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Rational and Other Animals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

John Haldane
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Extract

The soul has two cognitive powers. One is the act of a corporeal organ, which naturally knows things existing in individual matter; hence sense knows only the singular. But there is another kind of power called the intellect. Though natures only exist in individual matter, the intellectual power knows them not as individualised, but as they are abstracted from matter by the intellect's attention and reflection. Thus, through the intellect we can understand natures in a universal manner; and this is beyond the power of sense. (St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 12, a. 4; responsio.)

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 41 , September 1996 , pp. 17 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1996

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References

1 Quotations from Aquinas are taken (and in some cases adapted) from The Summa Theologica Literally Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1912).Google Scholar

2 For relevant texts of Dilthey see Rickman, H. P. (ed.), Dilthey, Selected Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

3 Elsewhere I have addressed the issue of the objective metaphysical preconditions of cognition arguing that the objects of knowledge must instantiate intelligible structures. Knowledge is of form. See Haldane, John, ‘Mind-World Identity Theory and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in Haldane, J. and Wright, C. (eds), Reality, Representation and Projection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, and ‘The Forms of Thought’, in Hahn, L. (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

4 For an English translation see Kenelm Foster, O.P. and Silvester Humphries, O.P., Aristotle's De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951)Google Scholar.

5 For nominalistic worries about this see Putnam, Hilary, ‘Aristotle after Wittgenstein’, in Words and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).Google Scholar A reply is presented in Haldane, John, ‘On Coming Home to (Metaphysical) Realism‘, Philosophy, 71 (1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 McDowell, John, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

7 Mind and World,?. 33.Google Scholar

8 Mind and World, p. 44.Google Scholar

9 Mind and World, p. 71.Google Scholar

10 See Haldane, John, ‘Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behaviour‘, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 62 (1988)Google Scholar; and ‘Naturalism and the Problem of Intentionality‘, Inquiry, 32(1989).Google Scholar

11 Mind and World, p. 109.Google Scholar

12 Mind and World, p. 114.Google Scholar

13 Summa Theologiae, la. q. 78. a. 4.Google Scholar

14 Mind and World, p. 123.Google Scholar

15 Ibid.

16 See Haldane, John, ‘The Mystery of Emergence‘, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Smart, J. J. C. and Haldane, J. J., Atheism and Theism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).Google Scholar