It's going to depend on a lot of background assumptions, e.g. someone that likes phenomenology is going to have strong grounds for rejecting 2 since phenomenology generally rejects the notion that we know intended objects through some kind of mediate image or representation is incoherent.

I agree that priviliaged acess constiutes an argument against materialism but I think that unfortuantely great philosopher though he was Augstine's argument is flawed. Premise Two is the dreaded 'Imagist' thesis, which has lurked like a colony of cancerus cells since at least Aristotle rose to near terminally overwhelm Western philosophy in the 16th century only to die a death with Logical Positivism. Be thankful its now about as rare as smallpox and pray for its total elimination from this earth.

(Even very intelligent men such as Frege or Russell who spurned Nominalism and Humeanism display elements of Imagism)

Miguel wrote:

UGADawg wrote:

It's going to depend on a lot of background assumptions, e.g. someone that likes phenomenology is going to have strong grounds for rejecting 2 since phenomenology generally rejects the notion that we know intended objects through some kind of mediate image or representation is incoherent.

 
But even phenomenologists would accept that the intended objects are present to us by their material effects, no? We become aware of a ball (as intended object) because we see it, we feel it, etc. Our experience of its material effects or constituents has to have something to do with our awarenss of it. But with the mind, it is not clear that, when we take it as an intentional object, we do so because of any vision, touch, smell, hearing, etc. otherwise, you're probably right.

No, a core part of phenomenology is the bracketing of actual existence claims to focus on essences (the eidetic reduction) e.g. if one was perceiving a triangular shape in visual space the phenomenologist would say that we should put aside all question of whether the object is actual (as opposed to just possible) and focus on its necessary features (for instance that it can be dissected into two further triangles with the addition of a line down the middle).

(Likewise phenomenology began as a project to explain how we cognise abstracta like propositions and mathematical objects)

Augustine's argument suggests others in that family. One could interpret it as something akin to Leibniz Mill - that  complete presentations of all material aspects of the brain one would not alone be able to recognise the workings of the mind (it is only beacuse we understand mental activities that we can correlate them with brain activities). Alterantively it is an argument from privilaged acess*.

*Which I actually agree with. The materialist would say its question-begging to say that no material being has such properties except brains, which is technically true though it would be mighty 'queer', especially as they can give us no explaination of how this property of awareness 'emerged'.

Last edited by DanielCC (3/11/2018 4:59 pm)

The argument requires that the relevant form of mediation by representation cannot just be the state's (say, thinking about a fox) being representational. Otherwise self-knowledge would be mediated by representation. It has to be that there is a third thing, a representational object, which stands between knower and known, grounding the knower's knowing the known.

So construed, (2) is just 'Imagism'. But I think there's a good argument to be made that Aristotle (or at least Aquinas' Aristotle) is not an Imagist in that sense.

(That our knowledge of material things depends on their causally impinging on us is not, I think, true, since one can learn about material things through other people's testimony or through inference as well as through observation. But anyway that consideration doesn't lend support to (2), which is stating that knowledge of material things is mediated by a particular kind of mental item.)

I see what you mean. I meant to deny that they were Imagists in the broader sense, but I had in mind the intellectual side of the cognition of singulars, and was thinking that the problem was that the intelligible species might be play a role akin to a mental image.

It’s hard to say what Aquinas means by ‘phantasm’. If one skins over a number of texts where he argues for the necessity of phantasms in human cognition, the particular inference to that necessity is uniformly odd.

Often ‘phantasm’ is just translated ‘sense experience’. In that spirit I would aim to minimize its role as a mediator, and just say that a phantasm is an activation of the senses by what is sensed (so that to say that the intellect abstracts from the phantasm is just to say that what is thought is more abstract than what is sensed). But it’s not clear to me that that is Aquinas’ intention.