Hylomorphic Animalism, Emergentism, and the Challenge of the New Mechanist Philosophy of Neuroscience
Keywords
Hylomorphism, Animalism, New Mechanist Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology, Philosophical Anthropology, Aristotelianism, Thomas Aquinas, EmergentismAbstract
This article, the first of a two-part essay, presents an account of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism that engages with recent work on neuroscience and philosophy of mind. I show that Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is compatible with the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology, but that it is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. I begin with the basic claims of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism and focus on its understanding of psychological powers embodied in the nervous system. Next, I introduce the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology and illustrate how it can enrich the more abstract ontological framework of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism. In the third section of this article I establish in detail the many ways Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. Based on these fundamental differences I show why a criticism leveled against emergentism by the new mechanist philosophy does not hamper my proposed rapprochement between hylomorphism and the new mechanist philosophy. This conclusion, however, leaves untouched the problem I address in the second article, namely, is the new mechanist philosophy compatible with Aristotelian philosophical anthropology’s contention that intellectual operations are immaterial and interact with the psychosomatic operations of the rational animal?
References
Primary Sources
Aristotle. 1984. De anima. Translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle,
edited by Jonathan Barnes. Vol. 1, 641–92. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Aquinas, Thomas. Sentencia libri De anima. ed. R.-A. Gauthier, Leonine, vol. 45/1.
Rome, 1984.
Aquinas, Thomas. 1949. Quaestiones disputatae de potentia. ed P.M. Pession. In S. Thomae
Aquinatis Quaestiones disputatae. 8th ed. Vol. 2. Turin: Marietti.
Aquinas, Thomas. 1961. Liber de veritate catholicae Fidei contra errores infidelium seu
Summa contra Gentiles, t. 2-3. eds. P. Marc, C. Pera, P. Caramello. Rome: Marietti.
Aquinas, Thomas. 1962. Summa theologiae. Rome: Editiones Paulinae.
Secondary Sources
Anderson, Michael L. 2014. After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. MIT Press.
Armstrong, David M., and Norman Malcolm. 1984. Consciousness and Causality: A Debate on the Nature of Mind. Blackwell.
Bechtel, William. 2007. Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience. Psychology Press.
Bechtel, William. 2009. “Constructing a Philosophy of Science of Cognitive Science.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1 (3): 548–69.
Bechtel, William, and Adele Abrahamsen. 2005. “Explanation: A Mechanist Alternative.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2): 421–41.
Bechtel, William, and Robert C. Richardson. 2010. Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research. MIT Press.
Bedau, Mark A., and Paul Humphreys. 2008. Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science. MIT press.
Bennett, M. R., and P. M. S. Hacker. 2003. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Vol. 79. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Bennett, M. R., and P. M. S. Hacker. 2012. History of Cognitive Neuroscience. John Wiley & Sons.
Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel N. Robinson. 2007. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. Columbia University Press.
Bermudez, Jose Luis. 2003. Thinking Without Words. Vol. 11. Oxford University Press.
Braine, David. 1992. The Human Person: Animal and Spirit. University of Notre Dame Press.
Brower, Jeffrey E. 2014. Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects. Oxford University Press.
Butterfill, Stephen A., and Ian A. Apperly. 2013. “How to Construct a Minimal Theory of Mind.” Mind and Language 28 (5): 606–637.
Chemero, Anthony. 2011. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Bradford.
Churchland, Paul, and John Haldane. 1988. “Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behaviour.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 62 (1): 209–54.
Clayton, Philip, and P. C. W. Davies. 2006. The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis From Science to Religion. Oxford University Press.
Craver, Carl F. 2007. Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
Craver, Carl F., and William Bechtel. 2007. “Top-down Causation without Top-down Causes.” Biology and Philosophy 22 (4): 547–63.
Craver, Carl F., and Lindley Darden. 2013. In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences. University of Chicago Press.
Craver, Carl, and James Tabery. 2016. “Mechanisms in Science.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/science-mechanisms/.
De Haan, Daniel D. Forthcoming. “Dator Formarum, Emergentism, or Educed Substantial Forms? Hylomorphic Mixts and Elemental Virtual Presence.”
De Haan, Daniel D. 2014a. “Moral Perception and the Function of the Vis Cogitativa in Thomas Aquinas’s Doctrine of Antecedent and Consequent Passions.” Documenti E Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 25: 289–330.
De Haan, Daniel D. 2014b. “Perception and the Vis Cogitativa: A Thomistic Analysis of Aspectual, Actional, and Affectional Percepts.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 88 (3): 397–437.
De Haan, Daniel D. 2017. “Hylomorphism and the New Mechanist Philosophy in Biology, Neuroscience, and Psychology.” In Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, edited by William M. R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons, and Nicholas J. Teh. Routledge.
De Haan, Daniel D., and Geoffrey A. Meadows. 2013. “Aristotle and the Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 87: 213–230.
Decaen, Christopher. 2000. “Elemental Virtual Presence in St. Thomas.” The Thomist 64 (2): 271–300.
Feser, Edward. 2014. Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Editions Scholasticae.
Glennan, Stuart. 2009. “Mechanisms.” In The Oxford Handbook of Causation, edited by Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Menzies, 315–25. OUP.
Glennan, Stuart. 2016. “Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, edited by Paul Humphreys, 796–816. OUP.
Hacker, P. M. S. 2008. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Wiley-Blackwell.
Hornsby, Jennifer. 2000. “Personal and Sub-Personal: A Defence of Dennett’s Early Distinction.” Philosophical Explorations 3 (1): 6–24.
Humphreys, Paul. 2016. Emergence. Oxford University Press.
Hutto, Daniel D. 2012. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Bradford.
Hutto, Daniel D., and Erik Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. MIT Press.
Hutto, Daniel D., and Erik Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. MIT Press.
Hyman, John. 2015. Action, Knowledge, and Will. Oxford University Press.
Jaworski, William. 2011. Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.
Jaworski, William. 2016. Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind: How Hylomorphism Solves the Mind-Body Problem. Oxford University Press.
Kenny, Anthony. 1971. “The Homunculus Fallacy.” In Interpretations of Life and Mind, edited by Marjorie Glicksman Grene and Ilya Prigogine, 155–165. New York: Humanities Press.
Kenny, Anthony. 2009. “Cognitive Scientism.” In Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P. M. S. Hacker, edited by Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman, 250–62. OUP.
Koons, Robert. Forthcoming. “Against Emergent Individualism.” In Blackwell Companion to Dualism, edited by Jonathan Loose, Angus Menuge, and J. P. Moreland. Wiley-Blackwell.
Koons, Robert. 2014. “Staunch vs. Faint-Hearted Hylomorphism.” Res Philosophica 91 (2): 151–77.
LaRock, Eric. 2013. “Aristotle and Agent-Directed Neuroplasticity.” International Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4): 385–408.
Lonergan, Bernard. 1992. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. University of Toronto Press.
Machamer, Peter K., Lindley Darden, and Carl F. Craver. 2000. “Thinking about Mechanisms.” Philosophy of Science 67 (1): 1–25.
Maley, Cory, and Gualtiero Piccinini. 2017. “A Unified Mechanistic Account of Teleological Functions for Psychology and Neuroscience.” In Explanation and Integration in Mind and Brain Science, edited by David Kaplan. OUP.
McDowell, John. 1994. “The Content of Perceptual Experience.” The Philosophical Quarterly 44 (175): 190–205.
McLaughlin, Brian P. 1992. “The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism.” In Emergence or Reduction?: Prospects for Nonreductive Physicalism, edited by Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim. De Gruyter.
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. MIT press.
O’Connor, Timothy, and John Churchill. 2009. “Nonreductive Physicalism or Emergent Dualism : The Argument from Mental Causation.” In The Waning of Materialism: New Essays, edited by Robert C. Koons and George Bealer. Oxford University Press.
O’Connor, Timothy, and Hong Yu Wong. 2015. “Emergent Properties.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2015. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/properties-emergent/.
Oderberg, David S. 2007. Real Essentialism. Routledge.
Oderberg, David S. 2017. “The Great Unifier: Form and the Unity of the Organism.” In Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, edited by William M. R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons, and Nicholas J. Teh. Routledge.
Olson, Eric T. Forthcoming. “For Animalism.” In The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, edited by Jonathan Loose, Angus Menuge, and J. P. Moreland. Wiley-Blackwell.
Piccinini, Gualtiero, and Carl Craver. 2011. “Integrating Psychology and Neuroscience: Functional Analyses as Mechanism Sketches.” Synthese 183 (3): 283–311.
Ramsey, William M. 2007. Representation Reconsidered. Cambridge University Press.
Rickabaugh, Brandon. Forthcoming. “Against Emergent Dualism.” In The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, edited by Jonathan Loose, Angus Menuge, and J. P. Moreland. Wiley-Blackwell.
Ryle, Gilbert. 2009. The Concept of Mind: 60th Anniversary Edition. Routledge.
Sellars, Wilfrid S. 1963. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Science, Perception and Reality, 127–96. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Smit, Harry, and Peter M. S. Hacker. 2014. “Seven Misconceptions About the Mereological Fallacy: A Compilation for the Perplexed.” Erkenntnis 79 (5): 1077–1097.
Stock, Michael. 1958. “Sense Consciousness According to St. Thomas.” The Thomist 21 (n/a): 415–86.
Stump, Eleonore. 2012. “Emergence, Causal Powers, and Aristotelianism in Metaphysics.” In Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, edited by Ruth Groff and John Greco, 48–68. Routledge.
Thornton, Allison Krile. 2016. “Varieties of Animalism.” Philosophy Compass 11 (9): 515–26.
Toner, Patrick. 2011. “Hylemorphic Animalism.” Philosophical Studies 155 (1): 65–81.
Wallace, William A. 1996. The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis. CUA Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2010. Philosophical Investigations. John Wiley & Sons.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
CC BY ND 4.0. The Creator/Contributor is the Licensor, who grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work on the fields indicated in the License Agreement.
- The Licensor grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work/related rights item specified in § 1 within the following fields: a) recording of Work/related rights item; b) reproduction (multiplication) of Work/related rights item in print and digital technology (e-book, audiobook); c) placing the copies of the multiplied Work/related rights item on the market; d) entering the Work/related rights item to computer memory; e) distribution of the work in electronic version in the open access form on the basis of Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 3.0) via the digital platform of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Press and file repository of the Nicolaus Copernicus University.
- Usage of the recorded Work by the Licensee within the above fields is not restricted by time, numbers or territory.
- The Licensor grants the license for the Work/related rights item to the Licensee free of charge and for an unspecified period of time.
FULL TEXT License Agreement
Stats
Number of views and downloads: 949
Number of citations: 3
