The idea of objectivity is being defined here as a real form, grasped identically by many minds at once but not a phenomenological existent. The phenomenologists would say instead that concepts like objectivity and categorial self-identity are abstractions which emerge out of our embodied engagement with a world, rather than originating in a metaphysical essence separate from the phenomenal world. The objectivity of ‘triangularity’ comes from shared embodied access to the world.
I think the point you made about semiotics losing track of participation is really the crux of it for me. You’ve put your finger on something I was gesturing at eariler re: Deely — that a purely semiotic framework, however sophisticated its relational ontology, risks treating the sign-web as self-grounding and thereby losing the very thing that makes the sign-relation intelligible in the first place: the act of understanding that the sign-process is for. Deely’s Peircean-Thomistic synthesis is genuinely illuminating about the structure of sign-relations, but it tends to flatten the cognitional process into an endless chain of sign-to-sign-to-sign without adequately accounting for what Aquinas calls simplex apprehensio — the moment where the discursive movement terminates in an act of intellectual grasp, where the mind doesn’t just process another sign but actually has the form. That’s not one more node in the semiotic web; its the telos of the whole process, the point where the knower and the known are, as you nicely put it, one in act. And I think your Hegel point supports this from the other direction — if “abstraction” is treated as merely a subtraction from the real (less content, less concreteness, therefore less real), then you’ve already conceded the empiricist framework where the maximally real is the maximally sensory, and the sage is further from being than the stroke victim. Whereas if grasping form is what makes any determinate thought possible at all, then intellectual insight isn’t a retreat from reality but the condition of any cognitive contact with it whatsoever.
This is a strong claim and runs into the familiar objection. If intelligibility just is the mind’s constructive activity, then there’s nothing for that activity to be right or wrong about. Once the distinction between understanding and what is understood collapses, you lose any grounds for saying that one understanding is better than another — that heliocentrism is a better grasp of planetary motion than geocentrism, say, rather than just a different constructive activity. The language of “co-constitution” sounds attractively non-dualist, but under pressure it faces a dilemma: either the world contributes something determinate to the co-constitution — in which case you’ve smuggled in the prior intelligibility you wanted to deny — or it doesn’t, in which case “co-constitution” is just idealism wearing a naturalistic hat. The Thomistic claim isn’t that intelligibility floats around in the world waiting passively to be collected; it’s that things have determinate formal actuality whether or not any finite mind is grasping it, and that the mind’s act of understanding is an achievement precisely because it reaches something it didn’t constitute. Remove that and you haven’t overcome the subject-object divide, you’ve just absorbed the object into the subject and called it partnership.
There’s an important difference between discriminating quantities and understanding quantity. A crow can distinguish three seeds from four — there’s good experimental evidence for this kind of subitizing across many species. But the crow doesn’t grasp why three plus four equals seven, or what it means for a quantity to be prime, or what the relationship is between arithmetic and geometry. The difference isn’t one of degree — as if the crow has a dim grasp of number theory and we have a bright one. It’s a difference in kind of act. The crow’s discrimination operates at the level of sensory estimation (what Aquinas would call the vis aestimativa), which is precisely the sort of thing animals do very well. Intellectual understanding — grasping intelligible relationships that aren’t themselves sensible — is something else entirely.
“Phantasm” isn’t a pejorative term. It’s just the Thomistic term for the imaginative presentation that intellect operates on. Lonergan uses it because he’s retrieving Aquinas’s technical vocabulary; you can substitute “image” or “sensory-imaginative presentation” and the point remains the same. Sensory experience can be as rich and concrete as you like — nobody’s denying that — the question is whether the act of understanding that experience is itself just more sensory experience, or something distinct. If you think its just more experience all the way up, you owe an account of how experience alone generates the kind of normativity that distinguishes, say, a valid proof from an invalid one.
I should have been clearer — Maritain does not concede the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. Maritain would concede the epistemological distinction between what things are in themselves and the mode under which they are known by us. But for him that is not a split within being, it’s a distinction between the fullness of the intelligibility of the things itself and the finite and partial nature of our understanding of it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It looks like you’ve developed some rather unorthodox interpretations of Aquinas. To be completely honest with you, I’m not particularly interested in debating those interpretations. Sorry.
Yes, @Joshs and I have gone through this many a time. He can correct me if I am misremembering (searching the old archive is a little more difficult than the old sit), but IIRC his account of why intelligibility is contained within/posterior to disparate metaphysical systems runs through Wittgenstein’s “private language argument(s)” and notion of hinges in On Certainty.
This is a good example of the impasse though because I think it should be relatively uncontroversial that the private language arguments and the ultimate conclusions in OC (which circle around the same issue as Aristotle’s PA) fail rather obviously if one allows a faculty like noesis/intellectus. The assumptions about how one can even understand that one is in error take a wholly discursive view.
The difficulty, I guess, is that if intelligibility and truth are dependent on these systems then the claim that “intelligibility and truth are dependent on these systems” is itself one of these dependent claims, and yet it rests on assumptions that come out of a particular contingent Western context.
But as you point out, there is an issue with error: error for whom? This seems particularly acute if there is simply nothing (no being, no principles) outside the constructing subject(s)’ activities. In that case, in virtue of what should they agree or disagree or be any way at all?
I suppose it also requires a particular definition of truth and intelligibility. If one assumes that truth is coextensive with being, such that for anything that exists or is actual, it is true that it is so, then what would it mean that “the constructive activity of mind in world simply IS intelligibility?” Why would the mind construct the world one way and not any other if nothing is prior to it? (This seems to me akin to the problem of voluntarism versus intellectualism, but with none of the old apparatus to resolve it).
My apologies @Joshs, I am probably repeating myself.
@Tom_Storm enactivism is primarily a theory about mind and cognition. No doubt many enactivists might say something like that, but I know some that accept the lable that would not. Those are some pretty heavy duty positive metaphysical claims, and it seems possible to accept the theory re cognition without necessarily buying into those.
“For Empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features – that is, natures, say, the human nature – which exist in the real as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).
Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is sugar or what is intruder. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings – only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his (the dog’s) field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free – in man – the potential infinity of knowledge.
Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize.”
Jacques Maritain, ‘The Cultural Impact of Empiricism’
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I’d put it slightly differently. In the classical account, form is not simply another instance of objectivity. It is what grounds objectivity. Objectivity consists in the mind’s successful grasp of form. In other words, triangularity is not objective because many minds agree about it; rather, many minds can agree about it because they apprehend the same intelligible form. Compare Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy, World of Universals:
Suppose that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is ‘in our mind’. …In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word ‘idea’ …causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an ‘idea’. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an ‘idea’ in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man’s act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man’s; one man’s act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man’s act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.
This passage makes a crucial distinction between idea as a formal object of thought and idea as the content of an individual mind. When those senses are conflated — as they very often are — formal objects such as triangularity or logical principles end up being treated as if they were merely private mental contents. Once that happens, they are effectively relativised, since the contents of individual minds are necessarily variable and particular.
I don’t think any of this is the target of enactivism or embodied cognition. If you look at The Blind Spot (Glieser, Frank, Thompson), their principle target is the substtition of abstractions for lived experience. Throughout that book, they write of the ‘surreptitious substitution’ :
“ A particular worldview had been grafted onto science, the worldview we are calling the Blind Spot. The dominant philosophical conception of science led to elevating mathematical abstractions as what is truly real and to devaluing the world of immediate experience, which Husserl called the “life-world.” Modern humanity had lost sight of the fact that reality and meaning are far richer than they are represented as being in the dominant materialistic philosophy attached to science. That philosophy had led to a “disenchantment of the world,” to use German sociologist Max Weber’s term. ”
Excerpt from
The Blind Spot
Adam Frank; Marcelo Gleiser; Evan Thompson;
As Husserl argued — and as these authors elaborate — this situation arose from the quantification of nature beginning with Galileo and the scientific revolution.
But that criticism cannot really be directed at scholastic realism. Even though Galileo’s work in some ways grew out of the medieval intellectual world, the medieval framework did not mistake mathematical abstractions for reality in the way early modern philosophy later did.
In the scholastic context, abstractions were understood as intelligible aspects of things, not as replacements for the world of experience.
So enactivism and embodied cognition — both emerging from phenomenology — can be seen as attempts to restore a sense of participatory knowing. In that respect they may actually be recovering something that was already present in earlier philosophical traditions but became occluded in early modern thought.
Some phenomenologists, such as Robert Sokolowski and Dallas Willard, argue that phenomenology can actually clarify the classical distinction between the act of knowing and the intelligible object known. In that sense it may reopen, rather than close, the space for something like the classical account of universals.
You’re assuming a pre-given intelligible form that the mind grasps. The mind and the form are already there; knowledge is a relation between them. But according to enactivist theory, cognition is not the grasping of pregiven forms. It’s the enactive bringing-forth of a world through embodied interaction.
For Husserl. triangularity isn’t an eternal intelligible form discovered once and for all. It’s an ideal object constituted within historical practices of geometry. We construct ideal invariances out of our engagement with the world. We don’t discover them as already given forms. Many minds aren’t grasping the same form, they are inventing it by abstracting away certain aspects of the experienced world in order to arrive at pragmatically useful invariances.
In the enactivist and phenomenological context, abstractive idealizations are not intelligible aspects of things, they are creative productions or techniques designed to transform our relation to things in certain useful ways.
The concept of an ideality for phenomenologists doesn’t rest on whether or not it is restricted to the content of an individual mind. When I constitute a spatial object like a chair as a persistingly self-identical thing, I have constructed a formal object, albeit not a pure ideality of the order of a geometric form, which involves an intersubjective coordination of perspectives. But the process of idealizing objectivation is the same, and what is essential to it is the generation of invariance. Even when a mathematical form is intersubjectively constituted, this collective process doesn’t usurp the primacy of the role of subjective constitution, what you are calling a ‘private mental content’. Given the fact that that private content already consists of idealizations formed out of interaction with a world, what defines an idea for Husserl is not that it is inner or outer, private or public, but that it constructs identity out of similarity.
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I don’t differ far from you in my interpretation of Aquinas. You may remember that in our initial replies to Wayfarer concerning the op, I agreed with you on the most significant matter.
Where I disagreed was is in some finer points, such as your interpretation of the concept of “participation” in Aquinas. You described an explicitly Neo-Platonist concept. But the Neo-Platonist concept of participation is incompatible with Aristotelian metaphysics. So, Aquinas reworked the concept to be consistent with Aristotle. He worked diligently to resolve differences between Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists and sometimes that requires leaning one way or the other. Notice, we talk about the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, not the Neo-Platonist-Thomistic tradition
It’s not the case that I have unorthodox interpretations of Aquinas. I studied under a professor trained in the Catholic tradition, and I received high grades (unusual for me). However, the concept of participation in Aquinas is quite difficult, especially if one clings to the Pythagorean/Platonist/Neo-Platonist tradition, which Aristotle broke away from. To properly understand Aquinas’ conception requires that we respect this break.
Now, you supported your interpretation with a reference which I have been unable to verify because it does not exist as stated. So I asked you clarify, twice now. If it is true that you actually derived your interpretation from a specific reading of Aquinas, then you ought to be able to recognize the mistaken reference, and provide me the correct reference, where you derived this understanding from Aquinas. Otherwise it appears like you are just making stuff up, and pretending to support it with fake references.
Was it an honest mistake in the reference, or a fake? Instead of rectifying this situation, demonstrating that yours is actually an interpretation, instead of just made up bull shit, you simply dismiss me as having an unorthodox interpretation. That leads me toward the conclusion of fake.
I think two issues are being run together here: the historical genesis of concepts and the logical status of the truths discovered through them.
Of course geometry arises historically through practices—drawing, measuring, idealising shapes, abstracting from experience. No one disputes that. (I read the origin of classical geometry was with the ‘rope-stretchers’ of ancient Egypt, who were required to apportion lots of land on the Nile delta after the flood season.)
But once the concept of a triangle is articulated, something interesting happens: its properties are not up for negotiation. They follow with necessity. The internal angles sum to 180° in Euclidean space not because geometers decided it should be so, but because that is what follows from the structure once defined.
So while the practice of geometry is historically contingent, the relations discovered within it are not. That is the meaning of something that must be true in all possible worlds. Wherever a plane figure is bounded by three straight lines, the form of triangularity follows. That doesn’t require imagining triangles floating in a Platonic realm, but it does suggest that once certain intelligible relations are specified, their consequences are necessary rather than conventional.
Husserl’s account of ideal objects actually comes quite close to this classical insight. In the Logical Investigations he argues explicitly against psychologism and insists that meanings and geometrical forms are ideal unities that remain identical across different acts of consciousness. The same ideal object can be grasped repeatedly and by many minds without being identical to any particular mental act. Again, not because the form pre-exists in any temporal, or even obviously ontological, sense, but simply from logical necessity.
That position has obvious Platonic roots. The ideal object is not a psychological event, nor merely a useful technique. It is an intelligible structure that can be grasped in different acts of thought while remaining the same object.
So while geometrical concepts certainly emerge historically through practices of abstraction, the ideal structures they disclose are not themselves contingent on those practices.
There is no pre-given logical
necessity involved here. For Husserl, a triangle isn’t a container of all its properties waiting to be “discovered” like a hidden Platonic truth. Rather, each property, whether it’s the sum of angles in Euclidean space, the Pythagorean relation for a right triangle, or something more sophisticated like the laws of similarity, is constituted in consciousness at the moment it is intended or conceptualized.
Imagine a proto-geometer starting with a triangle defined via basic measurement techniques. That’s the first constitutive act, giving the triangle a particular sense horizon. When the geometer later discovers, say, the relationship between side lengths and angles, this isn’t merely uncovering a pre-existing logical implication. Instead, it’s a new act of constitution: the triangle takes on a new sense for consciousness. In other words, each new property is a new layer of ideality, not something already “latent” in the triangle independently of the constitutive acts.
This mirrors Wittgenstein’s assertion that discovering a new property is like entering a new language game. You’re not just translating old rules into a new form; you’re actively shifting the framework of sense that gives rise to new truths about the object. Husserl would say these shifts are phenomenologically real. They are new moments of intentionality, not merely unpacking what was “already there” in a Platonic or purely logical sense.
For Husserl, the triangle’s ideal object doesn’t come with a pre-loaded set of all its properties. Its properties emerge through successive acts of constitution, each capable of revealing genuinely new aspects of the object, even if the triangle remains numerically the same eidos across these acts.
That’s right, the Egyptians knew how to make a right angle , and from this they could produce parallel lines to mark off plots of land. This was long before the Pythagorean theorem, so they probably just figured out a simple 3,4,5, formula.
I don’t think I would agree with this. The specified relations are only necessary for the purpose of conforming to the stated conventions. The definitions, axioms, are made to be consistent, but there is no true “necessity”, other than the need to adhere to the conventions for the purpose of logical procedure. The circle might have been defined at 400 degrees, then the right angle would be 50, and the triangle would consist of 100 degrees. there is no necessity in the triangle being 180 degrees.
Then one might argue that the necessity is in the geometric figures themselves, and in their relations to each other. But these figures are only made necessary by application in the physical world. So the necessity here, is to conform to the physical world, in a way which makes the figures useful. So now for example, there’s questioning about Euclid’s parallel postulate because it loses its usefulness in modern conception of space time. And so the limits to Euclid’s geometry are being exposed, and we see that the whole “necessity” of it is just grounded in its usefulness. If it gets replaced by something better, how could there have been any real necessity?
I think there are two phases to sensory experience―the unconscious and the conscious. The latter I see as being meta-cognition or reflective consciousness. What we are not, and even perhaps cannot be, conscious of might also be understood to be a part of consciousness… or not, depending on your ontological view.
I would say the understanding of sensory experience in the most basic sense is an integral part of that experience. The richer the experience the richer that basic intuitive understanding. Meta-cognitive understanding, being better understood as discursive judgement is another matter requiring, I think it is safe to conclude, symbolic language.
In any case, it seems reasonable to think that animals are not conscious in any kind of reflective sense that requires symbolic language.Nonetheless, their environments are obviously intelligible to them, else they could not survive.
Distinguishing a valid proof from an invalid one would seem to consist in the ability to recognize inconsistency and contradiction. We can all do that intuitively, or so it would seem. When throwing the ball for a smart dog, try pretending to throw it and see her run for it only to be disappointed, and see how long it takes her to stop being fooled.
As to notions like “agent intellect” I think those are, to use Whitehead’s term, “fallacies of misplaced concreteness”… which means mistaking the conceptual for the actual.
I am out of time now, and will see if I can come back to respond to some of your other points later.
According to classical logic, logical necessity is pre-given as a matter of definition.
I found this crib on Husserl’s ‘ideal objects’ on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
For Edmund Husserl, an “ideal object” is non-temporal and non-spatial and exists independently of any particular mind or physical instance. These include numbers, logical laws, and universal concepts (essences/eidos). Unlike actual objects, which exist in time and space, ideal objects (e.g., the number 2 or the color red) are universally valid, sharable, and known through through a specialized form of perception Husserl calls “categorial intuition”.
According to an entry in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, key aspects of Husserl’s ideal objects include:
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Irreducibility to Mental Acts: Ideal objects are not mere psychological fictions or ideas inside a person’s head; they are real in their own right, although they do not exist in the physical world, says a chapter in Springer Link.
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Identical Across Instances: An ideal object is a “unity” that remains the same regardless of how many times it is thought or instances of it are perceived. For example, the concept of “redness” is a single, universal ideal object that persists despite the various physical red objects in the world.
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Distinction from Real Objects: While real objects (e.g., a specific apple) are temporal, spatial, and changeable, ideal objects (e.g., the formula for a circle) are universal, atemporal, and unchanging.
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Role in Knowledge: They constitute the objective content of sciences like mathematics and logic. While scientific laws often concern these ideal entities, they can be used to understand the real world indirectly by providing an “approximate” understanding, according to a chapter in Springer Link.
Husserl emphasizes that ideal objects are not existent in sense that objects in the spatio-temporal world are, but they are real in that they are perceptible to all rational beings and exhibit unconditional validity.
Going back to the OP contrasting the ‘sensible and intelligible’ consider this graphic:
The objects differ in colour, orientation, pattern, and proportion, yet an observer immediately recognises the same form in each case: triangularity. The universal form is not identical with any particular instance, yet it is what makes all of them intelligible as triangles.
I asked the House Bot for a summary which ended with:
Ultimately, the discussion seeks to recover a robust account of formal causation and the objectivity of the intellect against the backdrop of modern naturalism and subjectivism.
Here is what I wrote:
The reference is to Summa Theologiae I, Question 84, Answer 5:
For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types
It’s clear to see that I am paraphrasing Aquinas here and it should have been very easy for you to verify this given your stated familiarity with Aquinas. Furthermore, the interpretation I gave is not considered controversial — it is a standard reading within the tradition — certainly not worthy of sustained argument.
I will be bowing out of any further discussion on this point. Thank you.
You’re letting classical logic stand as the ultimate ground, whereas Husserl’s whole transcendental project is precisely to bracket that assumption and locate the grounds of classical logic in subjective processes of constitution.
“… only “composed” logical notions can be defined without referring to psychological genesis; these notions are mediate and hence insufficient. They are already constituted, and their originary sense escapes us. They suppose elementary concepts like “quality,” “intensity,” “place,” “time," and so on, whose definition cannot, in Husserl’s eyes, remain specifically logical. These concepts are correlative to the act of a subject. The concepts of equality, identity, of whole and of part, of plurality and of unity are not understood., in the last analysis, through terms of formal logic.
If these concepts were a priori pure ideal forms, they would not lend themselves to any definition; every definition supposes in fact a concrete determination. This determination cannot be provided except by the act of actual constitution of this formal logic. Thus, we must turn toward concrete psychological life, toward perception, starting from which, abstraction and formalization take place. An already constituted logical form cannot be rigorously defined without unveiling the whole intentional history of its constitution. If such a history is not implied by all the logical concepts, these become unintelligible in themselves and unusable in concrete operations.
Thus, Husserl maintains against Frege that one has no right to reproach a mathematician with describing the historical and psychological journey that leads to the concept of number, One cannot “begin" with a logical definition of number. The very act of this definition and its possibility would be inexplicable. Thus, all that can be asked of a mathematician is to begin with a concrete description of the genesis of the notions they use and thus to bring to light the sense of these notions for a consciousness.(Derrida, The Problem of Genesis)”
Ideal objects are not reducible to psychological events, but neither are they mind-independent entities in a Platonic realm. Their identity is maintained through intersubjective intentional constitution.
So the triangle is not a mental image, a physical thing or a Platonic entity floating somewhere. Instead it is an ideal unity constituted across possible acts of meaning and intuition. That’s why Husserl can say it is identical across acts while still insisting that its sense must be grounded in constituting subjectivity.
The exampleof the proto-geometer shows why the “pre-given logical implication” story doesn’t really work historically or phenomenologically.
Imagine the development:
A triangle is first constituted through practical measuring procedures.Later someone discovers the angle-sum theorem.Later still, new relations appear (similarity, trigonometry, etc.).
From a purely formal perspective, classical logic says those relations were already implied by the definition. But phenomenologically that’s not how they appear. Each discovery involves a new act in which the object acquires a new articulated sense. Logical implication is therefore a retrospective formalization of structures that were originally constituted in acts of insight.
Husserl studied this phenomenon in The Origin of Geometry. There he argued that geometrical truths arise in concrete acts of discovery but then become sedimented in symbolic systems (definitions, proofs, diagrams). Once sedimented, they look like timeless logical necessities, and we forget the constituting acts that originally disclosed them.
So the illusion that geometry is just the unfolding of pre-given logical implications is itself a product of sedimentation. Phenomenology’s job is to reverse that forgetting and recover the living acts of meaning-constitution underneath the formal system.
EQV, In The Summa Theologica, the Questions are divided into Articles. “Q 84, A 5 would indicate Question 84, Article 5. But there is only three Articles to Question 84, therefore no A 5. Also, there is no such thing as “Answer 5” anywhere in Summa Theologica.
Question 84 is called “Of Adoration”. Article 1, ”Whether Adoration is an Act of Latria or Religion?” Article 2, “Whether Adoration Denotes an Action of the Body?” Article 3, “Whether Adoration Requires a Definite Place”. That’s the entirety of Q 84.
Can you please tell me where you derive your quote from. This is important, because each Article is filled with replies and objections, and a part title “On the contrary”. There is only a small section entitled “I answer that,”, and that small part reflects what Aquinas is putting forward as a resolution.
Husserl is certainly concerned with how logical idealities are given to consciousness, but that is not the same as saying their necessity is produced by subjective processes. They are constituted in consciousness, but not the product of it.
What I think Husserl is protesting is the idealisation of objectivity, the idea that logical facts exist independently of any mind. It’s part of the modern view of the Cosmos, which supposedly exists in serene indifference to the human mind, governed by physical principles which operate just so, and of which we ourselves are the product. That is laid out in Crisis. But it’s not what is implied by claiming that logical necessity is binding.
My interpretation of realism doesn’t postulate a “mind-independent realm” in the sense described here. Ideal objects can only be grasped by a mind, certainly. But that doesn’t mean they are created by it. The mind discerns or apprehends that identity rather than generating it. But because they can only be grasped intellectually, then their reality itself is intellectual. They are not phenomenally existent. Because of the Galilean division into the subjective and objective domains, this understanding has been lost.
This is a snippet from the very first post I entered on the Paul Knierem forum when I first started posting
…consider number. Obviously we all concur on what a number is, and mathematics is lawful; in other words, we can’t just make up our own laws of numbers. But numbers don’t ‘exist’ in the same sense that objects of perception do; there is no object called ‘seven’. You might point at the numeral, 7, but that is just a symbol. What we concur on is a number of objects, but the number cannot be said to exist independent of its apprehension, at least, not in the same way objects apparently do. In what realm or sphere do numbers exist? ‘Where’ are numbers? Surely in the intellectual realm, of which perception is an irreducible part. So numbers are not ‘objective’ in the same way that ‘things’ are; but they are nevertheless real.
To put it in other words, The mind grasps mathematical truths, but the necessity that obliges us to accept them is not produced by the mind.
So I can agree that
Without then conceding that logic or mathematics is purely subjective even if they have a subjective pole or aspect which is inextricable from them.
I am responding for the sake of the thread, so that others won’t be confused.
Question 84 of Summa I has eight articles, not three. The quotation I paraphrased is taken from the fifth article. The link to the fifth article can be found below:
The quotation is taken from the second paragraph of the corpus, the one starting with the words “When, therefore, the question is asked: Does the human soul know all things in the eternal types?”. If I am counting correctly, it is the seventh sentence in that paragraph beginning “For the intellectual light itself which is in us…”
Please try to be more careful before accusing people of fabricating references, especially when it can be easily verified. The notation I used (“Summa I, q.84, a.5”) is the standard format for referencing the Summa. Simply pasting that reference (or the quotation I provided) into Google would have brought you directly to the relevant passage.
I hope that helps clear up any remaining confusion.
The dog that is fooled by the fake throw simply revises an expectation, whereas to recognize something as a contradiction is to grasp a relation that holds necessarily — regardless of any particular sensory episode. For human beings, sensory episodes appear to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the grasping of such relations.
I don’t think the fallacy of misplaced concreteness applies in this case. The “agent intellect” is just a theoretical way of talking about a recurring cognitive operation: the act by which we move from images and symbols to the grasp of an intelligible relation. The point is not to reify a faculty, but to identify something that concretely occurs whenever we understand something.
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The point was that pretending to throw the ball is a performative contradiction within the context of the dog’s expectation. I’m looking at such things as being the concrete basis for symbolically elaborated logical contradictions.
Another example in relation to grasping necessary relations―if I throw the ball from the verandah and it goes over the edge, the dog doesn’t know where it is but he grasps that it cannot be on the verandah since he saw it go over the edge.
I think the idea of an agent intellect is a reification of what is merely a theoretical concept. If it is merely a cognitive act then it is an act of intellection―a doing rather than a being, so why the need to posit an entity, a kind of being, that performs the act?