Mediated Experiences: 1-7

Philosophy

We take this book forum as an opportunity to reflect on Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary through our experiences, exploring how these texts served as our tools, and to what end. We discuss a research methods seminar in which we traced one possible variation on the âgenealogical lineâ and âpedagogical legacyâ (p. 33) to which this reader is extended as an invitation. The spirit of that invitation is, in our understanding, not to a canon that would replace any number of others, but to a set of equipment.

The question is not only: What are practices of science today? The question is: How do we become capable of naming anthropological problems of the sciences today? Vocationally, what work on ourselves as anthropologists might we need to do in order to be capable of carrying out this activity? (Stavrianakis, Bennett, Fearnley, 11) 1. I have a distinct memory of my first graduate presentation: a visceral sense of anxiety felt acutely from my stomach to neck. A fear that I'd be unable to articulate what I'd been thinking; that my thoughts weren't even worth articulation in the first place. Learning to engage with the texts (to read, speak about, and think with) was an experience that was part panic, part excitement. They led me to inhabit a space where I constantly questioned and reflected on how I understood myself, my capabilities, and my limitations. That research methods seminar was organized around many of the same texts (https://www.academia.edu/15386387/Research_Methodology_in_Anthropology_Syllabus) as Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, and we (at the time, three students starting graduate school and their professor) traced one possible variation on the "genealogical line" and "pedagogical legacy" (p. 33) to which this reader is extended as an invitation. The spirit of that invitation is, in our understanding, not to a canon that would replace any number of others, but to a set of equipment. We take this book forum as an opportunity to reflect on Science, Reason, Modernity through our experiences, exploring how these texts served as our tools, and to what end. [1] (#_ftn1) 2. I remember my initial surprise, in the seminar as in this reader, at the relative lack of texts disciplined into anthropology. Learning to become a "subject of truth under the conditions of modernity" requires as much unlearning as it does thinking about new concepts and ways of conduct. The works in the twentieth-century human sciences collected in Science, Reason, Modernity have brought, in the words of Paul Rabinow, to whom the reader is dedicated as the editors' teacher (and directly or indirectly ours), "philosophical learning, diagnostic rigor, and a practice of inquiry that operates in proximity to concrete situations into a productive relationship" (p. 250). That is, the reader's texts demonstrate a mode of inquiry that is identifiably anthropological in Rabinow's sense, and share key characteristics of the anthropology he has come to conceptualize and practice. Of course, as Rabinow notes in a different section of Anthropos Today, "it is worth forcefully repeating that there are a multitude of other practices anthropologists might pursue" (emphasis in the original, 2003, 85). 3. I often asked myself "where do I start?" I had a preliminary idea for a research project that would be part of my Master's thesis, but found it difficult to articulate what I'd been thinking. Confronted by what Stavrianakis, Bennett, and Fearnley describe as "diffuse, if not contradictory, possible approaches" (p. 1) toward an object of study, I found it difficult to make sense of what I was doing in anthropology. Many of the texts in Science, Reason, Modernity provided the foundations of a seminar in which I was able to finally conceptualize what it was I wanted to do, identifying the "'actual interconnections among things' in the world" not as ends in themselves, but in order to "grasp the 'conceptual interconnections among problems'" (Weber, p. 10). Rather than provide an overview of widely varying works and a history of methodology, this assemblage of texts helped the reader, a student beginning his graduate program, articulate his own position within an ever-changing field. As the editors, Anthony Stavrianakis, Gaymon Bennett, and Lyle Fearnley, observe, "The modern problematizations of science, those troubled figures illuminated by Dewey and Weber, Canguilhem and Foucault, are themselves already becoming historical." The anthropology of science has captured, in French tradition, an anthropology of the experience of modernity, or as the editors put it, an anthropology of modernities. They argue that therefore future anthropologists of science must take up, observe, and reflect on their relationship to these prior problems in order to "articulate lines of inquiry neither bound within nor forgetful of the modern crises of truth and life" (p. 33). 4. It was only once I stopped expecting "modernity" to present itself to me as an easily digestible concept that I came to see its traces exist almost everywhere. In the reader, the question of modernity is addressed in terms of both its scientific origins and how contemporary anthropology has been transformed in thinking through it. Modernity––what to a student may appear as an elusive concept––becomes a historical event and is put in relation to changes in anthropology. Modernity, for me, became a means through which to better comprehend the existence of contemporary phenomena that include the not-so-distant past. Yet the need to take up the problem of modernity is not quite, or not only, because of the empirical history of a given research topic and the way it exists in the contemporary. The editors tell us that the reader is composed as a guide, a set of texts that has helped them "engage the sciences as matters of truth, power, and ethics" (p. 11). While the texts provide a genealogy of how the human sciences have problematized the "hard" sciences, the editors are clear that intentions are pedagogical."We delineate a genealogical pathway," they tell us, "in order to provide some of the equipment that will enable readers, we hope, to constitute themselves as subjects of a contemporary anthropology of science" (p. 11). As Rabinow wrote in 2003 (excerpted in the reader), the mode of inquiry that he identified in these readings "proceeds through mediated experience. It contributes to what used to be called a Bildung, a process of selfformation, that today might be called an attitude or an ethos" (p. 250). 5. Over the course of our program, the students in my cohort not only critically reflected on who they were and what they were doing in both superficial and fundamental ways, but also struggled with emotional stability, relationships, and even health. In fact, one of the closest bonds I made with another student was after realizing that we were both excusing ourselves from our communal study room to break down and cry in private. This experience was not one of taking ourselves too seriously. Rather, it was part of the process of developing trust in our abilities and the conviction to take ourselves and our work seriously. Roland Barthes writes in "To the Seminar," "just as, for Brecht, Reason is never anything but the sum total of reasonable people, for us, seminary people, research is never anything but the sum total of people who, in fact, search (for themselves?)" (1989, 341). The need to search for ourselves, however, came in part through our need to become capable of doing research and the demands that that work, our interlocutors, and our material, then made on us. One premise of our seminar was that the work we did together with these texts was as fundamental to becoming an anthropologist as the field and "the desk." Underlying this position, and the editors' selection process, is Foucault's work in the ethics and politics of truth, particularly his lectures concerning "practices of the self" or "care of the self." In one of the texts Science, Reason, Modernity includes, Foucault writes that "the care of the self" had been the framework and justification for "knowing oneself" in Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman societies (200). In proposing to guide students towards being a "subject of truth" within this modern moment, the editors are not only tracing ways that the importance of the "care of the self" became displaced to "knowing oneself," they are also trying to encourage students to ask themselves (ourselves) how we can become capable of "speaking the truth" (p. 31). 6. I find this sentiment as inviting and confusing as I did two years ago when I began my graduate studies. To think about oneself as a subject enmeshed in ethical concerns and conflicts seems immensely important in upholding some kind of "ethnographic responsibility" which goes beyond overly stylized attempts at self-reflexivity in ethnographic writing, demanding that the researcher critically think about who they are and what they do. I admit that I am still at a loss to understand how "care of the self" can be incorporated in this "modern moment" – especially in our contemporary universities and disciplines which do not only prioritize knowledge but monetize it into result-oriented production. Through these readings we came to rethink what it means to know: to problematize and creatively think about how the "hard sciences" construct knowledge, curiosity, and objectivity as well as to reflect on our own relationships with truth. "Caring for the self," as Foucault demonstrates in Antiquity, had a positive meaning as well as a generally recognized importance for being able to "know oneself." As subjects seeking new ways to engage with truth in this contemporary moment it is for us to not just place ourselves along genealogical lines but to learn to recognize a journey while it is unfolding and undertake it intentionally. 7. Three main questions remain active for me: how can "care of the self" can be taught? What counts as a sacrifice or transformation in order to gain access to the truth? And what would it mean if students, specifically, are more conscious that what they are embarking on is changing the kind of subjects they (we) may become? One question Science, Reason, Modernity poses is what it means to practice anthropology as a vocation, and, as we engaged these texts as well as our fieldwork, we found that for us this is experimental, conceptual, and ethical. The empirical situations and material of our projects compelled us to adapt our methods and develop new concepts. This required experimentation with the forms, practices, and venues of our anthropological practice, and with ourselves. Works Cited Barthes R. 1989. The Rustle of Language, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rabinow P. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bradley Dunseith (MA, University of Ottawa) has studied ethics and gun ownership in the American South (https://anthropoliteia.net/2015/07/14/thelost-space-of-dissent-amidst-charleston-unity/). He is currently based in Mumbai, India. Sean Miller (https://anthropoliteia.net/author/smillzer/) (MA, University of Ottawa), has studied gentrification, community, and corruption in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently preparing for his PhD and living in Montreal, Canada. Antoine Przybylak-Brouillard (https://uottawa.academia.edu/AntoinePrzybylakBrouillard) is an MA candidate in Anthropology at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on right-to-die advocates in Canada and Belgium and their conceptualization of suffering. Meg Stalcup (https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/? lang=fr#!uottawa/members/957) (PhD, UC Berkeley and San Francisco) is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Ottawa. [1] (#_ftnref1) Each of the numbered paragraphs was written independently as a response to the reader by Dunseith, Miller, and Przybylak-Brouillard. The rest of the text was written by Dunseith, and Stalcup, who compiled, rewrote, and edited the ensemble. [view academic citations]


Material Difficulties: Matter and the Metaphysics of Resurrection in Early Modern Philosophy

Philosophy

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 26, Number 2, 2005 Material Difficulties: Matter and the Metaphysics of Resurrection in Early Modern Natural Philosophy Christia Mercer 1. Introduction When Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, philosophers were still inclined to offer natural explanations in Aristotelian terms. Neither the physical proposals of Bruno himself, nor those of other prominent non-Aristotelians like Paracelsus had diminished the power of the explanatory model offered by the scholastics. For those philosophers watching the demise of Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the burning of the wood and its subsequent effects would have been explained adequately in terms of matter and substantial form. For such Aristotelian philosophers, all natural objects are constituted of matter and form, and natural events are explained in terms of the actualization of the potency of these two "principles of nature." By the time Kenelm Digby composed his Two Treatises of 1644 and Thomas Hobbes his De Corpore in 1655, there was a new explanatory model available to explain such events, one that had greatly diminished the power of the scholastic model. 1 According to the mechanical philosophy, nature is composed of matter-whether the res extensa of Descartes, the atoms of Gassendi, or one of the many less popular accounts of corporeitywhose actions and interactions cause and explain all the phenomena of nature. For the mechanist, therefore, all physical phenomena are to be explained in terms of some kind of matter and motion. Although these thinkers disagreed about how to define the material component in nature, they all took it to be entirely devoid of substantial forms. For our purposes here, it will be helpful to distinguish between first wave and second wave mechanists. A first wave mechanist is someone like Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes, or Gassendi who proposed a version of the mechanical explanatory model before (roughly) 1650. A second wave 123 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL mechanist is a philosopher working in the second half of the seventeenth century who accepts the mechanical explanatory model. For our purposes, it is important that many second wave mechanists were prepared to reject the scholastic explanatory model, replace it with the mechanical one, and yet were not content to accept the metaphysical grounding of the mechanical physics offered by the first wave mechanists. I do not mean to imply that first wave mechanists like Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Galileo considered themselves players on the same team. While each of these "new" philosophers defined himself against the Aristotelians, each also identified himself in opposition to one or more of the others. Because many of the details of their views stand in contradistinction to one another (e.g., on the void, on the cause of motion, on the existence and nature of incorporeal beings, etc.), it is all the more striking that so many second wave thinkers tended to lump them together. Consider, for example, Anne Conway's Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, written in the 1670s. Although Conway is keen to note the dissimilarities between "Cartesianism and Hobbesianism," the differences that interest her concern their views about "incorporeals" and "spirits." Distinguishing clearly between her "fundamental principles" and their "false philosophy," she nonetheless admits "the remarkable and ingenious things concerning the mechanical aspects of natural processes" which are proposed by these philosophers.2 It is important to recognize that despite the doctrinal dissimilarities among Descartes, Hobbes, Galileo, and Gassendi, and despite the fact that they saw themselves as very different, their immediate successors were often happy to consider them members of the same school. The history of the mechanical philosophy and its contribution to what has traditionally been called "the scientific revolution" have been much discussed,a and the subtleties of the doctrinal differences among the "mechanical" philosophers have begun to be noted.4 Despite recent scholarly reevaluations of the demise of the Aristotelian philosophy and despite our greater understanding of the discrete forces behind the rise of the new physics, it remains a fact that the mechanical explanations of physical phenomena won the day against those of the Aristotelians. But what has gone mostly unnoticed in this account is that the metaphysical foundations of that physical model were not a success. As Conway makes perfectly clear, the mechanical explanations are "ingenious" and helpful, but based on utterly "false principles." Such philosophers, insists Conway, have generally erred and laid a poor foundation from the beginning .... From such an absurd foundation, many other most crass and dangerous errors have arisen, not only in philosophy but also 124 MERCERIMATERIAL DIFFICULTIES in theology with great injury to the human race, to the detriment of true piety, and in contempt ofthe most glorious name of God.5 This tension between physics and metaphysics-between the explanations given of physical phenomena and the principles that underlie those explanations-had a major influence on seventeenth-century thinkers and hence on the development of early modern science. Conway, Leibniz, and other prominent seventeenth-century thinkers found severe problems with the metaphysical proposals of the "new philosophers." Many of these problems were generated by their account of matter. Among the most serious of these is that of substantial identity. That is, many second wave mechanists embraced the physical explanations of the new philosophy and yet rejected core doctrines of its proponents. In their eagerness to replace scholastic physical explanations with mechanical ones, philosophers like Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and Gassendi either ignored or refused to answer a number of traditional metaphysical questions concerning identity, especially substantial identity.6 Because theological doctrines as important as the Eucharist and the resurrection of the body depend crucially on such an account, the failure of the mechanists in this regard seemed severe to many seventeenth-century thinkers. The failure of the first wave mechanists to offer adequate metaphysical grounding for such theological doctrines put many thoughtful philosophers in a difficult spot. On the one hand, they were persuaded by the physical explanations of the new mechanical philosophy; on the other hand, they could not embrace a philosophy in tension with fundamental Christian doctrines. Some of these philosophers attempted to ground the new physics in a way that would accommodate their theological commitments. In this paper, I focus on one such theological doctrine, namely, the doctrine of the resurrection. After describing the doctrine, I present Aquinas' neat way of accounting for it, and then reveal the tension between the doctrine and the account of material substance assumed by first wave mechanical philosophers. I propose that many philosophers working in the second half of the seventeenth century-many second wave mechanists-were critical of the mechanical philosophy for this reason. I use Leibniz as an example of someone willing to rework the mechanical philosophy so that it could accommodate the doctrine of resurrection. 2. The Metaphysics of the Resurrection The Christian doctrine of the resurrection creates severe metaphysical demands on any thinker concerned to construct a philosophy consistent with Christian theology. Many fundamental Christian beliefs depend 125 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL on the fact that human beings will be resurrected, as was Jesus Christ before them. The doctrine maintains that at some time in the future, our immortal soul will be reunited with its long-buried mortal body. Paul makes clear the centrality of the doctrine: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. (Romans 6.3-8)7 Although Paul himself seems to distinguish between the body of the flesh and the "spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15.42), the idea evolved among Christian theologians that the resurrected body must be (in some sense) the same as the one that died. So the basic philosophical question became: how can it be the same human substance that persists through the radical changes in a human life, then dies, and then is resurrected? Paul himself hints at a possible answer: "And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body" (1 Corinthians 15.37-8). The underlying metaphysics here may be interpreted as follows: There is some sort of substantial core that underlies all the changes ofthe substance, including the radical changes of death, the disintegration of the flesh-andblood body, and the resurrection of a body which, despite its more spiritual nature, contains its former core.8 3. Scholasticism and Substantial Identity For most Aristotelian philosophers, natural objects are constituted of two principles, matter and form, and natural events are explained in terms of the actualization of the potency of these two principles. Roughly speaking, for the scholastics, the substantial forms of bodies possess innate powers that incline those bodies to behave in characteristic ways: fire, for example, contains the innate power to heat and to rise while rocks possess the tendency to fall. Although scholastics differed widely about the right way to characterize matter, form, and substance, they agreed that the active form combines with the passive matter to create an individual concrete substance. For such philosophers, the problem of substantial identity was relatively easy to solve: an individual concrete substance like Socrates persists as long as the union of form and matter does. As long as Socrates' substantial form 126 MERCERIMATERIAL DIFFICULTIES organizes and activates his material component, he is the very thing that he is. Moreover, the Aristotelian account of substance is perfectly consistent with substantial change. The oak tree grows new leaves in the spring and yet remains the same thing. Socrates loses his hair and yet remains the very person that he is. Many scholastics considered their account of identity to be closely related to their account of substantial unity. The underlying assumption here is that despite changes to the substance, as long as it remains the same unified thing, it retains its identity. The tree regains its leaves, Socrates loses his hair, but both substances retain their underlying substantial unity. There was a good deal of disagreement among scholastics about the principle or source of substantial identity and unity. For our purposes, it will be helpful to cite briefly some of the relevant claims made by Duns Scotus. Scotus famously proposes haecceity or "thisness" as the source of the individuation and identity of a substance. For Scotus, as long as an individual substance retains the "thisness" of its substantial form, it will remain the thing that it is. He asserts: "An actually exiting substance, not changed by any substantial change, cannot from 'this' become 'not this'. For this singularity, according to what was just said, cannot be one singularity and another in the same substance that remains the same and is not substantially changed."9 For our purposes, the metaphysical tenacity of substantial unity and identity is noteworthy. As long as a substance retains its substantial form, "it remains the same substance numerically." For the scholastics, the substantial form did a lot of metaphysical work. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that when the "new philosophers" stripped the world of substantial forms, they faced a number of difficult metaphysical problems. Before turning to some of the most prominent of these problems, it will be interesting to consider the tidy success of Aquinas' account of resurrection. 4. Aquinas on Resurrection The Aristotelian notion of substance, as interpreted by many scholastics, seems custom-made to solve the problem of resurrection. In his Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas discusses the doctrine at length. Citing what "the apostle" wrote in Corinthians, he concludes: "It is, then, a necessary tenet of faith to believe that there will be a resurrection of the dead."lo According to Aquinas, Paul is perfectly clear that the resurrection is not just a "spiritual" one and therefore that "it is the body that will rise" (SG IV, 79.7). In confirmation, Aquinas cites Job who says: "in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19.25-6). According to 127 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL Aquinas, the soul is immortal and can exist without its body. However, Aquinas' metaphysics requires that the "natural" place of the soul is to be joined with its body and therefore the metaphysics perfectly motivates the resurrection of the body. Aquinas argues: "[I]t is contrary to the nature of the soul to be without the body" and "since nothing contrary to nature can be perpetual . . . the soul will not be without the body perpetually .... Therefore, the immortality of the soul seems to demand a future resurrection of bodies" (SG IV, 79.10). In presenting his account of resurrection, Aquinas deals directly with our problem, namely, how the body or corporeal substance can be "numerically one from the beginning of his life to the end of it," despite life's radical changes. He summarizes his point: But in the body of man, so long as he is alive, it is not with respect to matter that he has the same parts, but with respect to his species. In respect to matter, of course, the parts are in flux, but this is not an obstacle to his being numerically one from the beginning of his life to the end of it. (SG IV, 81.12) According to Aquinas, "although not everything that is in him materially in one state is also there in another," this is not a problem since "the form and species . . . remain continuously through a whole life" (ibid.). In short, "that he should assume again ... the same body and bodily parts that were with him in life" is "not a requirement of man's arising [from the dead] with numerical identity." Rather, "he need assume ... only what suffices to complete the quantity due." In the end, then, regardless of the particular material parts, as long as there is the relevant quantity and as long as the soul or form is there, the body will be resurrected. But how does the soul or form create such a robust single thing with the matter? The key to Aquinas' answer is his account of substantial unity. In part II of the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas is keen to show that Plato is wrong to claim that the body and the soul are separate. The human soul can exist separately from its body (as it does between the dissolution of the body after death and the resurrection). Nonetheless, when the soul is joined with its body, they "have not each a distinct being" but rather "make up one single being."ll Flatly rejecting Plato's view that the human soul is related to the body "as its mover," Aquinas insists that the human soul is "united to the body as its form." He then offers a very nice account of the relation: For one thing to be another's substantial form, two requirements must be met. First, the form must be the principle of the substantial being of the thing whose form it is; I speak not of the productive but of the formal principle whereby a thing exists and is called a being. The second requirement then follows from this, namely, that 128 MERCERJMATERIAL DIFFICULTIES the form and the matter be joined together in the unity of one act of being .... And this single act of being is that in which the composite substance subsists: a thing one in being and made up of matter and form. (SG II, 68.2-3) Despite the fact that the scholastic account of matter-especially Aquinas' notion of prime matter-is notoriously difficult, it seems safe to say that when the substantial form of a substance actualizes or "reduces" the potency of its matter (reducere ad actum), it necessarily forms a unity with it. The matter forming the unity with the form simply cannot be separated from the form and therefore cannot strictly have components added or substracted. For our purposes, it is particularly important that as long as the substantial form in a substance creates a unity with its material component, the identity of that substance persists. Thus, Paul's body might have turned to dust, but when his soul reunites with some material component at resurrection, the same corporeal substance will exist. As long as Paul's form joins in "one act of being" with matter of the appropriate "quantity," the substantial unity that is Paul will exist. 5. Mechanical Physics and Metaphysical Problems Descartes' Principia Philosophiae of 1644 was intended to replace the scholastic explanatory model as an account of "the entire visible world."12 According to Descartes, there is "no phenomenon of nature" which cannot be explained by the principles enumerated in his treatise, namely, the various sizes, shapes, and motions which are found in all bodies. According to Gassendi in the Syntagma of 1658, the matter of the world and all the things contained in it is made up of atoms ... which God created finite from the beginning, which he formed into this visible world, which, finally, he ordained and permitted to undergo transformations out of which, in short, all the bodies which exist in the universe are composed.13 Whether it was Descartes, Gassendi, or one of the other first wave mechanists, the scholastic explanatory model had to be rejected and natural phenomena were to be explained by appealing to matter and motion. That is, an explanation of physical phenomena is consistent with the mechanical explanatory model just in case it appeals to some sort of matter, the features of that material stuff, and its motion. As Steve Nadler nicely summarizes Descartes' position: Physical bodies just are parcels of matter in motion, collections and configurations of such parts. Hence, all the real and apparent properties of a body (its shape, size, solidity, color, taste, texture, etc.) 129 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL are explained by means of the size, shape, position or configuration, and motion of its constituent material partic1es. 14 It did not take long to digest and respond to the philosophical proposals of first wave mechanists. By the 1650s, there were many philosophers prepared to reject the scholastic explanatory model and replace it with the mechanical one. What struck many second wave mechanists as right about the mechanical philosophy was the idea that the corporeal features of natural bodies were to be explained in terms of matter and motion, so that there was no need for "mysterious" innate tendencies.15 Whether it was the shape of the wood or the heat of a fire, corporeal features were reducible to some form of extension and motion. But many second wave mechanists were concerned with the various metaphysical difficulties posed by the first wave thinkers. Throughout Europe, protests were made against the metaphysical inadequacies of first wave thinkers. In Germany, Johann Clauberg criticized Descartes for not attending enough to the "thisness" of the corporeal substance.16 In England, Anne Conway proposed that these mechanists had inappropriately stripped the world of activityY And in France, JeanBaptiste du Hamel claimed that while the new philosophy explains many of the phenomena, it does not account for their "ultimate source."18 That is, many second wave mechanists would have agreed with Leibniz' comments in section 10 of the Discourse on Metaphysics: I agree that the consideration of these forms serves no purpose in the details of physics and that they ought not to be used to explain particular phenomena. In this the scholastics failed . . . thinking that they could account for the properties of bodies by mentioning forms and qualities, without taking the pains to examine the manner of their operation.19 But Leibniz is equally clear about the fact that although "the physicist can give an explanation of his experiments" by the careful use "of geometric and mechanical demonstrations," ultimately he must return to metaphysics. 6. The Mechanical Physics and the Problem with Resurrection If the body of Paul is a collection of extended corpuscles, then it becomes difficult to grasp how that collection might be resurrected and joined with his soul. Even philosophers who thoroughly embraced the new philosophy recognized its weakness on theological points in general and on the doctrine of resurrection in particular. Robert Boyle himself was keen to show that the mechanical account of nature could be made to cohere with Christian doctrines. In Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection, Boyle is unwill130 MERCERIMATERIAL DIFFICULTIES ing to side-step the issue of resurrection although he admits at the beginning of that work that "if God had not had the scripture positively reveal his purpose of raising the dead, I confess I should not have the thought of any such thing."20 Leibniz' "return to metaphysics" is overdetermined and he offers many different reasons for his rehabilitation of substantial forms throughout his life. The most important of these, for our purposes, concerns the doctrine of resurrection. Leibniz is perfectly clear about the fact that Descartes and other philosophers who maintain that the nature of body consists in extension contradict "our mysteries." In a letter of 1679, he makes the point succinctly: There is another important thing in my philosophy which will give it access to the Jesuits and other theologians. This is my restoration of substantial forms, which the atomists and Cartesians claim to have exterminated. It is certain that, without these forms ... it is impossible to explain our mysteries. (A 11.1, 490) I have argued in my book, Leibniz' Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, that Leibniz developed some of the core elements of his metaphysics in order to explain the Christian mysteries, namely, the Eucharist, the immortality of the soul, the trinity, the resurrection, and so on.21 He was interested in them all. About the resurrection, he had a good deal to say. Consider an essay that he attached to a letter of 1671. In it, he discusses the doctrine at length and criticizes Boyle's treatment. The essay, entitled "On the Resurrection of Bodies," is a longwinded and odd text that considers, among other things, cannibalism and the bones of Lazarus. Throughout the essay, however, Leibniz' main concern is to explain how the soul may be rejoined with its original body at resurrection even though the parts of that body may be "scattered all over the world."22 Leibniz insists that the standard mechanical accounts of matter as passive stuff pose grave difficulties for the doctrine. He argues roughly as follows. For someone who accepts the existence of body as extended stuff (whether Descartes' res extensa, Gassendi's atoms, or some other form of extended corporeity), either there is some kind of general material stuff or there are material atoms. In the former case, because the matter of bodies will be in "continuous flux," there is no single identifiable thing to be resurrected. In the latter case, while it is true that atoms (by definition) persist and therefore that the atoms of a particular body could be reassembled, a number of questions arise due to the long lives ofthese basic material elements. It is at this point in the text that Leibniz indulges in a number of thought experiments involving cannibalism. He points out, for instance, that if one person ingests the 131 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL body of another and absorbs those atoms, then it is unclear to whom the atoms belong. Although Leibniz thinks that, at resurrection, they would probably belong to the first person to have them, his point is that the standard theory of atoms cannot explain resurrection. He is keen to make evident that the issue here is important. At the time of resurrection, the good Christian wants to make sure that it is her body and not someone else's accompanying her soul through the pearly gates. For our purposes, the important moral to the story is that there is more to a body than organized matter. In the letter accompanying the essay, Leibniz writes: "I am of the opinion that in a body, whether of a human being or animal, vegetable or mineral, there is a core [Kern] of its substance .... This core is so subtle that it remains also in the ashes of burned things and can, so to speak, draw itself into an invisible center" (A 11.1, 108). That is, Leibniz seems to take up Paul's suggestion that I will exist when my core does. But what is this core? In short, it is a combination of an active mind or substantial form and some bit of passivity that the mind organizes and through which it acts. As Leibniz writes, "in everything there is a certain seminal center that is diffused throughout the thing" (A 11.1, 116). This center is "the fountain oflife" and that "in which the very soul is implanted." The "subtle spirit or substance" cannot be destroyed but will survive through fire and other changes as "the flower of substance." Leibniz insists that his theory has many benefits. Besides solving the problem of resurrection, it explains "the generation of plants from seeds," the development of the seed in the uterus, and "the essences of chemicals." Leibniz is proud that his theory agrees with "the Jews" (A 11.1, 117). He explains: "Indeed, the Jews maintain that, in a certain little bone, which they call Luz, the soul with this flower of substance remains unconquered by anything that happens." Whether it is the development of a crystal, the generation of a plant, the movement of an object, or the resurrection of the body, the same process occurs: there is a core of substance that diffuses the thing. But what about the dramatic changes which every human being suffers in the eternity of existence? In the letter, Leibniz acknowledges those changes. He explains that the core is like "an embryo or seed of an animal"23 which contains "the core of the whole body" (A 11.1, 109). He insists that "this core of the substance of a human being neither increases nor decreases although its clothing and casing [Kleidt und Deckel are in constant flux." These fluctuations are extreme. Not only is ''the core of the whole body" able to spread throughout the body, it is also able to "retract itself back to its source and fountain" where it is in a state of such subtlety that "no force ... is able to damage it." 132 MERCERIMATERIAL DIFFICULTIES Leibniz' theory of a core of substance is clever: it explains how a substance is able to remain fundamentally the same and yet undergo the changes of growth and death. In the case of Paul, for example, he grows from infant to adult, then dramatically shrinks and expands between the moments of death and resurrection. Although all of these modifications are part of his substance, underneath these variations in his passive principle stands his unchanged core. Because the core just is his soul and body, it is ripe for life, death, and resurrection. 7. Conclusion On the hundredth anniversary of Bruno's death, no self-respecting natural philosopher would have appealed to substantial forms in explaining the physical phenomena of poor Bruno's demise. The success of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century is enormously important, and the historical events leading to its dominance constitute a major part of the history of modem science. But its success is a much more complicated and varied process than historians generally acknowledge. The mechanical philosophy failed to solve a number of metaphysical and theological problems. In the second half of the seventeenth century, this led many progressive thinkers to reconsider the metaphysical grounding of that physics. By focusing on one of the many problems that faced the mechanical philosophy, I have tried to excavate a part of the history of that reconsideration. There is much more work to be done. NOTES 1. A new generation of scholars has begun to document that the traditional categories of old and new, Aristotelian and modern are not what they once seemed. See, e.g., Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Thomas Leinkauf, Mundus combinatus: Studien zur Struktur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers SF (1602-1680) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993); Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Christoph Luthy and William R. Newman, "Matter and Form: By Way of a Preface," Early Science and Medicine 2:3 (1997), pp. 215-26; Daniel Garber, John Henry, Lynn Joy, and Alan Gabbey, "New Doctrines of Body and its Powers, Place, and Space," in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 553-623; Cees H. 133 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes' Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Cees Leijenhorst, Christoph Luthy, and J.M.M.H. Thijssen, eds., The Dynamics of Aristotelian Philosophy from Late Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2002); and my "Kenelm Digby," in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Michael Ayers, et al. (London: Routledge, 1998). Compare these to standard treatments by Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954); Marie Boas, "The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy," Osiris 10 (1952), pp. 422-33; Eduard J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World-Picture, trans. Carry Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); and Robert H. Kargon, Atomism in England from Harriot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 2. Anne Conway, Principia Philosophiae Antiquissimai & Recentimissae (Amsterdam, 1690); The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 9, §2. 3. See, e.g., Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 4. See, e.g., Alan Gabbey, "Henry More and the Limits of Mechanism," in Henry More (1614-1687): Tercentenary Studies, ed. Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 19-36; Leijenhorst, Mechanisation of Aristotelianism; and especially Christoph Luthy, John Murdoch, and William R. Newman, eds., Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 5. Conway, Principles, chap. 9, §l. 6. I do not mean to suggest that historians have not noted the criticisms leveled against first wave mechanists. See e.g., Desmond M. Clark, Occult Powers and Hypotheses: Cartesian Natural Philosophy Under Louis XIV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637-1650 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992); Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, chaps. 8-9; Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton, eds., Descartes' Natural Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000). But no one, as far as I know, has thoroughly analyzed the full range of theological reasons behind the criticism leveled against the mechanists. 7. Biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version. 8. I do not mean to suggest that this is Paul's view. How Paul intended to explain what he says is not clear. 9. John Duns Scotus, "Six Questions on Individuation," in Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals, trans. and ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), quo 4, §77. 10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles N: Salvation, trans. Charles J. O'Neil (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), chap. 79, 134 MERCERJMATERIAL DIFFICULTIES para. 4; hereafter cited as SG IV, followed by chapter and paragraph number. 11. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II: Creation, trans. and ed. James F. Anderson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), chap. 57, para. 6; hereafter cited as SG II, followed by chapter and paragraph number. 12. Rene Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, vol. 8A of (Euvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1964-76), pt. 4, §199. 13. Pierre Gassendi, Physica, in Syntagma Philosophicum, vols. 1-2 of Opera Omnia (1658; reprint Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1964), sect. I, bk. III, chap. 8. 14. Steven Nadler, "Doctrines of Explanation in Late Scholasticism and in the Mechanical Philosophy," in The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy, p. 523. 15. See my "The Vitality and Importance of Early Modern Aristotelianism," in The Rise of Modern Philosophy, ed. Tom Sorell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 33-67. 16. Johann Clauberg, Opera Omnia Philosophica (1961; reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968). 17. Conway, Principles, chap. 9, §2. 18. Jean-Baptiste du Hamel, Philosophia vetus et nova ad usum scholae accomodata; Astronomia physica, De meteoris et fossilibus libri duo, et De consensu veteris & novae Philosophiae (Nuremberg, 1681). 19. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, in series VI, vol. 4 of Samtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Akadamie Verlag, 1923-). I cite the Akademie edition as A, followed by series, volume, and page numbers; translations are my own. 20. Robert Boyle, Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection, in vol. 4 of The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (1772; reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966), p. 192. 21. Christia Mercer, Leibniz' Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22. Leibniz, "On the Resurrection of Bodies," A 11.1, 115. In his discussion, Leibniz cites Biblical chapter and verse. 23. The text is: "dem foetu oder frucht der Thiere." As this phrase suggests, Leibniz' Baroque German does not always conform to modern spelling, punctuation, or the convention of capitalizing nouns.


In defense of extreme (fallibilistic) apriorism

Philosophy

JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES 12:1 (SPRING 1996): 179-192 ©1996 CENTER FOR LIBERTARIAN STUDIES IN DEFENSE OF EXTREME (FALLIBILISTIC) APRIORISM Barry Smith* I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a doctrine to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question: I. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any nonempirical assumptions? One can answer this question with either a 'yes' or a 'no'. 'No' is the preferred answer of most contemporary methodologists - Murray Rothbard is one distinguished counterexample to this trend - who maintain that empirical theories are completely free of non-empirical ('a priori') admixtures and who see science as a matter of the gathering of pure 'data' obtained through simple observation. From such data, scientific propositions are then supposed to be somehow capable of being established. It is one solid result of the philosophy of science that no conception of the way scientific knowledge is gained and scientific hypotheses are formulated can be acceptable. The philosophy of science has shown that certain categories (conceptions, hypotheses, assumptions) are necessarily presupposed if, for example, an empirical observation is to be scientifically usable. Every observation is in this sense 'theory-' or at least 'categoryladen'. One cannot measure anything, and one can bring no results of measurement into correlation with one another, if one does not have prior concepts or categories of what one wants to measure.1 To carry out experiments in meaningful and systematic fashion, to represent the results of these experiments theoretically, and to process these results, one needs assumptions, concepts, categories and other theoretical instruments. Logic and the theory of definition, as well as many branches of pure mathematics, belong to this pre-empirical foundation of the empirical sciences - 'preempirical' in the sense that it cannot be gained through induction or observation but rather makes induction and observation possible. All scientists bring with them non-empirical presuppositions of different * Barry Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. 1 See for example Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 1972), 187ff. A more powerful formulation of this same thesis is to be found already in the writings of Edmund Husserl's teacher Franz Brentano. See Franz Brentano, Deskriptive Psychologie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982); English translation by B. Müller Descriptive Psychology (London: Routledge, 1995). 180 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES sorts, presuppositions which are usually tacit in nature, which will often seem trivial when made explicit, and which will therefore no less often lend sanction to the view that they are somehow empty or analytic - that they are all without exception derived from logic. Most twentieth-century philosophers of science have indeed assumed as a matter of course that scientific theories ought properly to consist entirely of empirical propositions (propositions amenable to empirical testing) built up on a foundation of strictly analytic propositions of logic and mathematics. This leads to the further question: II. Are the propositions which express the pre-empirical assumptions of empirical science in every case analytic (tautological, lacking in content)? 'Yes', say the logical positivists. Logic, and all that one can derive from logic, together with conventional definitions, suffices in their view for the purposes of this non-empirical part of science. Many later analytic philosophers have also believed that this logical-positivist conception of the indispensable non-empirical foundation of science is the only one that can be seriously entertained. They have not, however, noticed that the corresponding analyses even of the simplest examples of non-empirical propositions have still to be provided. Indeed, too often they let the matter rest on programmatic declarations and did not care about providing examples of any sort. Consider for example the law of the transitivity of the part-whole relation.2 This law reads as follows: [TRANS] If A is a part of B, and B a part of C, then A is also a part of C. It may be that some of us may recognize a point in our lives when we first apprehended this law. But still, it is difficult seriously to entertain the thesis that our knowledge of the law is a result of empirical research, of observation and induction. The proposition in question is, however, clearly of extraordinary importance for every science and for every scientific experiment. Like many other laws pertaining to the simplest and most general relational categories, it is at the same time also entirely trivial. Now it is a common peculiarity of human beings that they like to turn away from trivial or elementary propositions of this sort and that they have a tendency to refuse to accept their peculiarities and their consequences: 'trop de vérité nous étonne', as Pascal once formulated the matter.3 Who, after all, is interested in the fact that human action exists, that pleasure is different from greed, that triangles are different from squares, that warnings are different from congratulatings, that Julius Caesar is not a cardinal number. It is for this reason possible that both philosophers and scientists have often overlooked 2 See Barry Smith, "Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy", in Wolfgang Grassl and Barry Smith, eds. Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background (New York: New York University Press, 1986; London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986), 1–36. See also Barry Smith, "Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics", in B. Caldwell, ed., Carl Menger and His Economic Legacy, Annual Supplement to vol. 22, History of Political Economy (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990) 263–288, and Barry Smith, Austrian Philosopy (Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court, 1994). 3 Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres Complètes, L. Lafuma, ed (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), p. 527. Smith In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism 181 the fact that all normal human beings are in possession of a whole host of such items of knowledge or insight. And for this reason also the temptation very easily arises to want to devalue such propositions by classifying them as 'analytic' or 'tautological' or 'lacking in content'. The law of the transitivity of the part-whole relation is however - for all its triviality - not analytic according to the standard reading of this notion. According to this standard reading we are to define 'analytic' as follows: A proposition is analytic if and only if it is either itself a law of deductive logic or it is capable of being transformed into such a law through the replacement of the defined terms it contains with corresponding definitions. All bachelors are unmarried can be exhibited as analytic in this sense by substituting 'unmarried man' for 'bachelor' and noting that the result is an instance of the logical law All A which are B are B. [TRANS], now, contains just one term which might come into question as 'defined', namely the relational term 'is a part of'. This expression is not a logical term; axioms governing the corresponding relation will be found in no standard logical textbook, and neither will [TRANS] itself. Unfortunately for the advocates of the logical positivist conception, however, it is also not definable. Rather it presents an example of one of those fundamental concepts with whose help the very process of defining scientific terms can sensibly begin. According to the definition of 'analytic' that is standardly accepted by logical positivists and by analytic philosophers in general, then, the given law is synthetic. But might one not call into question the preferred definition of 'analytic'? Might one not, with Carnap and others, assert that the truth of a proposition such as [TRANS] is somehow a consequence of the rules of language?4 [TRANS] would then be lacking in content in the sense that it would have nothing to do with the actual world but rather only with our language-use. Yet the given law would clearly still obtain even if no language or rules of language should ever have evolved; indeed it would clearly still obtain even in a world lacking all cognitive subjects. Even then it would still for example be true that, of three arbitrary parts of a stone, or of a planet, if the first is part of the second, and the second part of the third, then the first is also part of the third. To conceive the law of transitivity as 'lacking in content' in the suggested fashion is therefore at least a mite more problematic than the defenders of the corresponding theories have normally supposed. For this reason I shall assume in what follows that at least some of those non-empirical assumptions or hypotheses which are presupposed by the various branches of science are not analytic. The question then arises: 4 See for example Rudolph Carnap, Meaning and Necessity. A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 222-229. 182 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES III. Do we have an infallible knowledge of all synthetic preempirical propositions which are presupposed by the various sciences in the different phases of their development? Already for purely logical reasons it is impossible that one should answer 'yes' to this question. For such pre-empirical assumptions have not always remained the same through the course of scientific development, and successive assumptions have not always been consistent with one another. As is shown by the developments of the last one hundred years in the relations between geometry and physics, the results of empirical research sometimes seem to exercise a retroactive control over pre-empirical assumptions and lead to their elimination or modification. The realm of the pre-empirical thus provides no royal road to indubitable knowledge. Much rather is synthetic pre-empirical knowledge a hard-fought achievement, and those who seek such knowledge must be ready to face many detours and setbacks on the way. For the same (logical) reasons we should have to deny the thesis that the synthetic pre-empirical propositions at the core of science might all be true. Even in the realm of the pre-empirical there is no infallible knowledge and no truth-guarantee. We are dealing here with 'assumptions' in a strict sense of the word, assumptions which may, even if only in isolated instances, turn out to be false. Interestingly, traces of this fallibilistic conception of the a priori are present in Husserl, and already Leibniz spoke of a methodus conjecturalis a priori, which proceeds with the aid of hypotheses: [assumere] causas licet sine ulla probatione.5 With this, however, there arises the following question: IV. Could these assumptions be arbitrary? Feyerabend has given a positive answer to this question, propounding what he calls an 'anarchistic theory of knowledge' and abandoning the scientific goal of truth in favour of a position of epistemological relativism. Feyerabend calls for a maximally broad and 'ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives' - of alternative counter-intuitive (and also 'counter-inductive') theories.6 As soon, however, as we attempt to imagine in concrete fashion what it would mean to practice science (or anything else) consciously and consistently according to the policy of arbitrariness, then we recognize that Feyerabend's doctrine of 'anything goes' is entirely indefensible. For however large and important the role of serendipity in science may be, it is surely obvious that the idea that scientists could apply arbitrary assumptions is impracticable. Even those who hold falsification to be the primary motor of scientific development must insist that the falsification of arbitrary assumptions would be a fruitless enterprise. 5 For Edmund Husserl's fallibilism see for example his "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie", Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 1, (1913). (and as Husserliana III/1, III/2). On Leibniz, see H. Schepers, "A priori/A posteriori", Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1 (Basel/Stuttgart, 1971), p. 466. 6 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 30. Smith In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism 183 This, however, implies that there must be some criteria of evaluation which the scientist applies, whether consciously or not, in working out his assumptions, or through which he allows himself to be guided in determining which assumptions are and which are not acceptable. How, then, does this evaluation of scientific assumptions proceed? The answer to this question that is favoured by the positivists is in its simplest version as follows: we evaluate assumptions exclusively according to their consequences, i.e. according to the principle of expedience or predictive power. We establish in other words that certain assumptions yield assertions about the future which are empirically confirmed - or at least not easily falsified. A position of this sort is defended for example by Milton Friedman, at least in his methodological writings.7 Friedman maintains that assumptions can be completely arbitrary, that they can even be false, if they only enjoy a certain power to generate predictions. It might for example turn out that an economic theory was developed which correlated stock-market movements with sun-spot activity; and then, so long as this theory enjoyed predictive power, it would as theory be fully acceptable. For the positivists, science evolves by becoming ever more concentrated on assumptions with predictive power. Theories and hypotheses which prove unreliable will be slowly filtered out. We have accepted already that there can in this sense be a control even of the pre-empirical assumptions adopted by the natural sciences. This can indeed be counted as a scientific commonplace. The corresponding process of filtering out however, whether it is understood according to the classical model of empirical confirmation or according to the Popperian model of falsification, because it is purely retrospective in nature, does not take us further with respect to the just-mentioned problem of arbitrariness. The question of criteria of ex ante evaluation remains to this extent open (a consequence which we could incidentally have predicted, if we had kept in mind the example of pure mathematics, in which pre- (or non-)empirical assumptions are equally necessary, but where talk of predictive power is clearly inappropriate). For it is of course not the case that the scientist occupies himself with arbitrary assumptions in the hope - and to the extent that the relevant assumptions were truly arbitrary this would have to be a groundless hope - that they will manifest in unexpected fashion a high predictive power. No scientist would ever consciously rely on pure arbitrariness in this fashion. The search for assumptions on the part of the scientist is subject rather to a whole host of ex ante (or as we might also say: a priori) controls. For he seeks only those assumptions which will give him a justified expectation of predictive power. The sun-spot example fails to awaken such expectations precisely because we can find no intelligible reason why sun-spots should cause stockexchange movements. Even if we were to accept such a correlation as a fact, we would still be unsatisfied with the corresponding hypothesis, because we would feel no certainty that this correlation might not at any moment cease to obtain. Certainty of this sort is acquired only where we have some explanation 7 Milton Friedman, "The Methodology of Positive Economics", in Essays on Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 184 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES as to why these and those stock-exchange phenomena are associated in a nonarbitrary fashion with these and those sun-spot phenomena. What, then, are the criteria of ex ante evaluation which serve to temper arbitrariness? Here there is much that is to be said – for instance that our assumptions must in the normal case stand to other accepted assumptions in relations of logical consistency. For our present purposes however it will suffice to point out that these assumptions must, in general at least, be characterized by a certain plausibility. Scientists attempt to find assumptions in relation to which they can have a justified expectation that they be true.8 This holds not least for the category of synthetic pre-empirical assumptions. Indeed we want to claim that with the development of science the relevant synthetic pre-empirical propositions must come to be characterized by such plausibility to an ever increasing degree. Then, however, the question arises: V. Might this sort of plausibility be always a contextual affair, so that an 'intrinsic' plausibility would be excluded? It is commonly held that nothing is in itself plausible, that what one finds plausible depends always on one's presuppositions, perhaps also on certain background features of one's society or language, on the current state of the sciences, and so on. The thesis that all the pre-empirical propositions that are of interest to us here might enjoy only this sort of context-determined (perhaps we might call it 'hermeneutical') plausibility is, however, rather improbable. I cannot, for example, imagine what it would be like for the plausibility of [TRANS] to be context-dependent in the suggested sense. [TRANS] is clearly accepted by all scientists, and it is presupposed also, it seems, in many of the simplest and most common human activities in all cultures, and it seems to be associated with no specific types of scientific problem or subject-matter. Moreover, it would similarly be difficult to conceive of a purely context-dependent plausibility for propositions like red is different from green or seeing is different from hearing. There are, it follows, intrinsically plausible pre-empirical assumptions which play an indispensable (if often trivial) role in the advance of science and knowledge. In the philosophical literature on the topic of the a priori it is usually only certain selected examples of such propositions which are treated of, so that it can easily appear as if they could each be shown in turn to be 'analytic' or 'tautological' by some manipulation of definitions.9 The question however arises: VI. Whether the intrinsically plausible 8 Their eventual falsification might then teach us something important and essential. Cf. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 196f. 9 Against this, see wojciech Zelaniec, "Fathers, Kings and Promises: Husserl and Reinach on the A Priori," Husserl Studies, 9, pp. 147–177. Smith In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism 185 pre-empirical synthetic propositions which play an indispensable role in the sciences are truly given only individually, i.e., in such a way that there obtains no systematic relation between them? Kant answered this question in the negative in that the whole of arithmetic and of physics are based in his eyes on synthetic pre-empirical presuppositions. In the last hundred years it has however come to be taken for granted in the literature that we have to deal here with only single, unconnected propositions. Thus for example the logical positivists, in their attempts to demonstrate the analyticity of all pre-empirical assumptions, have over and over again worked with the same few examples: the law of cause and effect, the proposition that nothing can be red and green all over – examples which, in their isolation, can be dismissed as being of at most curiosity interest and of negligible scientific import. A more careful investigation shows, however, that there are whole systems of such pre-empirical propositions, even leaving aside the examples to which Kant himself paid special attention. Not only is mereology a self-contained science of the laws of part and whole,10 there are also other sciences - or 'pre-sciences' (Vorwissenschaften) as Husserl's teacher Stumpf called them11 - which consist exclusively in intrinsically plausible pre-empirical principles. Stumpf himself offers as examples what he called 'phenomenology' (which he defined as the theory of sensible phenomena), 'eidology' (the theory of non-sensory 'formations' given in experience, including valueand Gestalt-formations), and the 'general theory of relations' (the theory of relational concepts such as 'similarity, equality, intensity, logical and real dependence, the relation of part and whole, and so on).12 These pre-sciences are according to Stumpf: . . . the atrium and the organon of every other science insofar as the object of every science includes their object, since all research makes use of relational concepts and laws . . . In an ideal encyclopedia of knowledge everything which can be said about relations between arbitrary elements in general would have to come first.13 There are therefore, if Stumpf is right, whole systems of synthetic assumptions of a non-empirical sort, assumptions which enjoy an intrinsic plausibility and which play an important (even if easily overlooked) role in the sciences. Husserl himself held that there were three a priori ontologies, three 'material a priori sciences' of thing, soul, and society: the pure science of nature, pure psychology and pure sociology, respectively. The ontology of things includes as branches the pure theory of space (geometry), pure time theory (chronometry), pure kinematics, and the pure disciplines of the possible deformations of spatial formations. The pure a priori science of the soul, initially called by Husserl 'descriptive psychology' and associated with the 'rational psychology' of Christian Wolff, has as its subject-matter the 10 See Peter M. Simons, Parts. A Study in Ontology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), ch 1. 11 Carl Stumpf, "Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften", Abhandlungen der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. 1907, Kl., 4, pp. 39f. 12 Stumpf, "Zur Einteilung", p. 37. 13 Stumpf, "Zur Einteilung", p. 39. 186 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES psychical experiences, perceptions, memories, imagination, expectations, decisions, choices, and so on, in other words thought experiences of every sort, as well as feelings and acts of will. The regional ontology of society, finally, concerns itself with cultural formations like state, law, custom, church and so on.14 Husserl's early followers in Munich, the so-called 'realist' phenomenologists, and above all Pfänder, Scheler and Reinach, embraced wholeheartedly the project of working out in systematic fashion the entire pantheon of such theories and sub-theories, both formal and material. There are, first of all, the formal a priori disciplines of ontology and mathematics, including arithmetic, set theory, topology, mereology, the 'theory of objects' in Meinong's sense, and many others. We then have a priori disciplines dealing with the three-dimensional world of space and time, and with the objects of nature, including the overlapping disciplines of rational mechanics,15 naive or qualitative physics,16 kinaesiology, stereology, geometry, chronometry, and so on. We then have the various sub-disciplines of aesthesiology (theories of secondary qualities17): colourology, the a priori science of tones, of feelings of warm and cold, textures and so on. There then follow logic and the various disciplines associated with logic, including the theory of evidence, apophantic logic, concept-theory, decision theory, the logic of truth, and so on. Next come various sciences of 'rational psychology,' sciences of beliefs and desires, feelings, values and valuings, including Scheler's material ethics, and formal axiology and deontic logic, the a priori theories of imperatives,18 of norms, of will, a priori aesthetics, the ontology of art and art works developed by Roman Ingarden, and so on. We then have various a priori sciences pertaining to the domain of language and expression,19 universal and categorial grammars, the a priori sciences of phonology, and the theory of speech acts or categorial pragmatics developed by Reinach20 and later by Austin and Searle. In the same work Reinach conceived the project of a general a priori ontology of the entire domain of 14 Karl Schuhmann, "Husserl's Concept of Philosophy", Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 21 (1990): 274-283. 15 Max Scheler, "Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik", Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 1, (1913/1916): p. 449n. English translation by M. S. Frings and R. L. Funk as Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 16 Patrick Hayes, "The Second Naive Physics Manifesto" in J. R. Hobbs, and R. C. Moore, eds., Formal Theories of the Commonsense World (Norwood, N. J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1985); also, Barry Smith and Roberto Casati, "Naive Physics," Philosophical Psychology, 7/2 (1994), 225–244. 17 Cf. Günter Witschel, "Edmund Husserls Lehre von den sekundären Qualitäten" (Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Bonn, 1961). 18 Alexander Pfänder, "Imperativenlehre" (MS of 1909), in H. Spiegelberg and E. AvéLallemant eds., Pfänder-Studien (The Hague: Nijhoff,1982) 295-324. 19 Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson's Approach to Language: Phenomenological Struc turalism (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975). 20 Adolf Reinach, "Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechts," Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 1 (1913 ): 685-847. English translation by J. Crosby as "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law", in Aletheia, 3 (1983), 1– 142. See also Kevin Mulligan, ed., Speech Act and Sachverhalt. Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). Smith In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism 187 social interaction. Sub-branches of the latter might include praxeology, the a priori science of action, the a priori ontology of work, a priori economics, the a priori theory of institutions, of law, a priori politics,21 the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, the a priori science of dialogue, a priori sociology, a priori geography, the a priori theory of the life world, eidetic history, a priori anthropology, and so on. Of the non-formal disciplines on this list it is above all two whose principles and applications have been worked out in detail: the a priori theory of law worked out, again, by Reinach in his "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law"22 and the a priori science of economics worked out by successive generations of so-called 'Austrian economists' from Menger to Rothbard and beyond. Few in the tradition of Austrian economics have however taken cognisance of the fact that, as Reinach puts it, the realm of the ontological a priori is "unsurveyably wide; whatever sorts of object we know, they all have their 'what', their 'essence', and of all essentialities essential laws hold."23 On the standard praxeological account of economic science shared by Mises and Rothbard and succinctly stated in the latter's "In Defense of 'Extreme Apriorism'"24 there are held to be certain fundamental axioms of economics which are both true and such that their truth is grasped immediately. The theorems of economics are then established via logical deduction from these axioms. There is in consequence no need for empirical testing of these theorems, which is fortunate since, as Rothbard points out, empirical testing is in any case impossible in the sciences of human action: It is physics that knows or can know its "facts" and can test its conclusions against these facts, while being completely ignorant of its ultimate assumptions. In the sciences of human action, on the other hand, . . [t]here is no laboratory where facts can be isolated and controlled; the "facts" of human history are complex ones, resultants of many causes. These causes can only be isolated by theory, theory that is necessarily a priori to these historical (including statistical) facts.25 The only way to understand human behaviour, Mises and Rothbard hold, is by means of a priori categories which we are able to recognize in the complex and ever-changing warp and woof of history in virtue of the fact that we are ourselves historical agents who are ready-armed with an intimate knowledge of these categories through our own experience. In a similar way we are able to recognize the presence of instantiations of ethical categories in the warp and woof of history in virtue of the fact that as a result of our own experience as ethical subjects we have an intimate knowledge of ethical categories such as guilt, responsibility, obligation, and so on. Rothbard draws a distinction between two approaches to the a priori as 21 See Karl Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 1988). 22 Adolf Reinach, "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law." 23 Adolf Reinach, "Concerning Phenomenology," The Personalist, 50, (1969 ), 194–211. (English translation by Dallas Willard of a lecture given in Marburg in 1914.) See also Adolf Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, K. Schuhmann and B. Smith, eds., 2 vols. (Munich and Vienna: Philosophia, 1989). 24 Murray N. Rothbard, "In Defense of 'Extreme Apriorism,'" Southern Economic Journal, 23 (1957): 315–20. 25 Rothbard, "In Defense," p. 315. 188 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES follows: Professor Mises, in the neo-Kantian tradition, considers [the law of human action] a law of thought and therefore a categorical truth a priori to all experience. My own epistemological position rests on Aristotle and St. Thomas rather than Kant, and hence I would interpret the proposition differently. I would consider the axiom a law of reality, rather than a law of thought.26 We are now in a position to understand what Rothbard means here by 'law of reality.' The definitive account of such laws is in fact to be found neither in Rothbard nor in Aristotle and St. Thomas but rather precisely in the writings of Reinach and the other realist phenomenologists. How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? For the members of the Reinach group, as also for Aristotle, Aquinas and Rothbard, there exists an ontological a priori, an a priori in reality. The a priori status of judgments, propositions, beliefs or 'laws of thought' that is so central to the Kantian approach then proves to be derivative of this more deep-lying a priori dimension on the side of the things themselves. According to the Kantian conception, in contrast, science consists not so much in the attempt to construct a system of intrinsically intelligible assumptions, but rather in a 'coercion of nature' (Nötigung der Natur) of such a sort that the latter comes to be formed in conformity with prior principles. Consider the following passage from Kant's first Critique: When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane . . ., a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, coercing nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. Accidental observations, made in observance to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover.27 This passage expresses an important epistemological insight to the effect that scientists, if they seek systematic results in the form of scientific laws, must undertake systematic observations guided by relevant scientific assumptions. Kant and his followers have however drawn ontological conclusions from this insight. They claim in fact to have shown that the object-domain which is in each case grasped by the scientist must first have been pre-formed and preconstituted in some peculiar ('transcendental') fashion. This doctrine is then introduced by the Kantians into their explanation of the peculiarity of a priori propositions: the latter are now held to acquire their truth from the fact that we ourselves have in King-Midas-fashion imposed them upon reality, have coerced reality to have it fit our prior prejudices. Now however we must ask: VII. Is it really true that, as the Kantians assert, intrinsically 26 Rothbard, "In Defense", p. 318. 27 KrV., B XIII. Cf. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 189. Smith In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism 189 plausible or intelligible pre-empirical synthetic propositions are in some sense imposed upon the world by cognizing subjects? That we have to answer 'no' to this question should be clear. Consider once again the example of the law of transitivity as this is applied to the parts of a stone or of a planet. This law would of course hold also in a world without thinking ('forming', 'constituting') subjects. It is thus impossible to conceive it as something subjective (a mere 'law of thought'). The thesis of the supposed subject-dependence of all laws of this kind - as originally formulated by Kant - is moreover not capable of being harmonized with the fact that pre-empirical assumptions are sometimes contradicted through retrospective empirical control. For the assertion that the given laws hold only because we have read them into the structure of the world, that the empirical world of what happens and is the case is itself a product of such reading in, surely excludes the possibility of conflict between such laws and empirical happenings. The thesis that the world is 'transcendentally' formed leads further to the question why precisely these rather than those transcendental forms should be the ones through which the imposition of structure is effected. Once again, the problem of arbitrariness seems here to raise its ugly head. Many Kantians (and Popperians) are today content with an evolutionistic treatment of this problem. In their eyes those pre-scientific assumptions have come to dominate which enjoyed under the prevailing circumstances a greater capacity for survival or a greater adaptability than the available alternatives. But the proponents of this doctrine appeal in this connection to the results of a science - biology - which itself presupposes very many pre-scientific assumptions of its own. This means that they are precluded from extending their account to at least one important group of pre-scientific assumptions, since the assertion that a science which itself presupposes certain principles can itself serve to justify those principles contains an obvious vicious circle. The striving for a fully adequate picture of reality thus requires an answer to the question as to how pre-scientific assumptions arise and are justified that goes much deeper than the answer of the evolutionists. And as Husserl showed in the "Prolegomena" to his Logical Investigations,28 the same holds of every attempt to account for such assumptions through appeals to an empirical science. Our realistic conception of the empirical sciences tells us, however, how we are to formulate an answer of the required sort. The striving on the part of scientists for intelligible assumptions can be justified by appeal to the fact that the world itself possesses certain intelligible structures – structures of the sort which are captured for example in the laws of mereology or colourology. The world itself is in many of its traits in itself intelligible. The general idea is well conveyed by the Munich phenomenologists, for example by Scheler in his great critique of formalism (and in particular of Kantianism) in ethics.29 Scheler is there concerned to establish the basis of an 28 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, critical edition (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1975, 1984); English translation of 2nd ed. by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). 29 Scheler, "Der Formalismus." 190 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES ethical theory which is 'a priori' in the sense that, as he puts it, 'its propositions are evident and can neither be tested by something that has been found, prior to such testing, by observation and induction nor be refuted by observation and induction.'30 Our knowledge of such a priori propositions is gained by means of what Scheler calls an 'intuition of essences' of the sort that is involved, for example, when we grasp the colour red and grasp that it is different from green or blue, or when we grasp the essential interconnection between red and visual extension. We do not have to observe and check and carry out inductions in order to grasp that red is different from green, or that jealousy is different from greed. Whenever we have such essences and such interconnections among them (which can be of different kinds, e.g., reciprocal, unilateral, conflicting, or, as in the case of values, ordered as higher and lower), the truth of propositions that find their fulfillment in such essences is totally independent of the entire sphere of observation and description, as well as of what is established in inductive experience . . . Hence the a priori is not dependent on propositions (or even on acts of judgment corresponding to them). It is not dependent, for example, on the form of such propositions and acts (i.e., on "forms of judgments," from which Kant developed his "categories" as "functional laws" of "thinking"). On the contrary, the a priori belongs wholly to the "given" and the sphere of facts. A proposition is only a priori true (or false) insofar as it finds its fulfillment in such "facts."31 A priori knowledge thus rests on experience, since . . . everything and anything that is given rests on "experience." He who wishes to call this "empiricism" may do so.32 . . . It therefore is not experience and non-experience, or so-called presuppositions of all possible experience (which would be unexperienceable in every respect), with which we are concerned in the contrast between the a priori and a posteriori; rather, we are concerned with two kinds of experience.33 On the one hand is immediate intuitive experience of essences such as colours and shapes and their interrelations, and on the other hand is observational experience of what happens and is the case. Now however we have to consider the question: 30 Scheler, "Der Formalismus," translation, pp. 47f. 31 Scheler, "Der Formalismus," translation, p. 49. 32 Compare Rothbard: 'I would consider the axiom [of action] a law of reality rather than a law of thought, and hence "empirical" rather than "a priori." But it should be obvious that this type of "empiricism" is so out of step with modern empiricism that I may just as well continue to call it a priori for present purposes.' Rothbard, "In Defense," p. 318 33 Scheler, "Der Formalismus," translation, p. 52. Smith In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism 191 VIII. Might the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions all be false? Certainly it might be that in the course of scientific development preempirical assumptions arise which correspond to no structures in the world and have only a somehow purely pragmatic value. From the realistic standpoint, however, the proportion of true pre-empirical assumptions must be considerable in every phase of this development. For the doctrine of scientific realism asserts not only that the world exists, but also that it corresponds broadly to the ideas we have about it. What the view presented here adds to this doctrine of scientific realism (which is, the reader will remember, here presupposed without argument) is the result that the true picture of reality, broad strands of which are already in our possession, must consist not only of accidentally true propositions which picture the accidents of reality, but also of true, necessary and contentful propositions which picture certain intelligible structures. Such propositions can also be called 'a priori'. Note again, however, that the conception of the a priori that is then yielded turns out to be a nonKantian conception. It claims that, where Kant wanted always to have the a priori viewed as something subjective, something pertaining purely to knowledge, there is in fact such a thing as an a priori in the world. We affirm simply that there are synthetic intrinsically plausible true propositions, and that science strives to accumulate ever more of these; we do not however affirm that we know (or much less that we have certain knowledge about) which of the available candidates for such propositions are true among those which at any given time play a role in the really existing sciences. The given intelligible structural traits of reality can be overlooked or misinterpreted. The recognition that there are a priori structural traits in the world yields, to repeat, no easy sort of indubitable evidence in relation to the corresponding propositions. This fallibilistic doctrine of a priori laws of reality does however yield a nice solution to one age-old problem facing all defenders of the a priori. How, as Caldwell puts it,34 does one choose between rival systems all of which claim to rest on a priori foundations? On the nonfallibilistic conception it is difficult to make sense even of the possibility of rival systems of this sort. On the conception here defended, in contrast, the existence of such rival systems can be seen to be a perfectly natural and acceptable consequence of the just-mentioned difficulties we will often fact in coming to know even the intelligible traits of reality: one adjudicates between such systems in the same way in which one adjudicates between all rival scientific hypotheses, namely via a complex mixture of empirical and a priori considerations. 34 Bruce Caldwell, "Praxeology and Its Critics: An Appraisal," History of Political Economy, 16 (1984), 363-379. 192 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES IX. Conclusion We can summarize the main argument of this paper as follows: Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions? ___________________|_____________________ | | Yes No (extreme empiricists) | Are the propositions which express these pre-empirical assumptions in every case analytic (tautological, lacking in content)? _______________|_________________________ | | Yes (logical positivists) No | Do we have an infallible knowledge of all the synthetic pre-empirical propositions which are presupposed by the various sciences in the different phases of their development? _________________|_______________________ | | Yes (extreme Cartesians) No | Could these assumptions, which are presupposed by the empirical sciences,be arbitrary? ____________________________________|_________ | | Yes (Feyerabend) No | The propositions in question must therefore be characterized by a certain plausibility. Is this plausibility always a contextual affair? ________________|_________________________________ | | Yes (hermeneutic relativists) No | There is therefore something like an intrinsic plausibility. Are the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions which play an indispensable role in the sciences given only individually, so that we have only a few isolated examples thereof between which no systematic relations would obtain? _________________________|________________________ | | Yes No | Is it really true, as the Kantians assert, that the intrinsically plausible or intelligible preempirical synthetic propositions here at issue are read into or imposed upon the world by us? ____________________|_____________________________ | | Yes (Kantians) No | Might the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions all be false? _____________________________|____________________ | | Yes No | Certain pre-empirical synthetic intrinsically plausible propositions thus require ontological correlates which are their truth-makers. Hence, there are intelligible structures in the world, which we could also call 'a priori structures'.