Ideas in Process: A Study on the Development of Philosophical Concepts 9783110328141, 9783110327892

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Nicholas Rescher Ideas in Process A Study on the Development of Philosophical Concepts

PROCESS THOUGHT Edited by Nicholas Rescher • Johanna Seibt • Michel Weber Advisory Board Mark Bickhard • Jaime Nubiola • Roberto Poli Volume 22

Nicholas Rescher

Ideas in Process A Study on the Development of Philosophical Concepts

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Marilyn Adams, Annette Baier, Marjorie Green, Eleonore Stump Philosophical Groundbreakers

Ideas in Process (A Study on the Development of Philosophical Concepts) Contents Preface Chapter 1: IDEAS IN PROCESS: THE FLAWS OF HISTORICISM

1

Chapter 2: FOUR MODELS OF CONCEPTUAL CHANGE IN PHILOSOPHY

7

Chapter 3: FREE WILL AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDENTITY MODEL

11

Chapter 4: INTERSUBSTANTIVAL RELATIONS AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE COMMON CORE MODEL

19

Chapter 5: ANALYTICITY AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE COMMON CORE MODEL

29

Chapter 6: THE COHERENCE THEORY OF TRUTH AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE THEMATIC LINKAGE MODEL

55

Chapter 7: DIALECTIC ITSELF AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE DIALECTICAL MODEL

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Chapter 8: PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY IN PROCESSPHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

133

Name Index

145

PREFACE

T

he book aims to provide a process-philosophical perspective philosophizing itself. It employs the perspectives of process philosophy for elucidating the historical development of philosophical ideas. The doctrine of historicism in the history of ideas has it that each era and perhaps even each thinker employs philosophical ideas in such a user-idiosyncratic way that there is no continuity and indeed no connectivity of public access across the divides of space, time, and culture. In opposition to such a view, the present processist deliberations see the development of ideas as a matter of generic processes that have ample room for connectivity and recurrence, permitting the very self-same conception to be shared by philosophers of different settings. Beyond arguing this histico-processism on general principles, the book presents a series of case studies of significant philosophical topics that illustrate and elaborate upon the developmental connectivities at issue. I am very grateful to Estelle Burris for her excellent assistance on preparing this material for publication. Nicholas Rescher Pittsburgh PA December 2008

Chapter One IDEAS IN PROCESS (THE FLAWS OF HISTORICISM) 1. IDEATIONAL CONTINUITY IN PHILOSOPHY

P

lato’s classic theory of ideas was predicated on a fundamental contrast between the material things of the world of everyday life and the immaterial things of the realm of ideas. The former he saw as ever-changing, impermanent, and perishable; the later are unchanging, ever-stable, and fixed. The world’s concreta are transitory, the ideas are eternal. However, insofar as ideas are the sorts of things we nowadays generally consider to be such in contrast to the changeless forms of metaphysics, this sort of thing certainly does not hold. Here changeless eternality simply does not come into it. The ideas at work in contemporary cognitive dealings are subject to ongoing change. Our ideas function in contexts, and the contexts of thought and inquiry are ever-changing. As we deal with them, ideas are works in progress. Like landscapes they are subject to ongoingly transformative forces: the processes of change can affect the immaterial objects of thought as much as the physical materials of nature. The ideas that figure in philosophical inquiry illustrate this general circumstance. The historical and doctrinal context in which they figure becomes a powerfully formative function in the shaping of philosophical ideas. Their historical development is a process of continual readjustment to a changing doctrinal and cultural context. Accordingly, philosophical ideas do not stand still but reappear in changed form in different doctrinal settings. The historiography of philosophy inclines to look on this as an embarrassing difficulty. It tends to be biographical; it generally addresses how a certain philosopher articulates his ideas or theses or doctrines. Only on occasion is philosophical historiography doxographic rather than biographic, taking the drachonomic format of seeing how a certain idea, problem, or issue is handled by different philosophers over the course of time.1 The so-called historicist reaction is one particularly radical response to this situation. Historicists maintain that access to an idea is always limited to a particular culture and era and accordingly view ideas as context-

Nicholas Rescher • Ideas in Process

bound. As they see it, thinkers in different temporal and cultural-settings simply “do not speak the same language” with the result that they never really understand one another. The upshot is a cognitive isolatism that has us living in an impenetrable intellectual cocoon with no prospect of getting out. The ideas of different culture and eras are simply incommensurable. And so what may seem to be conflicting philosophical doctrines are in fact—so they contend—totally separate positions that are actually incomparable or incommensurable—incapable of being made congruent with those outside. Such discordant positions—so these incommensurability theorists maintain—simply cannot be brought into contact with one another; they cannot be compared in point of agreement or contradiction because no common measure of comparison can be established between them. Different philosophers do not, in fact, form schools that hold divergent views on essentially the same issues—they actually share no issues and live in disjoint cognitive domains that share no common territory. Rival doctrinal positions are totally disconnected—they cannot be expressed in common units of thought. Adherents of different theories literally live in different thought worlds, among which contact—be it by way of disagreement or agreement—is simply impossible. In the English-language orbit, the prime spokesman for such a view was R. G. Collingwood, who effectively viewed the matter in the following terms: If there were a permanent problem P, we could ask What did Kant, or Leibniz, or Berkeley, think about P? and if that question could be answered, we could then go on to ask Was Kant, or Leibniz, or Berkeley, right in what he thought about P? But what is thought to be a permanent problem P is really a number of transitory problems, P1, P2, P3, … whose individual peculiarities are blurred by the historical myopia of the person who lumps them together under the name P.2

And many intellectual historians share this point of view, maintaining that every thinker stands alone, his teaching personally distinctive, with every thesis so impregnated with the characteristic thought style of its proponent that no two thinkers ever discuss the same proposition. On such a view, there just are no schools of thought constituted by different thinkers who share common commitments and no perennial issues treated in common by successive generations of theorists. Different thinkers occupy different thought worlds. Disagreement and indeed even real comprehension becomes impossible across doctrinal divides. The thought of every thinker

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stands apart in splendid isolation. Discordant philosophers can never be said to contribute to the same ongoing issues: “There are simply no perennial problems in philosophy: there are only individual answers to individual questions, with as many different answers as there are questions, and as many different questions as there are questioners.”3 Philosophers of different persuasions are separated from each other by an unbridgeable gulf of mutual incomprehension. So argue those historicist theorists of doctrinal incommensurability. But there is something decidedly unrealistic about this view. For it quite overlooks the prospect of a process of renovation or remodeling. Think here of the ongoing renovation of an old building or complex—an Oxford college, say, or the Ford auto plant at River Rouge. There is ongoing change—a wing added there, an outbuilding demolished, a section reconstructed, a boiler replaced. What is there changes, but yet is integrally connected to the past in such a way that to understand what there currently is one must take account of what has gone before. Each stage absorbs but yet transforms its predecessor stages. There is an unquestionable unity and identity, but it is unity and identity rooted in processual development, with each stage linked through the wisdom of hindsight to what has gone before, and yet more predictable from those predecessors. Such unicity and continuity in the purport and meaning of an idea will be available only on the bases of hindsight. Its development is formed by a view of kinship to what goes before as viewed from the perspective of the present. It is a matter of conceptual continuity seen from the retrospective vantage point of the present—and is accordingly a continuity of theme that is itself a thing of change. Accordingly the development of an idea itself is something of an organic growth, it is certainly no snowball-like accretion of further material that leaves earlier material intact, but like an organic growth changes (and often subtracts) prior material. And so what continuity there is is apparent only “with the wisdom of hindsight.” And in such a development the idea may well be transformed, but it is never “changed beyond all recognition.” Continuity overrides attention—the ideas are near “changed beyond recognition.” That they cannot be properly grasped from a later vantage point, and that the questions and doctrines at issue have altered beyond the prospect of meaningful agreement and disagreement is simply false—an historicist’s myth if you will.

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2. UNITY AND ITS RATIONALE The fact of it is that philosophical historicism exaggerates mutual incomprehension to the point of absurdity. Of course, incomprehension can and sometimes does occur across reaches of time or space when major conceptual dissimilarities are involved. But this is certainly not the case generally or necessarily. There is, after all, no shortage of examples of problems and issues discussed by different philosophers working in different times and places. Protagorean relativism, Cartesian skepticism, and Berkeleyan phenomenalism are all issues that our contemporaries can identify and examine equally well as their inaugurators—and accept or reject in whole or in part as their own commitments would indicate. Philosophical concepts and issues can certainly be transposed from one systemic setting to another, despite any differences of nuance and attunement derived from their particular context of origin. Indeed even the very question that we are presently discussing (Can different philosophers debate the same issues?) is a clear-cut example of this commonality of issues, with, for example, Collingwood and Randall assuming essentially the same holistic position and the present discussion rejecting it—along with the entire doxographic tradition. To insist that deliberations about the nature and function of the law in St. Thomas Aquinas are incommensurable with those in Kant is like saying that the Alps and the Rockies cannot both be mountain ranges because they are so different. To deny the possibility of philosophical disagreement on grounds of incommensurability is to abandon the enterprise as a meaningful cognitive project from the very outset. Only if disagreement is possible does the enterprise make sense. Philosophical positions have a point only insofar as they deny something: omnis affirmatio est negatio. They claim truth by denying falsity; they assert saving insight by attacking dangerous error. To this end there must be contrasts. If one denies the very existence of rival positions and views them as literally inconceivable, there can be nothing substantial to one’s own view. Where there is no preexisting opposition to attack, there is no position to defend. To see rival positions as incomprehensible is to demean and devalue one’s own; if opposing positions were conceptually ungraspable in their very natures, there would be little use in taking a stance that precludes them. Where no possible rival position has the least plausibility, advocacy of a particular doctrine as the “appropriate” position becomes altogether pointless.

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3. THE PRICE OF DISUNITY Without the prospect of shared problems and theses considered in common by diverse thinkers, all hope of interpretation and comprehension is lost. Every thinker—indeed each one of us—would be locked within the impenetrable walls of his own thought world. If one philosophical mind cannot connect with another, then we ourselves cannot connect with anyone either. In the absence of relatability to other times and places, the historian himself would be faced with issues that he is incapable of dealing with. If Kant cannot address Hume’s problems, neither can R. G. Collingwood. If conceptual contact across the divide of conflicting beliefs were impossible, then, given the diversity of their views, all philosophers would be condemned to mutual incomprehension. Were it the case that, as a matter of principle, X would not come to grips with a rival theorist Y by way of agreement or disagreement, then we ourselves would be condemned to philosophical solipsism—unable to come to make a rational assessment of the ideas of any other thinker due to an inability to make conceptual contact. If the ideas of one era or culture are inaccessible to the ideational resources of another, then the thought of difficult times and places automatically becomes a closed book to us. And if philosophical exponents of different ideas or systems cannot speak to one another, then they cannot speak to us either. Any prospect of communal discussion of shared issues is at once destroyed. If the conflicting views of philosophers cannot be brought into touch—if they indeed are strictly incommensurable, with each theory enclosed in a world of its own—then they become altogether inaccessible. We all become windowless Leibnizian monads—though bereft of the coordinative benefit of a pre-established harmony. A dogmatic insistence on cognitive incommensurability is unprofitable and self-defeating. Contact of some sort among philosophical doctrines is essential. Determinists and indeterminists do not generally disagree about what causality is, but about its pervasiveness. Skeptics and cognitivists need not disagree about the idea of knowledge, but only about its availability. Statists and libertarians do not clash about what desires individuals have, but about the weight these preferences should carry in public policy deliberations. All such controversies flow from agreement about the range of jurisdiction or desirability of certain factors with respect to whose nature there is little or no disagreement. If we cannot in principle relate the thought of distinct philosophers by way of identity and similarity, if we cannot say that here they are discussing the same (or similar) questions and

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that there they are offering consonant or conflicting answers, then we shall be in bad straits indeed. For we then cannot claim to know what they are talking about. If we cannot relate X’s thought to Y’s, we cannot relate it to ours either. We are locked into mutual incomprehension. (And worse: what makes for so great a difference between X’s understanding of Y and X’s understanding of the X of a year ago who also held rather different opinions? A cognitive solipsism of the present moment looms.) The proper study of the development of ideas calls for a more complex and nuanced approach than that of a discritized disjointness of our historicism that proposes to cut everything off from everything else. It must be predicated on the idea that history’s leaps can only be properly appreciated against the background of its continuities. NOTES 1

During the six years 2003–2008 the journal History of Philosophy Quarterly published 126 articles. Of those, 112 or just short of 90 percent were what one might call narrowly focused, i.e., devoted to the work of a single philosopher or school. And the Journal of History of Philosophy manifests an even more narrowly focused orientation: for example, during the 2002–04 triennium not a single article had a purview larger than a two-person comparison. In earlier days, however, doxographic history flourished in philosophy, as witness such books as: •

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, Geschichte der Kategorienlehre (Berlin: G. Bethge, 1846).

•

Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn: J. Baedeker, 1866).

•

J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan, 1920).

But of late the history of philosophical ideas of this has fallen on hard days. For every work along these lines there are dozens that proceed in the person-oriented biographical manner. 2

R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 69.

3

John Herman Randall, The Career of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962-65), p. 50.

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Chapter Two FOUR MODELS OF CONCEPTUAL CHANGE IN PHILOSOPHY

W

hen a concept is taken over by one philosopher from another, and borrowed (as it were) as a thought instrument to be used for his own purposes, this will generally occur because the borrowed concepts has a core-meaning that the borrower proposed to retain. And with this core alone preserved at later stages the historical process at issue will yield a conception some elements of whose meaning is preserved across a variety of historical contexts. But another, decidedly different sort of situation can also obtain. This occurs when philosopher P2 fixes on a concept C1 employed by a predecessor P1 and transmutes this conception into a cognate C2 through readjustment in the wake of his own (P2’s) doctrines and convictions, so that C2 emphasizes some P2-correlative aspect of C1. And now when yet another philosopher P3 reconfigures C2 into C3 in line with his own position, this will, often as not, turn on aspects of C2 that fail altogether to narrow C2’s relation to C1. The developmental process C1-to-C2-to-C3 represents a genealogical process of thematic overlap without there necessarily being an overall commonality from beginning to end. Abstractly approached, it is in theory possible to envision four distinct models for the transit of concepts across the pages of philosophical history. When different philosophers working in different times and places discuss what seems on first view to be the same concept or idea one or another of the following four models may actually be in operation: I.

The identity model. The conceptions that those different and contextually separated thinkers are dealing with are one and the same. Contextual differences notwithstanding, the concept at issue in the one case can—and generally will—be just the same as that in the other.

II. The common core model. While the concepts at issue with those different thinkers are indeed rather different, they are actually variants whose essential core is uniformly the same. The essential crux

Nicholas Rescher • Ideas in Process

of those concepts is preserved in common, though they may differ in the ways that common core is elaborated and applied. A single fixed leitmotiv of thematic commonality runs through the different concepts at issue. III. The thematic linkage model. Although there is no common core of substantive identity there is a sharing of topical and functional concern in providing different answers to the same question. IV. The dialectical model. The concepts at issue are distinct, disjoint, “incommensurable.” Whatever unity is at issue is one that obtains in name only. The use of a given term for very different ideas can here become something of a pun. Display 1 THE STRUCTURE OF AN IDEA ACROSS SUCCESSIVE STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

I.

The Identity Model

A

A

A

A

II.

The Common Core Model

A1 + A2

A1 + A3

A1 + A4

A1 + A5

III. The Thematic Linkage

A1 + A2

A1 + A3

A2 + A2

A2 + A3+ A4

IV. The Dialectic Development Model

A1 + A2

A1 + A3

A2 + A3

A3 + A4

Four distinct processes of concept development are thus at issue here, what will be characterized as preservation, extension, transformation, and alteration, respectively. These four models for the process of reconceptualization across the transition from one continent of thought to another can be illustrated by schematic account provided in Display 1. Observe here that with the Identity model there is monotonic uniformity across the board. With the Common Core Mode there is not total but merely partial issue-identity across the board. With the Thematic continuity model there is something that any two stages have in common, but what it is can vary wildly. Finally, with the Dialectical model there is something that any two proximate

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FOUR MODELS OF CONCEPTUAL CHANGE IN PHILOSOPHY

changes have in common, but overall this can result in a total discontinuity, where there need be no commonality with what was present at the outset. The present deliberations will argue that none of these models have the field to themselves. None has a monopoly in application, but each of them fits some cases and not others. And this is something we will endeavor to show not by means of general principles but by a series of concrete case studies. Specifically the following theses will be maintained and substantiated. 1.

The identity/preservation model fits the much-controverted conception of free will (Chapter 3),

2.

And also that philosophical theory of relations (Chapter 4).

3.

The common core or extension fits the concept of coherence (Chapter 5).

4.

The dialectical linkage or transformation model fits the concept of analyticity (Chapter 6).

Finally there is the situation of none-of-the-above which contemplates a situation of disjointness or alteration model that fits the concept of dialectic itself. For, perhaps ironically, the development of the concept of dialectic is not really dialectical. (Chapter 7) A lesson which emerges from these deliberations, and which will be elaborated upon in the closing chapter (Chapter 8), is that the doctrine of historicism which sees the disjointness model as all-predominant and allsufficient is in some cases outright mistaken. The development of philosophical ideas is a variegated process of dialectic that makes reason for a varied spectrum of ideational development, so as to give ample scope to varied modes of conceptual relatedness— specifically including the models of identity, common-core, thematic unity, and disjointedness. One important preliminary issue must be addressed. When is the use of a certain concept to be ascribed to a philosopher? Consider the following famous passage from René Descartes’ Discourse on Method: I came to the conclusion that I might assume; as a general rule, that the things which we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true.

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It is clear that Descartes is here concerned with the issue of criterion of knowledge. Yet no less clearly, neither the word criterion nor the word knowledge (or their verbal equivalents) occur in this passage. So how can it be said that the concept of knowledge is at issue here given that Descartes himself does not say this in so many words? The first is that this concept ascription is not simply matter of report but rather one of interpretation. But just exactly what is at issue with interpretation in such a philosophical setting? One can certainly entertain and use a concept without overt use of the terminology commonly associated with it. (For example, the word “knowledge” nowhere appears in that Descartes quotation, which speaks merely of having a truer conception of things.) It is clear that concept ascription can be a matter of interpretation—of devising a paraphrase, that is to say, which capture the salient point that can reasonably be imputed to a discussion. Granted, the concepts imputed to a philosopher can only be properly ascribed on the basis of what is actually said, but this is not something that can appropriately be done without a conscientious unraveling of what is actually meant.

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Chapter Three FREE WILL AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDENTITY MODEL

T

he problem of free will was put on the agenda of philosophy in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, where it was posed in the following classic formulation, Socrates being the speaker: I felt very much as I should feel if someone said, ‘Socrates does by mind all he does’; and then, in telling the causes of what I am doing should say first that the reason why I sit here now is, that my body consists of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints between them, and the sinews can be tightened and slackened, surrounding the bones along with flesh and the skin which holds them together; so when the bones are uplifted in their sockets, the sinews slackening and tightening make me able to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I have bent together and sit here; and if next he should give you other such causes of my conversing with you, alleging as causes voices and airs and hearings and a thousand others like that, and neglecting to give the real causes … But by the Dog! these bones and sinews, I think, would have been somewhere near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried there by an opinion of what is best, if I had not believed it better and more just to submit to any sentence which my city gives than to take to my heels and run. To call all those things the causes is strange indeed. If one should say that unless I bad such things, bones and sinews and all the rest I have, I should not have been able to do what I thought best, that would indeed be true. But to say that these, and not my choice of the best, are the causes of my doing what I do (and when I act, by mind, too!), would be a very heedless way of speaking.1

The question at issue is effectively the following. Do people have the power to determine their action through choices made on the basis of deliberations based on their own preferences and wishes, or is what we do always the result of the operation of the impersonal forces of nature and the animality of our physical make-up. I have recently compiled a bibliography of the problem. This bibliography of some 3,500 works dealing with freedom of the will is extensive though doubtless not complete, a state virtually unachievable in this sort of

Nicholas Rescher • Ideas in Process

context. Few philosophical issues occupy as large a region of print space as does the problem of free will. It was said of Helen of Troy that her face had a beauty which launched a thousand ships. And it can be said, with understatement, that the problem of free will has a fascination which launched a thousand books. Rare indeed is the philosophical problem that has engendered a literature of comparable scope. Anyone who takes so extensive a bibliography into hand cannot fail to be impressed by the amount of philosophical productivity regarding this problem. Nor is this all the fruit of the problem’s two and a half millennia of existence. For three fourths of the writing ever done on the topic is the work of the past single generation. The bibliography can properly be characterized as extensive rather than comprehensive. It can make no claims to completeness. This would be quite unachievable, not because of the range and popularity of the topic, but also because its boundaries are sufficiently indefinite that no exact line of demonstration can be drawn between “appropriately in” and “appropriately out.” Various errors of omission and commission are effectively unavoidable here. All the same, even a casual look at such an extensive bibliography will suffice to show that a change of tectonic propositions has come over the subject over the past two generations. The explosion of the literature has rendered it impossible to do “business as usual.” No longer can even the most dedicated of scholars be able to take the literature of the subject into adequate account—not even where one single particular problem-issue is concerned. In every era of Western history, free will has called for defense against powerful obstacles and objections. In antiquity and patristic times they centered in the conception of Fate. In the middle ages and the Reformation era they counted on the use of God’s foreknowledge and matters of election and reprobation. In the era of modern science determinism through the level of nature has been the challenge. Throughout history the defenders of free will have had their work cut out for them. (Little wonder, then, that the bibliography of the field should be extensive.) But while the context varies and the emphases differ, the basic problem remains essentially identical. To be sure, the English philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood spoke for a plethora of theorists in maintaining that different eras and cultures cannot address the same question. This doctrine—generally called historicism—has it that even where a contention is formulated in the same words, the concepts at work in different culture-contexts are incommensur-

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FREE WILL AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDENTITY MODEL

able. So there can be no perennial philosophical issues because as the historico-cultural context changes, the idea at work assure a different guise and a change of setting becomes a change of subject. Across the boundaries of eras and places there is bound to be conceptual discontinuity. The problem of free will is a perfect test-case for this position, seeing that to all appearances it has been on the agenda of philosophical concern—alike in Mediterranean antiquity, in the Christian northern Europe of the Middle Ages, and in contemporary multi-cultural industrialized North America. Is it or is it not the same problems that have been addressed throughout by all those participants in the discussion? And are not those lawyers who wrangle throughout the years about the responsibility for action in its legal bearing dealing with the same issue? As within so many of these deep conundrums, the answer is neither flatly yes nor no but something in-between. What happens in this matter of the question of “the same issue?” is something of continuity amidst change—sameness in fundamentals upon which an ongoing change of detail is superimposed. Along with the ancients—and everyone else—we have to eat, to sleep, and also to decide among alternatives. And with them as with us these decisions are made for self-practical reasons and sometimes the result of causal factors beyond the individual’s control. The basic categories in which the issues are found are elements of the human condition that are invariant through time and circumstance—and readily recognized as such. To be sure the detail—how the causality of nature works, that sort of undue influence can affect human decisions—all this sort of thing represents matters of subordinate detail about which there can be differences of thought in the wake of cultural change. The issue of personal decision is in this regard much like the issue of bridge-building. What a bridge is is a matter of commonality as between the ancient Romans and ourselves, although issues of the classification, construction, and design etc. of bridges are all matters of individual variations of thought. Someone of fundamentals with variation of detail holds for the issue of free will over as it does with bridges. The very reason for being of many a philosopher’s work is often to take issue with what a predecessor has said and to disagree with it. (It was, after all, to refute the cognitive nihilism of Pyrrhonian skepticism that Descartes labored: it was exactly what those ancients affirmed. Descartes labored to refute.) To deny cognitive contact across the divides of time and space is to abandon the effort to understand, to explain. If one former thinker cannot

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enter into the thought of another, then neither can we ourselves make any claims to such comprehension. To be sure, what is here required is an endeavor to understand others in their own terms. But to deny the prospect of doing so is to embark on a slippery slope into a cognitive solipsism that ultimately locks each thinker into his own impenetrable thought world. If I cannot get at what Aquinas says about free will, then you cannot get at what I say about it either. A discussant working at a later time and different place may well have a nowise sophisticated and narrowed understanding of something (X), but the very fact that it is, by hypothesis, the understudy of X that is at issue means that there is no vitiating conceptual discontinuity (let alone “incommensurability”). The issue of free will exhibits in miniature a problem that confronts philosophers in the present era of an explosion in “the literature” of their subject. In the course of working on the bibliography I made an effort to compile a comprehensive inventory of the literature of the topic. (I advisedly say “comprehensive” rather than “complete” because I realize only too well that no claim to completeness is warranted.) As it stands, this bibliography—which I plan to publish later—contains some 4,000 entries by some 1,700 authors. (Six languages are canvassed—Latin, English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian—no effort having been made to cast the net more widely.) In a way I see such a bibliography as affording a reductio ad absurdum of a certain concept of philosophical mastery—a concept typified by the German Habilitationschrift. The traditional idea of such a dissertation was to make contact with the totality of external work on a given issue or topic. In the present state of the philosophical literature—where even a single problem can, like free will, be the subject of some 4,000 publications, this objective is no longer practicable. Perhaps the task should be scaled down to dealing with the important work. If one invokes “Rousseau’s Law” to the effect that in a field of N publications the sub-group of “truly important publications” can be fixed at ,N , this amount can be set at roughly 200—a volume of work that is perhaps just within the limit of what a single scholar can handle. However the problem still remains that different investigators will have very different opinions about what the many works at issue will fall into this top priority group. What are individual investigators to do when confronting a large literature on some problem they have in mind? They can place their hope that sig-

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nificant contributions will make themselves felt in subsequent discussion so that something like citation indexing will bring them to light. But this hope that ideas receive a just treatment at the hands of history all too often goes unrealized. One has to accept that the literature of the field is a haystack in which many a good insight is an unfindable needle. As one endeavors to perform a public service by equipping one’s book with a comprehensive bibliography, one opens oneself up to the plaintive question “But have you yourself actually read all of those books.” No, dear reader, I cannot claim that I have. But what I can safely claim, I think, is that I have read more of these works than the majority of those who wrote them. Another surprising fact about the mass of philosophical literature is the virtual absence from the debts of evolutionary considerations. Given the evolutionary development of mankind’s intellect nothing would seem more natural than to expect that a resource like free will—if actually present in homo sapiens—would be a feature of these creature’s evolutionary emergence in the scheme of things, much like language, intelligence, and aesthetic sensibly. Somehow this rather obviously relevant line of thinking seems to have remained very much on the back burner—if even that. The problem of free will vividly illustrates the dialectic of philosophical development in general. For philosophical deliberation is usually rooted with an aporetics situation of individually plausible but collectively inconsistent theses, as per: (1) Whatever happens in the world is the product of the inexorable operation of nature’s causal laws. (The Principle of Causality) (2) The causality of nature’s processes proceeds independently of our thought-operated decisions and resolutions. (Naturalistic determinism) (3) Our thought processes—our deliberations and decisions—control our actions in the world. (Free will) Given the incompatibility of these considerations as they stand, a limited number of alternative approaches present themselves: (1)-abandonment: Some occurrences stand outside the domain of causality. (Causality-reduction theme)

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Nicholas Rescher • Ideas in Process

(2)-abandonment: Our thought can control the flow of natural causality. (Mental causation) (3)-abandonment: Our thought is itself the product of natural causality. (Causal determinism) (1)–(3) reconciling reconstruction: the causality of nature and the causality of mind proceed independently but somehow in parallel, somewhat as per Leibniz’s idea of a pre-established harmony. (Compatibilism) The history of the subject is such that all such possible responses have been made and ongoingly contrived to be advocated. But as no given alternative is espoused, its operative issues objections and challenges that its proponents then seek to meet by means of due qualifications and refinement. This dialectal development leads to an ongoing sophistication—and complexification—of the theory in the wake of objections. The result is an arms-race like escalation of ongoing sophistication and potency, where ever more elaborate refinements in the theory are in response to the challenges of its opponents. The fundamental positions remains the same, but their articulation and exposition becomes ever more complex and its defuses ever more detailed and sophisticated. In this regard, the contentiousness of the issue is striking. One would think that most discussants would favor this seemingly unique feature of homo sapiens as the crown of creation. Not so. For every friend to free will there is an equal and opposite foe. This phenomenon is, as I see it, a vivid counterindication to the historicists thesis that every philosopher—and indeed every thinker—is locked into the thought world of his own contemporaneous culture so that the thinkers of different eras and cultures never actually discuss the same issue, idea, or question. For in no era on philosophic history has the problem fallen from view—every era and virtually every important thinker throughout the history of philosophy has addressed the question. And despite the diversity of answers across the whole spectrum of yes-no-maybeso resources, there has been substantial agreement in keeping the question framed in line with its original articulation. Notwithstanding, the variety of views about the existence and bearing of freedom of the will, there has throughout been an ongoing identity of concern with one such essentially

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FREE WILL AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDENTITY MODEL

selfsame issue, namely that posed in the deliberations of the Platonic Socrates in the Phaedo passage cited at the outset—to wit the role of impersonal nature and persona choice in the determination of human agency. The perduring identity of the question at issue mandates the problem of free will as a clear-illustration of the identity model of conceptual development. Even those who sought to reject the problem of the will’s freedom as ultimately meaningless have been in agreement with their opponents as regards what the question asks and what the controversy over free will is actually about. The elaborate controversy over the freedom of the will thus affords a vivid and telling illustration of the possibility of a conceptual commonality of philosophical concern across the divides of time and place. NOTES 1

Plato, Phaedo 98C.

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Chapter Four INTERSUBSTANTIVAL RELATIONS AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE COMMON CORE MODEL 1. INTRODUCTION

T

he logical and metaphysical problem of fitting the relations that obtain between various items into a natural realm of things and their properties has long been a challenge to philosophical theoreticians.1 According to Leibniz, the first modern philosopher to concern himself with relations was Joachim Jungius (1587–1657), a productive natural philosopher who for many years taught in Rostock and Hamburg.2 In his Logica Hamburgiensis of 1638, Jungius criticized the traditional (Aristotelian) logic on grounds— among others—of neglecting relations by focusing on descriptive predications. This omission, so Jungius held, severely limited a capacity adequately to address both philosophical and scientific issues. And it was Jungius who, through his influence on Leibniz, put the issue of intersubstantival relations on the agenda of modern philosophy, where its essential core has persisted down to the present. The course of development at issue here is a topic that repays study. 2. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716) As a dedicated substance philosopher, Leibniz thought that intersubstantival relations were not an objective reality as such but were phenomena which, as it were, “lay in the eyes of the beholder.” Substances do indeed bear relationships to one another, but these root in and emerge from the properties that are intrinsic to the substances at issue. On this basis, Leibniz held that from the logical point of view, all intersubstantival relations are “reducible” to compounds of predications. Thus consider as a paradigm example: —John is the father of Jane.

Nicholas Rescher • Ideas in Process

As Leibniz sees it, this statement can be analyzed into a conjunction of three terms (1) John is a parent (i.e., a father to someone). (2) Jane is an offspring (i.e., is somebody’s child). (3) (2) is grounded in (1): it obtains in virtue of (1)’s obtaining. In this way, so Leibniz maintains, any claim to intersubstantial relations can be resolved into a pair of predicative substance-attributions (as per (1) and (2)) together with a generic concept of grounding or explainability (as per (3)). Thus when it is said with regard to substantial states a and b that one proceeds the other, we can define a