Again from the top, still thinking about what makes a human being, it seems to me there are two main layers, each relatively autonomous and constituted on its own terms, but each also having a different sort of dependency on the other. I want to say that our emotional character — acquired, accumulated, and modified over time — is what defines us as common-sense individuals with personal identity. I also want to say that the values we live by constitute an ethical character that is very different from common-sense personal identity. Emotional character gives us an empirical “me”. Ethical character gives us a rational or ecstatic “I that is a We”.
Aristotelian Subjectivity
If we want to find an analogue in Aristotle for the notion of (transcendental) subjectivity developed by Kant and Hegel, the best place to look is in the concept of ethos, rather than in something like soul or intellect, which for Aristotle have more specialized roles. Then, going in the other direction, this Aristotelian point of view centered on ethos helps to clarify and consolidate many of the points Brandom has wanted to make about the mainly normative or ethical import of subjectivity in Kant and Hegel.
Philosophical interest in subjectivity applies especially to the transcendental kind. Traditionally, this has been situated between what was called metaphysics and something like the “rational psychology” classically criticized by Kant. With inspiration from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom, I’ve been proposing that the constitution of transcendental subjectivity is instead ethical at root. This seems much more helpful than the traditional version for addressing the human condition and questions of who and what we are. The values we actually live by are far more important for this than claims about the existence of some abstract entity like a personal Subject. Meanwhile, personal identity is better left outside the transcendental sphere, and located instead in our concrete emotional constitution. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Two Kinds of Character; Substance Also Subject.)
Dialectic, Semantics
Aristotle’s potent combination of dialectic with semantics starting from common experience guides his interpretations of things throughout his work. (Metaphysics applies this general approach especially to higher-order cases.) His core concepts are mainly either tools for this — like form, matter or circumstance, ends, means, actuality, potentiality, hylomorphism, difference, univocity and equivocity, and substance — or they are the results of applying such an approach in particular contexts. (See also Material Inference; Practical Judgment.)
Ethics vs Metaphysics
On my reading, the original “metaphysics” (Aristotle’s) was developed mainly as a kind of dialectical semantics. It is fundamentally about higher-order interpretation of contents we have already encountered, not about exotic existence claims. In the later tradition, however, this became greatly confused, and “metaphysics” acquired a completely different meaning.
Although Aristotle regarded ethics as of pivotal importance and recognized that all reasoning has a normative aspect, he seems to have valued theoretical reason even more than practical reason. It is to Kant that we owe the refinement of a clearly expressed thought of the primacy of practical reason. This perspective was taken up by Hegel, and later by Brandom. Things like Hegelian Spirit are mainly ethical concepts.
In the spirit of both of these, I have been developing a philosophical account of subjectivity grounded in ethics, rather than metaphysics in the usual modern sense. From this perspective, metaphysics as dialectical semantics is subsumed under ethics and meta-ethics. (See also Ethos; Aristotelian Dialectic; Aristotelian Semantics; Material Inference; Metaphysical, Nonmetaphysical.)
Ethos
Our ethical development, or what Aristotle would call our ethos — our piece of Hegelian Spirit, as it were — builds on our emotional development. A relatively harmonious emotional constitution will be naturally open to the influence of ethical development grounded in mutual recognition.
It seems to me that this is already enough for a fully rich account of a human being. If we have ethos, then things like will, ego, intellectual soul, and mind-as-container seem superfluous.
Self-Consciousness vs Identity
In the development being pursued here, reason, self-consciousness, agency, and responsibility all end up being trans-individual and social things. My emotions are basically mine, but my thoughts, commitments, and actions and their consequences involve more than just me. At the same time, though, as I put it once before, these things that involve more than just me actually say more about who “I” am than my inner state says about “me”. Who we are as ethical beings involves much more than personal identity and what is strictly ours. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Apperception, Identity; Expansive Agency; The Ambiguity of “Self”; Essentially Self-Conscious?; Ego.)
Apperception, Identity
If personal identity is mainly emotional, while reason is at root trans-individual, it should make perfect sense that a Kantian unity of apperception or rational “I” would be quite different from a personal identity. In my view, there is no such thing as rational personal identity. There is emotional personal identity, there is rational coherence of thoughts, and there are various ways in which these may be interwoven. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Soul, Self; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet; Ego; What Is “I”; Psyche, Subjectivity; Individuation; Mind Without Mentalism; Subject.)
Soul, Self
At the risk of some repetition, and putting it very simply this time, my own view is that common-sense personal identity is centered in the emotions, and in what Brandom would call our sentience, and Aristotle and Averroes would have called our soul. Reason, on the other hand, while it does in one aspect get secondarily folded back into the individuality of our Aristotelian soul, is at root trans-individual and social. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Parts of the Soul; What Is “I”; Psyche, Subjectivity; Individuation; Subject; Mind Without Mentalism; Ego.)
Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul
In the 13th century, Christian theologians worried in varying degrees about the way “the” Commentator, Averroes, tended to separate intellect from the individual human soul (see digression on this aspect of Averroes in What Is “I”?) — enough so that the reception of Aristotle into the Latin world was for a time threatened. Aquinas wrote a famous little treatise in 1270 On the Unity of the Intellect, mustering as many arguments as possible for a reading of Aristotle that avoided this separation, and gave each soul its own individual intellect. Due to the minimalist nature of Aristotle’s own account, the argument has continued to the present day. Both sides of the dispute have some textual basis on their side. Supported by Augustinian orthodoxy and the writings of Avicenna, the theologians generally argued for a strongly unified intellectual soul. Part of their concern seems to have been a clearly nonphilosophical one, having to do with moral justification of the possible eternal damnation of a human. More purely philosophical readers of Aristotle tended to be less worried about these matters.
The French Thomist scholar E. H. Wéber wrote a couple of fascinating books, L’Homme en Discussion a l’Université de Paris en 1270 (1970) and La Personne Humaine au XIIIe Siècle (1991), about the way Aquinas in this context also, rather unexpectedly, drew on the early Christian neoplatonic writings attributed to a fictitious Greek disciple of the apostle Paul called Dionysius the Areopagite.
Both Albert the Great and Aquinas made considerable use of pseudo-Dionysius in their theology. A bit like Augustine in this regard, pseudo-Dionysius had a strong neoplatonic notion of divine illumination in the soul. As with intellect in Averroes, this also comes from outside, but unlike anything in Averroes, it involves a direct relation between God and the soul. Wéber argued that this played a larger role in the thought of Aquinas than has been generally recognized, and it does seem to me that when Aquinas talks about the natural light of reason, it has something of the character of a divine illumination, quite different from the mainly linguistic, social, and ethical view of reason I find in Aristotle. This view of reason as divine illumination in the soul did not require any “separate” intellect, leaving Aquinas free to argue that both the active and the potential intellect were strictly parts of the individual soul.
Wéber recounts that Aquinas (like Albert) was initially only moderately concerned about the views of Averroes on the soul, but later took a stronger position, harshly condemning this aspect of Averroes’ thought. Politically speaking, it seems that Aristotle had to be separated from Averroes on this matter, in order to make Aristotle safe for Christianity at the time. Matters of theological diplomacy were an important practical part of the unity of truth in Aquinas. Whatever we think of this particular development, we should be grateful to Aquinas for his role in historically securing Latin acceptance of Aristotle. (See also Archaeology of the Subject; Intelligence from Outside; Parts of the Soul; God and the Soul; Fortunes of Aristotle; Errors of the Philosophers; Subject; Mind Without Mentalism. )
Medieval Math
I have previously argued that Aristotle’s relative lack of engagement with mathematics was based not on any deep-seated antipathy, but rather on an accurate practical assessment of how little the mathematics available in his lifetime had to offer for explaining why things happen as they do in the world of becoming. In the middle ages, some scholastics began to develop aspects of a mathematical physics.
At Merton College, Oxford, in the 14th century there was a group of scholars who came to be known as the “Calculators”, including Thomas Bradwardine 1300 – 1349), William Heytesbury (1313 – 1373), Richard Swineshead (mid-14th century) and John Dumbleton (1310 – 1349). Building in part on the earlier work of Walter Burley, they discussed applications of mathematics to various physical problems. Bradwardine’s mathematical work was also taken up by John Buridan’s student Nicolas of Oresme (1320 – 1382), and by the unorthodox Italian scholastic Biagio da Parma.
The major work in optics by the Iraqi Ibn al-Haytham or Alhazen (965 – 1040) was also taken up by several Europeans, including Roger Bacon and Biagio da Parma. This laid the ground for the theory of perspective used in Renaissance painting.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 