Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature

Description

This is probably Prof. Feser's maximus opus (greatest work) yet, many years in-the-making. It's a culmination/sequel of Scholastic Metaphysics and Aristotle's Revenge, which it cites passim. It's very insightful. It's for theory of mind what Aristotle's Revenge was for philosophy of science; although Aristotle's Revenge isn't anything too new (it's a sort of up-to-date version of what River Forest Thomism has been doing that for decades), Immortal Souls seems unique in its ability to engage modern philosophy of mind with Thomism.

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Abstract

Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print. Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of human nature. Along the way, the main rival positions in contemporary philosophy and science are thoroughly engaged with and rebutted.

Reviews

“Feser defends the Aristotelian and Thomistic system, effectively bringing it into dialogue with recent debates and drawing on some of the best of both analytic (Kripke, Searle, BonJour, Fodor) and phenomenological (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus) philosophy. He deftly rebuts objections to Thomism, both ancient and modern. Anyone working today on personal identity, the unity of the self, the semantics of cognition, free will, or qualia will need to engage with the analysis and arguments presented here.”
Robert C. Koons, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin

„Edward Feser’s book is a Summa of the nature of the human person: it is, therefore, both a rather long – but brilliant – monograph, and a valuable work for consultation. Each of the human faculties discussed is treated comprehensively, with a broad range of theories considered for and against, and, although Feser’s conclusions are firmly Thomistic, one can derive great benefit from his discussions even if one is not a convinced hylomorphist. Every philosopher of mind would benefit from having this book within easy reach.“
Howard Robinson, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Central European University

About the Author

Edward Feser is Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California, USA. His many books include Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction , Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science , and Five Proofs of the Existence of God.

Paperback, 548 pp, 14,8 x 21 cm

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from Prof. Feser's blog:

My book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature will be published this summer by Editiones Scholasticae. At well over 500 pages, it's my longest book yet. Here are the back cover copy, endorsements, and table of contents:

Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print. Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence [ch. 9 "Neither Computers nor Brains", ref:18.1-130; cf. Jaki, Brain, Mind and Computers], and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of human nature. Along the way, the main rival positions in contemporary philosophy and science are thoroughly engaged with and rebutted.

CONTENTS

Preface

Part I: What is Mind?

1. The Short Answer

2.The Self

3. The Intellect

4.The Will

Part II: What is Body?

5.Matter

6. Animality

Part III: What is a Human Being?

7. Against Cartesianism

8. Against Materialism

9. Neither Computers nor Brains

Part IV: What is the Soul?

10. Immortality

11. The Form of the Body

Index

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KOReader notes:

Preface

10/29/24Preface : 11

I say nothing about the distinction between the sexes, which is no small part of human nature. (I will treat that at length in a later book.)

1. The Short Answer

11/15/241. The Short Answer : 29

Combining these ideas, we can say that to have a mind, to be a self, and to be a person are all essentially the same thing, and that what they amount to is being a substance which by nature possesses an intellect and a will.

2. The Self

11/15/242. The Self : 38

The burden of this chapter is to defend the commonsense supposition that the self is real, and that it is not reducible to a mere bundle of thoughts and experiences (or to anything else for that matter). This will require defending the thesis that the self is a kind of substance.

3. The Intellect

11/19/243. The Intellect : 135

imagery is a necessary precondition of the normal functioning of the human intellect

i.e., phantasms

11/20/243. The Intellect : 140

John Searle’s way of putting the distinction, whereas linguistic representations like words have only “derived intentionality,” mental representations like concepts have “intrinsic intentionality.”123

11/19/243. The Intellect : 141

When you think about triangles, it is indeed triangles that you are thinking about, rather than the concept of being a triangle.

pace Kant

11/19/243. The Intellect : 141

The concept is (usually) not itself the object of your thought, but rather that by which you grasp the object of your thought

quod vs. quo

11/19/243. The Intellect : 143

be a concept is to be the sort of thing under which a class of things falls

cf. Duhem’s view that physical theories are classifications of experimental laws, thus they‘re concepts?

11/19/243. The Intellect : 144

Using connectives like “and” and “or,” we can construct compound propositions out of elementary ones.

CNF?

11/19/243. The Intellect : 157

an instrumental sign is a sign that is also something other than a sign

11/19/243. The Intellect : 157

its intentionality is of what Searle calls the “derived” kind

11/19/243. The Intellect : 157

A formal sign, by contrast, is a sign that is nothing but a sign

11/19/243. The Intellect : 157

Its intentionality is therefore of what Searle calls the “intrinsic” kind.

11/19/243. The Intellect : 159

not all of the signs from which these instrumental signs derive their meaning can be instrumental, on pain of vicious infinite regress or circularity. There must be signs which simply have their intentional content in an intrinsic or built-in way, or there would be nothing that signs with merely derived intentionality could derive it from

Hence why there must be indemonstable truths?

11/19/243. The Intellect : 160

Hence concepts are formal signs.

11/19/243. The Intellect : 168

because the mechanism will be sensitive only to that immediately preceding word, and not to what was emitted by the speaker several words previously.

not with Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs), attention methods, etc.

11/20/243. The Intellect : 183

theory, in the sense of a body of knowledge about members of a class

à le Duhem

4. The Will

11/20/244. The Will : 223

Aquinas holds that the intellect is prior to the will, a thesis sometimes called intellectualism

11/20/244. The Will : 223

the will is a power of a substance, and a power is ontologically less fundamental than the substance of which it is a power. And the kind of substance of which it is a power is a rational or intellectual substance. Hence, the will is posterior to the intellect

11/20/244. The Will : 226

One then can start wondering whether it might not really be the eight ball that is knocking into the cue ball, and be led thereby into voluntarism.

because of kinematic relativity

11/20/244. The Will : 226

We must also avoid confusing the will with the emotions that are often associated with its exercise.

11/20/244. The Will : 230

Are volitions themselves voluntary?

11/22/244. The Will : 252

there are always alternative possible ways the thinker might conceptualize the world, consistent with this set of facts.

à la Galileo’s Rinuccini letter

11/22/244. The Will : 253

since the intellect can in principle conceptualize or describe the same one thing in different ways and thus, depending on the conceptualization or description, judge the very same thing either as a good end (or means), or judge instead that some other end (or means) is better, it follows that the agent could in principle either will or not will the same end (or means). Thus he has the ability to do otherwise, just as a consequence of having an intellect.

11/22/244. The Will : 255

there are no strict laws correlating mental and physical phenomena, the way there are strict laws of physics and chemistry

11/23/244. The Will : 261

Because the intellect is not necessitated to conceptualizing things one way rather than another, the will is not necessitated to being moved to one end rather than another.

11/23/244. The Will : 276

having free will is fundamentally about being the ultimate author of one’s actions

11/23/244. The Will : 280

While an average of 200 milliseconds passed between the conscious sense of willing and the flexing of the wrist, the activity in the motor cortex would begin an average of over 500 milliseconds before the flexing. Hence the conscious urge to flex, it is suggested, seems not to be the cause of the neural activity which initiates the flexing, but rather to follow that neural activity.

11/23/244. The Will : 287

activity in two brain regions predicted which button would be pressed up to ten seconds before the conscious decision was reported

11/23/244. The Will : 288

with Libet’s experimental setup, the action studied by Haynes is highly idiosyncratic. It involved choosing one action rather than another for no particular reason

Buridan’s ass

11/24/244. The Will : 293

there cannot be laws of psychology the way there are laws of planetary motion, laws of chemistry, and the like

Why?

11/24/244. The Will : 297

The will is in this sense an uncaused cause or unmoved mover.

5. Matter

11/24/245. Matter : 322

Their mistake is failing to note the difference between actuality and potentiality.

11/24/245. Matter : 324

Heraclitus makes the opposite error, of collapsing all reality into potentiality and denying actuality.

11/25/245. Matter : 349

scientific explanations ceased to make any reference to God, so too did reference even to externally imposed teleology disappear

11/25/245. Matter : 357

well-known controversy about whether the “principle of least action” is teleological, though that is not without interest.335

11/25/245. Matter : 365

a cow is far from the level of prime matter insofar as there are several intermediate levels of kinds of physical substance between it and prime matter

seems against the unicity of substantial form

6. Animality

11/26/246. Animality : 385

Machines seem life-like only if we ignore this crucial distinction between substantial and accidental form.

11/26/246. Animality : 385

It is directedness toward that particular sort of end – again, the perfection or completion of the causal agent itself – that is definitive of immanent causation and thus definitive of life.

11/26/246. Animality : 395

If someone pointed out to you that circles differ in kind from polygons, it would be absurd to accuse him of insinuating thereby that circles must have been specially created by a divine designer

à les Pathagoeans?

11/26/246. Animality : 411

Concupiscible appetite is a matter of being drawn toward something straightforwardly pleasant or repelled by something straightforwardly unpleasant

11/26/246. Animality : 412

Irascible appetite is a matter of being drawn toward something pleasant but difficult to attain, or repelled by something unpleasant but difficult to avoid.

11/26/246. Animality : 415

the “qualia problem” (also known as the “hard problem of consciousness

7. Against Cartesianism

11/27/247. Against Cartesianism : 490

All intelligent behavior thus ultimately rests instead on knowing how – again, on dispositions and the like. Since playing chess, driving a car, and for that matter carrying out a conversation with someone about whether Socrates is mortal are all bodily activities, the dispositions in question are bodily dispositions.

11/27/247. Against Cartesianism : 491

the action loop phenomena studied by psychologists

proves all knowledge comes through senses?

11/28/247. Against Cartesianism : 499

that I try to describe the experience in terms of sense data such as a roundish red patch in the center of my field of vision, etc

cf. Duhem Aim & Structure ** pp. 178-9 re: sense vs. physics precision etc.; sense knowledge more certain

11/28/247. Against Cartesianism : 500

There is no way to identify exactly which collections of particles I have in mind in any particular case except by reference to the ordinary objects they are supposed to be replacing.

11/28/247. Against Cartesianism : 517

if, as Wittgenstein holds, the notion of a logically private language is incoherent, then the “self-containedness” that the Cartesian picture attributes to the mind is also incoherent.

How would Perice, Deely, or Poinsot answer?
Words in closed book still signify?

11/28/247. Against Cartesianism : 525

the intellect, though differing in kind and not merely in degree from the imagination, in its ordinary operations works in conjunction with imagination

Einstein's adage, right?

11/28/247. Against Cartesianism : 526

But for a theorist who takes a certain concept to be innate, experience does not generate the concept, but rather merely triggers our awareness of what was already there in the intellect before the triggering.

Platonic

11/29/247. Against Cartesianism : 536

The acquisition and first exercise of the concept can instead be simultaneous, just as the acquisition and first exercise of the ability to ride a bike are.

11/29/247. Against Cartesianism : 539

For example, an abstract geometrical concept like circularity or triangularity hardly resembles any of the motions of particles or electrochemical activity in the brain that such an empiricist regards as its trigger. This is precisely why early modern rationalists like Descartes judged that the mechanical conception of nature pointed to innatism rather than empiricism.

11/29/247. Against Cartesianism : 551

the early modern rationalists’ general conception of how nature operates led them to conclude that concepts could not arise via experience and must be innate

thus the importance of a proper natural philosophy (Pope St. Pius X, Doctoris Angelici : "error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God").

8. Against Materialism

11/30/248. Against Materialism : 584

mystery is different from, and far better than, the self-defeating incoherence that Ross’s critic is forced into.

11/30/248. Against Materialism : 584

John of St. Thomas distinguished between instrumental signs and formal signs.570

11/30/248. Against Materialism : 586

if every sign were a material sign, we would be led into a vicious regress

11/30/248. Against Materialism : 607

with the sui generis acts of thinking (or “formal signs,” as John of St. Thomas characterizes them), there is no such gap. The thought just is its content

11/30/248. Against Materialism : 610

Fred Dretske’s approach to solving the misrepresentation problem.595 He begins by introducing the notion of a “natural sign,”

= Poinsot‘s?

12/01/248. Against Materialism : 643

the number of neural phenomena is finite, whereas the number of concepts we might form is not just larger but infinite
[context: storage problem]

12/01/248. Against Materialism : 644

That the intellect can grasp a potential infinity of concepts is obvious just from the fact that the series of numbers is infinite, and there is no number in the series of which we are incapable in principle of forming a concept.
[context: storage problem]

12/01/248. Against Materialism : 660

reductio ad absurdum arguments, the probative force of which is generally acknowledged

Who denies their validity?

12/01/248. Against Materialism : 665

the intellect is simple or non-composite is thus to be understood as the claim that it is neither extended nor composed of form and matter

12/02/248. Against Materialism : 700

Kantianism denies that we can know things as they are in themselves; constructive empiricism holds that what we can reasonably believe about a scientific theory is at most only that it is empirically adequate, but not that it is true; Noam Chomsky distinguishes between the problems that minds of our kind are capable of solving and the mysteries that they cannot solve; and so on

12/02/248. Against Materialism : 703

The critic will no doubt reply that this makes thought mysterious, but that is no objection to the argument. Thought is mysterious.

9. Neither Computers nor Brains

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 724

rhetorical barrier

Linus Torvalds says AI is 90% marketing.

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 728

That someone follows the algorithm does not suffice to show that he knows how to multiply, and could not in principle do so, precisely because it is written in such a way that no understanding of multiplication is necessary.

Begs question of how one learns to multiply in the first place

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 734

a computer qua computer can in the nature of the case only ever mimic or simulate an intellect, and never actually amount to one

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 740

there is parallel distributed processing (PDP) or connectionism, a model of computation that is much closer than Turing’s is to the way the brain operates.

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 749

We can imagine instead that he memorizes the symbols and the rulebook and carries on answering questions in Chinese put to him by consulting his memory of what the symbols look like and how the instructions tell him to respond

Memory vs. understanding

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 750

But for all Searle has shown, when he follows the algorithm for answering questions in Chinese, this yields a second mind, which does understand Chinese.

Peirce‘s interpretant?

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 751

Hence, if someone wants to claim that something in the scenario (even if not Searle himself) does have genuine understanding, he’ll have to appeal to more than just the following of the algorithm.

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 752

following the algorithm is not sufficient to yield genuine understanding

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 752

Computation is a matter of manipulating symbols according to syntactical rules. Yet symbols and syntax are not intrinsic properties of the physical world, but merely observer-relative features of it.

seems to realize Peirce’s interpretant neccesary

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 753

The argument against cognitivism goes deeper by pointing out that in fact something’s running an algorithm actually presupposes intelligence. Hence appeal to algorithms and the like cannot be even part of the explanation of intelligence.

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 767

Arguments inspired by Gödel

Jaki mentions, too

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 772

extrinsic

Sic ; "intrinsic"?

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 773

First, an intelligent thing is a kind of substance, not an artifact. But second, a machine is an artifact, and not a true substance. Therefore, no machine can be an intelligent thing.

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 790

subject to not

sic : "do"?

12/03/249. Neither Computers nor Brains : 799

Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines, and Mental Representation, Third edition (London: Routledge, 2016

pro-AI

10. Immortality

12/05/2410. Immortality : 846

Some such experiences might be the result of special divine action.

or preternatural

12/05/2410. Immortality : 851

When it is said that the intellect knows something, this is to be understood as a shorthand way of saying that the person knows it, by virtue of his intellect. Similarly, when it is said that the will chooses some end, this is a shorthand way of saying that the person chooses it, by virtue of his will

12/05/2410. Immortality : 852

John Lamont helpfully characterizes Aquinas’s conception of action as “life-driven,” by contrast with the “goods-driven” conceptions that predominate today.

12/05/2410. Immortality : 855

For Aquinas, a necessary condition for repentance is the recognition of a higher good the realization of which is frustrated by the action of which one repents.816 He compares this to correcting an intellectual error by reasoning back to first principles (an example of which would be the law of non-contradiction).

12/05/2410. Immortality : 864

by nature the body exists for the sake of moving the soul towards its perfection or completion

11. The Form of the Body

12/06/2411. The Form of the Body : 881

The words most commonly translated “soul” in scripture (the Hebrew nephesh and the Greek psychē) connote that which makes a body a living thing

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 909

Nor is it correct to say that, until all this happens, we are dealing only with a potential rational animal. Rather, we are dealing with an actual rational animal that has not yet realized all its potentials

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 909

If soul and body really were, as Descartes supposes, distinct substances each complete in its own right, then there arguably would be no reason to take the soul to be present until the rational powers are actually exercised. By contrast, if the soul is what gives form to the body, then it must be present as soon as the body is present, whether or not all the organs characteristic of such a body are yet formed or all the powers it gives the body are yet exercised

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 909

Aquinas himself, though a hylemorphist, took the human soul to be present only long after conception.852 But that is not because he thought a human body was present even before the human soul was present. Rather, he thought that conception yields something that is not yet a human body but which gives way to a human body precisely when it loses its substantial form and takes on the substantial form of a human body – that is to say, a human soul

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 911

the fact that the exercise of a power is absent does not entail that the power itself is absent, or that the substantial form that grounds the power is absent.

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 917

to be a dualist is precisely to reject materialism

∵ materialists reject teleology

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 919

how can one’s soul come from the souls of one’s parents? That would seem to require that a part of one’s father’s soul and a part of one’s mother’s soul be passed down to their offspring

à la St. John Chrysostom’s metaphor?

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 923

Natural material causes can no more reunite soul and body than they could generate a soul in the first place

12/07/2411. The Form of the Body : 924

It seems relevant to point out in closing that there is one religion, and only one, that grounds its claim to divine provenance precisely on evidence that one such Resurrection has already occurred.