Types of Ethics

Organizing the many different ethical systems produced by philosophers over the ages, some scholars have divided them into two camps: deontological (duty-oriented) and teleological (goal-oriented). The former tells us to do the right thing because it's the right thing; the latter tells us to do what is needed to achieve the right outcome.

Others have added two more categories: "virtue ethics" (in which actions are seen as arising from, manifesting, and giving information about the character of the agent), and "pragmatic ethics" (in which the social context of the action, i.e., the properties of society - its views on, and response to, the act in question).

Given any number of categories, the critical question is then whether, if some of the categories can be shown to be equivalent, that the number could be reduced. Some scholars even suggest that there is only one category: ethical systems.

In any case, we are discussing categories of systems: in each category, there will be many distinct and mutually exclusive systems.

Professor Alfred Freddoso writes that

Important recent work in ethics signals a healthy shift away from "act-centered" moral theories and toward "character-centered" theories. The medievals, of course, fashioned several subtle and interestingly diverse doctrines of virtue, which could perhaps serve as touchstones for contemporary discussions.

Ethics done in this way identifies and enumerates virtues in the agent. Actions manifest or exemplify those virtues, and so remain secondary while virtues are primary in such an ethical system.

Events and Things

In the natural sciences, or observational sciences, descriptions can be about things or about events. Often we can construct two equivalent descriptions, one thing-centered, and the other event centered. A thing-centered description of magnetism states that a magnet has the power to attract bits of iron in its vicinity. An event-centered description would say that a magnet and a bit of iron moved closer together.

Although such pairs of descriptions may in many cases be equivalent, in other cases, or in other ways, they might not be synonymous. Professor Alfred Freddoso writes:

Some prominent philosophers of science, dissatisfied with basically empiricist conceptions of natural law and scientific explanation, now argue that natural substances are best thought of as nonfree agents endowed with causal powers and that laws of nature are properly expressed by specifications of those powers rather than by generalizations (whether necessary or not) about events. The medieval Aristotelians, despite the inadequacy of their scientific theories, elaborated just such a philosophical conception of nature. Their writings in this area may prove to be illuminating, as has been clear ever since Peter Geach published his penetrating essay on Aquinas in Three Philosophers.

Comparing events to objects, some philosophers have noted that objects can change location, while events cannot. Following Hume, we would think of a magnet as the conjunction of numerous attraction events which occur at different times and places. Following the medievals, we think of a magnet has having the power of attraction, which naturally remains with it when it moves. The medieval view is more intuitive; the burden lies on Hume to show why we would need to override such an intuitive view.

Logic and the University

Although Scholasticism among thinkers like Johannes Scotus Eriugena certainly preceded the formal institution of the university, it is clear that the birth and flourishing of the university in late eleventh century invigorated scholasticism. We can trace the building of intellectual momentum from Charlemagne's educational initiatives to Bologna in 1088. Frederick Copleston writes:

In 910 the abbey of Cluny was founded; and the monasteries of the Cluniac reform, which was introduced into England by St. Dunstan, contributed to

the emergence of Scholasticism. The university would be the result of merging such monasteries - or at least their intellectual powers - with the cathedral schools in the larger cities and the occasional law school.

For example, the monk Abbon, who died in 1004, directed a monastic school on the Loire, where, in addition to the study of the Scriptures and the Fathers, attention was given to grammar, logic, and mathematics.

Logic at that time was built around Aristotle (whose logical works were not lost, but rather had been translated into Latin by Boethius around 520 A.D.), commentary on Aritstotle by Boethius, and Porphyry.

A more prominent figure, however, is Gerbert of Aurillac. Born about 938, Gerbert became a monk of the Clunaic reform and studied

what could still be rescued from Spain after the Islamic invasions of 711. Spain would be slow to develop universities until freed from Muslim oppression. Gerbert managed to gain some understanding of the Arabic philosophy. The Scholastics generally were able to absorb and preserve elements of Arabic philosophy after Islam turned on Arab scholars and purged their work from itself. By the end of the Middle Ages, Europe had more of Arabic philosophy than Arabia. In any case, Gerbert

seems to have acquired some knowledge of Arabic science. Later he became direct of the school at Rheims.

The school at Rheims, founded in the late tenth century, belonged to a group of schools centered on the emerging curriculum of the “liberal arts” and a step closer to the concept of the university.

In his period of teaching at Rheims he lectured on logic; but he is more remarkable for his study both of the classical Latin literature then available and of mathematics.

The early roots would bring forth results when both Scholasticism and the concept of the university were more developed. Alfred Freddoso writes

that the most profound thinkers of the late medieval era (e.g., Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham) viewed logic primarily as a tool, albeit an indispensable one, for dealing with the “big” questions in metaphysics and theology. To illustrate, Aquinas's perceptive discussions of the logic of reduplicative propositions occurs within his treatment of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Again, by the time that Ockham wrote his groundbreaking Summa Logicae, he had already employed almost all his distinctive logical insights in one or another metaphysical or theological context.

The sophisticated and nuanced approach to logic found among the late Scholastics continues to challenge philosophers in the twenty-first century:

the medievals managed to raise some deep questions in philosophical logic which have not been faced squarely by contemporary philosophers. For instance, as a recent work by Fred Sommers suggests, the two-name theory of predication may have been done in more by Fregean fiat than by decisive arguments. Again, one suspects that we could learn something from medieval logicians about the ontological issues surrounding the semantics of past- and future-tense sentences or the use of fictive terms (e.g., 'chimera').

From early Scholasticism to later Scholasticism to contemporary twenty-first century philosophical questions about metaphysics, logic has played a continuously central role.

Thomist Concepts

On Wednesday, March 7, 2012, Professor Tad Schmaltz lectured at the University of Michigan on notions of cognition and will found in Aquinas. Any deficiencies found in this account of Professor Schmaltz's lecture should be assigned to the note-taker and not to Professor Schmaltz.

Aquinas frames human knowledge between two other types of knowledge: between angelic cognition and the sense-cognition of non-human (sub-human) animals (and perhaps plants). Angels are incorruptible and disembodied intellects; their cognition is not the act of a bodily organ and is therefore unconnected with matter. They have a direct knowledge of immaterial forms, because they are directly illuminated by divine light. They perceive without sense-data. Angelic knowledge of matter or material objects is deduced from their knowledge of forms; Thomist forms contain within themselves enough information that every specific instantiation of them can be deduced from them; they are therefore probably somewhat richer than Plato's forms. Angels do not obtain or receive sense-data; one might therefore ask if they are blind and deaf.

By contrast, the cognition of animals, and of any other category of being which might be considered a corruptible material substantial form, is based exclusively upon sense-data. This sensory cognition is devoid of any knowledge of forms; such creatures are necessary unaware and ignorant of forms, because their cognition is purely the act of bodily organs and nothing else. When the body dies, the form dies. Animalistic cognition knows only materials particulars, of which it forms phantasms (mental images) by collecting sensible species (sense data) through its sensory organs. This is a thoroughly physical process.

The "middle" place to which Aquinas then assigns human cognition is between angelic and animalistic. The human intellect is incorruptible: Platonic, it can exist by itself without a material body. Intellectual activity is not a function of bodily organs. The cognitive power of the soul is, or relates to, the form of the body. The human intellect understands the material world through phantasms; it deduces forms via the material world. Aquinas usually designates as 'intelligible species' those forms which the mind deduces. ('Forms' and 'intelligible species' might be very nearly synonymous in Thomist vocabulary.)

We have seen how Aquinas locates human intellect in a "middle" position between angelic and animalistic cognition. He faces the challenge of showing that he can harmonize his system with both Augustine and Aristotle. The process of divine illumination is central; Augustine locates forms in God, or more precisely in the divine intellect. Augustine says that we know material objects through God's ideas. According to Augustine, God illuminates our minds with forms. By contrast, Aquinas has indicated that the human intellect deduces forms from phantasms informed by sensible species. How then can Aquinas claim to be in harmony with Augustine? Aquinas will claim that his system shows humans to be indirectly illuminated by God. Augustine seems to indicate a more direct illumination, but if Aquinas can explain some manner of indirect illumination, he can then say that he agrees with Augustine that the human intellect receives divine illumination, and downplay the distinction between his indirect illumination and Augustine's direct illumination. In any case, it will be imperative for Aquinas to avoid giving the impression that the human intellect is self-illuminating.

Turning to the issue of the human will, Aquinas is concerned to show that he is in harmony with Aristotle. Aristotle posited the will as a rational appetite which is necessarily directed toward happiness. Aquinas agrees, and one question about the human will is about the nature of the necessity which directs it toward happiness. Such a necessity could be at odds with some notions of freedom. By contrast, Aquinas and Aristotle define 'passion' as a sensory appetite. Aquinas, who is concerned to weld Aristotelian psychology to Christian ethics, posits a second function of the will: free choice. This activity of free choice is not necessary, and therefore contingent, and is directed toward practical goods. Practical goods are, or are thought to be, means to an end, where the end is happiness. This allows for the human will to be at times misguided, when we freely chose a means, but do not know that these means will fail to achieve the desired end.

The will as rational appetite, which is determined by its object, inasmuch as happiness is necessarily the goal of the will is contrasted with the will as free choice, which is not determined by its object. Even in the former case, Aquinas sees the necessity as uncoerced: happiness necessarily attracts the will, but the will is not forced toward it.

Aquinas raises some murky issues around the question of whether the notion of Providence conflicts with free will. First arises the older question, going back at least to Augustine if not earlier, about the compatibility of our free action with God's foreknowledge. How can God foreknow our free actions prior to creating anything, specifically, prior to creating our wills which will make choices freely? To the extent that God's foreknowledge is based upon His knowledge of our will, it would seem that He designed our wills, and so His foreknowledge comes into tension with the freedom of those wills.

Sartre on Heidegger

Jean-Paul Sartre's voluminous correspondence with his friend Simone de Beauvoir offers us a glimpse both into his intellectual life and into his personal life. Although we do not gain a detailed understanding of his reading of Heidegger in these letters, we do see how central Heidegger was to Sartre's development.

In July of 1939, he wrote to her that he was happy that

you've finally read Heidegger, it's worth your while and we'll talk about it.

Later the same year, he records his impressions of Paris in its last pre-war late summer. Even Sartre's mundane ruminations on travel are affected by his reading of Heidegger:

Paris was very strange. Everything was closed, restaurants, theaters, stores, because it's August, and the neighborhoods had lost their individual character. There was only one totality left, Paris itself. A totality which, for me, was already a thing of the past and, as Heidegger says, retained and upheld by nothingness.

His reference to Paris as 'a thing of the past' may be because he's getting ready to leave, or because his sense that soon war will change it. In either case, once he has left (to resume his military service), he writes to Simone de Beauvoir about his fellow officers, even describing one's personality in Heideggerian categories, in a letter dated 6 September 1939. A few weeks later, he explains how he departs from Heidegger in his own thinking:

All of man's acts, being accomplished by means of the body, are registered finitely on a double infinity - of immensity and minuteness. And from that fact, all consideration of objects as implements brings human reality to the consciousness of its own disregard. For what Heidegger did not see is that the infiniteness of the world surpasses its implementicity in every direction.

He continues:

If the vast distances to the stars produce a stupor akin to Pascal's terror, that is because it comes from the transcendent infinite of the transcendental consciousness - and, at the same time, the perception of the stars necessarily includes an attempt at their implementation which conflicts with their “out-of-reach” quality. Heidegger didn't see that his world for man - which is indeed immediately and pre-ontologically an implement - is coincidental with man and not wtih the transcendental consciousness, and that it is completely surpassed and disarmed by the world for consciousness, which isn't capable of receiving implementicity, across which implementicity slips without being able to grab hold.

In October of 1939, he writes that

I'm mulling over a central idea that will finally allow me to eliminate the unconscious, to reconcile Heidegger and Husserl.

Later, he reports that

I attempted a reconciliation of Heidegger and Husserl. It didn't pan out, but I stuck to it doggedly, and I feel quite woozy after six hours' effort. The whole thing must be done over. There is still this entirely circular idea and I don't know where to pick it up, so I grab at it, and it slips through my fingers like a ball of grease. You'll see, it makes for odd little notebooks.

In November, he complains in a letter that one of his fellow officers didn't understand a Heidegger book which Sartre had lent to him; presumably most of Sartre's fellow officers would have been in that situation, although Sartre seems to think that after weeks of trying, they've begun to understand a bit of Heidegger. These were the long weeks after war had been declared in the autumn of 1939, but before actual fighting began in early 1940. Such officers had lots of time for conversation, but with an ominous or foreboding sense about the future. Sartre notes that

Human reality is of a particular existential type, as constituted by its existence in the form of value to be realized through its freedom. This is what Heidegger expresses when he says that man is a being of distances.

Even as Heidegger's influence on Sartre makes itself ever more felt, Sartre discovers Kierkegaard's influence on Heidegger. He writes in another letter to Simone de Beauvoir about Kierkegaard's book

The Concept of Dread, in which there are countless things within theologic terms that are obviously a bit forbidding. His influence on Heidegger is undeniable.

In another letter, dated December 1939, Sartre continues, telling her that he's continuing to study

The Concept of Dread, which I'll send or bring back to you, and which you'll read with the greatest of interest, if only to understand Kierkegaard's influence on Heidegger and on Kafka (you know that Kafka feathered his nest through that book).

It becomes clear, through these letters, that 1939 was a pivotal year for Sartre's intellectual development, and that Heidegger influenced him greatly during this time.

Heidegger on Logic

Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, if one wishes to be kind, is a most difficult system to understand, complicated by his technical terminology, including new words which he coined, e.g., ‘thrownness,’ which is meant to indicate the human phenomenological experience of being confronted with, or by, the world of sense-data and experience. If one wishes to be less than kind, one may pose the blunt question whether or not Heidegger makes any sense at all, and whether his thoughts and writings are actually rational.

It is then perhaps an odd juxtaposition that we would turn precisely to Heidegger for words about that subdivision of philosophy to which he seems least attached: logic. Yet, as every philosopher must, he busied himself, at least for some fraction of his time, with logic. In his lecture notes for the 1925/1926 academic year, he wrote:

If we desire a more vital concept of “logic,” we have to ask a more penetrating question: what is the subject matter of the science of logic? In doing so, we leave aside any consideration of logic as one discipline among others - viz., the science of speaking and therefore of language - and focus instead on what it is about.

Heidegger here uses the word ‘science’ in the philosophical sense: in ordinary life, we think of ‘science’ as biology and chemistry, as geology and astronomy. The philosophical sense is broader, including those, but including also anything which can be made into a systematic body of knowledge, or an academic discipline. Not only is the philosophical sense of the word broader, but it carries a different emphasis: it is not the content of biology or astronomy (frogs and stars, respectively) which interests the philosopher, but rather the systematic arrangement of that content - that it can be categorized according to a taxonomy, or its events analyzed in terms of cause and effect. It was a philosopher, Aristotle, who organized not only a taxonomy for biology, but for political science and other fields as well.

It is in this sense, then, that Heidgger speaks of ‘the science of logic’ - and here also he is following a philosophical tradition; the very phrase ‘science of logic’ (die Wissenschaft der Logik) has a long and venerable history among philosophers.

Seen historically, Heidegger proposes that logic arose from the study of language (grammar), and the study of language arose from the study of speaking. After sketching his somewhat obscure distinction between ‘language’ and ‘speaking’ - the latter being the most literal study of making sounds with the mouth, and the former a somewhat more abstract study of meaning and grammar - he goes on to explain logic as an extrapolation from speaking and language: what the speaking is about, or what the language is about:

the basic achievement of speech consists in showing or revealing what one is speaking about, what one is discussing. Indeed, making vocal sounds was quite secondary to that.

As one abstracts from speech and language to logic, we see that grammar is to language as logic is to thought: and it is in thougt that the content of the “science” at hand will be defined and revealed:

In such acts of revealing, whatever one is speaking about shows up, becomes perceivable, and, as something perceived, get defined in and by the discussion about it. This revelatory defining of what is experienced and perceived is the very same thing that we generally call “thought” and “reflection”.

To speak of a process of ‘revealing’ is typically Heideggerian, for which he is alternately loved and hated. Heidegger’s concept of ‘truth’ is a notion of uncovering or disclosing, which stands in contrast to a competing concept, truth as corresponding. In a correspondence view of truth, symbols - be they spoken or written, be they mathematic, scientific, or ordinary words - are true if they are arranged in a patterns which corresponds to reality. Heidegger, to the contrary, embraces his own view of truth, that it consists in, not corresponding to reality, but rather revealing or disclosing it. Heidegger goes on:

In summary: in our primary, natural experience of how human beings live together with each other, we understand speech as the revealing of something by speaking about it, and as a thinking that determines and orders it. Language, speaking, thinking: they coincide as the human way of being. They are the way we reveal and illumine (both for ourselves and for others) the world and our won human existence, so that in this luminosity we gain sight: human insight into ourselves and an outlook on, and a practical insight into, the world. Logic as the science of speaking, studies speech in terms of what it properly is: the revealing of something. The subject matter of logic is speech viewed with regard to its basic meaning, namely, allowing the world, human existence, and things in general to be seen.

The subject matter of logic is not merely speech, but speech viewed viewed with regard to its basic meaning. Grammar, philology, and related disciplines are the study of speech; logic is the study of speech’s meaning. Phrased another way, logic is ‘deep grammar’, while the ordinary study of phonemes and morphemes is ‘surface grammar’. Because deep grammar is deep, it needs to be uncovered, discovered, and revealed:

The fact that existence has and understands and strives for this basic form of revealing implies that, for the most part, much of the world stands in need of ‘revelation’, of being uncovered and made known. In other words, much of the world and much of human existence is by and large not un-covered. So beings can be drawn out of their not-un-covered-ness, their hiddenness. They can be un-covered or un-hidden. This uncoveredness or unhiddenness of beings is what we call truth.

Following Aristotle (who followed Socrates), Heidegger sees definitions as central to logic:

Logic investigates speaking - the thinking that defines things - inasmuch as speaking uncovers things. The topic of logic is speech, specifically with regard to truth.

Observational sciences, natural sciences, like chemistry or biology, are also concerned with truth. Likewise, social sciences like sociology or political sciences seek truths. So what makes logic different, or even distinct, from them? Those other sciences seek to identify truths, or to sort out which statements are true and which are false. Logic, according to Heidegger, takes true statements and asks why they are true and how they are true.

Our definition of logic as the science of truth could be misunderstood. One might object that every science deals with truth, that truth is what all scientific knowledge is after. Yes, except that there is a misleading ambiguity here in how the word truth is being used. In a strict sense, no individual science other than logic deals with truth. The natural sciences, on the other hand, deal only and always with the true, i.e., what-is-true; and they do so within the arena of the knowledge of nature. Or outside of the natural sciences, one inquires into what-is-true for human action, or about the true that faith gives.

Logic deals with truths; the concrete individual sciences deal with truths. There are biological truths, spiritual truths, geological truths, ethical truths; but logic deals with truth itself, truth seen as truth, not seen in relation to the content of a particular science. Astronomy gives us truths; faith gives us truths; chemistry gives us truths; morals give us truths; but logic examines truth itself - what it is to be true.

But logic does not ask about the what-is-true in just any sense. Rather, it inquires primarily and properly into the truth of what-is-true. It asks: What makes this or that true thing be true in a given case? and what makes it be this true thing? The only way to make any grounded sense out of the truth of theoretical-scientific knowledge, practical reflection, or religious truth is to get to the foundation that lets us understand what truth means at all. Only from that foundation can we decide which kind of truth is most original, and whether the ideal of truth is to be found in theoretical-scientific truth or practical insight or religious faith. In other words, it is not easily decided which form of the true is primary and most basic. Even in today’s philosophy, this question has not yet been settled.

Heidegger indicates that we should seek which form of truth is most ‘primary’ and ‘basic’ - this will be a daunting task, for it is not clear which standards will allow us to judge in this case, and it is perhaps a bit too optimistic to assume that philosophers as a community will ever agree to any potential answer.

The Basis of Modern Science

Although we might sometimes think of science and philosophy as two rather different academic subjects, they are in many ways related. We can see this in, for example, some of the words used in a current science textbook (An Introduction to Physical Science, a commonly-used college freshman text, 2009, Houghton Mifflin). Early in the introduction, it offers us this quote from the Lutheran pastor and philosopher, Johannes Kepler:

Theory guides, experiment decides.

Kepler, often known today for his discovery that planetary orbits are elliptical and not circular, spent most of his life thinking about theology, having studied at the seminary in Tübingen in Germany.

The textbook goes on to state in its own words that

Based on the assumption that the universe is orderly enough to be understood, a method of observation and rules for reasoning and making predictions have been formulated.

The clear philosophical import of this text is the “assumption” that the universe is rational, that it follows the laws of algebra and geometry, and eventually, the laws of chemistry and physics. The universe, then, has been designed around a set of principles - according, at least, to the current thinking in physics departments at the nation’s universities. Further, there are “rules” for reasoning.

The idea that there are rules for reasoning, in physics at least, goes back as far as the theologian Isaac Newton. Outside of physics, in pure mathematics and logic, the idea is even older. This is the foundation of observational and empirical science as we now know it. Isaac Newton, because of his discovery of mathematical truths like the theorems and principles of calculus, and because of his discovery of physical laws like gravitation, spent most of his scholarly effort analyzing, and wrote most of his publications about, the Bible.

We see, from the works of men like Kepler and Newton, that there is a thick tangle where philosophy, mathematics, natural observational sciences, and theology meet. Assumptions about the possibility of phenomena in the universe being subject to mathematical modeling come very near to expressing certain aspects or properties of God.