A couple of things about the history that Gilson is sketching out here in Chapter 1.
First thing… [writing on chalkboard] In the history of philosophy, many of you
know this who took Modern Philosophy with me, it's important to recognize that Kant
is not engaging the Scholastic tradition directly.
Kant is engaging the Cartesian tradition that has replaced the Scholastic tradition by his time.
So we have… [writing on chalkboard]
We have this first wave of modernity comes
along, and Cartesian rationalism utterly destroys late scholasticism.
Late scholasticism just limps along, I suppose you could say, there are there a couple of
survivals, but as a going concern it's gone, and rationalism owns basically the second
half of the 17th century.
When Kant… [writing on chalkboard]
When Kantian critical philosophy comes along,
his philosophy of critique, his Critique of Pure Reason, in the late 18th century, it
utterly obliterates rationalism.
This is one of the steps that Gilson is talking about in this chapter, when he mentions his
grounding of physics in sensible intuition, which can't be accounted for by rationalist methods.
So when we look for, when we look at Kant’s success, we look at it as a success over the
then reigning rationalist system, okay, which Kant was earlier schooled in and was converted
from by his reading of Hume.
We might ask then, why hasn’t Kantianism engaged with scholasticism?
Because scholasticism is dead and buried for a century by the time that Kant comes along.
So for those of you who are unaware of that historical progression, this is what in the
modern… [writing on chalkboard]
in the modern class I call Cartesianism, the
first wave of modernity, which washes away most of the Scholastic inheritance, such as
it is, which has become sort of hollowed out and weakened.
And then the second wave I usually assign to empiricism, but I can incorporate that
here into this: second wave, Lockean empiricism.
Third wave, Kant comes along.
And Kant generally owns the show by the time that we get to the twentieth century.
So it's not unexpected that neoscholastics in the early twentieth century are trying
to think of: how can I make my peace with critical philosophy?
Is their way of recognizing what's true in it its key insights and incorporating them
into a Thomist realist system of epistemology?
Now Gilson says: Thomist yes, realist no.
You can be a Kantian Thomist but you cannot be a Kantian Thomist realist, because Kantianism
is, he thinks, idealistic right down to its core.
So that's the first historical point I wanted to make.
The second point I think I can make… [erasing chalkboard]
…by talking about the nature of critique, the nature of critical epistemology.
We dealt with this way back in January when we were reading chapter two, chapter one or
two, of McInerny’s book, right.
So to come back to it again: [writing on chalkboard]
Anytime we're dealing with critical philosophy
or the philosophy of critique, we're thinking about Kant historically.
This would not be the case with something called critical theory, which is a late 20th
century phenomenon.
So if you see the words “critical theory” together, that's something other than this,
but critical philosophy or the philosophy of critique is the philosophy of Kant.
And this is part of a general modern, [writing on chalkboard]
…part of a general modern turn to the subject, in which Descartes also takes part.
You notice Descartes begins with the mind and its method and its limits, rather than
the object and its intelligibility, right.
He knows that this has been neglected by prior epistemologies. [writing on chalkboard]
This is the philosophy, the epistemology,
that begins with the human mind, with the knowing subject, examines the nature and limits
of the knowing subject and its capacity to know, the methods by which it knows, and most
importantly the limits of its knowledge.
This critical philosophy is almost always a philosophy of limitation.
The critique that it makes then of prior, say, scholastic philosophy, or just the whole
Aristotelian-Platonic tradition, is that that philosophy was insufficiently critical.
[writing on chalkboard] Prior philosophy was uncritical.
It ignored the limits of the human mind and claimed to have knowledge of “supersensible
realities,” one of Kant’s terms that comes up again.
[writing on chalkboard]
And so pre-critical, non-critical philosophy
makes impossible knowledge claims.
It claims to give us knowledge, with certainty, of realities of being that lie beyond the senses.
[writing on chalkboard] The limit of the mind [writing on chalkboard]
is going to be importantly tied to sensible experience for Kant, okay.
None of this is new to you guys, a lot of this is review, I trust, but I’ll put it
down this way for the sake of discussing it in Gilson.
So we begin with the mind, we then work from the mind what we can know.
We’ll have to be satisfied with [writing on chalkboard] a more limited scope for human
knowledge, but [writing on chalkboard] but we do acquire, for Kant, certainty within
those limits.
Within that scope, we do have the certainty that we require, and this is his way of responding to the crisis
initiated by Hume.
Hume points out that our reasoning about matters of fact, about empirical matters, including
science, that's the big prize everybody’s playing for, scientific knowledge depends
upon this assumption that can't be justified.
So it, so Hume opens this door to skepticism about the actual nature our knowledge.
So he thinks he can give us limits, but within those limits certainty.
This is what I'm called in another course [writing on chalkboard] Kant’s Gambit.
What we give up is the ability ever to make true statements about being, considered just
in itself, being in itself, things in itself, the noumenal.
The Queen sacrifice [writing on chalkboard] is knowledge of being.
We cannot know being in itself, [writing on chalkboard] what he calls the noumenal.
We just can't know that.
All knowledge claims about noumenal realities are illusory.
And they always have been!
Nobody ever, not Aristotle, not Plato, not Descartes, not Spinoza, nobody has ever had
that kind of knowledge.
It has always been an illusion.
Kant says with critical philosophy we've now woken up to that fact.
We're able to reform philosophy, pull back its frontiers quite significantly, to within
the limits of the powers of the human mind limits dictated by experience, sensory experience,
but within those limits we can have absolute certainty because of the way that the mind
is structured.
This is Kant’s new metaphysics as a science, as a discipline, a body of study.
So the gain: [writing on chalkboard]
We gain a secure foundation for science, for
scientific knowledge claims about phenomena, once we give up the noumena, but that's not
actually giving up anything, it’s giving up what we never actually had, because knowledge
of noumena is, was, and always will be impossible.
Now we reground our knowledge of science, of phenomena, on a solid foundation.
Any questions before I erase this?
I'm not quite sure from your faces how much of this is review and how much of this is
new or shocking. Annie and then Phil.
(Student: I don't know if we can answer this question now, but Gilson kind of implies that
science, especially Kant through applying the physics background to everything, limits it.
But a lot of philosophers believe that science, like through coming to know the natural sciences
you can come to know metaphysics better, like Moses Maimonides, he said that, and a couple
of others. So I don’t know how that really fits in.)
Okay. I'm going to erase this to put some more stuff up.
Phil, can I erase this before answering your question? Okay.
So for Kant, I mean, it's common to speak of pre-Kantian and post-Kantian metaphysics.
That's how much of a watershed figure he is.
So maybe I can answer your question in this way: Maimonides, I think, is going to fall
into that category of insufficiently critical philosophies.
So we're not going to get to any knowledge of being beyond the sensory experience by
any means, that's just not something we can know.
We can have faith about that, we can have beliefs about that, we can have sort of speculative
or regulative ideals, so I can think of the existence of God, can be an object of faith,
it can be a regulative ideal that I employ in governing my behavior.
I'm going to live my ethical life as though God exists, and thinking of God is existing
as a supreme lawgiver helps me to internalize and act according to the genuine force of
the moral law.
But I can't claim to *know* that God exists.
I can't claim that kind of knowledge.
Knowledge is going to be restricted to this sphere of phenomena.
So if you ask, sort of, what about Aquinas’s five ways?
Can’t I observe the world and then use metaphysical principles to reason to the existence of unseen
and unsensible beings?
And Kant says no.
All proofs of God will fail.
God can't be proved because God can't be known, if he's a being that is not present to our
sensible intuition.
So pre-Kantian… [writing on chalkboard]
Before Kant, we have what I call speculative
metaphysics, which is an attempt to grasp, to know [writing on chalkboard] to know the
truth about being.
Being considered beyond us, this kind of speculation goes beyond, reaches out into the world.
[writing on chalkboard]
The object of post-Kantian metaphysics is descriptive.
The goal is not to grasp the reality of something outside of ourselves.
It's to grasp the actual nature of the working mind that is doing the knowing.
So what I want to know is the truth about the structures of the human mind and the way
those structures help to limit, structure, create experience and knowledge.
So instead of asking about being I'm asking about [writing on chalkboard]
conditions for the possibility of having any knowledge.
You'll see this over and over again in Kant.
We're not looking at the reality of the things, we can't get to that.
We're looking at the conditions for the possibility of what we do know about it, what we do experience
about it.
And Kant thinks he can construct a working metaphysics on that basis, or a working
epistemology, and the metaphysics is sort of going to be consequent to that.
So it all sort of holds together with his general method.
Does that answer your question?
I sort of said the answer was no, Maimonides is not going to be able to arrive at any knowledge
of God. (Yeah.)
If the conclusion of your argument is: “Therefore I have knowledge of a supersensible reality,”
your argument is invalid, because your conclusion is false.
There can be no good argument that concludes that you have knowledge of something that's
beyond the senses.
All knowledge is either sensory knowledge, which can be physics, or it's going to be
this kind of descriptive metaphysical knowledge of the conditions for the possibility of physics.
So metaphysics’ job is to talk about how physics is possible.
That's what philosophy is now.
It going to be sort of the ancillary to science instead of to theology.
Phil? [unintelligible] Okay, that’s fine.
[unintelligible] Thumbs up, okay, great.
I need wrap up the Kant lecture soon if we’re going to talk about Gilson.
So the thing that it seems to me… the second point I want to make, that I’ve been on
the way towards, is that it seems to me that the divide between sort of pre- and post-Kantian
approaches to philosophy we can also think of as a divide between living in a world of
beings [writing on chalkboard]
and living in a world of experiences or sensations.
We might ask: what populates our epistemology?
What are these things that we are coming to know?
And I think implicitly in Descartes and kind of finally in Kant, we shift from thinking
about being surrounded by and analyzing different beings with which we interact to thinking
instead of having different experiences, different mental events, different presentations
through my senses or through my imagination or thought, experiences, thoughts, and the like.
I have to weigh up which ones of these are veridical or not, which ones of these
I should trust, which ones are going to count as true knowledge.
So I need a sifting algorithm.
This is what Descartes is after with his method: how can I separate the true from the false
*purported* knowledge claims?
I'm not talking about being, I’m talking about the experiences I have or the beliefs
that I have, the experiences, the thoughts, etc.
Notice these are all internal.
Part of what Gilson is saying is if you begin in the mind, you begin in the world of experiences,
he doesn't think you’re going to be able to fight your way back to a world of beings,
not by immediate realism, not by the problem bridge, not in any way.
If you want to have knowledge of being you have to sort of bite the bullet at the beginning
an reject idealism at the start of your philosophical epistemology.
You have to reject Descartes, reject idealism, reject Kant.
You can't incorporate Kantian insights if it means starting in the subject.
So part of what he says here is that accepting the Cartesian framing of the question is always
going to lead you to a Cartesian answer.
This is his particular brand of neoscholasticism.
There are others.
There is a sort of, even today, flourishing branch of Kantian flavored Thomism.
I think Bernard Lonergan probably falls into that category.
Maybe I will introduce something by him later in the semester if you'd like to at least
get a taste for what that looks like.
But all of them represent an attempt to begin in the subject.
They sort of take this modern turn to the subject as representing something true and
valuable that needs to be recognized and responded to.
And they might say, “Look, I’m a Thomist and Thomas made the best use of the true things
that came before him: he took what was true in Aristotle and left what was false.
If Thomas were alive in the 20th century, if he were able to read Kantian philosophy,
he would say, ‘Kant’s on to something.
I need to modify my system in order to incorporate this truth about the priority of the knowing subject.’”
Gilson says no. No, that's a mistake.
A lot of what this chapter is about, the sort of inside baseball stuff, is: what's the right
way to be a Thomist and still a realist?
And Gilson’s taking the no-compromise line.
You can't begin on this side of the line and hope to cross back over and draw conclusions
on this side of the line.
Now, he might be wrong about that.
It might be possible to cross over.
I haven't given you anything by Noel or any of the other people he's criticizing.
We might look into those later on or I might give you guys some resources if some of you
want to investigate yourselves.
So that's my sort of preliminary review, I think, of Kant and critical philosophy.
It's sort of the table set, giving you a good idea of what the battlespace is like here.
[Music]