In Aristotelian physics, natural objects are characterized by their teleology, i.e. their tending toward certain ends. According to St. Thomas, what makes an event a voluntary action is that the subject of the event has knowledge of the end toward which the action is directed.
Post-Galileo, physics is not about teleology in this way. Instead, physics is about laws, rules according to which events unfold. Accordingly, many early modern philosophers hold that a voluntary action is an event which unfolds according to a rule which has been adopted by the subject of the event. The clearest statement of this idea I know of is at the beginning of section 3 of Kant’s Groundwork, but I think it can be found as well in Samuel Clarke and Thomas Reid, and maybe also Leibniz. I think it might also be implicit in Berkeley, which is why I’ve been thinking about it. So there’s a shift from regarding a voluntary action as one pursuant to an end adopted by the agent, to regarding a voluntary action as one pursuant to a rule adopted by the agent. Of course, for anyone who believes in free will of any robust sort (even a compatibilism of Leibniz’s sort), teleology can’t drop out entirely, the way it does for Spinoza, but rules of action acquire a new importance, and in many cases they seem to become more important than ends. For Reid and Kant, at least, this is also connected to deontologism in ethics.*
Interestingly, for many early modern philosophers, the connection between rules and voluntary action goes the other direction as well. The view that the notion of a rule or law only makes sense if there is someone who prescribes the rule, either to himself or to some other agent capable of following it voluntarily, is behind a key argument for occasionalism with respect to the movements of bodies in Malebranche, Clarke, Berkeley, and Reid.
In the title of this post, I said I was going to give a hypothesis. I’m pretty confident about the basic facts here (though the statement of them is a little rough; this is, after all, only a blog post). The hypothesis is the explanatory connection between the facts: i.e. the claim that it was due to the shift in thinking in physics that the shift in thinking in action theory occurred. True or false?
* Reid emphasizes virtue a lot more than most deontologists, but for Reid a virtue is by definition a character trait formed by the conscious and intentional adoption of a rule of conduct (I defend this view in sect. 2 of “Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom”), so the rules are prior to either virtues or ends, which makes Reid, at least on some definitions, a deontologist.
(Cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net)
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A minor point on Aquinas: knowledge of the end is necessary but not sufficient for voluntariness. Agents with knowledge of their ends are the sorts of agents that can act voluntarily, but of course they can also fail to act voluntarily. Voluntary actions are often contrasted with coerced actions, i.e., actions resulting from violence, and the issue there is not knowledge of the end, but whether the principle of the action is internal or external.
Regarding the hypothesis you’re interested in, I have some doubts about the story of teleology it relies on. It’s easy enough to find scholars telling a story very like yours, but I doubt that Galileo really marks such a sharp break. For example, does Aquinas accept Aristotelian teleology?
Sydney – It is certainly more plausible, philosophically, to hold that knowledge of the end is necessary but insufficient than to hold that it is necessary and sufficient, and you are right that Aquinas talks about knowledge of the end in a section where he is arguing that humans are the sorts of beings who are capable of voluntary action, so I think you’re probably right that that’s what he intended.
I don’t mean to suggest that Galileo is a sharp break. I think there’s a lot of continuity. Maybe the point could be made like this: people who thought of Aristotle as the hero-founder of natural philosophy tended to tell the story that focused on teleology, while people who thought of Galileo (or Descartes, or Newton) as the hero-founder of natural philosophy tended to tell the story that focused on rules.
Does Aquinas accept Aristotelian teleology? Well certainly he accepts many relevant parts of Aristotle’s theories, but (contrary to some caricatures) he does not follow Aristotle slavishly. Was there some particular Aristotelian thesis, rejected by Aquinas, which you had in mind?
One of the distinctive features of Aristotle’s account of final causation is it can happen without cognition of the end. On Aquinas’s account, however, I think you need cognition. Of course, the cognition can be provided by God on behalf of non-rational things, but, still, it seems to me that this might be a significant departure from Aristotle.
Yes, that sounds right. But for Aquinas aren’t those divine final causes still crucial for making individual natural objects the sorts of things they are? And doesn’t this still end up being at the core of what physics is all about?
Regarding the historical hypothesis, Descartes might be a counterexample. He seems to adopt the Galilean picture in which nature is not to be understood teleologically, but he also seems to characterize free action in terms of knowledge of the good: we are perfectly free when we pursue what we clearly see as true and good.
Of course, if you’re interested in painting the history with a broader brush, then there does seem to be a correlation, and a single counterexample isn’t very important. But it might still be interesting to inquire into why Descartes doesn’t fit the mold.
Yes. I think Locke also doesn’t fit neatly into the picture, especially in the first edition of the Essay. I suspect the reason for this is just that the Platonic/Augustinian theory of the will had a strong hold on a lot of 17th century philosophers.