THE LOGIC OF TRUTH. St. Thomas Aquinas's Epistemology and Antonio Livi's Alethic Logic

Epistemology

A Series of Critical Essays

on Contemporary Philosophy

edited by Antonio Livi

1

William J. Slattery

THE LOGIC

OF TRUTH

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS'S

EPISTEMOLOGY

AND ANTONIO LIVI'S

ALETHIC LOGIC

Casa Editrice Leonardo da Vinci

Editorial Data:

Author: William J. Slattery.

Title: The Logic of Truth. St. Thomas Aquinas’ Epistemology and Antonio Livi’s Alethic Logic.

Series: Epistemology, no. 1.

Size: 17 × 24 cm.

Pages: 504.

Publisher: Casa Editrice Leonardo da Vinci.

Place and Year of Publication: Roma, 2015.

Items: Epistemology, Logic, Truth, Common Sense, Thomas Aquinas, Antonio Livi.

© 2015 by Casa Editrice Leonardo da Vinci

Via Laura Mantegazza, 8 – 00152 Roma, Italy.

www.editriceleonardo.com

Printed in Italy by epxPrinting (Città di Castello).

Cover Image: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea (1815).

To the Queen of Heaven and Earth

You are she who so ennobled human nature…

Lady, at once so great and so worthy…

In thee there comes together whatever of excellence is to be found in creation.

(Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII)

To

my Father and Mother,

Thomas and Margaret,

with deep gratitude for their self-sacrificing love

and for giving me life’s greatest treasure:

the Catholic Faith.

To

Paul and Hélène

Amor Christi illuminet vos nunc et in eternitate eternitatum.

ENDORSEMENTS FOR THE LOGIC OF TRUTH

Some Italian scholars…have already tried to give a synthetic overview of my philosophy of alethic logic. William Slattery is the first non-Italian scholar to do so, and I sincerely think that his attempt is the best, both for completeness and intellectual depth. So it is a pleasure to present his work and to recommend it to all who are concerned with the contemporary discussion about truth.

– Msgr. Antonio Livi, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Philosophy, Pontifical Lateran University, Rome.

"Fr. William J. Slattery gives us a clear, rigorous, deep, and complete study of the questions raised by one of the most interesting philosophical currents of our times: the philosophy of sensus communis of Antonio Livi. Whoever already knows something of Livi's thought will find here the possibility of valuable critical instruments for an ever greater awareness of the range and value of the philosophy of sensus communis; those who have never had contact with this philosophical orientation will benefit from a very good text that will greatly facilitate their direct contact with the works of Livi."

– Prof. Dario Sacchi, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan.

"Scholastic logic was taught in two parts: formal logic, the ‘lesser’ logic or Summulae (title of the popular 13th-century textbook of Peter of Spain) and ‘greater’ logic, also called ‘dialectics’ or ‘material’ logic: debates over logic itself and metaphysical and noetic studies of the structure of reality with a view to determining the foundations of ‘science’ and so of truth. Formal logic today lies in substantive continuity with the ‘lesser’ logic but the ‘greater’ logic is little practiced or studied. In his fine work on the logic ‘of truth’, Father Slattery examines, in the light of St. Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics of cognition, the ‘alethic’ logic of Msgr. Antonio Livi, a ‘material’ logic ‘of contents’. In this view, the first two acts of the mind, apprehension and judgment, are stressed; the third, formal inference, is complementary. The ‘material’, the content apprehended and judged, is the pre-philosophical, ‘common-sense’, experience of certainties beyond cultural difference. Today there are many ‘informal’ logics, critical thinking, the new rhetoric, pragmatic logic..., but the alethic logic of Livi and Slattery is unique, based explicitly on sound philosophical analyses. The Logic of Truth, I believe, will reward the reader with important insights in the tradition of the ‘greater’ logic.

– Dr. Walter Redmond, Austin, Texas.

"Readers will better understand the relevance of Livi’s philosophy thanks to The Logic of Truth placing it in its historical context and by its analysis of the chief objections raised against it. Furthermore, Slattery succeeds in the gigantic task of thoroughly comparing Livi's alethic logic with Aquinas’s theory of knowledge, something that others had only partially done. This was long overdue, and Slattery accomplishes it with analytic depth and great accuracy, providing us with an excellent tool not only to introduce us to Livi's philosophy, but also to render explicit St. Thomas’s position vis-à-vis critical realism."

– Professor Thomas Rego, Catholic University of La Plata, Argentina.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ENDORSEMENTS FOR THE LOGIC OF TRUTH

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

1. Definition of Livi’s alethic logic of sensus communis

2. Common Sense: an ambiguous term

3. Outline of The Logic of Truth according to its examination of the criticisms made against Livi’s philosophy

3.1. An underlying theory of realism that is uncritical in the light of the objections raised by transcendental Thomism

3.2. Common sense is either merely irrational knowledge or opinion and has no role in philosophy

3.3. Livi interprets St. Thomas’s metaphysics as one that is grounded on common sense

3.4. The first principles (first certainties) of the philosophy of sensus communis are at the level of particular experience and not at the level of formal judgment and thus have no universal epistemic validity

3.5. Livi’s claim that common sense is the fundamental alethic criterion

3.6. The use of the linguistic-analytic method, phenomenology, and metaphysical gnoseology within Livi’s epistemic method

3.7. Ontologism

CHAPTER I: Livi’s alethic logic of sensus communis in the historical context of the multiple philosophical semantics and concepts for common sense

1. Introduction

2. Psychological meanings for common sense

2.1. Aristotle: ta koina aisthēta, aisthēsis koinē and endoxa

2.2. St. Thomas: sensus communis and communis consensio

2.3. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Kant: common sense as a psychological power predisposing man to moral and aesthetic judgment

3. Alethic meanings for common sense: the intuition of existential reality functioning as the foundation for metaphysical truths

3.1. 17th and 18th century philosophers who attributed alethic value to common sense

3.2. Giambattista Vico

3.3. Thomas Reid and the Scottish School

3.3.1. Principles of Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense

3.3.2. Epistemic Role of Common Sense

3.4. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

3.5. Oetinger and Balmes

3.6. Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain and Gilson

3.7. Philosophers of science: Meyerson, Polanyi, and Bohm

3.8. Philosophers of the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition

4. Sociological meanings for common sense: socio-culturally conditioned convictions of the masses

4.1. Common Sense as Wisdom: from the Stoics to Modern Times

4.2. Descartes

4.3. Ideological and Political Applications of Common Sense

4.4. A Critical Common Sense: Pragmatists - Peirce, James, Santayana

4.5. Bergson and Édouard Le Roy

4.6. Contemporary Sociological Interpretations of Common Sense

4.6.1. Vague Convictions of the Masses that because of their widespread nature point to possible epistemic characteristics

4.6.2. Influence of Max Scheler’s Theory of Common Sense on Contemporary Sociological Interpretations

5. Conclusion

CHAPTER II: The gnoseological realism underlying Livi’s alethic logic of sensus communis

1. The two realist interpretations of St. Thomas’s gnoseology

2. Historical context of Thomist critical realism

3. Chief characteristics of the critical realist interpretation of St. Thomas’s gnoseology

3.1. The critical realist interpretation of the dubitatio of Descartes and that of St. Thomas

3.2. The critical realist interpretation of the cogito of Descartes and the reflexio of St. Thomas

3.3. St. Thomas’s primum cognitum interpreted by Maréchal as transcendental esse

4. The fundamental reasons why St. Thomas’s realism justifies the realism of Livi’s alethic logic of sensus communis

4.1. The relationship between cognition, truth, and certainty in Livi’s philosophy of sensus communis is metaphysically justified by St. Thomas’s gnoseology

4.2. St. Thomas’s realism, founded upon his theory of logical truth as the conformity of the mind to being made possible by ontological truth (the intelligibility of being), grounds Livi’s realism

4.3. St. Thomas’s realism, whereby logical truth is possible due to man’s natural knowledge of the first metaphysical-logical principles that are infallible due to their participation in the truth of the divine intellect, grounds Livi’s alethic logic of sensus communis

CHAPTER III: A definition of Livi’s sensus communis

1. The epistemic status of sensus communis

2. Livi’s use of phenomenology and components of the Anglo-Saxon linguistic-analytic tradition

3. Definition of «experience» in sensus communis

4. Sensus communis: a method of logic that simultaneously identifies and critically justifies the alethic criterion

5. Livi’s claim for sensus communis as the «foundationalist» alethic criterion

5.1. First and second certainties

5.2. Third Certainty

5.3. Fourth Certainty

5.4. Fifth Certainty

CHAPTER IV: Sensus communis in the light of St. Thomas’s theory of cognition as immanent, hylemorphic, and intentional

1. Introduction

2. Cognition according to the hylemorphic nature of man

3. Cognition as an immanent operation

4. Intentional nature of cognition

5. Conclusion

CHAPTER V: Sensus communis in the light of St. Thomas’s theory of intuition

1. Introduction

2. Role of the external senses and the phantasms

3. Role of the internal senses

4. Intuitive power of the intelligence

CHAPTER VI: The first certainty of sensus communis in the light of St. Thomas’s metaphysical gnoseology for the primum cognitum

1. First certainty of sensus communis has the same material referent as St. Thomas’s primum cognitum, «ens»

2. First certainty in the light of St. Thomas’s gnoseology of the gradual nature of intuition

3. Intuition of the material object of the first certainty: undifferentiated realities-in-existence

4. Realities intuited as identifiable substances because their proper accidents are distinguished

5. Realities intuited as caused or causing

6. Realities intuited as a «world of realities» in the light of the unity due to the analogy of being

CHAPTER VII: Sensus communis as certainties that are first judgments in the light of St. Thomas’s theory of truth and certainty

1. The problem of defining the certainties of sensus communis to be judgments

2. The critical mechanism of the intelligence: the operation of the reflexio

3. Composite structure of the simplex apprehensio

4. Analogical nature of truth: truth in judgment, simple apprehension, and reality

5. First certainty as judgment

6. Theory of certitude of sensus communis in the light of St. Thomas’s theory

7. Critical Evaluation

CHAPTER VIII: The critical justification of sensus communis as the alethic criterion

1. First certainty as alethic criterion in the light of St. Thomas’s first metaphysical-logical principle

2. Critical justification of sensus communis through the method of the presupposizione

3. Method of presupposizione in the light of St. Thomas’s resolutio

CONCLUSION: The alethic logic of sensus communis as a post-Cartesian argument for the realism of St. Thomas’s Metaphysics

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

1. Abbreviations of St. Thomas’s Works

2. Other Abbreviations

3. Conventions

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. St. Thomas Aquinas

1.1. Latin texts

1.2. English translations

2. Antonio Livi

2.1. Books

2.2. Articles

3. Other Authors

INDEX OF AUTHORS

BACK COVER TO PRINTED EDITION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Veritas Christi Urget Nos!

PREFACE

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)

The Logic of Truth is a cold-blooded book: since its aim is cognitive dissection its language is technical, its temper phlegmatic, and so it offers naught to immediately warm your heart. Could it be otherwise in epistemology? Its scrutiny of the structure of truth in human thought, as it is revealed through language, is carried out with the aid of the lens of a modern alethic logic theory made partially of materials from the sensus communis and Anglo-American analytic philosophical tradition¹. This alethic logic is examined in the light of the theory of cognition of St. Thomas Aquinas in order to verify its compatibility with the latter and thus reveal the deep metaphysical foundations on which its linguistic and phenomenological analysis rests.

Though serenely diagnostic in style, The Logic of Truth was passionately motivated. For it was written by a Catholic. Catholics do not decide to author such a work without some connection between it and the one and only supreme love of their lives, the Lord Jesus Christ and the truths revealed by Him that are found in Catholicism. From this source flows the hot blood running through their veins that motivates them to press on in the face of the ordinary, and sometimes extraordinary, obstacles to be overcome in such a project. The next few pages, by exposing this motivation, will hopefully also clarify for the reader the theme’s relevance both for the individual and for society at the beginning of the third millennium.

When I was fifteen years of age I began to question the meaning of life. I had serious doubts about whether or not to remain Catholic because I didn’t see why I should due to an education that had given me few arguments for believing. I decided that if Catholicism were not true, then, frankly, to hell with it. I fully shared the opinion of the convert from atheism, C. S. Lewis:

Here is a door, behind which, according to some people, the secret of the universe is waiting for you. Either that’s true, or it isn't. And if it isn’t, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud, the most colossal ‘sell’ on record. Isn’t it obviously the job of every man (that is a man and not a rabbit) to try to find out which, and then to devote his full energies either to serving this tremendous secret or to exposing and destroying this gigantic humbug?

²

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True – or False’ into stuff about a good society, or morals, or the incomes of Bishops, or the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine…their belief that a certain amount of ‘religion’ is desirable but one mustn’t carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important

³.

But the problem was that although I suspected there might be a reasonable set of arguments for the truth of Catholicism, I didn’t know where to find them in those pre-internet days. However, providentially, amid the bookshelves in my family’s living-room I came across an old dust-covered and yellow-paged book that presented clear arguments, based on the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, for the existence of God, the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the authority of the Church. Amazed at my find, I went from conviction to conviction about Catholicism and its mission to achieve the eternal salvation of souls. Faith led to prayer; and prayer to more incisive grace-action in my soul; so much so, that when the vocation to the priesthood was heard a year later, I was wide open: Why not? What greater thing could one do with one’s life than to help others reach their eternal destiny in Heaven and avoid the ultimate tragedy of unending damnation? So sublime a mission is worth any sacrifice – even ones as costly as renouncing marriage and physical fatherhood.

Catholicism as the one and only truth about the ultimate purpose of reality became the North Star of my existence. With its light I could see the goodness and beauty of life’s ocean crossing; I had a compass pointing me homewards; I knew how to navigate through the reefs of lies and deceits; I was blessed to be able to help other sailors along the voyage; and was even able to survive a ‘shipwreck’. Through the truth of the Faith I became ever more deeply aware of the goodness and beauty of God and this world; through its truth all other truths took on deeper hues, pain acquired value, and the mind found satisfaction and the serenity of order. And I knew that my experience was not unique – a countless multitude of Christian brothers and sisters, century after century, had felt the same after finding the Beauty ever ancient, ever new (St. Augustine).

But the rock-bottom requirement in order to be able to acknowledge the truth of the divinely revealed doctrines of Catholicism is the recognition that man has a natural ability to be certain of the truths that are the stepping-stones to faith: the certainties of God’s existence and His traits of wisdom, power, holiness, justice and goodness; as well as the certainties that are the logical presuppositions for these latter truths: the existence of the world around us, of the self and other persons in their metaphysical dimensions, and of the physical and moral laws that configure reality.

Underneath all of this structure must lie the acceptance of man’s natural ability to know reality and not just his own ideas about reality: this is the foundation of the foundations of all knowledge. If realism is denied, then the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, and the nature of the Church can no longer be proposed as truths; they become quaint ideas with a pragmatic or aesthetic value; or, as they say in street-talk, just wishful thinking.

The Dictatorship of Relativism, the dominant culture of the post-modern world with its roots in the Cartesian, Protestant, and French revolutions, is ultimately a revolution against Truth. There is therefore a radical and total opposition between it and the Catholic Church. For Catholicism asserts that man is able to know reality as reality and not merely as physical-mathematical appearance; that the individual discovers and assents to the truths discovered in and through the cosmos and self but does not and may not create truths; that the most important truths – those regarding the honor of God and eternal salvation – transcend man’s abilities, have been revealed by God, are conserved by the Catholic Church, are untamperable, and are perfectly in harmony with reason.

But the currents of modern philosophy, influenced by the Enlightenment concept of reason, and now dominating the thought-patterns of the West, are skeptical about these claims. This skepticism, fueled by modern utilitarianism and hedonism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires⁴ has led men in the West to fear truth. They have built a Dictatorship of Relativism (Benedict XVI) where political correctness rules supreme and in which Catholics – real Catholics – are viewed as dangerous people. For the further a society drifts from Truth, the more it will hate those that speak it (George Orwell).

The consequences are colossal. For the very pillars of civilization are built on the foundations of man’s ability to know the laws about human nature by which certain actions are ever good and others absolutely evil. Where truth is imprisoned, ideologies rampage through the streets and menacing fanaticisms and fundamentalisms wait at the society’s borders, scenting like wolves the weakness of such a society. No civilization in denial of truth has ever survived because where truth has been destroyed, love is swiftly obliterated. This is the situation of the West, and because of the West’s influence, that of the globe: a new Dark Age has arisen, one far darker than the epoch after the Roman empire’s collapse, because this one has all the power of technology with which to dehumanize man.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity⁵.

The philosophical currents of immanentism, historicism, and pragmatism that have poisoned the air of the West have not halted at the frontiers of the Church. Penetrating deeply within the philosophy and theology of many leading Catholics, they have provoked the popes to alert us about the danger of trying to reconcile these incompatible systems with the Faith: Pius X in 1907 in Pascendi, Pius XII in 1950 in Humani Generis, and John Paul II in 1998 in Fides et Ratio. As philosophies that are structural to the Dictatorship of Relativism, they deny firstly that man can know absolute and immutable truths and secondly that the Catholic’s act of faith is an intellectual assent to truths. They shrink man’s knowledge to mere valueless, fleeting opinions, and warp the faith into a pragmatic, aesthetic, or emotional experience.

Especially since the 1960s, these errors have been an important factor in a complex web of causes that have largely destroyed the clear self-identity of many Catholics. How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, declared Cardinal Ratzinger, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking? The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another…⁶. For millions of Catholics the Faith has become a blurred reality that is no longer the one true religion. And if it is not that, why remain Catholic?

Why indeed? Millions upon millions have abandoned and continue to abandon the Church due significantly to this downplaying of truth and the importance of doctrine (vis-à-vis experience) in the training of priests, catechesis, and apologetics⁷. The severity of the hemorrhage is menacing to bleed Catholicism almost to death, immediately in the West, and elsewhere in the long-term. In 2005, in the USA, one in ten adults was an ex-Catholic; by 2015 the number has rocketed to one in eight (12.5%); and between 2007 and 2014 the Catholic share of the population fell from 23.9% to 20.8%⁸. In Europe matters are even worse. In the Netherlands, for instance, in the 1950s 90% of Catholics still went to Mass every Sunday – now it’s only 5%. All over Western Europe churches are being closed and sold off. Catholicism in Latin America is also in a state of freefall and at an astounding rate⁹. In 1960 90% of the people were Catholic; today only 69% per cent are¹⁰. Roughly one in four Nicaraguans and one in seven Venezuelans are former Catholics. Self-identified Catholics in Brazil dropped from approximately three-quarters (74%) in 2000 to about two-thirds (65%) in 2010. Mexico, the country with the second-largest Catholic population in the world, went from 89% Catholic in 2000 to 85% Catholic in 2010¹¹.

Not only have millions left the Church but the rate of converts to the Church has also dropped. This is a sure sign of the intellectual paralysis of Catholics who are now unable, and often unwilling, to propose the Faith as the one true religion to outsiders. But it also points to the stranglehold of the Dictatorship of Relativism on contemporary thought. For two millennia countless men and women, among them prominent philosophers, writers, artists, monarchs and politicians, converted to the Catholic Faith often in the face of social rejection, persecution, and indeed martyrdom.

The willingness of converts to use their freedom to embrace Truth, at whatever cost, displayed man’s grandeur as man. By contrast, what a sign of decadence it is when conversions decrease to a trickle. It points to a society grown senile because freedom has been forcibly separated from truth. So many are incapable of conversion because there is nothing to convert from and nothing to convert to, since truth no longer exists – all that exists is me and my opinions, you and yours. Men can nonchalantly walk through the ancient churches of Rome oblivious to the ground they walk on, soil made sacred with the blood shed by the first Christian converts for the sake of the Truth. And for the same reason they cannot really understand why our fellow Christians are ready to be martyred in Syria and Iraq rather than renounce Christ – nor why the Islamic fundamentalists slaughter them. All of which has dangerous socio-political implications for the future of the West.

Catholics’ loss of conviction that Catholicism is the one true religion is due largely to the philosophical denial that there can be rational arguments enabling assent to the Catholic Faith because it is true – and not merely because of sheer faith (fideism), or because it is therapeutic (feels good), or is culturally acceptable (nice). These arguments (traditionally known as the praeambula fidei) demonstrate the existence of God, his attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, wisdom and goodness, along with the possibility of divine revelation and miracles. On this rationale, developed by some of Western civilization’s greatest minds, rests the intellectually coherent position of the Catholic who proposes conversion to Catholicism to the non-Catholic.

Truth is like a lion, wrote St. Augustine. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself. He is right, but in our times firstly we must free him since he has been imprisoned by the dictatorship. Catholics are born for combat (Leo XIII): we Catholics must seize the keys of his den from the jailers and end his captivity if we are to effectively propose the divinely revealed religion to the world and unleash the revolution for a civilization founded on Truth. Given the grip of the deadly regime on the mass media we can expect no swift triumph and none without intolerant opposition. For relativism, although it hides behind masks of tolerance and intellectual modesty, is an egocentric tyrant who by denying absolute truths can enslave men to the intellectual fashion of the moment, thus controlling knowledge to its very foundations in order to have a world order of almost unrestrained materialism, technocracy, and lust. He is therefore free to deal with his opponents in any way he wishes. Proof of this is his bloody treatment of the millions of the most defenseless among us, the unborn.

As revolutionaries of the Cross we must be convinced that the beginning and end of our combat, and the measure of our progress while campaigning, lies in Truth! Love of the truth will impel us to be on our guard to protect it and the truths of divine revelation from the anonymous manipulations of relativism – which is really just another name for skepticism – and which has penetrated Catholicism as the polycephalic python of modernism, rapidly asphyxiating the faith of millions by cutting off the oxygen of the supernatural.

In whatever colors it takes, relativism is the world’s flight from reason (Arnold Lunn). Nietzsche described it well: There are many kinds of eyes…and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths’ and consequently there is no truth. Relativism as the work of the sceptic for the past hundred years has indeed been very like the fruitless fury of some primeval monster; eyeless, mindless, merely destructive and devouring; a giant worm wasting away a world that he could not even see¹². From it has sprung an immunity deficiency syndrome in contemporary society, an immunity to truth, which threatens to abolish man. For a man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed (Chesterton). The ultimate consequences of relativism could not be grimmer. As a certain polite Oxford professor once concluded: Out of this apparently innocent idea [that values are subjective] comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as men choose their clothes¹³.

In this struggle to defend truth and the divinely revealed truths, we can lay hold of the metaphysics authored by the Catholic who stated Truth is the ultimate purpose of the entire universe¹⁴. For St. Thomas the knowledge of truth always precedes the love of truth¹⁵. It was his sole aim in philosophizing: The study of philosophy is not the study of men’s opinions, but of the truth of things¹⁶. It would be difficult to surpass his open-mindedness: "Just as one can pass judgment in a lawsuit only if he hears the arguments on both sides, in a similar way one who has to pass judgment on a philosophy is necessarily in a better position to do so if he will hear all the arguments, as it were, of the disputants¹⁷. Due to his love of truth and the Catholic Faith, his writings are sealed with an eternal wisdom. In them one marvels at a seamless unity of incisive independent thinking, reverence for the sensible arguments of whomsoever, technical sophistication, steely logic, and an enchanting self-forgetfulness. In these dramatic times when Truth has been exiled to the edges of the dominant global culture, St. Thomas’s philosophy has an urgent relevance.

Timeless truth is always timely, of course, but some aspects of truth are especially needed at some times, and it seems that our times badly need seven Thomistic syntheses: (1) of faith and reason, (2) of the Biblical and the classical, the Judeo—Christian and the Greco—Roman heritages, (3) of the ideals of clarity and profundity, (4) of common sense and technical sophistication, (5) of theory and practice, (6) of an understanding, intuitive vision and a demanding and accurate logic, and (7) of the one and the many, a cosmic unity or ‘big picture’ and carefully sorted out distinctions. I think it a safe judgment that no one in the entire history of human thought has ever succeeded better than St. Thomas in making not just one but all seven of these marriages which are essential to mental health and happiness

¹⁸.

The Angelic Doctor’s focus on truth and realism sharply distinguishes him from the main modern philosophies of Cartesianism, Kantianism and Hegelianism. One agnostic convert to Catholicism, G. K. Chesterton, highlighted this Thomistic feature as he remarked about a Jesuit’s commentary on Hegel:

Above all, his wide reading in metaphysics has made him patient with clever people when they indulge in folly. The consequence is that he can write calmly and even blandly sentences like these. ‘A certain likeness can be detected between the aim and method of St. Thomas and those of Hegel. There are, however, also remarkable differences. For St. Thomas it is impossible that contradictories should exist together, and again reality and intelligibility correspond, but a thing must first be, to be intelligible.’ Let the man in the street be forgiven if he adds that the ‘remarkable difference’ seems to him to be that St. Thomas was sane and Hegel was mad. The moron refuses to admit that Hegel can both exist and not exist; or that it can be possible to understand Hegel if there is no Hegel to understand. Yet Father D'Arcy mentions this Hegelian paradox as if it were all in the day's work; and of course it is, if the work is reading all the modern philosophers as searchingly and sympathetically as he has done

¹⁹.

St. Thomas’s metaphysics protects the soundness of human knowledge by a methodical realism. By rationally arguing for the validity of the key metaphysical-logical principles of identity, non-contradiction, sufficient reason, causality and finality on the basis of the metaphysical concept of ens (being) whose referent is man’s immediate intuition of reality, it justifies the mind’s capacity for truth. Thus it is the philosophy of common sense understood not as mere historically-relative opinions held by the masses, but as the very structure of human thought in its immediate contact with the world around us. St. Thomas’s metaphysics thereby provides the solid ground on which the rational foundations of the assent to the truth of the Catholic Faith can stand.

What St. Thomas achieved in the defense of man’s ability for truth through his complex metaphysical epistemology, Monsignor Antonio Livi, who recognizes Etienne Gilson and Cornelio Fabro as mentors, has sought to do through his original theory of alethic logic in which he has made use of some of the most valuable methods of the sensus communis philosophical tradition and contemporary analytic philosophy. His precise and nuanced distinctions, encyclopedic knowledge, and open-mindedness to use any and every valid philosophical argument for the service of Truth merit him a prominent place in contemporary philosophy.

Livi argues that a philosophical dissection of the logic present in language unfolds an ‘alethic’ (truth) structure wherein man’s knowledge is built on the intuitive, virtually metaphysical, and certain awareness of the existence of the real world around us, of the self, of other persons, of an ordered physical and moral structure governing nature, and, by an immediate inference from the preceding intuitions, of a First Cause that ultimately grounds the rational status of reality and knowledge.

A sword sharpens a sword. The Logic of Truth argues that the alethic logic of sensus communis is confirmed, clarified, and revealed as resting on deep metaphysical foundations by St. Thomas’s theory of knowledge. Thus it is a valuable weapon with which to combat for the Culture of Truth and for a civilization in which man will more easily be able to recognize and adore, through the Catholic Faith, the First Truth who is also the Supreme Good, Pure Beauty, and Absolute Love.

William J. Slattery, Ph.D., S. T. L.

Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,

June 2015, Rome.

¹ An alethic logic indicates the ways (modes) in which truth exists, especially necessity, impossibility, and contingency.

² C.S. LEWIS, Man or Rabbit? in God in the Dock, Grand Rapids, 2014, 108.

³ C.S. LEWIS, Christian Apologetics in God in the Dock, 101-102.

⁴ Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, April 18, 2005.

⁵ William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming.

⁶ Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, April 18, 2005.

⁷ http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/

⁸ http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/.

⁹ http://www.pewforum.org/2013/02/13/the-global-catholic-population/

¹⁰ http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/

¹¹ http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/

¹² G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shadows, Aziloth Books, 2012, 48.

¹³ C. S. Lewis, The Poison of Subjectivism in Christian Reflections, Grand Rapids, 1967, 73.

¹⁴ St. Thomas Aquinas, Liber de veritate catholicae fidei, I, ch. 1.

¹⁵ St. Thomas Aquinas, Homiliae super Evangelia, 14,3.

¹⁶ St. Thomas Aquinas, In libros Aristotelis De caelo et mundo expositio, book 1, lesson 22.

¹⁷ St. Thomas Aquinas, In Metaphysica Commentaria, Bk. 3, lesson 1, n. 342.

¹⁸ Peter Kreeft, A Summa of the Summa, San Francisco, 1990, 13.

¹⁹ G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dover Publications, 2009, 94.

FOREWORD

Some Italian scholars (Pier Paolo Ottonello, Roberto Di Ceglie, Fabrizio Renzi) have already tried to give a synthetic overview of my philosophy of alethic logic. William Slattery, who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, and was awarded the PhD in philosophy at the Gregorian University and the STL in Fundamental Theology at the Lateran, is the first non-Italian scholar to do so, and I sincerely think that his attempt is the best, both for completeness and intellectual depth. So it is a pleasure to present his work and to recommend it to all who are concerned with the contemporary discussion about truth.

The Logic of Truth deals with my proposal of systematizing and updating the philosophical thought of Saint Thomas in relation with the key problems of epistemology, trying to connect in a logical system his four principles: firstly, the metaphysical nature of logical truth, as adaequatio intellectus ad rem; secondly, the primacy of direct experience over both reasoning and indirect knowledge through faith in a witness; thirdly, the alethic function of the first principles of knowledge as the universally necessary background in the search for truth; fourthly, the judgment as the reflexive act of the mind by which the thinking subject expresses his awareness of having reached the truth about some concrete object in a certain moment.

In order to perform this project of organizing and updating the philosophical thought of Saint Thomas in relation to these points, I took advantage of the modern notion of ‘common sense’ which had been developed by several philosophers, both Thomists and non-Thomists, in their defense of metaphysical realism vis-à-vis Descartes’ idealistic system and Kant’s transcendental system. Moreover, I took advantage of the contemporary achievements of the Anglo-American analytic school of logic. For this reason, Slattery’s attempt to perform a critical comparison between the doctrines of Saint Thomas and my alethic logic system was really extremely difficult because it demanded a deep penetration into the meaning of the different terms used by both Aquinas and modern and contemporary philosophers.

But Slattery rose to these challenges, attaining an excellent degree of understanding of Aquinas through an attentive reading of his epistemological works as well as those of my alethic logic. He has shown that what I defend with my ‘philosophy of common sense’ is precisely the epistemic primacy of ‘common sense’ among all kinds of ordinary knowledge in order to save a holistic theory of truth. But he also underlined what so many fail to understand: ‘common sense’ as I use the term is not to be understood sociologically or psychologically but epistemologically since epistemology is the main issue of philosophical logic.

Actually, my philosophy of common sense should be understood as something similar to what Roderick Chisholm called ‘the foundations of knowing’. In other words, common sense, as I conceive it, is the first step of a theoretical process leading beyond mere semantic holism, i.e. the holism of meaning, in order to take into account alethic holism, i.e. the holism of truth. This is made possible by detecting a set of logical connections between judgments based on truth as the basic value in judging.

The result is an axiomatic system of epistemic logic grounded on the acknowledgement of the real dependence of every judgment on the truth of its necessary presuppositions, i. e. the logical conditions of possibility for it to be true. This is the meaning of what I maintain to be the basic law of thinking according to the most rigorous phenomenology of the mind’s processes which are all directed to the awareness of truth, i.e. to the certainty that the contents of my judgment, here and now, are really true, and that I absolutely cannot suppose the contrary to be true. This can only occur when any judgment is founded on its presuppositions whereby I become aware that it is the necessary result of the true knowledge that I have already obtained. This is the general framework of what I conceive to be the holism of truth. According to this logical system, any true thought – and any assertion that can express it – is linked with all the other thoughts through its epistemic justification by the need of finding its own premises and presuppositions.

In such a holistic system of alethic logic, my notion of common sense refers only to a few, identifiable primary certainties which are the universal presuppositions for both ordinary and scientific knowledge. In others words, ‘common sense’ in my logical system is the core of the holistic structure of truth. I reached such a conclusion taking in account the basic date of cognitive science, the most advanced studies on the philosophy of mind, and the best results of the phenomenology of consciousness – all of which use both subjective introspection and the analysis of inter-subjective communication. I realized that in the consciousness of every thinking subject there are some certainties about the ‘real world’, certainties whose epistemic justification is founded on the immediate evidence of existing beings that necessarily and always are present in everyone’s experience.

But I assert much more. In my system such certainties constitute the very first link in the chain of presuppositions – they can in no way be subject to doubt. This means that their non-truth is absolutely unthinkable: no one can really doubt them, and one must understand that any affirmations to the contrary are merely verbal posturing, the expression of a pragmatic logic, and not the expressions of a real certainty, endowed with its own adequate epistemic justification. Given that the truths of ‘common sense’ constitute the nucleus of experience understood as a body of unmediated knowledge, such certainties are present to man’s consciousness in every moment of his search for truth as the logical presupposition of all knowledge deriving from reflection and inference, both inductive and deductive.

For this same reason, such certainties function as an ultimate criterion of truth to verify any hypothesis successively formulated. They therefore constitute the main alethic presupposition, i.e., the presupposition necessary for any ulterior knowledge to be thought of as true. On the basis of these original truths every thinking subject verifies, again and again, the admissibility of any hypothesis formulated by himself or proposed by other subjects through one of the ways for communicating thought. Consequently, all scientific knowledge should be structured as a system logically compatible with the primary truths of ‘common sense’ so as to place the instruments of dialectics (reflection, interpretation, inference) effectively at the service of the search for further truths.

It is my hope that The Logic of Truth will help to make better known in the English-speaking world my philosophy of alethic logic as a logical justification for the modern philosophical choice of realism – the remedy for both scepticism and rationalism, as I have already systematically presented in my book The Philosophy of Common Sense: The Modern Discovery of the Epistemic Foundations of Science and Belief (The Davies Group, 2013).

Antonio Livi

INTRODUCTION

1. Definition of Livi’s alethic logic of sensus communis

The Logic of Truth is a critical investigation of the theory of alethic (from the Greek alētheia = truth) logic of sensus communis (common sense) of Antonio Livi in the light mainly of the gnoseology (which I define as the metaphysical examination of the psychological process of cognition) of St. Thomas Aquinas. However, the critical study of Livi’s alethic logic theory that The Logic of Truth aims to be will also contextualize the theory historically by confronting it with the multiple semantics and concepts for common sense. It will examine the various criticisms proposed by philosophers against firstly any philosophy of common sense, and secondly against Livi’s particular philosophy; and it will clarify with special care why Livi’s sensus communis may not be identified with either St. Thomas Aquinas’s or Aristotle’s use of common sense.

Firstly, however, let us define Livi’s alethic logic and sensus communis.

The alethic logic [alēthēs logos = «true discourse»] theory is defined by him, from the formal perspective, as an epistemic method constituted by the organic ensemble of universal and necessary evident certainties (sensus communis) at the level of man’s intuitive metaphysical experience, which are present and operative, immediately and universally, in the act of cognition. Hence, he argues, these certainties function as the ultimate presuppositions («evidences» or «first truths»), necessary for any knowledge to have truth-value.

By the term «alethic» Livi qualifies the theory epistemologically, distinguishing it as a material logic (a «logic of contents») vis-à-vis formal, pragmatic or aesthetic logics. It is a branch of material logic in that its purpose is to identify not the alethic justification of particular rational conclusions but the very foundations for the alethic justification of all rational knowledge. As an alethic logic its purpose is to examine the materia of cognition (and its expression in language), i.e., the content, that which is thought about, the cogitatum, noema. And since, in his philosophy, what is thought about is always knowledge (thinking is cognition even though in a variety of forms and with differing procedures), the content of thought is the result of the cognitive act of apprehension. The content of apprehension is a particular dimension of reality since cognition is naturally structured to assimilate what is present to it within the framework of the mode of the object and the successive stages of the act of cognition. Alethic logic therefore seeks to identify the criteria (laws) on the basis of which the content of thought (knowledge) can be asserted to be true and not merely formally logical. These laws must not merely be relative to a particular sector of knowledge but must be absolute and global, the ultimate foundation of all knowledge from the point of view of truth. They must be the judgments that function as the premises for every ulterior judgment claiming to be true.

In other words Livi’s semantic for common sense asserts that every person possesses a body of certain knowledge that is prior to any rational investigation from his immediate contact with reality. Hence, as a set of immediately known facts that are absolutely primary they make up the set of fundamental certainties that function as the necessary presupposition for any proposition to claim to be true.

Livi alleges that his philosophy can be gnoseologically justified on the basis of St. Thomas’s realism, a claim that is certainly not universally accepted among Thomists due to the different interpretations of St. Thomas’s realism, as we shall see in Chapter 2.

The nature of Livi’s theory makes it a formal reflection about experience which he defines as man’s immediate cognitive contact with extra-mental realities. In the light of the multiple semantics for experience in contemporary philosophy Livi’s meaning for it will be defined in detail in Chapter 3 and then critically examined from the perspective of metaphysical gnoseology in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. His theory of experience distinguishes between particular and universal experience. Its purpose is not to theorize regarding man’s countless experiences that are purely particular, i. e. relative merely to the individual in question. Rather, it is to argue that in the midst of all of the purely particular experiences that there are some which are universal: universally valid as knowledge because they are the constitutive metaphysical components of reality that are most immediately present to the conscience, judgments prior to reflection, truths that are natural and spontaneous and intimate to man, certainties that any and every man is capable of reaching simply because he is man. Hence they are the logical dimension intrinsic to experience, existing and operating even when not reflexively recognized by the subject.

It is Livi’s philosophy of sensus communis that differentiates his theory of alethic logic from other alethic theories. The semantic of sensus communis is formulated in a unique manner within his philosophy, referring to the «truths of universal experience» that can be classified in two groups.

The first group is a restricted number of virtual judgments present immediately, de facto, even if only implicitly, in any act of cognition, as the necessary presupposition for any knowledge that is obtained through inference (deductive and inductive) and reflection. These judgments are indexical in that they only point to the existence and not to the essence of their referent. They are five in number and they express in the vaguest of terms, but absolutely, those dimensions of human experience that transcend man’s socio-cultural circumstances. The first is the recognition that there is a world of realities, the second is that the self exists, the third that there are others in the world similar to the self, the fourth is that there is a physical and moral order in the world and the fifth – by spontaneous inference from the previous four judgments – that there is a First Cause of everything.

The second group is a set of judgments of attribution inferred immediately from the first group and constituted by the first metaphysical, logical and moral principles. Both groups form an organic ensemble. In the first group the second judgment is derived from the first, the third is derived from the second, the fourth from the third and the fifth from all four preceding judgments.

The philosophy of sensus communis proposes to be the reflexive examination of this universal experience, of knowledge at the primary level of cognition. Livi argues that the object of his philosophy is the raw material object of philosophy itself since philosophy is by definition a reflection and a search for explanations regarding the data presented by human experience or it is without significance. Accordingly, since Livi’s sensus communis, in its specific technical significance, unfolds the basic epistemic content of experience, it presents a pre-philosophical alethic criterion as the basis for demonstrated knowledge, particularly for metaphysics. In this way, as is argued by Livi, philosophy depends on sensus communis for its object but the latter is independent of philosophy except in as much as it needs to philosophize to rationally justify the validity of its epistemic function.

All of which is subject to multiple criticisms as we shall outline in the third section of this introduction.

2. Common Sense: an ambiguous term

The criticisms to which Livi’s theory are subject are compounded and complicated by the designation of his alethic logic theory as a philosophy of common sense (sensus communis).

Livi’s use of the term sensus communis to indicate his philosophy of alethic logic renders the attempt to understand this philosophy complicated on account of the multiple meanings of the term. History records that there is no agreement among philosophers regarding the meaning of the expression common sense. Moreover, many philosophers have added to the confusion by not defining the term when they have used it within their philosophical writings.

Historically there are three major meanings. Firstly, the contemporary sociological understanding of the term as it appears in various languages – common sense, senso comune, sens comun, sentido común: an ensemble of knowledge at the epistemic level of opinion held by the masses in function of practical judgment. Secondly, the two technical, philosophical meanings: the first designates a body of universally valid, primary, pre-rational judgments – such is the meaning of the term held by men with philosophies as diverse as Buffier, Vico, Reid, Moore, Garrigou-Lagrange and Gilson; the second philosophical meaning is that of a psychological faculty – such is the meaning of the term held by Aristotle and St. Thomas.

However, even when philosophers designate common sense as a body of universally valid, pre-rational, primary judgments, they either designate it as irrational, or – if they recognize its rationality – fail to specify the contents or do so only partially. As a result, incorrect interpretations of the meaning of Livi’s sensus communis are frequent and lead to a denial of his philosophy’s validity. For instance, if Livi’s common sense is interpreted as a set of pre-rational certainties, and if the epistemic justification for this claim is presumed to be their spontaneous evidence, the theory can be classified as irrational. If, on the other hand, one seeks to justify the evidence of the primary certainties in Livi’s philosophy on the grounds of the ability of a psychological faculty in man, such as the aisthēsis koinē of Aristotle, this can be shown to be erroneous since such a power cannot identify primary universal truths at the level of experience.

In order to clearly distinguish Livi’s meaning for common sense from that of other philosophers, Chapter 1 will therefore conduct a historical survey presenting the philosophical semantics of the term. But not only the different meanings: it will also examine the various philosophical opinions regarding the conceptual basis for Livi’s philosophy, i. e. that there are universally valid intuitive primary certainties that function as the alethic foundation for all knowledge. This should clarify by contrast not only what Livi’s philosophy of sensus communis is not, but also provide the historical context by which Livi’s philosophy has been influenced. In particular it will pay attention to the following meanings for common sense: those of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Reid. Included with each account will be brief indications of the points of agreement and disagreement between each philosophical opinion regarding common sense and Livi’s. It should thus become clearer that Livi proposes his philosophy of common sense neither as a set of critically unjustifiable cognitions, nor as a particular cognitive power, but rather as an identification, using a precise method of logic, of