Autor: Feser, Edward

Buch: Scholastic Metaphysics

Titel: Scholastic Metaphysics

Stichwort: Szientismus 3b; Metaphysik: vorrangig zu Epistemologie; Naturalismus, epistemologische Engführung (Kant -> Wissen "geformt" durch Evolution, Geschiche);

Kurzinhalt: ... that metaphysics is prior to epistemology. One way in which this is the case is that absolutely every epistemological theory rests on metaphysical assumptions... But the Scholastic simply rejects the entire rationalist/empiricist/Kantian dialectic ...

Textausschnitt: 27a Now as we will see, the Scholastic maintains that there are truths of a metaphysical nature which (like the truths of logic and mathematics) are necessary and objective but which also (like the truths of logic and mathematics) are not plausibly regarded as propositions either of natural science or of mere “conceptual analysis.” Like logic and mathematics, and like the naturalist’s own basic epistemological assumption, they simply fall between the tines of Hume’s Fork. The naturalist might not understand how such knowledge is possible, but that is his problem, not the Scholastic’s. The naturalist already has oceans of knowledge for which he cannot account — again, the truths of logic and mathematics, and his own metaphysical variation on Hume’s Fork — and thus has no business questioning the epistemological credentials of Scholastic metaphysics. He is like a thief caught red handed with the loot, who demands that the police who have apprehended him produce the pink slip for their cruiser. (Fs)

27b This situation illustrates what is for the Scholastic a basic philosophical truth, which is that metaphysics is prior to epistemology. One way in which this is the case is that absolutely every epistemological theory rests on metaphysical assumptions — including Hume’s when he begins with the supposition that there are impressions and ideas, and including the naturalist’s when he supposes that our cognitive faculties are at least reliable enough to make natural science an objective enterprise. Naturally, these metaphysical assumptions cannot be justified by reference to the epistemological claims they support without begging the question. When the critic of metaphysics insists that the metaphysician establish his epistemological credentials before making any metaphysical assertions, he is making a demand that is incoherent and to which he does not submit himself. (Fs)

28a Another way in which metaphysics is prior to epistemology is that our knowledge of various metaphysical truths is something with which a sound epistemology must be consistent, so that if an epistemological theory is not consistent with our having knowledge of these truths then it must be rejected. In the limiting case, an epistemological theory that was inconsistent with its own metaphysical assumptions would obviously be for that reason something we must reject. Now elsewhere I have (following James Ross) argued that our capacity to grasp abstract concepts and to reason in accordance with formally valid patterns of inference is something incompatible with naturalism, and that the naturalist cannot evade the problem by attempting to deny that we really possess such concepts or reason in such ways (Ross 1992 and 2008, Chapter 6; Feser 2013a). That alone is reason to reject any naturalist epistemology. But we will see in the course of this book that there are other metaphysical truths which cannot coherently be denied, so that if scientism or naturalism is incompatible with our knowing such truths, what follows is not that we don’t know such truths but rather that scientism or naturalism is false. (Fs)

28b Naturalists do not see the force of these difficulties because they presuppose too narrow a range of epistemological options. In particular, they tend at least implicitly to operate within a framework of assumptions inherited from the early moderns. The rationalists held that certain metaphysical concepts and truths are innate. The empiricist tradition, denying that there are any innate concepts or knowledge, ended up denying also that we really have the metaphysical concepts in question, or at least that we can know that the concepts correspond to anything in mind-independent reality. Splitting the difference between rationalism and empiricism, Kant held that the concepts in question are innate, but reflect only the way the mind must carve up reality and correspond to nothing in reality itself. His successors claimed that even this is too ambitious — that the concepts in question do not reflect even any necessary features of cognition as such, but only the contingent way in which cognition has been molded by evolution, or even merely by historical and cultural circumstances. Naturally, metaphysics as “conceptual analysis” or as “descriptive” (Strawson 1959) comes to seem about as relevant to discovering objective truth as lexicography is. The latter tells us only how we talk about reality, and not about language-independent reality itself. The former tells us only about how we conceive of reality, and not about mind-independent reality itself. (Fs)

29a But the Scholastic simply rejects the entire rationalist/empiricist/Kantian dialectic and insists on maintaining an epistemological position that predated these views, and against which they reacted. The Scholastic agrees with the rationalist that there are necessary metaphysical truths that we can know with certainty, but does not take them to be innate. The Scholastic agrees with the empiricist that all of our concepts must be derived from experience and that our knowledge must be grounded in experience, but he does not accept either the early modern empiricist’s desiccated notion of “experience” or his tendency to collapse intellect into sensation, as e.g. Hume does when characterizing “ideas” as faint copies of impressions. (This is an issue I will have reason to address later on in the book.) Thus the Scholastic does not accept the basic assumptions that made Kantianism and its contemporary “naturalized” or “descriptive” successors seem the only alternatives to a rationalist or empiricist position. (Fs)

29b Thus, when some recent advocates of “naturalized metaphysics” dismiss contemporary “conceptual analysis” based metaphysics as “neo-scholastic” (Ladyman, Ross, Spurrett, and Collier 2007), they demonstrate only their ignorance of what Scholastics actually thought. The Scholastic maintains that though “there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses” (to cite a famous Scholastic maxim), the intellect can nevertheless come to know, via the abstraction from particulars of universal essences and via demonstrative rather than merely probabilistic arguments, aspects of reality beyond what can be experienced. I will have reason to address this topic briefly in the last chapter of this book, but spelling out in detail how this all works would require a long excursus in Scholastic philosophical psychology and epistemology. (Cf. Bittle 1936; Coffey 1958a and 1958b; Van Steenberghen 1949; Wilhelmsen 1956; O’Callaghan 2003; McInerny 2007; Ross 2008, Chapter 5; Groarke 2009) But such an excursus is, for the reasons given, in no way necessary here as a prolegomenon to metaphysics. For epistemology and philosophical psychology themselves presuppose metaphysics. Vis-à-vis epistemology and psychology (“naturalized” or otherwise) — and vis-à-vis natural science too, where (though only where) it touches on the most fundamental issues about substance, causation, essence, and the like - - metaphysics wears the trousers.