Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy

Dominik Perler, Sebastian Bender, Dominik Perler, Sebastian Bender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351379380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation.In line with this general approach, this book features original essays written by leading experts in early modern philosophy. It is organized around five guiding questions:

• What are the entities involved in causal processes leading to cognition?
• What type(s) or kind(s) of causality are at stake? Are early modern thinkers confined to efficient causation or do other types of causation play a role?
• What is God's role in causal processes leading to cognition?
• How do cognitive causal processes relate to other, non-cognitive causal processes?
• Is the causal process in the case of human cognition in any way special? How does it relate to processes involved in the case of non-human cognition?

The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

1 Suárez on Intellectual Cognition and Occasional Causation

Dominik Perler

1. Introduction: Problems of Abstraction

The Aristotelian idea of assimilation dominated epistemological debates far into the seventeenth century and played an important role in controversies about the relationship between causation and cognition. Advocates of this idea claimed that human beings cannot fully cognize a material thing unless their intellect assimilates the substantial form of that thing. This means, for instance, that we cannot acquire cognition of a horse that is standing in front of us unless our intellect grasps the form that structures this particular thing and makes it the very thing it is. Clear and simple as this thesis looks at first sight, it gives rise to a fundamental question: how can we ever get hold of a form? Obviously, we cannot grasp or somehow absorb it by simply looking at a material thing. All we can detect when perceiving it is a bundle of accidents: a certain color, size, shape, etc. How do we get from such a bundle of accidents to the substantial form?

Many scholastic Aristotelians, ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Eustachius a Sancto Paulo and other seventeenth-century textbook authors, answered this question by positing a cognitive process that involves at least two steps.¹ In the first step, they claimed, we need to form a sensory representation, called a phantasm, which enables us to grasp the material object as a unified thing with a number of specific accidents. Thus, when seeing a horse in front of us, we first need to come up with a phantasm that represents it as a large, brown, galloping thing. In the second step, we need to use our intellect to produce another representation, called an intelligible species, which enables us to grasp the substantial form that is responsible for all the essential features of a thing. Thus, once we have formed a phantasm of the galloping horse, we need to bring about an intelligible species that makes features like being a mammal and having a respiratory system cognitively present—features that can be found in all horses and are indispensable for them. The species representing these features has to be abstracted from the phantasm, for we cannot produce it out of nothing; nor can we simply take it out of our intellect, for there is no innate representation. Rather, we need to extract or abstract it from what is given to us on the sensory level. It is precisely this process of abstraction that enables us to assimilate the substantial form.

So far, so good—or rather, so bad, as early modern anti-Aristotelians would have replied. In their view, this two-step process raises more problems than it solves, even if we are willing to accept the basic idea that the cognitive process starts with perception. The second step in particular looks quite enigmatic. How can the intellect ever abstract anything from a phantasm that has been produced on the sensory level? The intellect is fully immaterial, as all Aristotelians affirmed, whereas the phantasm present in the body is material, so how can there be a causal relation between them? But let us assume for the moment that such a relation is possible. What does it mean that the intellect acts upon the phantasm and abstracts an intelligible species from it? Does the intellect sort out all the features that are represented by the phantasm and take just the essential ones? But how does it know which features are essential and which are not? After all, it is not evident that being brown and big are accidental features, whereas having a respiratory system is an essential one. How can the intellect tell the difference when it deals with horses? And even if we suppose that it somehow knows how to do that, it is still difficult to understand what it really does when it abstracts essential features. Does it extract them from a bundle of features and shift them, as it were, from the sensory to the intellectual level? How would that work? Abstraction looks like the miraculous transfer of essential features from one realm to another.

It was not just critics of the Aristotelian theory of assimilation who were puzzled by these problems of abstraction. Francisco Suárez, a staunch defender of Aristotelianism, already realized that the standard account of the two-step process raises serious problems. Criticizing earlier authors who took abstraction to be quite natural and unproblematic, he remarked:

one should note that the species cannot be said to be something that is potentially or actually abstracted from phantasms as if the species were first mixed up with phantasms, from which it would then be separated by the agent intellect and transferred to the possible intellect. It would be childish to think that. For in what way would the spiritual be mixed up with the material? And how would an accident migrate from one subject to another?²

Suárez here points out the crucial problem. What do his predecessors want to say when they claim that the intellect “abstracts” a species? They can hardly mean that there is first some kind of mixture consisting of a material phantasm and an immaterial species, and that the intellect then takes just the immaterial part out of it. This is impossible, because a material item and an immaterial item cannot be mixed together. And the intellect cannot extract anything from the whole mixture, for it cannot descend, as it were, to the sensory level and take something out of it. Nor can a material item somehow move up to the intellectual level. So how can there ever be an interaction between these two levels? As long as this question remains unanswered, the entire account of abstraction remains obscure.

Given this fundamental problem, it is hardly surprising that Suárez was dissatisfied with the standard account of cognition. In the following, I want to examine how he replaced it with a new one that avoided positing an interaction between the sensory and the intellectual level. To do that, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will take a closer look at Suárez’s critique of traditional theories of cognition (Section 2). Then I will reconstruct his own theory, focusing on his explanation of the relationship between sensory phantasms and intelligible species (Sections 3–4). Finally, I will draw some conclusions and point out the consequences of Suárez’s transformation of the Aristotelian model for the development of non-Aristotelian theories of cognition in the early modern period (Section 5).

2. The Failure of Traditional Cognitive Theories

Suárez presents his own theory of cognition as an alternative to the theories that were available in his time. It is therefore important to take a look at these theories and to see why he rejects them. The first theory he considers is the Platonic theory that takes the human intellect to be an immaterial entity that is distinct from the body and has innate knowledge of all things.³ Rephrased in scholastic terminology, this means that the intellect has inborn (or innate) species of all things. The main idea of this theory can then be summarized as follows:

• (1) Innatist model: the immaterial intellect can think about all material things because it has innate species that represent all of them.

This theory has the clear advantage that there is no interaction that needs to be explained. Thus, I can think about a horse without being in contact with a material horse and without acquiring a phantasm. My intellect is, as it were, a self-sufficient cognizer that needs no input. But simple and elegant as this theory looks, it has some serious shortcomings, as Suárez is quick to point out. First of all, it seems pointless to have a body and to produce phantasms. Whether or not I really see a horse and have a horse phantasm, I can immediately think about a horse. Why then would I ever need to come up with a phantasm? Second, it seems that I never make any progress in my thinking. Since my intellect always possesses species of all things, I can always think about them, no matter what the objects in my environment are. I simply need to appeal to the species that are, as it were, waiting to be used. This clearly goes against our experience, as Suárez dryly remarks.⁴

Now, one could object that Suárez simplifies the Platonic theory. It does not need to be understood as a theory that posits innate species as actual representations that can be used at any time. Species are nothing but dispositional representations that need to be actualized; and for an actualization, phantasms are clearly required. Thus, thanks to the innate horse species, I have the disposition to think about a horse. But I cannot actually think about a horse unless I see one and acquire a phantasm that represents a particular horse with some particular features. The phantasm is therefore not superfluous: it serves as the trigger that is indispensable for actualizing a dispositional horse representation.

This is an argumentative move every Platonist could (and should) make.⁵ But it immediately leads to an interaction problem. If the intellect is indeed an immaterial entity that is distinct from the body, as Platonists assume, and if the species present in the intellect is therefore an immaterial dispositional representation, it is questionable how it can be triggered by a material phantasm in the body. How, for instance, should the sensory image of a brown animal with a flying mane trigger the horse species in my intellect? As long as it is not clear how something material can act upon the immaterial intellect, this actualization remains mysterious.

Given this crucial problem, it is not surprising that Suárez dismisses the innatist model and turns to another one that was more popular in his time. He attributes it to Cajetan and presents it as a model invoking a special form of illumination.⁶ Unlike the innatist model, it insists on the fact that intelligible species are acquired, and it explains this process as follows: whenever a phantasm is present, the intellect illuminates it and thereby makes the essence of a given thing visible, that is, intelligible. It is on the basis of this process that the intellect then produces a species, which represents nothing but the essence. Thus, when I have acquired a phantasm of a horse, my intellect becomes active and somehow “screens” it: like an X-ray machine that makes nothing but the bones visible, leaving muscles and other soft tissues aside, the intellect makes nothing but the essential features visible, leaving all the accidental features aside.⁷ Once it has done that, it produces a kind of intellectual X-ray photograph that represents just the essential features. This explanatory model can be summarized as follows:

• (2) Illuminationist model: the immaterial intellect can think about all material things because it can make their essences visible and represent them by means of species.

Clearly, this model takes into account that there needs to be an experiential basis for our thinking. But despite its empiricist flavor, Suárez does not accept it. Why not? He thinks that one cannot make sense of the illumination process.⁸ For what does it mean that the intellect “illuminates” a phantasm? The intellect cannot approach it and shed light on an essence that is somehow hidden in the dark. Nor can it separate the essence from all accidental features. No matter how close the intellect comes to the phantasm, it always remains an immaterial faculty that cannot get in touch with a material item.

An advocate of the illuminationist model could immediately reply that this critique is based upon a misunderstanding. After all, the intellect does not need to get in touch with the phantasm. Nor does it need to separate the essential features from the accidental ones. All the features remain together when the phantasm is illuminated, just as all the bones and soft tissues remain together when an X-ray machine screens a body. The essential features are simply highlighted and therefore shown as a special set of features as soon as the intellect screens them.

Suárez would hardly be satisfied with this reply. Two crucial problems still remain unsolved. The first has to do with the activity of the intellect. Suppose the intellect could indeed highlight the essential features and distinguish them from the accidental ones. Obviously, it could do that only if it had access to both types of feature. But how could it ever reach them? Because all the features are present in the material phantasm, no access seems possible. Unlike a material X-ray machine that can approach and screen the parts of a body, which are also material, an immaterial faculty cannot screen something material. Hence, it makes no sense to say that it illuminates the phantasm with some kind of immaterial light; it is simply not the right kind of light.

The second problem has to do with the features that are supposed to be illuminated. Supporters of the illuminationist model point out that the features highlighted by the intellect are not just essential but also universal ones that are to be found in many individuals of the same kind.⁹ Thus, when the intellect highlights the essential features of a horse, it makes visible features such as being a mammal and having a respiratory system—features that can also be found in all other horses...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Suárez on Intellectual Cognition and Occasional Causation
• 2 Descartes on the Causal Structure of Cognition
• 3 Cartesian Causation and Cognition: Louis de la Forge and Géraud de Cordemoy
• 4 Causation and Cognition in Malebranche
• 5 Ralph Cudworth: Plastic Nature, Cognition, and the Cognizable World
• 6 Nothing Is Simply One Thing: Conway on Multiplicity in Causation and Cognition
• 7 Cavendish on Material Causation and Cognition
• 8 The Mechanical Mind: Hobbes on Sense Cognition and Imagination
• 9 Knowing Mind Through Knowing Body: Spinoza on Causal Knowledge of the Self and the External World
• 10 The Many Faces of Spinoza’s Causal Axiom
• 11 Locke on Causation and Cognition
• 12 Embodied Cognition Without Causal Interaction in Leibniz
• 13 John Sergeant and Antoine Le Grand on the Occasional Cause of Cognition
• 14 Berkeley on Causation, Ideas, and Necessary Connections
• 15 Hume and “Reason as a Kind of Cause”
• 16 Reid on Intentionality and Causation
• List of Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index