Stephen Menn on Anthony Kenny

8/12/2019 Stephen Menn on Anthony Kenny

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Philosophical Review

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Searle's account of external or desire-independent reasons revisits terrain first covered in his How toDerive 'Ought' from 'Is'. IWe encounterdesire-independent-hence external-reasons when we commit ourselves,freely and voluntarily, to pay for a beer by ordering it or commit ourselves tothe truth of an assertion by freely making it.There is obviously something tothis, but just as obviously more needs to be said to support the connectionSearle claims to find between these sorts of commitments and rationality. Liarsand those who make promises they don't intend to keep don't seem to be soeasily convicted of irrationality.

The book contains sensible chapters on weakness of will, why deductivemodels of practical reasoning seem so unilluminating, and an extended but,to this reader, utterly opaque defense of an irreducible non-Humean self.

Searle is always engaging and often insightful. This book, however, suffers from an impatience with detailed argument that goes beyond what mightbe expected in awork that was presented-as the Nicod Lectures are-to aninterdisciplinary audience.

John RobertsonSyracuse University

1. PhilosophicalReview 73 (1964): 43-58.Philosophical Review, Vol. 115, No. 3, 2006DOI 10.1215/00318108-2006-004

Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being.Oxford: Clarendon, 2002. x + 212 pp.

Medieval metaphysicians, who devote much energy to discussing being, somehow fail to notice the distinctions that since Frege and Russell we find fundamental, between the 'is'-es of existence, predication, identity, and class-inclusion.

Worse, much of the profundity they claim for the concept of being seems toturn on not recognizing these logical distinctions: assuming existence (likeidentity) is a first-order concept, they infer that it is amysterious and profoundfirst-order concept, but the mystery would dissolve if existence were distinguished from other senses of being and recognized as second-order. Medievalphilosophers too enjoy distinguishing senses of being and accusing each otherof ignoring crucial distinctions, but their distinctions stubbornly refuse to lineup with ours. Are they missing something basic? Or are we?

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Thomas Aquinas, who makes the concepts of existence and essencecentral to his metaphysics, has especially become the focus of modern discussion. Etienne Gilson, in Being and Some Philosophers,' tried to show that Thomasadded a crucial insight into being that earlier philosophers had lacked andthat later philosophers too did not fully comprehend. Anthony Kenny is notresponding directly toGilson but to Peter Geach's analytic Thomism. Geachunderstood what Frege had accomplished, and, in his article Form and Existence,'2 he tried to show that Frege had not made Thomas's insights irrele

vant and indeed that Thomas's notion of the form signified by a predicateterm and Frege's theory of concepts as functions are close enough to benatural allies against nominalist or extensionalist accounts, on which thesubject- and predicate-terms are two names for the same object. Geach alsonoted that Frege had been forced to admit, alongside the second-order concept of existence ( F exists = the concept F is instantiated ), a first-orderconcept, S exists = S is present or actual (the existence denied in Jacob'slament 'Joseph isnot ). Geach argued that Thomas drew a similar distinctionbetween two one-place senses of being: in one sense (which Thomas calls

being as truth and sees as answering the an sit question of Aristotle's PosteriorAnalytics 2), blindness exists means something isblind ; in another sense Sexists holds only if S has an essence, thus only if S is in one of the categories,not an ens rationis like blindness. Geach identifies the first sense with Frege'ssecond-order concept of existence (symbolized by the quantifier) and the second with Frege's first-order concept, and says that, when Thomas asserts thatesse is something real (and distinct from essence), he means the second. Admittedly,when Thomas inDe ente et essentia infers the essence-existence distinctionfrom our ability to know what a phoenix iswithout knowing whether phoenixes exist, he illegitimately treats the second-order concept of existence as ifitwere first-order; but Geach treats this as an aberration of Thomas's earliest

writing. (Since Gilson it has been customary to blame Thomas's early departures from later orthodoxy on the malign influence of Avicenna.)Kenny shares Geach's and Gilson's suspicions of De ente, and therefore, rather than giving a systematic treatment of Thomas on being, he goesthrough each text in chronological order, extracting what each has to sayabout being, concentrating on the De ente, Sentences commentary, Summa contragentiles, Summa theologiae, Metaphysics commentary, and various Disputed Questions.3Kenny thinks Thomas tried to solve the problems of De enteby isolating

1. Etienne Gilson, Being and SomePhilosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949).

2. Reprinted in his God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)and expanded in G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1961).

3. Kenny provides in footnotes the Latin original for each text he cites. At 100-101,the discussion is vitiated by translating essentia est secundum illud esse as the essence is

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a sense of being inwhich he could assert that creatures' esse is other than theiressence and that God is his own esse, indeed is esse ipsum subsistens, without thenonsense that would result from taking esse in the second-order (quantifier)sense; but, unlike Geach, he is unconvinced that Thomas has found such asense of esse.Kenny notes different distinctions in senses of being that Thomasdraws (under different argumentative pressures) in different works, but hedoes not share Geach's belief that these fit into a system, and in his conclusionhe assembles a chaotic list of twelvedifferent senses of being or existencehe has found in Thomas. Inmy view, the chaos is largely a by-product of Kenny's method of reading each work separately: Thomas ismore systematic thanKenny recognizes. However, the system is not Frege's. Kenny's basic mistakeis to follow Geach in trying to harmonize Thomas's distinctions in senses of

being with Frege's, and although Kenny is right that this often cannot work,he iswrong to blame Thomas for it.

Thomas understands his distinctions among senses of being as aninterpretation of Aristotle's account of four senses of being inMetaphysics 5.7;his interpretation largely follows Averroes (and indirectly Farabi), with onecrucial innovation. Aristotle may intend his being as truth purely as a twoplace concept, signified by the copula, but Averroes and Thomas apply it alsoto one-place uses, and Geach is right that their concept of one-place being-astruth resembles Frege's concept of existence as symbolized by the quantifier(their calling it a second intention roughly corresponds to Frege's calling itsecond-order). But Geach and Kenny are wrong to assimilate Thomas's concept of being-as-divided-into-the-categories or having an essence outside thesoul to Frege's first-order concept of actual or present existence: Frege's concept ismeant to exclude past and future existents (and timeless objects, likenumbers), Thomas's to exclude beings per accidens like white man and entiarationis like blindness. For Averroes and Thomas, when we begin the inquiryinto F, we do not know the scientific definition expressing the real essenceof F, or even whether F has a real essence: we know only the meaning of thename. We then askwhether F is in the sense of truth, that is,whether the concept of F is instantiated; if so, we askwhether F is in the sense divided into thecategories, that is,whether it has a real essence (unlike entia per accidens orprivations), and, if so, we look for a definition expressing that essence. Geachand Kenny intend there are Fs (the quantifier sense) to hold even if thereare only past or future Fs (thus the domain of our quantifiers includes pastand future objects, and the sense inwhich only present things are is a strongersense of being than that entailed by quantification); the distinction betweendetermined by the esse, when itmeans the essence is on account of this esse, as something mnight be white on account of awhiteness. On p. 88, he says that the expressions(taken from Avicenna) possibile esse and necesse esse mean possible entity, necessaryentity, with esse meaning a thing or entity ; in fact necesse esse means necessary inregard to existence, whose existence is necessary.

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these two senses of being is intended to allow us to truly assert Joseph is notwithout reference-failure. Averroes and Thomas have a different aim: since

they believe, with Aristotle, that being is said nonunivocally of things in different categories, they want to explain how we can ask an sit F before knowing what F is, thus before knowing which sense of being-as-divided-into-thecategories applies to F, orwhether F is a privation or ens per accidens and belongsto no category. Thomas does distinguish a sense of esse as actual existence,

but this should not be identified with being-as-divided-into-the-categories(being as having an essence), and it is not developed simply by contrast with

being as truth, but arises from a further complication.Averroes argued that Avicenna, in distinguishing existence from

essence, had confused being-as-truth with being-as-divided-into-the-categoriesand that, by distinguishing these two senses of F exists, we can see that Fnever exists through an existence really distinct from its essence (as F canbe white through awhiteness really distinct from its essence): the existenceasserted by F exists in the sense of truth is accidental to F (since it is notcontained in the concept of F that the concept is instantiated), but it is only asecond intention and thus an ens rationis, not something real.When we say Fexists in the sense of having an essence, we are predicating something real ofthe thing F, but what we are predicating is F's own essence, not something distinct from the essence. Thomas accepts this argument from Averroes, but he

wants tomaintain an essence-existence distinction to show why God is necessarily existent and why angels and celestial movers, although immaterial andsempiternal, are contingent on God's act of creation. But Thomas notes that

Metaphysics 5.7 distinguishes, alongside being as truth and being-as-dividedinto-the-categories, being as actuality and as potentiality; and he argues thatif F is not God, the being it has through its essence is a mere potentiality forexisting that must receive actuality from something else, and that the esse signified by actually exists is both real and distinct from the essence in thingsother than God.There are real problems making sense of this thesis about actual existence, and Averroes's and Thomas's ways of interpreting the different senses

of being from Metaphysics 5.7, so that each covers both one-place and twoplace cases, are certainly not how we carve up the senses of being, and thusthey need critical investigation. Kenny makes some good critical comments,

but his project of positive understanding ishampered when he follows Geachin squeezing the three main senses of one-place esse into two, and when heexpresses surprise each time he finds Thomas associating an sitwith the copula. His Geachian insistence that a form must be (like a Fregean Begriff) thesignificatum of an incomplete expression also leads him to indignant outbursts

whenever Thomas talks about an F-ness subsisting without a suppositum (Eucharistic accidents, angels as separate forms, God as esse ipsum subsistens): Kennyassumes that such Platonism is a disease of language that any logically compe

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tent philosopher would avoid, rather than being, as both Aristotle and Thomasthink, an issue that must be considered on itsmerits for each predicate F.

Aquinas on Being has met a hostile reception both from neo-Thomistsand from analytic Thomists. I too have had critical things to say. Nonetheless, the book is very stimulating inworking through each of Thomas's manydiscussions of being and raising critical questions. Kenny shows that we cannot systematically harmonize Thomas either with himself across his wholecareer or with Fregean conceptions of existence. Working through the textsthat Kenny indicates, with Kenny in hand, will be invaluable for anyone who

wants to do better atmaking sense of Thomas on being. Furthermore, many ofthe book's faults are those Kenny has inherited either from the neo-Thomistsor from Geach. This includes the habit of blaming much of what one dislikesin Thomas either on Avicenna or on the Platonists: this is an understandabledefense strategy for a committed Thomist, but an objective scholar should reexamine Avicenna for himself rather than taking Gilson's word for it.Anotherreviewer has said that Kenny isunrivaled in his ability to place Aquinas withinthe larger context of philosophy as awhole, having devoted himself to the

whole history of philosophy. This is false: although Kenny has worked onAristotle, Descartes, andWittgenstein, Aquinas on Being contains no primarysource references toMuslim philosophers (there are reliable translations inLatin and, increasingly, inmodern languages). It isdisturbing that this is stillacceptable in Thomas scholarship, and many detailed difficulties, as well asthe overall picture of how Thomas's senses of being are related, might havebeen cleared up by first-hand acquaintance with Avicenna and Averroes.StephenMenn

McGill University and Humboldt-Universitat zu BerlinPhilosophical Review, Vol. 115, No. 3, 2006DOI 10.1215/00318108-2006-005

Robert B. Brandom, Tales of theMighty Dead:Historical Essays in theMetaphysics of Intentionality.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. x + 430 pp.

Robert Brandom has for some time been promising to publish a book onHegel. When and if it finally appears, Brandom's Hegel book will be as good amarker as any of the point where analytic philosophy finally turned full circleto bite its own tail. Born of the fiercely anti-idealistic spirit ofMoore and Russell, the analytic tradition has in recent years flirted more and more openly

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