The time is long overdue for a compte rendu of articles from recent issues of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. First, let’s note some of the articles in the first two issues of volume 95. Then, we will focus on a few of particular note. This will lead us, in closing, to a more extended look at the debate on the priority of “thought” to “talk”, between Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P. and Dr. Marie George.

– ACPQ 95.1: Articles generally noted

Articles of note in this issue include Fr. Christof Betschart’s “The Constitution of the Human Person as Discovery and Awakening,” Gregory Stacey’s “Perfect Being Theology and Analogy,” and Patrick Byrne’s “Curiosity: Vice or Virtue? Augustine and Lonergan.” Also of note are two reviews in this issue: a review of Richard Berquist’s recent book From Human Dignity to Natural Law, and Reinhard Hütter’s excellent new monograph John Henry Newman On Truth and Its Counterfeits, also reviewed here at Thomistica.

Betschart argues that, in her philosophy of the human person, Edith Stein “integrates her phenomenological research into a metaphysical framework,” and thus the two aspects should not be separated. Stein, he claims, uses her own interpretation of Husserl’s notion of “constitution” in attempting to understand the human person’s lived experience as “self-discovery” and “awakening.” Stacey aims to strengthen the doctrine of the analogy of being against criticisms made by Thomas Williams as part of his defense of the univocity of being. Stacey’s approach takes its particular inspiration from the thought of Suárez. Byrne’s article draws upon recent work of Joseph Torchia and Paul Griffiths and seeks to provide a “more nuanced view” of the vice of curiosity and its distinction from the virtue of studiositas, a category he seeks to recover by returning to St. Augustine’s consideration on the matter, read in close conjunction with Bernard Lonergan’s “unrestricted desire to know.” 

Of more particular interest in this issue are Yul Kim’s “Why Does the Wood Not Ignite Itself? Duns Scotus’s Defense of the Will’s Self-Motion,” and Paul Macdonald’s “Acknowledging Animal Rights: A Thomistic Perspective.”

Kim’s article is a detailed examination of a line of debate connecting John Duns Scotus, Godfrey of Fontaines, and Henry of Ghent. The deeper issue here is the Aristotelian motor-causality principle, so frequently discussed in medieval philosophy and contemporary Neo-Scholastic philosophy: omne quod movetur ab alio movetur, or, every thing in motion is put in motion by another. Godfrey posits a reductio against Henry’s theory of the self-motion of the will, which seemed necessary in order to explain the will’s freedom. In short, if the will can move itself, the reductio argues, this sets up a slippery slope where everything moves itself. Wood should be able to ignite itself. Kim then examines the evolution of Scotus’s own thought in response to Godfrey’s argument, showing how this influences Scotus’s view to “[expand] the horizon of self-motion beyond the psychological realm to the physical world.” Close study of the underlying arguments and analysis presented in this paper will aid the better understanding of debates regarding the Aristotelian motor-causality principle and its centrality, especially insofar as a grasp of motion in nature, which is more evident to us at first, is prior to a grasp of extended senses of motion in the will.

Macdonald’s article defends the existence of animal rights in both an indirect and a direct sense, where “an indirect right is a right whose possession by an individual depends on the existence of rights possessed by other individuals, a direct right is a right whose possession by an individual does not depend on the existence of rights possessed by other individuals.” He raises and considers objections to this “admittedly contentious claim” concerning direct rights. He maintains that this does not entail a denial of the ontological difference between human beings and non-human animals, nor does it require that “animals and human beings have an equal moral status or worth, and so possess the same kind and range of rights as we do.” For instance, Macdonald thinks, there is a limit or asymmetry in animal’s direct rights insofar as they do not imply correlative duties. His argument will, at the very least, cause further consideration of the gradated hierarchy of being in the cosmos and its moral implications. Its considerations also pair well with the linguistic, evolutionary transition between non-human and human animals, debated by Austriaco and George, in this same issue. We return to that debate below.

– ACPQ 95.2: Articles generally noted

This issue is currently only online (at least, my hard copy hasn’t yet arrived). Noteworthy articles are Jon W. Thompson’s “Individuation, Identity, and Resurrection in Thomas Jackson and John Locke,” Lukáš Novák’s “Suárez’s Notion of Analogy: Scotus’s Essential Order in Disguise?,” and Justin W. Keena’s “Plato on Forms, Predication by Analogy, and Kinds of Reality,” the runner-up for the ACPQ’s Rising Scholar Essay Contest. Books of note that are reviewed in this issue include a review of Fr. Kevin Flannery’s Cooperation with Evil, a review of Fr. Mariusz Tabaczek’s Emergence, and a review of Sacra Doctrina Project member Taylor Patrick O’Neill’s Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin. The issue also features an extended discussion of a recent book by David McPherson, Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective.

Thompson examines the views of Thomas Jackson and John Locke on the metaphysics of bodily resurrection. The article examines their rejection of the 17th-century Scholastic views regarding material continuity as principle of individuation over time, and suggests a connection between Locke and Jackson (or to some other source). The article is not entirely historical, as Thompson argues that matter “might provide a suitable principle of diachronic individuation in both everyday cases of living bodies and in the case of resurrection.” Novák’s article continues the ACPQ’s streak of publishing Scotus-Suárez analogy articles to two (see Stacey above). He contends that “what Suárez calls ‘analogy’ is basically the same thing as Scotus’s essential order.” Keena aims to show that “Plato held a kinds of reality theory, not a degrees of reality theory, and that this position solves otherwise intractable problems about the Forms, notably the Third Man critique.”

Anthony Flood, in “Aquinas on Contrition and the Love of God,” argues that, in the complex interplay of objects of love and fear and, ultimately, divine friendship, “contrition performs a fundamental role in countering, restoring, and safeguarding a proper ordering of love and attainment of the ultimate good of union with God.” The article examines St. Thomas’s treatment of penance, the associated virtues of hope and charity, and the “role of fear in contrition, especially in terms of servile and filial fear.” He concludes that “In a fallen world marked by sin and disordered love, it is the principal human act in the sacrament and virtue of penance that reverses the disorder of the will from an aversion to God and a conversion to mutable goods to a conversion to God and an aversion from a disordered attachment to mutable goods.”

Christopher-Marcus Gibson’s essay “What’s the Good of Perfected Passion?: Thomas Aquinas on Attentiveness and the Filiae Luxuriae”—which is also the ACPQ’s “Rising Scholar Essay Contest” winner—raises and seeks to answer what Gibson calls the “instrumentalizing problem,” arising from treating the passions of the soul as making “at best a merely instrumental contribution to the workings of intellect and will, in which alone the good of human activity consists.” By contrast, Gibson defends the view that the passions are partly constitutive of the virtues, reaching this conclusion via an examination of Aquinas’s consideration of the “daughters of lust,” and blindness of mind in particular.

– ACPQ 95.1 Disputed Question: On speaking one’s mind

This issue also features a special “Disputed Question” segment, a sic et non series of essays authored by Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP, and Dr. Marie George on the question of the priority of thought to language. This is a continuation of their earlier exchange in the pages of the ACPQ. In “Defending Adam After Darwin,” Austriaco set forth his case for monegenism, “[proposing] that our natural kind can be defined by our developmental capacity for language, which,” he suggests “is needed for abstract thinking.” In a later issue, George criticized certains claims of Austriaco’s in a rebuttal essay, “Aquinas’s Teachings on Concepts and Words in His Commentary on John contra Nicanor Austriaco, OP.” (This essay was summarized on Thomistica previously.) Specifically, George argues against Austriaco’s claims but also offers ways in which Aquinas might accept them with suitable qualifications and modifications.

Austriaco begins the renewed debate, in “Thomistic Thoughts About Thought and Talk,” by recapitulating and extending his earlier article. In his view, “the formation of an abstract concept presupposes language because the process outlined by Aquinas to perfect the concept can only happen if the rational animal can speak to himself.” He begins his defense with his own interpretation of the passage from St. Thomas’s commentary on St. John’s gospel (I.1, n. 26), upon which George’s original response was based. Austriaco asserts that the “discourse” within reason that Aquinas speaks of is a sort of interior speech, and then proceeds to support this contention with various examples about how one learns a new word or concept, also noting how some language-users lack certain concepts which others possess because one language has a word another one does not, and discussing how learning a new word for an experience helps us to clearly conceptualize that experience (e.g., the French expression dès vu). He defends the idea that “without language, the animal capable of abstracting would be incapable of reasoning. And without reasoning, the animal would be incapable of truly knowing.”

George responds, in “Does Knowing What Things Are Require Language (As a System of Physical or Imaginable Signs)?,” with a straightforward opening argument: words as signs are artefacts, the invention and use of which require a conceived purpose, which therefore requires that concepts are prior to language: “We cannot intend to invent words in the absence knowing their purpose, which is to organize and express concepts of what things are. If we had no concepts, then we could not intend to invent words.” George’s argument emphasizes the priority by nature of concept-formation, which, she maintains, shows that “the position that language is prior to all concepts without qualification entails the denial that there is a purely natural process by which humans form concepts starting from sense experience.” She also adduces examples of cases where human individuals learned a language only later in life, as well as reflections on other experiences of thinking without words.

The two articles after this initial statement of views, Austriaco’s “On the Limits of Abstraction,” and George’s “A Rambutan by Any Other Name Would Taste as Sweet,” highlight various places where the two disputants are in agreement. As for their disagreements, the debate arrives at a central principle at issue: that in our intellectual development, we proceed from the more universal and indistinctly grasped concepts to more specific and distinctly grasped ones. This is Aristotle’s view—defended by Aquinas—in Physics I.1, that children at first overextend the use of their names, which indicates the generality and vagueness of the conceptual grasp of distinct realities. Aristotle’s example is that children at first call all men “fathers” and all women “mothers,” and only later realize that not all adults have offspring. George’s own example is that, at first, some children call foxes “dogs.” While it seems to me that George is right in her response that Austriaco dodges the question at issue here, George, for her part, does not press her case far enough but instead merely settles for “showing that Austriaco’s account is not Thomistic.”

On my reading of this debate, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the scorecard for their exchanges is 2–0 in favor of George. Austriaco does not accurately utilize the distinction among the analogous senses of “word,” e.g., between the interior word that is a product of imagination and the interior word that is intellectual, nor does he offer a definition of language or spoken words, as George does, that clearly advances his argument. George’s claim that language is an artefact, and artefacts posterior to thought, seems irrefutable, and Austriaco’s counters appear to either miss the point or beg the question. It also seems that Austriaco’s own examples beg the question at issue, since they are typically drawn from our experience of thinking and talking, which a view such as George’s also must take for granted—that is, such experiences themselves are not probative here, but rather the analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the requisite powers of the soul enabling such experiences. Nonetheless, the debate is worthwhile reading, and the points of agreement just as illuminating and instructive.