The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

ON JUDGING RECENT DEVELOPMENTS in thomistic critique of knowledge-usually though not too aptly called epistemology -could be summed up as centered on a growing awareness of the importance of the act of judging as the full and complete act of human knowing, that in which truth is for the first time formally present as known. These characteristics had indeed been known all along, but in a rather theoretical and abstract way. Their bearing on the critique of knowledge has been fully acknowledged by Scholastics only in the last thirty years or so, at least if one is to take the best known and most used manuals as guide. There are many reasons for this state of affairs. Among them some doctrinal and historical ones seem particularly pertinent. Perhaps the main doctrinal factor is that in the normal course of philosophy judging was treated only from a logical perspective , as judgment, the second act of the mind. Since the first act, conception or simple apprehension, leads to the second which is logically symbolized asS is P, and therefore expressed as a proposition in which there appears to be a mental synthesis of two previously formed concepts, the act of judging was treated as such a union (or disjunction, in negations) of two concepts. The act of judging was thus supposed to display itself fully in the form of the proposition, and the logical properties of propositions were investigated. After this the act of judging was considered to have been sufficiently treated. It was not later treated from the psychological point of view, as a full-blooded act of the mind; and as a result its central significance in the critique of knowledge was overlooked. After all, if the judgment is only the union of two previously formed concepts, it does not add anything new to the content of knowledge , with the result that knowing will be reduced, in its 768 ON JUDGING 769 essentials, to conception; and the critique of knowledge will deal almost exclusively with this. Concepts are abstract and universal. They do not directly refer to the existential order of really existing things. If the judgment does no more than unite two concepts the existence expr.essed in the copula " is " will be no more than mental. Thought, even when leading to judgment, will then be confined to the immanent or conceptual order, and the age-old problem of how to relate thought to reality will place itself in the forefront of critical reflection. Moreover, precisely because concepts are universal, the prototype of human judgments will be taken to be found in universal propositions such as that oldest inhabitant of logical text-books: all men are mortal. Singular, and especially existential judgments will be treated as oddities and of little value. The attempt to establish the existential reference of thought, in such a context, to reality has absorbed the energies of many an almost despairing realist. This way of conceiving judgment and of placing the critical problem is connected with another doctrinal matter, one that is thoroughly metaphysical: the notion of being and of existence . Insofar as the judgment makes use of the copula it affirms existence, so that to consider the act of judging is at once to raise the question of existence; and if the judgment is confined to the conceptual and abstract order, such existence will be seen either as merely mental or, at most, as factual givenness of the objects represented in the terms of the judgment and reached by the mind in some non-intellectual way, by instinct, sympathy, common sense, or even by faith. This in turn leads to-or perhaps it springs from-a completely impoverished notion of existence as mere factual givenness, to the neglect of its properly metaphysical value. It is no casual coincidence that a more enlightened approach to the study of judging has gone hand in hand with a return to a genuinely thomistic appreciation of being and with developments in contemporary philosophy leading in the same direction. The trend towards what we may call conceptualism, or essentialism , may be to some extent innate in the version of 770 AMBROSE MCNICHOLL thomism which had won most support...