Posted by Miguel  3/11/2018 11:30 am | #1 |
As seen and discussed in this blogpost http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.br/2014/11/augustine-on-immateriality-of-mind.html
The final version which Feser presents there is this one:
1. The mind knows itself directly, without the mediation of a mental image or any other representation.
2. But the mind knows material things only via the mediation of a mental image or some other representation.
3. So, the mind is not a material thing.
Now, what do you think about this argument? Is this, perhaps, akin to Avicenna's "floating man" and knowledge by presence? Contrary to the floating man, Augustine's argument doesn't say that we'd know ourselves if we had no stimulus in any senses, but it still seems to imply that we have a special, immediate access to ourselves in a way that is very different from how it comes to know material objects. And this seems to me plausible.
In defense of 2, we may point not only to experience but also to the fact that it would be meaningless to come to know a material being (even its existence) through anything but its physical effects (how it looks like, smells like, tastes like, sounds like, feels like, or how it composes something else which has physical effects, in the case of scientific inferences). If we are aware of thinking or reasoning, we just are aware of thinking or reasoning, there is no inference from any representation or physical effect, just the immediate presence of thinking.
Could the critic say that this special access just happens to come from the fact that we *are* the thing in question (say, the brain) and we therefore are just aware of ourselves through no representation because of our "self" (which may be material) and not because of anything special in the soul/intellect? I don't think so. If we were bats, one would suppose we'd be aware of who we are by means of physical effects and representations - that I am flying or that I feel something in my wings, that I hear random stuff, etc. Similarly, in a little panpsychist experiment, if we were a chair, how could we be aware of ourselves through anything but the physical relations of our parts? A chair, being what it is, could only know what it is through its physical relations or by mediation of particular representations.
We can say that we are only aware of material things through particular representations, since material things are particular. But our knowledge of the soul/ourselves is immediate, through no representation. But then it can't be material if it doesn't need representations.
Last edited by Miguel (3/11/2018 11:31 am)
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Posted by UGADawg 3/11/2018 11:49 am | #2 |
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.
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Posted by Miguel 3/11/2018 12:24 pm | #3 |
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.
Last edited by Miguel (3/11/2018 12:27 pm)
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Posted by DanielCC 3/11/2018 1:05 pm | #4 |
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)
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)
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Posted by Miguel 3/11/2018 1:47 pm | #5 |
Can you elaborate on what you're calling the imagist thesis and its problems? I may be getting it confused with representationalism or a mental picture of thoughts (for example, Hume's) which Wittgenstein criticized, but that's not Aristotle's position afaik.
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Posted by Greg 3/11/2018 3:45 pm | #6 |
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.)
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Posted by DanielCC 3/11/2018 4:34 pm | #7 |
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.
To qualify: I don't think Aristotle or Aquinas are Imagists, at least not in the Humean sense, but there is an Imagist element in their thought in as far as they (or at least Aquinas) hold that cognition of singulars requires the mediation of the 'phantasm'. This what I meant by it lurking since Aristotle.
More was written on this topic a few years ago.
http://classicaltheism.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?pid=2394#p2394
Last edited by DanielCC (3/11/2018 4:35 pm)
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Posted by Greg 3/12/2018 10:16 am | #8 |
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.
