Singleness

Michal Glowala

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110463019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy

The book is a systematic study of the issue of self-individuation in the scholastic debate on principles of individuation ( principia individuationis ).

The point of departure is a general formulation of the problem of individuation acceptable for all the participants of the scholastic debate: a principle of individuation of x is what makes x individual (in various possible senses of 'making something individual'). The book argues against a prima facie plausible view that everything that is individual is individual by itself and not by anything distinct from it ( Strong Self-Individuation Thesis ). The keynote topic of the book is a detailed analysis of the two competing ways of rejecting the Strong Self-Individuation Thesis: the Scotistic and the Thomistic one. The book defends the latter one, discussing a number of issues concerning substantial and accidental forms, essences, properties, instantiation, the Thomistic notion of materia signata, Frege's Begriff-Gegenstand distinction, and Geach's form-function analogy developed in his writings on Aquinas.

In the context of both the scholastic and contemporary metaphysics, the book offers a framework for dealing with issues of individuality and defends a Thomistic theory of individuation.

1Introduction

The topic of this study is the scholastic debate on principles of individuation (principia individuationis); more precisely, I focus on various ways in which self-individuation, being individual of itself, is accepted and rejected within the main standpoints of the debate. This, I hope, will be a sort of unifying perspective that will help to see the core of the problem and various relationships between its solutions, and finally to evaluate particular theories of individuation. On the other hand, it seems that self-individuation (of various sorts) has not received the sort of attention it deserves in the contemporary literature. So the aim of this book is, on the one hand, a presentation of one of the most important strands in the scholastic debate that, as I hope to show, sheds much light on problems of individuation and their solutions; on the other hand, my aim is to sketch and advocate a Thomistic theory of individuation in this light.

Since ‘principle of individuation’ is used in various ways, it is necessary to sketch preliminarily the way it is, as I claim, used to identify the object of the scholastic debate by its participants (the details of this sketch will be discussed in due course). Suppose there are five houses in a street. Now one may ask what makes a given building a house; the answer is roughly clear: it is the way the building is arranged as a place to live in. But one may also ask what makes it a single house (in the sense relevant for counting and identifying what counts as a single house). This question is much more difficult than the former one. It is not even clear whether the answer should be different than in the former case: after all, does not anything that makes it a house make it a single house? In a way to be a house is to be a single house. At any rate, we usually know what counts as a single house, a single roof tile, a single tree, a single leaf and stalk, a single man, a single action, a single hour of life, a single breath, a single rosary bead, a single bell or a single bell stroke. Being single (being something that counts as a single F) is an important feature ascribed to things, so the question about the basis of this feature is an important one. It is just the question of a principle of individuation (of houses, roof tiles, men or their deeds) in the sense that I am interested in here. A principle of individuation is a principle of being single (in the sense of being something that counts as a single F), something in a thing in virtue of what it is a single thing. So what I am interested in here is not the epistemic sense of ‘a principle of individuation’ – the way in which we individuate or single out something, but instead the metaphysical sense of ‘a principle of individuation’. I neither presume here that there is a single sort of principle of individuation in all the cases (for example, in the case of roof tiles and human actions), nor even that in a single case there is only one thing that may rightly be called the principle of individuation.

The scholastic debate on principles of individuation, conducted during some centuries by many generations of the best thinkers, sheds much light on a number of metaphysical issues invoked more or less directly by the question of principles of individuation; and all of these issues are important ones. It also sheds much light on a number of important and well known standpoints concerning unity and plurality, identity and distinction, number, parts and wholes, extension, and universals. It is just this debate that I am trying to present here in a systematic manner.

In my preliminary remarks I will proceed in the following way: first I offer a general formulation of the question of a principle of individuation (1.1); then I sketch the very concept of an individual (individual) and the background of some related concepts (1.2) and give main reasons for the importance of the issue of individuation (1.3). Then, from a historical point of view, I show the main stages of the scholastic debate on principles of individuation (1.4). Finally, I sketch the way in which the debate is presented here (1.5). These preliminaries are restricted to the minimum that is necessary to grasp the subject of the debate. Various important issues obviously involved in the preliminaries are postponed and discussed in the course of the book.

1.1The Problem of Principles of Individuation

To keep trace of an argument exchange or to get involved in it one has to know at least roughly what the subject of the debate is, and what is uncontroversial about that subject. The scholastic individuation debate poses serious problems here, for the very concept of principium individuationis coming from the jargon of philosophy may provoke some misunderstandings, and there is a muddle of issues (metaphysical, logical, and epistemic) in contemporary philosophy that are brought together under the heading of “principles of individuation”. Moreover, what I am interested in here, is not just a precise formulation of some problem, but a formulation that was in fact accepted by participants of the scholastic debate.1 This is necessary if we are to learn something from the very exchange of arguments in the scholastic debate on individuation.

One of the sources of misunderstandings seems to be the very grammatical form of ‘individuation’ (‘individuatio’) which might suggest that individuation is a sort of procedure, an operation or a process; so, for example, Jorge J.E. Gracia claims that individuation (at least taken in some important sense) is a process of becoming individual.2 This view, however, at least in its general form, seems unjustified. Admittedly, ‘individuatio’ is a noun derived from a verb, but ‘relatio’ (relation), ‘negatio’ (negation) or ‘oppositio’ (opposition) are also derived from verbs and it would be at the very least strange to suggest that relation or negation are (in general or in some central or particularly important meaning) processes;3 it is similarly strange, I think, in the case of individuation. It seems rather that the Latin verb ‘individuari’ means precisely ‘to be (an) individual’, ‘individuum esse’ (they are obviously used interchangeably in most contexts).4 So individuatio is just being (an) individual – or, in other words, individuality;5 similarly: relation (relatio) is just being related (referri) to something, opposition (oppositio) is being opposed (opponi) to something, and motion (motio) is just being moved.

The verb ‘individuari’ in scholastic texts is regularly accompanied by ‘per aliquid’ or ‘aliquo’ – ‘by something’ or ‘in virtue of something’ (and ‘individuari per aliquid’ is clearly used interchangeably with ‘esse individuum per aliquid’). In a similar way you can ask, for example, per quid or quo – by what or in virtue of what – something is a house, is white or is good, and that is the question about something inhering in an entity in virtue of which the entity is a house, is white or is good6. In a similar sense the soul is that in virtue of what we live – quo vivimus: something inhering in a human being that makes him a living human being7. To be sure, there are many various ways in which such ‘quo’ is used, and various senses of, say, ‘that in virtue of which the chalk is white’; some of them may well seem unclear and stand in need of further inquiry. At any rate, however, all of them are closely related to the concept of a principle (principium) in one of its important senses: something in virtue of what a thing is white is its principle of being white. Similarly something in virtue of what a thing is (an) individual (id quo individuatur) is its principle of being (an) individual, that is, its principle of individuation or just its principle of individuality (principium individuationis).8

In some cases, however, we would say that a true answer to the question ‘in virtue of what is something F?’ does not yet reveal a principle of being F. We should say so, for example, if someone claimed that something is indivisible in virtue of its indivisibility; or that it is the shininess of a piece of steel that makes it shiny. We could also say so when someone claimed that a thing is (an) individual in virtue of its individuality. Such answers are unsatisfactory – they do not yet reveal a principle in question – for at least two reasons. The first is that (as Scotus points out in the case of indivisibility), we should ask at once in virtue of what does the thing enjoy indivisibility.9 The other is that such answers do not tell us whether something is F and i G in virtue of the same thing or in virtue of two distinct things; for example, in the case of shininess we would like to know whether it is one and the same thing that makes a white shiny thing both white and shiny; or we would like to know whether it is the same thing that makes a given person both patient and resolute. It is clear, for example, that it is one and the same thing that makes a uniformly red shiny apple both red and colourful; but it is far from being trivial whether the same thing makes it also shiny. Settling such questions concerning the identity of principles seems to be one of the fundamental procedures connected with the concept of principle I have sketched.10

The complex of identity statements concerning that which makes various things fall under various predicates (and especially the complex of arguments for these identity statements) constitutes a framework of principles we are able to look for. The question about principles of individuation presupposes such a framework in the background; for the scholastic dispute over individuation such a background is provided by, roughly speaking, Aristotelian metaphysics with its key concepts of substance and accident, form and matter, actuality and potentiality. So the issue of individuation is also the issue of relation between principles of individuation and other principles responsible for other features of things, especially features such as unity, persistence, distinction from other things, extension in space, various forms of activity and passivity, and so on. There are various connections between individuality and, say, unity or persistence, so it seems that there is a close relationship between their principles; it may even seem that the principle of all of them is one and the same.

So that is a general formulation of the question of a principle of individuation that I think can be ascribed to all the authors engaged in the scholastic debate over principles of individuation. The Thomists, Scotists and nominalists do differ fundamentally from one another in their views on unity, plurality, number, universals and related issues; henceforth they differ fundamentally from one another in their theories of principles of individuation. The question they ask, however, is the same: what in a thing makes it (an) individual. So my claim is that the whole scholastic debate on principles of individuation focuses on various ways in which individuality belongs to various sorts of entities.

In this general formulation of the question I leave it open what individuality can be truly ascribed to; at any rate, it is one of the most important topics of this book. Some contemporary formulations of the problem presuppose that individuality is ascribed only to individuals (for example, King says (2000, 162) that the problem of individuation is “what makes a given individual an individual”, and Lowe (2005, 75) claims that “what ‘individuates’ an object […] is whatever it is that makes it the single object that it is”; in both cases individuality is ascribed to individuals; one of my main points here, however, is that individuality can be ascribed not only to individuals (see in particular 3.4, 5.2.1 and 5.2.4).

Moreover, the general formulation does not imply the uniqueness of the principle of individuation in a given case; it does not rule out the possibility that there are some distinct things that all make something (an) individual, each of them in some specific way, or that each of them is responsible for some distinct aspect of individuality, so that they all may be rightly called principles of individuation.11 Therefore I prefer to speak about a principle of individuation rather than the principle of individuation. Moreover, the general formulation does not imply that there is one general answer to the question about principles of individuation, holding for all sorts of entities whatsoever. Some participants of the discussion (like Scotus, Ockham, Suárez or Leibniz) do claim that such a general answer revealing uniforme principium individuationis is possible and desirable. Some other, mainly Thomists, claim that there is no general answer to such a question, but various answers for various domains of reality. There are, in particular, three kinds of being for which they thought one should expect fundamentally different answers: material substances like human beings, animals or plants; properties of mat...