Robert Pasnau

What is Sound

Our standard view about sound is incoherent. On the one hand, we suppose that sound is a quality, not of the object that makes the sound, but of the surrounding medium. This is the supposition of our ordinary language, modern science and a long philosophical tradition. On the other hand, we suppose that sound is the object of hearing. This too is the assumption of ordinary language, modern science and a long philosophical tradition. Yet these two assumptions cannot both be right – not unless we wish to concede that hearing is illusory and that we do not listen to the objects that make sounds. To avoid these consequences we must recognize and repair the inconsistencies contained in our standard view of what sound is. I offer an account that describes sound as a quality belonging, not to the medium, but to the object that makes the sound. email : pasnau@sju.edu

Souls and the Beginning of Life (A Reply to Haldane and Lee)

In a recent book, I attempt to use the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas to defend a moderate view regarding abortion: that an abortion at any time during a pregnancy should be considered a grave loss, but that it should be considered murder only after roughly the middle of the second trimester. John Haldane and Patrick Lee contend that I have misunderstood the implications of Aquinass view, and that in fact his metaphysics supports the conclusion that a human being comes into existence at the moment of conception. In this paper, I make a brief reply.

Form and matter

The first unquestionably big idea in the history of philosophy was the idea of form. The idea of course belonged to Plato, and was then domesticated at the hands of Aristotle, who paired form with matter as the two chief principles of his metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the medieval period, it was Aristotle’s conception of form and matter that generally dominated. This was true for both the Islamic and the Christian tradition, once the entire Aristotelian corpus became available. For this reason, although there is much to say about the fate of Platonic Forms in medieval thought, the present chapter will focus on the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotelian commentators have been puzzled by form and matter for as long as there have been Aristotelian commentators. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these are topics about which Aristotelians have never formed a very clear conception, and that their failure to do so was the principal reason why Aristotelianism ceased to be a flourishing research program from the seventeenth century onward. For those who aspire to a modern revival of Aristotelianism, the concepts of form and matter can easily take on the aspect of a kind of Holy Grail, such that if only we could get these ideas clearly in focus, we could see our way forward on any number of philosophical fronts, such as the union of mind and body, the coherence and endurance of substances, the nature of causality, and so on. The historical record, however, suggests that this hope is a snare and delusion, insofar as there has never been any such thing as the theory of form and matter. Although medieval philosophers of all kinds used this terminology incessantly, it had no more of a fixed meaning than does the ubiquitous contemporary philosophical talk of “properties.” Hence, the most a general survey of the topic can do is consider some of the more important areas of agreement and disagreement.

Creation and causation

Medieval thinkers regarded it as a foundational tenet of faith that the world had come to be through divine agency. The three monotheist Scriptures testify to this in clear terms, and each of the attendant theologies also came to regard it as important that God be recognized as creator. But how is God’s creative act to be understood? Is it entirely sui generis , or does it correspond to some recognized category of change, either straightforwardly or by analogy? Are the facts of creation and its salient characteristics susceptible to rational analysis and demonstration, or do they fall outside those phenomena that it is the business of philosophy to investigate? And what might the connection, or lack thereof, tell us about either creation or causation? After lengthy deliberations, and not without dissent, Christian orthodoxy settled on the world’s having been created ex nihilo in a limited past. At the same time, medieval philosophers also inherited the dominant philosophical view that the sensible world has always existed, a sempiternal beneficiary of an eternal agency. The compatibility of these two positions was considered problematic early on, and gave rise to an extensive debate over the eternity of the world. Because eternity was closely linked with self-sufficiency in the philosophical tradition, the idea that there might be other eternal principles besides God prompted questions about the necessity and contingency of the current world order and the different ways in which causal dependency might be construed.

Id Quo Cognoscimus

In a book published eleven years ago, I defended a thesis about Thomas Aquinas’s theory of cognition that has not been widely accepted. My claim was that, despite Aquinas’s apparent statements to the contrary, he actually does conceive of sensible and intelligible species as in a way the objects of cognition. I acknowledged that Aquinas does believe it is the external world we perceive and think about, in normal cases, rather than our mental images or ideas. In this sense, Aquinas is a realist about cognition. Nevertheless, I maintained that he is a kind of representational realist, inasmuch as we come to apprehend external things – to perceive them and think about them – in virtue of grasping an internal representation of those things. I said that this thesis has not been widely accepted. Alas, it has not even been narrowly accepted – unless one counts the sole, limiting case of myself. This is to say that, so far as I know, no one else has been persuaded that this reading of Aquinas is correct. A better man would at this point conclude he is wrong, but I (again alas) am not that man, and so I must confess to remaining persuaded of my original thesis. Still, I am not here going to offer further arguments for that thesis, or even recite the original arguments.1 Instead, I want to step back from the case of Aquinas and consider more generally the philosophical issues at stake in the Aristotelian idea that forms – that is, species – can be used to explain mental representation. I believe it is not generally recognized just how perplexing and problematic an idea this is, and that the reason for our failure is that we do not have a very clear sense in general of what forms are and how they relate to their subject. The thesis of this paper is that, once we reach a clear sense of the different things a form might be, we are forced to make various hard choices about how to understand species in cognition.

Democritus and secondary qualities

Abstract Democritus is generally understood to have anticipated the seventeenthcentury distinction between primary and secondary qualities. I argue that this is not the case, and that instead for Democritus all sensible qualities are conventional.

Religious authority and the state

Religious authority and the state were conceived very differently in the Byzantine world, the Muslim world, and Latin Europe. This last was the only civilization in which the age-old and nearly universal notion of sacred monarchy was consistently and increasingly challenged. In the Byzantine and Muslim worlds (except among the Shīʿites), the ruler remained a focal point of living religious authority. The Latin West was also distinguished by the variety of views expressed on this subject and the variety of forms which the relationship between church and state took. In some places the bishop was also temporal ruler, whereas in self-governing cities clergy had no overt political role. In feudal kingdoms, bishops were major landowners and often state counselors, but they owed their position partly to royal favor. Moreover, the way in which the church–state relationship was understood and theorized in the West changed as time went by. In Byzantium, by contrast, it never changed, while in the Muslim world, changes were rarely registered in what people wrote down. BYZANTIUM Eastern Christendom drew its notion of sacred monarchy from Roman imperial ideology, christianized by Eusebius of Caesarea ( ca. 260–340). The one emperor was supposed to reflect the one God; he ruled “by God’s favor” as “God’s deputy.” The common form of address to a Byzantine emperor was “O most divine emperor.” For more than a thousand years, the Eastern church regarded the empire as an essential part of the expression of Christ in the world.

Arguments for god’s existence

Kant named the three main sorts of argument for God’s existence “ontological,” “cosmological,” and “teleological.” All three sorts were deployed in the Middle Ages. “Ontological” arguments are deductive and have no empirical premises. These originated with Anselm of Canterbury and flourished in the thirteenth century, but fell into disuse afterward, reemerging only with Descartes. Medieval “cosmological” arguments are also deductive, but have at least one empirical premise. Most medieval cosmological arguments depend heavily on material from Aristotle or John Philoponus; the most original medieval contributions were by al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Cosmological arguments typically first infer the existence of something, and then argue that it is God. Although medieval philosophers had much to say on the second score, for reasons of space this chapter focuses only on their existence arguments. Teleological arguments – arguments from design – were not prominent in medieval philosophical theology and mostly remained at an intuitive level. The Middle Ages’ real contribution to natural theology thus lies with the first two sorts, and so this chapter discusses only these. ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS Anselm gave the first “ontological” argument in Proslogion 2. The key passage is this: We believe [God] to be something than which nothing greater can be thought … The Fool … when he hears … “something than which nothing greater can be thought,” understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his intellect. [But] it cannot exist in the intellect alone. For if it exists only in the intellect, it can be thought to exist also in reality, which is greater. If therefore it … exists only in the intellect, this same thing than which a greater cannot be thought is a thing than which a greater can be thought … So something than which no greater can be thought … exists … both in the intellect and in reality.

Petri Iohannis Olivi Tractatus de Verbo

In what follows I have edited part of the beginning of Peter John Olivis Lectura super Iohannem (LSI), his commentary on the Gospel of John. Olivi (1247/8-1298) discusses at length in this part of LSI a problem of substantial philosophical interest, the nature of a concept, or mental word (verbum). In my introduction to the text I offer a brief overview and analysis of the philosophical argument contained in this Tractatus de verbo (TDV), followed by some editorial details regarding the text.