer printout of the position and shape of all the affected particles in the environment and in the nervous system. But a moment’s reflection reveals that, for creatures of finite intellect, such information would be useless to the point of dangerousness. An airline pilot


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who had to analyse a computer printout before being able to take evasive action would still be at work with his calculator and log tables when the crash occurred. Instead, he is alerted to the danger by various crude but effective devices – warning buzzers or flashing lights. These represent the relevant information very selectively, and in highly schematic and simplified form, but one which enables the necessary decisions to be taken quickly. This is exactly how it is with respect to human beings and their bodies. Sensory ideas are indeed about something: they convey information about the internal states of our bodies, and the relationship between our bodies and the environment. But the mode whereby such representation is effected is entirely unlike that which operates in the case of the mathematical ideas employed by the physicist: instead of a transparent presentation of configurations and properties as they obtain in the extended world, there is a kind of opacity: the structure of the relevant objects ‘does not correspond to my sensory grasp of them’; but the sensory grasp is adequate for survival purposes – indeed more effective for those purposes than a more transparent representation would be. Is this consistent with Descartes’ apparent talk elsewhere of the confused and indistinct nature of sensory awareness? I think it is; and to explain how, it may be useful to draw an analogy with Sigmund Freud’s account of how things are represented in dreams. In the Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900), Freud introduces the notion of representation in displaced form : The … species of displacement which occurs in dream formation … results in a colourless and abstract expression … being exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one. The advantage, and accordingly the purpose, of such a change jumps to the eyes, A thing that is pictorial is, from the point of view of a dream, a thing that is capable of being represented: it can be introduced into a situation in which abstract expressions offer the same kind of difficulties of representation in dreams as a political leading article in a newspaper would offer to an illustrator … The dream seeks to reduce the dispersed dream-thoughts to the most succinct and unified expression possible …21 The analogy is a powerful one, irrespective of whether one buys the wider Freudian theory of the psychoanalytic significance of dream experience. The central point is that the dreaming mind is ill-equipped to cope with certain kinds of information except in a displaced and stylised form. And similarly, the Cartesian view is that the human being is ill-equipped for survival unless the realities of the extended universe (the ‘colourless and abstract’ molecular configurations in the environment and in our own bodies)

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are represented in a displaced and stylised form: from a cognitive point of view, sensory ideas are representationally inadequate; but from a functional point of view, they do the job of enabling us to take the appropriate actions to preserve the health of the mind–body composite. The analogy can be pressed further. Just as, if Freud is correct, the symbols that appear in dreams need to be deciphered, via the psycho-analytic process, if we are to achieve a full understanding of what is really going on, so in Cartesian science, the deliverances of the senses need to be decoded if we are to achieve an adequate understanding of what the reality of the world is like.22 ‘If we say we see colour in an object’, says Descartes, ‘this amounts to saying that we see something there of which we are completely ignorant’ (Principles, Part I, art. 68). Or again: ‘when we say that we perceive colours in objects, this is really just the same as saying that we perceive something in the objects whose nature we do not know, but which produces in us a very vivid sensation which we call the sensation of colour’ (art. 70). The Cartesian scientist, like the Freudian psychoanalyst, needs to ‘crack the code’ – not of course the code used by the mind in dreams, but the code encapsulated (whether naturally or by divine decree) in our sensory awareness. Visual sensations, says Descartes in his early treatise Le Monde, are ‘signs established by nature’; what it is that is signified remains to be discovered.

The boundaries of the mental If sensory ideas are like signs, if they do have intentionality (even though the mode of representation involves a certain sort of opacity), then Descartes’ approach to mentality turns out to match Brentano’s rather closely. Intentionality does indeed turn out to be the hallmark of the mental, and what is given in sensory awareness does not need to be classified separately, as pure, non-intentional phenomenology. Cartesian sensory ideas represent, crudely and schematically, certain states or events: ‘something nasty is occurring to my left foot’; ‘here is a flower of a distinctive visual hue’. There is clearly intentional content here: we are dealing with something much richer than mere ‘natural meaning’ – ‘those clouds mean rain’; ‘those rings mean the tree is fifty years old’ – since when I have a sensory idea this involves a directedness of thought towards my own internal condition, and/or the condition of the environment.23 Even if the claim just made is correct, the question nonetheless arises as to whether sensory states like being in pain, or seeing a yellow colour, may not involve, and involve essentially, something more than just the presentation of ideas with a certain intentional content. Those who believe in this ‘more’, this raw, non-intentional residue, rely on what we nowadays think of as the Nagelian dimension: the subjective or qualitative aspect of a sensory idea,


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the way it is for the experiencing subject. And this is supposed to be a further fact, not captured by the intentional content of the sensory idea (nor indeed by the purely physical properties of its bodily counterpart).24 In favour of this view is what seems to many to be an intuitively clear gulf between merely believing that, for example, one’s foot is being damaged (plus desiring to remove it from the noxious source), and feeling that damage as a painful stimulus (though for functionalists, of course, the alleged gulf could be shown to disappear in the light of a correct analysis of the complex pattern of inputoutput relations involved). Against the view in question is the philosophical difficulty (already touched on) of giving a coherent account of such ‘qualia’, construed as items beyond the reach both of intentional content on the one side, and of even the fullest functional-cum-physiological account of the workings of our bodies on the other. As far as Descartes was concerned, there are at least two pieces of evidence that he was from time to time (rightly or wrongly) drawn to the notion of sensory qualia in the sense just alluded to. The first is the fact, already noted, that he refers to sensations like hunger and pain in a way which suggests they have an irreducible and indescribable phenomenology – the ‘I know not what’ aspect. The second piece of evidence is Descartes’ assertion (which I have discussed elsewhere)25 that God bestows kinds of sensation on his creatures in a fashion which Leibniz scathingly called arbitrary: God simply decrees, Descartes sometimes suggests, that sensations of such a kind, rather than of another kind, should “arise” in our souls when our brains are stimulated in a certain way. Thus, talking of damage to the foot, and its associated nerve stimulations and brain events, Descartes suggests that ‘God could have made the nature of man such that this particular motion generated an entirely different kind of sensation in the mind’ (AT VII 88: CSM II 60). Now if sensations involve access to intrinsic qualities which can be arbitrarily bestowed or withheld at will by the deity, then the secular analogue of this is that there is part of the mental realm which has an intrinsic nature that lies beyond either intentional content, or physical reduction. If this can indeed be laid at Descartes’ door, then he is father to a long history of philosophical puzzles: Locke’s bizarre suggestion that your violet could be my marigold, and the whole barrage of arguments – qualia swaps, inverted spectrums and the like, which have bedevilled the philosophy of mind ever since. The term ‘bedevilled’ is appropriate here for the reason that, if qualia are really as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘free-floating’ as this story suggests, then it seems they might belong to anything – chimpanzees, goldfish, even tomatoes. Without any scientific basis for connecting the occurrence of qualia with either propositional thoughts on the one hand, or physiological or behavioural states on the other, we appear to be plunged into a problem of other minds so acute that total scepticism threatens. Of course there are attempted replies

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to this, and clearly I do not have the space to launch into this vexed issue here (though I will briefly touch on one aspect of it in a moment). The relevant point I want to pick out for the present purpose is that if Descartes really was a wholehearted qualia-merchant, then we might expect him to line up with the sceptics on what mental states could or could not be attributed to other creatures. But in fact he generally takes both a firm (non-sceptical, non-hesitant) and also an austere (that is to say, restrictive) line, adamantly refusing the attribution of mentality to non-human creatures. Let me conclude this survey of Descartes’ account of the mind and its objects by focusing on the special problem posed by animal sensations. Descartes has taken a lot of stick for characterising animals as mechanical automata – a thesis which is taken to imply a denial that, for example, they can be in pain. The truth of the matter, I think, is that Descartes often adopts a reductionist stance about sensation (and for that matter, locomotion, nutrition, memory, and a lot other faculties), but that his reductions are not eliminativist: he does not deny any of these faculties to animals, or indeed to the mechanical android described in the Treatise on Man; he merely attempts to explain their workings in micro-mechanical terms.26 What he does deny is that these faculties and events are mental. But (I hear you cry) if he denies mentality to animals, doesn’t that mean they can’t have sensations? It depends what you mean by mentality, and it depends what you mean by sensations. I have suggested that the dominant account of mental states in Descartes is that they are intentional states with a propositional content; this applies primarily to pure intellectual representations, but secondarily to sensory representations, which still have intentional content, albeit of a rather special and schematic kind. It fits in rather well with this that the famous discussion of animals in part five of the Discourse is almost entirely concerned with the refusal to attribute linguistic abilities to them – a refusal which (aside from the marginal and still debated case of chimpanzees) is surely entirely correct. So what is denied to animals by this reasoning? Not, as I have just explained, that they can be in pain, or be hungry, or see objects in the environment; all these statements remain true, and reductively explained. What is denied is that they have sensory ideas. But that, surely, is, once again, entirely correct. Given what I take it we agree, that animals have no access to propositional content, it is hard to see how one could defend the notion of their having ideas, in the sense of representational mental states. For in the light of the Cartesian analysis that I unfolded earlier, this would have to come out as – absurdly – the subjects having access to ‘signs’ which they were wholly incapable, even in principle, of interpreting linguistically, let alone decoding into the language of mathematical science.


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If the points made in the last two paragraphs are conceded, then Descartes’ position with respect to the mental life of animals is neither suspect because he denies they can see or be in pain (for he does not deny that such properties, reductively explained, can be ascribed to them), nor because of his denial that they have representational states (since such a denial, if ‘representational’ is construed propositionally, is eminently defensible). So what remains to object to in his position? Presumably, that his view threatens to rob animals of ‘qualia’ – that it denies that animals are the subjects of raw phenomenological states of an entirely non-linguistic kind. Yet how, given the way qualia are supposed to be accessed, namely from entirely subjective standpoint, can we possibly know whether such a denial is correct or incorrect? The worry whether we should tack access-to-qualia on to animals (or for that matter on to goldfish or tomatoes) seems entirely intractable. It is important to see, moreover, that this is not just an epistemological problem. In the absence of an account in terms of intentional linguistic content on the one hand, or the possibility of reductive explanation in terms of physiology and behaviour on the other, we are left entirely without any criteria for the attribution of such qualia-access to others. So the supposed problem of leaving no room for animal qualia can hardly, I suggest, be a decisive objection to the Cartesian position, for the simple reason that we are now in an area which is beyond the bounds of the sayable. I want to end, however, with a concession. Though I think the Cartesian position is broadly defensible, suspicions may remain that it draws the boundaries of the mental too narrowly. Most people, one suspects, would be fairly happy to deny mentality to cockroaches and goldfish, but intuitively inclined to extend it to dogs. Do we not want to allow for some kind of mentation that falls short of the full propositional intentionality of the language-user, yet goes beyond the mere teleology of the wasp or the shark? I tend to agree that we do. When we see a group of chimpanzees chasing a monkey, gesturing, throwing stones, screaming with excitement, we are strongly inclined to maintain that the screams are ‘about’ something, albeit in a rudimentary way. One way of understanding what is going on here is in terms of what Marcia Cavell has dubbed ‘pre-intentionality’ (a term she uses to describe the responses of infants at the pre-language stage). The behaviour in question can indeed be about something in so far as it forms part of a complex interactive context in which X recognises a mutuality in respect of its dealings with Y. The baby begins to learn that its smiling responses to the mother’s smile elicit further complex maternal responses, and so on. In short, Cavellian ‘pre-intentional’ behaviour is intentional in a rudimentary sense to be cashed out, in a Wittgensteinian way, by focusing on a complex network of social

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practices: ‘the path the child travels in learning to mean will be the same as that which teaches her something about the responses of another, about how to elicit those responses, and to know that something she has done is the reason why the other is responding as he is’.27 I should add that it is hard not to agree that something similar is going on when the dog fetches its lead and lays it at the foot of the master – something that may or may not have been done to Descartes by his own pet dog whom, significantly, he named ‘Monsieur Grat’. It is these genuine, if rudimentary, cases of intentionality that make us want to extend the boundaries of the mental to at least some animals. But if this is supposed to be a victory over Descartes, it is a Pyrrhic one. For the dominant Cartesian thesis (or the Descartes-Brentano thesis, as one may perhaps now be allowed to call it) is that intentionality exhausts the domain of the mental. The Cavellian strategy just canvassed either works or it does not (there is no space for me to evaluate it here). If it fails, then Descartes’ restriction of mentality to humans is not threatened. If it succeeds, then mentality can be extended to animals, but only in so far as intentionality turns out to be stretchable a little way beyond the linguistic domain; and this would turn out to be a perfectly benign extension, since it can be cashed out in terms of the complex interactive patterns of mutually recognised purposes among relatively intelligent creatures. Such cases will remain, to be sure, on the borderline of the mental; but a grey area here is something that after Darwin we should accept, and indeed expect. Descartes’ creaking ontology, of course, is something that does not support grey areas: you either have an immaterial soul or you don’t. But if I am right, he nonetheless went a long way towards identifying, correctly, intentionality as the feature delimiting the boundary of the mental. And the identification of such a property remains a significant philosophical achievement despite the demise of the incorporeal substrate in which Descartes misguidedly insisted that any such property must inhere. We can see in conclusion that Descartes’ view of the mental is Janusfaced. He was sporadically attracted by ineffability, the mind as private theatre, the raw phenomenology of the ‘I-know-not-what’ inner feeling – the whole catalogue of tangles so often pejoratively labelled ‘Cartesian’. But what I have called his dominant view was that when we have taken out all the aspects that can be fully explained physiologically and behaviourally, we are left with a residual realm of the mental that can adequately be characterised in terms of the capacities of language-users and the intentional content of ideas. It is an ambitious and in some ways revisionary view, which prefigures post-Kantian conceptualist accounts of the mental domain. And it may very well be correct.28


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Notes 1 The key figure for the medieval debates is Aquinas, who distinguished esse naturale (real existence in the world) from esse intentionale (roughly, existence as an object of thought). See Summa theologiae 1a 84; Aquinas’ views are discussed by A. Kenny in ‘Aquinas: Intentionality’, in T. Honderich (ed.), Philosophy and its Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 2 F. Brentano, Psychology from and Empirical Standpoint [Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874], transl. L.L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1974), Bk II, ch. 1. 3 See John Searle, ‘Intentionality’, in S. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, l994), p. 397. Searle defines intentionality in terms of the mind’s being directed at ‘objects and states of affairs in the world’, though this could be misleading, since neither the medieval scholastic philosophers who first wrestled with intentionality, nor Franz Brentano, who later proposed it as the hallmark of the mental, were committed to supposing the objects of thought must be items in the world. It would be better, perhaps, to say that intentionality has to do with the representational powers of the mind, leaving open the ontological status of what is represented. 4 The closest Descartes comes to explicitly Platonic terminology is in the Third Meditation, where he traces the source of ideas to a primary idea associated with an archetype: ‘although one idea may perhaps originate from another, there cannot be an infinite regress here, but eventually one must reach a primary idea, the cause of which will be like an archetype’ (AT VII 42: CSM II 29). In this paper, ‘AT’ refers to the standard Franco-Latin edition of Descartes by C. Adam, and P. Tannery, Œuvres de Descartes, (12 Vols, revised edn., Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76); ‘CSM’ refers to the English translation by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and ‘CSMK’ to Vol. III, The Correspondence, by the same translators plus A. Kenny (Cambridge University Press, l991). 5 Somewhat confusingly modern (post-Fregean) usage with respect to the terms ‘idea’ and ‘thought’ seems to be pretty much the opposite of Descartes’: people now tend to think of ‘ideas’ as psychological items, whereas they talk about ‘the thought that x’ when referring to the (public) content of a proposition. It is significant that Descartes links the possession of an idea to the ability to use a linguistic term correctly: ‘whenever I express something in words, and understand what I am saying, this very fact makes it certain that I have an idea of what is signified by the words in question’ (Second Replies, AT VII 160: CSM II 113). 6 See J. Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, l993), s.v. ‘idea’. 7 A comment made by Locke some three days before his death; cited in N. Jolley, The Light of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon, l990), p. 81. 8 The seemingly bizarre theory of vision in God turns out, on Jolley’s interpretation, to be a corollary of his firm separation of the province of logic from that of psychology; ‘to say that we directly perceive ideas in God is to say that we directly perceive items in logical space’ (op. cit., p. 87). 9 Descartes rebuked Hobbes for failing to distinguish an idea, in his sense, from the scholastic notion of a phantasm in the corporeal imagination (AT VII 181: CSM II 127). Compare Second Replies: ‘it is not only the images depicted in the imagination which I call “ideas”; indeed, in so far as these images are in the corporeal imagination, that is are depicted in some part of the brain, I do not call them “ideas” at all’ (AT VII 160–1: CSM II 113). 10 Ideas are veluti quasdam imagines (‘like images of a certain sort’, AT VII 42, line 12: CSM II 29).

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11 Nullae ideae nisi tanquam rerum esse possunt (‘There can be no ideas except as it were of things’, AT VII 44). Compare also the following phrases: Quaedam ex [ideis] tanquam rerum imagines sunt (‘some ideas are as it were images of things’, AT VII 37); una [idea] unam rem, alia aliam representat (‘one idea represents one thing, another another’, AT VII 40). 12 AT V 160: CSMK 343. Cf. J. Cottingham (ed.), Descartes’ Conversation with Burman (Oxford: Clarendon, l976), pp. 23 and 90ff. 13 Nowadays, we may tend to construe the objects so referred to as belonging to the realm of logical necessity, or describing what is true in all possible worlds. But this (post-Leibnizian) way of thinking is largely alien to Descartes, who instead regards the verities of logic and mathematics, no less than the actually existing universe, as the inscrutable creations of the divine will. This view of the status of the objects of logical and mathematical thought generates a what I have elsewhere called a ‘worm of contingency’ at the heart of the Cartesian system (‘The Cartesian legacy’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Sup. Vol. LXVI (l992), pp. 1–21). It is not that such truths must be so, or that they are so in all possible worlds; it is just that they, as a brute fact, are so. Indeed, it gets worse. If the items to which our thought is directed correspond to fiats of the divine will, rather than objects of the divine intellect, this seems to call into question the truth-stating function of the relevant propositions. What we humans take to reflect truth and reality is grounded in something ultimately imperatival rather than indicative. So the famous Cartesian natural light, the divine light of reason which illuminates our souls, turns out in the end to be more like an external force which constrains our thinking than a searchlight which picks out real intellectual objects. A radical gulf thus opens up between human and divine cognition. From the human perspective, our ideas represent ‘real and true entities’: there is a correspondence-relation between our thought and what it refers to. But from the divine perspective, there is no such correspondence, but rather a kind of pure volitional activity – not a vision of truth, but a series of commands about how lesser creatures are to think. The metaphysics here becomes pretty murky, especially when we add in the Cartesian rider that the divine intellect and the divine will cannot really be distinguished: ‘we must not think that God understands and wills as we do, by means of operations that are in a certain way distinct from one another; rather, there is always a single identical and perfectly simple act by means of which he simultaneously understands, wills, and brings about all things’ (Principles of Philosophy I 23, AT VIIIA 14: CSM I 201). For a stimulating discussion of the significance of this rider, see A. Nelson and D. Cunning, ‘Cognition and Modality in Descartes’, in T. Ako and M. Yrjönsuuri (eds), ‘Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes’, Acta Philosophica Fennica 64 (1999), pp. 137–53. 14 I owe this way of putting it to Nicholas Jolley, The Light of the Soul , p. 87. 15 M. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 111. 16 The term embraces not only ‘internal’ sensations like pain, but also mental phenomena such a colour perceptions. Cf. Jolley, The Light of the Soul, p. 60. 17 Entretiens sur la Métaphysique [1687], Dialogue III. 18 Phänomenologie des Geistes [1807], section 110. 19 R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), ch. 1. 20 The dichotomy is not meant by Rorty to be an exclusive one: it allows for the possibility of mental states – for example being angry with someone – which have an intentional object as well as a phenomenological aspect. 21 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], ch. 6; emphasis added. 22 Compare J.L. Marion, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991).


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23 Arguably, even when I am subject to a vague feeling e. g. of anxiety or euphoria (without any specific object of dread or elation), the feeling can still be said to be directed on something – myself. (See Tim Crane, ‘Intentionality’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge 1998.) 24 Thus Crane (‘Intentionality’) invokes qualia to suggest that pains have essential nonintentional properties. Though I cannot defend this here, I am myself inclined to the view that qualia talk is best analysed in terms of abilities and dispositions (of ‘knowing how’ rather than ‘knowing that’), and hence that it is misguided to think that properties (and hence facts) are involved here. 25 See J. Cottingham, ‘Descartes on Colour’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , XC, 3 (l989–90), pp. 231–46. 26 See my ‘Cartesian dualism: theology, metaphysics and science’, in J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l992), esp. p. 246ff. 27 Marcia Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, l993), p. 122. (See further my review of Cavell in Philosophical Quarterly, 1995.) 28 I am most grateful to Max de Gaynesford, Hanjo Glock, James Handel, Brad Hooker, David Oderberg and John Preston for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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‘A tumbling-ground for whimsies’? The history and contemporary role of the conscious/unconscious contrast Neil Campbell Manson

Introduction: consciousness and the conscious/ unconscious contrast William James argued that the distinction between ‘the unconscious being and the conscious being of the mental state’ was ‘the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies’.1 Little over a century later, not only is the distinction between conscious and unconscious mentality taken for granted in psychology and philosophy of mind (pace Searle), but as Robert Van Gulick has observed, the distinction is taken by many thinkers to provide the explanandum for accounts of consciousness and the consciousness of mental states.2 If we are to explain consciousness, then, Van Gulick insists, ‘At a minimum we need to explain the difference between conscious mental states and nonconscious mental states or unconscious mental states or processes’.3 In what follows we shall be primarily concerned with how the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states is drawn upon by those who seek to explain the conscious status of mental states rather than the related issues of how we should explain the distinction between conscious beings and unconscious ones. What has changed since James’ time? Has psychology become a ‘tumblingground for whimsies’ as James warned? The aim in this paper is to attend to the history of the notion of unconscious mentality in order to shed light on the different motivations for postulating unconscious mental entities, and relatedly, to map some of the key lines of distinction within the umbrella term ‘unconscious mentality’. There are a number of historical accounts of the notion of unconscious mentality prior to its use in psychoanalytic theory.4 We shall not go over the ground covered by these histories. We shall, instead, focus on the motivations for, and the sources of, four different notions of unconscious mentality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will then return to the issue of the way in which the conscious/unconscious contrast is drawn in contemporary thinking about the mind.

‘A tumbling-ground for whimsies’?

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The history of unconscious mind: four notions of unconscious mentality Unconscious mentality 1: not-occurrently-conscious mental states The notion of an unconscious mental state is a contrastive one. Because unconsciousness is recessively defined against notions of consciousness, different notions of what the consciousness of a mental state consists in will give rise to different notions of unconsciousness. The notion of consciousness has many strands.5 On the one hand we might want to claim that conscious mental states are, in some sense, always conscious occurrences within an ongoing stream of conscious experience and thought.6 If we frame the conscious/unconscious distinction for mental states in terms of what is occurrently conscious and what is not, then at any particular time most of our beliefs, desires, and so on will count as unconscious – even if we can avow them, express them, act upon them, or make inferences on the basis of them. The distinction between what is occurrent in consciousness at a time and what is accessible to, or recoverable by, the conscious subject, provides the source of our first putative notion of unconscious mentality. For example, in Northridge’s overview of the history of unconscious mentality Schopenhauer’s distinction between ‘a man’s knowledge, and what his mind is occupied with at any moment’ is cited as an example of the contrast between conscious and unconscious mentality.7 By way of contrast, in contemporary thinking about the mind the conscious/unconscious distinction for mental states is usually framed in terms of a more broad notion of consciousness: in terms of a mental state and its content being accessible to the subject, or available for certain kinds of reflective thought. For example, Chomsky frames his conception of the ‘unconscious knowledge’ which determines and constrains our use of language, against the idea that we have ‘privileged access to the principles that enter into knowledge and use of language’.8 Unconscious knowledge is inaccessible knowledge, and, he adds, ‘In referring to the “accessibility” of the structures of mind, I am thinking of the belief that its contents are in principle open to reflection and careful thought if only the barriers of dogma, superstition, or psychic disorder are removed’.9 Alternatively, we can use Freud’s distinction between preconscious mentality (mental states that are ‘capable of becoming conscious’10 ) and unconscious mentality (putatively mental states that are inaccessible to the conscious subject) to distinguish two ways in which the conscious/unconscious distinction may be drawn. It is no easy matter to give precise conditions for something’s being capable of becoming conscious, or for its being accessible to a conscious subject. For our current purposes we need only note that the conscious/unconscious distinction for mental states can be drawn

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in two ways. We can make the distinction in terms of a narrow notion of consciousness (essentially bound up with occurrences in the stream of conscious experience). On such a view both preconscious (accessible) and unconscious (inaccessible) mental states will count as unconscious. Or, alternatively, we can frame the distinction in terms of a broad notion of consciousness (which includes both conscious occurrences and those mental states which a subject has access to: her non-repressed beliefs, memories, desires and so on). There are many issues here: is something mental which is now, in fact, inaccessible to the thinker (due to repression or even tiredness) to be counted as conscious or unconscious? Should we only count mental states that are inaccessible in principle as unconscious? We have not the space to deal with these concerns here. The point that I want to make is that if we do seek to explain the difference between conscious mental states and nonconscious mental states then, as a first step, we need to be clear about whether we want to explain the difference between beliefs and occurrent thinkings on the one hand, and inaccessible cognitive processes on the other; or between occurrent thinkings and occurrences on the one hand, and all other putatively mental states on the other. Unconscious mentality 2: the psychology of consciousness and the explanatory need for unconscious causes and conditions of consciousness Empirical psychological explanations of consciousness provide the source of our second notion of unconscious mentality. Consider the following remark by William James:11 Now, the immediate fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to study is also the most general fact. It is that fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some kind of consciousness is always going on. […] So far as we class the states or fields of consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents into elements, or trace their habits of succession we are on the descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they come from or why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level. This passage captures two ideas: first, that consciousness is the subject matter of psychology. Here James reflects the orthodox view of late nineteenth-century psychology that consciousness is the primary explanandum for scientific psychology (rather than, say, the codification and explanation of patterns of behaviour). Second, insofar as psychology is an explanatory concern, questions may arise about the source and nature of


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consciousness or aspects of consciousness. If our aim is simply to describe the contents of consciousness (assuming that we do so from the first-person point of view), then there is little pressure to make appeal to unconscious phenomena (mental or otherwise) except insofar as nonconscious objects, properties, and so on, feature as part of the content of conscious mental states. But now suppose that we ask the kinds of question which are an integral part of what James called the explanatory level. Even here it need not be the case that we are thereby pressurised to cite unconscious explanatory elements. There are different kinds of explanation which may be offered of a conscious event. We may, in many cases, be able to offer a reason-explanation of why some conscious thought occurred. This may consist in giving our reasons for why we were thinking about some subject matter. Or, it may be a case of giving our reasons for judging something to be the case. What about explaining how we think? Often we can do so by making appeal to conscious mental states and events.12 Suppose we ask a sleuth how she deduced that the disgruntled butler killed Sir George. Rather than giving us her reasons for concluding that the butler did she may be able to tell us how she reached her conclusion: she mentions the clues, the false leads, the steps she took in order to reach a conclusion. But if we ask the sleuth how she managed to recognise the butler each time she sees him there may well be nothing she can cite by way of explanation of how she does so. From her conscious point of view, being able to recognise someone by seeing them is just something she can do. There need be no further conscious steps, methods or activities which she went through in order to do it; nor need there be any clue in consciousness as to how she manages to recognise faces. At this point we might be tempted to insist, as Norman Malcolm does, that being able to recognise someone we know by seeing their face is just a normal human capacity and we may deny that there is any need for further explanation of how it is that we can do things like recognise our friends and others familiar to us.13 But if we do seek an explanation of how we recognise the faces of those familiar to us then, it seems, we will have to make appeal to nonconscious explanatory elements. There are many aspects of our conscious mental life which seem to resist explanation in terms of further conscious elements. Thoughts occur to us and we do not know why. We engage in thinking, we use the fruits of our thinking in our everyday life, but we may not have any clue as to how it is that we are thinkers. An early example of reflective puzzlement about just how our conscious thought is effected can be found in Abraham Tucker’s Light of Nature Pursued: The mind only begins a train of thinking or keeps it in one particular track, but the thoughts introduce one another successively. […] Whoever

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History of the mind–body problem will carefully observe what he does when he sets himself down to study, may perceive that he produces none of the thoughts passing in his mind.14 [T]he machinery of our organs bears at least an equal share with the mind, in all our transactions, for she only chooses what shall be done next, but the several means, and minute steps necessary for executing it, occur without our seeking. […] The disposition of our organs to fall into little series of motions spontaneously, is the thing that gives us all our dexterity and expertness in every kind of action.15

Note that Tucker does not simply suppose that something, some unknown process, is involved in underpinning his trains of thought. He assumes that it is the ‘machinery’ of his ‘organs’ which plays a role in enabling his thinking. Our second notion of unconscious mentality derives from the coupling of (i) a recognition of the fact that there is a limit to the explanatory potential for explaining aspects of consciousness in terms of further aspects of consciousness, with (ii) the assumption that we may and should extend our explanatory inquiry beyond the domain of consciousness by making appeal to aspects of our physiological nature. If we take it that our conscious thought and experience are causally dependent upon the brain then when we seek an explanation of how transitions in thought are effected appeal will be made to properties, states, and processes of the brain. Such an appeal may come in at the point when explanation by appeal to conscious elements runs out, or it may be part of a general account of the physiological underpinnings of our conscious trains of thought. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the idea that we must appeal to nonconscious physiological processes had a number of adherents. A good example is William Carpenter with his doctrine of ‘unconscious cerebration’.16 Carpenter cites from an 1870 lecture, ‘Mechanism in Thought and Morals’, given by the American essayist and physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes: The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping stones: how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. […] After all, the mystery of unconscious mental action is exemplified, as I have said, in every act of mental association. What happens when one idea brings up another? Some internal movement of which we are wholly unconscious, and which we know only by its effect.17


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Carpenter argues that we must make appeal to ‘unconscious cerebration’ in order to explain how transitions in thought occur in the way that they do.18 Why ‘cerebration’? Carpenter argues that the unconscious explanatory elements ‘can scarcely be designated as Reasoning processes, since “unconscious reasoning” seems a contradiction in terms. The designation unconscious cerebration is perhaps as unobjectionable as any other, and has been found readily intelligible’.19 Whilst Carpenter makes appeal to ‘unconscious cerebration’ the psychologist James Sully talks of ‘unconscious psychical activity’20 and of ‘unconscious psychical processes’.21 Similarly, G.H. Lewes talks of ‘unconscious sensual and volitional processes’.22 Such claims about unconscious mental processes were subject to criticism in the nineteenth century by, amongst others, J.S. Mill, Franz Brentano and later, William James.23 James and Brentano in their attack on the very notion of unconscious mentality criticise the psychologists Helmholtz, Herbart, Maudsley, Fechner, Benecke and Ulrici for their appeal to unconscious explanatory elements.24 What Brentano and James object to is the idea of an unconscious mental state or process. But, we may wonder, in what sense are the putative unconscious processes, appealed to by these nineteenth-century psychologists, mental? These unconscious psychological processes are mental only in a derivative sense. They are, typically, physiological processes. They are labelled as mental to mark the fact that they are a proper object of study for psychology, precisely because of the essential role that they play in enabling, causing or structuring conscious thought or experience. Empirical psychology as an explanatory project includes within its explanatory domain the states, processes and mechanisms that enable, bring about or underpin our conscious mental lives. The hypothesised unconscious psychological processes and states are not be taken to be akin to our conscious beliefs, thoughts and experiences. It will help if we have a label for this notion of unconscious mentality. As it is bound up with empirical psychological attempts to explain consciousness or aspects of consciousness I shall refer to it as the notion of unconscious psychological processes and states. The explanatory elements are postulated and taken to be mental just because empirical psychology, in its explanatory guise, needs to have more within its domain of inquiry, and more to draw upon as explanantia, than conscious mental states. Unconscious mentality 3: unconscious perception and will: the metaphysical unconscious All the histories of the notion of unconscious mentality noted above cite Leibniz as the first person to give a systematic explanatory role to unconscious mental elements.25 Leibniz’s notion of unconscious mentality is framed in

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terms of insensible or minute perceptions. But Leibniz’s metaphysics commits him to a notion of perception that is logically distinct from our everyday notion of conscious perception. Leibniz’s metaphysical view is that the world is constituted out of indivisible simple substances or monads. Leibniz uses the term ‘perception’ to refer to a change or episode within a monad.26 All monads are in contact with all other monads to a greater or lesser degree according to the ‘Pre-Established Harmony’ in the universe initiated by God. But human souls are monads. So human souls have countless episodes or perceptions linking them to every other monad. But human consciousness is bounded. Our conscious mental life is not swamped by a registration of episodes in every existent monad, so, Leibniz argues, there must be many perceptions occurring in each human soul has that the subject is not consciously aware of at that time: insensible perceptions. There is a further metaphysical principle which plays a role in Leibniz’s case for insensible perceptions, namely Leibniz’s ‘Law of Continuity’. Leibniz holds that ‘nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most verified, that nature makes no leaps’.27 Because ‘nature makes no leaps’ Leibniz is driven to argue that ‘noticeable perceptions arise by degrees from ones which are too minute to be noticed’.28 Conscious perception is instead to be viewed as a summation of a myriad minute perceptions. The minute perceptions are not conscious but provide the elements from which conscious experience is made up. Leibniz argues that in order to hear the sound of the ocean we must have millions of minute perceptions of the individual waves. The motion of each wave must affect us otherwise we would not hear the sound of a hundred thousand waves since, as he puts it ‘a hundred thousand nothings cannot make a something’.29 Leibniz’s argument for minute insensible perceptions is not a good one.30 But our concern is not with the issue of whether Leibniz’s doctrine is defensible. Rather, our concern is with the conception of unconscious mentality which Leibniz’s doctrine brings with it. If we fail to register the fact that Leibniz’s notion of perception has a distinctive use within his metaphysical system we might easily take Leibniz to be offering an argument like those offered by nineteenth-century empirical psychologists like Carpenter, Lewes and Sully. Why? Because Leibniz offers us a number of psychological explanatory applications of his doctrine of insensible perceptions. For example, he argues that his doctrine allows us to explain how it is that human beings, when faced with a seeming indifference between two choices, choose one or another even if, from their conscious point of view, there seems to be nothing to choose between them: [I]t is these minute perceptions which determine our behaviour in many situations without our thinking of them, and which deceive the unsophis-


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ticated with an appearance of indifference of equilibrium – as if it made no difference to us, for instance, whether we turned left or right.31 Leibniz concludes that the doctrine of insensible or unconscious perceptions has a vital explanatory role to play in ‘pneumatology’ (the science or theory of spirits and spiritual beings): In short, insensible perceptions are as important to pneumatology as insensible corpuscles are to natural science, and it is just as unreasonable to reject the one as the other on the pretext that they are beyond the reach of our senses.32 The doctrine of insensible perceptions may have an explanatory application, but the mental status of the explanatory elements is secured by Leibniz’s particular use of the everyday concept of perception in a new, technical way within the confines of his particular metaphysical system. Whilst the unconscious psychological processes (discussed in the last section) are only mental insofar as they are part of a broad explanatory concern with consciousness and its causes and conditions, the mental status of Leibniz’s insensible perceptions is a by-product of his metaphysical commitments (to the law of continuity and to the idea that all monads are linked by perceptions). The insensible perceptions would still be perceptions (on Leibniz’s view) even if they were not cited, or citable, in explanation of anything to do with the conscious mind. So, our third notion of unconscious mentality is one which has its source in the novel application, or the analogical use, of everyday mental notions within metaphysical systems. The use of a mental notion within a metaphysical system does not entail the notion of unconscious mentality, but by using a mental term in a way that is quite divorced from its normal use the logical space is opened up for the existence of nominally mental states and events that are not conscious mental states of conscious subjects. It then becomes possible to cite mental elements as ubiquitous aspects of nature (unconscious perceptions, in Leibniz’s sense, may be links between people, pebbles or potatoes). A similar distortion of our everyday use of mental terms can be found in the metaphysical position that there is some form of universal will underlying natural phenomena. Such a view was widespread in German thought in the nineteenth century. Whole metaphysical systems were founded on Schopenhauer’s replacement of the Kantian thing-in-itself with unconscious will.33 There is not space here to go into the dense thickets of metaphysical thinking surrounding this notion of unconscious will, but good examples include Carl Gustav Carus’ Psyche: On the Development of the Soul34 and Eduard von

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Hartmann’s massive three volume work The Philosophy of the Unconscious.35 Carus approvingly quotes from Schelling: ‘All movement and activity, all life, including that of nature, is only unconscious thinking, or takes place in the form of thought’36 ; whilst Von Hartmann informs us that in his book ‘[T]he principle of the Unconscious is imperceptibly extended beyond the physical and psychical domains […] until, expanded to all-unity, it embraces the Cosmos’.37 If we reject panpsychist views of the world, then we may feel that there is no case to be made for taking these unconscious metaphysical phenomena to be mental, even if they are labelled ‘perception’ or ‘will’. Our third notion of unconscious mentality might be better viewed as mental in name only. I prefer the label metaphysical unconscious as a way of registering the fact that it is the peculiar metaphysical application of everyday mental terms which provides the logical space for cases of seemingly unconscious mentality. Unconscious mentality 4: Hamilton, Freud and the reconciliation of laws of conscious thought and motivation with seemingly anomalous cases In his 1836 series of Lectures on Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, William Hamilton offers a number of arguments in favour of what he calls ‘unconscious mental modifications’.38 There is one argument in particular on which I want to focus. Hamilton argues that we must make appeal to unconscious mental modifications if we are to explain certain seemingly anomalous trains of thought. Hamilton is committed to the view that there are associative laws governing successive events in trains of thought, ‘laws to which the succession of our whole mental states are subjected’.39 In addition to his associationist commitments Hamilton also adheres to the view that mentality is essentially conscious: ‘every mental phaenomena may be called a fact of consciousness’.40 It may seem surprising that Hamilton argues for, as he puts it, ‘unconscious mental modifications’. Hamilton was well aware of Leibniz’s arguments for insensible perceptions, but objects to Leibniz’s unconstrained application of mental concepts to seemingly nonmental phenomena.41 He insists that Leibniz was ‘unfortunate in the terms which he employed to propound his doctrine’ and insists that in using mental terms in such a way ‘he violated the universal usage of language. For perception, and idea, and representation, all properly involve the notion of consciousness’.42 Hamilton’s key argument stems from what seems to be a problem for the associationist psychology. There are cases where successive thoughts occur but the antecedent thought episodes do not exhibit the required associative links to the subsequent thought: ‘It sometimes happens that thoughts seem


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to follow each other immediately, between which it is impossible to detect any bond of association’.43 But Hamilton argues that ‘if this anomaly be insoluble, the whole theory of association is overthrown’.44 This might seem to be a puzzling line of inference. If the laws governing the succession of thought episodes only apply to some, but not all, thought episodes then we can allow that in some cases thoughts occur which bear no associative link to their immediate antecedents. In order to make sense of Hamilton’s claim we have to assume that he takes it to be the case that the laws of association apply to all successive thought episodes. Against this background assumption, that the associative laws apply to all successive thought episodes, Hamilton offers us an example of a seemingly anomalous train of thought from his own life: Thinking of Ben Lomond [a mountain in Scotland], this thought was immediately followed by the thought of the Prussian system of education. Now conceivable connections between these ideas in themselves, there was none. A little reflection, however, explained the anomaly. On my last visit to the mountain, I had met upon its summit a German gentleman, and though I had no consciousness of the intermediate and unawakened links between Ben Lomond and the Prussian Schools, they were undoubtedly these – the German, – Germany, – Prussia, – and, these media being admitted the connection between the extremes was manifest.45 Within our everyday thought there are cases whereby one thought seems to succeed another without any reason or logical connection. There is nothing puzzling about this, nothing anomalous, unless we are, like Hamilton, committed to the existence of laws governing the occurrence of successive mental episodes. But for Hamilton, even if not for us, there is an issue of how the anomaly is to be explained. Hamilton’s response is that ‘[i]t can only be explained on the principle of latent modifications’.46 In such cases, whereby one thought follows from another with no obvious logical connection, Hamilton claims: [I]n these cases we can generally discover by an attentive observation, that these two thoughts, though not themselves associated, are each associated with certain other thoughts; so that the whole consecution would have been regular, had these intermediate thoughts come into consciousness, between the two which are not immediately associated.47 Why is this not just an instance of our second notion of unconscious mentality, that of unconscious psychological processes, where something occurs in consciousness but appeal needs to be made to something

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nonconscious in order to explain how it came about? Mill accepts Hamilton’s line of argument but argues that unconscious mental modifications should be taken to consist in ‘unconscious modifications of the nerves’.48 Why does Hamilton not take this option? Why does he not make appeal to an unconscious physiological link between the two successive thoughts? The point is that Hamilton is trying to reconcile two assumptions: first, that there are ‘laws to which the succession of our whole mental states are subjected’;49 and second, that such laws are general and apply without exception to successive conscious thought-occurrences. Hamilton notes the existence of cases which seem to be at odds with this pair of assumptions. He faces a dilemma. Either ‘the whole theory of association is overthrown’;50 or, he finds some way of reconciling the seemingly anomalous data with the associationist laws as he construes them. To claim that successive thoughts are linked by unconscious physiological causes without showing how those causal links constitute the appropriate ‘bond of association’ would be to admit that, in some cases, successive thoughts were not governed by the laws of association – they just occur as a matter of brute causal fact. If the associative laws are to continue to apply to the anomalous case then mental contents must be found to provide the requisite intermediate associative links. It is arguable that Hamilton conflates the causal explanation of trains of thought with the practice of giving an elucidation of what a subject can associate with the content of a thought, and as such we cannot take his argument to be sound. But my concern here is with the form of Hamilton’s argument, not its soundness. Hamilton’s remarks show that the content of the putative intermediaries is accessible to him, or recoverable by him. Rather than simply viewing Hamilton’s argument as an argument in favour of unconscious (in the sense of inaccessible) mental states, we can view it as an argument to the effect that if the associationist psychological laws are to be universal, and apply to all transitions in thought, then they must be extended to apply to non-occurrent mental states. Hamilton wants something more than just a brute causal intermediary between the seemingly anomalous thought-episodes. He wants to show how the associative laws still govern these seemingly anomalous successive thoughts. If we allow non-occurrent mental states into the picture then we can appeal to their contents to provide the missing ‘associative bond’. We can make matters clearer if we leave behind associationism for a moment. Suppose that (for some reason) we held that rational trains of thought had to be of syllogistic form and that each premise of a proper train of inference had to occur as a conscious mental occurrence. In such a context enthymematic trains of reasoning would seem to be anomalous: how could the thinker have reached her conclusion if she did not explicitly entertain each premise. If we reject the view that the rationalising elements have to be


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occurrences (and we allow that a person’s beliefs can do duty in inference even without being occurrently entertained), then the problem is resolved. However, when we return to Hamilton’s associationism, the problem is how we make sense of a non-occurrent mental state that can do duty as an element in association psychology (we cannot make use of the notion of a propositional attitude, for the associative elements need not have propositional contents). My concern here is not to defend Hamilton, nor is it to resurrect associationism. What needs to be stressed is that unlike the attempt to explain aspects of consciousness in terms of nonconscious causes and conditions, Hamilton’s notion of unconscious mental modifications stems from his attempt to reconcile the view that there are certain laws governing mental states coupled with data that seems to provide exceptions or anomalies. In effect he does this by arguing that the association psychology must apply to non-occurrent mental states as well as conscious occurrences. The reason why I have stressed the form and source of Hamilton’s argument rather than the conclusion is this: Hamilton’s argument is not that which underpins the empirical psychological appeal to unconscious psychological processes, but it is, arguably, the same form of argument as some of those used by Freud in favour of unconscious mentality. This is not to say that Hamilton is the source of Freud’s thinking (though Whyte does note that Hamilton’s followers, Carpenter, Maudsley and Morell ‘directly influenced Freud’s teachers in Vienna’).51 My claim is not that one thinker influenced another, rather it is that a particular form of argument is employed by both Hamilton and Freud, and the form of argument differs from the other arguments in favour of unconscious mentality found in nineteenth-century thought. The key similarity is that both thinkers end up postulating unconscious mental elements because they seek to reconcile the assumption that there are generally applicable laws of conscious thought (or motivation) with the observation of cases which seem to be exceptions to those laws. In an early paper ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, Freud notes that the speech of hysterical patients often makes seemingly unintelligible leaps.52 The hysterical patient’s train of thought seems to be illogical. But, Freud insists: [W]e may make the same demands for logical connection and sufficient motivation in a train of thought even if it extends into the unconscious, from a hysterical patient as we should from a normal individual. It is not within the power of a neurosis to relax these relations.53 Even ‘deranged’ people, Freud argues, are not at liberty ‘to throw overboard the common psychological laws that govern the connection of ideas’.54 Freud,

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like Hamilton, holds that there are certain exceptionless psychological laws. Faced with seeming anomalies the appeal to unconscious motives serves to reconcile the empirical data with the general applicability of the laws: Once we have discovered the concealed motives which have often remained unconscious, and have taken them into account, nothing that is puzzling or contrary to rule remains in hysterical connections of thought, any more than in normal ones.55 Freud, like Hamilton, is not concerned with explanation simpliciter, rather his concern is with reconciling a commitment to ‘psychological laws that govern the connection of ideas’56 with the existence of hysterical trains of thought which seem to be ‘contrary to rule’ or anomalous relative to these psychological laws. Freud’s later arguments in defence of the postulation of unconscious mental states make use of a similar line of reasoning.57 Freud notes that ‘the data of consciousness have a very large number of gaps in them’.58 Should we explain such gaps? If so, how should we explain them? Freud presents us with a trilemma. We are impaled on the first horn of the trilemma if we take the view that no explanation of such gaps is required or possible. To say that there are events or facts about human behaviour which cannot be explained is, Freud insists, to have ‘thrown overboard the whole Weltanschauung of science’.59 We end up at the second horn if we try to explain slips of the tongue, dreams, and so on in nonmental terms. But, Freud argues, with regard to hypothetised neurological or physical causes of dreams and other seemingly irrational phenomena, ‘[a]s far as their physical characteristics are concerned, they are totally inaccessible to us: no physiological concept or chemical process can give us any notion of their nature’.60 That is, we have no systematic form of physiological explanation available. The third option, the least pernicious horn of the trilemma, is to give up the assumption that mental states have to be conscious. We then continue to employ our commonsense psychological laws even though they initially seemed to be applicable only to conscious mental states. Freud concludes: All these conscious acts remain disconnected and unintelligible if we insist upon claiming that every mental act that occurs in us must also be necessarily experienced by us through consciousness; on the other hand they fall into a demonstrable connection if we interpolate between them the unconscious acts which we have inferred. A gain in meaning is a perfectly justifiable ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience.61


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Here, the ‘gain in meaning’ attendant upon the postulation of unconscious mental states is relative to the two other options: first, no explanation at all; second, explanation in terms of physical processes and mechanisms. We can sum up the similarities and differences between Hamilton and Freud’s arguments. In Hamilton’s case, what does the work is the assumption that certain laws of thought, laws which initially seem to range over conscious occurrences, must be revised or rejected, or, as Hamilton seems to argue, extended so that the association laws continue to apply even in the absence of conscious occurrent thoughts which have the requisite contents. On my interpretation of Hamilton, he presentes us with a dilemma: either we admit non-occurrent mental states into the association psychology or ‘the whole theory of association is overthrown’.62 Whilst Freud’s arguments rehearsed above are formally akin to Hamilton’s they are not framed in terms of the laws of association. In recent Freud exegesis, one extremely plausible interpretation of Freudian theory is that it is ‘an expansion, effected step by step, of that provided by the commonsense conception of the mind’.63 Whereas Hamilton’s argument extended the reach of associationist laws and their attendant application in psychological explanation to (accessible) non-occurrent mental states, Freud’s arguments extended the reach of everyday psychological explanation (by appeal to motives) to inaccessible or not-currently-accessible mental states. It is this extension of commonsense psychology to unconscious states that Freud aims to justify via the trilemma noted above. There is not space here to enter into further debate about the defensibility of Freudian theory. My aim has been to attend to a form of argument used by both Hamilton and Freud which gives us another source of the notion of unconscious mentality. The source is the attempt to reconcile a commitment to general laws or norms of conscious thought or motivation with seemingly anomalous cases where appeal to a mental state seems to be required (by the light of the laws or norms in question) but no conscious mental state of the requisite kind can be appealed to.

Contemporary thinking about the mind: consciousnessindependence We began by contrasting James’ dismissal of unconscious mentality against Van Gulick’s remark that if we are to explain consciousness then ‘we need to explain the difference between conscious mental states and nonconscious mental states or unconscious mental states or processes’.64 We are now in a position to consider the change in our thinking about the conscious/unconscious contrast since James’ time. Assuming that contemporary psychologists and philosophers of mind are not going to draw upon the metaphysical

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unconscious of Leibniz, Carus and von Hartmann then it might seem that Van Gulick’s remark amounts to the claim that if we are to explain consciousness then we need to explain the difference between: (a) occurrent episodes of thought as opposed to ongoing standing states like belief; (b) conscious episodes and the accessible contents of mind, as opposed to the nonconscious physiological causes and conditions of mind; (c) non-repressed motives and wishes as opposed to repressed ones. All of (a) – (c) could, plausibly, provide an explanandum for theorizing about consciousness and conscious mentality. But if we leave matters here, at a point where we have identified three contrasts which might provide part of the explanandum for theorizing about consciousness, we will have failed to touch upon a crucial feature of contemporary thinking about the mind. Our examples above, save for the metaphysical unconscious, all involved appeal to unconscious elements against a background assumption that the mind is paradigmatically conscious. I now want to give a brief sketch of how contemporary thinking about the mind gives rise to, and draws upon, a conscious/unconscious contrast distinct from those already discussed. Much of contemporary Anglophonic philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology draws upon what I call a consciousness-independent notion of representation as a basic mental notion. What do I mean by consciousness-independence? One key aspect (but not a sufficient condition) of a consciousness-independent conception of representational mentality is the view that consciousness is not a necessary condition for something’s being a representational mental state (there is then a further issue about whether there are further aspects of mind which resist characterisation and explanation in consciousness-independent, representational terms e.g., qualia). To say that consciousness is not a necessary condition of representational mentality is ambiguous: we might mean that it is not a necessary condition for an object or creature to have a representational mental state that the object or creature be conscious (or capable of becoming conscious). Or we might mean that even if the creature in question is conscious, or capable of being conscious, it is not a necessary condition for a state of that conscious creature to be a mental state, that the state be a conscious mental state. These two notions of consciousness-independence are related, but for our present purposes we can restrict ourselves to the latter reading. The claim that consciousness is not a necessary condition of mentality is not sufficient for a consciousness-independent conception of mentality. After all, we have been viewing various historical claims about unconscious mentality which do not draw upon a consciousness-independent conception of mind (Leibniz’s notion of perception is, perhaps, an exception). We have yet to pin down just how contemporary thinking about the mind differs from, say, that of the nineteenth-century psychology of consciousness. The differ-


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ence is that in contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind, the view that consciousness is not a necessary condition of mentality is not merely one which applies to a few exceptional or anomalous cases, relative to a conception of mind as paradigmatically conscious. Rather, the contemporary notion of a representational state is part of a general conception of representational mentality which can be specified and explained in independence from considerations about consciousness. If the notion of representation is framed in independence of consciousness then what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being a representational mental state? There is, as Stich puts it, ‘a dizzying range of options’ offered in answer to this question.65 Candidates include the causal or functional role of the state (with or without additional teleological conditions); or certain causal and dispositional relations between the state and objects or properties in a creature’s environment. Whilst some theories of content (e.g. teleological ones) may hold that only organisms have mental states, even those theories are framed in such a way that the conscious status of a mental state is something over and above its representational or mental status. There are good reasons for being committed to a consciousnessindependent conception of representation. First, it enables philosophers of mind to adopt a ‘divide and rule’ strategy to problems in the philosophy of mind: issues about mental representation are to be dealt with independently of, and perhaps prior to, issues about consciousness. A ‘divide and rule’ strategy affords the practical advantages attendant upon a tighter focus upon particular problems. If one can give an account of representation in consciousness-independent terms, then one may be able to avoid, or postpone, traditional problems which arise when one tries to explain consciousness in objective, naturalistic terms. As Dennett remarks: My fundamental strategy has always been the same: first, to develop an account of content that is independent of and more fundamental than consciousness – an account of content that treats equally of all unconscious content-fixation (in brains, in computers, in evolution’s ‘recognition’ of properties of selected designs) – and second, to build an account of consciousness on that foundation. First content, then consciousness.66 A further reason for being committed to a consciousness-independent conception of mind is that the conscious/unconscious distinction is one ‘we may have to cut through in seeking a natural domain within the set of phenomena now covered by the term psychology’ (Pylyshyn 1984, 265).67 That is, the causal generalisations required by an adequate empirical psychology may only be able to be framed in terms of a consciousnessindependent notion of representation.

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There is much more that could be said by way of elucidation of the notion of consciousness-independence and by way of an evaluation of the reasons for adopting a consciousness-independent conception of representation. We have not space for that here. Let us now return to the contrast between conscious and unconscious mentality. A consciousness-independent conception of representational mentality does not, by itself, entail a conscious/ unconscious contrast. But in cognitive science and cognitive psychology there are deemed to be many cases whereby a subject satisfies the sufficient conditions for the ascription of (consciousness-independent) representational mental states (e.g., a subject exhibits a non-accidental complex pattern of behaviour in response to some kind of stimulus), whilst certain necessary conditions for the ascription of the relevant conscious mental states fail to be met (e.g., the stimuli in question are such that the subject claims to have no cognisance of them). The conditions for ascription of nonconscious representation are much more easily met than the conditions for the ascription of conscious mentality. As a consequence, there are many examples of the explanatory postulation of unconscious representational states including the explanation of subliminal perception, blindsight, and tacit learning.68 Contemporary theories of conscious mentality take such empirical work to provide a coherent conscious/unconscious distinction amongst mental states. How does commitment to a consciousness-independent conception of representation, coupled with the empirically-drawn conscious/unconscious distinction influence the way people seek to explain conscious mentality? We might reject the coherence of a consciousness-independent view of mentality altogether, and thus we would reject the idea that an account of conscious mentality should be framed in terms of, or based upon, a consciousness-independent notion of representation. If we do accept a consciousness-independent conception of representational mentality then two further strategies suggest themselves. First, we might hold that the consciousness-independent conception of representation is only suitable as the basis of an account of unconscious representation. We cannot build upon the consciousness-independent conception of representation in framing an account of conscious thought. Alternatively we might notice the mooted explanatory advantages of a consciousness-independent account of representation and wonder if we can build an account of conscious mentality on the basis of a consciousness-independent account of representation. It is this way of conceiving things, taking the conscious status of a representational mental state to be something superadded to its consciousness-independent representational status, which provides the starting point for a number of contemporary theories of conscious mentality. At this point philosophical assumptions about the concept of consciousness come into play and this gives rise to different accounts of what it is for a representation to be conscious. One view, drawing on the intuition that thinkers can be conscious of


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only their conscious mental states, is that conscious mental states are just those that are subject to, or available to, further higher-order representation.69 On another view higher-order representation is not necessary for consciousness: conscious mental states are those representational states which play, or are poised to play, a distinct, privileged causal role in the control of action, inference and speech.70 What our historical survey has brought to light is that it is not the distinction between conscious and unconscious mentality simpliciter which plays a role in constraining theorizing about consciousness and conscious mentality. The key point is that contemporary theories of conscious mentality typically draw upon, and seek to build upon, a consciousness-independent conception of representational mentality. In the nineteenth century, lacking any conception of how something could be a representational state without being a conscious state, we can understand James’ resistance to the idea of unconscious mental states. For James, any explanation of conscious mentality in nonconscious terms would have to be framed in nonmental terms. But a consciousness-independent conception of mind allows theorists to try to frame their accounts of conscious (representational) mental states in mental rather than nonmental terms. Commitment to a consciousness-independent conception of mind seems to provide prospects of an explanation of at least some aspects of conscious mentality where hitherto there were none.71 We have identified a kind of explanatory strategy which utilises the conscious/ unconscious distinction as it is drawn in cognitive psychology. But the conscious/unconscious distinction in empirical psychology, and the explanatory strategy are both underwritten by a consciousness-independent conception of mind. We must leave the question of the propriety of that strategy, and of the consciousness-independent conception of mind, for another occasion.

Notes 1 William James, The Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1890), Vol. 1, p. 269. 2 For Searle’s view, see his ‘Consciousness, explanatory inversion and cognitive science’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 1990, pp. 585–642 and The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 3 See p. 62 of Robert Van Gulick, ‘What would count as explaining consciousness’, in Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1995). 4 See E. van Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Coupland (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1893 [1869]), Vol. 1, pp. 16– 42; H.F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970); L.L. Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (London: Tavistock, 1962); I. Levine, The Unconscious: An Introduction to Freudian Psychology (London: Leonard Parsons, 1923), pp. 11–45; W.L. Northridge,

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6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26 27

28 29 30

History of the mind–body problem Modern Theories of the Unconscious (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924), pp. 1–28. See, for example, A. Bain, Mental and Moral Science, Appendix E (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1879); T. Natsoulas, ‘Consciousness’, American Psychologist 33, 1978, pp. 906–14; G. Güzeldere, ‘The Many Faces of Consciousness: A Field Guide’, in Block, Flanagan and Güzeldere (eds), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). See e.g. W. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to students on some of life’s ideals (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910 [1899]), p. 15. Northridge 1924, p. 11. Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations, p. 244 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). Chomsky, Rules and Representations, p. 241. Freud, ‘The Unconscious’, p. 173, Vol. XIV, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, with the assistance of Alix Strachey and Aloan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1915). Talks to Teachers on Psychology, pp. 15–16. See e.g. Ryle, On Thinking (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 121–30. Malcolm, Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 159– 69. Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (London: Thomas Tegg & Son, 1834 [1768]), pp. 14–15. The Light of Nature Pursued, p. 97. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology (London: Henry King, 1874). Principles of Mental Physiology, p. 539. Principles of Mental Physiology, p. 517. Principles of Mental Physiology, p. 517. J. Sully, Outlines of Psychology (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1884), p. 74. J. Sully, The Human Mind, (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), Vol. 1, p. 75. G.H. Lewes, The Study of Psychology: its Object Scope and Method (London: Trubner, 1878), p. 18. See Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, Sixth Edition (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889 [1865]); Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. L.L. McAlister; trans. A.C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell and L.L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995 [1874]); James, The Principles of Psychology. See Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, pp. 101–37; James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, pp. 162–76. See Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, p. 17; Levine, The Unconscious: An Introduction to Freudian Psychology, pp. 12–17; Northridge Modern Theories of the Unconscious, pp. 5–9; Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud, p. 99; Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, p. 312. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, in The Monadology and other Philosophical Writings, trans. R. Latta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925 [1714]), p. 411. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 [1698–1705]), p. 56. New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, p. 56. New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, p. 54. See e.g. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, p. 164; C.D. Broad, Leibniz: An Introduction. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 130–6.


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31 New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, p. 56. 32 New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, p. 56. 33 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969 [1819]), Vol. 1, p. 111. 34 Carus, Psyche: On the Development of the Soul, trans. by Renata Walsh (New York: Spring Publications, 1970 [1846]). 35 Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3 vols., trans.Coupland (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., (1893) [1868]). 36 Psyche: On the Development of the Soul, p. 55. 37 The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. 1, p. 3. 38 Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1859 [1836]), Vol. 1, pp. 310–70. 39 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 352. 40 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 269. 41 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 361. 42 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 362. 43 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 2, p. 244. 44 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 2, p. 244. 45 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 352. 46 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 352. 47 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 352. 48 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, p. 355. 49 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 352. 50 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 1, p. 244. 51 The Unconscious Before Freud, p. 147. 52 ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, Vol. II, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 53 ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, p. 293. 54 ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, p. 294. 55 ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, p. 294. 56 ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, p. 294. 57 See ‘The Unconscious’, pp. 166–71. 58 ‘The Unconscious’, p. 166. 59 ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XV, p. 53. 60 ‘The Unconscious’, p. 168. 61 ‘The Unconscious’, p. 167. 62 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Vol. 2, p. 244. 63 Richard Wollheim, The Mind and its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 93. 64 ‘What would count as explaining consciousness’, p. 62. 65 Stich, ‘What is a theory of mental representation?’, in Stich and Warfield (eds), Mental Representation: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 348. 66 Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 457. 67 Z. Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 265. 68 For subliminal perception, see A. Marcel, ‘Conscious and unconscious perception: experiments on visual masking and word recognition’, Cognitive Psychology 15, 1983, pp. 197–237; for blindsight, see L. Weiskrantz, Blindsight: A case study and implications (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); for tacit learning, see A. Reber, Implicit Learning

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and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 69 See P. Carruthers, Language, thought and consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); W. Lycan, Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); D. Rosenthal, ‘A Theory of Consciousness’, in Block, Flanagan and Güzeldere (eds), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. 70 See N. Block, ‘On a confusion about a function of consciousness’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, 1995, pp. 227–87; B.J. Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 71 See e.g. Rosenthal, ‘A Theory of Consciousness’, p. 735.

The origins of qualia

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The origins of qualia1 Tim Crane

The contemporary mind–body problem The mind–body problem in contemporary philosophy has two parts: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. These two parts are not unrelated; in fact, it can be helpful to see them as the two horns of a dilemma. The causal interaction between mental and physical phenomena seems to require that all causally efficacious mental phenomena are physical; but, the phenomenon of consciousness seems to entail that not all mental phenomena are physical.2 One may avoid this dilemma by adopting an epiphenomenalist view of consciousness, of course; but there is little independent reason for believing such a view. Rejecting epiphenomenalism, then, leaves contemporary philosophers with their problem: mental causation inclines them towards physicalism, while consciousness inclines them towards dualism. To accept that this is the way that the problem is generally conceived is not to accept that the problem has been well-formulated. One may legitimately question the assumptions which give rise to the mental causation problem: for instance, what are the grounds for believing that anything that interacts with something physical must itself be physical? And how can we formulate a conception of the ‘physical’ which does not render the question trivial (as would be done by treating the physical as the causal)?3 However, as an account of the current state of the debate within contemporary philosophy of mind, the above description of the problem ought to be fairly uncontroversial. It is perhaps equally uncontroversial to say that while the problem of mental causation is regarded as a relatively ‘technical’ problem – whose solution requires only a more careful treatment of the notions of causation or physical realisation – the problem of consciousness is thought to be a deeper and more difficult problem for physicalists and non-physicalists alike. The problem is often expressed in terms of ‘qualia’: the ‘qualitative’ or

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‘phenomenal’ features of conscious states of mind. How can a mere physical object, which we know a person to be, have states of mind with qualitative features or qualia? This question, which poses what David Chalmers calls the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, is supposed to be the real heart of the mind–body problem in today’s philosophy.4 As Jaegwon Kim puts it, ‘the stance you take on the problem of qualia [is] a decisive choice point with respect to the mind–body problem’.5 To have a clear understanding of this problem, we have to have a clear understanding of the notion of qualia. But despite the centrality of this notion in formulating this aspect of the mind–body problem, it seems to me that there is not a clear consensus about how the term ‘qualia’ should be understood, and to this extent the contemporary problem of consciousness is not well-posed. The difficulty here can be vividly brought out at first by considering the fact that there seems to be a real dispute about whether qualia exist at all. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the recent debate will be aware that some philosophers take the existence of qualia to be an obvious fact, while others deny their existence. So, we find Ned Block responding to the question, ‘what is it that philosophers have called qualitative states?’ with the quip: ‘As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know”’.6 But, we find Michael Tye and Gilbert Harman arguing that there are no qualia in visual experience, and Daniel Dennett denying the existence of any qualia whatsoever. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett says: Philosophers have adopted various names for the things in the beholder (or properties of the beholder) that have been supposed to provide a safe home for the colors and the rest of the properties that have been banished from the ‘external’ world by the triumphs of physics: ‘raw feels’, ‘sensa’, ‘phenomenal qualities’, ‘intrinsic properties of conscious experiences’, the ‘qualitative content of mental states’ and of course ‘qualia’ … There are subtle differences in how these terms have been defined, but … I am denying there are any such properties.7 At first sight, this dispute might seem to be a straightforward ontological matter, like a dispute about the existence of numbers or universals. But closer reflection shows that the dispute cannot be exactly like this. For the normal route to introducing numbers or universals into an ontology is that they explain some phenomenon which is agreed on all sides to exist and require an explanation: mathematical practice, or apparent sameness of kind. The claim is that we should believe in these entities because they explain the obvious truths about the ‘appearances’, broadly understood. But the truths about qualia, by contrast, are supposed to be truths about the appearances


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themselves, about how things seem to us in experience. And it is reasonable to expect that how things seem to us should not be a theoretical posit, but a pre-theoretical starting point: a point from which to embark on a debate, where things are relatively obvious to all its participants. This is clear from Block’s remark: that there are qualia is supposed to be something obvious, something whose existence a moment’s reflection on experience or consciousness is supposed to establish. A theory of consciousness is a theory of qualia: qualia are the data to be explained by a theory of consciousness. A similar approach is taken by Kim and Chalmers. Yet Dennett, Tye and Harman take themselves to be giving theories of experience while denying the existence of qualia (or at least of qualia of a certain kind). And Fred Dretske and W.G. Lycan argue, against Block, that qualia should be conceived as intentional states.8 Furthermore, Tye and Harman argue against qualia by reflecting on experience, and claiming that it is obvious that there are no such things as qualia in perceptual experience. What Block claims obviously exist Tye and Harman claim obviously don’t exist. What is going on? How can there be such extreme disagreement about what is obvious?9 The aim of this paper is to gain an understanding of this dispute by examining some of its historical origins in twentieth century philosophy. In particular, I shall be concerned with the origins of the terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’, and with how these terms became central in the formulation of the mind–body problem. I shall claim that the debate will not be advanced by ‘focussing inwards’ (to use a phrase of Colin McGinn’s) and swapping intuitions about what is obvious. Rather, we should try and make progress by understanding how the term ‘qualia’ (the concept of qualia) has entered the debate, by trying to see what role the term was introduced to play and for what purpose, and how this purpose may or may not differ from the purposes of contemporary disputants. The question on which I want to focus is: what was the original point of talking in terms of qualia, and does this point differ from the point which contemporary philosophers are trying to make by using the term? I begin by examining a connection between the dispute about qualia and a dispute which many would now consider defunct: the debate over sensedata in the philosophy of perception. I argue that a similar puzzle arises there as arises over qualia, and that the solution to the puzzle gives the resources to suggest, in broad outline, how the dispute over qualia may be resolved. The third section then gives an account of the origin of the notion of qualia, and its relation to the notion of sense-data. I claim that in the philosophy of mind of the first half of the twentieth century, qualia and sense-data play similar roles: sense-data are objects of experience and qualia their properties. In the fourth section, I explain how qualia came to play a different role in subsequent discussions of the mind–body problem: rather than being

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properties of the objects of experience, they became properties of the experiences themselves. The fifth section outlines why this change took place, and suggests the conclusion that the most plausible conception of qualia in contemporary philosophy is an intentionalist one (or, better, a conception which rejects qualia as they are normally understood). This final conclusion is, strictly speaking, independent of the investigation into the origins of qualia – but I nonetheless believe that the proper lesson of the historical investigation is that to appreciate the origins of qualia is to appreciate why we no longer need to talk in terms of them.

The origins of sense-data The idea that perceptual experience involves awareness of sense-data was a dominant theme in discussions of perception and epistemology in the first half of the twentieth century.10 In contemporary discussion, by contrast, little attention is paid to the idea of sense-data, or to the question to which they were supposed to provide an answer, ‘what are the direct objects of perception?’11 But it has not been sufficiently noted that a puzzle emerged about sense-data that is closely parallel to the puzzle noted above about qualia. In a paper published in 1936, called ‘Is there a problem about sensedata?’, G.A. Paul remarked that Some people have claimed that they are unable to find such an object [as a sense-datum] and others have claimed that they do not understand how the existence of such an object can be doubted.12 Sense-data were supposed to be the immediate objects of experience. So conceived, our awareness of sense-data is among those facts about experience which are open to philosophical reflection, rather than scientific theorising. One would expect, then, that awareness of sense-data is something that can be gleaned from thinking about ‘what it is like’ to have an experience, in Nagel’s phrase. Since facts about what it is like to have experience ought, on the face of it, to be obvious to us, or obvious on reflection, then the existence of sense-data ought to be obvious to us. If this is so, then how can the situation described by Paul arise? How can it be that some philosophers deny that they find sense-data in their experiences, and others claim that it is obvious – it cannot be denied – that there are sense-data? This is the puzzle, parallel to our puzzle about qualia, towards which Paul’s remark points. To solve this puzzle, we need to know more about the role of the concept of sense-data in the philosophy of the early twentieth century. Many students of philosophy first encounter the sense-datum theory of perception in the opening chapters of Russell’s 1912 The Problems of Philosophy. Like much


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in Russell’s philosophy of this period, the doctrines advanced in these chapters reflect strongly the influence of G.E. Moore.13 And it was Moore who was the first to introduce the term ‘sense-data’ into philosophy, in his 1910–11 lectures called Some Main Problems of Philosophy.14 But there is a difference in the way that Moore thought of sense-data, and the way they have come to be conceived in the later philosophical discussion. In contemporary discussions, the sense-datum theory of perception is often put forward only to be refuted by the manifest absurdity of its commitment to mysterious non-physical objects, the sense-data of which we are supposedly aware.15 This commitment was influentially criticised by J.L. Austin,16 and would be rejected by many naturalistic philosophers today on broadly metaphysical grounds. Now certainly, the idea of being aware of (and therefore causally affected by) non-physical objects seems to be suggested by Russell’s account in the Problems. But in his initial discussions, Moore did not introduce the term as having this meaning. In his 1910–11 lectures, Moore defines the term ‘sensedata’ by using an example of looking at a white envelope. He then claims that what are seen are patches of colour and shapes: These things: this patch of a whitish colour, and its size and shape I did actually see. And I propose to call these things, the colour and size and shape, sense-data, things given or presented to the senses.17 Moore commented much later (1952) that he should have called the patch the sense-datum, and not the properties of the patch – the colours are properties of the particular patch. In another lecture in the 1910–11 series, Moore employs a similar strategy. In asking us to look at a pencil, he says that what you ‘directly apprehend’ is ‘a patch of brownish colour, bounded on two sides by fairly long parallel straight lines’. These coloured patches are the sense-data you see.18 Moore distinguishes between the sense-datum, which is given to the mind, and the sensation, which is the act or event of being aware of the datum. (This is what used to be called an ‘act-object’ conception of experience.) Having made this distinction, we can see that two possibilities emerge, within the terms of the definition put forward so far. One is that sense-data are mind-independent objects presented in experience. The other is is that sensedata are not mind-independent objects. Are sense-data objects of the first kind, or of the second? Moore’s answer to this question oscillates, throughout all his discussions of perception. In his 1910–11 lectures, he denies that sense-data are ordinary material objects, since while two people can see the same object, no two people can sense the same sense-datum.19 This suggests an indirect realist account of perception: sense-data, non-physical objects,

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are the immediate objects of experience in virtue of which we are aware of physical objects. But, in a 1918–19 paper, ‘Some judgements of perception’, we find him reverting to a direct realism (at least about the objects of perception if not how they appear). Perhaps because of this oscillation, Moore’s first attempts to define sensedata did not meet with universal acceptance.20 So in a later paper, ‘A defence of common sense’ (1925) he attempts to define them again in terms that should be so uncontroversial that ‘there is no doubt at all that there are sense-data, in the sense in which I am now using that term’.21 Again, his method is ostensive: In order to point out to the reader what sort of things I mean by sensedata, I need only ask him to look at his own right hand. If he does this he will be able to pick out something … with regard to which he will see that … it is a natural view to take that that thing is identical, not, indeed, with his whole right hand, but with that part of his surface which he is actually seeing, but will also (on a little reflection) be able to see that it is doubtful whether it can be identical with the part of the surface of his hand in question. Things of the sort (in a certain respect) of which this thing is, which he sees in looking at his hand, and with regard to which he can understand how some philosophers should have supposed it to be the part of the surface of his hand which he is seeing, while others have supposed that it can’t be, are what I mean by ‘sense-data’.22 Moore adds that he meant to define the term in such a way that it should be an open question whether or not the sense-datum is identical with part of the surface of his hand. This attempt to clarify the position was famously criticised by O.K. Bouwsma on the grounds that the procedure cannot identify sense-data in this neutral way unless we already have Moore’s conception of what sense-data are.23 If we follow Moore’s instructions and pick out the surface of our right hand, we will not be able to doubt whether the thing we have picked out is the surface of our right hand unless we have already picked it out as something which might not be the surface of our right hand: that is, as a sense-datum. It is Moore’s conception of sense-data which is driving the possibility of doubt, not vice versa. However, Bouwsma misses Moore’s point. What Moore is trying to do in this passage, as the last quoted sentence makes plain, is to bring out the sense in which (almost) all philosophers have agreed on something. They have disagreed about whether one sees the surface of one’s hand: some say that what is seen is the surface of one’s hand, others deny that it is the surface of one’s hand. But what is the ‘it’ I am talking about when I say that others ‘deny that it is the surface of one’s hand’? The ‘it’ is what Moore


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means by sense-data: the object of experience, whatever it is. All one needs to do to understand this definition of Moore’s is to understand how a philosopher might doubt that what one sees when one seems to see the surface of one’s hand is indeed the surface of one’s hand. To do this is not to propose any particular philosophical theory about the object: it is just to entertain the idea of an object of experience. The matter becomes clearer when we consider H.H. Price’s views in Perception (1932). Price, who had attended Moore’s lectures in Cambridge, introduces the notion of sense-data in Moore’s way: The term sense-datum is meant to be a neutral term … The term is meant to stand for something whose existence is indubitable (however fleeting) something from which all theories of perception ought to start.24 To illustrate what kind of things these are whose existence is indubitable, Price introduced the example of seeing a tomato: When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is a material thing there at all … One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour-patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is presented to my consciousness … that something is red and round then and there I cannot doubt … that it now exists and that I am conscious of it – by me at least who am conscious of it this cannot possibly be doubted … This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given, and that which is thus present is called a datum.25 Price points out that what can be doubted here is that it is a tomato I am seeing, or that the thing is a material object. But what cannot be doubted is that there is something red and round which I am seeing. Like Moore, then, Price introduces his reader to the idea of sense-data as the entities, whatever they are, which are present to consciousness in experience in this ‘peculiar and ultimate manner’. Since J.L. Austin’s criticism of the sense-datum theory in Sense and Sensibilia (1962) it has become common to attribute the errors of the sensedatum theory to foundationalist, infallibilist epistemology: sense-datum theorists were trying to find the certain basis of all knowledge.26 And the conclusion is drawn from this that once we dispense with these epistemological requirements, the motivation to posit sense-data evaporates. But, as M.G.F. Martin has made clear, the natural interpretation of the passage

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from Price does not require atttributing to him these epistemological motives.27 Price’s point is essentially the same as Moore’s: that perception presents us with something, something is given to us – this something is the given. Price distinguishes two methods by which we may distinguish different senses of the given, the physiological and the immanent or phenomenological. The physiological enquiry into perception delivers the given in a causal sense: the immediate causal precursors of experience. The immanent method delivers the given in the phenomenological sense: ‘what is given to consciousness or presented to the mind’. Price’s point, then, is that perceptual experience is relational: experience relates us to something which is given to us.28 Among recent writers, Howard Robinson endorses this view in what he calls his ‘Phenomenal Principle’: that when one has a sensory experience as of something being F, there is something F which one is experiencing.29 Now this principle may be controversial – and we shall find reasons for doubting it – but it is not controversial because it entails a foundationalist infallibilist epistemology, or an attempt to refute scepticism. And if we compare Robinson’s Phenomenal Principle with Moore’s and Price’s remarks about sense-data, it is plain that Robinson is essentially following through the same line of thought as they were.30 C.D. Broad argued along the same lines that when we approach perception from what he calls the ‘purely phenomenological point of view’ perception is ‘ostensibly prehensive of the surfaces of distant bodies as coloured and extended’.31 Now Price thought it a ‘gross absurdity’ to suppose that the existence of sense-data depend on our awareness of them.32 But nonetheless, he could not straightforwardly identify sense-data with material objects or their surfaces. The reason comes from the essential consideration underlying the argument from illusion: if my experience could be the same even if the material object of the experience did not exist, then the material object is not essential to the experience. But since it is indubitable that experience is relational, that all experiences have objects, then the objects of experience are not material objects. And since what is present to our minds does not exist in our minds, then we are led to the conclusion that sense-data are nonmental, non-physical objects. The argument involves many steps and many assumptions, and it is not my aim to discuss it in detail here. The important point at this stage is that the argument which leads sense-data theorists to the idea that sense-data are non-physical objects is a further step, further to the introduction of the idea of sense-data itself. This brief survey has given us enough material to solve the puzzle in Paul’s article. What Moore and Price think is obvious is that phenomenologically, perception has a relational character: that experience involves being given something. To this extent, they think that the existence of sense-


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data cannot be denied. But a more demanding conception of sense-data arises from reflection on how to reconcile the idea that experience is relational with the apparent possibility that a perceiver could be in an indistinguishable mental state from a perception of a mind-independent object, and yet the mind-independent object not exist. If we allow this possibility, and we hold that experience is relational, then it is a short step to admitting that what is given cannot be a mind-independent object. Since the experience is qualitatively identical in both cases, the conclusion is drawn that the object of the experience is the same in both cases – assuming, of course, that the nature of the experience supervenes on the nature of its objects. And it is sense-data according to this conception which the opponents of sense-data claim not to be able to find in experience. In short, when Moore and Price say that the existence of sense-data cannot be denied, what they mean is that it cannot be denied that experience is relational. But when the critics of sense-data say they cannot find sensedata in experience, they are questioning the existence of sense-data in the more demanding sense, the sense which is generated by the conception of experience as relational plus the argument from illusion. This, it seems to me, is the solution to the puzzle posed by G.A. Paul’s remarks.33 In fact, it can be denied that experience is relational. This is, after all, what an ‘adverbial’ theory of perception says. An adverbialist holds the qualities sensed in experience to be modifications of experience itself: sensing a blue patch ought to be understood as sensing bluely. This theory does deny what Moore and Price take to be obvious. But it is not hard to understand how such a theory could have arisen out of a resistance to sense-data in the demanding sense: since it is absurd to suppose that there are such strange objects outside the mind, the distinctions in experience which these objects are supposed to mark must really be modifications of the experiences themselves.34 As we shall see, a similar distinction – between those who think that differences between experiences are explained in terms of differences in their objects, and those who think that some such differences are explained in terms of differences in properties of the experiences – will be what provides the key to the puzzle about qualia posed in the first section. This should not be surprising if I am right in my claim that sense-data and qualia were introduced to play very similar roles. I shall attempt to argue for this claim in the next section.

The origins of qualia While sense-data are largely a British invention, it is American philosophy which can lay claim to the invention of qualia. The first philosopher to use

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terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’ in something like its modern sense was C.S. Peirce. When Peirce wrote in 1866 that ‘there is a distinctive quale to every combination of sensation … a peculiar quale to every day and every week – a peculiar quale to my whole personal consciousness’, he was talking about what experience is like, in a general sense, not restricted to the qualia of experience in the sense in which it is normally meant today.35 William James occasionally used the term specifically to discuss sensation, but as far as I can see the term had no special technical significance in his philosophy or psychology.36 The term is occasionally used by some of the so-called New Realists: for instance, we find R.B. Perry talking of ‘sensory qualia which are localisable in the body’ but as with James the term means little more than ‘sensation’.37 It is fairly clear that the chief source of the technical use of the term ‘qualia’ is C.I. Lewis’ discussion in Mind and the World Order (1929).38 The theme of this work is to reconcile what Lewis saw to be correct in the idealism of those such as Royce, who held that experience always involves interpretation or conceptualisation, and the realism of his day, which held (along with Russell and Moore) that whatever the mind grasps must be independent of the mind. The basis of Lewis’ reconciliation is a distinction between two elements in our cognitive lives: the immediate data ‘which are presented or given to the mind’ and the ‘construction or interpretation’ which the mind brings to those data.39 Lewis rejects the idealist critique that any experience is so entirely conceptualised that there is no non-conceptualised core: The distinction between this element of interpretation and the given is emphasised by the fact that the latter is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter what we think or conceive (p. 52). But the fact that there is this unaltered ‘given’ does not entail that we are able to describe it, since ‘in describing it … we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasise aspects of it, and relate it in particular and unavoidable ways’ (p. 52). So the given is in a sense ineffable: The absolutely given is a specious present, fading into the past and growing into the future with no genuine boundaries. The breaking of this up into the presentation of things marks already the activity of an interested mind (p. 58). Having made this claim, however, Lewis then goes on to say a little more about what it is that is given:


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In any presentation, this content is either a specific quale (such as the immediacy of redness or loudness) or something analyzable into a complex of such. The presentation as an event is, of course, unique, but the qualia which make it up are not. They are recognisable from one to another experience (p. 60). Qualia, then, are properties of what is given. However, although they are universals, since they can re-occur in distinct experiences (p. 121), qualia should not be confused with the objective properties of objects in the external world. The critical realists – R.W. Sellars, C.A. Strong, together with C.D. Broad – are criticised for making this confusion. Lewis’ reasons for distinguishing qualia from objective properties are that objective properties are always more complex in nature than qualia, and their existence extends beyond the specious present. The same objective property, for instance blueness, can give rise to many different colour qualia in different situations (p. 121). It is the confusion between properties of objects and qualia that gives rise, in Lewis’ view, to the absurdity of the idea of unsensed sensa – a problematic idea with which those in the sense-data tradition struggled. Objective properties are what we have knowledge of; we have no knowledge of qualia since ‘knowledge always transcends the immediately given’ (p.132). How then does Lewis allow himself to talk of the ‘immediacy of redness or loudness’ as qualia? His answer reveals a commitment to the possibility of inverted qualia: Qualia are subjective; they have no names in ordinary discourse but are indicated by some circumlocution such as ‘looks like’ … All that can be done to designate a quale is, so to speak, to locate it in experience, that is, to designate the conditions of its recurrence or other relations of it. Such location does not touch the quale itself; if one such could be lifted out of the network of its relations, in the total experience of the individual, and replaced by another, no social interest or interest of action would be affected by such substitution (p. 124). We can talk about qualia, then, by comparing them to properties in the world and by locating them in terms of their relations to what brings them about. But our access to qualia in this way will be inevitably indirect. Qualia are properties, then; but what are they properties of? They cannot be properties of material objects for the reason stated. Lewis’ answer is they are properties of an event, the event which is the ‘presentation of the given’ (p. 60). Qualia are the ‘recognisable qualitative characters of the given’ (p. 121). Lewis actually says that ‘what is given may exist outside the mind – that question should not be prejudiced’ (p. 64). Initially, it is hard to square

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this thought with the idea that qualia are ‘subjective’ (p. 124). However, Lewis’ remarks could be defended on the grounds that exists outside the mind does not entail mind-independent. An object may be mind-dependent even though it exists outside the mind: it may be an object of awareness, distinct from the state of mind which is the awareness of it, which is brought into existence by the state of awareness itself. This recalls the conception of sense-data as the given: non-physical, nonmental items which are present to the mind in experience. So what actually is the difference between qualia and sense-data? As we have noticed, one difference is simply a difference in metaphysical category: qualia are properties (so, universals) and sense-data are particulars. But this need not be significant, since sense-data have properties too, and qualia are the properties of a particular, the given. What exactly would be wrong with an interpretation of qualia and sense-datum theories which treats sense-datum as the given, and qualia as the properties of the given? Many of Lewis’ contemporaries and commentators saw the matter that way. E.M. Adams explicitly identifies sense-data and qualia (though, as we have seen, this is to confuse particulars and universals) and Lewis’ student Roderick Firth straightforwardly asserts that Lewis was a sense-datum theorist.40 This interpretation is true to the common meaning of ‘datum’ and ‘given’: after all, and Lewis clearly would reject an adverbialist conception of experience. Both Lewis and the sense-data theorists emphasise the given element in experience, and like Price, Lewis finds it to be a plain fact about conscious experience that something is given in experience. As he says, ‘no-one but a philosopher could for a moment deny this immediate presence in consciousness of that which no activity of thought can create or alter’ (p. 53).41 However, the identification of qualia with the properties of sense-data would be resisted by many contemporary philosophers who are happy to accept qualia (in their sense) but will have nothing to do with sense-data, or even the given in any form. Many of these philosophers would agree with the view Firth attributes to Lewis: Lewis never makes the mistake that Thomas Reid so eloquently charged to Descartes and the British Empiricists – the mistake of treating senseexperience as the object of perception.42 The point attributed here to Reid became a common criticism of sensedata theories: we do have sensations in perception, the objection runs, but that doesn’t mean we perceive those sensations. Rather we perceive objects by having sensations – that is the only role of sensation in perception. Now it is true that Lewis will not say that we perceive experiences, since an


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experience is the state of being aware of the given. But we are aware of the given: the given is not a sensation, but this is not a reason for saying it is not a sense-datum. The criticism of sense-data theories just mentioned misses the point, since as we saw with Moore and Price, sense-datum theories are careful to distinguish the sense-datum from the ‘act’ of sensing it. They are not committed to the view that we ‘see sensations’. The heart of the matter, it seems to me, is this. Lewis’ qualia-theory and the sense-datum theory resemble each other in their central claim: that in experience, something is given. They differ in that Lewis thinks that the qualitative properties of experience are in a sense ineffable, and can only be indirectly described; but in the context of their common commitment to the given, this is a relatively unimportant disagreement. As far as the core commitments of the two theories go, it would not mislead to say that the given is a sense-datum, and qualia are its properties. There is a radical difference in contemporary philosophers’ attitude to qualia and their attitude to sense-data. Contemporary philosophers are fairly unanimous in their rejection of sense-data. The idea that experience is awareness of non-physical objects is thought to be an out-dated product of a discredited epistemology and philosophy of mind. But it is perhaps equally clear that there are as many contemporary philosophers who accept the existence of qualia as there are those who reject sense-data. Sense-data are the product of confusion; qualia, on the other hand, are troublesome but undeniable features of our experience of which we have to give a physicalist or naturalist account. What has all this got to do with the mind–body problem? Lewis and Goodman both had theories in which qualia play an important role; but they did not see this as relevant to the question of the relationship between mind and body. We can trace the explicit interest in the bearing of qualia on this relationship to Herbert Feigl’s 1958 essay, The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’.43 Feigl accepts the ‘very persuasive arguments [which] point simply to the existence … of immediate experience, i.e. the raw feels or hard data of the immediately given’.44 But he explicitly distinguishes his own form of empiricism from C.I. Lewis’ epistemology, ‘according to which physical knowledge concerns only the form or structure of events in the universe, whereas acquaintance concerns the contents or qualia of existence’.45 The difference is that whereas Lewis denied that qualia can be known at all, Feigl thought that they could be known by acquaintance (for Lewis, acquaintance is not a form of knowledge). The given element in immediate experience gives rise to the mind–body problem: for having allowed that there can be knowledge of qualia, Feigl explicitly states what has now become known as the ‘knowledge argument’ (though he does not, of course, draw the conclusion that physicalism is false).

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This gives us one link between Lewis’ conception of qualia and the current ‘problem of qualia’ for physicalism. But given the many ways that the term ‘qualia’ has been used, do we have any firmer analytic reasons to suppose that the qualia which pose the problem for physicalism are the qualia which are the properties of sense-data or the given? I think we do, but teasing out the connection is a little complex: this is the task of the next section.

The contemporary problem of qualia When qualia are discussed in contemporary philosophy, how are they being conceived? As might be expected, there is not one answer to this question, since in the contemporary debate, the term ‘qualia’ is used in a number of different ways. Dennett says ‘qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject’s mental states that are 1. ineffable; 2. intrinsic; 3. private; 4. directly or immediately apprehensible in experience’.46 Sydney Shoemaker describes the objection that functionalism cannot account for qualia as substantially the same as the objection that functionalism ‘cannot account for the “raw feel” component of mental states, or for their “internal” or “phenomenological” character’.47 And Scott Sturgeon has said that qualia are ‘the features that give certain perceptions and sensations their characteristic subjectivity’.48 Frank Jackson and David Braddon-Mitchell distinguish the use of the word ‘qualia’ to denote non-physical properties of the mind (according to which the existence of qualia is incompatible with physicalism) and the use of the word to denote intrinsic non-functional properties (according to which the existence of qualia is incompatible with functionalism).49 And M.G.F. Martin distinguishes (in the contemporary debate) between qualia conceived as properties of experiences, and qualia conceived as apparent properties of the objects of the experiences.50 What should we make of these very different uses of the term? The first thing to notice is that the variety of uses provides us with a straightforward way of solving the puzzle of the first section, in a parallel way to the solution provided with sense-data. As with sense-data, there is a relatively innocuous sense of ‘qualia’ (roughly, Sturgeon’s) where for a state to have qualia is just for it to be a conscious state. In this sense, Block is right that the existence of qualia cannot be denied. But if qualia are the things Dennett and Jackson/ Braddon-Mitchell are talking about, qualia in the more demanding sense, then it is not obvious that there are qualia. This predictable solution to our puzzle parallels the solution for sense-data. Solving this puzzle, however, does not resolve the substantial debate. For we still need to know what qualia in the more demanding sense are, and whether there are any such things. Here, since the mind–body problem is our concern, we should follow the link I made above between Feigl and C.I.


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Lewis, and ask: which notion of qualia is important for understanding their role in the mind–body problem? When Frank Jackson said that he is a ‘qualia freak’, and went on to argue that the existence of qualia presents a problem for physicalism, what did he mean by ‘qualia’? We can address this question by asking what qualia would have to be for qualia-based objections to physicalism to succeed.51 For the main role which qualia play in contemporary debate is as the source of the central objection to physicalism: that physicalism cannot account for qualia. An argument against physicalism which simply appealed to the existence of certain mental states (e.g. sensations) and then claimed that physicalism could not ‘account’ for these states is not an argument which should trouble physicalism. As David Lewis has put it, in discussing the sensation of pain, Pain is a feeling. To have pain and to feel pain are one and the same. For a state to be pain and for it to feel painful are likewise one and the same. A theory of what it is for a state to be pain is inescapably a theory of what it is like to be in that state, of how that state feels, of the phenomenal character of that state … Only if you believe on independent grounds that considerations of causal role and physical realisation have no bearing on whether a state is pain should you say that they have no bearing on how that state feels.52 The mere assertion that a physicalist cannot identify a supposed qualitative state with a brain state is not an objection, but a straightforward denial of physicalism. To put the point in this way is to beg the question. Jackson’s well-known knowledge argument, however, does not beg the question in this way against physicalism. The question it raises (as Lewis goes on to note in a postscript to the paper just quoted) is Feigl’s question: whether physicalism can account for our knowledge of qualia, and the answer it gives is that physicalism cannot do so, and that (surprisingly) there are therefore non-physical facts. The argument starts with a thought-experiment involving a person, Mary, who is virtually omniscient about colour and colour vision, who has lived all her life in a black-and-white room, and has done all her learning there. When she leaves her room and sees something red for the first time, she comes to know something new: what it is like to see red. Let’s call this knowledge of the qualia of red. Jackson argues that if you cannot know about qualia no matter what knowledge you have of the physical facts, then knowledge of qualia cannot be the same as knowledge of anything physical. So if facts are simply identified as the objects of knowledge, facts about qualia cannot be physical facts. I am not concerned here with whether the knowledge argument is successful, or with the physicalist responses to the argument. I am only concerned

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here with what has to be assumed about qualia if the argument is going to stand a chance of succeeding. For this will tell us what qualia are, insofar as qualia are intended to present a problem for physicalism. To begin with, we can ask what knowledge of qualia is supposed to be being contrasted with. We are told that Mary knows all the physical facts, so it might be thought that the contrast is between knowing everything physical, and knowing something non-physical. Hence the relevance of the conclusion to the truth of physicalism. But in fact, if the reasoning is sound, the conclusion is not just that physicalism is false, but something stronger. For it is not directly relevant that the knowledge which one acquires about colours inside Jackson’s black-and-white room is stated in the language of physics. Or even in the language of physics plus physiology. What is relevant is that the knowledge can be stated at all: what one learns in the black-and-white room is just knowledge which can be stated in some form or another. As David Lewis says, ‘our intuitive starting point wasn’t just that physics lessons couldn’t help the inexperienced to know what it is like. It was that lessons couldn’t help’.53 This tells us something about what ‘physical facts’ are, for the purposes of the knowledge argument: they are anything which could be learned in the black-and-white room. So what about qualia? A first conjecture might be that qualia are those properties knowledge of which requires experience of them. But this is not quite right: redness maybe a property full knowledge of which requires experience; but one can learn about redness in the blackand-white room (one can learn, for instance, that tomatoes are red). What has one still to learn by experience? What is left out? The answer is obvious, but in this context unhelpful: knowledge of what red looks like. To say that this is knowledge that can’t be imparted through any lessons only tells us about the knowledge, it doesn’t tell us about what the knowledge is knowledge of. What is it knowledge of? It is plain that the knowledge is knowledge of a property, since many people can know what red looks like. So using ‘qualia’ just to mean the properties which can only be known by experiencing them, we can ask: what are qualia properties of? Many philosophers assume that they are properties of experiences.54 But this does not follow from the fact that knowledge of them requires experience. One could say that colours are properties of public material objects, but they are properties which can only be fully understood when experienced. If fully understanding something is understanding all its properties, then understanding a property P is understanding P’s own properties. So on this view, the qualia of red – i.e. what one has to experience in order to fully understand red – are properties of properties. A red quale is a property of redness. The lesson of the knowledge argument on this view is that there are certain properties of colours which can only be learned about through experience.


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This is not the only possible view, of course. I mention it here only to point out that it does not follow that just because one needs experience to know X, that X is a property of one’s mind. The fact is, as Martin has pointed out, that expressions like ‘how something looks to you’ hide an ambiguity. The ambiguity is between: – how it is with you when you are looking at something and – how that something appears to be when you are looking at it.55 As Martin shows, when Dennett says that qualia are ‘how things seem to you’ and then goes on to identify the reference of this phrase with properties of experiences (only in order to deny the existence of such properties, of course) then he is taking the phrase only in the first way. And when a representationalist like Lycan or Dretske identifies qualia with represented properties, they are using the phrase in the second sense. In the first sense, qualia are properties of experiences; in the second sense, qualia are properties of mind-independent properties. Dennett’s claim that qualia are the ‘very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states’56 only serves to keep the distinction blurred. But the qualia of the knowledge argument (call these properties ‘K-qualia’ for convenience) cannot be straightforwardly identified with qualia in either of these senses, to the exclusion of the other. All that K-qualia need to be is properties (of properties) which can only be known by experience of those properties. ‘How red looks’ or ‘what it is like to see red’ could pick out properties of redness, or properties of the experience of seeing red. Whether or not the argument succeeds does not depend on which of these understandings of ‘qualia’ we choose. It just affects the conclusion we draw: we might say that, amazingly enough, there are properties of some physical properties which are beyond the reach of objective science; or we might say that, amazingly enough, there are properties of some mental properties which are beyond the reach of objective science. The term ‘quale’ is neutral, then, in the role it plays in the knowledge argument, between being a property-of-a-mind-independent-property, and a property-of-a-mental-property. It is also neutral, as should be obvious, between the question of whether qualia are intentional or non-intentional. For suppose we assume intentionalism: that all mental properties are intentional.57 This does not itself block either the soundness or the validity of the knowledge argument: the conclusion is that there are some intentional properties (representing redness by experiencing it) which are inaccessible to objective science. An intentionalist could endorse this conclusion. Assume the denial of intentionalism, and the argument’s conclusion is equally unaffected.

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The generality of the knowledge argument’s conception of qualia might help explain the pervasive appeal of the argument, and explain too why it is that the argument seems so hard to refute. But just as most interpreters have taken the target of the argument as physicalism narrowly conceived – i.e. all facts are physical or physiological – so they have taken K-qualia in one particular way – as properties of experience. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this: all I have said so far is that this would have to be justified on grounds independent of the actual argument. This does raise another question, though: what are these grounds? Why has it become so standard to take qualia as properties of experiences? In the next section I shall attempt to answer this question.

Qualia as properties of experience It is not at all obvious that when we learn what it is like to taste retsina, we are learning about a property of an experience. Isn’t it slightly more obvious, at least at first sight, that we are learning something about retsina: viz., what it tastes like, or what it is like to taste it? Yet many philosophers do take such knowledge to be obvious.58 This just illustrates, once again, the puzzle with which we started: appealing to the obvious at this stage makes progress impossible. So if we cannot appeal to what is obvious, how should we proceed? We want to understand why contemporary philosophers take K-qualia to be properties of experience. Many current disagnoses of this view, however, are as unsatisfactory as the appeal to the obvious itself, in that they account for philosophers’ adoption of the view in terms of pathological intellectual urges or simple errors. Dennett, for example, has offered two such diagnoses of the urge to posit qualia as properties of experience. The first is in terms of ‘the seductive step, on learning that public redness … is a relational property after all is to cling to [its] intrinsicality … and move it into the subject’s head’. The second diagnosis is an equally unthinking resistance to physicalism: ‘qualia seem to many people to be the last ditch defense of the inwardness and elusiveness of our minds, a bulwark against creeping mechanism … otherwise their last bastion of specialness will be stormed by science’.59 Neither of these diagnoses, it seems to me, gets to the heart of the matter. The first diagnosis has no explanation of why someone subject to this illusion should want to ‘cling to the intrinsicality of redness’. When someone learns that weight is a relational property, there is no parallel urge to ‘cling to its intrinsicality’, despite the fact that weight hardly seems relational. So what is so special about redness? The diagnosis does not say. The second diagnosis, on the other hand, leaves it utterly mysterious why physicalists should affirm


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the existence of qualia, conceived of as properties of experience, regardless of whether they feel troubled by them.60 So what is the reason to believe that qualia are properties of experience? This is where matters can be illuminated by returning to the origins of the idea of qualia. For there is a parallel here with the discussions of C.I. Lewis and the sense-data theorists. On Lewis’ conception, qualia are a kind of Kqualia: they can only be known through experience. As we saw above, Lewis’ qualia can be conceptualised, but this only gets at their nature ‘indirectly’. So someone in the black-and-white room is someone who cannot really understand which subjective qualia are being denoted by the term ‘red’. (This is true for Feigl too, for obvious reasons: qualia or raw feels can only be known through acquaintance.) But Lewis denies that learning about K-qualia is learning about the higherorder properties of objective properties (i.e. what they look like). As noted above, he denies this partly because objective properties (e.g. the surface properties of objects in virtue of which they are red) are more complex in nature than simple qualia, and partly because the same objective property can give rise to distinct qualia (remember that he endorsed the inverted spectrum possibility). So Lewis’ qualia are not properties of public or objective properties. But Lewis, like Price after him, does not thereby infer that they are properties of states of mind. Rather, they are properties of an event, the event which is the presentation of the given – a ‘phenomenal individual’. As I noted at the end of the third section above, it would not be misleading to call this individual a sense-datum. These reasons for denying that qualia are objective properties parallel (to a certain extent) the reasons of those who are reluctant to identify colours in any straightforward way with surface properties of objects. First, it is widely held that the properties of objects which are responsible for colour experience (or K-qualia) do not stand in any simple correlation with perceived colours. This does not stop us from identifying colours with these properties in a more sophisticated way, but we have to concede if we do this that either these properties will be lacking in the simplicity which perceived ‘phenomenal’ colour has (perhaps they will be so-called ‘disjunctive properties’61 ) or we will often be in error about the nature of the properties.62 Although some of the details differ, the reasoning here is parallel to Lewis’ reasoning about why qualia are not properties of public, objective properties. The second reason for refusing to identify qualia with properties of objects derives from the inverted qualia thought-experiment.63 Some have argued that if it is possible for a person A seeing red to have an experience with the same K-qualitative character as person B has when they see green, when both A and B are looking at physically identical objects, then the difference

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in their experience cannot be a difference in the objects. Therefore K-qualia, whatever they are, are not properties of public objects, and nor are they properties of those properties. This parallels Lewis’ acceptance of the inverted qualia hypothesis, and his view that locating a quale relationally ‘does not touch the quale itself’. But even if both these lines of argument are sound, they do not entail that K-qualia are properties of experiences, without some further assumption. The most they establish is that K-qualia are not properties (first- or secondorder properties) of public, physical objects. For all that has been said, Kqualia could be properties of non-physical, non-mental objects: sense-data, the given, on the Price/Lewis conception of them. However, few philosophers these days take the idea of such objects seriously.64 The naturalism which has dominated philosophy in the last forty or so years has removed sense-data theories such as Price’s from the philosophical agenda: even raising the question of commiting oneself to these objects would be, in effect, to raise the question of the adequacy of the methodology of current science. I am not recommending bringing these theories back for serious consideration. I mention their departure from the range of acceptable theories here just to fill the gap in the argument which leads to accepting K-qualia as features of experience. For contemporary thinkers, to deny that K-qualia are properties of physical objects leaves them with no alternative to thinking that K-qualia are properties of experience. No matter how complex the physical properties which are causally responsible for colour experience, the properties of the experience – phenomenal red – are perceptibly simple. It turns out, then, that when one is aware of a red thing in experience, one is also aware – in some sense – of a feature of one’s experience. But merely to say this does not settle the question about the nature of this feature. This brings us to the next distinction in the use of the term ‘qualia’ mentioned in the fourth section above: qualia conceived either as intentional or as non-intentional properties of experience. One way of understanding qualia as intentional properties of experience has been defended recently by Lycan. Lycan begins by explaining that he has C.I. Lewis’ conception of qualia in mind: ‘a quale is the introspectible monadic qualitative property of what seems to be a phenomenal individual, such as the colour of what Russell called a visual sense datum’. But his theory of qualia is that ‘a quale is a represented property, an intentional object; S’s visual sensation represents the tomato as having the colour red’.65 Qualia, on this intentionalist’s view, are the represented properties, the properties which experience represents the world as having; they are ‘properties of experience’ in the sense that the content of a belief is a property of it. The belief that it’s raining has the property of representing the world as being such that it’s raining. Perhaps


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this is a relational property – perhaps it is a monadic property identified in terms of a relation to an abstract object. It doesn’t matter for present purposes. Obviously, intentionalists have their work cut out in accounting for the inverted spectrum possibility – and usual approaches may deny that the relevant kind of inversion is a possibility, or they hold that that one of the ‘inverts’ is in error about the real colour of things, or they adopt an error theory of colour altogether.66 Opposed to the intentionalist view is the view that treats qualia as intrinsic, non-intentional properties of experiences, the view defended forcefully by Block. Phenomenal red, the other colours, all the conscious properties of experience which make it have the qualitative character it has – these are all intrinsic properties of experiences, with no intentional content themselves.67 Block takes this as apparent from reflection on experience, or from reflection on certain thought-experiments, notably the ‘inverted earth’ thoughtexperiment. But insofar as what makes us talk in terms of qualia at all are the considerations which give rise to the knowledge argument – subjective experience – we have no reason to prefer non-intentionalism to intentionalism. Block is wrong therefore when he accuses the intentionalist of a fallacy: the fallacy of intentionalising qualia.68 Even if it is a mistake, not all mistakes are fallacies. But is it a mistake to intentionalise qualia? This is a question I cannot address in detail here.69 However, I do think that if we are to learn anything at all from the discussion of these matters earlier in the twentieth century, a negative answer is strongly suggested. Recall the lesson of our investigation into sense-data: what was supposed to be obvious in the sense-datum theory was the idea that in experience, something is given to the experiencer. Or, in other words, experience has an apparently relational structure. Sense-data are, in Price’s phrase, what is ‘immediately given to consciousness or present to the mind’. It is a further step, derived from the arguments from illusion and hallucination, to say that what is given is a mind-dependent object. So to reject such objects is not to reject the very idea of the given. As I said in the third section above, there were philosophers – the adverbialists – who rejected the idea that something is given in experience, that experience has a relational character. For an adverbialist, to experience an F is to experience F-ly; that is, to have one’s experience modified in a certain way. Contemporary non-intentionalists like Block do not accept the adverbialists’ way of speaking, but the essence of their view is the same, when it concerns the qualitative or conscious character of an experience: this character derives from intrinsic non-intentional properties of the experience, rather than from what is given in experience. The natural suggestion, to complete the picture, is that the contemporary counterpart for the idea of the given is the idea of intentionality. For an

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intentional state is one in which the mind is directed on an object, one which presents an object, or one which has a content or a subject-matter. As these phrases suggest, intentional states seem to be relational. Of course, many theories of intentionality end up denying that intentional states are genuine relations – some call them ‘quasi-relational’ – but the point is rather that these states give the appearance of presenting something, even if (as in the case of hallucination) there is nothing there to be presented. So a theory which treats perceptual experiences as intentional states understands the given in a particular way: what is given is an intentional object. This is why Lycan can claim to be following C.I. Lewis in defending qualia as the properties of the given, translating them into modern intentionalist terms. The dispute between intentionalists like Tye and Lycan, on the one hand, and non-intentionalists like Block on the other, resembles in an important respect the dispute between sense-data theorists and adverbialists. What they are debating is whether the consciousness involved in experience is exhausted by its relational or quasi-relational intentional structure; that is, by what is given to the mind and the way it is given. Both can agree that in some sense qualia are properties of experiences; to say that they are intentional properties is partly to say that the idea of the given is the central idea in understanding perceptual consciousness; to say that they are non-intentional intrinsic properties is to say that perceptual consciousness cannot be understood in terms of what is given to the mind. Nothing I have said in this section should be regarded as an argument against the non-intentionalist conception of qualia. What I have tried to do is to disagnose why qualia are treated as properties of experiences, and to show that even once this has been accepted, there are still two remaining conceptions of qualia: the intentionalist and the non-intentionalist. That is, accepting that qualia are properties of experience does not yet get you to Block’s conclusion. Nonetheless, I believe that if we want to recover the truth in the sense-datum theorist’s claim that experience presents itself as relational, then we should favour an intentionalist conception of qualia. But to defend this claim in detail would need further work.

Conclusion One main debate in contemporary theories of consciousness and qualia is between intentionalists like Tye, Dretske and Lycan, and non-intentionalists like Block. I draw two lessons for this debate from this investigation into the origins of qualia. First, insofar as what makes us talk in terms of qualia at all are the considerations which give rise to the knowledge argument – subjective experience – we have no reason to prefer non-intentionalism to intentionalism. Second, the very considerations which originally drove


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philosophers to qualia – the relational conception of experience, the idea of the given – now tend to favour an intentional conception of the qualia of perceptual experience rather than an intrinsic conception. However, given the many, varied and conflicting uses to which the term ‘qualia’ has been put, and given the dominant association of the idea of qualia with nonintentionalist views, it may be less misleading to express this conclusion by saying that the reflections on the nature of the given should lead us to reject qualia. In this sense, appreciation of the origins of qualia should discourage us from talking about qualia in experience at all.

Notes 1 This paper was originally written for a conference on the future of analytic philosophy at the University of Warwick in 1996. Later versions were presented at a conference in Miskolc, Hungary, and at the Universities of Cambridge, Uppsala, Helsinki and University College Cork. Thanks to Katalin Farkas, Peter Lipton, Greg McCulloch, Howard Robinson and Jonathan Wolff for comments. I would like to express a special debt to Mike Martin for invaluable criticism and the influence of his writings. 2 For this way of seeing the mind–body problem as a dilemma, see Tim Crane ‘The mind–body problem’ in F. Keil and R. Wilson (eds), MIT Encylopedia of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). See also Jaegwon Kim, ‘The mind–body problem after fifty years’ in A. O’Hear (ed.) Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 21, and David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 134–5. 3 See Tim Crane, ‘The mental causation debate’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 95, 1995, and ‘Against physicalism’ in S. Guttenplan (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 4 See David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5 Kim, ‘The mind–body problem after fifty years’, p. 20. 6 Ned Block, ‘Troubles with functionalism’ in Block (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 278. 7 Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1991), p. 372. 8 See Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); W.G. Lycan, Conscsiousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 9 My understanding of this issue is indebted to M.G.F. Martin, ‘The transparency of experience’, forthcoming. For further discussion about the problem of the disagreement about the obvious in the theory of perception, see Martin’s essay in this volume: ‘Beyond Dispute: Sense-Data, Intentionality and the Mind–Body Problem’. 10 A good anthology of central essays on the subject of sense-data is Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing, ed. R. Swartz (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). 11 For an account of this change of emphasis in twentieth-century philosophy of perception, and of the underlying, persisting problem of perception, see Martin, ‘Beyond Dispute: Sense-Data, Intentionality and the Mind–Body Problem’, this volume. 12 G.A. Paul, ‘Is there a problem about sense-data?’ (1936), repinted in Swartz (ed.) Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing, p. 103.

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13 See The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), where Russell explicitly acknowledges Moore’s influence on his views on perception; Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytical Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Thomas Baldwin, G.E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990), e.g., p. 323 fn. 6. 14 Moore’s most important writings on perception are collected in T. Baldwin (ed.) G.E. Moore: Selected Writings (London: Routledge, 1993). See also Baldwin, G.E. Moore, pp. 148–51. 15 See, for example, W.H.F. Barnes, ‘The myth of sense-data’ (1944–45), in Swartz (ed.), Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing 16 Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 17 Moore, ‘Sense-Data’ from Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: Unwin, 1953); reprinted in Moore, Selected Writings, ed. Baldwin, p. 48. 18 ‘Hume’s theory examined’, in Selected Writings, p. 65. 19 ‘Sense-Data’ in Selected Writings, ed. Baldwin, p. 51. 20 For a discussion, see Thomas Baldwin, G.E. Moore. 21 ‘A defence of common sense’ in Selected Writings, ed. Baldwin, p. 128. 22 ‘A defence of common sense’, pp.128–9. 23 O.K. Bouwsma, ‘Moore’s theory of sense-data’ in P. Schilpp, The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1942). 24 Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932), p. 19. 25 Perception, p. 3. 26 Austin’s diagnosis of the errors of sense-data theorists was that their ‘real motive’ is ‘that they wish to produce a species of statement which is incorrigible’ (Sense and Sensibilia, p. 103). 27 See Martin, ‘J.L. Austin: Sense and Sensibilia revisited’ in M.G.F. Martin and M.W.F. Stone (eds), The History of the Problems of Perception (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 28 Perception, p. 63. 29 Perception (London: Routledge, 1994), chapter 2. 30 For other writers who argue for sense-data without making epistemological assumptions, see F. Jackson, Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); E.J. Lowe, ‘Experience and its objects’ in Tim Crane (ed.) The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 31 C.D. Broad, ‘Elementary reflexions on sense-perception’ (1952) in Swartz (ed.), Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing, p. 32. By the phenomenological point of view, Broad means ‘as they appear to any unsophisticated percepient, and as they inevitably go on appearing even to sophisticated percepients whose knowledge of the physical and physiological processes assures them that the appearances are misleading’ p. 30. By ‘prehension’ Broad means what Russell meant by ‘acquaintance’. 32 Perception, p. 126. 33 Cf. Barnes, ‘The myth of sense-data’ (1944–5) in Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing p. 159. See also chapters 1 and 2 of J.J. Valberg, The Puzzle of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 34 See C. Ducasse’s criticism of Moore’s theory, and defence of adverbialism, in ‘Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism”’ in Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G.E. Moore. 35 C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers para 223. For today’s usage, see the discussion in the fourth and fifth sections. 36 See for example chapter 20 of his Principles of Psychology, the section on ‘The meaning of localization’: ‘No single quale of sensation can, by itself, amount to a consciousness of position … a feeling of place cannot possibly form an immanent element in any


37 38

39 40

41

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

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single isolated sensation’. In The Origins of Pragmatism (San Fransisco: Freeman, 1968), A.J. Ayer puts forward a theory of experience in terms of qualia in the context of a discussion of James; but it is clear that Ayer does not attribute this conception of qualia to James. For Ayer, qualia are essentially sense-data in the sense discussed in section 2 above: see pp. 299 and 317. See the discussion in J. Dewey, ‘Value, objective reference and criticism’, Philosophical Review, 1925. Mind and the World Order (London: Constable, 1929). It is not difficult to see where Lewis might have got the term from: his teachers at Harvard as an undergraduate were James and Royce, and his postgraduate teacher in 1908–10 was Perry. Mind and the World Order, p. 38. E.M. Adams, ‘C.I. Lewis and the inconsistent triad of modern empiricism’, pp. 377 and 384; Roderick Firth, ‘Lewis on the given’, p. 330, both in The Philosophy of C.I. Lewis ed. P.A. Schillp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1968). Further reason for identifying qualia with the properties of sense-data can be derived by looking at Goodman’s use of the concept of qualia in The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951). For Goodman, qualia are the primitives of a phenomenalist system of accounting for the whole of reality: they are the phenomenal individuals out of which enduring public objects are constructed. To this extent, they resemble the sense-data of Ayer, in The Central Questions of Philosophy (London: Weidenfeld, 1973). One thing that makes this discussion difficult to integrate with the contemporary issues about qualia is that the distinction between the physicalistic and the phenomenalistic systems is supposed to be a difference in ‘choice of language’ rather than in any matter of fact. On this aspect of Ayer’s view, see Martin, ‘Austin: Sense and Sensibilia Revisited’. Firth, ‘Lewis on the given’, p. 331. The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’, first published in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, eds. H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958). Reprinted with a postscript by the same publisher in 1967. Lawrence Nemirow makes the explicit connection between his presentation of the problem and Feigl’s in his ‘Physicalism and the cognitive role of acquaintance’, in W.G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). ‘The “mental” and the “physical”’, p. 8. The expression ‘raw feel’ is from E.C. Tolman, Purposive Behaviour in Animals and Men (1932). ‘The “mental” and the “physical”’, p. 83. D. Dennett, ‘Quining qualia’, in W.G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 523. S. Shoemaker, ‘Functionalism and qualia’, in Identity, Cause and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 185. Scott Sturgeon, ‘The epistemic view of subjectivity’, Journal of Philosophy XCI (1994), p. 221. David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell 1996), pp. 123–4. See M.G.F. Martin, ‘Setting things before the mind’, in Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind, ed. A. O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), pp. 158–63. Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly 32 1982, pp. 127– 36. ‘Mad pain and martian pain’, Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). See David Lewis, ‘What experience teaches’, in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 281; see also D.H. Mellor,

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‘Nothing like experience’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 92, 1992–3. 54 See (e.g.) Joseph Levine, ‘Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, 1983, pp. 354–61. 55 ‘Setting things before the mind’, p. 161. 56 ‘Quining qualia’, pp. 539 and 523. 57 For intentionalism, see Tim Crane, ‘Intentionality as the mark of the mental’, in O’Hear (ed.), Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind, and Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 58 See, for example, the opening pages of Joseph Levine’s paper in T. Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience (Paderborn: Schöningh-Verlag, 1995). 59 ‘Quining qualia’, p. 524. One of the weaknesses of Dennett’s discussions of this issue is his failure to account for his disagreement with his opponents: Dennett gives us no account of why it is that any reasonable person should think differently from him. 60 See, for example, David Lewis, ‘Should a materialist believe in qualia?’, in his Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology. 61 Or disjunctions of properties. This approach is taken by Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 4, ‘The primary quality view of colour’. 62 See David Hilbert, Color and Color Perception (Stanford: CSLI, 1987). 63 See Shoemaker, ‘Qualities and qualia: what’s in the mind?’, in The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 108–13. 64 A striking exception is Howard Robinson, Perception. 65 W.G. Lycan, Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 99. 66 For further discussion, see chapter 4 of Lycan, Consciousness and Experience. 67 Though they may be properties of states which have intentional content – e.g. perceptual states. 68 Ned Block, ‘Inverted earth’, reprinted in N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Güzeldere (eds), The Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 69 I do try and address it in ‘Intentionality as the mark of the mental’, and in ‘The intentional structure of consciousness’, in A. Jokic and Q. Smith (eds), Aspects of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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Beyond dispute: sense-data, intentionality and the mind–body problem1 M.G.F. Martin

Thomas Reid remarked that we hardly ever attend to the visible appearance of objects, but that our attention is normally drawn to the objects themselves and those features of them which best fit our intentions and interests.2 For example, I can with a cursory glance take in the lavender bush at the end of my street, some fifty metres away, and note the overall colour of the bush – a dull green at this time of year – and its rough, somewhat square, shape. But it takes more attention, reflection and skill to move beyond this description and to discover the distinctive ways in which these objects can appear to me. I may note, for example, that the lavender bush appears more flattened than the garden hedge some mere ten metres from me. Or it may strike me that the distinctions that I can make among the branches of the lavender bush are a matter of the pattern of shading across its apparent surface while for the hedge each branch stands out distinctly. Many different trades and professions seek to refine the skills of attention and articulation required in order to discern and express the ways in which things can appear. Over many generations, painters have developed skills for attending to the particular appearances of objects at different distances and in different lights in order better to depict them. Attention to colour and form is as much a concern of designers and producers of decoration as of painters, and it is also a skill useful for those engaged into research on visual cognition. What holds for the visual case is as true, perhaps even more so, for other sense modalities: perfumers and brewers have an obvious interest in treating the appearances of smell and taste as complex and differentiable. These observations on the difficulty in attending to the appearances of objects contrast with an assumption common in philosophical discussions of perception and consciousness: that appearances – both the ways things appear to one to be and one’s state of mind of being appeared to in such ways – are obvious to one. This assumption is present in much of the discussion of qualia and consciousness, where it is often suggested that one can do no more than indicate to the reader the obvious presence of such qualities.3

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When Thomas Nagel challenges the explanatory pretensions of physicalism by denying that we could know what it is like to be a bat, his background assumption is that we all do know what it is like to be human, and exercise the sensory faculties we have.4 Arguably, the assumption is also at work in the theory of knowledge. In different ways, both A.J. Ayer and Roderick Chisholm appeal either to appearances or judgements about appearance as the foundations of empirical knowledge.5 Such foundationalism, with its assumption that there are judgements which can stand as the basis of empirical knowledge but which themselves are beyond defeat, is now unfashionable. Yet few are prepared to challenge the thought that one cannot go wrong when one restricts one’s judgements simply to a report of appearances. Rather, it is more common to challenge the idea that such restrictive judgements could act as a basis for the rest of one’s body of knowledge. So, it is common to think that thoughts about one’s own perceptual states are easy to arrive at, and not particularly susceptible to error. The contrast is such that one might at first think that the actual method of those who have a practical interest in appearances simply contradicts the assumptions of those who merely theorise about them. But this is merely a seeming contradiction: we can reformulate the philosophers’ claims to be quite consistent with the actual practice of those who have an interest in attending to how things appear to them. The philosophers’ assumptions about the obviousness of appearance properly only relate to the move from having attended to some object, some feature of it, or how either appears to one, to knowledge of how it is for one when things so appear. The skills that the artist, the perfume-maker, or the psychologist nurture give each a richer hoard of elements of experience to enjoy or scrutinise than the rest of us. In some cases such learning may even lead to a difference in how one experiences the world rather than just a difference in what one knows of how one experiences the world: someone so skilled may be able to make finer discriminations than the rest of us. A theorist can quite consistently accept that such experts have both greater powers of discrimination among objects in the world and better developed powers of attention to aspects of how things appear, while claiming that the reflective move, from attention to the features of objects to knowledge of what it is like for one so to be aware of those features, is the same for all of us. One’s reflective judgement about how one’s own state of mind is grounded is explained in the same way for all: as being grounded in what is obvious to such reflection. However, there is something paradoxical here, nonetheless. For if we look simply to the disputes among philosophers we find substantive debate about the nature of appearances. Some philosophers claim that we have visual sensations, that there is more to what our visual perceptions of the world are like than the presentation of visible objects and features in the

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world around us. Others insist that our experience of the world is transparent or diaphanous, that there is no more to be introspected in this than the world as it is presented to us. Some philosophers claim that we perceive nonphysical entities in virtue of which we perceive the world around us. Others insist that perception of the physical environment is direct or immediate. Some philosophers claim that perception is intentional, akin to belief or judgement in being about or representing the environment around us. Others insist that they can make no sense of this, that there is all the difference in the world between feeling and thinking. While not all of these disputes are framed in terms of claims about appearances, most, if not all, of these positions put forward claims about perceptual experience or what it is like consciously to apprehend the world around us. These various proposals concerning conscious experience conflict with each other. Now if we take seriously the thought that appearances really are just obvious to one – or obvious given a bit of reflection – then it should be puzzling how there can be such disagreement. For surely the slightest amount of thought will reveal that a given account is correct or incorrect. The persistence of dispute would seem to indicate that at least one of the parties is confused, or that the character of philosophers’ inner lives is far more varied than we previously had reason to suspect. This is no mere idle puzzle. Nor should we take it as simply a sign that either the conception of appearances in play or the debate about them is something just not in good order. Rather, it reflects something at the heart of the problem of perception, something which is rarely made fully articulate in discussion of it. It has become fairly standard to present the problem of perception as primarily a problem about our knowledge of the world around us, where such knowledge is derived from the senses. While discussions of perception are commonly framed within the context of an attempt to give an explanation of our knowledge of the common place – my knowledge that there are more than twenty houses on my street; that there are two coffee cups on the table; that there is traffic in the street – the real problem here is one concerning our knowledge of our own minds. What sense can we make of conscious perceptual experience as it reveals itself to us through introspection? Perceptual awareness of the world around us and of one’s own body provides the paradigm example of episodic, or phenomenal consciousness. When one comes to reflect on what it is like so to be conscious, and to be aware of the world, one comes to reflect on such perceptual consciousness. The various debates about the nature of perception, or the objects of perception, or states of perceptual experience, disagree on what is to be said about such perceptual consciousness. At the same time, most of these accounts assume that phenomenal consciousness per se is open to immediate

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reflection such that the defining truths about it should simply be obvious to us. Yet, the very fact that such dispute can be sustained indicates that such an assumption is questionable. And in rejecting this assumption, we will need to mark a distinction between the real nature of appearances – states of being appeared to in a certain way – and how those states seem to us, even if such a distinction may sound paradoxical to some ears. Moreover, as we shall see, we can only properly understand the debate about perceptual consciousness, once we recognise that the various views of it are committed to supposing that appearances may mislead us not only about the world around us, but also about themselves. In this paper I want to place the above set of concerns within the historical context of the developments within Anglophone discussions of the problems of perception. One can easily gain the impression from the slightest acquaintance with writings about the problems of perception that there has been a marked change in the ways in which the problems are formulated, and competing theories are presented. If we go back only as far as debates around the middle of the twentieth century, we find such a striking shift in the terms of the debate and assumptions that are brought to bear that it becomes too difficult to discern what continuity, if any, there is in the debate. This presents us with a genuine problem of interpretation: how are we to make intelligible to ourselves the past history of debate? I shall seek to show that this apparent discontinuity and apparent unintelligibility are simply symptoms of the more general issue we have raised here. How can there be dispute about the nature of perceptual consciousness, if the nature of such consciousness is supposed simply to be obvious to one given the slightest reflection? We can make best sense of the different positions here by understanding them in the light of a rather different conception of perceptual consciousness than is currently favoured. Both traditional sensedatum accounts of object-perception and recent theories of perceptual experience as an intentional phenomenon stand opposed to a supposedly crude form of naïve realism about perception. Naïve realism is taken by both traditions to be falsified by considerations about the existence of illusion. The different traditions that have developed show continuity in the centrality of this problem. The striking differences between them can be explained in terms of the different intellectual contexts of debate in early modern times, at the beginning of the twentieth century and more recently. In the first part of this paper, I lay out the problem of interpretation more precisely. In trying to make sense of the traditional debate, we then need to look in more detail at formulations of the argument from illusion. Here Hume’s discussion in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding provides a useful stalking horse. In the sections which follow I argue that the standard explanations of such forms of argument are inadequate to the

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task of making intelligible the debates of the past. In the final section, I first sketch an alternative way of making sense of the argument from illusion as it has developed in the sense-datum tradition, and then on the back of that propose a different way of seeing the development of the debate.

A discontinuity in the debate A remarkable shift has taken place in Anglophone discussion of perception over the twentieth century. For much of the early part of that century, and for some time in the latter half, discussion of perception focused on the existence or nature of immediate objects of perception which could not be identified with physical or public objects of perception. J.L. Austin begins his lectures Sense and Sensibilia with the following rather withering assessment of the content of that debate: The general doctrine … [that] we never see otherwise perceive (or “sense”), or anyhow never directly perceive or sense, material objects (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas, impressions, sensa, sense-perceptions, percepts etc.) … is a typically scholastic view, attributable, first, to an obsession with a few particular words, the uses of which are over-simplified, not really understood or carefully studied or correctly described; and second to an obsession with a few (and nearly always the same) half-studied “facts”.6 Austin’s intention here is not just to reject the doctrine that there are sense-data, but rather to dismiss the terms of the whole debate. Yet the problems he seeks to dismiss are ones that had preoccupied such figures as Russell, Moore, Broad, Price, and Ayer.7 That debate focused on a conflict between so-called Naïve Realism, sometimes alleged to be the view of common sense concerning perception and its objects, and a more philosophically and scientifically sophisticated alternative, which was answerable to the discoveries of Enlightenment science, labelled Representative Realism.8 The turning point of such disputes concerns the clash between common sense views concerning the objects of perception and their characteristics and certain fairly evident reflections concerning the possibility of perceptual illusions or hallucinations. The latter considerations are often grouped together under the heading of ‘the argument from illusion’. The debate between Naïve Realism and Representative Realism can be traced back at least as far as Hume, though its main tropes are already present in Berkeley.9 The argument from illusion, or the closely related argument from conflicting appearances (which avoids denigrating any appearance as illusory or privileging any as veridical) is more ancient: traces of it are found

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in the earliest fragments we have of Greek philosophy, and it plays a central role in Plato’s Theaetetus.10 Nevertheless, Austin took his task to show us how we could: … rid ourselves of such illusions as ‘the argument from illusion’ – an ‘argument’ which those (e.g. Berkeley, Hume, Russell, Ayer) who have been most adept at working it, most fully masters of a certain special, happy style of blinkering philosophical English, have all themselves felt somehow to be spurious.11 If one contrasts the writings of Russell or Ayer with recent discussions of perception, one might think that, simply as a matter of intellectual history, Austin has been remarkably successful in his crusade.12 Where the argument from illusion could once have been seen as the arch under which all debate about perception would take place, no such structure has replaced it in recent discussion. Indeed, the argument itself is often now used as an example for first-year students of how not to construct philosophical positions. Austin himself was sceptical of offering any illuminating philosophical account of perception. But philosophical theorising about such issues has not gone away. Rather, accounts which predominate now are those which view the states of mind one has when perceiving – perceptual experiences – as analogous to beliefs, or judgements or desires as being about something and being so in virtue of how they represent the world. Such, for example, is suggested by Tyler Burge in the following passage: I begin with the premiss that our perceptual experience represents or is about objects, properties, and relations that are objective. That is to say, their nature (or essential character) is independent of any one person’s actions, dispositions, or mental phenomena. An obvious consequence of this is that individuals are capable of having perceptual representations that are misperceptions or hallucinations …13 We might call this kind of approach an Intentional Theory of Perception. Theories of this kind have been promoted by, among others, D.M. Armstrong, G.E.M. Anscombe, John Searle, and Christopher Peacocke.14 For proponents of such views, the idea that one’s experience might be veridical or illusory, correct or incorrect, is just built into the conception of experience as intentional. That is, it is claimed that it is part of our conception of such experience that it is directed on to the world in such a way that its being so is no guarantee that the world is as it is experienced. So the argument from illusion can present no special problem about sense perception. At best, it can only point us to the intentionality of this state of mind. Such writers often present the

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view they defend as one which their readers can see as being obviously good sense or correct, and hence they imply that the traditional problem is no problem at all: it has simply been dissolved as a ‘pseudo-problem’. However, one might think that there is a sense in which Austin and others who have been critical of the debate about direct perception have also been just too successful in their critique. For in convincing us that there is no real problem of perception concerning the direct objects of perception and the status of sense-data, they have left us with a rather different, and in the end potentially more intractable, problem. If the assumptions which fuelled centuries of debate are themselves so obviously inadequate, one may wonder why the debate itself should have survived. As Burnyeat puts the point: What emerges … is a typical philosophical problem. I do not mean the problem of deciding what does follow from the premiss that appearances conflict. For the answer to that question, I believe, is that nothing follows: nothing of any epistemological significance at all. The problem rather is to discover why so many conflicting conclusions have been thought to follow. Why have some philosophers been so impressed, while others like Austin, remain unimpressed, by the familiar fact that appearances conflict? What assumptions, spoken or unspoken, are at work to make the familiar fact seem problematic?15 The shift of perspective on these issues has been so remarkable that we are in danger of finding the past debate simply unintelligible. What was once taken as a compelling argument is now taken as patently fallacious; what was once seen as the central problem is now seen as no problem at all. One might be Whiggish about such things, of course, and simply take this to be evidence of progress within philosophy. But even the mildest scepticism about the powers of human reason should lead one to wonder at how recent and sudden the shift has been. Is it not more reasonable to think that the seeming unintelligibility of past debate may rather be a symptom of something else? That is indeed what I shall argue to be the case. The shift reflects our initial puzzle, namely that we have here a debate about the nature of appearance. The gulf between earlier debates and current ones seems so unbridgeable because on either side we have different assumptions about what is obvious about the nature of perceptual appearance. Making good that claim and making sense of how that can be will in turn unearth a deep continuity between the traditional debate and more recent concerns. To justify this claim, we need to look first at a concrete example of a form of argument which no longer looks remotely compelling to us. Our task here is to understand how anyone might have been moved to put forward just such an argument, rather than simply to criticise the arguments proposed.

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I shall first present an argument drawn from Hume, note certain puzzles concerning it and then consider two strategies of explaining why Hume should have put it forward as he did.

The argument from illusion Although even a cursory reading of past discussions of sense-data and perception reveal the importance of the so-called ‘argument from illusion’, it is in fact difficult to find an explicit statement of the argument as an argument. This has led some philosophers to suggest that strictly there is no such argument, but rather a set of considerations which place a duty of explanation on any theory of perception or thought.16 Such a claim would be an over-statement if it were taken to mean that there are no examples of these considerations put forward as straightforward arguments. For we can find such in the work of, for instance, Hume, Russell and Ayer.17 However, when we look at what is presented as supposed argument, it is often difficult to determine what its exact form is, or to identify the premisses or mode of reasoning involved. It is this problem which indicates the real difficulty in interpreting past debate. Given that the reasoning in question is supposed to lead us to an avowedly surprising conclusion, we should expect each step of the argument to be clear and obvious, and the mode of reasoning to be unquestionable. For otherwise, when faced with an unpalatable conclusion, we are as liable to reject one of the premisses, or the mode of reasoning used to arrive at the conclusion, as to submit to the conclusion. Where the argument is inexplicit, its suasive force becomes hidden and it is rendered more obscure why someone should have thought there was a genuine argument or justification for the claim. So the need to explain what is really involved in this kind of reasoning becomes more pressing. This is well illustrated by Hume’s use of the argument in his first Enquiry. The argument is presented in the context of Hume’s scepticism with regard to the senses, a form of scepticism he considers to be more profound than either ancient scepticism or that deriving from Descartes. His argument has two parts: in the first he outlines what he takes to be the view of the common man concerning the objects of perception and our relation to them, beliefs which we all hold as a matter of our nature: … when men follow this blind and powerful instinct of nature, they always suppose the very images, presented by the senses, to be the external objects, and never entertain any suspicion, that the one are nothing but representations of the other. This very table, which we see white, and which we feel hard, is believed to exist independent of our perception, and to be something external to our mind, which perceives it.18

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This view he takes to be destroyed by ‘the slightest philosophy’. In its place, one is compelled by reason to adopt a ‘philosophical’ theory of perception and its objects which admits a distinction between the external, mindindependent objects of perception, and the mind-dependent images or impressions which are present to the mind and which represent those external objects. This latter view is not a natural one, but recommended solely by reason in the face of the failure of our common sense beliefs. Hume’s slightest philosophy is a form of the argument from illusion, and he uses it against the view he takes to be that of common sense. At the same time, he employs sceptical reasoning against the philosophical view, familiar from Berkeley’s attack on his predecessors. It is the combination of these two criticisms that Hume takes to establish scepticism with regard to the senses. The form of Hume’s challenge is first to find an error in our common sense beliefs concerning perception, and then to show that there is no reason to accept any positive philosophical account which can be put in its place. Hume’s characterisation of the views of the vulgar can be seen as the origin of Naïve or Direct Realism, in the sense discussed in the twentieth-century debates about sense-data; while the ‘philosophical theory’ is the origin in such discussions of Representative or Indirect Realism. Hume’s sceptical challenge presents us with the origin of the assumption that Representative Realism faces a particular sceptical challenge involving ‘a veil of ideas’. The argument from illusion, as Hume uses it, is an attempt to show that our common sense views of perception, as Hume conceives of them, are evidently false. However, when one comes to the swiftly developed argument intended to show this, one finds that the epithet ‘slightest philosophy’ may be thought appropriate for more than one reason: [T]he slightest philosophy … teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are only the inlets, through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object. The table, which we see, seems to diminish, as we remove farther from it: but the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration: it was, therefore, nothing but its image, which was present to the mind. These are the obvious dictates of reason; and no man, who reflects, ever doubted, that the existences, which we consider, when we say, this house and that tree, are nothing but perceptions in the mind, and fleeting copies or representations of other existences, which remain uniform and independent.19 Clearly there are problems here both with the example Hume uses, and with how Hume uses the example in order to extract his conclusion.

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From what he says it is clear that Hume wishes to treat the viewing of the table as an example of illusory perception, one in which the table appears to be changing in size when commonsensically we would judge it to be stable in size. But although he treats it as fairly evident that this is a case of illusion, as Reid was ready to point out, that assumption actually falsifies the character of our experience.20 While Hume is right to think that there is an alteration in how one sees the table, and indeed in how the table looks, it is not obvious that this alteration is in any way illusory. The alteration in the look of the table is now commonly called its apparent size, and it is a well-documented fact that the apparent size of objects alters relative to one’s viewing position. But it is also as commonly documented that they appear to have a constant size when one moves away from them: so that in such experience we have both the size the table appears to have, and its apparent size; the former remains constant, the latter alters. We have been given no reason to suppose that it is the latter feature which is the appearance of the size of the table rather than the former. And hence, we have not yet been given reason to suppose that this counts genuinely as an illusory aspect of the experience. There is much to be said about the relation between apparent size and the size that something can appear to have, and different emphases will be given depending on whether one has a treatise for painters interested in perspective, or works on the psychology of shape and size perception. The question of most concern to us is why Hume should so readily be prepared to take the example as one of obvious illusion or conflicting appearance, when it is not at all evident that it is such an illusion. In part, the answer may simply reside in the context in which he wrote. One can find other authors, both philosophers and non-philosophers, who are prepared to describe the case in just this way. For the examples of visual perception of size and shape were often taken to be the locus of an issue concerning the relation between retinal stimulation, the occurrence of visual sensation and the role of judgement in discerning either the shape or size of an object.21 Hume’s anticipated reader might be expected already to have a theoretically sensitive attitude towards what he or she could introspect. But that thought should already raise the suspicion that we ought not to suppose that Hume’s argument simply relies on some evident, or supposedly evident, truths concerning perception from which he will go on to draw surprising conclusions. On the other hand, at this point we can extract nothing further from his text which might explain why he could expect us to accept his description of the situation. This should make us suspicious of treating the passage at face value as presenting a genuine piece of straight forward reasoning. Nevertheless, while this failing in Hume’s reasoning is worthy of comment, it is not the most serious problem with the argument. For there are genuine illusions which parallel Hume’s example. Viewing with one eye

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through an aperture into an Ames room can lead to distorted judgements of size: with the table positioned in one corner of the room, it may appear much, much larger than it really is; while, when placed in the other corner, it may seem much, much smaller. In this case we have an example in which the table will seem to have a size other than it has, in addition to having an apparent size. Even though Hume’s own example may not be convincing, we can easily substitute a case of visual illusion which will provide the needed premisses. For the moment we can bracket the puzzle of why Hume should be confident in his choice of example, and instead see how his argument is intended to develop from a similar case of undisputed illusion. Having described the case in terms of illusion, Hume immediately draws his conclusion, ‘it was, therefore, nothing but [the table’s] image, which was present to the mind’. This conclusion includes both a positive and a negative claim. The positive claim is that an image of the table, whatever that is to amount to, is present to the observer’s mind. The negative claim is that the table itself is not present to the mind. Although we have the appearance here of argument, an indicated premiss concerning a case of illusion, and a conclusion drawn as such, in fact we lack the argument proper itself. No additional reasons are offered to support the conclusions drawn, apart from the supposition that how the table looks is not how it is. This failing is what is liable to prompt the charge that, strictly speaking, there is no argument from illusion. An author may indicate an example of illusion as relevant to the claims he or she wishes to make about the nature of perception, but he or she offers no explicit means for us to move reasonably to that claim from the observations with which he or she starts. Of course, that is not to say that we cannot interpret the implicit argument lying behind what is given explicitly as reasoning. It is common to think that in such a case there has been a move from a claim about how to the perceiver things appear to be, to a claim about how things are in so appearing. Commonly, such a move is interpreted as either involving a piece of fallacious reasoning, or as relying on some further assumption which is less than obvious. The argument is then treated as simply fallacious or question begging. If we are simply to ask whether we should accept as a piece of persuasive reasoning Hume’s argument or some such similar arguments to be found in Russell, or Ayer, or Price, then such criticisms seem apt. The arguments do not seem to be good arguments to us now, nor ought they to be treated as good. As a matter of intellectual history, the argument poses us the deep problem that Burnyeat notes. Given that the argument seems so patently inadequate to us, the question becomes one of understanding why anyone should have put it forward as a good one. With this question of interpretation in mind, neither of the common accounts of the argument is at all satisfactory. For neither is adequate to explain why what is obvious to us should not be

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obvious to past thinkers, nor why what they thought should be obvious is so obscure to us now.

The intentional fallacy The charge that there is a fallacy of reasoning here is to be found most commonly in expositions of what I have labelled the intentional theory of perception. When we look to cases of belief or thought in general, we find it fairly evident that our beliefs or thoughts can be true or false. A child may believe that there are sweets in the Smarties tube, even though there are only pencils there. If the child is more than four years old, she should herself be able to recognise the possibility of error here. Few of us are inclined to respond to this situation by denying that error is really possible.22 It is entirely implausible to suppose that when someone falsely believes there to be sweets in the tube when there are pencils, then the belief in question is really about something other than the tube before the believer, or about something other than sweets as they may be found in the eager palms of infants. We take it that it is simply in the nature of beliefs, and thoughts in general, that they can be correct or incorrect concerning how things are in the world. This assumption about the nature of belief is reflected in our ascriptions of belief. In ascribing a belief we often wish to indicate how a person takes the world to be, without committing ourselves to the world being so. Given that, we want to accept that Mary believes that there are sweets in the tube before her

(B1)

may be true without it also being true that there are in fact sweets in the tube before Mary. So in some circumstances, we wish to accept (B1) as true without, there are sweets believed by Mary to be in the tube before her

(B2)

also being true. Hence, we consider it a mistake of reasoning, if anyone is inclined to accept (B2) simply on the basis of (B1). There are parallels here with certain other kinds of statement, for example, acceptance of (P1) need not lead one to accept (P2): It is probable that there are fifteen people in the next room.

(P1)

There are fifteen people of whom it is probable that they are in the next room.

(P2)

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And it is somewhat controversial whether the following inference is valid:23 It is possible that Mary could own a donkey

(M1)

There is a donkey which Mary could own

(M2)

So in general, we have learned to be highly suspicious of any such move. No philosopher now is liable to think that such a transition is simply obviously correct without further comment. Although it is a more controversial matter whether in each of these cases we can find a common form, and hence, in the cases where the inference fails, one kind of fallacy in accepting the second of the pair on the basis of the first.24 Therefore one might interpret Hume so. He attempts to reach his positive conclusion by moving from It appears to David as if there is a small rhomboid before him.

(A1)

to There is a small rhomboid which appears to David to be before him. (A2) (A2) is not yet the conclusion that Hume wishes to arrive at: that an image, impression or some other mind-dependent entity is present to the mind. But we can see how ancillary reasoning might make one accept that further claim, once one has arrived at (A2). Ex hypothesi, the table in the room is not a small rhomboid, and furthermore the case can be set up so that there is no other public object which is an appropriate candidate to be apparent to David. If some small rhomboid is apparent to him, it is something other than a public object. The suggestion that it is an image which must be present to him, may then be taken as the best explanation of why (A2) should be true in this case. Whatever one thinks of the latter move, it is fairly evident that the move from (A1) to (A2) is suspect. Moreover, if one thinks that perceptual states, that is states of being appeared to, just are examples of intentional states of mind, then one may well think that the error in moving from (A1) to (A2) just is that from moving from (B1) to (B2). Indeed, when we look to proponents of intentional theories of perception, we can find them diagnosing the errors of the sense-datum tradition as involving just such misconceptions about intentionality. For example, we have G.E.M. Anscombe writing shortly after Austin’s lectures:

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History of the mind–body problem … both [sides of the debate] misunderstand verbs of perception, because these verbs are intentional or essentially have an intentional aspect. The first position misconstrues intentional objects as material objects of sensation; the other allows only material objects of sensation …25

While a slightly different diagnosis is offered some twenty years later in Searle’s defence of his own rather different version of the intentional theory of perception: I want to argue that the traditional sense data theorists were correct in recognizing that we have experiences, visual or otherwise, but they mislocated the Intentionality of perception in supposing that experiences were the objects of perception …26 The accusation that sense-datum theorists and others who take the argument seriously must be confused about the intentionality of experience can be found also in Gilbert Harman, Michael Tye and Ruth Millikan, among others.27 I do not want here to criticise either the various accounts of perception that these authors wish to promote in their criticisms of the argument from illusion or the sense-datum theory of perception. Nor do I want to promote Hume’s argument, or any variants of it. However, it should be fairly clear that these criticisms of the argument, if aimed partly at understanding past uses of the argument from illusion as well as simply repudiating it, are plainly inadequate. For the errors of reasoning that these authors impute to past proponents of the argument are very obvious ones. If we simply reflect on the parallel examples for cases other than perception, we can see that we have little inclination to accept the move as valid. Either we are inclined straight off to reject it, or at least to see it as questionable. If there is no more to the argument then asking us to make a move we find so mistaken in the other cases, then the suggestion is simply that the argument’s proponents are making an obviously fallacious move. The claim here is not the pessimistic one that there is never progress in philosophical thought; nor is it the optimistic one that human powers of reasoning are such that we are never in the sway of illusions of thought or false pictures which take time and perseverance to overcome. It is no doubt true that in the past and in the present, there has been much philosophical reasoning about thought, representation and perception which comes to exhibit the kind of mistake suggested above. The problem is not so much with the imputation of error, but with the imputation of what is now, for us at least, so obvious an error, or at the very least so obviously a questionable move. The story as told so far identifies an error, but does not have the

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resources with which to explain why past thinkers should have been liable to fall subject to it in a way that such authors clearly expect their current reader not to. Moreover, the problem here is not merely that this diagnosis leaves work undone, it is also that it misses something in the thought of past thinkers which ought to warrant more pause for thought. It fails to notice a certain systematic element in the use of the argument from illusion: that it is consistently used in relation to sensory states and the context of perceiving properties, even where no parallel argument is applied in relation to other mental states. This point may have been obscured for some given a certain interpretation of the views of certain past philosophers concerning the nature of intentionality: that it required the introduction of intermediaries for all cases of intentionality. On this view, the argument from illusion as employed by Hume is simply an example of a special case of this general attitude to thought and mental representation as applied to the case of perception. So, we find in some accounts of early modern philosophy the thought that a wide variety of philosophers, including Descartes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley and Hume all exemplify the ‘theory of ideas’ which supposes that objects before the mind represent the world beyond it.28 What could be a better expression of the view than the following notorious passage from Malebranche: I think everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by themselves. We see the sun, stars, and an infinity of objects external to us; and it is not likely that the soul should leave the body and stroll about the heavens, as it were, in order to behold all these objects. Thus, it does not see them by themselves, and our mind’s immediate object when it sees the sun, for example, is not the sun, but something that is intimately joined to our soul, and this is what I call an idea. Thus by the word idea, I mean here nothing other than the immediate object, or the object closest to the mind, when it perceives something, i.e., that which affects and modifies the mind with the perception it has of an object.29 But one should resist imposing this conception of intentionality on the early moderns in general. While there is common purpose among these philosophers in talk of ideas (at least to distance them from their scholastic predecessors), it is difficult to discern any common theory of ideas across the tradition from Descartes to Hume. Apart from Malebranche, one cannot easily locate a commitment to a representative theory of ideas among the early moderns.30 Indeed, in contrast to those philosophers who now take the paramount concern of philosophy to deliver an appropriately naturalistic

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account of intentionality, it is worth comment that in those times there seemed to be so little concern with explaining the powers of the mind to think about objects distinct from it.31, 32 If we suspend judgement about the presence of a common theory of ideas, one can still find used in different authors to different effect, a fairly common usage of either the argument from illusion or the argument from conflicting appearances. While it is difficult to discover a systematic confusion about the nature of thought and representation, it is fairly easy to discern a repeated use of the argument from conflicting sensory appearances or from illusion across the centuries in different intellectual contexts and put to different purposes.33 This suggests a separation of concern between thought and sense perception, and a specific cluster of assumptions or ideas associated with the latter. That impression is surely reinforced when one reflects on the debate about sense-data in the early part of the twentieth century. For example, when one looks at the work of Russell and Moore, one finds both a concern with sense-data and a concern with the nature of judgement and the possibility of true and false judgement. If the inclination to take the argument from illusion seriously was simply a symptom of confusion about intentionality, then one should expect parallel arguments and confusions in both sets of debate. But for all the oddity of Russell’s and Moore’s various different theories of judgement at different times, it is notable how far their discussions of these matters are from the way in which they treat the issues of the objects of perception.34 Likewise, in the case of C.D. Broad, we find a distinction drawn between the material and epistemological objects of perception, which suggests some sensitivity to the special properties of thoughts and intentional states of mind.35 And the point is made clearest in the work of H.H. Price: he not only endorses the argument from illusion in a modified form, but also emphasises the intentionality of perceptual experience, which he calls perceptual acceptance – explicitly indicating that this is a belief-like state of mind, in the process alluding to the work of Reid and of Husserl.36 In none of these cases can we be content with the supposition that the authors suffer from a general confusion about the notion of intentionality which explains their endorsement of the argument from illusion in the particular case of sensory states. In each case, we have a contrast between the author’s treatment of thoughts and their treatment of sensory states. In the final example, we have someone who accepts that experience has intentionality, but still supposes that the argument from illusion generates a problem – for him, at least, an intentional approach could not be thought adequate to dissolve the problems of perception. If we relied on the thought that the past attractions of the argument from illusion resided solely in a form of fallacious reasoning or a general mistaken

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conception of intentionality, we would fail in our understanding of past philosophy of perception in two ways. We would simply be attributing a near self-evident mistake to past thinkers, without any explanation of why they should have made such a mistake. The ancillary suggestion that past thinkers are just confused about intentionality in general is not borne out by the actual record. However, such a blanket interpretation ignores the systematic exploitation of the argument from illusion in relation to sensory states, in contrast to the variety of treatments of thought. An explanation of the past tradition needs to find more systematic structure in the viewpoint which takes the argument from illusion to present a genuine difficulty. We need therefore to look beyond the intentional fallacy to find the relevant assumptions peculiar to the sensory case.37

The hidden assumption Burnyeat in his survey of the arguments from conflicting appearances and illusion claims that philosophers who use such an argument are in the grip of an ‘undeclared picture or model of what perception is or ought to be like. It is an inappropriate picture … and for that reason is not something a philosopher will readily acknowledge, even to himself’.38 If correct, this would explain why Hume offers us no explicit argument, and why many should have doubted that any such explicit argument could be formulated: once the premisses of such an argument are made explicit, they lose all attraction. There is certainly some reason for thinking that this must be so. It is one thing for the argument from illusion to impose on us the positive claim that we perceive images along with external objects. As surprising as this conclusion would be, we have learnt in other areas that there is more to the world than we had previously anticipated. But as Hume is well aware, the negative half of the conclusion does seem to conflict directly with a belief that is commonsensical and that acts as one of Hume’s premisses, namely that we do perceive such mind-independent objects as tables. So the argument from illusion in Hume’s hands appears to have the form of a reductio ad absurdum. But such a form of argument can have suasive force only if we find its premisses more compelling than the rejection of its conclusion. Since the relevant premisses Hume must be employing are left unstated, there is no reason for us to think such an assumption better grounded or more unshakeable than the common sense thought that we perceive mindindependent objects. To make his assumptions explicit rather than implicit would seem to dissolve the force of the argument entirely. Burnyeat himself actually seems to go further than this. Starting with an observation from Austin that no one seriously believes that a straight stick has to look straight on all occasions it is viewed, Burnyeat claims that pro-

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ponents of the argument are indeed committed to that strange view. He takes the relevant added principle to be the following: (1) If something appears F to some observers and not-F to others, then it is not inherently/really/in itself F. As he then points out, this is equivalent to its contraposition: (2) If something is inherently/really/in itself F, then it appears F to all observers or it appears not-F to all.39 Ignoring the second disjunct of the consequent, this amounts to the claim that Austin insists no one seriously believes. On the other hand, Burnyeat notes that one can find the principle stated in the form of (2) only very rarely. This he takes to indicate that those attracted to it are also wary of taking its consequences seriously. He then takes the explanatory task to be one of showing the way in which someone might come under the sway of certain metaphors or models which would make the otherwise unappealing assumption seem correct. In this case, the relevant model is what he calls the ‘window model’ of vision, which he characterises variously so: [T]hat we look through our eyes as through a window … (p. 83). The window-pane should be transparent, without spot or blemish. Or better, since Greek windows were unglazed, the eye should be an aperture with no pane at all. There is as it were nothing between the perceiver and the thing he perceives … (p. 85) at the core of the perceptual experience there will be an unmediated knowing, like Moore’s diaphanous awareness of blue, and when a suitable story has been told about the objects of this knowing, the problem of conflicting appearances is solved (p. 95). We could then see the window model of perception as providing the hidden premiss of Hume’s argument. The table cannot be the object of awareness in a case of illusion, for given the model, the object of awareness must be as it appears to be, and ex hypothesi the table is not as it appears; the image or impression must be the object of awareness. On this model whatever one is aware of must be as it appears and only such an object is guaranteed to be as it appears. At the heart of Burnyeat’s account is the thought that there can be no rational explanation of why the argument has been found so compelling. He criticises Austin (and no doubt would criticise the authors cited in the last section) for attacking past philosophers without according them due respect

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or trying to understand them. But Burnyeat’s suggestion is that we understand them not by finding appropriate grounds for the assumptions they make, but rather by seeing how they may have been seduced by various errors, and by recognising the same impulses in our own breasts: Whether it is the flawless close-up vision or the prehensive grasp, whether it secures a whole object or only some part of the surface of one or just a non-physical substitute for these, such pictures have their origin in our earliest and deepest experience. If they elicited a smile, it should have been a smile of recognition and not contempt. For if, as Heraclitus advised, we remember our dreams, we will recognise that there was a time in our own lives when the problem of conflicting appearances engaged our strongest feelings …40 Burnyeat’s aim here seems to be a form of philosophical pathology. We are to recognise that it is part of the human philosophical condition to be swayed by a conception of perceiving which is simply inappropriate. Our respect for past thinkers is to be instilled in us by our recognising the fact that we share a failing with them. In fact, Burnyeat’s case here is somewhat overstated. While it is true that we can find no explicit statement of the required assumption in Hume, in the twentieth-century discussion of the immediate objects of perception, authors have been less coy about explicitly stating the assumption. Such explicit statement is often conjoined with the admission that they lack any independent grounds for it. Such candour is evidenced by H.H. Price when he writes: When I say ‘This table appears brown to me’ it is quite plain that I am acquainted with an actual instance of brownness (or equally plainly with a pair of instances when I see double). This cannot indeed be proved, but it is absolutely evident and indubitable.41 And Howard Robinson, one of the few recent defenders of a sense-datum conception of experience, happily identifies the key premiss of the argument from illusion as what he calls the Phenomenal Principle: If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality.42 Robinson sees it as the great advance of early twentieth-century philosophy of perception that the role of this assumption was made explicit in discussions of perception. Like Price, Robinson offers no direct argument

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for the principle; he takes it to be intuitively plausible, and defends it only by criticising what he takes to be rival accounts of the nature of sensory experience. How does Burnyeat’s strategy apply to Price and Robinson? Not well, I suggest, and for two reasons. First, it is an important element of Burnyeat’s strategy that we should suppose the relevant assumptions or model of perception are hidden or at least half-hidden. For the problem, as he poses it, is that rational reflection will show that the principle has unacceptable consequences and hence cannot be endorsed. The only way the principle can retain its grip, on his interpretation, is by not being revealed in rational light for what it is. This ill-fits Price, and indeed his contemporaries Moore and Broad, all of whom are explicit that the argument from illusion relies on just such an assumption for which they can provide no further justification, but which seems to them indubitable.43 So in relation to such writers, Burnyeat’s strategy shows no greater respect than does Austin’s: the targets of criticism must be so confused that we cannot find them readily intelligible. Second, the cogency of Burnyeat’s strategy depends on the problem being one of historical interpretation of past figures with whom we cannot conceive ourselves to be engaged in active debate. While we can try to be engaged by their problems and their arguments, we can also allow that there is a point at which we find their assumptions or reasoning unintelligible or unsupportable by our lights. There is no further task of debate, but simply one of understanding. The latter, Burnyeat suggests, can be engaged in by seeing ourselves as equally subject to philosophical illusion as our forebears, even if we come to recognise it as illusion in a way that they failed. But when we consider Robinson, and indeed other philosophers who still explicitly endorse the traditional problem and forms of the argument from illusion, Burnyeat’s strategy is bound to seem inadequate.44 For we cannot pretend that we are not in debate with our contemporaries. To say of them that they are simply in the grip of a false image expresses no more than our disagreement with them. This is not to say that there is no problem here. Burnyeat is surely right to highlight the deep disagreement involved. The question is rather one of how to respond to the problem. One could simply adopt the view of the past inherited from Austin, and from some followers of Wittgenstein, which simply sees philosophical debate as so immersed in confusion that there is no intellectually respectable project of understanding to be undertaken here. All that one can do is express one’s disagreement and distaste with past discussion of the matter and those of one’s contemporaries who insist on pursuing the matter. But here again, Burnyeat must be correct to insist that we owe the past the respect of attempting to understand past views and that it is a proper and genuine project for philosophers to understand the reasoning and concerns of other times. The acute problem for gaining such an under-

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standing is simply that the shift has been so immense: from a perspective in which the argument from illusion frames the whole debate, to one in which the argument must be rejected from the outset as evidently bad. At the same time, the time scale for that shift has been so short: although the argument from illusion has had a long history, it is only within the last thirty to forty years that its place at centre stage of philosophical discussion of perception has been overthrown. From our current perspective, it seems near impossible to place us in a position where these arguments could hold the same authority over our deliberations. However, I suggest that the root of the problem is not quite where Burnyeat suggests that it is. It is not that we have here people under the sway of a philosophical illusion which needs uncovering, but rather that we have a dispute which centres on the nature of appearances. The intractability of the debate simply reflects the paradoxical nature of this type of problem. We have difficulty in making sense of past philosophers here because the assumptions they make about appearances are so different from the ones that we are inclined to. The parties to the dispute disagree about the nature of appearances, while yet supposing that this nature is somehow obvious to us, and hence beyond dispute. Since the parties do dispute the question, it is difficult to find any common ground among them. If we are to make the debate tractable, we need to try and make sense of how there can be dispute about the nature of appearances.

Grounding the obvious Our first move is to show how we can make better sense of the debate by seeing it strictly in terms of a dispute about how things appear to us. From that point we can move to the question of how there can be such a dispute, and why we might end up with the different positions of sense-datum views and intentional theories. That, in turn, raises an urgent question about the status of appearances. We can solve Burnyeat’s initial problem once we ask how Price and Robinson could think that a controversial principle, which is clearly not a self-evident truth, is still somehow intuitively correct, or obviously right. The best explanation of their attitude is to see them as supposing that while the principle is not self-evident, it is nonetheless evident in the light of experience. If all one has to go on is reflection on the proposition itself, then one cannot determine whether it is true or not. But the proposition in question concerns appearances, how things appear to one, and that one can test just by reflection on how things do appear to one. Hence, simple reflection on one’s own case should show one whether the principle in question is true. So we might interpret Price and Robinson as supposing that one’s self-

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conscious knowledge of sensory consciousness is sufficient to reveal to one the truth of the principle. Although not self-evident, the principle is taken to be an obvious and indubitable truth given how experience presents itself to us to be. Or so they are convinced. Certainly this line of interpretation helps to make sense of Hume, and why the key premisses are missing from his argument. If a relevant claim just seems so obviously true to one, then one will be unlikely to bother to make it explicit or to attempt the fruitless task of justifying it. Indeed, where a principle is so obvious, it is often extremely difficult to consciously articulate it, and make explicit its role in one’s reasoning. Rather than taking the lacunae in Hume’s reasoning to be evidence of argumentative incompetence, we can rather see it as evidence of how deeply embedded the relevant principle is in his reflection on appearances. Now, if the principle is thought to be evident in the light of experience, then the problem about justification in the light of its unpalatable consequences is not so pressing. For even when faced with a counter-intuitive conclusion, one cannot help but endorse the principle (by ‘the natural light of reason’, so to speak), if one is convinced that it is correct simply by reflection on what experience is like. The option of modus tollens in the light of such an argument will not arise. Suppose that introspection of experience gives conclusive grounds for the problematic principle. Simply coming to recognise unpleasant consequences of the principle needn’t by itself alter the kind of experience one has, and hence won’t alter the support that the principle rests on. But this, of course, does not solve the wider problem of interpretation which Burnyeat raises. We may now understand how proponents of the argument from illusion could take Robinson’s Phenomenal Principle to be beyond justification because they thought it obvious in the light of reflection on experience. But this moves the problem one stage back. We now need to understand how they could have taken it to be obvious in just this manner. For, of course, the mere fact that Anscombe, Searle, Harman and others have thought that the principle is false, and have failed to find any justification for it apart from the seductions of a certain fallacious form of reasoning indicates that the principle cannot be obvious, even were it true. So, why should those who take the argument from illusion seriously think that experience shows the principle to be obviously true? If we leave that question on one side for a moment, and stand back from the whole debate, we can see a suggestive parallel between traditional sensedatum theories and some proponents of the intentional theory. Both approaches appeal to what one can know about appearances from introspection in support of their positions. We have just noted how the sense-datum tradition makes such an appeal. In the case of intentional theories of perception, the

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appeal is in support of the link between experience and the mind-independent objects of perception. For example, Gilbert Harman thinks that introspection supports his case in defending a form of the intentional theory and at the same time creates a problem for the sense-datum theory: Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict that you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented tree, including relational features of the tree “from here”.45 Harman is confident that his readers will agree with him that initial reflection on one’s visual experience will support the thought that one encounters only mind-independent objects and their features and how they relate to one when one introspects. There is a positive and a negative side to the claim here: that one does encounter the mind-independent world in experience; and that one encounters nothing else. We might call the positive thesis Transparency: that the character of one’s experience involves in some sense, or is directed on, or of, the mind-independent objects and their features which we take to be around us in our environment. While Harman thinks this evident, sense-datum theorists such as Moore and Jackson, and their predecessors such as Hume, think it wrong. So they do not suppose that the principle of Transparency is obvious, given reflection on one’s experience. However, that it is not to say that they think that experience obviously involves only mind-dependent objects or features; rather, they suppose that experience is neutral about these matters. As Hume puts it: [the senses] give us no notion of continu’d existence, because they cannot operate beyond the extent, in which they really operate. They as little produce the opinion of a distinct existence, because they neither can offer it to the mind as represented, nor as original … We may, therefore, conclude with certainty, that the opinion of a continu’d and of a distinct existence never arises from the senses.46 And while Hume would agree with Harman that Harman’s view is the view of common sense, since ‘the universal and primary opinion of all men’ is that this table which we see is independent of the mind, Hume is careful not to ground this belief in how appearances strike us. The only explanation of the belief is that it is natural in us. In this way, therefore, we can see the sharp discontinuity between the older debate about sense-data and the objects of perception and more recent discussions of the intentionality of experience as reflecting a deep disagree-

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ment about the nature of appearances. Since there is a tendency on both sides to appeal to introspection to support their claims, there is a consequent difficulty in making sense from either side of the view of the other, and equally a difficulty in stepping back from the whole debate and finding some common ground from which the disputants then move to their opposed positions. But we can make progress here, I suggest, by seeing how the principles each side ground in introspection of experience can be combined to reveal a possible position against which both of the traditions will be united in opposition. The dispute between traditional sense-datum theories of perception and recent intentional accounts turns on two claims relating to appearances, and not just one. Each side supposes that one such claim is evidently true when one reflects on the character of experience, while the other side insists that reflection on experience neither shows the truth or falsity of that principle – while at the same time, denying the principle in question. So neither side claims that appearances themselves show the principle put forward by the other side is false. The dispute about appearances is more indirect: whether they can offer positive support for one principle or the other. Now the two claims in question are not inconsistent with each other. The claim of Transparency requires that experience be of mind-independent objects and their features; while the claim of Hume and the sense-datum theorists, which we might call Actualism, requires that whatever qualities one senses, some actual instance of those qualities and the object which bears them must exist and be sensed. In combination they would simply require that when one senses some quality, an appropriate mind-independent object and feature should exist and be sensed by one. Given the consistency of the two claims, one might hold that introspection of one’s experience gives equal support to each of the claims. Indeed, if we combine the two claims together we end up with a position which seems very like the kinds of view the sense-datum theorists labelled Naïve Realism, and which they took to be refuted by the argument from illusion. For, if we accept the Transparency of experience, we will suppose that the very mindindependent objects and qualities which we take ourselves to perceive are aspects of what our experiences are like; while if we insist on the Actualism of experience, we will accept that in having such experience, such objects and qualities will actually have to be there before us. If I can see a table, and it looks to me as if there is a table there, then what I sense is a table which exists independently of my mind, and I could not so experience if the table were not there. When I stare out of the window I can see the lavender bush at the end of the street, the straggling rose on my fence, and I can hear the sound of traffic in nearby roads. When I reflect on what it is like for me so to experi-

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ence, these very same objects and features remain the focus of attention as aspects of how I experience: this commits me to Transparency with regards to perception, as proponents of intentional theories stress. At the same time, it is evident to me that I am experiencing these things, and not merely thinking about them, or imagining or remembering them. The latter things I can do in the absence of the objects of perception, but it does not seem to me that I can be this way, actually experiencing, without the relevant objects or features present in my environment. This recommends Actualism to me, as defenders of the sense-datum tradition have observed.47 So, if we take seriously the hypothesis that reflection on experience gives equal support to both Transparency and Actualism, then we will think that such reflection ought to compel the acceptance not of sense-datum views or intentional theories of perception but rather of some kind of Naïve Realism. From this perspective, what is notable about each of the main traditions is not what they seek to defend by reference to introspection, but what they are prepared to reject in the face of introspective support. The sense-datum tradition denies the manifest fact that it seems to us as if we are presented in experience with mind-independent objects and states of affairs in the world around us. The intentional tradition denies the introspective evidence that things apparently sensed must actually be before the mind for one to experience so. From this perspective, the explanatory task is not to explain why the sense-datum tradition thought that Actualism was an evident truth, but rather why both the sense-datum tradition and intentional theories reject one or other aspect of Naïve Realism. In as much as introspection gives support both to Transparency and Actualism, one will find no answer to this question by appealing to how our experiences strike us as being. But one can easily find reasons elsewhere for rejecting this option. For here we find a role for the argument from illusion after all. Rather than thinking of it as a positive argument for the existence of sense-data, or for that matter for the intentionality of experience, it is better to view it as an argument against Naïve Realism. When I stare at the lavender bush at the end of the street, it certainly seems to me as if I could not be this way without the bush really being there. On the other hand, it also seems quite clear to me that for all I know, it is possible that I should be in a state of mind which just by reflection I cannot distinguish from this state of mind and yet in that case not be perceiving anything in the physical world at all, but only be hallucinating. It is common to take this admission as revealing something about the kind of state of mind, the kind of sensory experience, one has when perceiving: that it is the kind of state which could occur whether one is perceiving or hallucinating.48 Hence whether an experience counts as a case of perception or hallucination tells us something about its aetiology but does not determine its fundamental kind.

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Now in a case of hallucinating a lavender bush just like this one, I would be as inclined on the basis of introspection to assert that both Transparency and Actualism were true of that experience. For, just as in this case, it would seem to me as if I was presented with a piece of flora independent of my awareness, there in my environment regardless of whether I was paying heed to it or not. Likewise, it would strike me that what was distinctive of my situation is that things could not be this way with me and no object be there at all. This is, after all, a case of sensory experience and not thought. Nonetheless, in such a situation there need be no appropriate candidate in one’s environment, no lavender bush to catch one’s eye. So in such a case of hallucination, it seems clear that at least one of the two principles must be false. Either Transparency must be wrong and one is aware of an object, just not one in one’s physical environment; or Actualism must fail, and one’s experience does not require that there be an object there. The line of thought can be developed a bit further. If the same kind of state of mind, the same perceptual experience, can occur whether one is perceiving or having an illusion or suffering an hallucination, then whatever principles hold of the hallucinatory experience must hold of the veridical perceptual experience too. So, if at least one of the principles, Actualism or Transparency, must be false of illusions and hallucinations, then that principle must be false also of the corresponding veridical perception. The possibility of such perfect hallucinations seems to show that Naïve Realism cannot be true of any sensory experience. More needs to be said here to develop this into a proper argument, but the idea that somehow the existence, or possibility, of perceptual illusions is inconsistent with Naïve Realism is a familiar one. We have already seen in the case of Hume, and adverted to with respect to the sense-datum theorists, an appeal to the argument from illusion to show that something like Naïve Realism is false. As the quotation from Burge earlier indicated, while many philosophers would now repudiate anything with the title ‘argument from illusion’, they would not reject the bearing that illusions and hallucinations have on giving an account of perceptual experience. So it is not implausible to appeal here to some form of argument concerning illusion to explain why Naïve Realism might be rejected. In addition, if we assume that, with proper attention, the character of experience is obvious to us, then when one attends appropriately to one’s experience one should be able to see that one of these principles is not, after all, supported by introspectible evidence. We should expect, therefore, a theorist who is moved by this line of argument not only to reject one of the principles but also to deny that it is seemingly correct to someone who reflects on their experience. But now, one might point out, if in fact introspection supports each principle equally, then there is no introspective evidence to lead one to reject

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one principle rather than the other. So we are not to explain the disagreement across the traditions of debate by reference to different kinds of experience that the disputants enjoyed, or to their different powers of introspection. The argument from illusion might lead one to the commitment that one of the two principles must be wrong, and if wrong not evidently supported by introspection, but nothing yet will show which to reject. That now leaves the way open for us to explain the disagreement in terms of other aspects of the two traditions’ intellectual contexts. If, in fact, there is nothing about introspected experience per se which should lead one to reject or endorse Actualism rather than Transparency, there are plenty of other philosophical concerns which separate typical sensedatum theorists from defenders of intentional theories. Some of these are sufficient to explain why one might antecedently be inclined to repudiate Transparency while upholding Actualism, or alternatively be inclined to excoriate Actualism and embrace Transparency. Consider first Hume’s intellectual context. Notoriously within the early modern tradition, common sense realism is taken to be problematic. In digesting the new science, one comes to question the status of sensible qualities such as colours and tastes, and the true nature of grossly observable elements of the world around us. In some figures, one finds a commitment to realism at odds with common sense – for example, in Descartes we witness the downgrading of the senses as a source of knowledge of the nature of the world, and instead an emphasis on the role of intellect. In Berkeley, on the other hand, we see an attempt to hold onto the most precious aspects of the sensible world, at the cost of rejecting a material and mind-independent world. Hume’s discussion in ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses’ is sensitive to the distance these opposing approaches are from the views of the vulgar. For if it can be a matter for serious debate whether the world is as it is presented to us by the senses, then one will not suppose the matter settled simply by introspection. Yet, if Actualism and Transparency can be shown to be true and certain simply by reflection on one’s experience, then that would be the outcome. For, were the combination of these two true, then the correctness of common sense realism would simply be obvious to us, and hence beyond dispute. So the rejection of Transparency seems naturally to cohabit with the problematic status of such realism. It is symptomatic of the thought that the world is properly to be described only through a developing scientific discipline that the senses reveal to us much less about the nature of the world than we are vulgarly inclined to suppose. If we move forward in time to the early twentieth century discussions of sense-data, we find relevantly similar concerns about realism. While one finds an opposition to the idealism of late nineteenth century, common sense realism is taken to be no less problematic than in early modern times: one of the central concerns is to explain how we place the mind in a world of the

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form described by then current science. Equally importantly, and again echoing the early modern period, there is no reason to resist the consequences of Actualism which in certain cases of illusion and hallucination will lead to a commitment to non-physical objects of sense. For the idea that the physical world must be causally complete, with purely physical events having sufficient causal explanation in terms of purely physical antecedents, is not a doctrine accepted on faith and without question. Rather the unity of science and the mind’s place in nature are taken in many such discussions to be open. For example, at this time we find serious discussion of the parapsychological as a realm governed by psycho-physical laws uninvestigated by then current science.49 These intellectual concerns contrast sharply with much of the dominant philosophical ideology of the last forty years. One of the most notable developments since the middle of the last century has been the ascendancy of a commitment to physicalism in some form or another. In particular, in discussions of mind there has been a concern to avoid any commitment to the existence of peculiar, and distinctively mental, entities. An acceptance of Actualism would lead one to accept the existence of non-physical objects of sense in the case of hallucinations and some illusions, and so would apparently lead one to conclusions in conflict with physicalism.50 If one already has reason to reject Actualism through a prior endorsement of physicalism, then the considerations about illusion and the general unreliability of the senses do not by themselves give one any reason to dispose of Transparency as well. Even if common sense realism is taken to be controversial or to be false, one will simply think that this reflects a way in which our experience of the world is more or less accurate. Only the combination of Actualism and Transparency would commit us to the definite truth of common sense realism. Indeed, the more firm one’s commitment to Transparency, the more implausible Actualism can be made to seem. One may be more inclined to accept that a non-physical mosaic of colours must exist whenever one has a visual experience than to accept that some non-physical table or rabbit should so exist because one’s experience presents such entities. So the more reason one has to insist that experience really is as of tables and rabbits, the more evident it will be that Actualism cannot be true. Given the implications of the considerations about illusion and hallucination, one finds a conflict between Actualism and Transparency internal to the problem of perception. Other intellectual proclivities, in favour of, or sceptical towards, physicalism and realism about the empirical world, explain one’s antecedent inclination towards one of the principles rather than the other. When the focus is on the problematic status of common sense realism, and monism is not assumed, Actualism can be taken to be secure and to define the options. When some form of physicalism is beyond question,

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Actualism is highly questionable, and an insistence on the correctness of Transparency reinforces any reasons for thinking of experience as intentional in nature. These suggestions offer us a strategy by which we can resolve our problem of interpretation. At first sight, the shift between the traditional problems of perception discussed by sense-datum theorists and recent accounts of perception has been so large that it is difficult to see how there can be a common concern here. Equally in looking back from our current perspective it is difficult to make sense of the early tradition as a cogent piece of reasoning about the senses. If we take seriously both the suggestion that the different views seek for support in the character of appearances, and that these different views get equal support from introspection of experience, then the disagreement becomes easier to comprehend. Underneath the apparent differences of approach, there is a common thread and a common problem: first reflection on experience recommends Naïve Realism to one; then, considerations which may loosely be tied together under the heading of ‘the argument from illusion’ suggest that no such view can be correct. The sensedatum tradition and intentional approaches are just alternative responses to this problem. If experience does support the key principle of each view equally, then we are not to explain the differences between them, the rejection of one principle rather than the other, directly in terms of the evidence that they have available about the introspectible character of experience. At the same time, by taking a broader perspective and looking at other aspects of the intellectual context, we can see why certain thinkers would be predisposed to the rejection of Transparency or of Actualism.

Conclusion Over the past few pages we have focused on three questions. The most specific is that of how we should make sense of the argument from illusion as evidenced in Hume’s first Enquiry. This reflects the second and more general question of how we are to make sense of past debates about perception which seem to be framed in such different terms from those in play in recent discussion. In answer to these questions I suggested that we should take seriously the hypothesis that introspection recommends to us naïve realism as the proper account of our sensory experience. Rather than seeing the argument from illusion as a positive argument intended to show the existence of certain strange entities, impressions or sense-data, we should see the considerations about illusion or hallucination as intended to show the falsity of the view commended by introspection. As indicated above, this helps make the argument from illusion more intelligible by inserting further premisses to make the argument valid, while

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indicating appropriate grounds for accepting the relevant assumptions. Moreover, with the extra premisses in play, we can see an answer to the second question. Far from the argument from illusion being merely an outmoded form of argument belonging to an old tradition of debate about the problems of perception, we can see recent intentional approaches to perception tacitly employing the very same concerns. Both sense-datum theories and intentional approaches reject naïve realism and arguably do so for the same set of reasons concerning illusion and hallucination. This fact is obscured by superficial dissimilarities in terminology and focus. There are differences between the two traditions, of course. Proponents of the intentional approach are inclined to assert the transparency of experience and to ridicule the principle Actualism; sense-datum theorists are happy to insist that Actualism is an indubitable truth, while questioning whether there are sufficient grounds for endorsing Transparency. So the two traditions seem to be in direct dispute about what should be most obvious to us. Hence these differences lead us to the third question with which this paper started. How can there be dispute about appearances, if it is right to assume that the nature of appearances is simply obvious to us all? The answer suggested here is that the differences and disputes between the two traditions do not in fact belong to anything that can be introspected about our experience. Each side should agree that our experience seems to us to be naïve realist in character. When they disagree about the real nature of perceptual consciousness, the stories told above suggest that each party is moved by intellectual concerns beyond those which can be extracted simply from reflecting on the obvious character of experience itself. That leads us to look to three consequences of the tale just told. It is fairly common now to claim that the mind–body problem has a central role within philosophical debate; more particularly, that the central question philosophers face is the difficult one of seeing how minds such as ours could be no more than a part of the physical world around us. The discussion above lends some support to this thesis. If the explanation of the differences in the terms of debate about perception is right, then we can understand recent writing about perceptual experience only in the context of certain broad, if not always explicit, physicalist assumptions. However, it should be noted that these framing assumptions join with a much older set of philosophical problems, the problems of perception, which can and have been posed against a rather different background of metaphysical assumptions. We should be wary, therefore, of supposing that the only philosophical agenda that one should address in relation to the mind is that of the mind– body problem. Indeed, one will take this moral more seriously if one reflects on some of the ways that the recent debate might be accused of distorting the discussion

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of perceptual consciousness. Such discussions tend to contrast qualia and phenomenal states of mind with states which have a representational content, and suppose that there can be little in common between phenomenal states on the side and propositional attitudes on the other. Against this background, one cannot but feel sympathy with Richard Rorty’s complaint that The attempt to hitch pains and beliefs together seems ad hoc – they don’t seem to have anything in common except our refusal to call them “physical”.51 And it is no surprise, in the light of an assumption that the phenomenal lacks any representational content and intrinsic structure, that theorists of consciousness have sought to define consciousness principally in terms of accessibility to thought.52 It seems to me that such theories are far removed from phenomenology – perhaps, here I speak only for myself, but I have at least the suspicion that the inner lives of others are as complex, troubling and difficult to articulate as my own. It is no surprise that one may end up with the feeling that the explananda have been lost in the construction of the theory, when confronted with most discussions of the phenomenal and consciousness. I suggest that we can understand such distortions in the theory of consciousness through a combination of an implicit recognition of the intuitive appeal of Actualism with a wish to avoid any commitment to ‘the theatre of mind’. So, we find philosophers endorsing the feeling that with genuine sensory states, in contrast to mere thoughts, there must actually be some qualities distinctive of the sensory state, qualia, while rejecting the idea that there must be sense-data as inner objects of awareness. The tension is reconciled by an appeal to qualia as mere qualities of a state of mind, which alleviate the pull towards Actualism, without being taken to be objects of awareness. However this advantage is gained at the cost of the theoretical account becoming completely divorced from giving a believable story about the apparent structure of perceptual consciousness, for which the theory is supposed to be an account. The distortion in how one characterises the phenomenological aspects of the mind arises when one takes physicalism not only as a plausible end point in one’s discussion of the mind, but as a starting point in defining the phenomena with which one will deal. It is only when we pay due attention to the attractions of naïve realism, and face up explicitly to the challenge posed by illusion and hallucination, we shall be in a better position to construct a theory of perceptual consciousness. This leads to the final moral with which to end. So far, the account offered has been hypothetical. If we make the interpretive leap, and suppose that

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sense-datum theorists take introspection to support their position, and if we make sense of that in turn by supposing that introspection most directly supports naïve realism, then we have an answer to the three questions above. However, nothing has yet been done to show directly that this latter hypothesis is correct. But suppose that we do have reason to endorse this suggestion, then the way in which we view the problems of perception should alter radically. From the perspective of naïve realism, the problem of perception does not principally concern our knowledge of the external world, so much as our understanding and knowledge of our own sensory states. The sensedatum theory conflicts with how our sensory states seem to us, to the extent that that theory posits non-physical objects as the objects of awareness in the having of experience, despite the fact that introspection recommends Transparency to us. The conflict here is not so much with the positing of non-physical objects of awareness as the assumption that these objects play the role in awareness that introspection would lead us to suppose that the mind-independent objects of perception play. Likewise, the intentional approach conflicts with naïve realism. According to intentional theories, the manner in which objects are present to the mind in sensory experience is consistent with the non-existence of the putative objects of awareness. If there is introspective support for Actualism, then it seems to us for some aspects of our experience as if we couldn’t be so without the objects of which we are aware genuinely being there. So where a sense-datum account of perception conflicts with a naïve view of what objects can be given in experience, an intentional view conflicts with a naïve view of how those objects are given to us in experience. Once we recognise that introspection supports naïve realism, rather than directly recommending either a sense-datum view or an intentional account, then we are faced with the consequence that at least some experiences will be misleading about their own nature. Consider an hallucination indistinguishable for me from a veridical perception. If in the case of veridical perception it seems to me that Actualism and Transparency hold, just given reflection on what the experience is like, then in introspecting the matching hallucination, the two principles will seem to hold as well. However, in just such a case at least one of the two principles must be false. So given introspective support for naïve realism, at least some states of being appeared to must be misleading not only about the world, but as paradoxical as this may sound, also about themselves. Given the assumption that the nature of appearances must really be obvious to one given suitable reflection, this conclusion may well seem absurd. One might think that what it is for something to be an aspect of how one is consciously experiencing things is for it to be open to knowledge simply through reflection on the state. One may insist that unlike one’s knowledge

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of the external world, when it comes to conscious experience there is no room for a distinction between how things seem to one and how they really are. However, our discussion suggests that despite the prevalence of this assumption, the argument from illusion illustrates that it is not tenable. Sensedatum theorists may seek to hold on to the assumption by insisting that it really does not even seem to us as if Transparency is true of our experiences, and intentional theorists may insist that there is no introspective support for Actualism. In both cases the mirror-image position undermines these protestations. The only way that we can make proper sense of the development of the debate is to accept that there is at least some prima facie support for the opposing position. Once one arrives at that position, then one cannot hope to show on the basis of introspection alone that one’s preferred principle is manifestly correct and the other lacks proper support. And that means that in the end we must accept that appearances are not entirely obvious in their nature. The central problem of perception, therefore, is to address the argument from illusion and the conflict between it and the claims philosophers have been prompted to make about the nature of experience on the basis of introspection of it. The problem of making sense of how there can be debate about appearances has become the problem of making sense of how we can be mistaken about them.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this material have been presented at talks in Cork, Dublin, Birkbeck, and Brown and in a graduate seminar series in UCL. I am grateful to those audiences for questions and comments and in particular to Michael Ayers, Justin Broackes, Victor Caston, Tim Crane, Naomi Eilan, James Levine, Tom Pink, Paul Snowdon, Scott Sturgeon and Alan Weir for their comments on earlier drafts. Work on this material was originally supported by a British Academy research leave award. 2 An Inquiry the Human Mind On the Principles of Common Sense, edited by D. Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinbugh University Press, 1997; originally published in 1785), Ch. 6, sect. III. 3 Cf. Ned Block: ‘…what is it that philosophers have called qualitative states?: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, “If you got to ask, you ain’t never going to get to know”’, ‘Troubles with Functionalism’, in Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, edited by N. Block (London: Methuen), p. 278. 4 Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 5 For the former see A.J. Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1940) and The Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1956), Ch. 2; for the latter see Roderick Chisholm, Perception (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), Ch. 5, and Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966).

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6 J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 2–3. 7 For example, see Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), Ch. 1; also The Philosophy of Logical Atomism; G.E. Moore, ‘Visual sense-data’, in C. Mace (ed.), British Philosophy in Mid-Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), and ‘A defence of common sense’, in Philosophical Papers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959); C.D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923), Chs VII and VIII, The Mind and its Place in Nature, London: Kegan Paul, 1925), Ch. IV and ‘Elementary reflexions on senseperception’, in R. Swartz (ed.), Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); H.H. Price, Perception (London: Methuen, 1932) and Hume’s Theory of the External World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). For Ayer’s construal of the debate see The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Chs. 1–2 and The Central Questions of Philosophy (London: Weidenfeld, 1973), Ch. V. It is common to take Ayer as representative of the whole tradition (as indeed Austin does), but in fact Ayer’s work involves a substantial revision of key assumptions common to Moore, Russell, Broad and Price. (For more on this see my ‘Austin and the SenseDatum Tradition’ (forthcoming).) Although the debate about sense-data predominantly took place in Britain, there are similarities with it in some US debate: cf. C.I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), and Roderick Firth’s discussion of the whole debate in ‘Sense-data and the percept theory’, in R. Swartz (ed.), Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). 8 One should also include idealism and later phenomenalism as among the parties to this dispute – typically defenders of such a bold metaphysical view of the nature of empirical reality saw themselves as holding on to the claims of common sense while paying due respect to the arguments of indirect realism. There are also important connections with discussions within the phenomenological tradition, particularly in some works of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty although the role of realism within the Anglophone tradition bears a problematic relation to the setting of the phenomenological debate. 9 Berkeley is also the source of idealism, and Hume in the Treatise has been taken, by Herbert Price and Norman Kemp Smith in particular, as inspiration for phenomenalism. 10 See, for example, the discussion in Myles Burnyeat, ‘Conflicting appearances’, Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979), pp. 69–111. 11 Sense and Sensibilia, p. 4. 12 Putnam claims, however, that Austin’s effect was at best cosmetic, ruling out any appeal to terms such as ‘sense-data’ or ‘impressions’ but not a general appeal to such intermediaries – see Putnam, ‘Sense, nonsense and the senses’, Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994), pp. 445–517. 13 ‘Cartesian error and the objectivity of perception’, in P. Pettit and J. McDowell (eds), Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 125. 14 See, for example: Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968), Ch. 10; Anscombe, ‘The intentionality of sensation: A grammatical feature’ in R. Butler (ed.), Analytic Philosophy, second series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962); Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 2; Peacocke, ‘Perceptual content’, in J. Almog, J. Perry and H. Wettstein (eds), Themes from Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), Ch. 3. One can also add to the list: Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), Ch. 6 and Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Gilbert Harman, ‘The intrinsic quality of

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experience’, in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 4 (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1990); Ruth Millikan, ‘Perceptual content and the Fregean myth’, Mind 100 (1991); and Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Qualia and consciousness’, Mind 100 (1991), pp. 507–24 and Michael Tye, ‘Visual qualia and visual content’, in T. Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). ‘Conflicting appearances’, p. 73. Cf Michael Dummett, ‘We commonly employ a distinction between how things appear and how they really are; and it is therefore natural to push this distinction to its limit. This seems to me the best way in which to view the so-called “argument from illusion”. If this is regarded as an argument, properly so called, with premisses and a conclusion, it is difficult to make out what are the premisses and what the conclusion. Rather, it is a starting-point’. From ‘Common sense and physics’, in G. Macdonald (ed.), Perception and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 2. David Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge and revised by P. Nidditch, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), sec. XII; Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Ch. 1; Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ch. 1. This point is pressed home forcefully in ‘How to interpret “direct perception”’, in T. Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience. Snowdon’s discussion forcefully presses the need to provide a proper interpretation of the debate about the direct objects of perception, and the discussion here is indebted to it, although the strategy of interpretation diverges. Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, pp. 151–2. Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Inquiry and Essays, eds R. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,1983), Essay Two, Ch. 14, pp. 175–80. See for example, Nicolas Malebranche, Philosophical Selections, ed. and trans. S. Nadler (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992), John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); for a review of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories see M.J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). ‘Few’ should be used advisedly here – among exceptions we might include Parmenides who seems to have denied that false thought is possible and one can find in Plato’s Theaetetus and Sophist a concern with challenges to the claim that one’s sayings or thoughts can really be false. For an illuminating discussion of these matters see N. Denyer, Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991). The validity of this inference normally holds in systems containing the Converse Barcan Formula, but whether that principle reflects our common conception of modality is a matter of some controversy. It might be tempting to treat all these examples as presenting problems of the same form. We could see each as involving what Russell would call a scope fallacy: we have a simpler sentence embedded within an operator: the move is then from OaSomeF to SomeFOa; such a move is not valid even for many truth-functional operators, and in none of these cases is the operator a truth-function. However, there are no agreed uniform diagnoses of these different contexts, and different accounts have been offered of modal and epistemic contexts. Anscombe, ‘The intentionality of sensation: A grammatical feature’, p. 11 in reprint Collected Papers, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).

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26 Intentionality, p. 61. 27 Harman, ‘The intrinsic quality of experience’; Tye, ‘Visual qualia and visual content’; Millikan, ‘Perceptual content and the Fregean myth’. 28 This kind of interpretation has its origins in Reid, but for recent proponents see in particular Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 29 Malebranche, Philosophical Selections, The Search after Truth, Bk. 3, Pt. 2, Ch. 1, p. 27. (I am not here endorsing or rejecting this interpretation of Malebranche.) 30 One can find such proponents in the pages of hostile critics: Berkeley represents the materialist as endorsing a representative theory of ideas, and Hume presents matters in much the same terms. But the picture presented by Berkeley and Hume do not really fit Locke’s explicit pronouncements, so the relation between criticism and target is more complex than is often presented in introductory accounts of British Empiricism. A more detailed discussion of the relations here belongs elsewhere. 31 It is interesting to contrast Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), Ch. 4 or ‘A theory of content, Parts 1 and 2’, in A Theory of Content and other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) with Descartes’ discussion of the objective reality of thought in the Third Meditation and Locke’s discussion of the origin of ideas in ‘An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all things in God’. Where Fodor takes the problem of intentionality to be the question of how to locate it within a natural, physical world, there is no apparent concern in either Descartes or Locke with the need to explain powers of thought in terms of other aspects of the world – that there are ideas is something which is simply beyond serious question. (Although in Locke’s case, there is in addition a scepticism about the possibility of explaining why the ideas that are occasioned by external causes are so.) 32 The most concerted assault on this picture of early modern philosophy is in the work of John Yolton; see in particular Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984). For more recent work in this tradition see Steven Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). One may accept much of what Yolton says without endorsing his interpretation of Locke as a ‘direct realist’, however. For more on this, see Michael Ayers, Locke (London: Routledge, 1991), Chs 5–7 and ‘Ideas and objective being’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); for a defence of a more traditional interpretation see Vere Chappell, ‘Locke’s theory of ideas’, in V. Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 33 Indeed, this is one of the points stressed most strongly in Burnyeat, ‘Conflicting appearances’. Burnyeat also offers evidence for seeing Plato’s discussion of perception and knowledge in the Theaetetus in terms amenable to the thrust of argument in the text: when Socrates finally rejects Theaetetus’s identification of knowledge and perception, part of the concern is to allow for the possibility of false thought; but the separation of the two leaves intact the thought that it is impossible for perceptions themselves to be false. However, for a contrasting interpretation of ancient attitudes to intentionality, see Victor Caston, ‘Aristotle and the problem of intentionality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998), pp. 249–98, which links the problem of sensory error and error in thought in the interpretation of Aristotle much more closely than I have suggested should be done in general here. 34 For useful discussions of various of Moore’s and Russell’s views on the nature of judgement see, Richard Cartwright, ‘On a neglected theory of truth’, in Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the

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Emergence of Analytical Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Thomas Baldwin, G.E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990). See The Mind and its Place in Nature, Ch. IV. Perception, Ch. V, esp. pp. 150–6. Compare here also Snowdon’s suggestion that we need an explanation of the psychological attractions of Hume’s and Price’s positions; see ‘How to interpret “direct perception”’. ‘Conflicting appearances’, p. 75. Both from ‘Conflicting appearances’, p. 74. ‘Conflicting appearances’, p. 108. Perception, p. 63. Robinson, Perception (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 32. See, Moore, ‘Some judgments of perception’, in Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922) and Broad, Scientific Thought. Cf. M. Perkins, Sensing the World (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), John Foster, A.J. Ayer (London: Routledge, 1986), Barry Maund, Colours: Their Nature and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). One might also include Frank Jackson, Perception: A Representative Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): Jackson explicitly disavows the argument from illusion, but not because of the principle here under debate, but rather for independent issues concerning the role of subjective indistinguishability in the argument. ‘The intrinsic quality of experience’, p. 39. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge and revised by P. Nidditch, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 191–2. And not just proponents of the sense-datum tradition; compare Sartre’s discussion of the phenomenological contrast between perception and imagination in Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (New York: Citadel, 1991). This assumption is rejected by so-called ‘disjunctive’ accounts of perception. For such approaches see J.M. Hinton, ‘Visual experiences’, Mind 76 (1967), pp. 217–27 and Experiences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Paul Snowdon, ‘Perception, vision and causation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (1980–81), pp. 175–92 and ‘The objects of perceptual experience’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 64 (1990), pp. 121–50; also John McDowell, ‘Criteria, defeasibility and knowledge’, Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982), pp. 455–79; and Putnam, ‘Sense, nonsense and the senses’. It is worth noting that both Broad and Price professed a serious interest in the parapsychological. Cf. here J.J.C. Smart, ‘Sensations and brain processes’, in D.M. Rosenthal (ed.), The Nature of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind; Tye, ‘The adverbial approach to visual experience’, Philosophical Review 93 (1984), pp. 195–225. Some philosophers dispute whether there is a conflict between physicalism and sense-data, cf. James Cornman, Perception, Common Sense and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) and Perkins, Sensing the World for a discussion of this. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 22. See in particular, S. Shoemaker, ‘Self-Knowledge and “Inner Sense”’, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 54, pp. 249–314; D.M. Rosenthal, ‘A Theory of Consciousness’ (Report no. 40/1990, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research [ZiF], Research Group on Mind and Brain, University of Bielefeld).

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248

Index

Index

aboutness see intentionality abstractionism 78–80 Ackrill, J.L. 33n actualism see perception, actualism Adam, C. 102n, 145n–6n Adams, E.M. 180, 193n Aersten, Jan A. 62n, 128n Ako, T. 146n Albert the Great 42, 53, 60n, 64n Alexander of Aphrodisias 39–40, 49, 58n, 60n–1n, 114 Alexander of Hales 37, 64n Algazel 49, 58n Almog, J. 228n Annas, Julia 33n Anscombe, G.E.M. 200, 207, 216, 229n Aquinas, Saint Thomas 4, 6, 34–5, 45–69, 78–9, 84, 92–95, 98–101, 104n, 107n–8n, 112–16, 118, 121, 128n–9n, 133, 145n Ariew, Roger 128n–9n Aristotelianism 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 35–69, 77–84, 90, 92, 94, 101, 104n–5n, 112–14, 116, 119–20, 122–7, 128n–30n, 133 Aristotle 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13–33, 35–69, 71, 77–84, 90, 92, 94, 101, 112–19, 128n–30n, 133, 230n Armour, Leslie 129n Armstrong, D.M. 200, 228n, 231n Arnauld, Antoine 96, 118, 129n, 133, 209 associationism 9, 156–8 Augustine 36–7, 57n–9n, 133 Austin, J.L. 102n, 173, 175, 192n, 199–201, 207, 211–210, 214, 228n

Averroes 4, 36, 39–45, 48–52, 54–6, 57n, 62n–3n, 65n–9n, 114, 128n Averrois see Averroes Avicebron 36, 58n Avicenna 36, 40, 49, 57n, 62n Ayer, A.J. 193n, 196, 199–200, 202, 205, 227n, 229n Ayers, Michael 227n, 230n Baemuker, Clemens 58n Bain, A. 166n Baker, G.P. 128n Baldwin, Thomas 192n, 231n Barnes, Jonathan 13, 31n–3n, 60n–1n, 67n Barnes, W.H.F. 192n Barrs, B.J. 168n Bataillon, L.J. 67n Bazan, Bernardo Carlos 63n–5n, 68n Beanblossom, R. 103n, 229n ben Luca, Costa 36, 58n Benecke 153 Bennett, Jonathan 166n, 230n Berkeley, G. 199–200, 203, 209, 221, 228n, 230n Bianchi, Luca 68n Block, Ned 166n, 168n, 170–1, 182, 189–90, 191n, 194n, 227n Blumenthal, H.J. 62n Blund, John 36, 58n body 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13–31, 37, 74–6, 80, 83, 88–90, 94–8, 112–13, 115–16, 118–20, 122–8, 140–1, 152–3, 160, 176 Bonaventure 45, 47, 52–3, 56, 66n, 68n

Index 249 Borgnet, S. 64n Bouwsma, O.K. 174, 192n Braddon-Mitchell, David 182, 191n, 193n Brady, Ignatius 66n Brams, J. 60n Brandom, Robert 12n, 74, 103n, 107n Brentano, Franz 7, 60n, 131, 137, 140, 144, 145n, 153, 166n British Empiricism 180, 230n Broackes, Justin 227n Broad, C.D. 176, 179, 192n, 199, 210, 214, 228n, 231n Burge, Tyler 200, 220, 228n Burman, Frans 100, 134 Burnett, Charles 58n Burns, Ivo 61n Burnyeat, Myles 3, 4, 11n, 19–31, 32n–3n, 72–3, 75, 102n–3n, 107n, 201, 205, 211–16, 228n, 230n–1n Burwood, Stephen 12n Butler, R. 228n Callus, D.A. 58n, 60n Campbell, Keith 11n Canziani, Guida 128n Carpenter, William 152–4, 159, 166n Carriero, John 93, 102n, 103n, 108n–9n Carruthers, Peter 168n Cartesian 2, 5, 8, 70–147; see also Descartes, René Cartesianism see Cartesian Cartwright, Richard 230n Carus, Carl Gustav 155–6, 162, 167n Caston, Victor 31n–2n, 227n, 230n Caterus 96 Cavell, Marcia 143–4, 147n Chalmers, David 11n, 170–1, 191n Chappell, Vere 230n Charlton, William 31n–2n Chatelin, E. 60n Chisholm, Roderick 196, 227n Chomsky, Noam 149, 166n Code, Alan 32n Cohen, Marc 32n–3n commonsense 5, 101, 155–6, 160–1, 199, 202–4, 211, 217, 221 conscious see consciousness; preconscious 149–50

consciousness 1, 2, 8, 9, 44, 46, 52, 56, 125, 148–65, 169, 171, 182, 190, 195, 197, 215, 225 content see intentionality Converse Barcan Formula 229n Cornman, James 231n Cottingham, John 2, 5, 7, 56n, 102n– 10n, 128n–30n, 131–47, 145n–7n Coupland, William C. 165n Courtenay, William J. 68n Craemer-Ruegenberg, Ingrid 64n Crane, Tim 1–12, 2, 9, 10, 57n, 147n, 191n–2n, 194n, 169–94, 227n, 229n Cranz, Edward F. 61n Crawford, F. Stuart 62n critical realism 179 Crowley, Theodore 57n Cunning, D. 146n da Palma C., Giambattista 65n Dales, R.C. 57n, 59n–60n, 66n d’Alverny, Marie-Therese 58n Dancy, Jonathan 103n Dante 55, 69n Darwin, Charles 144 Davidson, Herbert A. 62n de Gaynesford, Max 147n De Libera, Alain 66n–7n Denilfe, H. 60n Dennett, Daniel 163, 170–1, 182, 185–6, 191n, 193n–4n Denyer, N 229n Descartes, René 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 34, 56n, 70–147, 180, 221, 230n Dewey, J. 193n direct realism see perception, direct realism Dod, Bernard 57n Dodd, Tony 65n Dretske, Fred 171, 185, 191n, 228n dualism 1, 3, 5, 8, 14–15, 23, 27, 34, 37, 40–53, 56, 70, 74–5, 95–101, 111–12, 123–4, 169 Ducasse, C. 192n Dummett, Michael 229n Eilan, Naomi 227n eliminativism 35, 142

250

Index

Ellenberger, H.F. 165n–6n emergentism 19 empiricism 84 Enders, Gerhard 62n epiphenomenalism 169 Everson, Stephen 32n–3n Farkas, Katalin 191n Fechner 153 Feigl, Herbert 1, 2, 181–2, 187, 193n Ferraro, Domenico 128n Fioravanti, G. 65n first-person see introspection; selfknowledge Firth, Roderick 180, 193n, 228n Fitzpatrick, E.A. 128n Flanagan, O. 166n, 168n, 194n Fodor, Jerry 11n, 230n Fontinos, Athanasias P. 61n Foster, John 56n, 231n Foster, K. 104n Fowler, C.F. 128n–9n Frede, Michael 31n–2n Freud, Anna 166n Freud, Sigmund 9, 139–40, 146n, 149, 156, 159–61, 166n–7n Fricker, Miranda 102n Fromondus 124 functionalism 2, 3, 4, 14–31, 141, 163, 182 Furth, Montgomery 33n Gallop, David 31n Garber, Daniel 104n, 230n Gassendi, P. 100 Gauthier, R. A. 63n, 69n George, Rolf 61n Geyer, B. 64n Gibieuf 100 Gilbert, Paul 12n Gilson, Etienne 58n, 104n Glock, Hanjo 147n God see theology Goodman, Nelson 181, 193n Gotthelf, Alan 31n Grosseteste, Robert 59n Gundissalinus, Dominicus 36, 58n Gutas, Dimitri 62n Guttenplan, S. 145n Guzeldere, G. 166n, 168n, 194n

hallucination 10, 11, 190, 199–200, 219–20, 222, 224, 226; see also illusion Hamelin, Octave 61n Hamilton, Sir William 9, 156–61, 167n Handel, James 147n Harman, Gilbert 170–1, 208, 216–17, 228n–30n harmony theory of soul see soul, harmony theory of Hartmann, Eduard von 155–6, 162, 165n–6n Hasse, Dag Nikolaus 62n Hegel, G.W.F. 136 Heinze, Richard 61n Helmholtz 153 Herbart 153 Hilbert, David 194n Hinton, J. M. 231n Hobbes, Thomas 145n Holmes, Oliver Wendell 152 Holton, Richard 31n homonymy principle 20–3, 26–7 Honderich, T. 145n Hooker, Brad 147n Hornsby, Jennifer 102n Hume, David 10, 198, 200, 202–5, 208–9, 211, 213, 216–18, 220–1, 223, 228n–31n Humean 132 Humphries, S. 104n Hunt, R.W. 58n Husserl, Edmund 210, 228n hylomorphism 3, 4, 6, 37, 39, 41, 46 Hylton, Peter 192n, 230n–1n Hyman, Arthur 63n idealism 15, 23, 27, 73-75, 178, 221 ideas 131–138; innate 79–88, 94–5, 98–99, 101–2; sensory see perception; sensation illusion 10, 71-73, 83, 186, 198–200, 203–205, 220, 222, 224; argument from 176–7, 189, 198–9, 202–27 Imbach, Ruedi 64n–5n, 68n immortality 4, 6, 7, 37, 45, 49–50, 112, 115; see also soul, immortality of indirect realism see perception, indirect realism

Index 251 intellect 38–53, 79, 90, 92, 94, 99, 102, 114, 125; unicity of 50–3 intentional fallacy 206–11 intentionalism see perception, intentionalism intentionality 1, 7- 8, 10, 131–44, 159, 162–5, 171, 189, 206–10, 225; pre-intentionality 143 introspection 196–198, 204, 215–27; see also self-knowledge Jackson, Frank 182–3, 191n–4n, 217, 231n James of Venice 36 James, Susan 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 111–30, 130n James, William 148, 150, 153, 161, 165, 165n–6n, 178, 192n–3n Jeck, Udo Reinhold 58n, 64n, 68n John of Spain 58n Johnston, Leonard 57n Jokic, A. 194n Jolley, N. 145n Jones, O.R. 12n judgement 6, 127, 204, 210 Kant, Immanuel 144, 155 Kantian see Kant, Immanuel Keil, F. 191n Kenny, Anthony 12n, 57n, 104n, 145n Kim, Jaegwon 170–1, 191n King, Edward B. 59n Kretzmann, Norman 57n, 66n, 128n–9n Kristeller, Paul Oskar 61n Krop, Hemi 64n Langton, Rae 2, 3, 11n, 13–33 language 132, 135–6, 142–4, 159 Latta, R. 166n Lehrer, Keith 103n, 229n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 9, 141, 153–4, 156, 162, 166n–7n Lennon, Kathleen 12n Lepore, Ernest 32n Levine, I. 165n–6n Levine, James 227n Levine, Joseph 194n Lewes, G. H. 153–4, 166n Lewis, C. I. 178–83, 187–8, 190, 193n, 228n

Lewis, David 15, 23, 31n–3n, 183–4, 193n–4n Link-Salinger, Ruth 63n Lipton, Peter 191n Lloyd, G.E.R. 62n Locke, John 132–3, 136, 138, 141, 145n, 209, 229n–30n Lockean 132–3 Lohr, C. H. 57n Lonergan, Bernard 67n Lowe, E. J. 192n Lycan, William G. 168n, 171, 185, 188, 190, 191n, 193n–4n magic 19–26 Makin, Stephen 31n Malcolm, Norman 151, 166n Malebranche, P. 133, 136–7, 209, 229n–30n Mandonnet, Pierre 65n, 68n Manson, Neil Campbell 2, 8, 9, 148–68 Marcel, A. 167n Marion, J.-L. 146n Marlasca, Antionio 68n Marrone, Steven 59n Martin, M.G.F. 2, 10, 11, 175–6, 182, 185, 191n–4n, 195–231 Martin, Michael see Martin, M.G.F. materialism 2, 3, 8, 14–31, 34, 40–53, 56, 120; see also naturalism; physicalism mathematics 19, 26–31, 85–6, 142 matter 3, 19–31, 70, 77 Maudsley 153, 159 Maund, Barry 231n Maxwell, G. 193n McAlister, L.L. 145n, 166n McCulloch, Gregory 12n, 191n McDowell, John 73, 103n–4n, 110n, 228n, 231n McEvoy, James 60n McGinn, Colin 2, 171 McInery, Ralph 66n–67n mechanism 7, 77, 90, 101, 119–21, 142, 186 Mellor, D.H. 193n–4n Merleau-Ponty 228n Mersenne, M. 113, 135 Metzinger, T. 165n, 194n

252

Index

Migne, J.P. 57n Mill, J.S. 153, 158, 166n Millikan, Ruth 208, 229n–30n mind-body problem 1, 8, 11, 34, 70, 125–7, 131, 169–71, 181, 224 Modrak, Deborah 33n Mojsisch, B. 63n monopsychism 2, 4, 34–69 Montero, Barbara 57n Moody, E. A. 59n Moore, G.E. 173–8, 181, 192n.,199, 210, 212, 214, 217, 228n, 230n–1n Moraux, Paul 61n Moravcsik, Julius 32n Morell 159 Morgan, M.J. 229n Morris, K.J. 128n Muckle, J.T. 58n multiple realisability 3, 16–31 Murdoch, Dugald 56n, 102n–10n, 128n–30n, 145n–6n Nadler, S. 229n–30n Nagel, Thomas 1, 11n, 131, 140, 172, 196, 227n naive realism see perception, naive realism Nardi, Bruno 69n Natsoulas, T. 166n naturalism 8, 13–31, 56, 137, 163, 181, 188, 209, 221–2, 224; see also materialism; physicalism Nelson, A. 146n Nemirow, Lawrence 193n Neoplatonism 40, 46 Nequam, Alexander 36, 58n–9n New Realists 178 Nidditch, P. 229n Niewohrer, Freidrich 62n Nifo, Agostino 68n nonconscious see unconscious Northridge, W.L. 149, 165n–6n Nussbaum, Martha 3, 11n, 15, 18, 24, 26, 30, 31n–3n, 60n Ockham, William of 118 Ockhamism 119–20 Oderberg, David 147n Oguejiofor, J. Obi 57n–9n O’Hear, A. 191n, 194n

O’Meara, Dominic 63n Owen, G.E.R. 62n panpsychism 155–6 Park, Katherine 129n–30n Parmenides 229n Pasnau, Robert 57n passion 6, 7, 121–2, 126 Patterson, Sarah 1–12, 2, 5, 70–110 Paul, G.A. 172, 176–7, 191n Peacocke, Christopher 200, 228n Peccham, John 45, 56, 66n Pegis, Anton Charles 57n, 104n, 108n Peirce, C. S. 177–8, 192n perception 2, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 21–5, 71–79, 83–4, 86–8, 90, 93, 101, 113–14, 121–6, 131, 135–40, 153–6, 162, 171–91, 195–227; actualism 10, 11, 218–26; adverbial theory of 177, 189; direct realism see perception, naive realism; indirect realism 173–4, 197, 199, 197, 201–3, 208, 210, 213, 215–21, 223–7; insensible see unconscious, metaphysical; intentional theory of see perception, intentionalism; intentionalism 11, 172, 185, 188–9, 197–8, 200, 206, 208, 215–19, 221, 223–4, 226–7; naive realism 11, 174, 197–9, 201–3, 218–20, 223–4, 226–7; objects of 10, 133–7, 172–91, 195–227; representative realism see perception, indirect realism; transparency 10, 11, 197, 217–24, 226 Perkins, M. 231n Perry, J. 228n Perry, R.B. 178 Perte, E. 58n Pettit, P. 103n, 228n phenomenal principle 213–16 phenomenology 7, 131, 136–44, 170–1, 175–6, 183, 195–227 Philip the Chancellor 37, 43, 59n, 64n physicalism 1, 2, 8, 14–20, 22–7, 141, 169, 173, 181–6, 196, 222, 224; see also materialism; naturalism physics 77, 86, 94–8, 101, 124, 136, 139

Index 253 physiology see body Pinborg, Jan 57n Pink, Tom 227n Plato 13, 31n, 46, 132–3, 200, 229n–30n Platonism 40, 133 Pluta, O. 63n pneumatology 155 Pomponazzi, Pietro 116, 129n Preston, John 147n Price, H.H. 175–7, 180–1, 187–9, 199, 205, 210, 213–15, 228n, 231n privacy 131, 137, 144, 182 Putallaz, Francois-Xavier 64n–5n, 68n Putnam, Hilary 3, 15, 18, 24, 26, 29–31, 32n–3n, 228n, 231n Pylyshyn, Zenon 163, 167n

Schelling, F. 156 Schillp, P. 192n–3n Schmitt, C. 129n scholasticism 5, 6, 35, 78–80, 82, 112–13, 115–17, 119, 121–2, 209 Schopenhauer, Arthur 9, 149, 155, 167n Schroeder, Frederic M. 62n Scot, Michael 36, 57n Scriven, M. 193n Searle, John 2, 11n, 145n, 148, 165n, 200, 208, 216, 230n Selby-Bigge, L. A. 229n self-knowledge 8, 88–93, 123, 150–1, 164–5, 196–8, 204, 215–27 Sellars, R.W. 179 Sellars, Wilfrid 12n sensation 5–6, 80, 126, 135–42, 173, qualia 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 141–3, 162, 183, 195–6, 204 169–72, 177–91, 195, 225 sense-data 10, 11, 171–7, 180–2, 187–8, 190, 198–9, 201–3, 208, Rancurello, A.C. 166n 210, 213, 215–21, 223–7 Reber, A. 167n–8n sensory experience see perception; reductionism 3, 14–31, 35, 132, 141–3 qualia; sensation Regius 117 Shoemaker, Sydney 8, 11n–12n, 182, Reid, Thomas 103n, 180, 195, 204, 210, 193n–4n, 229n, 231n 227n, 230n Siger of Brabant 4, 34–5, 38–9, 42–5, Remnant, Peter 166n 48–9, 52–5, 63n–5n, 67n–9n, 128n Renan, E. 65n Skinner, Q. 129n representation see intentionality Smart, J.J. C. 231n representational content see Smith, J.A. 33n intentionality Smith, Norman Kemp 228n Robinson, Howard 32n, 176, 191n, Smith, Peter 12n 194n, 213–16, 231n Smith, Q. 194n Roland of Cremona 37 Snowdon, Paul 227n, 229n, 231n Rorty, Amelie Oskenberg 11n, Socrates 30, 92 31n–3n, 60n, 104n, 108n Solomon Bar Jehuda ibn Gabriol see Rorty, Richard 74, 137, 146n, 225, 231n Avicebron Rosenthal, David 9, 168n, 231n Sorabji, Richard 15, 21, 25–6, 32n–3n Ross, W.D. 33n Sorell, T. 129n Royce, J. 178 soul 3, 7, 13–56, 78–80, 89, 92, 95, Rozemond, Marleen 96, 110n, 128n 98–101, 113, 115–19, 122–7; Russell, Bertrand 101, 110n,172, 178, harmony theory of 13–19, 29; 192n, 199–200, 202, 205, 210, immaterial 37, 42–3, 46–7, 51–2, 228n–31n 54, 98–9, 112, 124–5, 128 ; Ryle, Gilbert 35, 57n, 166n immortality of 6, 7, 37, 45–50, 112, 115–117, 122, 124, 126; see also Sartre, J.-P. 228n, 231n immortality; intellectual 4, 6, 7, 35, scepticism 5, 70–7, 83–8, 141–2, 38, 41–2, 46, 53–5, 92, 98–9, 202–3, 221 113–14, 116, 122–3, 125–6;

254

Index

nutritive see soul, vegetative; rational see soul, intellectual; sensitive 7, 13–31, 38, 41–2, 113–14, 116, 118, 121, 125; vegetative 38, 41–2, 113–14, 118, 120, 125 Spettman, P. Heironymous 66n Spruit, Leon 57n Steel, Carlos 68n Steneck, Nicholas H. 64n Stich, Stephen 163, 167n Stone, M.W.F. 2, 4, 34–69, 102n, 192n Stoothoff, Robert 56n, 102n–10n, 128n–30n,145n–6n Strachey, Alix 166n Strachey, James 166n Strong, C.A. 179 Stroud, Barry 102n Stump, Eleonore 57n, 66n, 128n–9n Sturgeon, Scott 182, 193n, 227n Sturlese, Loris 62n subjective 1, 7, 8, 10, 73–6, 92, 101, 131, 136–7, 140–1, 179–80, 182, 185–7, 189 Sully, James 153–4, 166n supervenience 16–31 Swartz, R. 191n–2n, 228n Swinburne, Richard 56n Szubka, T. 11n–12n, 56n Tanner, Norman P. 128n Tannery, P. 102n, 145n Taylor, Richard C. 63n Tempier, Stephen 52, 55–6 Terrell, D.B. 166n Themistius 40, 49, 61n–2n theology 4, 6, 35–36, 42–56, 73–4, 77, 80, 85–7, 96–8, 100–1, 112– 17, 119, 123–4, 127, 133, 141 Theophrastus 49 Thery, G. 61n Thomas see Aquinas, Saint Thomas Thomism 6, 112–13, 115–17, 119 Thompson, Rodney 58n–59n Thorndike, Lynn 57n Todd, Robert B. 61n–2n Tolman, E.C. 193n Tomberlin, J. 229n Torrell, J.P. 66n

transparency see perception, transparency Tucker, Abraham 151, 166n Tye, Michael 170–1, 189, 194n, 208, 229n–31n Tyson, Aloan 166n Ulirici 153 unconscious 8, 148–65; metaphysical 9, 153–6, 161–2; psychological 8, 150–3, 156–65 Valberg, J.J. 192n Van Gulick, Robert 32n, 148, 161–2, 165n Van Steenberghen, Fernand 57n, 60n, 62n, 65n–6n, 68n–9n Vanhamel, W. 60n variable realisability see multiple realisability Verbeeke, G. 61n, 67n vision 20–4, 195–227; window model of 212 Voetius 124, 126 volition 6 von Hartmann, Eduard see Hartmann, Eduard von Warner, R. 11n–12n, 56n Weber, Edouard-Henri 67n Weir, Alan 227n Weisheipl, James A. 64n Weiskrantz, L. 167n Wettstein, H. 228n Whiting, Jennifer 33n Whyte, L.L. 159, 165n–6n will 6, 84, 114, 118, 124, 153, 155– 6; see also Will Will 9, 155 William of Auvergne 37, 58n William of Baglione 45, 56, 66n William of Moerbeke 37, 49, 60n– 1n William of Ockham see Ockham, William of Williams, Bernard 33n, 72–3, 75, 102n–3n, 107n Wilson, Margaret 83, 104n, 135, 146n Wilson, R. 191n

Index 255 Wippel, John F. 67n, 69n Witt, Charlotte 31n Wittgenstein, Ludwig 137, 143–4, 214 Wittgensteinian see Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wolff, Jonathan 191n Wollheim, Richard 167n

Yablo, Stephen 110n Yolton, John 230n Yrjonsuuri, M. 146n Zarka, Charles 128n Zavalloni, Roberto 59n Zimmermann, A. 69n

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