What Happened to Philosophy Between Aquinas and Descartes?

WHAT HAPPENED TO PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN AQUINAS AND DESCARTES? JoHN DEELY Loras College Dubuque, Iowa INTRODUCTION a. Pondering the Imponderable HE NEO-THOMISTIC revival launched by Leo XIII eems to have run its main course with an almost exclusive ook at the works of Thomas himself without taking much into serious consideration the work of his Latin commentators. At this moment, we find that a book translated from the work of the last of the Latin commentators, the Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot, while receiving no significant treatment within the Catholic intellectual world,1 is seriously discussed within the international intellectual movement that has grown up in the last quarter century around the study of signs and reviewed in such mass media as the Times of New York, Los Angeles, and London.2 Such a situation participates in improbability. My own view is that The Semiotic of John Poinsot (as the work in question is subtitled in its contemporary edition) is a harbinger of what 1 For details, see footnote 2 of the article by James Bernard Murphy, "Language , Communication, and Representation in the Semiotic of John Poinsot," in this issue. 2 Thomas A. Sebeok, " A Signifying Man," feature review of Tractatus de Signis in The New York Times Book Review for Easter Sunday, 30 March 1986, pp. 14-15, also in German translation by Jeff Bernard in Semiotische Berichte Jg. 11 2/1987: 234-239, with translator's "Anmerkung" p. 240; Richard J. Morris, The Book Review of The Los Angeles Times, Sunday, 11 May 1986, p. 8; and Desmond Paul Henry, "The Way to Awareness," The Times Literary Supplement no. 4,413 (October 30-November 5, 1987), p. 1201. 543 544 JOHN DEELY the postmodern development may prove to be. Postmodernism, in my view, is not to be, as initially appears, a kind of literary/ sophistic attempt to eviscerate rational discourse in philosophy through a forced control of signifiers made rather to dismantle (under the mantra of " deconstruction ") than to constitute some text taken precisely as severed from any vestige of authorial intention . Postmodernism in the long run will be seen rather as the term inevitably employed through juxtaposition with the internal dimensions of the classical modern paradigm so as to establish thereby a philosophical sense of a change of age and temper of thought defined historically but able to link contemporary requirements of speculative understanding with late Latin themes omitted from the repertoire of analytic tools developed by modernity.3 b. Naming the names Several names here bear explaining, not the least of which is "semiotic." Suffice it to say that this is the name coined by John Locke in 1690 to designate the field of investigation that would result from thematic inquiry into the role of signs in human affairs wherever there is a question of experience or knowledge. This study, or "doctrine of signs," as Locke also called it, turns out to be extensive, since it embraces the whole of human knowledge from its origins in sense to its most refined intellectual forays in whatever field, and the realms of social interaction and cultural development as well.4 Sacramental theology has its foundations in the sign, and experimental study depends on the interpretation of signs throughout its ambit. Whether we look to communication as between God and human beings, between human beings among themselves, between human beings with 3 This is the argument of my work, New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 4 " Sommaire: c'est dans la tradition de Peirce, Locke, et Jean de SaintThomas que la logique peut devenir une semiotique qui absorberait l'epistemologie et meme la philosophie de la nature" (Eleuthere Winance, Revue Thomiste, LXXX[juillet-aout 1983], 514-516. BETWEEN AQUINAS AND DESCARTES 545 other species, or between human beings and the physical world, we find ourselves caught up in a web of sign relations. It is hardly without interest to discover that the first thinker who was able to systematize the unity of the object of inquiry the action of signs provides was a thinker from the end of the Latin Age who also was a principal commentator on and...