Philosophical Review

Beviev [unlilIed]
AulIov|s) SlepIen Menn
Souvce TIe FIiIosopIicaI Beviev, VoI. 115, No. 3 |JuI., 2006), pp. 391-395
FuIIisIed I BuIe Univevsil Fvess on IeIaIJ oJ FIiIosopIicaI Beviev
SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/20446913
Accessed 16/03/2010 1944
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Philosophical Review.
http://www.jstor.org
BOOK REVIEWS
Searle's account of external or desire-independent reasons revisits ter
rain first covered in his "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'."I We encounter
desire-independent-hence external-reasons when we commit ourselves,
freely and voluntarily, to pay for a beer by ordering it or commit ourselves to
the truth of an assertion by freely making it. There is obviously something to
this, but just as obviously more needs to be said to support the connection
Searle claims to find between these sorts of commitments and rationality. Liars
and those who make promises they don't intend to keep don't seem to be so
easily convicted of irrationality.
The book contains sensible chapters on weakness of will, why deductive
models of practical reasoning seem so unilluminating, and an extended but,
to this reader, utterly opaque defense of an "irreducible non-Humean self."
Searle is always engaging and often insightful. This book, however, suf
fers from an impatience with detailed argument that goes beyond what might
be expected in a work that was presented-as the Nicod Lectures are-to an
interdisciplinary audience.
John Robertson
Syracuse University
1. Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 43-58.
Philosophical Review, Vol. 115, No. 3, 2006
DOI 10.1215/00318108-2006-004
Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being.
Oxford: Clarendon, 2002. x + 212 pp.
Medieval metaphysicians, who devote much energy to discussing being, some
how fail to notice the distinctions that since Frege and Russell we find fundamen
tal, between the 'is'-es of existence, predication, identity, and class-inclusion.
Worse, much of the profundity they claim for the concept of being seems to
turn on not recognizing these logical distinctions: assuming existence (like
identity) is a first-order concept, they infer that it is a mysterious and profound
first-order concept, but the mystery would dissolve if existence were distin
guished from other senses of being and recognized as second-order. Medieval
philosophers too enjoy distinguishing senses of being and accusing each other
of ignoring crucial distinctions, but their distinctions stubbornly refuse to line
up with ours. Are they missing something basic? Or are we?
391
BOOK REVIEWS
Thomas Aquinas, who makes the concepts of existence and essence
central to his metaphysics, has especially become the focus of modern discus
sion. Etienne Gilson, in Being and Some Philosophers,' tried to show that Thomas
added a crucial insight into being that earlier philosophers had lacked and
that later philosophers too did not fully comprehend. Anthony Kenny is not
responding directly to Gilson but to Peter Geach's "analytic Thomism." Geach
understood what Frege had accomplished, and, in his article "Form and Exis
tence,'2 he tried to show that Frege had not made Thomas's insights irrele
vant and indeed that Thomas's notion of the "form" signified by a predicate
term and Frege's theory of concepts as functions are close enough to be
natural allies against "nominalist" or extensionalist accounts, on which the
subject- and predicate-terms are two names for the same object. Geach also
noted that Frege had been forced to admit, alongside the second-order con
cept of existence ("F exists" = "the concept F is instantiated"), a first-order
concept, "S exists"
= "S is present or actual" (the existence denied in Jacob's
lament 'Joseph is not"). Geach argued that Thomas drew a similar distinction
between two one-place senses of being: in one sense (which Thomas calls
"being as truth" and sees as answering the an sit question of Aristotle's Posterior
Analytics 2), "blindness exists" means "something is blind"; in another sense "S
exists" holds only if S has an essence, thus only if S is in one of the categories,
not an ens rationis like blindness. Geach identifies the first sense with Frege's
second-order concept of existence (symbolized by the quantifier) and the sec
ond with Frege's first-order concept, and says that, when Thomas asserts that
esse is something real (and distinct from essence), he means the second. Admit
tedly, when Thomas in De ente et essentia infers the essence-existence distinction
from our ability to know what a phoenix is without knowing whether phoe
nixes exist, he illegitimately treats the second-order concept of existence as if
it were first-order; but Geach treats this as an aberration of Thomas's earliest
writing. (Since Gilson it has been customary to blame Thomas's early depar
tures from later orthodoxy on the malign influence of Avicenna.)
Kenny shares Geach's and Gilson's suspicions of De ente, and there
fore, rather than giving a systematic treatment of Thomas on being, he goes
through each text in chronological order, extracting what each has to say
about being, concentrating on the De ente, Sentences commentary, Summa contra
gentiles, Summa theologiae, Metaphysics commentary, and various Disputed Ques
tions.3 Kenny thinks Thomas tried to solve the problems of De ente by isolating
1. Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Me
dieval Studies, 1949).
2. Reprinted in his God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)
and expanded in G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1961).
3. Kenny provides in footnotes the Latin original for each text he cites. At 100-101,
the discussion is vitiated by translating "essentia est secundum illud esse" as "the essence is
392
BOOK REVIEWS
a sense of being in which he could assert that creatures' esse is other than their
essence and that God is his own esse, indeed is esse ipsum subsistens, without the
nonsense that would result from taking esse in the second-order (quantifier)
sense; but, unlike Geach, he is unconvinced that Thomas has found such a
sense of esse. Kenny notes different distinctions in senses of being that Thomas
draws (under different argumentative pressures) in different works, but he
does not share Geach's belief that these fit into a system, and in his conclusion
he assembles a chaotic list of twelve different senses of "being" or "existence"
he has found in Thomas. In my view, the chaos is largely a by-product of Ken
ny's method of reading each work separately: Thomas is more systematic than
Kenny recognizes. However, the system is not Frege's. Kenny's basic mistake
is to follow Geach in trying to harmonize Thomas's distinctions in senses of
being with Frege's, and although Kenny is right that this often cannot work,
he is wrong to blame Thomas for it.
Thomas understands his distinctions among senses of being as an
interpretation of Aristotle's account of four senses of being in Metaphysics 5.7;
his interpretation largely follows Averroes (and indirectly Farabi), with one
crucial innovation. Aristotle may intend his "being as truth" purely as a two
place concept, signified by the copula, but Averroes and Thomas apply it also
to one-place uses, and Geach is right that their concept of one-place being-as
truth resembles Frege's concept of existence as symbolized by the quantifier
(their calling it a "second intention" roughly corresponds to Frege's calling it
second-order). But Geach and Kenny are wrong to assimilate Thomas's con
cept of being-as-divided-into-the-categories or "having an essence outside the
soul" to Frege's first-order concept of actual or present existence: Frege's con
cept is meant to exclude past and future existents (and timeless objects, like
numbers), Thomas's to exclude beings per accidens like white man and entia
rationis like blindness. For Averroes and Thomas, when we begin the inquiry
into F, we do not know the scientific definition expressing the real essence
of F, or even whether F has a real essence: we know only "the meaning of the
name." We then ask whether F is in the sense of truth, that is, whether the con
cept of F is instantiated; if so, we ask whether F is in the sense divided into the
categories, that is, whether it has a real essence (unlike entia per accidens or
privations), and, if so, we look for a definition expressing that essence. Geach
and Kenny intend "there are Fs" (the quantifier sense) to hold even if there
are only past or future Fs (thus the domain of our quantifiers includes past
and future objects, and the sense in which only present things are is a stronger
sense of being than that entailed by quantification); the distinction between
determined by the esse," when it means "the essence is on account of this esse," as some
thing mnight
be white on account of a whiteness. On p. 88, he says that the expressions
(taken from Avicenna) "possibile esse" and "necesse esse" mean "possible entity," "necessary
entity," with "esse" meaning "a thing or entity"; in fact "necesse esse" means "necessary in
regard to existence," "whose existence is necessary."
393
BOOK REVIEWS
these two senses of being is intended to allow us to truly assert "Joseph is not"
without reference-failure. Averroes and Thomas have a different aim: since
they believe, with Aristotle, that being is said nonunivocally of things in dif
ferent categories, they want to explain how we can ask an sit F before know
ing what F is, thus before knowing which sense of being-as-divided-into-the
categories applies to F, or whether F is a privation or ens per accidens and belongs
to no category. Thomas does distinguish a sense of esse as actual existence,
but this should not be identified with being-as-divided-into-the-categories
(being as having an essence), and it is not developed simply by contrast with
being as truth, but arises from a further complication.
Averroes argued that Avicenna, in distinguishing existence from
essence, had confused being-as-truth with being-as-divided-into-the-categories
and that, by distinguishing these two senses of "F exists," we can see that F
never exists through an existence really distinct from its essence (as F can
be white through a whiteness really distinct from its essence): the existence
asserted by "F exists" in the sense of truth is accidental to F (since it is not
contained in the concept of F that the concept is instantiated), but it is only a
second intention and thus an ens rationis, not something real. When we say "F
exists" in the sense of having an essence, we are predicating something real of
the thing F, but what we are predicating is F's own essence, not something dis
tinct from the essence. Thomas accepts this argument from Averroes, but he
wants to maintain an essence-existence distinction to show why God is neces
sarily existent and why angels and celestial movers, although immaterial and
sempiternal, are contingent on God's act of creation. But Thomas notes that
Metaphysics 5.7 distinguishes, alongside being as truth and being-as-divided
into-the-categories, being as actuality and as potentiality; and he argues that
if F is not God, the being it has through its essence is a mere potentiality for
existing that must receive actuality from something else, and that the esse sig
nified by "actually exists" is both real and distinct from the essence in things
other than God.
There are real problems making sense of this thesis about actual exis
tence, and Averroes's and Thomas's ways of interpreting the different senses
of being from Metaphysics 5.7, so that each covers both one-place and two
place cases, are certainly not how we carve up the senses of being, and thus
they need critical investigation. Kenny makes some good critical comments,
but his project of positive understanding is hampered when he follows Geach
in squeezing the three main senses of one-place esse into two, and when he
expresses surprise each time he finds Thomas associating an sit with the cop
ula. His Geachian insistence that a form must be (like a Fregean Begriff) the
significatum of an incomplete expression also leads him to indignant outbursts
whenever Thomas talks about an F-ness subsisting without a suppositum (Eucha
ristic accidents, angels as separate forms, God as esse ipsum subsistens): Kenny
assumes that such Platonism is a disease of language that any logically compe
394
BOOK REVIEWS
tent philosopher would avoid, rather than being, as both Aristotle and Thomas
think, an issue that must be considered on its merits for each predicate F.
Aquinas on Being has met a hostile reception both from neo-Thomists
and from "analytic Thomists." I too have had critical things to say. Nonethe
less, the book is very stimulating in working through each of Thomas's many
discussions of being and raising critical questions. Kenny shows that we can
not systematically harmonize Thomas either with himself across his whole
career or with Fregean conceptions of existence. Working through the texts
that Kenny indicates, with Kenny in hand, will be invaluable for anyone who
wants to do better at making sense of Thomas on being. Furthermore, many of
the book's faults are those Kenny has inherited either from the neo-Thomists
or from Geach. This includes the habit of blaming much of what one dislikes
in Thomas either on Avicenna or on the Platonists: this is an understandable
defense strategy for a committed Thomist, but an objective scholar should reex
amine Avicenna for himself rather than taking Gilson's word for it. Another
reviewer has said that "Kenny is unrivaled in his ability to place Aquinas within
the larger context of philosophy as a whole, having devoted himself to the
whole history of philosophy." This is false: although Kenny has worked on
Aristotle, Descartes, and Wittgenstein, Aquinas on Being contains no primary
source references to Muslim philosophers (there are reliable translations in
Latin and, increasingly, in modern languages). It is disturbing that this is still
acceptable in Thomas scholarship, and many detailed difficulties, as well as
the overall picture of how Thomas's senses of being are related, might have
been cleared up by first-hand acquaintance with Avicenna and Averroes.
Stephen Menn
McGill University and Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin
Philosophical Review, Vol. 115, No. 3, 2006
DOI 10.1215/00318108-2006-005
Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead:
Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. x + 430 pp.
Robert Brandom has for some time been promising to publish a book on
Hegel. When and if it finally appears, Brandom's Hegel book will be as good a
marker as any of the point where analytic philosophy finally turned full circle
to bite its own tail. Born of the fiercely anti-idealistic spirit of Moore and Rus
sell, the analytic tradition has in recent years flirted more and more openly
395