Clarifications on the Formal Object of Logic

Clarifications on the Formal Object of Logic

The present text represents only a partial response to important concerns raised to me in private correspondence by Dr. Donald Boland, who (at least at the time of the writing of this essay) will be publishing a critique of a lecture that I gave on second intentions some years back. Dr. Boland, well along in his journey as a wayfarer on this mortal coil, is a former student of the great Fr. (often addressed as Dr. or “Doc”) Austin Woodbury, S.M., of Australia.¹ The proximate text that generated this interaction was a draft I had written some years ago concerning the formal object of logic. Eventually, this work was published in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly in 2019 as “Thomism and the Formal Object of Logic.” It is, however, only understandable in light of the 2017 ACPQ article “Beyond Non-Being: Thomistic Metaphysics on Second Intentions, Ens morale, and Ens artificiale.”

Something should be said about the genesis of both of these articles, if only to make clear their tone and their deficiencies. Both of them are connected to my final years in doctoral studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. The 2017 article represents a very groping attempt to articulate a metaphysical insight that I hope soon to have finally written in monograph form. Whether or not it sees the light of day in print is another affair. Because its particular—and perhaps peculiar—arguments go beyond the scope of the present question, I will leave it in the background. But I note that it represents an important reference point for a series of insights, which, at that time, were dawning on me but still groping for formulation.

The 2019 article was slightly different in ambition. It represents something of a digest of my dissertation. Generally speaking, I think that most dissertations should not be published. As the dear old Benedictine Fr. Sebastian Samay, O.S.B., told me many years ago: remember that your dissertation is your worst piece of work at that length because you’re just learning how to do it. There’s a lot of wisdom in this. But, nonetheless, most dissertations, if they are worthwhile at all, should attempt some kind of public expression. For my part, I made this expression in the aforementioned ACPQ article.

My dissertation itself was relatively straightforward. It had no ambition other than to propose a rereading of the Tractatus De secundis intentionibus by Hervaeus Natalis, O.P. (c. 1250/60–1323). Stylistically, I feel that the dissertation could have been written better, but at that time I was rather disenchanted with academia and, moreover, I did not receive a lot of interest from my dissertation director. So, somewhat at sea (but not totally lacking direction, I hasten to add, out of piety for a man whom I otherwise revere as a great scholastic mind, now deceased), I attempted to engage with the work of Hervaeus.

In the dissertation itself, the great “white whale” that I was after was a tendency of the literature discussing Hervaeus to focus on certain questions of philosophical psychology or mere history. What I wanted to show was how the entire treatise was traversed by one goal, one that is sufficiently obvious, in my opinion, when one heeds the overall trajectory of the work: to articulate the nature of second intentional relations, show their grounding on reality, and then argue for why these relations could function as the subject of a science (in the sense articulated by the Aristotelian tradition of the Posterior Analytics). In the end, that was really my only goal. The methods of the dissertation were partially historical, partially textual, and, I hope, through that process philosophical. Obviously, this is not my favorite manner of writing, but the method of exploring philosophical thought, precisely by exploring the history of philosophy, was the general approach of the Catholic University of America, at least at that time. I chose the particular topic because I actually wanted to find a topic in the world of Baroque scholasticism, but there were no faculty to direct such work at the time.

So, the 2019 article—which was a stabler version of the 2018 text read by Dr. Boland—served as a digest of this longer, somewhat more meandering project. In it, one still senses something of the dialectician and—let us admit it—academic who poses a history in order to “present something to think about.” Such an approach to thought has its uses, but it also is dangerous. In theology, it gives rise to the tendency to reduce sacra doctrina to an exercise in what Fr. Cajetan Cuddy has called “theologianology,” a study of thinkers and their thoughts about reality, not a study of reality itself. Philosophers are not exempt from this temptation.

My use of such a method was partially due to the training I received, but also was due to the desire of a newly minted PhD to avoid, perhaps, too clear a dicendum quod. Yet, of course, I knew that I was expressing a dicendum quod and it was this: even more than being a faithful interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, the later Thomist school’s position on the nature of logical science and the objects of its inquiry was true to reality. But I should have just written the article head on with what I thought at the time: John of St. Thomas was correct in these matters. However, because my dissertation forced me to systematically ignore such later thinkers, for a long time the shape of my argument did not include the Portuguese Scholastic. Eventually, his “successor” Antoine Goudin (1639–1695) became the protagonist for the “School”. However, I should have just openly discussed John. Today will be that day, but I must recognize certain points that have not been clear.

In my article, I defend the claim that it is metaphysically useful, and necessary to inquire about the status of the being of what the broad scholastic tradition came to call “second intentions.” At the time, I spoke generally of the need to metaphysically determine the “ontological” status of such second intentions. Thanks to its dubious origins and later uses, the word “ontology” is loaded and I should not have used it. Basically, this was the argument of the dissertation itself.

What do I mean by this? Well, later scholasticism eventually introduced a kind of final question into its metaphysical treatises. Admittedly, under the influence of Suárez, this treatise came to speak about “the shadow of being,” ens rationis. Basically, it’s the question of non-being and the various senses of non-being that are more or less founded upon reality. Consider the following questions: Does nothing exist? Do privations like “blindness” in an animal that should be seeing have any kind of positive being? What about pure-negations like “non-intellectual” when said of beings like oak trees, for which it is no deprivation to lack something (intelligence) which is not called for by the nature of an oak tree? And what do we say about certain things that are in our discourse such as “genus,” “species,” “argument,” etc.? How about seeming chimeras which, in fact, are possible existents, even if we only imagine them now (e.g. a gold mountain)?² What about truly chimeric chimeras like a “goat-stag”, which would be wholly goat and wholly stag, or a “square-circle”, both of which are unthinkable contradictions, never possible in existence, yet speakable? These various kinds of non-being³ are more or less real. And who but the metaphysician should treat such matters? It seems appropriate, therefore, that the various texts within the Aristotelian Metaphysics and its reception, touching on these questions, would be treated systematically somewhere in scholastic treatises of metaphysics.

In the dissertation, and the 2019 article, I very much emphasized that answering this question about “second intentions” is a metaphysical question. The strength of this assertion was doubtlessly due to the fact that I was fighting against a kind of “psychologizing” tendency in the Hervaeus literature. (The term “intention” seems to draw historians of thought and scholastics almost immediately into the questions about the mental “furniture” involved in the actualization of human intelligence, that is, the kind of topics that would be discussed in the De anima or the De anima et intellectu treatises of later Peripatetics and Neo-Platonist Aristotelianism. Modern obsessions over “epistemology” no doubt lead to some of this temptation.) I still stand by the claim that this is a legitimate thing to do. Not all non-being is equal. Various “beings of reason” have more or less foundation in reality, and one must ask about this, for it bears on the being and non-being of such “things.”

Even at that time, I had a sense that this claim put me in the camp of those who speak of “supertranscendentals.”⁴ What I am saying about being indicates that we can speak of ens naturae and ens rationis by way of proper proportionality. This is a controversial claim, but I most definitely do not take the position of those in the more or less Scotist line that would claim that this is a kind of univocal unity between these two modes of being. In any event, dealing with this question is important for the metaphysician.⁵ I see no other discipline which can answer these questions, precisely because it falls to metaphysics to order the status of beings in their full latitude. However, I could also imagine a kind of propaedeutic handling of these questions in logic itself, especially in so far as logic is a kind of wisdom of the “noetic” order—it studies all things, not as they are in themselves but as they are known. It falls to a science at least to explain its own subject matter and its formal character, for otherwise, the science in question would be mute about its own status. (Thus, John of St. Thomas opens his so-called “material logic” with such considerations.⁶)

In any event, I’m not looking to solve that problem today. Rather, I would like to attempt to articulate what I think is the object attained by logic, being a little clearer about the distinctions between material and formal object, as well as the subject of logic. At the time of my 2019 writing, I had not thought about these matters sufficiently, and I now find it necessary to clarify my terminology.

To begin with, there is the question of “material object.” Following Simon and John Cahalan, I hold that in most uses “material object” is synonymous with thing or res (sometimes, I will call this “reality”) as distinguished from the same thing considered as the terminus of a power, above all a knowing or appetitive power. This latter case is the “object,” not in the sense of a purely mind-independent entity but, rather, a thing as “objected,” as set before a power. So, we must recognize, therefore, that at this stage the term “object” presupposes that of thing. Thus, the object is never a kind of screen in the way of the thing. It is the very thing, but precisely as “objected” to a power.⁷

As is already evident, the word object is therefore somewhat ambiguous. The modern use of the word “object” is almost always in the register of meaning what the scholastics would have called “thing” or material object (in the aforementioned sense). But what is more, the term object already raises a further question: we are speaking about different faculties which have a kind of distinction among them. The maxim of St. Thomas is very important: acts, habits, and powers are specified by their objects.⁸ They are not specified by the things but, rather, by their objects. Thus, it became normal for Thomists to say they are specified by their formal objects or by their objects “quo” and “quod.”

Let’s take the classic example of colored surface, as the formal object of sight as a specific power, an example used by Dr. Boland. He is correct that very often scholastics—and I’m sure I have been guilty of this⁹—speak of “color” and not “colored” surface as the formal object of sight. Failing this important specification, one risks a tendency to “peel off” color by itself in a kind of abstraction. But what sight attains is not color. It is the colored body. If this were not the case, sight would not attain the “common sensibles” (which are sensible per se, though not proper sensibles), nor, through them, what is sensible only per accidens. Thus, Dr. Boland helpfully annotates the object of sight as follows:

To this end, translating and nuancing some of the language of the Thomist tradition, we should say that the colored surface is the formal object quod, the formal object that is attained by the power of sight.¹⁰ The same tradition would ask, however, a further question: by what is this object manifested? The answer is: light. Light is not the object of sight. It is, however, what enables the attainment of the “object quod”.

In intellectual matters, things get more complicated because there can be a kind of further plurification of the formal object “quo”. The classic example which gave rise to this distinction was theological science.¹¹ What do we do with a science that is truly supernatural (i.e., having the Triune Deity as its object in some way) but which specifies a distinct habitus from infused faith? Here, the question of the “light under which” or the “object quo” is very important, for the “light” of faith is the supernatural attestation of God supernaturally revealing, the “light” of theology is classically said to be “virtual revelation,”¹² and we could also continue by considering the way that theological hope and charity each attain the Triune Deity but as my supernatural good truly attainable because of the Divine Omnipotence and the supernatural good, infinitely loveable in Himself. In each of these cases, “what is attained” remains the same: the triune deity. However, He is attained as supernaturally believed; as reasoned about through faith-illuminated discursive reasoning; as infinitely hoped in as my attainable good; as infinitely loved for what He is.

In my 2019 article, I did not deploy this distinction, and yet it is very important for understanding what is at stake in the claim that I am making. What is more, even had I deployed this distinction I would have had a tendency to peel off the formal object quod and treat it as merely the formal aspect (as though to say “sight is specified by color”, rather than by “colored body, viewed under light” as its adequate object¹³). Here, Dr. Boland has placed his finger on a very important ambiguity in my 2019.

So, then, the question becomes “what is the formal object” of the specific habitus that is logic? Here, I will admit that I don’t do the legwork of proving that Thomas seems to cohere with the Thomists like John of St. Thomas or Goudin. (His relationship to Hervaeus is more fraught, although I remain convinced that Hervaeus is useful on these points. But, I will not readdress that here.) A comparison of the painstaking textual work of Fr. Schmidt (The Domain of Logic According to Thomas Aquinas) and the arguments of John of St. Thomas reveals this, I believe.¹⁴ This tradition—in arguments that seem solid to me and in ways that also seem textually founded on Thomas himself—defend the claim that what logic studies is “being of reason” but not of any kind indiscriminately, but rather precisely the particular “being of reason” that is second intentional being: those relations of reason that are formed by the intellect in its reasoning. One might say, as John of St. Thomas repeats so many times (in q. 1, a. 3 of the Material Logic): these second intentions are the order of objects as objects naturally inquired into by the speculative intellect, not the order of extramental things (for that order and those relations exist prior to being known), nor the order among our concepts as qualities¹⁵ (for those too are “natural” beings with their own order), but rather precisely the order of objects as objects, manifested by these concepts.¹⁶

Very openly he states that second intentions are the formal object quod, not the object quo:

[Second intention] is the formal object of logic as aspect which. In many cases the demonstrations of logic are designed to show that a second intention has a certain property; for instance, logic demonstrates that the universal has the property of predicability. Therefore the second intention is the thing known by the science of logic and pertains to the aspect which is known. This is why St. Thomas calls these intentions the subject of logic (Com. On Met. 4. les. 4. Cathala 574)-it is clear that the subject of a science is the thing which is known. The aspect under which is determined, in logic as well as in the other sciences, by abstraction from matter. Abstraction brings about the diverse systems of intelligibility within which a thing can be known in diverse ways, according as it is, in diverse fashions, disengaged from matter. More on this in philosophy of nature and in the last question on the Posterior Analytics (q. 27). The object of logic, which is a being of reason, enjoys a state of abstraction similar to that which characterizes metaphysics. It is an abstraction from all matter, achieved, not by purifying actuality from materiality, but by denying all matter.¹⁷

I’ll be honest, in line with what I have written elsewhere, the portion here concerning the object “quod” seems incontrovertible to me, for the demonstrations in logic are concerned with per se attributions of definitions, properties, etc. of second intentions themselves. (E.g., “Genera have a greater extension than species.” “Ultimately, there are three species of per se predication.” Etc.) In logic courses—not as a sociological reality in universities (because, there, logic is taught in haphazard and often-problematic ways) but in classic scholastic texts of logic from Peter of Spain onward—one teaches the nature of definitions, statements / propositions, and syllogisms. And if we do so scientifically, we do so in accord with the scientific demands of the Posterior Analytics itself.¹⁸ In other words, what we study in logic are these various orderings of known things.

Let us consider, however, the object quo. I admit that this seems less systematically developed when I look at John of St. Thomas. Yet, one gets a hint at something very important that now stands out to me, pursuant to Dr. Boland’s communication. In q. 27, a.1, he writes, in passing, while discussing subdivisions in the so-called “third degree of abstraction”:

In logic, metaphysics, and theology, there is abstraction from both sensible and intelligible matter on the part of the term from which, but the modes of immateriality attained by these sciences are diverse. Theology considers God himself as known through the divine light of virtual revelation; metaphysics [considers everything it considers] under the first and supreme aspect of being, as abstracting both from createdness and uncreatedness. Logic considers [second] intentions as founded upon the objects known to our intellect; of themselves, these intentions have but a negative immateriality, since they are nothing real.¹⁹

It is a rather terse text, but there is something very important here concerning the nature of the “light under which” or “object quo” of logic: logic considers second intentions as founded upon the objects known to our intellect. Or to put it another way: the quo of logic is negative abstraction from all matter (= 3^rd degree of abstraction, generically considered in regard to the terminus a quo of abstraction) as exercised upon intentions considered in their founded-ness on objects known (= the specific kind of foundation, however, upon presupposed first intentional “materiality”). In short: this ultimate foundation is upon first intentions.²⁰ These are, if you will, the material principle of the formal object of logic. Such first intentions are not only simple concepts but are also statements (either immediate or syllogistic conclusions) expressing some simple essence or complex affirmation (or denial) about reality: man, able to laugh, rational, cultural, political; man is rational; every man is rational, every rational being is political, therefore man is political. And this does not provide a complete catalogue of such first intentions. For example, in contingent realities (whether objectively or subjectively contingent²¹), we use statements and draw conclusions that are not subject to scientific certainty. Contingent matters are subject to probable certainty, to the second intentional relations studied in dialectical logic. (Something similar could be said, arguably, for rhetoric and poetic logic, as well as sophistical matter.²²) The logical relations which are studied—the formal aspect of the formal object quod—are intimately dependent upon the “matter” in which these relations are found (a “matter” from which logic cannot abstract).

This leads me to say, briefly and in the hope of clarity, the following:

• The ultimate material object of logic is any reality that is potentially knowable, whether natural, moral, artistic, or even logical

• The formal object quod of logic is:

  • Formally, second intentions

  • But as ordering the structure of things as known (=objects of knowledge, first intentions, variously serving as the matter of second intentions).

• The formal object quo of logic seems to be

  • The light of considering second intentions as founded upon the objects known to our intellect (and thus not able to abstract therefrom)

Moreover, considering the intentions actually studied in logic as a science, I would say

• Its subject²³ of attribution is reasoning, just as movable body is in natural philosophy—everything in logic is ordered to the discussion of reasoning.

• And the principal subject, somewhat like Pure Act as the capstone of metaphysics, is demonstration as the most perfect reasoning

I would like to thank Dr. Boland for furnishing this chance to clarify my thoughts on these matters. For further information on my thoughts concerning second intentions, see the six article series: https://www.athomist.com/articles/tag/Second+Intentions.

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1. For some information on Fr. Woodbury, see the work of Dr. Boland himself: Rev. Fr. Austin M. Woodbury, SM, PhD, STD and the Aquinas Academy (1945 – 1975) (En Route Books and Media, 2024).↩︎

2. This example, often used by scholastics, is rather important. Very often, scholastic authors would present this as a kind of impossible being. But, as Yves Simon has noted on various occasions, one must distinguish these kinds of pseudo-chimeras from chimeras in the pure sense. For one example of a text where he addresses this, see note 16 on page 588 in The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas:

   These examples are current in scholastic literature; they are not unobjectionable. A golden mountain is a thing which, so far as we know, does not exist, but there is not any reason why it should be held incapable of real existence. A chimera is usually represented as a she-monster made of incongruous parts (Webster). It is a being of reason if and only if the incongruity of the parts is such as to destroy the possibility of their existing together. The unicorn appears frequently in the works of modern logicians: it cannot be proved to be a being of reason, since we have no way to prove that an animal related to the horse but having one horn cannot exist except in the mind. A safe example of being of reason without foundation in the real would be the undine such as it is defined in the celebrated romance of De la Motte Fouqué: it is a creature that looks like a woman, talks like a woman, feels like a woman, but has no soul. Another clear example is the Yahoo of Swift: a brute in human form.

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3. In a somewhat whimsical article “The Metaphysics of Non-Being”, I discussed some of these matters in more detail.↩︎

4. I have written elsewhere about this in “To Supertranscendentality and Back Again.”↩︎

5. Similarly, the question of ens intentionale, ens morale, and ens artificiale are as well, as discussed in the 2017 article and in various articles that I have published both in peer reviewed sources and in drafts on To Be a Thomist.↩︎

6. I say “so-called” only because his coverage of the whole of material logic is partial. He is concerned with scientific matter above all. He does not, however, systematically treat of dialectical, rhetorical, poetic, or sophistical matter.↩︎

7. I take this point from Maritain’s 3^rd chapter in the Degrees of Knowledge.↩︎

8. For a discussion of this principle, see Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace, trans. Dominican Sisters of Corpus Christi Monastery (St. Louis: Herder, 1952), 467–80. ↩︎

9. I wonder whether even the great Fr. Wallace is guilty of this in the following passage of his The Role of Demonstration in Moral Theology, p. 4:

   When a psychological analysis of any act of knowing is made, the act itself is said to be specified by its object, because this is what confronts the mind, or is “thrown against” (= ob-iectum) the mind when something is actually known. In this object, St. Thomas makes the distinction between what is formal and what is material: the former is the aspect under which the object is related to the knowing faculty, while the latter is that which underlies this aspect. In the classical example of the faculty of sight, the formal object is thus said to be color or the colored, while the material object is said to be the body in which the color is seen. And the formal object is further distinguished into two aspects: that which is attained by the knowing faculty, or the objectum formale quod, and that by which it is attained, or the objectum formale quo. Again in the example of sight, the formal object quod is said to be color, as that which is seen as such, while the formal object quo is said to be light, as that by which color is made visible, and therefore able to be attained by the sense of sight.

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10. Here, I do wonder if I have hitherto been insufficiently sensitive to some shortcomings of speaking of this “formal object which” (is attained) using the Cajetannian language of ratio formalis obiecti ut res. Perhaps… At the very least, the “ratio formalis” seems to focus only on what is formal in the formal object mentioned heretofore. This is part of what orients Dr. Boland’s concerns with my essay.↩︎

11. One will see this in Cajetan’s text in a number of articles in ST I, q.1; the language I am deploying above is drawn, however, from the particular reception of this distinction in Garrigou-Lagrange.↩︎

12. Although, as I have noted in other places, this in fact designates only part of the domain of discursive theology.↩︎

13. I cannot here lay out the senses of proper, common (mediate and extensive), proportionate (=proper + mediate) and adequate (= proportionate + extensive) objects. On this, see Austin Woodbury, Natural Philosophy: Psychology (St. Vincent College, Latrobe, PA: The John N. Deely and Anthony F. Russell Collection, Latimer Family Library), esp. nos. 902, 904, and 920↩︎

14. I will here set aside my methodological concerns regarding the work of Fr. Schmidt. On the whole it is a very admirable work. I think that perhaps in my writing, my comments have led to some misunderstanding about what I think about his methods.↩︎

15. The jargon of his time and of many later scholastics would be “as subjective qualities”↩︎

16. In particular, see pages 29 and 31 of the translation by Simon et al.↩︎

17. Ibid., pp. 25–26.↩︎

18. Obviously, this can seem to introduce a kind of paradox where the person who is demonstrating in logic depends upon logic itself. Some of these issues are taken up in the first question of the Material Logic as well as its fifth.↩︎

19. Ibid., p. 562.↩︎

20. First intentions are somewhat of “two-faced.” They are objects, which are things, but precisely as known. To be an intention already indicates that something is known or is a thing which is an object. I discuss this at length in “A Prolegomenon Concerning the Objectivity of Second Intentions, Part 2.”↩︎

21. I attempt to discuss some of this briefly in my article, “An Introduction to Dialectical Logic: The Recovery of Probable Certainty as the Labor of the Human Intellect.” In particular see the Gardeil text that I cite therein.↩︎

22. I am here, however, setting aside the question of grammar. This is, of course, interesting but outside of our scope.↩︎

23. Woodbury here says “object”, though I think that “subject” is perhaps better, because we are here referring to that to which various predicates are attributed.↩︎