This chapter continues exploring powers from the inside. The Informational Thesis claims that powers carry representational, nonpropositional, map-like information geared toward their potential manifestations. First, this chapter motivates an ontological connection between information and powers via two arguments, one based on physics and one based on causation. Second, the modality of powers from the inside is illuminated using the blueprinting metaphor advanced by Neil Williams, which centrally involves an informational component. This prompts a more detailed discussion of the nature of information. Third, some important implications of the Informational Thesis are discussed, including its relation to the dispositional modality posited by Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford, the analysis of powers (dispositions), and the power/quality (dispositional/categorical) distinction. The chapter’s conclusion explores how the three d’s of the 3d account are interrelated and form a rich, novel account of powers.

‘Unconscious perception’ seems to be a contradiction in terms. What is perceiving, if not, one way or another, a conscious mode of experience? Is it not part of the definition of ‘perception’ that it is somehow conscious? If something happens in our body that does not affect our mind in any conscious way, does it make any sense to say that we ‘perceive’ it? This standard intuition, according to which perception necessarily implies consciousness, is given philosophical expression by John Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

But Leibniz teaches precisely that there are unconscious perceptions. Not only, according to Leibniz, are there perceptions of which we are not conscious, since they are imperceptibly minute, but conscious perceptions themselves involve, are indeed constituted by, these imperceptible or unconscious perceptions. By distinguishing between the concepts of perception and apperception, Leibniz breaks decisively with the notion that perception is inherently tied to consciousness or that it implies an idea's being ‘present to the mind’. This in turn forces a profound reformulation of the problem of freedom, since unconscious perceptions as well as conscious ones play a role in the determination of a subject's desire and agency. Indeed, as we will see, the role played by unconscious perceptions in this regard must be, without exaggeration, infinitely greater than that played by conscious perceptions.

In this chapter, I will take up Leibniz's mature metaphysical writings in order to isolate the resources for thinking the unconscious of thought that his philosophy articulates.

I

The traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, commonly known as ‘the design argument’, aims to ground belief in God’s existence in empirical evidence drawn from the world around us. The most telling items of evidence to which this argument appeals are biological organs that serve specific functions superbly well. The eye, to cite a frequently used example, serves the purpose of seeing so impressively, it seems impossible that it could have arisen by chance. Rather, it must have been brought into existence for that purpose by an intentional designer, which is to say, God.

David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, it is widely accepted, constitute an exhaustive and devastating critique of this argument. The characters engaged in dialogue debate a very modest version of the conclusion that the design argument might be held to sustain, namely, ‘That the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man’. Yet ultimately, even this very limited claim is found to be wanting. The design argument, which had widespread appeal in Hume’s own day, is wholly lacking in cogency, it seems.

In the Dialogues, the character who articulates and defends the design argument is Cleanthes. The character who undermines it is Philo. Somewhat strangely, however, in the opening paragraphs of the final part of the work Philo, the sceptic, suddenly seems to endorse the very conclusion he has been attacking. He remarks to Cleanthes:

Is this really a volte-face? Is Philo in the end unpersuaded by the arguments he himself has made? The quoted passage has often been interpreted in this way, but there is at least one interpretation that makes the reversal a little less dramatic. Possibly, Philo is here giving voice to a lingering psychological doubt. The key lies in the word ‘inexplicable’ and in the phrase ‘at all times’.

This book seeks to retrieve and defend a simple idea, namely that thought and consciousness are not coextensive. It is a project of retrieval, since the idea that thought and consciousness are identical is a relatively recent invention, a piece of modern doxa or ideology. But I want to put this nonidentity claim in a positive form: there is an unconscious of thought. I will defend this positive claim by exploring the unconscious of thought as it is articulated in the metaphysics of ideas of early modernity, in particular in the work of G.W.F. Leibniz, Benedict de Spinoza, and David Hume. These thinkers, I will show, were highly sensitive to profound dimensions of unconscious thought, a domain that is not just unconscious accidentally, in the sense that there are ideas that may happen not to be conscious, but is instead unconscious structurally, essentially, or necessarily, in the sense that there are elements of thought that are constitutively incapable of being directly consciously apprehended by individual subjects in reflection. Moreover, these unconscious elements constitute conditions for the possibility of consciousness: without them, there could not even be consciousness at all. To the extent that philosophical modernity has tended to overemphasise or inflate the importance of consciousness at the expense of this unconscious of thought, I hold that it is extrinsically valuable, as a matter of situated historical importance, to actively work toward rectifying this overemphasis in accounts of the nature of the mind; as should become clear, however, I also think that giving the unconscious of thought its due is also intrinsically valuable, as a matter of philosophical importance, insofar as doing so brings substantial conceptual and explanatory resources to light.

It is a project of retrieval, then, but also a project of invention or rereading, since the positive terms in which I am putting this claim were not used by, and indeed were not available as such to, the thinkers in question. None of them said explicitly that there is an unconscious of thought. My task is to demonstrate that they nevertheless held this position.

Philosophy has been taught and written in Scotland since the fifteenth century. The purpose of this series is to publish new scholarly work on any and every aspect of the history of Scottish philosophising, from John Mair to John Macmurray. Scotland’s most celebrated philosophical achievements remain those produced by Hume, Smith, Reid and their contemporaries in the eighteenth century. It is, however, no longer possible to believe that the Scottish Enlightenment had no indigenous roots. Nor is it possible to believe that there was no significant philosophy produced in Scotland once the Enlightenment was over.

There is no single set of intellectual concerns distinctive of and unique to philosophy as it has been taught and written in Scotland. Historical study of Scottish philosophy must be, to a significant extent, study of the changing nature of philosophy itself. It should be open to the idea that the preoccupations and methods of philosophers today may not be those of philosophers in the past. It should also concern itself with philosophical connections and intellectual affinities between Scotland, England, Ireland and the rest of Europe, and, where appropriate, between Scotland and America.

James Harris

Human minds are modes of thought, and the question of what they understand and how is an important one. But answering that question does not fully capture what Spinoza calls the ‘actual essence’ of finite beings, which is their striving. The striving of a human being to persevere in its being, to increase its power to think and to act, to produce the effects that follow from its nature, insofar as it is expressed both corporeally and mentally – Spinoza calls this desire. What does the persistence of inadequate ideas, and so of unconscious dimensions of thought in even the most active mind, mean for this conception of desire as the actual essence of individual human beings?

In the previous chapter, I argued that Spinoza's categorical framework of adequate and inadequate ideas, which is designed to respond to the ethical problematic that informs his metaphysics, namely the increase of power, has the following significant characteristics. First, the adequate and inadequate are not related to one another as are the true to the false. The inadequate is characterised not by anything positive on account of which it could be called false, but rather by its partiality: an inadequate idea does not fully explain that of which it is an idea, but clearly and distinctly expresses only some part or aspect of it. Inadequate ideas do not express their own causes clearly and distinctly, but they must nevertheless involve these causes, and thus do so only obscurely and indistinctly. Error consists, then, in taking an inadequate idea to be adequate, that is, in confusing the partial for the completely expressive.

Second, following Spinoza's analyses in Propositions 24 to 31 of Part II, there are some things of which we can only form inadequate ideas. In particular, as we saw, the human mind can only form inadequate ideas of the natures of external bodies and the parts of its own bodies, the nature of its own mind based on the ideas of its body's affections, and the durations of singular things, which includes itself as well as things outside it.

I

In Part 4 of his highly acclaimed book The Democratic Intellect, George Elder Davie tells a dramatic and riveting story about the decline of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in the course of the nineteenth century. A central role in the story is given to James Frederick Ferrier, Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews from 1845 until his death in 1864. The Democratic Intellect was published in 1961, but Davie’s fascination with Ferrier, he tells us, had begun nearly thirty years earlier in 1936, when he first read about Ferrier in Torgny Segerstedt’s book The Problem of Knowledge in Scottish Philosophy. As a result, he found himself

Davie’s estimate of Ferrier was not eccentric. Ferrier’s contemporary, Principal John Tulloch, a scholar of great distinction and philosophical acumen, concludes a long commemorative essay, ‘Professor Ferrier and the Higher Philosophy’, with this fine tribute.

Fifty years on, the estimate of Ferrier’s distinction had not diminished. In 1911, the University of St Andrews marked its 500th anniversary with a special publication – Votiva Tabella. The chapter on philosophy was written by G. F. Stout, then Professor of Logic and Metaphysics. He says this of Ferrier.

I

Andrew Seth (latterly Seth Pringle-Pattison) occupied the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh from 1891 to 1919. The Chair itself had a distinguished history. Seth succeeded his teacher Alexander Campbell Fraser, who had himself succeeded his teacher Sir William Hamilton. Together the tenure of these three philosophers in the Edinburgh Logic Chair extended over more than eighty years, and all of them were held in high esteem by their philosophical contemporaries and their students. None of them, however, has attracted much attention in the history of modern philosophy. Even their contribution to the history of philosophy in Scotland is largely overshadowed by the towering figures of the previous century. Alexander Broadie’s History of Scottish Philosophy (2009) is uniquely comprehensive, yet while his discussion of Hume, Smith and Reid extends to 175 pages, his discussion of Hamilton and Pringle-Pattison is confined to twelve. Fraser (who figured so prominently in the previous chapter) is merely mentioned.

Though Broadie’s treatment is modest, wider-ranging histories of philosophy, as could be expected, invariably give these figures even less attention, often none at all. When Hamilton does figure, it is largely as a historical curiosity, notable chiefly as the subject of J. S. Mill’s devastating Examination, and a figure whose own work no longer has any interest for contemporary philosophy. The case of Pringle-Pattison is a little different because in several places he has been accorded special status as a forerunner in the development of ‘personalism’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us that in the first half of the twentieth century ‘personalism’ came to designate a variety of philosophical schools that grew out of a reaction to the de-personalising elements in Enlightenment rationalism, Hegelian Idealism, and materialist psychology. Personalist philosophical systems are so called because they focus on ‘the person’ as the most fundamental explanatory principle of reality, and the leading representative of British idealistic personalism, the entry goes on to note, was Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison. This claim is elaborated at slightly greater length in the Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, where, under the heading of ‘Personal Idealism’, Pringle-Pattison is allocated a section in the chapter on ‘British Idealist Philosophy of Religion’. Broadie is more emphatic.