Tag: Descartes

Repraesentatio

Representation was not invented by Descartes, as Brandom tends to suggest. Concepts of representation had wide currency in the middle ages. The word used was literally repraesentatio. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice summary, which traces its philosophical use to the Latin translations of Avicenna.

John Duns Scotus (1266 -1308) wanted to rewrite Aristotle by insisting that there is a single meaning for “being” that underlies all the different meanings Aristotle had distinguished. The underlying minimal definition of being he proposed was precisely representability. Olivier Boulnois documents how Scotus believed he had invented a unified ontology that Aristotle thought was impossible, and did so on the basis of a doctrine of being as pure representability. Scotus thus appears as an arch-representationalist. Whatever else one may say about it, his notion of representation is clearly not the same as resemblance. Every medieval university had a Scotist on the faculty.

If memory serves, Aquinas had a doctrine of the possibility of perfect representation. Since it is perfect, this cannot be reducible to mere resemblance. Perfect representation is effectively equivalent to a kind of immediacy.

Some contemporary scholars also translate Greek Stoic phantasma as “representation”, based on the functional role it plays in the Stoic system. The Stoic theory in question dealt with sense perception, and was part physiological and part epistemological. It purported to provide a foundation for immediate certain knowledge of represented objects from their mental representations in perception. This sounds like representation before inference, and also like another variant of putatively perfect representation, which therefore would again not be reducible to resemblance, and would again be effectively equivalent to immediacy.

The Word “Rationalism”

Typical connotations of the word “rationalism” seem very unfortunate to me. Rationalism ought to mean something like just giving pride of place to reason (inference). Instead, it is usually taken to refer primarily to what I would regard as aberrant historical versions that carry unrelated and even antithetical baggage. I have in mind particularly Cartesianism and Wolffianism, both of which make dubious claims based on allegedly self-evident contentful truths.

At most, I think something called “rationalism” should recognize self-evidence only in a narrow formal domain, and I think even that is arguable. Otherwise, reason works from evidence, not self-evidence.

Although he did use the unfortunate phrase “evident from itself”, Spinoza was much more careful. He thought most of what the Cartesians and Wolffians claimed on the basis of self-evidence was not even true. Leibniz was a great explorer, and proposed not one but quite a few differently detailed systems at different times. (See also Enlightenment.)