Direct Realism and Aquinas’s Account of Sensory Cognition

The Thomist 71 (2007): 343-78 DIRECT REALISM AND AQUINAS'S ACCOUNT OF SENSORY COGNITION PAUL A. MACDONALD, ]R. Bucknell University Lewisburg, Pennsylvania AQUINAS RECENTLY has received renewed attention from philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition who view themselves as part of a broader movement in Thomistic studies known as 'analytical Thomism'. The leading spokesman of this movement, John Haldane, who coined its name, argues that Aquinas serves "as a thinker from whom we can learn in our efforts to answer speculative questions about the nature of mind and of the world."1 More specifically, Haldane and others argue that Aquinas provides important insights for defending realism within metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind: the position that the world both exists independently of the mind and is intrinsically intelligible to the mind, able and in some sense waiting to be known by the mind "as it is." 1 SeeJohn Haldane, "AnalyticalThomism and Faithful Reason," in idem, Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical (New York: Routledge, 2004), x. Haldane defends this claim in "A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind," Ratio 11 (1998): 253-77; "Forms of Thought," in Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy ofRoderick M. Chisholm (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 149-70; "Mind-World Identity and the Anti-Realist Challenge," in John Haldane and Crispin Wright, eds., Reality, Representation, andProjection (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15-37; and "Realism with a Metaphysical Skull," in James Conant and Urszula M. Zegleri., eds., Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (NewYork: Routledge, 2002), 97-104. For a further defense of this claim, see also Jonathan Jacobs, "Habits, Cognition, and Realism," inJohn Haldane, ed.,Mind, Metaphysics, andValue in the Thomistic and Analytic Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 109-24; Jonathan Jacobs and John Zeis, "Form and Cognition: How to Go Out of Your Mind," The Monist 80 (1997): 539-57; and John Jenkins, "Aquinas on the Veracity of the Intellect," The Journal ofPhilosophy 88 (1991): 623-32. 343 344 PAUL A. MACDONALD, JR. This paper is a deliberate exercise in analytical Thomism.2 In it, I engage Aquinas's own work as well as the work of thinkers operating within (or at least familiar with) the Anglo-American philosophical tradition in order to defend Aquinas's account of sensory cognition as undergirded by a strong commitment to direct realism. The direct realist holds that in cases of veridical sensation, or sense experience, cognitive subjects enjoy direct epistemic access to objective aspects or features (sensible aspects or features) of the external world. Put more strongly: according to direct realism, in veridical sensation cognitive subjects are in direct cognitive contact not with private objects of sensory consciousness, but with actual extrasensory and extramental objects and states of affairs. What direct realism denies, therefore, is that in cases of veridical sensation cognitive subjects and the world meet at an interface. Sense experience does not mediate our epistemic access to the world; it conjoins us to the world itself. From a robust direct realist perspective, however, it is not enough to claim that it is merely by having certain sense experiences, or being caused to have certain sense experiences, that we as cognitive subjects can be credited with genuinely experiencing a world that exists independently of our minds.3 According to the specific form of direct realism I articulate and defend here, which I claim emerges from a proper study of Aquinas's account of sensory cognition, it is only by having sense experiences that possess definitive content-content that is isomorphic or formally identical with the sensible features of mind-independent reality-that we can be credited with occupying world-intending sensory states, in which we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell objective aspects or features of the world itself. Thus, it is by virtue of possessing the requisite content that 2 I have in mind the work of Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, Robert Pasnau, and Anthony Kenny, in addition to the authors mentioned above. As will become clear, Pasnau is more critical of Aquinas than the others. 3 Hilary Putnam makes this claim in his recent Dewey lectures. See Hilary Putnam, "Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into...