Ars Disputandi

Volume 5 (2005)
ISSN: 1566 5399

Eileen Sweeney
BOSTON COLLEGE, USA

Thomist Realism and the Linguistic

Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of
Existence
By John P. O'Callaghan
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003; ix + 368 pp.;
hb. $ 59.95; ISBN: 0-268-04217-9.

[1]

This book is an heroic attempt to bring Thomas Aquinas to bear on

the post-Wittgenstinian world of philosophy of language. O'Callaghan's main
contention is that Aquinas is not subject to the same charge of `mental representationalism' as earlier gures, and thus escapes the criticisms of such views made by
contemporary philosophers of language. In order to do that, the author engages
the recent work of Fodor, Putnam, and other contemporary gures, modern philosophical accounts of language and representation in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume,
and develops a careful interpretation of Aquinas.
[2]
The author's attempt to stand Aquinas up as a real interlocutor in
the contemporary debate hearkens back to the project of Thomists of the 1950s.
Some might want to reject such a project out of hand on the premise that it is
anachronistic as an interpretation of Aquinas and unsuccessful as an attempt
to convert analysts into Thomists. I am skeptical about this kind of project,
but I don't reject it out of hand after all, what use is reading gures in the
history of philosophy if we don't take them to speak, somehow, to contemporary
issues? My dif culty with Callaghan's book is more practical; the book cannot
quite unify the two things it is attempting presenting an interpretation of Aquinas
and entering into the debate of contemporary analytic philosophy of language. It
simply becomes too dif cult to keep track both of O'Callaghan's views of Aquinas
and his arguments against various interpreters of Aquinas, as well as his arguments
explaining and objecting to the views of contemporary philosophers of language.
One gets down many layers into an argument about the internal inconsistency of
Putnam's views on essences, for example, and loses track of how all this relates
to Aquinas. Since Putnam criticizes an Aristotle-like position on essences, in
refuting Putnam, O'Callaghan is showing that some such position can perhaps be
reconstituted. But this is a bit of a stretch. Moreover, the author's view of the
relationship between Aristotle and Aquinas sometimes assumed to be identical,
sometimes not is not really clear or clearly argued for.
[3]
However, on these two different tracks, Aquinas interpretation and
contemporary philosophy of language, a number of good points are made. First,
c June 2, 2005, Ars Disputandi. If you would like to cite this article, please do so as follows:

Eileen Sweeney, `Review of Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence,' Ars
Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 5 (2005), paragraph number.

Eileen Sweeney: Review of Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence

contemporary philosophers of language are brought into dialogue with the wider
philosophical tradition and problems in the history of philosophy. O'Callaghan
shows the way in which philosophers like Putnam and even McDowell try but
do not escape thinking in the terms of modern philosophy. Second, Aquinas'
account of knowledge is re-interpreted in such a way as to free it from some of
the projections of modern philosophy. Thus, for example, O'Callaghan's account
of abstraction, the intelligible species, and the nature absolutely considered are
helpful and illuminating.
[4]
Further, O'Callaghan's joint consideration of Aquinas and contemporary
philosophy does get to a very important insight about the difference between
Aristotelian and Putnamian essences. `For Putnam,' he writes, `essence if it has any
place at all, is a fundamental part of a classi catory scheme, a special set of abstract
properties under which the values of the bound variable of a conceptual scheme
formally considered (a science, for example) may fall;' whereas, for Aquinas and
Aristotle, `essence is an intrinsic principle of a being, its actuality limiting but also
enabling the being to be as it is. . . ' (271) O'Callaghan asks whether Putnam can
achieve his goal of saving Aristotle's `common-sense world' without committing
himself to Arisototle's metaphysics. O'Callaghan's answer seems to be that if
Putnam wants his Aristotelian cake, he has to eat it too. I think it is probably right
that he is going to have eat some kind of cake, i.e., commit himself to something
more than he wants to epistemologically or metaphysically in order to leave the
world of ordinary experience standing.
[5]
In the end, O'Callaghan wants to align Aquinas with the later Wittgenstein in terms of the ways Aquinas sees language use and understanding within the
context of human life as whole. The `more perfect existence' of the title is a quote
from Aquinas referring to `that very social and political existence made possible
by language.' (289) While O'Callaghan is unwilling to reduce understanding and
thereby rationality to language use as McDowell, following Wittgenstein, seems
to do, he nds in Aquinas a model of the way in which those activities are seen
holistically, as is the human being him/herself. If connecting Aquinas to Wittgenstein is a way of restating in a more contemporary way Aristotle and Aquinas'
hylomorphism and their view of the essentially social/political nature of human
beings, I can agree, but more than that will not wash.
[6]
O'Callaghan makes his case that Aquinas is no modern philosopher but
in the end cannot convince me that Aquinas alone among philosophers from the
ancient through the modern world survives 20th century debates in philosophy of
language.

Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org