Robert Koons on Union of Knower with Known

10th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop: Knowledge, Truth, and Wisdom in Aquinas
June 26th, 2021

[peripateticpilgrim]

Aristotle, St. Thomas, and the Identity of the Intellect with its Object
In De Anima Book 3 (431b20), Aristotle infamously asserts that the intellect (the Nous) is, in a way, all things: ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι πάντα.
Narrow focus: accidental forms. Substantial forms are to some extent “hidden”: In Symbolum Apostolorum, pr. 864; In Metaphysics Z par. 1552; De Veritate q. 10 a.
1. Aristotle’s Theory of Forms
Plato’s theory (Phaedo 10b-1-1c): the F itself is that by which Fs are F.
The ablative theory of forms
Aristotle immanentizes and pluralizes the forms.
Aquinas’s moderate realism. See Jeffrey Brower (2017), “Aquinas on the Individuation of Substances, ” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 5(1).
Substances are metaphysically complex. Two forms of the same infima species are not fundamentally distinct—they borrow their distinctness from the numerical distinctness of their parcels of prime matter. Two conspecific forms have a kind of counterfactual numerical identity.
Accidental forms of the same species borrow their numerical distinctness from that of their associated substances.
Formal causation is real causation, between forms and matter (prime matter or substances).
2. Forms in the Human Intellect
To think about and to know lines in general, I must have cognitive access to whatever it is that grounds their unity. For Aristotle, this is a class of conspecific, counterfactually identical forms.
To think of a line, my mind must contain a form of linearity, conspecific with all such forms in nature.
St. Thomas’s intelligible species
The presence of an intelligible species in the mind constitutes a quality, a habit of understanding.
How can the presence of a quantitative form constitute a mental quality?
Two kinds of formal causation: materially-received and intellectually-received. Depends on the categories of the relata.
This is what entails the immateriality of the human intellect, the fact that we do not understand by means of any corporeal organ.
The process of abstraction: a natural process by which a special faculty of the mind, “the active intellect”, using an appropriate sensory image as an instrument, introduces a form into the intellect.
3. The Thomistic Account of Propositional Thought and Inference
Propositional thoughts are composed of things called interior words (verbum interius, also intentio intellecta or conceptio intellectus—see SCG I.53; SCG IV.11, De Veritate Q3.a2, Q4.a1, Q9.a4; De Potentia Dei Q8.a1). The presence of an intelligible species in my mind gives me the capacity to form interior words that represent the corresponding kind of natural thing.
Aristotle thought (De Anima iii 8, 432a8-9, 431a16–17; De Memoria 1, 449b31–450a1), and St. Thomas seems to agree phantasms (SCG II.80-81, In De Memoria, Lesson 1, par. 314-320), that our ability to engage in propositional thought and formal deduction depends in some way on our using sensory imagery or phantasms.
It is forms (ablative forms) that are responsible both for the facts about possibility and necessity, and for our knowledge of these facts.
4. Two Platonic Alternatives
Is the presence of a form in the human mind a matter of the essences of that form and of the human mind, or is it a matter of contingent fact that any human mind possesses the form in question? The two versions of Platonism: an innatist version (forms exist in the mind essentially) and an empiricist version (forms exist in the mind contingently, presumably as a result of actual experience of the natural world).
Intellectually Received Formal Causation (IRFC)
For both Aristotelians and empiricist Platonists, the IRFC relation is a contingent one, a contingent accident of the mind. The problem of the Platonist is this: what is it on the side of the form that actualizes its IRFC relation to a particular mind at a particular time?
5. Representationalism
An account of thought and knowledge that makes no use of ablative forms and no use of any special relation of intentional formal causation between forms and individual minds.
Reductive representationalists attempt to identify the representation relation with some form of causal or teleological connection between elements within the mind and features in nature. Primitive representationalists (Brower and Brower-Toland 2008) take the representation relation to be inexplicable and indefinable.
Aristotle and St. Thomas both endorse a representationalist account of all non-intellectual representation in the soul—that is, they give a representationalist account of sensory content and sensory knowledge. I take the “spiritual” reception of a quality R in the sense organ to be reducible to the natural reception of a representing quality Q. (ST I, Q78, a3).
5.1 The Problem of Content Indeterminacy for Intellective Representationalism
James Ross (1992), “Immaterial Aspects of Thought, ” Journal of Philosophy 89:136-50. Edward Feser (2013), “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought, ” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87: 1–32.
Mental item-type R represents feature F in the human soul if and only if human beings have a natural disposition or potentiality to form an instance of R in the brain in response to the influence of some feature F in the environment.
Extrinsic causal relations between organisms and their environment have a certain degree of variability and slackness. This means that the corresponding representational content is somewhat vague or indeterminate.
David Lewis’s best-interpretation model—theistic version. Downside: content of mental acts is extrinsic to it. Obstacle to self-knowledge.
5.2.The Problem of Modal Knowledge for Intellective Representationalism
Having such knowledge involves being able to distinguish between true universal generalizations that are wholly grounded in the essences of things, and those true universal generalizations that are only contingent or local in character.
Intuitive knowledge of essences requires a connection between essences and the human mind, and this representationalism cannot provide us.
What about primitive representationalism? This gives us a direct semantic connection between our concepts and the corresponding essences, but it doesn’t provide any way for information about the essences to govern our thinking or imagining.
Bealer, George (2002), “Modal Epistemology and the Rationalist Renaissance, ” in Conceivability and Possibility, Gendler and Hawthorne, eds. (OUP), pp. 71-126. Bengson, John (2015), “Grasping the Third Realm, ” Oxford Studies in Epistemology 5:1-38.