Pomponazzi, Smart, Hurley and Lara: four arguments about the limits of proof

The retelling that goes wrong has the book saying the soul dies with the body. That is not its conclusion. Pomponazzi argues at length that Aristotle's principles, honestly applied, make the intellect dependent on sense and imagination and so on the body; he follows Alexander of Aphrodisias here and dismisses Averroes's single shared intellect as "most false, unintelligible, monstrous, and quite foreign to Aristotle". But by chapter fifteen he calls immortality a problema neutrum, a neutral question, on the ground that no argument drawn from nature alone establishes either immortality or mortality. Faith decides, and he says so, closing the treatise and its successors with provisos that his conclusions hold only within philosophy and that the Church's determinations carry the greater authority.

This is where the label "double truth" gets attached to him, and it should not be. Pomponazzi nowhere asserts two contradictory truths, one philosophical and one theological. He asserts that one discipline cannot reach a conclusion the other holds on different grounds, which has a long medieval pedigree; Luca Bianchi places him squarely in that tradition of separating natural philosophy from theology. Scholars do disagree about him, but about sincerity rather than doctrine — whether the provisos were submission or prudence. On the evidence of a man who declined to retract under papal pressure and kept his chair for another seven years, prudence is not obviously the stronger reading.

Chapter fourteen dates least. Virtue needs no posthumous payment, Pomponazzi argues, because the essential reward of virtue is virtue itself, which brings security and peace of mind. That disposes of the practical reason most of his opponents cared about for insisting on immortality.

Smart's identity theory was a claim about this world, which is why it could be beaten#

Smart was born in Cambridge to Scottish parents. His father, William Marshall Smart, became Regius Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow and president of the Royal Astronomical Society; both younger brothers took chairs of their own, Alastair in art history at Nottingham and Ninian as a pioneer of religious studies in Britain. Smart served in the British Army from 1940 to 1945, largely in India and Burma, took his MA at Glasgow and his BPhil at Oxford under Gilbert Ryle, and in 1950 went to the Hughes chair at Adelaide. He stayed, took Australian citizenship in 1976 and died in Melbourne on 6 October 2012.

"Sensations and Brain Processes" appeared in the Philosophical Review in 1959 (vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 141–156), following U. T. Place's paper of 1956. Its argument comes not from neuroscience but from parsimony: if the physical account of the world is otherwise complete, sensations conceived as extra items, tied to brain states by further fundamental laws, would be what Herbert Feigl had called nomological danglers — lawlike leftovers hanging off physics. The sentence everybody quotes runs: "That everything should be explicable in terms of physics ... except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable." The obvious objection is that reports of after-images do not look like reports about brains. His reply was the topic-neutral analysis: a person who says he sees a yellowish-orange after-image is saying something like "There is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me" — a description that takes no side about what the something going on turns out to be.

What kind of claim this is bears directly on how machine minds are now discussed. Smart's thesis is a type identity: the kind pain is the kind such-and-such neural state, as a contingent empirical fact about this world, the way lightning is electrical discharge. It says nothing about all possible thinking things. Hilary Putnam's argument of 1967 exploited exactly that. Octopuses, birds and mammals all appear to feel pain, and their nervous systems are not of one physical-chemical kind; if pain is multiply realisable, it cannot be identical to any single neural type. Ned Block and Jerry Fodor pressed the point in 1972 and functionalism was the beneficiary: individuate mental states by their causes and effects rather than by their stuff, and the substrate stops mattering. Substrate-independent mind, the assumption behind most present argument about whether a machine could be conscious — including the case for substrate-flexible consciousness and much of what grew out of Chalmers's hard problem — came into philosophy through the door Putnam opened in Smart's wall. Saul Kripke, whose death this column marked yesterday, attacked the same thesis from modality and did further damage. Smart's identity theory lost because it was the sort of theory that could lose. That is a compliment.

He was also an act utilitarian of an unusually plain sort, dismissive of rule utilitarianism as superstitious rule worship. An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics (1961) was reprinted as his half of Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge, 1973), a hundred and fifty pages in which Bernard Williams's "A Critique of Utilitarianism" supplied the other half and the integrity objection that shaped every later quarrel about moral systems. Colleagues at the Australian National University remembered him for clarity and an unusual lack of pretension, which in a man who spent fifty years defending an unfashionable thesis counts for something. He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1990.

Hurley moved the boundary, and took the mind past the skin#

Susan Hurley read philosophy at Princeton (BA, 1976), took a BPhil at Oxford in 1979 and a DPhil in 1983 under John McDowell, then did what few philosophers do mid-career and took a Harvard law degree in 1988. All Souls lists her as the college's first woman Fellow. The year is less settled than the fact: the Princeton Alumni Weekly and Cherwell give 1981, Bristol's obituary says 1985 and calls her one of the first. She held the chair in politics and international studies at Warwick from 1994 and moved to a philosophy professorship at Bristol in 2006. She died of cancer on 16 August 2007, five weeks after hosting an international conference on perception, action and consciousness, and a month short of her fifty-third birthday.

Natural Reasons: Personality and Polity (Oxford, 1989) runs to 462 pages on practical reasoning and objective value. Consciousness in Action (Harvard, 1998) is the book that matters here. Its target is what she named the classical sandwich: perception as input from world to mind, action as output from mind to world, cognition as the filling between. The picture is built so deeply into the subject that it usually passes as a statement of the problem rather than a view anyone must defend. Hurley's case against it was empirical as much as conceptual. What a perceiver perceives depends on what the perceiver does, and on feedback loops running out through the body and the environment and back; the edges of the machinery are not the edges of the skull.

That puts her alongside Andy Clark and David Chalmers on the extended mind, and alongside the enactivists, though she arrived by a different route and with more attention to neuroscience than most. Her late work developed the shared circuits model, a layered account on which control, mirroring and simulation together underwrite imitation, deliberation and mindreading; it appeared in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–22) with peer commentary, after her death. She also did the applied work that follows from taking imitation seriously. "Imitation, Media Violence, and Freedom of Speech", in Philosophical Studies (vol. 117, no. 1, 2004, pp. 165–218), argues that if imitative tendencies run below conscious control, the free-speech defence of violent media loses the premise it leans on: that the viewer's autonomous choice stands between the image and the act. Boudewijn de Bruin replied in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice in 2008 that her case against the argument from autonomy fails, and that the data are too weak to license regulation. Daniel Dennett, quoted in Bristol's notice of her death, called her "an insider's insider — on both sides".

Lara's wager is that some moral facts are established by telling rather than proving#

María Pía Lara joined the philosophy department at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Iztapalapa in 1985 and ran it from 1990 to 1994; she was the first woman in her division named Distinguished Professor. Her books run from La democracia como proyecto de identidad ética (Anthropos, 1992) through Moral Textures (California, 1998) and the edited Rethinking Evil (California, 2001) to Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary (Northwestern, 2021).

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (Columbia, 2007) is the book that belongs in this company. Lara's claim is that evil is not a metaphysical kind awaiting correct definition, and that centuries of trying to define it have yielded less understanding than the narratives societies construct afterwards — trial testimony, memoir, historiography, film. Her apparatus is Kantian: reflective judgement, which moves from the particular case towards a concept it does not yet possess rather than filing the case under a rule already in hand, with the sensus communis that makes such judgements communicable and so public. Arendt is the bridge, having already turned Kant's third Critique to political use. In a 2008 article in Philosophy and Social Criticism Lara treats reflective judgement as world-disclosure, in Heidegger's sense, and concedes the awkward part of her own position: that cruelty has a dimension "which for its very nature cannot be expressed fully with words".

The obvious objection is that a public which narrates its way to a moral conclusion can narrate its way to a monstrous one, and that the twentieth century supplies the examples. Lara's answer is Kant's: reflective judgement carries a demand for the agreement of others, and is therefore answerable in a way private conviction is not. Whether the demand does enough work remains the live question in the secondary literature.

Four ways of saying that the argument stops here#

The sequence is real and should not be tidied. Pomponazzi is no sceptic about demonstration in general; he is precise about one demonstration and content to let faith take it from there. Smart does not answer his question so much as decline it, identifying the soul with something whose existence was never in dispute. Hurley's complaint was that the mind–body question had been asked about the wrong object, not that it was meaningless. Lara writes about evil rather than the soul, and her thesis about narrative would have persuaded none of the other three.

What they share is the assumption that when proof runs out the honest move is to say where it ran out and what takes over. Pomponazzi put the line at the edge of Aristotelian natural philosophy and named the successor: faith, held as faith. Smart put it at the edge of physics and denied there was anything on the far side. Hurley put it at the skull and denied that the edge was there. Lara puts it where a society tries to say what was done to it, and hands the work to judgement rather than definition. The Venetian Senate understood what it was dealing with. It burned a book whose author's offence was refusing to decide.

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.

Arthur O. Lovejoy