The Reality of Knowing: The Status of Ideas in Aquinas and Reid

244 Pages·2014·1.04 MB·English

The Reality of Knowing: The Status of
Ideas in Aquinas and Reid
Author: Sean Micheal Connolly
Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/723
This work is posted on eScholarship@BC,
Boston College University Libraries.
Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009
Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.
Boston College

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Department of Philosophy

The Reality of Knowing: The Status of Ideas in Aquinas and Reid

by

SEÁN M. CONNOLLY

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August, 2009
© copyright by SEÁN M. CONNOLLY
2009
The Reality of Knowing: The Status of Ideas in Aquinas and Reid

by

Seán M. Connolly
Advisor: Ronald K. Tacelli S.J.

Abstract:

Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Reid are philosophers who, while writing from very
different historical and intellectual contexts, both share a common conviction as
epistemological realists. This paper will argue that, despite any initial appearances of
conflict, their arguments and conclusions are both compatible and complementary, and
that through such an agreement we can come to a richer understanding of the realist
tradition. At the heart of this unity lie the shared principles that:
• Knowledge involves a direct apprehension of things themselves.
• Ideas are not themselves objects or intermediaries, but the active means by which the
intellect understands.
• The relationship between the mind and its object is not one of a material likeness, but of
a formal likeness.
• The existence of external objects of knowledge is not demonstrable, but is a self-evident
first principle.
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For there shall be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine, but
according to their own desires they will heap to themselves teachers,
having itching ears: And they will turn away indeed their hearing from the
truth, but will be turned to fables.

2 Timothy, 4.3-4
------
Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: The Emperor Has No Clothes 1

Chapter 2: The Real Over the Ideal 25

Chapter 3: Reid’s Razor 70

Chapter 4: Whither Ideas? 116

Chapter 5: One of These Things Is Not Like the Other . . . 166

Chapter 6: Brushes and Ladders 193

Chapter 7: Eggs are Eggs 217

Bibliography 234
Chapter 1: The Emperor Has No Clothes

If we mean to be philosophical our main concern will be that our beliefs
should be true; we shall care very little whether they happen to be popular
with the intellectual proletarians of the moment, and if we can get back to
truth we shall not mind having to go back a long way after it.1

It only takes an honest man to tell the truth, a dishonest man to tell a lie; but it
takes a misguided philosopher to confuse the difference. For while the honest man
describes things as they are, the dishonest man as they are not, the philosopher casts into
doubt the very possibility of what is or is not: with Pilate he cries “what is truth?” and
washes his hands of the consequences. Gifted with intelligence and the best of intentions,
the philosopher is readily drawn to a love of intellectual novelty, inventive musings, and
false progress, building elaborate structures of thought which either draw all truth into the
idealist and solipsistic realm of the mind alone, or seek to cast it beyond our reach in a
frenzy of skepticism.
In either case, what is so easily lost are the ties that bind the mind to things in the
act of knowing, and if man is indeed a rational animal, confusion on the nature of that
rationality is a serious matter indeed. If we see the intellect as the means by which man
is directly able to understand the nature of an external reality, the measure of the true and
the good will consequently be found in the equation of the mind to things themselves.
Hence the human intellect is not a measure, but a thing measured, and the true and the

1 A. E. Taylor, Recent Developments in European Thought, p. 48, as cited in Fulton J.
Sheen, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, New York, Image Books, 1958, p.
22.
1
good have an objective foundation.2 If, on the other hand, we see the operation of the
intellect as prior to or independent of any external reality, the measure of the true and the
good rests upon the subjective foundation of the mind alone. In the first case, truth is the
conformity of the intellect to things, the priority of being over mind; in the second case, it
becomes the conformity of things to the intellect, the priority of mind over being. The
first is the philosophy of objective realism, the second the philosophy of subjective
idealism.
Nothing less than the very sources and principles of all human judgment and
action, the normative standards of life itself, whether practical or theoretical, hang in the
balance here. Do we proceed from things to thought, or from thought to things? The
student of philosophy is well aware of the various answers to this question throughout the
ages, but is most familiar with its modern formulations, as evident in the prevailing
tendency of philosophical thought from Descartes to the present. What invariably
distinguishes the main thrust of modernity, and its inevitable offspring, post-modernity,
from the rest of the history of philosophy is its nearly unanimous support of various
forms of subjective idealism. This dominance has a profound effect not only in the
intellectual or academic arena, but also in the most immediate social and cultural norms
of everyday life.
Under such conditions, a defense of realism may appear nostalgic or reactionary;
but more importantly, it may appear as hopelessly naïve. A classical model of
epistemology, we are told, fails to employ a suitably critical method, in that it assumes

2 See St. Thomas Aquinas, (trans. Robert W. Mulligan), On Truth / De Veritate,
Chicago, Henry Regnery, 1952, Question 1, Article 2.
2
the very existence of things themselves as proper and immediate objects of awareness. A
critical model, however, takes no such thing for granted; it claims, by a careful and
systematic method, to examine the given conditions of thinking itself, to analyze the
content of our ideas, and then to determine how and why we might demonstrate a
corresponding external reality. An idealist conclusion is, of course, the unavoidable
outcome of such a critical method, since one is expected to begin with thought alone as
that which is most clear, distinct, and self-evident, only then to proceed onward to things
themselves.
Whether it be the cogito of Descartes, the solipsism of Berkeley, the habitual
belief of Hume, the transcendental idealism of Kant, or the dialectic of Hegel, the root
principles are the same. Wilhemsen’s classic account serves to highlight the distinction
between the critical and the non-critical:

The critical philosophers—following the program of Descartes—attempt
to subject the instruments of knowing to a searching analysis in order that
they might establish (if possible) the reliability of human knowledge itself;
once they have established this reliability to their satisfaction, they turn to
other philosophical issues; they begin with the evidence of thought; they
terminate (perhaps) in the evidence of being. The non-critical
philosophers—the metaphysical realists—begin with things, and in the
course of their speculations, they explain knowledge in terms of what they
know about the being of the things that are. The first principle of critical
epistemology is the truth that “thought is,” either thinking in general or my
3
own thinking. The first principle of non-critical epistemology—of
metaphysical realism—is the truth that “being is” or “beings are.”3

The critical approach seems tempting in its striving for a thorough rebuilding of
epistemology, taking nothing for granted, applying strict requirements of evidence and
proof to explain the act of knowing. Yet the model begs the question, presuming its own
conclusion as a premise in its argument. In accepting thought alone as the only measure
of truth, and ordering an external reality as secondary to it, the idealist already begins
with what he wishes to prove; it is a bitter irony that what at first appears as a modern
critical method ends up not being very critical at all.
The question becomes whether it is realism that is naïve in taking things
themselves as given, or idealism that is naïve in taking thought alone as given? A
defense of realism must give an account of the act of awareness, while at the same time
avoiding the trap of considering the act separately from its object. While the realist and
idealist will both surely agree that knowing is an operation of the mind, the act of a
subject who knows, it is the proper content of that operation that is in dispute. In other
words, what precisely is that we think about, and how are we to understand the relation
of subject and object in this action?
The idealist asserts that subjective thought or feeling has priority in the act of
knowing, and therefore treats thoughts and feelings as if they are themselves primary
objects. The realist, however, counters that the very action of feeling or thought already
presupposes as prior the thing itself as felt or known; hence the thing itself is primary.

3 Wilhemsen, Frederick D., Man’s Knowledge of Reality, Englewood Cliffs NJ, Prentice-
Hall, 1956, Ch. 3, p. 17.
4