Henri Bergson in an attempt to confront the mechanistic and deterministic philosophies of his day, philosophies often presented by their advocates as the rational foundation of modern science, developed a metaphysics of being critical of both Hegel and the empiricists. One of his most promising disciples was the young Jacques Maritain who had turned to Bergson then lecturing at the Collège de France because of a similar discontent with the prevailing intellectual milieu. Maritain, although initially attracted to the philosophy of Bergson, soon became critical of his mentor because in his judgment Bergsons metaphysics remained linked to and dependent upon the science of phenomena it hoped to replace. Never achieving metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense of the term,(1) it remained in Maritains judgment a process philosophy, not a philosophy of being. Maritains subsequent reading of Aristotle led him under the influence of Ernest Psichari to Thomas Aquinas. He was to say later that he was already a Thomist before he read a word of St. Thomas. Maritain was not alone in the search for a way out of the prevailing philosophical climate. In reaction to German idealism, which itself was framed as a reaction to Kants Critiques, new and critical realisms were beginning to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. Hegel, initially embraced as an antidote to empiricism, was abandoned when it became clear that Hegelians were hard pressed to account for the march of new scientific techniques which were leading to remarkable discoveries in the natural sciences. Above all, Maritain was confronted with August Comtes positivism. Schooled in the British empiricism of the day, Comte not only ruled out metaphysics but ruled out theoretical physics as well and both for the same reason, a denial of the efficacy of causal reasoning. According to Comte, physics errs as does metaphysics when it postulates abstract entities as explanatory causes. The success of 19th and 20th century theoretical physics had yet to undermine positivism as a philosophy of science. Quite apart from its speculative implication, Comte recognized the social implications of the empiricism emanating from the British Isles, implications which led directly to a secular humanism which he codified in his religion of humanity. Generally accorded the title, Father of Positivism, Comte is also regarded as one of the progenitors of sociology. Although Comtes interests led him away from the philosophy of science per se and into the field of sociology, the term he coined came to be used in the wider sense of a philosophy of knowledge which limited knowledge to sensory experience. Hence Maritains attempt to counter the brutal empiricism and nominalist pseudo-rationalism by showing that knowledge is not limited to the descriptive sciences, that ancient truths about nature, human nature and cognitive ability remained viable and, indeed, vital to humanity. Maritain is later to press the point in a work published under the title, Ransoming the Time.(2) Reflections on the nature and capacity of human knowledge date to the pre-Socratics. Platos discussion of science and the claims to knowledge by the Greeks, as Maritain recognized, will forever remain a starting point for the philosophy of science. It was Plato who bequeathed to Western philosophy the insight that all science is of the universal. Aristotle concurred, but he found the universal not in some realm of archetypes but in the nature common to members of the species. Aristotle taught that by a process of abstraction we come to know the essence, quiddity, or nature of a thing, prescinding from its accidental features which it may or may not have while remaining the thing that it is. Such is the object of science, the nature of an entity, the structure of a process, its properties and potentialities. Yet to have scientific knowledge is not simply to know what is, not simply to have uncovered a law of nature. For Aristotle to have scientific knowledge is to know the entity, process, or property in the light of its cause or causes. Presupposed by Aristotle are two principles, the principle of causality and the principle of substance, both principles rejected by the British empiricists. The positivism which Maritain confronted denies at once the intelligibility of nature and the power of intellect to grasp the more that is given in the sense report. Maritain offers an elaborate defense of the first principles of thought and being in his Existence and the Existent, affirming that there is more in the sense report than the senses themselves are formally able to appreciate.(3) John Locke, in denying the reality of substance, reduces what we call substances to a constellations of events or sense reports. According to Locke, we use terms which imply substances, but this usage is merely a shorthand way of pointing to something without repeating at length the properties we associate with that something or constellation. Ockham revisited.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 23:29:35 +0000
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