In the January 2016 issue of New Blackfriars, David Goodill reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics. From the review:
Feser[‘s]... purpose... is in bringing Scholastic metaphysics into conversation with contemporary metaphysics...The contemporary partners Feser chooses to converse with are analytical philosophers...
This engagement with contemporary philosophy ensures that the book is more than just an introduction which rehearses the arguments of others. Feser demonstrates a mastery of both the Scholastic tradition he draws upon and the writings of contemporary thinkers, which he uses to provide telling and insightful analyses of key metaphysical notions...
The value of Feser’s book is in its contribution to the[se] debates... and the analytical clarity with which he illuminates contemporary debate by using principles developed in scholastic thought.
While allowing that “inevitably with any work of such broad scope not every perspective can be included, nor can every debate be entered into,” Goodill suggests that there are two issues I might have pursued further. First, he says:
Feser rejects Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics and his return to the ordinary. Along with this he also argues that: ‘the Scholastics would not agree that it is to “grammar” that we must look to resolve (or dissolve) metaphysical problems’ (p. 221). Here Feser stands in opposition to those analytical philosophers who have drawn a line of continuity from Plato through the scholastics to Wittgenstein’s grammatical remarks. Most notably, G. E. M. Anscombe draws attention to the intimate relationship in Plato between the development of metaphysics and grammar, and argues that Frege and Wittgenstein stand within this tradition. More recently William Charlton has argued that grammar is central to metaphysics. An engagement with such views would be helpful in substantiating Feser’s claim that grammar did not figure when the scholastics sought to resolve metaphysical questions.
This is an interesting response to my remarks in the book about Wittgenstein, and I agree that those remarks should be qualified. So let me do so here.
“Grammar,” in the technical Wittgensteinian sense, has to do with those implicit rules of language which determine the bounds of meaningful usage. These rules are normative rather than merely descriptive, and a proposition which expresses a rule is therefore to be distinguished from an empirical proposition. The proposition that stones are material objects would be a “grammatical” proposition in this sense, whereas the proposition that stones can be found in riverbeds would be an empirical proposition. To deny that stones can be found in riverbeds would be to say something false, but it would nevertheless be to say something perfectly intelligible, something which could have been true. But to deny that stones are material objects would, in Wittgenstein’s view, not be intelligible. It would be nonsensical, insofar as the proposition that stones are material objectsis for him partially constitutive of the proper use of the term “stone.” We know that stones are material objects, not by virtue of empirical investigation (as with the proposition that stones can be found in riverbeds) but rather just by virtue of mastering the use of the word “stone.”
“Grammatical” rules in this sense are thus like the rules of a game. To say, in the context of a game of checkers, that a game piece with another stacked on top of it is a King is to give expression to one of the rules of the game. It is not like saying that player A’s King is on a red square. Falsely to say the latter (when the King is actually on a black square, say) is to make an empirical mistake. But to deny that a game piece with another stacked on top of it is a King is not to make an empirical mistake. It is simply to misunderstand what checkers involves.
Now, for Wittgenstein, a metaphysical theory like Berkeley’s idealism is like that. When Berkeley denies that a stone is a material object and says that it is actually a collection of perceptions, he is, in Wittgenstein’s view, making a “grammatical” error. He is like someone who denies that a checkers game piece with another stacked on top of it is a King. “Grammar” in the sense of the study of the constitutive rules of language can for the Wittgensteinian thus help us to expose the errors made by bad metaphysical theories. As Wittgenstein says, “essence is expressed by grammar” and “grammar tells what kind of object anything is” (Philosophical Investigations§§371, 373).
There are at least three ways to read what Wittgenstein is up to here, which I will call the anti-realist, realist, and neither anti-realist nor realistreadings. They can be described as follows:
1. Anti-realist: On this reading, Wittgensteinian “grammar” merely describes how we happen linguistically and conceptually to “carve up” reality. In principle, though, we might carve it up in some radically different way. “Grammar” captures necessary features of reality only in the sense that, giventhe language and conceptual scheme we happen to have, certain ways of describing things are ruled out as nonsensical. However, our language and conceptual scheme as a whole is contingent, and could in theory be replaced by some alternative and incommensurable language and conceptual scheme.
2. Realist: On this reading, Wittgensteinian “grammar” captures not merely how we happen, contingently, to “carve up” reality, but how reality itself must be. It tells us not just what is necessarily the case given our conceptual scheme, but what is necessarily the case full stop. We cannot so much as even make sense of the idea of a radically different and incommensurable conceptual scheme, because we cannot so much as make sense of reality being any different than the rules of “grammar” tell us it is.
3.Neither anti-realist nor realist: On this reading, the anti-realist and realist readings of Wittgenstein are themselves precisely instances of the sort of thing Wittgenstein is trying to overcome. For both involve a dualism of language and conceptual scheme on the one hand and reality on the other, and disagree merely about whether the former corresponds necessarily to the latter. But this kind of metaphysical picture is itself a product of what Wittgenstein would regard as “grammatical” confusion. In our ordinary linguistic usage and “form of life,” the question of whether language and conceptual scheme as a whole“correspond” to reality doesn’t even arise. Wittgensteinian philosophy is about getting us back to this state of pre-metaphysical innocence (as it were), and not about taking sides on any version of the metaphysical realist/anti-realist dispute.
Now, people who think that Wittgenstein is a kind of relativist, or that his criticisms of various metaphysical theories are a matter of “conceptual analysis” which takes for granted mere “folk” notions which might end up being overthrown by science, are adopting interpretation 1. But this interpretation, I would say, badly misreads Wittgenstein, and I think most Wittgensteinians would agree that it badly misreads him.
In fact, I think that Wittgenstein and most of his followers intend interpretation 3. In my view, though, the trouble with interpretation 3 -- or to be more precise, with the position that interpretation 3 rightly attributes to Wittgenstein -- is that it is unstable and tends to collapse into either the position described by interpretation 1 or the position described by interpretation 2. There is just no such thing as returning to a state of pre-metaphysical innocence (short of a lobotomy, anyway) because metaphysical speculation is not some pathology that arises when language “goes on holiday,” but is rather the natural manifestation of our essence as rational animals. Give man sufficient time and leisure, and he will become a metaphysician. The only question is whether he will do it well or badly.
If there is any value in Wittgenstein’s “grammatical” investigations, then -- and I certainly think there is -- then they will in my view have to be construed in terms of interpretation 2. Now, again, there are good ways and bad ways of doing metaphysics. I would say that what Wittgenstein was primarily reacting against were some bad ways -- namely, the ways represented by continental rationalist metaphysics, “naturalized” metaphysics of the sort inspired by British empiricism, idealism, Kantianism, etc. -- and that he mistook them for metaphysics as such. But all these approaches, which share certain key post-Cartesian assumptions, differ greatly from the classical approaches represented by Platonism, Aristotelianism, and the Scholastic thinkers who built on those traditions.
Aristotelianism in particular (and systems which incorporate it, like Thomism) take there to be a profound continuity between common sense and metaphysical speculation. Metaphysics goes well beyond common sense but it does not subvert it, at least not in any radical way. This continuity puts Aristotelian metaphysics much closer to Wittgenstein and his concern for ordinary language and the “form of life” it represents than other metaphysical systems are. Because of this closeness, I think that Aristotelians and Thomists are bound to find useful insights in Wittgenstein and his followers, and that Wittgensteinians are bound to find the work of Aristotelians and Thomists more congenial than that of other metaphysicians. It is unsurprising, then, that there are thinkers who have drawn inspiration from both traditions (e.g. Anscombe, Anthony Kenny, P.M.S. Hacker).
Now, when I said what I did in Scholastic Metaphysics about Wittgenstein, I had interpretation 3 in mind. And since that section of the book was not about Wittgenstein per sebut rather about defending Scholastic metaphysics against a certain kind of objection, those remarks sufficed for my purposes. But they certainly don’t represent the entirety of my views about Wittgenstein, and Goodill is correct that it would be quite wrong to claim that Wittgenstein has nothing to offer the Scholastic.
Finally, Goodill also writes:
Furthermore, although this is a work in metaphysics, some account of the relationship between metaphysics and logic in scholastic thought would both aid this dialogue and enable the reader to grasp something of the subtlety of the distinctions drawn by the scholastics.
Here too I agree with Goodill. I do briefly touch on such matters at the end of the book, where I discuss analogy, but much more could be said. Doing so, however, would require treatment of issues in philosophy of language and logic that would go far beyond the aims I had in mind in writing the book; indeed, it would require a book of its own.
There are several issues here to be disentangled. First there is the general question of the relationship between modern logic and the traditional logic presupposed by older Scholastic writers. Writers of an earlier generation such as Henry Veatch had something to say about this, but the subject really needs an up-to-date Aristotelian-Thomistic treatment that engages in depth with contemporary analytic philosophy. (David Oderberg has made a start in his anthology on logician Fred Sommers.)
Second, there is the gigantic topic of Aquinas’s position on the analogical use of language -- how properly to understand it (a matter of dispute among Thomists), the critiques by Scotists and others, and how all this relates to work in contemporary philosophy of language. Important work on these issues has been done by writers like Joshua Hochschild.
Third, there is the question of how specific Scholastic ideas and arguments in metaphysics reflect distinctive logico-linguistic assumptions. Gyula Klima has perhaps written more on this subject than any other contemporary philosopher.
What is really needed, though, is book-length work that ties all this together in a systematic way.