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Incarnational Anthropology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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The renaissance of philosophy of mind within the analytical tradition owes a great deal to the intellectual midwifery of Ryle and Wittgenstein. It is ironic, therefore, that the current state of the subject should be one in which scientific and Cartesian models of mentality are so widely entertained. Clearly few if any of those who find depth, and truth, in the Wittgensteinian approach are likely to be sympathetic to much of what is most favoured in contemporary analytic philosophical psychology. Finding themselves in a minority, they might well look elsewhere for support, hoping to establish the idea that opposition to scientific and Cartesian ways of thinking is by no means philosophically eccentric. Perhaps this partly explains the increasing British and North American interest in ‘continental’ thought, particularly as it bears (as most of it does) on the nature of human beings. Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre are obvious enough subjects for such attention.
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References
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2 The original passage comes in Hume, 's Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section I.Google Scholar
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9 Being and Time, Division I, ch. II, sec. 12, p. 57.Google Scholar
10 Being and Time, Division I, ch. VI, sec. 44 (c), pp. 228–9.Google Scholar
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17 This point is made by Herbert McCabe in published correspondence with Maurice Wiles. See ‘The Incarnation: an exchange’ in McCabe, H., God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987), 70.Google Scholar
18 To judge from the discussion in chapter 9 of his Understanding Identity Statements (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984) this is the response favoured by T. V. Morris. However, I have not yet had the opportunity to read his monograph on the Incarnation, viz. The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) which may depart from this approach, though I doubt it.
19 In Providence and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) Peter Geach offers a brief discussion of reduplicatives in connection with Christological predications. At one point he writes: ‘[C]learly, this predicate [is as P, Q] entails the simple conjunctive predicate “is both P and Q” but not conversely’ (27). I agree that the latter does not entail the former but nor, I believe, does the former imply the latter. If ‘A is both P & Q’ is equivalent to ‘A is P & A is Q’ then the contradictions which Geach and I both want to avoid would be one elimination step away. The only statements derivable from ‘x qua F is G’ are (i) ‘x is F’, and (ii) ‘x is G qua F’. But the second of these is obviously just a syntactical variant of the original.
20 Needless to say, this claim will be regarded as controversial. The following two objections may occur to readers (the first was put to me by Graham Priest).
(i) The analysis of ‘x as f is not (i.e. is un)entitled’ presented above is not that which an objector to my reduplicative account would give. For he could observe the ambiguity in claims of the form ‘it is not the case that x is f’ between external and internal readings of the negation, i.e. involving the sentence or the predicate respectively. So, the claim (H2) above should be represented as ∼(x) (Hx → Gx), and not as (x) (Hx → ∼Gx). This then unsettles the proposed identity of logical form. Recall that my thesis is that the following inferences are valid but since they yield a contradiction their antecedent conditionals cannot give the correct analysis of the entitlement/non-entitlement claims:
The counter-proposal is that since the correct logical form of the second conditional is ∼(x) (Hx→Gx), then ∼Gx is not validly derivable, and one is not forced into a contradiction: Gx simpliciter does follow, ∼Gx simpliciter does not.
My reply is as follows: ∼(x) (Hx→Gx) is equivalent to (∃x) (Hx & ∼Gx). If we assume, however, that the predicates F and H are co-extensive, i.e., in the example discussed above, that all members of the university are also community-charge payers, then the latter is clearly false since everyone is both a rate-payer and entitled to use the library. Thus, in the case where F and H are co-extensive the claimed existential consequence is false while the premise ‘Anyone who is a resident is not (i.e. is un)entitled’ remains true. So far as concerns the present issue, therefore, the wide scope reading of the negation fares no better than did the narrow one.
(ii) A second response argues that one may detach non(i.e. un)entitlement simpliciter, while capturing the sense of the qua construction in a standard logical form analysis. Consider the generalized non-entitlement claim (F2) above:
Anyone qua resident and charge payer is not entitled to use the Library.
This, it is supposed, may be represented as follows:
Here I, J, K, etc. stand for various entitling properties; thus we have:
Anyone who is a resident and charge-payer and is not a member of the University and is not a visiting scholar, etc., is not entitled to use the Library.
The problem with this proposal, as I see it, is that the reduplicative ‘x qua H is not G’ is semantically determinate in the way that the counter proposal is not.
One could grasp the sense and determine the truth value of the first without being able to do the same for the second—indeed, the ‘etc’ barely conceals that as it stand there is no articulable sense to grasp nor truth to determine. Given this fact the proposal fails as an analysis.
21 The importance of this point was first impressed upon me by reading ‘Nominalism’, in Geach, P., Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).Google Scholar
22 For some related discussion of the Christian idea of a bodily afterlife see Haldane, J., ‘A Glimpse of Eternity?’, The Modern Churchman 30, No. 3 (1988).Google Scholar
23 Summa Theologica, Ia, 1.66, a. 1, ad 1. The translation is that of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Washbourne, 1912).
24 The idea of different modes of potentiality, different kinds of ‘matter’, also has application in connection with the question ‘how is thought possible?’ For discussion of this see Haldane, J., ‘Brentano's Problem’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Mind/World Identity Theory and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in Haldane, J. and Wright, C. (eds) Realism, Reason and Projection, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
25 I am grateful to my colleagues Peter Clark and Anthony Ellis for discussions of issues raised in this essay.