Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice

4. DEPENDENT ANIMAL RATIONALITY

55 four Dependent Animal Rationality Epistemology as Anthropology The notion of substance as actualized and perfected through operations provides remote metaphysical underpinning for Aquinas’s account of the human intellect as a potency actualized by interaction with sensible substances. Aquinas is not preoccupied with skeptical doubts about how a mind-in-here can make reliable contact with a world-out-there. The starting point for him is not a vacant mind trapped within itself and desperately seeking an exit into the world; rather, he observes an intellect already ensconced within a world about which it knows a great deal. The accent is not on doubt but on wonder. The result of the mind’s awakening in wonder is not certitude but a heightened sense of mystery, a restfulness that is not to be confused with lethargy or mere inertness. In the last two chapters, we focused on the recovery of the language of virtue and practice in contemporary philosophy, a recovery that emerges from dissatisfaction with decision-procedure models of knowing and acting. Attending to the ways in which Aquinas might contribute to debates within ethics and epistemology, we discerned implicit connections between ethics and epistemology , on the one hand, and anthropology and metaphysics, on the other. Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion 56 Such a need was seen to be especially pointed in Zagzebski’s defense of a virtue epistemology, to which notions of ‘‘cognitive contact with reality’’ and the qualitative assessment of what one knows and how one holds knowledge are central. Anthropological and metaphysical commitments were also seen to be operative in Aquinas’s account of justice, especially in his conception of pious gratitude as the foundation of fulfilling what is due. The practices of gratitude and hospitality reflect and embody ‘‘ontological generosity.’’ These are the guiding assumptions of, the framework for, Aquinas’s account of human knowing, of the place of the intellect within the real order. Yet not everyone has been convinced that Aquinas is entirely removed from, or innocent of, the modern epistemological project. His occasional habit of speaking of the concept as a mediator between the intellect and the object of its knowledge has led some to believe that he is an adherent of ‘‘mental representationalism,’’ the thesis that what the mind principally knows is its own ideas, by means of which it comes to know external things. His teaching that the intellect knows by a process of abstracting intelligible species from sensible things also contributes to the suspicion that Aquinas is a precursor of the modern problematic. As a way of addressing these issues in Aquinas and, more broadly, of highlighting his account of intellect and real being, it will prove useful to examine the most philosophically ambitious recent attempt to investigate the relationship between mind and world, John McDowell’s influential Mind and World.1 In a Wittgensteinian manner, McDowell wants to exorcise peculiarly modern anxieties over the relationship between the knowing subject and its objects of knowledge, anxieties that have beset philosophy since the rise of modern science. His qualified Kantian project treats receptivity and spontaneity , passivity and activity, and sensibility and understanding, as partners in human knowing. But McDowell goes beyond Kant in his attempt to integrate or reconcile the apparent antinomies in human knowing. Writing after Heidegger and Rorty, McDowell seeks to eliminate any vestige of ‘‘mental representationalism .’’ For a number of reasons, McDowell’s book is relevant to our investigation. It pushes our investigation of virtue and knowledge forward to the frontiers of metaphysics. But it does so in a way that avoids grounding an account of mind and world in the private consciousness of the knowing subject. McDowell’s project is in some ways similar to Aquinas’s insistence on the darkness of the soul to itself and to his repudiation of the notion that the idea or concept is what is first and principally known. McDowell also relies heavily on accounts of first and second nature, human biology, and the space of socially inculcated reasons; this account makes for a nice comparison with Aquinas’s discussions of the analogies between animal and human reasoning, to which we adverted above in our discussion of just generosity. Finally, McDowell’s eschewal of ‘‘constructive philosophy,’’ understood as the project of securing a theoretical ground or justification of knowledge and as alien from the concrete conditions Dependent Animal Rationality 57 of cognitive...