One thing that is generally agreed upon by scholars is that the Cartesian turn in philosophy was not an act of creatio ex nihilio, but had its roots in various tendencies in logic, metaphysics, and epistemology located in the late scholastic tradition that preceded it. One such tendency was that of nominalism, which was a characteristic feature of late scholasticism made popular by William of Ockham and his followers, notably John Buridan. Nominalism as a feature of late scholasticism is the view that universals are not real but signify certain dispositions in the subject to think or speak in a certain way. Contrast this with realism that holds that universals are really existing either universally in both the mind and extra-mental reality (Platonism) or universally only in the mind and individually in reality (Aristotelianism, Thomism, Scotism).
Now if we focus on nominalism, it holds that universals are not real but signify only dispositions of the subject. On that account then, our knowledge of kinds and the ontological make-up of reality is nothing more than certain dispositions of the subject; for an Ockhamist, these would be dispositions to think in a certain way. It follows then that for such nominalists, engagement with characteristically philosophical problems occurs within a mental space wherein universals abound. Late scholastic nominalists then moved the philosophical discussion away from extra-mental reality and sought out explanations for philosophical problems from within the mental. This is juxtaposed to realists like Aquinas or Scotus who held that to engage with philosophical problems one must engage with extra-mental reality.
What scholastic nominalism bequeathed to philosophy was a tendency to do philosophy ‘in the head’ as it were; and it is no surprise that some of the most interesting contributions to the logic of this period were made by nominalists. Now if we consider this tendency to do philosophy within the head, we can notice the roots of a philosophical problem begin to emerge. What goes on in the head has a certain character to it; it doesn’t seem to be conformable to law, rather spontaneity seems to reign such that we can think what we like and oftentimes people entertain the most wildly contradictory of thoughts. By contrast, extra-mental reality seems to be governed by law, it is determined, regular and quite different from the spontaneity of mentality. If we connect this juxtaposition of the spontaneity of thought and the determinateness of the world with the nominalistic tendency to see philosophical problems as being addressed ‘within the head’, then we see a problem. Given that ‘in the head’ we are free to think of things as we like whereas in the world things go by a regular order that is subject to law like generalisation, the immediate problem arises as to whether or not what is going on in the head is in any way comparable to what is going on in reality, that is, whether or not our patterns of thought about the world actually match up to what is going on in the world. Late scholastic nominalism then envisaged a fissure between mind and world such that the manoeuvres in the mental space for the solving of philosophical problems may not exactly connect up with the world in any way. The problem then of the mind/world relation became an urgent one, and it was out of this philosophical matrix that a Descartes was to emerge and attempt to establish knowledge of the world on the basis of a sure and certain foundation.
What I find fascinating about Descartes is not the content of his thought, but the framework within which it was undertaken. The mind/world relationship is now envisaged as a relationship between two sui generis things and the central philosophical problematic is how to get from the mind here to the object in the world there. Without an external constraint on thought’s spontaneity, thought would be left spinning frictionlessly in the void to use McDowell’s happy metaphor; and so the task was to find an external constraint on thought that would legitimately relate it to the world. If Descartes’s successors were not so happy to follow him in his conclusions, they were certainly happy to accept his framework, and they all seemed to accept some sort of dualism of two sui generis spaces: mind and world.
Now Kant is rightly considered to have made a major breakthrough in this problematic and I think the reason why it was so major is as follows. Whereas Descartes, Locke and Hume (Hume it should be said anticipated Kant’s breakthrough), were trying to find a constraint on thought that is itself extrinsic to thought, Kant suggested that perhaps thought itself is the constraint. That is to say, in the engagement between mind and world, we need not look for an external constraint on thought, but rather have the world become conformable to thought. Hence we have the articulation of the Copernican hypothesis and its validation in the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason.
I don’t want to explore the details of Kant’s thought, but I do want to remain with this notion that thought itself is the constraint such that the world is conformable to thought. Implicit in this position is the view that in order for there to be engagement between the subject and the world, there has to be some sort of homogeneity between the two (as opposed to a link). For Kant this entailed the a priori determination of the matter of experience, thereby bringing the world into conformity with thought. A lot of my own research has been into the thought of St Thomas Aquinas and Kant, and people often ask me how I can admire Kant so much when I fundamentally disagree with him. The point is often made that I as a Thomistic realist hold a totally juxtaposed view to Kant to the effect that the mind is conformed to the world, it is the world that determines our thought, not that our thought determines the world as Kant would have it. It is true that this is a disagreement between Aquinas and Kant, but it masks a greater and more profound agreement: for both, knowledge is not conceived of as finding some extrinsic constraint on the spontaneity of thought, rather knowledge is conceived of as finding a suitable conformity between mind and world. Both Aquinas and Kant then conceive of knowledge as standing in a certain relation to world; so for both there is a conformability between mind and world and whilst they disagree on the kind of conformity, they agree that we need conformity.
Now, Kant opted for the conformity of world to mind, because following the Cartesian juxtaposition of mind and world, itself a derivation of a nominalist mode of thinking, he took each to be heterogeneous, so that one would have to be conformable to the other. He could not see how mind could be conformable to world, but he could envisage how world could be conformable to mind by means of the a priori forms and categories. Aquinas on the other hand, not laden with nominalistic tendencies which would lead one to privatise mentality as a kind of inner space wholly juxtaposed to the world, sees both the subject and extra-mental objects as items in the realm of determinate being. The realm of determinate being is such that there is a structure to things and the determinations characteristic of the structure of things serve to locate things within a type. On this basis then St Thomas claims that things with mental capacities are able to discern individuals within their types and thereby go on to classify them, form propositions about them etc. In other words, whereas for Kant conceptual content is only located within mentality, for Aquinas conceptual content is unbounded – the realm of determinate beings is the realm of conceptual content, and within that realm there are certain beings who have the intellectual capacity to focus on the conceptual content implicit in their experience of other beings. So Thomas is then led to the conformity of mind to world.
The stand-off then between Aquinas and Kant will turn on whether or not one is happy with the metaphysical presuppositions made by both authors. But I think it should be noted that what we have here is an indication that certain issues in philosophy have not gone unnoticed by earlier generations of thinkers, and if a certain generation of thinkers does not see a philosophical problematic as particularly urgent, it may not necessarily be because that generation are amateurs, it may be that within their framework of philosophising, such questions do not have the force that they have within another framework. So it might be an idea that when one doggedly pursues research into a philosophical tradition to ever greater complexity and with ever greater precision, one should stop and think why it is only one’s own tradition that finds these problems alluring and why other traditions do not take such issues so seriously; this will serve to highlight the philosophical presuppositions that go to fuel the arguments and debates in one’s own tradition and perhaps even lead one to overhaul the whole framework within which those arguments and debates are conducted. If anything, it will leave one with a greater appreciation of the richness of other philosophical traditions and hopefully insulate one from a philosophical parochialism that can often invade the subject.
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