A lean hylomorphism stands as a metaphysical holy grail. An embarrassing feature of traditional hylomorphic ontologies is prime matter. Prime matter is both so basic that it cannot be examined (in principle) and its engagement with the other hylomorphic elements is far from clear. One particular problem posed by prime matter is how it is to be understood both as a principle of individuation for material substances and as pure potency. I present Thomas Aquinas’s way of squeezing (...) some intelligibility out of prime matter by modeling it on the idea of logical genus. Such a modeling provides insight into understanding prime matter as substratum, as maximally indeterminate, and as ontologically vague. One of the unusual but exciting things that fall out from this analysis of prime matter is the Entirety Thesis: “For any substance x, if x has prime matter then the prime matter of x is the same* as x,” where ‘same*’ is understood as “indeterminately identical.”. (shrink)

Medieval interpretations of hylomorphism, in which substances are conceived as metaphysical composites of prime matter and substantial form, are receiving attention in contemporary philosophy. It has even been suggested that a recovery of Aquinas's conception of prime matter as a ‘pure potentiality’, lacking any actuality apart from substantial form, may be expedient in hylomorphic interpretations of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we consider a recent hylomorphic interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the theory of Cosmic Hylomorphism, which does (...) not explicitly invoke any notion of prime matter in its original formulation. We argue that prime matter does in fact play a role in constituting and individuating particles in this theory. However, we demonstrate that the notion of prime matter which features in the extended version of Cosmic Hylomorphism that we propose here is distinct from Aquinas's conception of prime matter, inasmuch as it has discrete metaphysical parts. (shrink)

Medieval interpretations of hylomorphism, in which substances are conceived as metaphysical composites of prime matter and substantial form, are receiving attention in contemporary philosophy. It has even been suggested that a recovery of Aquinas's conception of prime matter as a ‘pure potentiality’, lacking any actuality apart from substantial form, may be expedient in hylomorphic interpretations of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we consider a recent hylomorphic interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the theory of Cosmic Hylomorphism, which does (...) not explicitly invoke any notion of prime matter in its original formulation. We argue that prime matter does in fact play a role in constituting and individuating particles in this theory. However, we demonstrate that the notion of prime matter which features in the extended version of Cosmic Hylomorphism that we propose here is distinct from Aquinas's conception of prime matter, inasmuch as it has discrete metaphysical parts. (shrink)

Following in the hylomorphic tradition of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas holds that all material substances are composed of matter and form. Like Aristotle, Aquinas also recognizes two different types of forms that material substances can be said to possess: substantial forms and accidental forms. Of which form or forms, then, are material substances composed? This paper explores two competing models of Aquinas’s ontology of material substances, which diverge on precisely this issue. According to what the author refers to as the “Standard (...) Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter and substantial form. According to the “Expanded Model,” Aquinas’s view is that a material substance is composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of its accidental forms. After outlining the main claims of each of the two competing models and considering two arguments in favor of the Standard Model, the author offers two arguments in favor of the Expanded Model. He argues that, given the way in which Aquinas argues for God’s simplicity in question three of the Prima pars, and the way in which he consistently describes the difference between an essence and a suppositum, or individual substance, throughout his works, there is good reason to believe that Aquinas thinks that the accidental forms of a material substance are included among its metaphysical parts. (shrink)

Aquinas has much to say about individuation over the course of his career. Although certain aspects of his views appear to undergo development, there is one aspect that remains constant throughout—namely, his commitment to assigning both prime matter and quantity an essential role in the individuation of substances. This paper examines the vexed issue of how either prime matter or quantity, as Aquinas understands them, could have any role to play in this context. In the course of doing (...) so, the author attempts to put to rest a number of longstanding worries about the coherence of Aquinas’s views about individuation, as well as to draw out some of his broader commitments in metaphysics and natural philosophy that have yet to be fully appreciated. (shrink)

This article focuses on some topics in Jeffrey Brower’s recent and excellent book, Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects. Part of Brower’s goal for the book is to reconstruct Aquinas’s views. I offer some reflections on Brower’s use of this metaphor of reconstruction, before considering four topics in some detail. These are: 1. Brower’s discussion of the relation between Aristotle’s Ten Categories and the not-obviously-connected four-fold division of being into substance, form, prime matter, and (...) accidental unity. 2. Brower’s interpretation of prime matter as “non-individual stuff.” 3. Brower’s account of numerical sameness without identity along with some discussion of how this is supposed to be useful for solving a particular puzzle about accidental change. 4. I’ll close with some reflections on Brower’s somewhat novel solution to a longstanding problem with Aquinas’s metaphysics of the afterlife. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 439-440 [Access article in PDF] John F. Wippel. The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. Monographs of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2000. Pp. xxvii + 630. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $39.95. In this weighty volume, John Wippel brings together much of the important research that he (...) has carried out on the metaphysics of Aquinas over the last three decades in order to produce as he calls it, a "Summa metaphysicae" based on the original texts of Aquinas (xxvii). Throughout much of the twentieth century metaphysics has been thought to be Aquinas's greatest philosophical achievement. The historical research of Etienne Gilson and Joseph Owens together with the philosophical reflections of Jacques Maritain did much to place this topic at the heart of Aquinas scholarship. Therefore, this volume both represents Wippel's central research interest and brings to a head an entire school of Aquinas studies of the twentieth century. It is the clearest and most detailed account of the subject in the English language, bearing the hallmarks of Wippel's scholarship: clarity in reference to the arguments and attention to textual chronology.Metaphysics here does not mean so much a focus on Aquinas's treatment of Aristotle's four causes or his act and potency as much as a clear presentation of Aquinas's reflections on existence (esse) and the implications that this has for his thought. After an introductory discussion of the nature and subject of metaphysics for Aquinas, Wippel devotes the first part of the book to Aquinas's view of existence in order to unpack what it means to talk about individual things as beings, being in general, and the catagories of Aristotle (73-74). Masterfully, he explains Aquinas's analogical approach to being and guides the reader through the interpretive thicket of Cornelio Fabro, G. P. Klubertanz, and Ralph McInerny. An interesting parallel is presented between Parmenides' problem of the one and the many and Aquinas's philosophically interesting view of the composite manner in which concrete individuals exist (161-170). Since no individual creature is the author of its own existence, but does in fact exist, each finite being must receive existence from a single being that exists necessarily. Wippel highlights this and other approaches that Aquinas takes to clarify relations between the many individual beings and the single divine being that lies beyond the study of metaphysics.Part two is devoted to many of the ways in which Aquinas talks about concrete individuals. Here Wippel explains Aquinas's distinctions between substance and accident as well as between matter and form and how they relate to existence. Part three concludes the work with a treatment of what Aristotle and Aquinas call divine science. This consists of more than a hundred pages on Aquinas's famous arguments for the existence of God (379-500) and a discussion of what human beings can understand about God (501-575). Not only does Aquinas conclude that God exists, but he indicates the limited manner in which human beings can understand the divine. The problem is that if we acquire language in relation to concrete individuals, how can we use words to discuss a being who is not bound by space or time? The solution is to speak of words like "good" and "wise" in an analogical sense. Words like these when applied to creatures are used in a sense that is both similar to but different from the way they are used to [End Page 439] speak of the divine. Reiterating the theme of the one and the many, the name "good" has a single and most excellent meaning when applied to God and a limited sense when applied to creatures.This is an excellent and accessible book for the educated reader and specialist alike which can be supplemented by works such as Wayne Hankey's God in Himself: Aquinas' Doctrine of God as Expounded in theSumma Theologiae (Oxford: Oxford... (shrink)

It is now standard to interpret Aquinas as recognizing two main types of material objects: substances and artifacts, where substances are those material objects that result from some particular substantial form inhering in prime matter, and artifacts are those material objects that result from some particular accidental form inhering in one or more material substances. There are two problems with this standard interpretation. First, there are passages in which Aquinas states that accidental forms should be understood not as inhering (...) in substances from the outside, but as entering into their composition so as to be included among their metaphysical parts. Second, there are passages in which Aquinas states that it is impossible for any accidental form to be shared by two or more substances. This article considers what implications these two observations might have for how we understand the metaphysical structure of artifacts in Aquinas’s ontology. (shrink)

The final twenty-five years of the thirteenth century have received relatively little treatment by historians of medieval philosophy. Yet this period, which spans roughly from the death of Thomas Aquinas to the arrival of Duns Scotus at Oxford, is characterized by a remarkable philosophical vitality. One of the more neglected figures of this period is James of Viterbo. A member of the Augustinian Order, James was a Master in the Theology faculty at Paris from 1293-1300. Making use of his (...) recently edited Quodlibetal Questions and De divinis praedicamentis, the dissertation presents a historical reconstruction of James' metaphysics of finite being. Like most medieval thinkers, James is very concerned to distinguish between finite being and infinite being. While the divine being is absolutely simple, pure act, every finite being has within itself a composition of act and potency. This means that finite being has a structure that can be explicated by metaphysical analysis. There are three kinds of metaphysical composition found among finite beings: essence and existence; substance and accident; and matter and form. The dissertation analyzes James' understanding of these three compositions. Chapters I-III examine his position on issues involving essence and existence. Chapters IV and V deal with substance and accident. Chapters VI and VII are concerned with problems arising from the composition of matter and form. In presenting James' thought the dissertation gives some attention to determining his place in the doctrinal milieu of the late thirteenth century. James develops his own metaphysical positions only after deep reflection on the views of his contemporaries. He knows quite well the texts of Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines, and he is familiar with the work of Thomas Aquinas. Although he strives often to harmonize opposed positions, James possesses a highly personal metaphysics that cannot be reduced to that of other thinkers. The dissertation finds evidence for including James within the Neo-Augustinian movement of his day. (shrink)

Scholastic hylomorphism conceives prime matter and substantial form as metaphysical parts of every physical substance. During the early modern period, both hylomorphic constituents faced significant criticism as scientists and philosophers sought to replace Aristotelianism with physical explanations for the workings of the universe. This paper focuses specifically on prime matter and delves into the arguments put forth by four 16th-century scholastic philosophers – Toledo, Fonseca, Góis, and Suárez – in their attempts to establish the existence of prime (...) matter. Firstly, I analyse a set of arguments rooted in substantial change, which emphasize the crucial role of a persistent, common substrate in the processes of generation and corruption. Secondly, I explore a set of ex-nihilo arguments and, thirdly, I examine a series of demonstrations based on the interplay between accidental and substantial change. Although these three sets of arguments converge on the necessity of a common substrate for substantial change to occur, they fall short of demonstrating that this substrate is both prime and shared by all natural entities. Fourthly, I turn to a set of arguments centred on the impossibility of infinite regress, designed to complement those related to natural change, and I assess additional arguments that do not primarily focus on substantial change. Lastly, I draw my conclusions on these argumentative strategies to demonstrate the existence of prime matter. (shrink)

The introduction gives a brief but very useful account of the life and works of Aquinas. The Dictionary is planned as a handbook for modern students on the model of the Plato Dictionary and the Aristotle Dictionary and concentrates on the interests of modern studies in philosophy and theology. Hence terms like Analogy of Being, Participation, Act, Potency, Matter, Form, Person, Individuation, and the other central notions of Thomistic Philosophy receive scant treatment. Similarly theological terms like Incarnation, Trinity, Redemption, and (...) Supernatural are omitted. But it contains an impressive number of entries most of which get several important text references from the works of St. Thomas.—J. K. (shrink)

According to the Aristotelian account of substantial change, that is, the corruption of one substance and the generation of another, prime matter must be found at the starting and at the end point of change, as that which persists throughout the change. But knowing that matter remains as the substrate of change tells us little about the nature of this matter, which constitutes both the corrupted substance and the new generated substance. Among the questions we can ask about its (...) nature are whether prime matter is an entity of its own apart from form; whether it is one in all those individual material substances or is somehow divided or partitioned into different parts. Early commentaries on the Physics and Metaphysics were interested in precisely these questions about the unity and divisibility of prime matter and about what kind of unity this may be. This article aims to investigate how authors from the English commentary tradition in the period 1250–1270 answered these questions. (shrink)

According to St. Thomas, the natures of material things are the proper objects of human understanding.Thomas claims only that the natures of things are the proper objects of the intellect, not that they are its only objects: he does not deny that we have intellective cognition also of the contingent states and situations of particular material things. And he holds that, at least in this life, humans cognize these natures, not through innate species or by perceiving the divine exemplars, but (...) only by abstraction from phantasms (ST Ia, 84.7, 85.1).This claim applies to the exercising of concepts already acquired, as well as their initial acquisition (ST Ia 84.7). Here and throughout, I use “cognition” to translate “cognitio.” As Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed., N. Kretzmann and E. Stump [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 162) points out, translating “cognitio” with “knowledge” is misleading, given that cognitiones can, on Thomas’s account, be false (see, for example, ST Ia 17.3). I discuss Aquinas’s conception of cognition in section I.1. More precisely, the human intellect’s active component, the agent intellect, produces cognition of the natures of material things by abstracting intelligible forms from phantasms and informing them on its passive component, the possible intellect, to actualize the latter’s potency to understand.This division of the intellect into an active and a passive component originates in Aristotle’s cryptic remark that in the soul “there is a mind for becoming all things” and “a mind for producing all things” (DA III 5, 430a10). This passage has been subject to myriad interpretations. Aristotle’s Arabic commentators read him as saying that (one or both) of these intellects are single and separate from individual human souls. In opposition to these interpretations, Aquinas holds that the agent and possible intellects are both immanent powers of each individual soul. Since these interpretations enjoyed considerable popularity in Aquinas’s day, we often find him developing his account of the human intellect in explicit opposition to them (cf. OUIAA). The aim of the present piece is to clarify Thomas’s account of this intellective abstraction, and thereby the precise force of the conceptual empiricism it asserts.Important recent work by several scholars has advanced our understanding of many central aspects of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind and epistemology, including his account of intellective abstraction. See Eleonore Stump, “Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume) 17 (1992); “Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms of Intellective Cognition,” Revenue Internationale de Philosophie 52 (1998): 287–307; “Aquinas on Sensory Cognition,” in Medieval Analyses in Language and Cognition, eds. Sten Ebbesen and Russell L. Friedman, volume 77 in the series Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1999), pp. 377–395. Norman Kretzmann, “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1992); Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas; Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas).Many of these discussions share a salutary focus on Aquinas’s claims regarding the reliability of our faculties, so that their treatments of intellective abstraction tend to center on his prima faciae wildly implausible claim to its infallibility: “The proper object of intellect is the quiddity of a thing, and this is why intellect is not fallible regarding the quiddity of a thing, speaking of it just as such” (ST Ia 85.6). Kretzmann provides an interesting and detailed treatment of this claim. Drawing on a range of texts, he argues that the intellect’s apprehension of the quiddity of a thing is such that one acquires an initial, crude concept of that thing, and that this apprehension must be distinguished from the intellect’s act of compounding, in judgments, the aspects of things so apprehended: it is only through a fallible, and extended process of making such judgments that we arrive at more adequate concepts of things (see the final section of “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance”). MacDonald also makes insightful, and complementary, observations along similar lines (pp. 183–84). However, though helpful, these points do not suffice to explain, let alone render defensible, Thomas’s claim of infallibility: why can’t some of our acts of intellective abstraction yield false cognitions (however rudimentary), in the sense Thomas specifies?; in other words; why can’t the agent intellect sometimes produce in the possible intellect forms which do not correspond to the forms that actually inhere, or even could inhere, in material things? I think that Stump is right to take this optimism to be one striking instance of Thomas’s general epistemic optimism rooted in his conviction that God designed our cognitive faculties (Stump, “Foundations of Knowledge,” pp. 145–48).The interpretation of his intellective abstraction provided here complements Stump’s insight. For it, in effect, elaborates how Aquinas’s theistic metaphysics grounds his epistemic optimism about the first operation of our intellect. In particular, it explains how the agent intellect, as the human participating likeness in the divine light of understanding, has the active potency to order phantasms in such a way that it can produce in the possible intellect intelligible species which are determinate likenesses of the particular material things of which we have experience (cf. Section III iv, below). Examining his distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition, and his account of the way the former, in phantasms, supplies the data for intellective abstraction, will lead us to reassess the nature of Thomas’s antinativism—arguably the most important historical and philosophical legacy of his cognitive psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy by Tobias HoffmannNicholas OgleFree Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy by Tobias Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), xiv + 292 pp.Modern readers are often perplexed by the frequency and rigor with which angels are discussed in medieval philosophical texts. To the untrained eye, it may seem as if debates concerning the various properties (...) and abilities of purely spiritual beings are the epitome of Scholastic extravagance, which can be safely disregarded—if not outright ridiculed—as a fanciful diversion from more essential philosophical concerns. The truth, of course, is that angelological reflection gave rise to some of the most original philosophical ideas of the Middle Ages, from Anselm's two affectiones of the will to Aquinas's "real distinction" between essence and existence. Far from being an idiosyncratic theological addendum to an already complete philosophical system, consideration of the angelic nature was in fact a central component of medieval philosophy, without which certain crucial metaphysical and psychological insights might not have occurred. This often-neglected truth is given detailed expression in Tobias Hoffmann's Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy, which explores how philosophical investigation into the fall of the angels—that is, the hypothesis of an evil choice made by rational beings under optimal psychological conditions—helped bring about significant advances in medieval debates about free will. Focusing on the century immediately following the reception of Aristotle's action theory in the Latin West (from roughly the 1220s to the 1320s), Hoffmann examines how theological claims regarding angelic sin influenced medieval thinkers as they sought to reconcile the intellectualism of Aristotelian moral psychology with their understanding of free will as the power to choose between alternatives.This period is particularly deserving of study, Hoffmann argues, because it was then that the existence of free will first began to be "investigated within a philosophical account of action," rather than merely asserted on theological grounds as a necessary corollary of the doctrines of grace and sin (1). Consequently, theological anthropology took what Hoffmann calls a "psychological turn," with theologians newly determined to explain rational agency in terms of the interaction between different powers of the soul. In Hoffmann's estimation, the subsequent debates over the respective roles of intellect and will in the process of decision-making, as well as the relation between faulty cognition and voluntary wrongdoing, gave rise to some of the most innovative theories of free will in the later Middle Ages—including not only those of celebrated thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, but also those of lesser-known luminaries such as [End Page 388] John of Pouilly and Peter Auriol. Although the concerns that motivated these debates were primarily anthropological, having to do with specifically human psychological processes, Hoffmann's study foregrounds the role that the angels played in the unfolding of various controversies. Comparing medieval angelological discussion to the thought experiments commonly employed by contemporary philosophers, Hoffmann argues that angels proved significant because they provided a subject matter in which rational freedom could be considered in a pure and ideal form, abstracted from any material constraints (3). While the angelic nature was certainly regarded as worthy of study in its own right, it was also often viewed as an opportunity to explore the nature of cognition and volition simpliciter, in relation to which the distinctiveness of human psychology could be better understood.The book is divided into three parts, each of which traces the historical development of a distinct topic related to the free will debate. In the first part, Hoffmann presents a lucid account of the various ways that medieval thinkers employed Aristotelian ideas—including not only the essentials of his action theory, but also metaphysical doctrines such as the distinction between active and passive powers—as they sought to explain the psychological origins of free will. Comprising over half the text, these chapters provide a comprehensive overview of the free will debate from its origins in the writings of Anselm of Canterbury to its culmination in the proto-modern theorizing of William of Ockham, including a thorough discussion of the controversies... (shrink)

Students of Thomas Aquinas have so far lacked a comprehensive study of his doctrine of the transcendentals. This volume fills this lacuna, showing the fundamental character of the notions of being, one, true and good for his thought. The book inquires into the beginnings of the doctrine in the thirteenth century and explains the relation of the transcendental way of thought to Aquinas's conception of metaphysics. It analyzes 'Being', 'One', 'True', 'Good' and 'Beautiful' individually and discusses their importance for the (...) philosophical knowledge of God. Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas is intended as a contribution to the question 'What is philosophy in the Middle Ages?' It argues that the doctrine of the transcendentals is essential for understanding medieval philosophy. (shrink)

En los textos del Comentario a la Física de Aristóteles, Tomás de Aquino se esfuerza en destacar la distinción entre materia prima y privación. La materia prima es el sujeto del cambio sustancial; la privación es la carencia de forma que afecta a un sujeto de cambio, ya sea éste una sustancia natural ya sea la materia prima. Ambos son no-entes, es decir ambos están fuera del ámbito del ser formal o del ser en acto. Pero, mientras la materia prima (...) es en potencia, la privación simplemente no-es. La materia prima posee una confusa entidad ubicada entre el ser en acto o ser formal y el no-ser; abarca al ámbito del ser en potencia. La privación simplemente no es y, en consecuencia, es solo un ente de razón, elaborado por la mente humana con fundamento en la realidad. La materia prima con su ser en potencia es el fundamento ontológico del incesante cambio en el universo y de la esencial temporalidad de toda sustancia individual.Thomas Aquinas in the text of his Commentary to Aristotle´s Physics tries to point out the distinction between prime matter and privation. Prime matter is the subject of any substantial change; privation is the lack of a form affecting a subject of change, either a natural substance or prime matter. Both -prime matter and privation- are non-beings, that is, both are outside the scope of formal being or of being in act. But, if prime matter is in potency, privation simply is not. Prime matter owns a confused entity, located in between being in act or formal being and non-being; it belongs to the sphere of being in potency. Privation simply is not and, so, it is only a being of reason, built by human intellect with basement in reality. Prime matter with its being in potency is the ontological background of continuous change in the world and of the essential temporality of any individual substance. (shrink)

The two studies comprising this dissertation focus upon the contribution of Dietrich von Freiberg, O.P. to late mediaeval problems concerning identity and change in nature. The first study presents Dietrich's theories of the elements and prime matter, and features an extended historical and philosophical critique of Thomas Aquinas' notion of virtual being. It is with this notion that Aquinas attempts to resolve the apparent tension between Aristotle's theory of the chemical mixture and Aquinas' own doctrine of the unity of (...) substantial form. It is argued that virtual being is not a genuine Aristotelian mode of being and in any case does not resolve this apparent tension. Dietrich's own solution follows that of Averroes, maintaining that the elements in the mixed body are diminished from pure act to some degree of potency. It is argued that Dietrich mis-applies aspects of his theory of substantial generation in arriving at this solution. Such diminishment is possible, argues Dietrich, because of the elements' proximity to prime matter. The doctrine of proper form in its proper matter entails that prime matter must be complex, and those "natures" comprising prime matter be punctually indistinct. Thus are the elements themselves punctually indistinct in the homeomerous mixed body. Dietrich's solution is thus problematic precisely because it requires that the elements be capable of interpenetration. ;The second study evaluates, and attempts to situate in its historical context, Dietrich's theory that numerical identity is not preserved in intensive qualitative change. Rather, each new degree of intensity introduces a numerically distinct quality. This is because qualities lack the interiority of essence that substances possess. A survey of contemporaneous sources shows that while there was much opposition to this position, it was not uncommon. The discussion continues with an analysis of Dietrich's arguments that such change also neither is continuous nor entails an infinity of degrees. Degrees of intensity do not correspond with each "now" in the continuum of time. Rather, there must be an indivisible minimum, and intensive qualitative change must therefore be understood as stepwise and discontinuous. (shrink)

Written by a highly respected scholar of Thomas Aquinas's writings, this volume offers a comprehensive presentation of Aquinas's metaphysical thought. It is based on a thorough examination of his texts organized according to the philosophical order as he himself describes it rather than according to the theological order. -/- In the introduction and opening chapter, John F. Wippel examines Aquinas's view on the nature of metaphysics as a philosophical science and the relationship of its subject to divine being. Part One (...) is devoted to his metaphysical analysis of finite being. It considers his views on the problem of the One and the Many in the order of being, and includes his debt to Parmenides in formulating this problem and his application of analogy to finite being. Subsequent chapters are devoted to participation in being, the composition of essence and esse in finite beings, and his appeal to a kind of relative nonbeing in resolving the problem of the One and the Many. Part Two concentrates on Aquinas's views on the essential structure of finite being, and treats substance-accident composition and related issues, including, among others, the relationship between the soul and its powers and unicity of substantial form. It then considers his understanding of matter-form composition of corporeal beings and their individuation. Part Three explores Aquinas's philosophical discussion of divine being, his denial that God's existence is self-evident, and his presentation of arguments for the existence of God, first in earlier writings and then in the "Five Ways" of his Summa theologiae. A separate chapter is devoted to his views on quidditative and analogical knowledge of God. The concluding chapter revisits certain issues concerning finite being under the assumption that God's existence has now been established. -/- John F. Wippel, professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, was recently awarded the prestigious Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association. In addition to numerous articles and papers, Wippel has coauthored or edited several other works, including Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas and The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, both published by CUA Press. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 149 temporary, might he an eyeopener to young Thomists who know so little about his work. In the meantime, however, in this English version of The Eyes of Faith a primary source of first importance has come our way. Catholic libraries should definitely have it on hand for philosophers and theologians to consult. Fordham University Bronx, New York GERALD A. McCooL, S.J. The Phuosophy of Thomas Aquinas: (...) Introductory Readings. Edited by CHRISTOPHER MARTIN. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988. Pp. 202. $57.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). One has a difficult time finding a wholly satisfactory collection of writings from Thomas Aquinas in a single volume. In different ways, the well-known collections of Mary Clark, Robert Goodwin, Thomas Gilby, Vernon Bourke, and Anton Pegis have their merits, hut they have their defects too-one of which is that they all came out twenty to forty years ago. Christopher Martin has recently produced a new collection of readings, and his selection is much different. Add to this that many of the texts in his work are rare or nonexistent in translation, and one begins to see why it is delightful to see this work appear. Christopher Martin has gathered a number of philosophical texts from Aquinas for those who have already cut their teeth in philosophy. (Hence, the uninitiated to philosophy will find things here hard going.) Texts were selected principally with an eye to interesting those students who are most familiar with philosophy in the analytic tradition. They are often unacquainted with theology and at a loss as to how to sort out Thomas's philosophical claims from his theological claims. The aim was to produce a volume which would help such students read Thomas fruitfully and show them that Thomas has many genuine philosophical insights. To this end, texts were chosen that presupposed no, or a minimal, understanding of theology. Not every side of Thomas's philosophical thought is reflected in this work, hut a number of important sides of it are, and an idea of the breadth of it comes through. The format of this work is something like that of Ralph Mclnerny's recent A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas. Each chapter begins with an essay that is closely tied to a Thomistic text or two given at the end of the chapter. In Martin's work, however, the emphasis lies more on the itexts than on the expository essays. Apart from the introduction, the 150 BOOK REVIEWS book is divided into five chapters: Aquinas on Logic; Aquinas on Metaphysics; Aquinas on God; Aquinas on Truth, Knowledge and the Mind; and Aquinas on Ethics. The chapters by design follow the major divisions and order of Anthony Kenny's Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays. The essays which begin each chapter and introduce the texts that follow are solid pieces. They make many references to Thomas's depend· ence on Aristotle and to parallels between Thomas's handling of a problem and recent discussions of the same. They also give guidance in reading the Thomistic texts and explain what is difficult in the doctrine found in the texts. Throughout these essays, the influence of Peter Geach's writings is evident (especially God and the Soul and Three Philosophers). At times it is just an example or the choice of a term, and at other times it is something more substantial. Though Martin's essays are quite accurate and helpful, a reader can find things to quibble with. Thomas's distinction, for example, between id a quo nomen imponitur ad significandum and id ad quod nomen imponitur ad significandum does not seem, as Martin suggests, to be Frege's distinction between sense and reference or Kripke's distinction between the reference of a name and the fixing of a reference. Rather, Thomas seems to be distinguishing more the etymology of a name from its meaning. Again, it will not do to say that the principle of individuation for individuals of the same kind is " distinct lumps of matter " and that the lumpiness of matter in turn is responsible for the individuation of forms. The " lumpiness " of matter is itself a formal feature. Thomas's teaching... (shrink)

Prime matter plays an indispensable role in Aristotle’s philosophy, enabling him to avoid the pitfalls of both naïve Platonism and nominalism. Prime matter is best thought of as a kind of infinitely divisible and atomless bare particularity, grounding the distinctness of distinct members of the same species. Such bare particularity is needed in symmetrical situations, like a world consisting of indistinguishable Max Black spheres. Bare particularity is especially important in modern physics, given the homogeneity and isotropy of space. (...) With the importance of fields in classical, relativistic, and quantum physics, we have good reason to prefer something like Aristotle’s continuous, infinitely divisible matter over indivisible particles. Mass and energy in relativistic physics also points in the direction of prime matter as the enduring substrate of these quantities. Recent work on Aristotelian interpretations of quantum mechanics, further underscores the contemporary relevance of prime matter. (shrink)

I was in March last year, that "philosophy and culture"卅一volume the third period, published "Thomas Aquinas philosophy of" presence "of the meaning and importance of the> text is divided into five sections, because of space limitation, only published the first three paragraphs. Published the beginning of the fourth paragraph of this, that St. Thomas Aquinas in the "Aristotelian metaphysics Note" in the presence of some analysts, is divided into seven sections: one, there, there with the style or matrix; Second, since (...) including the existence of three-dimensional and essence; three, the first three-dimensional self-righteousness that the individual exists, since the immediate nature of the secondary; four per manifold and the combination of quality; five, can sense the quality from the original three-dimensional relationship; six dollars per quality of different shape and quality as well as per the principles of how to become an individual existence; seven dollars per quality-shaped and one question. Last March, in UNIVERSITAS, No. 3, Vol. XXXI, the writer published a paper titled as "The Meaning and Importance of Existence in Aquinas's Philosophy". This article is divided into five parts while, due to the finite of space, only three of them were published. Now in this issue, the fourth part is published in seven sections: first, existence, existence and subject; second, substance, including existence and essence; third, the primary substance is individual existence, and the secondary substance is essence; fourth, form / matter and their composition; fifth, the relationship between sensible substance and form; sixth, the difference between form and matter, and how matter becomes the principle of individual existence; seventh, the unity of form and matter. (shrink)

This paper tests the following hypothesis: that the prime matter of classical Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics is numerically identical to energy. Is P=E? After outlining the classical Aristotelian concept of prime matter, I provide the master argument for it based on the phenomenon of substantial change. I then outline what we know about energy as a scientific concept, including its role and application in some key fields. Next, I consider the arguments in favour of prime matter being identical to (...) energy, followed by the arguments against. The method used is that of ontological profile comparison: does the profile of prime matter match, in key features, that of energy? An affirmative answer, that P=E, would be a momentous discovery: it would show that one of the most neglected and derided ideas of pre-modern metaphysics – a contributor to its downfall in the wake of the Scientific Revolution – was right all along. From a negative answer we would still learn much about the interaction of science and metaphysics. It turns out, however, given what we currently know, that the answer is not quite as simple as one might hope. (shrink)

In the context of Aristotle's metaphysics and natural philosophy, 'prime matter' refers to that material cause which is both the proximate material cause of the four sublunary elements and the ultimate material cause of all perishable substances. On the traditional view, prime matter is pure potentiality, without any determinate nature of its own. Against this view, I argue that prime matter must be physical, extended, and movable matter if it is to fulfil its role as the substratum (...) persisting through the generation and corruption of these elements and the individuating subject in which their defining properties are found. (shrink)

In its formlessness and potentiality, prime matter is a problematic entity of medieval metaphysics and its ontological limitations drastically affect human possibility of conceiving it. In this article, I analyse three influential strategies elaborated to justify an epistemic access to prime matter. They are incidental perception, negative abstraction, and analogy. Through a systematic and historical analysis of these procedures, the article shows the richness of interpretations and theoretical stakes implied by the conundrum of how prime matter (...) can be known by human beings. In particular, the reasons behind the later medieval acceptance of analogy as the main way to unveil prime matter become clearer by pointing out the correlation between the ontological and epistemological levels of the medieval examination of prime matter. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas is one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy and philosophical theology. Relying on a deep understanding of Aristotle, Aquinas developed a metaphysical framework that is comprehensive, detailed, and flexible. Within that framework, he formulated a range of strikingly original and carefully explicated views in areas including natural theology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and ethics. In this book_, _Christopher Hughes focuses on Aquinas’s thought from an analytic philosophical perspective. After an overview of Aquinas’s life (...) and works, Hughes discusses Aquinas’s metaphysics, including his conception of substance, matter, and form, and his account of essence and existence; and his theory of the nature of human beings, including his critique of a substance dualism that Aquinas attributes to Plato, but is usually associated with Descartes. In the final chapters, Hughes discusses Aquinas’s account of the existence and nature of God, and his treatment of the problem of evil, as well as his ideas about the relation of goodness to being, choice, and happiness. Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and God is essential reading for students and scholars of Aquinas, and anyone interested in philosophy of religion or the history of medieval philosophy. (shrink)

The main thrust of this book, novel and yet convincing, is that medieval philosophy cannot be studied without noting the importance its participants paid to political matters. The selections are mostly whole sections of different works, thus enabling the reader to form his own judgments without fear that he is reading the philosophical interpretations of the editors. Writings of al-Fârâbî, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Abravenel, Aquinas, Roger Bacon and Dante are among the twenty-five entries.--C. E. B.

What is the ultimate structure of the material world? Brower’s monograph provides a well-argued reconstruction of Aquinas’s Aristotelian answer to this question: the fundamental contents of the material world are prime matter, substantial and accidental forms, substances, and accidental unities.Brower’s aim is twofold: presenting Aquinas’s ontology of the material world, and also emphasizing its relevance—as a mixed ontology and a peculiar two-tier structured substratum theory, combining elements of both thin and thick particularism—to current metaphysical debates. These two perspectives intermingle (...) in the five sections of the book. In part 1, Brower provides a clear roadmap and lucidly condenses the key elements.. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas describes embryological development as a succession of vital principles, souls, or substantial forms of which the last places the developing being in its own species. In the case of human beings this form is the rational soul. Aquinas' well-known commitment to the view that there is only one substantial form for each composite and that a substantial form directly informs prime matter leads to the conclusion that the succession of soul kinds is non-cumulative. The problem is that (...) this view seems to entail discontinuity in the process of generation. Aquinas argues for the continuity of a conceived being by appealing to the teleological argument at the core of Aristotle's embryogenesis theory: according to Aristotle, embryonic development is a gradual actualization of the form of the species, potentially present in the embryo from the outset. Aquinas denies such a gradualist account due to his metaphysical commitments , arguing instead that the .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews St. Auc~stine and Being: A Me$aphyM,cal Essay. By James F. Anderson. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965.Pp. viii [i] + 76. Guilders 9.90.) Contemporary students of medieval philosophy, especially those influenced by the writings of Gilson, usually view Augustine as primarily an essentialist in metaphysics, while Aquinas is viewed as some sort of existentialist. This is taken to mean that, whereas Augustine seems to identify being with (...) essence or wha~ a thing is, Aquinas distinguishes between what a thing is and its act of existence. The major contribution of Aquinas to later philosophy is often depicted as this distinction between essence and existence. Perhaps the major interest and value of Professor Anderson's essay is that it contests this currently predominant opinion of the essentialist character of Augustinian metaphysics and calls for a re-evaluation of the supposedly revohi~ionary character of the Thomistic concentration upon the act of existence. It is quite evident that Augustine broke with Plotinus when he asserted that the first principle of all things was God, being itself (ipsum esse), rather than the One, which transcends being. The controversy arises over Augustine's view of the nature of being (esse). For Gilson the notion of being remained for Augustine Neoplatonic, while for Anderson Augustine introduced an existential aspect to the notion of being lacking in Neoplatonic thought. Citing the same texts for support Gilson maintains that Augustine interprets the name of God given in Exodus as "I am he who never changes," while Anderson maintains that Augustine interprets Exodus as asserting that God is being, in the sense of existence, itself. The major point of disagreement between Gilson and Anderson is not whether Augustine regarded being as pre~ dominant, but how Augustine interpreted the notion of being. In some texts Augustine maintsSns that being and immutability mean the same thing, in others he argues that a thing truly is 'because it is immutable, and in yet others he argues that a thing is immutable because it truly is. The first opinion seems to be the one frequently favored as an interpretation of Augustine by Gilson. The second is usually regarded as Neoplatonic. The third is the opinion which Professor Anderson argues was most accurately Augustine's. According to Professor Anderson the first two opinions reflect for Augustine a merely factual connection between being and immutability, whereas the third reflects a metaphysical entailment. I should like to mention three points in Professor Anderson's discussion which seem to me weak. Firstly, as Augustine remarks that being is the name for unchangeableness we cannot take this as asserting a merely factual relationship. Secondly, to say that 'being' and 'immutability ~mean the same thing to Augustine or that being and immutability are identical to him does not necessitate, as Professor Andersen claims, denying the primacy of being. If 'being' and 'immutability' mean the same thing, then it is very peculiar to ask which is primary. If it is remarked that 'triangleI means the same thing as 'three sided figure', what sense does it make to ask which notion is primary? I suspect that Professor Anderson's contention makes sense only if one believes that there is a difference in the meanings of 'being' and 'immutability ', but whether or not there was such a difference for Augustine is precisely the point at issue. Professor Anderson asserts that it would be a "metaphysical inconsistency" to claim that God is both being and immutability, but it is not clear why such a claim would be inconsistent if the two terms in fact mean the same thing (p. 30). Thirdly, if, as is in fact the case, Augustine's remarks on the relationship between immutability and being are inconsistent perhaps we should accept the possibility that Augustine himself never came to a clear view on this matter rather than attempt to surmise what Augustine "must have meant." Of course, such inconsistency in Augustine's writings would tend to support the thesis of Gilson that Augustine has difficulties reconciling his theology and metaphysics. Moreover, the analogy Professor Anderson suggests between the Augustinian mutability-immutability contrast and the Thomistic potency-act contrast could only be a very rough one... (shrink)

Is prime matter the same as its potency, its readiness to take on the entire gamut of corporeal substantial forms? This question, arising from a passage in Averroes, lies at the core of later medieval hylomorphism and was hotly debated. The present article looks at three answers to the question by figures from the first half of the fourteenth century: Gerald Ot who takes a Scotistic approach to the issue, John of Jandun and Peter Auriol taking an Averroan (...) tack, and John Buridan with a nominalistic outlook. The discussion reveals a diversity of positions on the nature of potency and its relation to actuality, and in the case of Buridan an unusual view at the heart of his matter theory: the direct inherence of accidental forms in prime matter. (shrink)

How do the variegated forms of sublunar substances arise in prime matter? Averroes throughout his life believed that “a principle from without” was involved, but changed his mind over its identity. While in an early period of his life he maintained that all forms emanate from the active intellect, he later discarded that metaphysical notion and sought to develop a more naturalistic, astrologically inspired account, which identified the heavenly bodies as the source of sublunar forms. Comparing different versions of (...) Averroean texts, this paper seeks to spell out how, in Averroes' view, the heavenly bodies generate forms in matter. Averroes claims that this is brought about by means of their “heats,” an answer that is however problematic seeing that in the Aristotelian cosmology the celestial realm is quality-less. The paper examines Averroes' ideas on the relationship between light and heat, concluding that the Commentator was unable to integrate the postulate that the heavenly bodies inform matter within his Aristotelian theory of matter. (shrink)

Debates in Medieval Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses aims to de-mystify medieval works by offering an illuminating, engaging introduction to the problems that medieval philosophers from Augustine through Ockham wrestled with. Each of the volume’s 11 units presents a debate that will enable students to return to the primary texts prepared to think critically and imaginatively about them. Debates include: Does Anselm have a hierarchical or a flat conception of free will? Is Abelard’s ethics conceptually impoverished? (...) Does Avicenna teach that we acquire concepts through abstraction or emanation? What is Aquinas’s purpose in writing the Summa contra gentiles? How sound are Ockham’s criticisms of Scotus’s theory of universals and individuation? The 10 essays newly commissioned for this volume will advance scholarship in medieval metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, logic, and philosophical theology, and in particular they will showcase what is philosophically distinctive and original in medieval philosophy. Students without experience in the history of philosophy will benefit from each unit’s clear, sharply written introductions that supply the necessary background to approach the debates intelligently. In addition, the volume’s general introduction elucidates the value of studying the history of philosophy through debate, in particular the history of medieval philosophy. Students will find in these debates models that will train them to formulate their own critical evaluations of a wide range of philosophical texts by thinkers with diverse philosophical commitments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MARITAIN AS AN INTERPRETER OF AQUINAS ON THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUATION }UDE P. DOUGHERTY The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. I T HE MEDIEVAL problem of individuation is not the contemporary problem of "individuals" or "particulars" discussed by P. F. Strawson, J. W. Meiland, and others.1 In a certain sense the problem of individuation originates with Parmenides, but it is Plato's philosophy of science that bequeaths the problem (...) to Aristotle and to his medieval commentators. Its solution in Aquinas is not that of Aristotle, nor is it that of Scotus or Suarez. Aquinas will distinguish between the problem of individuation and what we may call the problem of "individuality" or the problem of "subsistence." The solution to both will draw upon many Aristotelian distinctions but will incorporate key elements of St. Thomas's own metaphysics, including the real distinction between essence and existence and his doctrine of participation. It is Maritain's appropriation of St. Thomas's metaphysics that enables him to produce a realistic philosophy of science, one that he offers as compatible with contemporary scientific enquiry. It also enables him to develop a theory of person and personality. But the story begins with Plato. Although Plato's theory of knowledge may appear fanciful to the modern reader, his analysis of scientific knowledge contains a basic set of observations whose truth remains uncontested even 1 Cf. P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen and Co., 1959); J.W. Meiland, Talking About Particulars (New York: Humanities Press, 1970); P. Butchvarov, Resemblance and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966). 19 20 JUDE P. DOUGHERTY though his explanation be faulty. Plato saw clearly that science is of the universal. Things may be particular, but when we consider them as objects of enquiry, the intellect focuses upon the form taken as an exemplar. In Plato's explanation things belong to their various kinds by participating in incorporeal, eternal, and unchangeable archetypes. From a realist's vantage point the problem may be stated simply: Since things are singular, how is it that we intellectually apprehend them as universal? Aristotle's solution is well known and it is one adopted and amplified by St. Thomas. Universals are abstracted from singular things. No one would present Maritain as a medievalist, but, as an interpreter of Aquinas, he has wielded considerable influence in the United States and in Latin America. Many have come to St. Thomas under his tutelage. His knowledge of Aquinas is extensive and is drawn upon throughout his lifelong work, but perhaps nowhere more than in his philosophy of science and in his discussions of the person. The primary text for Thomas's doctrine of individuation is his commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, where he discusses the division and methods of the sciences. Maritain's philosophy is indebted mainly to his reading of Thomistic texts, but he draws heavily, as well, on the works of his contemporaries, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Louis Geiger, and on those of the classic commentators on Thomas, Cajetan, Sylvester of Ferrara, and John of St. Thomas. Though employing St. Thomas, Maritain is always a man of the twentieth century. In books such as the Degrees of Knowledge, Science and Wisdom, Existence and the Existent, and A Preface to Metaphysics, his foe is always some contemporary exponent of a nominalist position.2 "Nominalists,'' he will say, "have a taste for the real, but no sense of being."3 Timeless 2 Degrees ofKnowledge [Les Degres du Savoir(l 932)], trans. G.B. Phelan, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959); Science and Wisdom [Science et Sagesse (1935)], trans. B. Wall (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940); Existence and the Existent [Court Traite de L:Existence et de L:Existant (1947)], trans. L. Galantiere and G.B. Phelan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948); A Preface to Metaphysics [Sept Le~ons sur L'Etre et les Premieres Principes de la Raison Speculative (1934)], trans. B. Wall (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939). 3 Degrees of Knowledge, 3. AN INTERPRETER OF AQUINAS 21 metaphysics, he will lament, no longer suits the modern intellect. "Three centuries of empirico-mathematics have so warped the intellect... (shrink)

In this chapter, I investigate the metaphysical assumptions that medieval thinkers considered necessary in order to integrate the vegetative powers and processes into their conception of human beings as composed of a material body and an immaterial soul. My aim is to show that vegetative powers and processes are central to the late medieval debate on faculty psychology and on the unity or plurality of substantial forms. The chapter has two parts. First, I present three different accounts of (...) the ontological status of the vegetative powers in relation to the body and the soul, as found in Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and John Buridan. All three maintain that the vegetative powers belong to the soul but disagree as to whether they are identical with it or somehow distinct from it, especially when the soul in question is immaterial. Second, I investigate how medieval thinkers accounted for the metaphysics behind the operations of the vegetative powers in human beings, who are endowed with immaterial souls, in particular when it comes to procreation and digestion. A pressing problem for the vegetative powers of human beings is how they can produce a new substance when this composite is supposed to include an immaterial soul which is not naturally generated. Regarding procreation, one can distinguish two different approaches: dispositional generation of material conditions and substantial generation of the body. A similar problem for human beings arises in nutrition and growth once this process is taken to be some kind of substantial change, namely, the corruption of food and the production of new parts of the living being. Two accounts can be distinguished: “transmateriation” of the matter of food into the nourished body and generation of parts of the body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews St. Auc~stine and Being: A Me$aphyM,cal Essay. By James F. Anderson. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965.Pp. viii [i] + 76. Guilders 9.90.) Contemporary students of medieval philosophy, especially those influenced by the writings of Gilson, usually view Augustine as primarily an essentialist in metaphysics, while Aquinas is viewed as some sort of existentialist. This is taken to mean that, whereas Augustine seems to identify being with (...) essence or wha~ a thing is, Aquinas distinguishes between what a thing is and its act of existence. The major contribution of Aquinas to later philosophy is often depicted as this distinction between essence and existence. Perhaps the major interest and value of Professor Anderson's essay is that it contests this currently predominant opinion of the essentialist character of Augustinian metaphysics and calls for a re-evaluation of the supposedly revohi~ionary character of the Thomistic concentration upon the act of existence. It is quite evident that Augustine broke with Plotinus when he asserted that the first principle of all things was God, being itself (ipsum esse), rather than the One, which transcends being. The controversy arises over Augustine's view of the nature of being (esse). For Gilson the notion of being remained for Augustine Neoplatonic, while for Anderson Augustine introduced an existential aspect to the notion of being lacking in Neoplatonic thought. Citing the same texts for support Gilson maintains that Augustine interprets the name of God given in Exodus as "I am he who never changes," while Anderson maintains that Augustine interprets Exodus as asserting that God is being, in the sense of existence, itself. The major point of disagreement between Gilson and Anderson is not whether Augustine regarded being as pre~ dominant, but how Augustine interpreted the notion of being. In some texts Augustine maintsSns that being and immutability mean the same thing, in others he argues that a thing truly is 'because it is immutable, and in yet others he argues that a thing is immutable because it truly is. The first opinion seems to be the one frequently favored as an interpretation of Augustine by Gilson. The second is usually regarded as Neoplatonic. The third is the opinion which Professor Anderson argues was most accurately Augustine's. According to Professor Anderson the first two opinions reflect for Augustine a merely factual connection between being and immutability, whereas the third reflects a metaphysical entailment. I should like to mention three points in Professor Anderson's discussion which seem to me weak. Firstly, as Augustine remarks that being is the name for unchangeableness we cannot take this as asserting a merely factual relationship. Secondly, to say that 'being' and 'immutability ~mean the same thing to Augustine or that being and immutability are identical to him does not necessitate, as Professor Andersen claims, denying the primacy of being. If 'being' and 'immutability' mean the same thing, then it is very peculiar to ask which is primary. If it is remarked that 'triangleI means the same thing as 'three sided figure', what sense does it make to ask which notion is primary? I suspect that Professor Anderson's contention makes sense only if one believes that there is a difference in the meanings of 'being' and 'immutability ', but whether or not there was such a difference for Augustine is precisely the point at issue. Professor Anderson asserts that it would be a "metaphysical inconsistency" to claim that God is both being and immutability, but it is not clear why such a claim would be inconsistent if the two terms in fact mean the same thing (p. 30). Thirdly, if, as is in fact the case, Augustine's remarks on the relationship between immutability and being are inconsistent perhaps we should accept the possibility that Augustine himself never came to a clear view on this matter rather than attempt to surmise what Augustine "must have meant." Of course, such inconsistency in Augustine's writings would tend to support the thesis of Gilson that Augustine has difficulties reconciling his theology and metaphysics. Moreover, the analogy Professor Anderson suggests between the Augustinian mutability-immutability contrast and the Thomistic potency-act contrast could only be a very rough one... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Aquinas, Aristotle, and Descriptive Metaphysics Substance and Accident Form, Matter, and Identity Individuation Substance, Causality, and Science Individuals, Universals, and Abstraction Mind and Soul Essence, Existence, and God.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life by Fabrizio AmeriniJohn LanganReview: Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, trans. Mark Henninger, Harvard University Press, 2013The ongoing and apparently interminable debate over the moral and legal status of abortion has come over the years to resemble the Western front in World War I, with two contending armies facing each other with limited maneuvering (...) room, familiar and overused weapons, periodic artillery barrages, increasing casualties, not much new to report, and a deadly ‘no man’s land’ between them in which virtually nothing survives. Against the gloomy monotony of the abortion wars, in which reductivist accounts of the opponents’ views and repetitious restatements of familiar and cherished views predominate, this book by Fabrizio Amerini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Parma, appears as a refreshing surprise. It is surprising for a number of reasons, which I shall present later. But its refreshing character comes primarily from its moderate tone and the care with which its arguments are presented. Amerini is clearly familiar with the Catholic tradition on abortion and euthanasia; he is respectful of this tradition, which he does not directly challenge, but his sense of scholarly integrity prevents him from simply presenting Aquinas as a defender and synthesizer of all the positions championed in that tradition or by its papal custodians. He has an impressive command of the relevant texts in Aquinas and the Fathers of the Church, which he joins with a scrupulous style of [End Page E-103] philosophical argument which has an affinity with the clarifying labors of G. E. Moore in the early days of analytic moral philosophy. The result is not easy reading, but the reader can be confident that the desire to score rhetorical points and political victories will not distort the philosophical and historical analysis. The book is intended primarily for those who can benefit from careful scholarship, but it should be instructive for all who regard the questions of abortion and euthanasia as genuinely difficult and as deserving our best intellectual efforts.The most important surprise is Amerini’s focus on the issue of delayed versus immediate hominization in the development from embryo to complete human being. Since Pius IX in 1867, the Vatican has insisted that from the moment of conception the embryo becomes a human person whose life is sacred and deserves full protection. This view is ordinarily discussed as ‘immediate hominization’. In Amerini’s view, the embryo lacks the development and differentiation of organs which would enable it to have a sustainable potentiality to perform the acts which are proper to a human person, particularly reasoning and choosing. In the Vatican’s view, the soul is immediately infused by God, though it obviously requires many years of development before it is able to function as a complete and distinct human person. Amerini regards this position as untenable within Aquinas’s metaphysical system and finds in Aquinas’s own texts evidence that he teaches a discontinuous process in fetal life. Amerini regards the insistence on immediate hominization as an arbitrary effort to maintain an absolute uniformity of moral status in all the stages of embryonic and fetal life. He sees the Vatican’s position as leading to an equation of abortion and homicide which he regards as unjustified. He does, however, affirm that there is an identity of subject running from the embryo to the developed person and also that this grounds an ethic of respect for life in all of its stages. The practical conclusions in bioethics he would draw from this position “could allow space for a judicious and discriminating ethical evaluation of individual cases,” as he puts the matter in the concluding sentence of the book.Other surprises are the author’s discovering from a careful reading of Aquinas’s texts that he taught a progressive plurality of substantial forms in the development of the embryo. For Aquinas, it is the substantial form which answers the question about what sort of being the object of our inquiry is. In the case of human persons, the substantial form is the soul, which includes the intellectual properties of... (shrink)

To avoid reification of prime matter, or the indeterminate, yet determinable, substrate underlying all change, many readers of Aristotle have identified this per se unknowable “stuff” with its functional identity, i.e., as a conceptual placeholder of the sum of formal potencies abstracted from concrete particulars.Despite the appeal of this reduction, a case will be made in reference to Siger of Brabant’s Metaphysics for the irreducibility of prime matter. This entails granting an extra-formal reality to prime matter beyond (...) its functional role as a correlate passively receiving forms imparted by an agent without contributing anything of this own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:152 BOOK REVIEWS with Weinrih's theory of formalism which Joseph Raz points out in his essay. One of the most serious of these deficiencies in my opinion is the role that is accorded to the judiciary. Weinrih's theory, as Raz shows, requires that when positive law is in conflict with the " form of law," positive law should he disregarded by the courts, and the courts in these cases (...) not only have the legal right to disregard the statutes of law hut even the moral duty to do so. To give such total discretionary power to the courts is certainly to offer an invitation impossible to re· sist, as the recent judicial history of the United States Supreme Court clearly shows, to autocratic and politically motivated judicial activism. The above remarks, inadequate as they are because of the constraints of space, may offer some indication of the rich diversity of natural law theories currently offering themselves for our consideration. Those interested in natural law theory either within the framework of moral theory, or legal theory, or both, will surely find that a careful reading of this volume will amply reward their efforts. St. John's University Jamaica, New York THOMAS A. FAY Metaphysics: An Outline of the History of Being. By MIECZYSLAW ALBERT KRAPIEC, O.P., translated by Theresa Sandok. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Pp. 539. $69.95 (cloth). This volume is the second in Lang's Catholic Thought from Lublin series edited by Andrew Woznicki. Krapiec's work is a tour de force of Gilsonian Thomism as it founds metaphyscis upon a judgmental grasp of the act of existence in sensible things. The hook is unrelentingly Krapiec. Though there are abundant historical descriptions, there is a minimum of textual citation. Also, the reader can plainly see that Krapiec is intent upon presenting his understanding of metaphysics ad mentem Thomae. Three main parts comprise the hook. Part One is on the object of metaphysics-being as being (as existing). Part One contains the most crucial pages of the hook, viz., pp. 86-100. There Krapiec explains the attainment of this object. This portion is obviously the heart of the hook, and I will treat it in detail later. Part One also includes a lengthy exposition of the transcendentals. Part Two focuses on the structure of being and elaborates the following : act and potency, substance and accidents, matter and form, essence and existence, and the causes of being. There are two noteworthy points here. First, Krapiec's lengthy inclusion (pp. 313-374) of BOOK REVIEWS 153 matter and form within his metaphysics seems to have metaphysics swallowing up natural philosophy. One's misgivings are not assuaged by Krapiec's presentation of the division of the speculative sciences hack in his General Introduction. There the first degree of abstraction is no longer the home of natural philosophy hut the home of the modern humanistic and natural sciences (p. 28). The second degree harbors mathematics, while the third degree is home not only to metaphysics hut "philosophy" (pp. 28-9). The reader is left wondering what has happened to natural philosophy. I see no exigency' for Krapiec's metaphysics to eclipse natural philosophy. Moreover, for some Thomists, the move will create an unfortunate distraction from the good points of Krapiec's metaphysics. Second, by this reader's count, Krapiec presents no less than nine arguments for the real distinction between essence and existence. These arguments include the following: Aquinas's De Ente et Essentia argument that one can know what a phoenix is without knowing that one exists; the necessary character of existence as an essence vs. contingent realities; the monism of existence as an essence vs. the plurality of beings ; the infinity of existence as an essence vs. finite realities; and the reality of the potency/act distinction applied to essence-as·potency and existence-as-act. I cannot engage this involved topic in the short space of a review. I will say, however, that with Joseph Owens, I fail to see why a conceptual distinction between essence and existence is insufficient to deal with the above facts and problems. Underwriting my skepticism is the understanding that meanings can remain... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A New Look at the Prime MoverDavid BradshawThe last twenty years have seen a notable shift in scholarly views on the Prime Mover. Once widely dismissed as a relic of Aristotle's early Platonism, the Prime Mover is coming increasingly to be seen as a key—perhaps the key—to Aristotle's mature metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Perhaps the best example of the revisionist view is Jonathan Lear's Aristotle: (...) The Desire to Understand. Lear describes Aristotle's position as a form of "objective idealism." It is idealism because Aristotle believes that the fundamental nature of reality conforms to the mind, rather than vice versa; it is objective because the mind to which reality conforms is not that of any particular thinking being, but the divine mind—that is, in a sense, mind itself. "Objects must conform to knowledge, but that does not in the least reveal them to be constituted by any contribution from us... Since, for Aristotle, there is nothing distinctively human about the mind to which objects are conforming, there is no basis for saying that the essences we contemplate are mere appearances."1 Although it may seem strange to think of Aristotle as an idealist, Lear makes a plausible case for his interpretation based on the relevant texts (primarily De Anima III.4 and Metaphysics XII.6-10), and he successfully integrates it into his treatment of other important themes in Aristotle's philosophy.Attempts such as Lear's to tease out the significance of divine thinking are not the only new development afoot. Whereas Lear seems to accept the traditional view that the Prime Mover is a final but not an efficient cause, others such as Thomas de Koninck and Sarah Broadie have challenged that view.2 They have successfully shown, in my opinion, that Aristotle's position requires [End Page 1] that the Prime Mover be in some fashion an efficient cause. But they have not successfully elucidated the nature of this causality, nor have they explained how it is related to the theme rightly given prominence by Lear, the creative character of divine thought.My purpose here is to bring these two strands together—to use an interpretation of divine thinking much like Lear's to illuminate Aristotle's otherwise vexing and obscure remarks about the Prime Mover's causality. Rather than follow the time-honored route of commenting upon the commentators, I will examine the whole issue afresh, working in roughly the order dictated by Aristotle's text. My hope is to present a comprehensive interpretation of the Prime Mover that is more compelling than any yet offered by either the revisionists or their critics.1. Activity and Actuality in Metaphysics XIIMetaphysics XII.6 begins with a terse argument for the existence of a first unmoved mover. In the course of this argument Aristotle drops some important clues about the nature of the Prime Mover and its relation to the cosmos.The argument runs as follows: (1) Time cannot come into being or pass away, for that would involve the paradox of a moment before time or a moment after time. (2) Given Aristotle's own definition of time as "the number of motion in respect of before and after," or any other definition linking time inseparably to motion, motion also cannot come into being or pass away, and so must be continuous. (3) There must be a mover to cause this continuous motion. (4) The mover cannot merely be something capable of causing the motion, but must actively do so (, 1071b17). (5) Even for the mover to act continually is not sufficient if its substance includes potency or is potency (, 1071b18), for then the mover could possibly not be, and so could not guarantee an eternal motion. (6) Therefore the very substance of the mover must be actuality (, 1071b20). In the next sentence Aristotle goes on to speak as if there might be more than one mover, noting that "these substances must be without matter, for they must be eternal, if anything is eternal" (1071b20-22). After this nothing more is said about the possibility of more than one mover until chapter XII.8.There is an... (shrink)

“Is there a medieval philosophy?” The work opens with critiques of answers by Gilson, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, and Alain de Libera, and then, on the basis of first-person singular statements by Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, and Eckhart, each of which concerns a doctrine of prima, communia, or transcendentia, proposes its own. “Over time, my conviction has grown that medieval philosophy can be regarded as a way of transcendental thought, as a scientia transcendens...”. The look (...) back to the middle ages must see through Kant’s erroneous assessment of the doctrine, as well as his influential appropriation of the term “transcendental” to refer to a priori modes of cognition, an appropriation that has infected the very study of medieval transcendental thought ; still, it is striking that, for Aquinas, transcendentals, while not a priori forms, “are the prima of the cognitive order”. The exemplary case of Aquinas is presented both to prove the general conviction and to supply a serious lack in Thomistic studies. (shrink)

Aquinas criticizes Averroes’ monopsychism for failing to offer a satisfactory explanation for the obvious fact that “this human being thinks.” However, it also poses great challenges to Aquinas himself to show how an individual person as a material compound can be the subject of thinking, which is supposed to be unmixed with the matter. This essay aims to address these challenges by reconstructing three ontological reasons Aquinas could have offered to demonstrate the compatibility of immateriality and individuality of thinking: the (...) conception of individuality in terms of imparticipability, the complicated status of intelligible species, and the ontological priority of the soul to the body. It argues that the intellective soul as the substantial form of human beings is the ultimate principle of thinking, both for its immateriality and for its individuality. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Disputing the Unity of the World: The Importance of Res and the Influence of Averroes in Giles of Rome’s Critique of Thomas Aquinas concerning the Unity of the WorldG. J. Mcaleer1. introductiongiles of rome (1243–1316) earned, after a decidedly difficult start, the most complete honors open to an academic religious in the Middle Ages. Joining the Hermits of St. Augustine at age 14, he became the first regent master (...) of his order at the University of Paris (1285–1291); his works were made compulsory in the education of students entering the Hermits in 1287; finally, in 1292 he became the general of the order itself.1 Giles is significant, as Mandonnet puts it, because he “est incontestablement au premier rang des théologiens de la fin du XIIIe siècle.”2 But this is not all. Giles is also important to the period because his writings were censured by the same commission that composed the famous Parisian condemnation of 1277. As a result of this [End Page 29] censure, Giles had to leave Paris, returning only in 1285.3 Perhaps of even greater significance is the fact that his teacher was Thomas Aquinas: Giles studied with Thomas at Paris during the years 1269–1272.4 It has been acknowledged for a long time now that Giles did not slavishly follow his teacher but wrought his own subtle and wide-ranging philosophical synthesis out of the various grand traditions of medieval thought.5 As the critical editions of Giles’s works appear (an enormous task currently moving forward under the guidance of F. Del Punta and G. Fioravanti) it will become clearer on how many issues Giles saw fit to criticize the positions of Thomas. It is one of these issues, Giles’s dispute with Thomas over the unity of the matter of the universe, that I wish to elaborate and analyze in this essay.6The thirteenth century is surely one of the greatest for philosophical innovation. Thinkers of the stature of Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Giles of Rome engaged great metaphysical themes ranging from the unity of being and creation to the composition of material substances. These speculations were prompted by their efforts to systematize the vast theological heritage of Christian thought and their encounter with the rich and varied traditions of Greek, Islamic, and Jewish thought newly entering the Latin West in translation. Questions involving matter were especially common amongst these speculations, carrying special significance in that they redounded upon conceptions of human nature and thus upon the Incarnation and Resurrection. Moreover, disputes about matter demanded arduous thought on the interrelations of the fundamental metaphysical notions of the period: act and potency; substance and accident; generation and corruption; essence and existence; principle and thing; and so on. The productivity of these thinkers, and the range and complexity of the [End Page 30] questions they treated, was stunning, and ultimately led to a massive condemnation of 219 philosophical and theological propositions at the University of Paris in 1277. The Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, with the aid of a theological commission that included Henry of Ghent, hoped to efface certain errors contained in these speculations. A large number of the condemned propositions were associated with Siger of Brabant and other so-called “Radical Aristotelians.” However, theses found in the works of Aquinas were included, and, as already mentioned, Tempier soon turned his attention to Giles of Rome.7A dominant issue throughout the condemnations and the works of the period, especially in questions concerning matter, is that of unicity and plurality. This is true of perhaps the two most famous debates: whether human nature is a composition of one or many forms and whether the intellect is one for all human persons. The latter is probably the most studied of all the disputes of that time and the controversy most often associated with Averroes. The question of whether there is one matter in the universe or two is very much connected with the plurality of forms debate. Regarding this debate, thinkers wanted to know not only the number of forms in material composites but also what material... (shrink)

Receptive potencies are the essence in relation to the act of being (esse) and the matter in relation to the form. Suárez identifies the essence with the existence. A potential essence, according to Suarez, is nothing; therefore it cannot be receptive potency for being (esse). The actuality of an actual essence is its being (esse). Hence, the actual essence does not need to receive any further being distinct from it. Essence does not differ really from being (esse); nevertheless, we can (...) conceive it without being. Essence as “whatness”, quiddity, is closely connected with concept and definition. In this regard we may make some critical remarks on Suarez’s doctrine: If the “whatness” is identical to the being (esse), this fact has to be reflected in the adequate notion of the “whatness”. If it is so, it seems that the essence conceived without being (esse) is not the same essence any more. Furthermore: If essence and existence are identified, what is it to which existence can be non-trivially ascribed? What is the receptive potency for being (esse)? Arriaga follows Suárez in the doctrine of essence and being, in his teaching on the prime matter however he goes even further. Whereas Suárez ascribes to the prime matter its own actuality, Arriaga assigns to it some attributes of substance. In contradistinction to the Suarezian conception of receptive potencies, the Thomistic doctrine of the relation of participation between potency and act permits metaphysics to withstand the threats of mechanicism and the post-fregean trivialization of the notion of being (esse). (shrink)

Receptive potencies are the essence in relation to the act of being (esse) and the matter in relation to the form. Suárez identifies the essence with the existence. A potential essence, according to Suarez, is nothing; therefore it cannot be receptive potency for being (esse). The actuality of an actual essence is its being (esse). Hence, the actual essence does not need to receive any further being distinct from it. Essence does not differ really from being (esse); nevertheless, we can (...) conceive it without being. Essence as “whatness”, quiddity, is closely connected with concept and definition. In this regard we may make some critical remarks on Suarez’s doctrine: If the “whatness” is identical to the being (esse), this fact has to be reflected in the adequate notion of the “whatness”. If it is so, it seems that the essence conceived without being (esse) is not the same essence any more. Furthermore: If essence and existence are identified, what is it to which existence can be non-trivially ascribed? What is the receptive potency for being (esse)? Arriaga follows Suárez in the doctrine of essence and being, in his teaching on the prime matter however he goes even further. Whereas Suárez ascribes to the prime matter its own actuality, Arriaga assigns to it some attributes of substance. In contradistinction to the Suarezian conception of receptive potencies, the Thomistic doctrine of the relation of participation between potency and act permits metaphysics to withstand the threats of mechanicism and the post-fregean trivialization of the notion of being (esse). (shrink)

Receptive potencies are the essence in relation to the act of being (esse) and the matter in relation to the form. Suárez identifies the essence with the existence. A potential essence, according to Suarez, is nothing; therefore it cannot be receptive potency for being (esse). The actuality of an actual essence is its being (esse). Hence, the actual essence does not need to receive any further being distinct from it. Essence does not differ really from being (esse); nevertheless, we can (...) conceive it without being. Essence as “whatness”, quiddity, is closely connected with concept and definition. In this regard we may make some critical remarks on Suarez’s doctrine: If the “whatness” is identical to the being (esse), this fact has to be reflected in the adequate notion of the “whatness”. If it is so, it seems that the essence conceived without being (esse) is not the same essence any more. Furthermore: If essence and existence are identified, what is it to which existence can be non-trivially ascribed? What is the receptive potency for being (esse)? Arriaga follows Suárez in the doctrine of essence and being, in his teaching on the prime matter however he goes even further. Whereas Suárez ascribes to the prime matter its own actuality, Arriaga assigns to it some attributes of substance. In contradistinction to the Suarezian conception of receptive potencies, the Thomistic doctrine of the relation of participation between potency and act permits metaphysics to withstand the threats of mechanicism and the post-fregean trivialization of the notion of being (esse). (shrink)