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John Deely What Happened
John Deely What Happened
Deely, John Thomist : a Speculative Quarterly Review; Oct 1, 1994; 58, 4; ProQuest pg. 543
544 JOHN DEELY
speculative value of the lost centuries separating Occam from Descartes and
the moderns. See my "Vindication of Hispanic Philosophy," forthcoming in
the Proceedings of the ler Congreso Mundial de Semi6tica y Comunicaci6n:
La Dimension Educativa, held in Monterrey, Nuevo Le6n, Mexico on June
16-18, 1993.
13 The October 14-17, 1992 " Hispanic Philosophy in the Age of Discovery"
conference organized by Jude Dougherty at the Catholic University of America
was an outstanding augur of developments in this area.
14 From the text of the original announcement of the publication of Tractotus
de Siqnis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985). See my "Semiotic in the Thought of ]acques Maritain,"
Recherche Sbniotiqtte/Semiotic Inq'l-tiry 62 (1986), 1-30, for details.
21 H.-D. Simonin, review of the 1930 Reiser edition of Poinsot's Ars Logica
of 1631-1632, Bulletin Thomiste [September 1930], p. 145.
22 On the contrast of doctrine with scientia in the modem sense, see the
terminological entry" Doctrine" in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics,
ed. T. A. Sebeok et al., and Appendix I " On the Notion' Doctrine of Signs'"
in my Introducing Semiotic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1982), pp. 127-130.
28 Maria Lucia Santaella-Braga, "John Poinsot's Doctrine of Signs: The
Recovery of a Missing Link," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New
Series, 5.2 (1991), p. 156.
28 I have explained the designation " Classical Thomism " in an article titled
"Metaphysics, Modern Thought, and 'Thomism'" written for Notes et
Documents 8 (juillet-septembre 1977), which unfortunately was published from
uncorrected proofs, but provides nonetheless a sound outline of what is at
issue.
2' The name of this journal was subsequently changed to the American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, a change difficult to understand after sixty-
three years of publication.
cern with the thought of Aquinas to delve deeply into the texts
of Poinsot. That Poinsot himself is among the historical hand-
ful who had developed an intimate acquaintance with the com-
plete range of Aquinas's writings and made this acquaintance
his own reference point, along with reason itself, in the evalua-
tion of theoretical issues in philosophy is to count for nothing."
Only the author's own reading of Aquinas, solipsistically under-
taken and maintained, is to count. Of course, the solipsism is an
illusion insofar as the reader thinks himself to be a pristine in-
terpreter of whatever truth Aquinas has to convey, just as the
presumption of Descartes to shrive his mind of all influence from
society and history was an illusion (a transcendental one at that,
inasmuch as it contained within itself the clues of previous-by
definition historical-influences, as Gilson was to demonstrate in
his doctoral work published in 1913).31
Bergson used to speak of the " natural geometry of the human
intellect" in order to explain its resistance to time and to seeing
the development of things in time. Perhaps the Cartesian preju-
dice with its various ramifications, more or less unconscious, is
nothing more than the formalization and explicitation among
philosophers of a resistance to history that is engrained in human
understanding according to its natural proclivity for seeing parts
as wholes and present phenomena as eternal species.
However that may be, there is resistance among philosophers
and scientists alike to recognizing the historicity of human
thought in all particulars. This resistance-powerfully reinforced
by the belief Descartes fostered as the father of modern philos-
ophy that Latin tradition is a nest of errors that can be safely
ignored in beginning philosophy anew on the basis of individual
experience and modern scientific methods-has had a twofold
baneful influence on work in philosophy. On the one hand, it has
given us secular historians of philosophy who look back to the
Latin Age only insofar as it can be made to reflect the narrow
4. Conclusion
By a curious confluence of independent reasons, those scholars
interested in philosophy's history, both secular and religious,
have unwittingly conspired to neglect the key figures important
to the development of thought in the last centuries of the Latin
age. This neglect has been unfortunate for two reasons. First,
speculative thought in the closing Latin centuries saw powerful
developments in epistemological theory which resonate with the
central developments of postmodern contemporary thought.
Second, there is the truth of Gilson's analogy," according to
which history provides for the philosopher what the laboratory
provides for the scientist, namely, the arena in which the con-
sequences of ideas are played out.
Miller describes this idea that the work of philosophy must
proceed through a study of history in order to achieve its best
results as among" the most lasting lessons Foucault learned from
his teacher," Jean Hyppolite." In any event, it is one of the de-
fining ideas of postmodernism, and certainly an idea that makes
incumbent on us the proper investigation of philosophy's past, in
particular the late centuries of the Latin Age whose intellectual
34 See Jeffrey s. Coombs, "John Poinsot on How To Be, Know, and Love
a Nonexistent Possible," in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.
LXVIII, No. 3 (Summer 1994), 333-346.