Abstract
This paper presents a version of analytical Thomism that brings the principles of Aquinas into systematic and sustained contact with the sciences as opposed to contemporary philosophy. The leading idea of this version of analytical Thomism is to test the viability of scholastic principles by seeing if they provide the resources to cope with problems emerging from the natural and social sciences. If they do, then Thomism vindicates itself in the marketplace of ideas. If not, then the analytical Thomist knows where the perennial philosophy needs further development and perhaps revision. The first part of the paper sets out the rationale for this project. The remainder of the paper illustrates this approach by examining a problem emerging from evolutionary biology, namely, the provision of a theory of individuation for living entities.
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Notes
It goes without saying, of course, that the analytical Thomist benefits enormously from sound historical work on Aquinas and his contemporaries. Analytical Thomism is therefore in no way hostile to the historico-expository approach to Aquinas. But history is not philosophy.
For detracting voices see the contributions of Brian Shanley, Stephen Theron, and John Knasas in Paterson and Pugh (2006).
This is no small achievement. Following Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris, numerous philosophically unsophisticated manuals summarising the work of Aquinas were produced for use in seminars. These works did much to re-enforce the widespread prejudice that there is little of philosophical value to be found in the Scholastics.
For a particularly forthright rejection of the use of Fregean logical syntax in metaphysics see E.J. Lowe’s (2012). Fred Sommer’s (1982) revitalisation of traditional logic and accompanying critique of Frege has done much to remove the shine from the Fregean revolution. For extended discussion of Sommer’s counter-revolution see Oderberg (2005).
Consider the projects of Dummett, Kripke, Rawls, Armstrong, Derrida, Levinas and Habermas, leading figures of the second half of the 20th century.
For extended discussion see Stephen Boulter’s (2013) “The Aporetic Method and the Defence of Immodest Metaphysics”.
See Jack Wilson’s (1999) for a recent book length treatment of biological individuality that begins by recognising the practical difficulty. For early discussions of the concept of the biological individual see T.H Huxley’s (1852), J. Huxley’s (1912), and E. Haechel’s (1979). For recent work suggesting that a grasp of the notion of the biological individual is absolutely essential to the viability of evolutionary theory, and that such a grasp is currently lacking, see Pepper and Heron (2008) and Ruiz-Mirazo et al. (2000).
As Hull says, “If selection is a process of differential perpetuation of the units of selection, and if organisms are the primary focus of selection, then we’d better know which entities we are to count” (2001, 17). Of course there are those who champion the gene as the basic unit of selection, and others who, while recognising the individual organism as one unit of selection, wish to add others such as the group or species. But both accept that the organism plays a key role in any account of selection. Groups are obviously made up of individual organisms, and genes are subject to selection indirectly through direct pressures brought to bear upon their interactors, i.e., the organism they use to replicate themselves.
“What the ecologist, as population biologist, studies is the density of a population (number of individuals per unit area), the rate of increase (or decrease) of such a population under varying conditions, and, when dealing with the populations of a single species, all those parameters that control the size of the population such as birth rate, life expectancy, mortality, and so on” (Ernst Mayr, 1997, 210–11).
We are standardly told that “…the fitness of a trait depends on the proportion of the individuals in a population that have that trait” (Sterelny and Griffiths 1999, 8). Similarly, “… difference in survival is expressed … by a parameter, assigned to each genotype, called relative fitness, a number that represents the fraction of the individuals of a given genotype that survives to adulthood and reproduction” (Stearns and Hoekstra 2005, 76).
“In contemporary evolutionary biology an ‘adaptation’ is a characteristic of an organism whose form is a result of selection in a particular functional context” (West-Eberhard 1998, 8).
The need to sure that we are comparing ‘apples with apples’ when employing the comparative method is part of the case Pepper and Heron (2008) make for the indispensability of an account of biological individuality to evolutionary theory.
This paragraph is heavily indebted to Wilson (1999, 6–7).
Space considerations make an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of these criteria impossible. But for extended discussion of the attending difficulties see Ellen Clarke’s (2010) “The Problem of Biological Individuality”, in Biological Theory.
A typical example of the principle at work can be found in Summa Theologiae (1988) I, q. 75, a 2. “Nihil autem potest per se operari, nisi quod per se subsistit. Non enim est operari nisi entis in actu: unde eo modo aliquid operator, quo est.” “Now only that which subsists in itself can have an operation in itself. For nothing can operate but what is actual, and so a thing operates according as it is.” English translation by Pegis (1997). This is reaffirmed in Quaestio Disputata de Anima: “everything that exists in its own right has its own activity” (in Aquinas 2008, p. 184).
Another significant difference is that the Thomist account suggests that the term ‘individual’ is analogical. There is a focal sense of ‘individual’ which attaches to the individual per se, viz., the independent agent; and then there are various analogically related senses of ‘individual’ that apply to agents who do not have this sort of independent activity. Recognising analogical senses of key terms frees one from an error of the analytic tradition, namely, insisting that all non-defective concepts are univocal, and thus have a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that apply to all legitimate applications of the term.
The plausibility of linking individuals to actions and operations can be re-enforced by other considerations as well. (1) The focus on action and operation is itself sensible because we do not live in a frozen world. Because change is a real feature of the world we inhabit, and change is primarily brought about by the actions of individuals, it is no surprise that our notion of the individual per se is closely connected to that of action. (2) Linking individuals to actions also delivers a common sense response to the discussion of mereological sums. There is good reason to consider an apple, say, to be a real entity above and beyond the atoms that make it up because there are actions associated with the apple that cannot be attributed to the atoms in and of themselves. Similarly, we do not usually consider an apple and a pear to constitute three objects (the apple, the pear and the apple/pear composite) but only two because there are no actions associated with the apple/pear composite. (3) Tying individuals to action also allows one to side-step Unger’s sorties paradox of composition as applied to biological entities. Unger (2009) argues that the following three propositions are inconsistent: (a) Organisms exists; (b) Organisms consist of a finite number of cells; (c) If organisms exists, then the net removal of one cell, or only a few, will not mean the difference as to whether the organism exists. Unger suggests that all three propositions are irresistible. But since they are incompatible at least one of them must be false. Unger suggests that the most vulnerable proposition is (a), and so he concludes that composite entities like organisms do not exist, even at the expense of saying that he must now deny his own existence. But surely it is more reasonable to deny (b) or (c) on the basis of the Thomist analysis of the biological individual as an independent agent.
Mitochondia lost the capacity to photosynthesize, while chloroplasts lost respiration.
See Stearns and Hoesktra, ch. 15, for extended discussion.
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Boulter, S. Aquinas on Biological Individuals: An Essay in Analytical Thomism. Philosophia 41, 603–616 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9482-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9482-x