The Human Person: What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer Modern Psychology
Author: Spalding, Thomas L.; Stedman, James M.; Gagné, Christina L.; Kostelecky, Matthew
Date: 2019-12-13T08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Psychology; Cognitive Psychology & Cognition; Philosophy; Mind & Body; personality; History; Metaphysics; General; Science; Psychedelic Library
Description: This book introduces the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the human person to a contemporary audience, and reviews the ways in which this view could provide a philosophically sound foundation for modern psychology. The book presents the current state of psychology and offers critiques of the current philosophical foundations. In its presentation of the fundamental metaphysical commitments of the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, it places the human being within the broader understanding of the world. Chapters discuss the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of human and non-human cognition as well as the rela
Publisher: Springer

Thomas L. Spalding, James M. Stedman, Christina L. Gagné and Matthew Kostelecky

The Human Person

What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer Modern Psychology

Thomas L. Spalding

Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

James M. Stedman

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

Christina L. Gagné

Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Matthew Kostelecky

St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-33911-1e-ISBN 978-3-030-33912-8
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8

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Preface

This book is something of an oddity—it is the outcome of a collaboration among two cognitive psychologists, a clinical psychologist, and a philosopher (an unusual grouping by pretty much anyone’s standards) trying to come to a common understanding of how psychology as a discipline can be unified such that the discipline provides a full picture of the human. Each of us, on their own and for their own reasons, had become interested in the philosophical tradition associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (and others), not just as an historical school to be studied, but as a living philosophical approach that could be applied to particular questions and issues in psychology. As we each, and in various combinations, worked on such particular questions, it seemed (to each of us) that the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition offered much that we felt was missing in modern psychology more generally. Writing this book has only reinforced our belief that A-T philosophy does indeed have much to offer, but also that psychology has much to offer in further developing a living, contemporary, A-T philosophy.

Given the nature of our main claim (i.e., that psychology would benefit by taking A-T philosophy seriously), it is inevitable that the book would appear, in some sense, highly critical of modern psychology. But, we are far from the first to note the general lack of unity in psychology and the weaknesses to which this lack of unity gives rise. Indeed, these critiques around the lack of unity in psychology arise every few years, with greater or lesser angst, and have from the very early years of the discipline. The critique has rarely been followed by any action toward more unity. In our view, the problem is that the critiques, important as they are, are often too focused on psychology, whereas we believe that the more fundamental problem is that the disunity in psychology arises out of conflicting philosophical underpinnings in different areas of the discipline. In addition, unlike some historical attempts at unifying psychology, we have been very careful about two issues. The first is that much of the day-to-day work of psychologists is relatively insulated from the philosophical underpinnings of the field. As such, most empirical psychological work is not impugned by our critique. Second, we have been at great pains to try to be clear that, in our view, unifying psychology at a philosophical level (making use of A-T concepts) extends to all areas of psychology: We are not interested in “ruling out” any area of psychology. We are particularly interested in avoiding many of the “science vs. not science” arguments that have roiled psychology since its earliest days. We see A-T philosophy as offering the best basis for doing so.

We want to be clear that it is the potential that we see in a more unified psychology that is the main motivation of our work: If we did not believe in the importance of psychology as a discipline, we would not have bothered with writing this book. Our critique and proposal for unity is only worthwhile, in our own eyes, because we truly believe that psychology—all of psychology—holds real importance in the modern world. Failure to understand the truly human will be a failure to solve human problems.

We hope that many people will find this book of interest: Psychologists, whether academic or professional, philosophers of mind, philosophers interested in the A-T tradition, cognitive scientists, students of psychology or philosophy or of allied fields. With such a broad audience in mind, we have intentionally eschewed some of the more typical trappings of a philosophy or psychology monograph: We have used no footnotes and have kept our citations to a (relative) minimum. We do not pretend to have presented any area of psychological literature in detail, nor have we presented A-T ideas in anything like the level of detail that one would expect to find in a dedicated philosophy book. In addition, we have been highly selective in presenting aspects of both A-T philosophy and psychology: We do not pretend that we have laid out every area of psychology that could benefit from thinking about A-T philosophy, or every area of A-T philosophy that might have important application to psychology. Instead, we have tried to identify and show some possibilities for the next generation of scholars to develop, while trying to present the A-T tradition in just enough detail for even quite philosophically naïve readers to understand and see the kinds of connections we believe exist. Indeed, every chapter here could probably be developed into a book in its own right. It is our hope that they will.

Thomas L. Spalding
James M. Stedman
Christina L. Gagné
Matthew Kostelecky

Edmonton, AB, CanadaSan Antonio, TX, USAEdmonton, AB, CanadaEdmonton, AB, Canada

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to theJournal of Mind and Behavior for permission to use elements of Stedman, Kostelecky, Spalding, and Gagné (2017) in Chap. 3 . The section “A-T Cognition” was adapted, in part, from the section “The Aristotelean-Thomistic Philosophical Model”, pp. 195–200, in Stedman, J. M., Kostelecky, M., Spalding, T. L., & Gagné, C. L. (2017). Animal cognition: An Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective.Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 38 , 193–214.

Contents

1 Introduction
1

Current State of Psychology
2

Unified Discipline
5

Philosophical Foundations
8

Why A-T Philosophical Psychology?
10

Science and the A-T Tradition
12

Overview of Chapters
14

References
16

2 The Metaphysical Foundations of the Human Person
19

Causality and Consistency Between Metaphysics and the Account of the Human Being
20

How to Talk About Similarities and Differences Between Humans and Non-human Things
24

A Schematic Account of the Powers of Living Things
26

Chapter Summary
31

References
32

3 Human and Non-human Cognition
33

A-T Cognition
34

The Object of Cognition
34

A-T Philosophy and Epistemology
35

Senses, External and Internal
38

Human Cognition
42

Modern Psychology’s Approach to Cognition
50

Behaviorism
51

Computationalism/Functionalism
53

Chapter Summary
57

References
59

4 Embodied and Humanistic Views of Cognition
61

Philosophical Developments
62

Relation to A-T Approach
64

Humanistic Psychology
65

Relation of Humanistic Psychology to the A-T Approach
67

Embodiment
68

Physical Environment and the Body
69

Social and Cultural Environment
70

Relation of Embodiment to A-T Approach
71

A-T and Modern Cognition
73

What Can the A-T Approach Contribute to Modern Approaches?
73

What Can Modern Approaches Contribute to the A-T Approach?
76

Chapter Summary
78

References
78

5 Emotion and Cognition
81

A-T Emotion
81

Appetitive Versus Cognitive Powers
82

Classification Scheme
84

Interim Summary
86

Relation of Mind and Body Implied by A-T
88

Modern Psychology
89

Theories of Emotion
89

Cognition and Emotion
95

Emotions and Flourishing
96

Chapter Summary
99

References
101

6 Human Flourishing
103

A-T Approach
104

Virtues
105

Development of Virtues
110

A-T Summary
113

Modern Psychology
113

Human Lifespan Development
114

Moral Development
120

Positive Psychology
124

Chapter Summary
125

References
126

7 The Human in Society
131

A-T Approach
132

Friendship
132

Politics
134

Rhetoric
135

Law
136

Summary of the A-T Approach
137

Modern Social Psychology
138

Social Cognition
139

Social Affect
140

The Self
141

Attitudes
142

Conformity
144

Prejudice
145

Competition and Cooperation
147

Summary of Modern Social Psychology
148

Chapter Summary
148

References
150

8 Summary and Conclusions
155

Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Science
155

Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Psychology
157

Understanding Psychology as Science
158

Psychology as a Coherent Field of Study
159

Integrating Psychology with Other Disciplines
161

Developing the A-T View
162

What Happened to A-T Psychology?
162

How Can Psychology Develop the A-T Approach?
165

Conclusion
167

References
167

Index
171

About the Authors

Thomas L. Spalding

is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on the psychology of concepts and the relation between the human conceptual and language systems.

James M. Stedman

is Clinical Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He has written on an array of topics in psychology, including child clinical pathology and treatment, education in clinical and counseling psychology, and application of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy to modern psychology.

Christina L. Gagné

is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta whose work focuses on the human conceptual system and compositionality/productivity within the conceptual system and language system.

Matthew Kostelecky

is an Associate Professor, Philosophy, at St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, who works on the history of philosophy with a particular focus on medieval metaphysics and cognitive theory.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_1

1. Introduction

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceMetaphysicsCausalityHuman person

For many readers, it might be surprising to see a new book arguing that philosophers such as Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas could have anything useful to say about modern psychology. Modern psychology is, if nothing else, an extremely broad and complicated discipline, with a wide range of empirical findings and theoretical hypotheses and explanations, with many more being developed and published every day. In this book, we do not pretend that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas directly offer a set of empirical results or competing modern psychological theories. Instead, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas offer something very different: an integrated philosophical vision of the human person.

Modern psychology, for all its strengths, is notoriously difficult to integrate into an overall understanding of the human person due to all the various subfields and differing theoretical frameworks that comprise it. Indeed, as we will see, the visions of the human person offered in modern psychology differ dramatically, and perhaps incoherently rather than complementarily, from area to area of the discipline. The Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) vision of the human person, on the other hand, is integrated and coherent: The A-T approach to understanding the human is driven by a few basic metaphysical principles, and the resulting understandings of various aspects of the human (e.g., emotion and cognition) are much more closely and clearly related than in modern psychology, because those aspects are understood in terms of principles in common. In addition, because the human and non-human are to be understood in terms of the same metaphysical principles, the A-T approach situates the human person in a particular way with respect to the rest of nature, emphasizing both similarity and difference. As such, this view has much to offer in terms of providing a useful framework for evaluating and guiding psychological theories across a range of areas within psychology.

We will argue that these characteristics of the A-T vision of the human person provide a way of understanding the human person in an integrated fashion, without attempting to replace, displace, or limit the kinds of empirical work ongoing in modern psychology. At the same time, though it does not challenge the empirical aspects of modern psychology, the A-T vision of the human person presents an enormous challenge to the underlying, and often rather implicit, philosophical approaches to modern psychology. Rather than replacing existing theories, this approach offers a way of enhancing current approaches. As a result, the A-T vision of the human does lead to different ways of thinking about what the empirical work of modern psychology can tell us about the human person and even about what questions, even empirical questions, should be asked, and how.

In this chapter, we will review the current state of psychology and its philosophical foundations and show why the discipline is so difficult to unify. We will then briefly discuss how the A-T approach to the human person can serve as a framework that allows an underlying unity even among the many different approaches represented in modern psychology. We will then deal with some objections that might arise at the very notion of adopting an “old” “pre-scientific” approach to the human person, like the A-T approach. Finally, we will provide an overview of the rest of the book and the specific topics that are covered.

Current State of Psychology

Any undergraduate student of psychology, at the end of their studies, knows that there is no coherent, understandable picture of psychology as a single discipline. Indeed, reading any modern introductory psychology textbook is enough to see this. It is not just that different areas of psychology emphasize different aspects or approaches, but that they have fundamentally different, and incompatible, philosophical commitments, although those commitments are rarely described. Even though the philosophical commitments are rarely described, and even more rarely seriously discussed or interrogated, the differences are stark. Henriques (2011) provides a good discussion of this issue. In this section, we will briefly recap the deep divisions within psychology, and how these divisions affect the prospects for a unified discipline, as well as discussing what actually drives these divisions. To foreshadow a bit, the divisions are primarily driven not by the science or by the actual empirical work of modern psychology, but by the often-unrealized philosophical commitments in the different areas.

It is something of a cliché that psychologists from different areas of the discipline are like blindfolded people feeling different parts of an elephant’s body and coming to radically different notions of the overall nature of the animal that they are feeling. We would argue, though, that the cliché situation is actually far less troubling than the actual situation of psychology. For one thing, the blindfolded people feeling the elephant are primarily responding to the empirical information brought to them by their sense of touch. In psychology, though, it is not really the case that the empirical data itself directly provides such misleading views of the human. Rather, it is the theoretical and indeed philosophical approaches of the psychologists in the different areas that at the least guide, and may in some cases determine, the perception and interpretation of the empirical data.

We should also note that difficulties stemming from the lack of an underlying philosophical psychology are not a new issue for psychology. Rather, it is one that arises throughout the history of psychology. For example, Mercier (1918) focusses on the ways in which early modern philosophy (particularly in the unbridgeable chasm that Descartes interposed between mind and body) had created, within psychology, completely incommensurable versions of materialism and rationalism as competing visions of the human. Indeed, this division internal to psychology was a major focus even of the first edition of his Origins of Contemporary Psychology, written in the mid-1890s. Clearly, these problems were seen prior to much of the specialization that has taken place within psychology. Hence, the philosophical problems of psychology cannot be caused by the differences among the various empirical areas of modern psychology. Rather, the different empirical areas have largely developed out of different philosophical assumptions about the nature of the human and the relation of the human to the rest of the world.

What then are these divisions in psychology? First, of course, there is a major division in that psychology is both a professional practice and a scientific/scholarly discipline. This introduces somewhat differing goals or ends of the study of psychology and, hence, different sets of assumptions about what is important. Interestingly, although the professional practice and the scientific/scholarly parts of the disciplines are often in contrast with each other, that contrast does not, in general, guarantee any internal coherence or consistency within each part. Instead, the confusions and divisions of psychology are prevalent both within the professional practice of psychology and within the scientific/scholarly discipline. Thus, this division adds an additional layer of complexity to the discipline as a whole.

Second, there are many approaches to psychology that play out across both the professional practice and the scientific/scholarly discipline. We will not, of course, attempt to lay out every different approach to psychology, but will briefly discuss a few of the major approaches. It is important to recognize from the start that a large part of the difficulty of psychology as a unified discipline is precisely that the different empirical approaches all have value—it is not that some are obviously right and others wrong. In that case, the difficulty would be to identify and eliminate the ones that are wrong, which is quite a different issue that the one actually faced by psychology. As Henriques (2011, p. 9) says, “… psychology is currently an ill-defined discipline consisting of a group of mid-level theories, perspectives, and schools of thought that each articulate some basic truths about the human condition but are organized in a manner that makes them compete against one another instead of being harmoniously and coherently interrelated.”

Importantly, many of these approaches were developed precisely in contradistinction to preceding or concurrent approaches. Some of the approaches are or were more important in the practice, some in the scientific/scholarly part of the discipline. Some approaches have migrated between practice and science over the years. Psychodynamic approaches, though somewhat out of favor currently, were both historically important to psychology’s development and still make up, perhaps, the bulk of what non-psychologists think psychology is about. Behaviorist approaches developed in contrast to both the overly mentalistic previous work of structuralists and functionalists, but also in severe contrast to the psychodynamic approaches. In turn, existentialist and humanistic approaches arose in contrast to the overly mechanistic and deterministic aspects of the behaviorist approaches. Similarly, the cognitive approaches arose (again) largely in reaction to the behaviorists “ruling out” of anything smacking of the mental, the evolutionary (and neuroscientific) approaches arose against the non-physical abstractness of the cognitivists, and cultural approaches arose in contrast to the almost exclusive focus on the individual (particularly within western culture) as the foundational unit of analysis in other approaches. Critically, the philosophical problem(s) of psychology is not so much that empirical work in these different approaches tell us different things about the human. Rather, it is that the philosophical assumptions behind the approaches virtually guarantee different answers to questions about the nature of the human, because those assumptions dictate different methods, different goals, and even different questions entirely.

Henriques (2011, Chap. 2) provides a very good review of the many philosophical problems that arise within psychology and contribute to the lack of unity in the discipline. He divides the problems into six different kinds of philosophical problems: (1) the substitution of method for coherent topic/problems/questions; (2) problems of definition and subject matter; (3) problems specifically in philosophy of mind , brain, and behavior; (4) problems of epistemology, mission, and values; (5) problems of disconnected domains of causality; and (6) problems of proliferation. We will not attempt to cover all of these issues here, of course. However, there are several that are important for our purposes.

First, there is the issue of substituting method for content. It has long been recognized that the scientific method is the pre-eminent way to learn about the physical world. However, there is a danger in transforming that method into a metaphysics. That is, although the scientific method is an excellent way to discover true things about the physical world, it does not, in and of itself, indicate that it is the only way to truth, or that anything that is not amenable to the method cannot be known, and so on. Scientism, this idea that science is the only way to truth and that anything not amenable to scientific investigation is not real, is a constant (philosophical) danger throughout the sciences (see, e.g., Robinson & Williams, 2014, for a recent discussion of the critical role of Scientism in modern thought). Psychology, early on, faced severe temptations in this regard, because psychology, as a rather late purported entrant into the field of sciences, was very tempted to pursue a simplistic imitation of the physical sciences as a way of guaranteeing its institutional separation from philosophy. Indeed, psychology is still highly tempted by the reflected glory of the other sciences. Thus, for example, psychologists were far more tempted by positivist philosophies than were the other sciences, because positivism was (briefly) a hot topic in physics at a critical time when psychology was attempting to become more “scientific.” We will argue that a philosophy that is capable of underpinning all of psychology must avoid these kinds of temptations, while also recognizing the importance of matching the method to the questions critical to the discipline (which will often, but not always, mean the scientific method being applied to psychological questions).

Second, psychology faces intransigent problems of philosophy of mind , brain, and behavior. Psychologists would, of course, deny that they are Cartesians, yet the field is riven by differences between Cartesian alternatives—totally mechanistic physical nature versus a special “thinking stuff” oddly untethered from anything physical. The different areas of psychology often take very different positions on fundamental questions of metaphysics and epistemology. Yet, we will argue later that at least some of these differences need not arise, if one squarely rejects the whole of the Cartesian worldview. Unfortunately, however, although psychologists often deny that they are Cartesian, they often still accept one or the other sides of the Cartesian dualism (e.g., neuroscientists are very often subscribers to a very Cartesian mechanistic view, while phenomenological psychologists are very often subscribers—though they may not realize this—to a development from the Cartesian notion of the completely non-physical human substance) (see for example Dawson, 2013).

Third, there are differences among areas of psychology in terms of domains of causality. For example, are various patterns of behavior caused by evolution or social roles? Is an inference caused by physical changes in the brain or by logical patterns? In brief, the answers to these questions are “yes.” Evolution and social roles, physical changes and logical patterns play causal roles. The problem for psychology, however, is that (a) the causal roles seem to be very different from each other and (b) the kinds of causal activities cannot be coherently integrated. One of the causes of this problem is that modern psychology, like most modern disciplines, engages only with a particular, and limited, understanding of causality, per se. To anticipate a bit, the A-T approach maintains Aristotle’s four-cause analysis (Final, Formal, Material, and Efficient), while modern psychology, following other modern sciences, attempts to pitch all its explanations in terms of Efficient causality (see Chap. 2).

Critically, Henriques (2011) ends his discussion of the philosophical problems of psychology by pointing out that there is an underlying problem, which is that psychology, however inchoately defined, is concerned with the understanding of the human, and that this understanding requires the physical, biological, and social sciences as well as the humanities. Thus, we see that to underpin a unified psychology, we will require a unified philosophy, capable of being applied across the issues that arise in the physical, biological, and social sciences, as well as the humanities. More specialized philosophical positions, even if they avoid some of the specific philosophical problems that currently bedevil psychology, will only reinforce the divisions that already exist.

Unified Discipline

One of the primary aims of this book is to demonstrate that the A-T approach can help provide a unified understanding of the human. It is important to understand that the degree of fragmentation in psychology is actually not mirrored in all other sciences. Psychologists sometimes claim that increased fragmentation is a necessary consequence of the advance of science, but as Henriques (2011) points out in some detail, the other sciences, despite longer histories of development, and at least arguably more “advances,” have far more unified characters than does psychology. Henriques (2011, p. 3) puts it this way, “It is true that there are many disputes in physics and biology, but what makes these qualitatively different from the foundational issues in psychology is that there is a general agreement about the major organizing theories and concepts. Modern physics, for example, is grounded in quantum mechanics and general relativity, and modern biology is organized by natural selection, genetics, and cellular theory. In contrast, there is no generally accepted framework in psychology, but instead profound disagreement, confusion, and almost limitless opinions about the foundational issues.”

What is the value of a unified discipline of psychology? Put differently, what is the cost of fragmentation? There are two general approaches to these questions. First, there are many pragmatic advantages to having a unified discipline. A unified field, a field that can convincingly and accurately describe itself in relatively simple and coherent terms, is a field that will have more impact. In the case of psychology, for example, the other social sciences would seemingly have much to gain from psychology. Yet, if a person from another discipline wanted to know how to apply psychology to their own discipline what would they do? They would first have to identify the correct area of psychology to apply. But to do this, they would also have to rule out the approaches of the other areas of psychology. In general, severe fragmentation makes it much more difficult for others to take advantage of the riches of psychology. This, in turn, makes psychology, as a discipline, less influential in the broader society.

Second, although the pragmatic argument above is important, we believe that the more important effect of fragmentation is the inability of psychologists to readily learn from each other, to work together, to understand psychology more broadly, to integrate the huge number of empirical facts that have been collected over the last hundred years or so. Imagine yourself to be a psychologist in a particular area of the discipline. How often can you make use of any empirical work from a different area of the discipline? How often can you even be sure that you have an appropriate interpretation of a given piece of empirical work from a different area of the discipline? Now, of course, we do not expect that a common philosophical framework will automatically make a person in one area an expert in all areas of the discipline, but it would at least provide some guidance in terms of how to understand work from other areas.

Presuming then that a unified discipline of psychology is to be desired, what is required for a unified discipline of psychology? Does psychology need a “grand theory” that spans the entire discipline? A Freud or a Skinner who can extrapolate from their own particular area to cover all the other areas? Someone to “explain away” all that seems different across the different areas of psychology, and to tell all other psychologists what to investigate and how, what theoretical constructs are allowable, who and what “counts” as “real psychology”? NO. It is critically important that psychology not attempt to move to a “unified discipline” by getting rid of the parts of the discipline that do not fit one particular approach. The push to move all of psychology into a behaviorist framework during the middle of the twentieth century was a clear example of this kind of attempt. Such an attempt is not at all what we have in mind. Henriques (2011, p. 5) had this to say on this issue: “And yet, despite the fact that there are compelling pragmatic and political reasons for moving toward a more unified approach, it is also the case that advocating unity for unity’s sake raises some significant concerns. Without addressing the foundational issues, the pragmatic appeal of a unified psychology can be reinterpreted as asking psychologists to gloss over authentic differences in paradigms and perspectives just so that we all get along with the illusion of unity.”

Instead, what we want to suggest is that psychology needs to think about an underlying philosophical approach that is sufficiently flexible that it can undergird all of modern psychology, but that is also sufficiently content rich that it can provide some actual guidance as to how psychology should think of what it is to be human, while leaving the empirical details and investigations to the proper spheres within modern psychology. As Henriques (2011, p. 8) writes, “… what is needed is a meta-theoretical framework that crisply defines the subject matter of psychology, demonstrates how psychology exists in relationship to the other sciences, and allows one to systematically integrate the key insights from the major perspectives in a manner that results in cumulative knowledge.” Thus, we believe that psychology needs a philosophical approach that speaks to all of modern psychology, not just a subfield or two, but at the same time does not attempt to displace the theoretical approaches that properly apply within the empirical fields of modern psychology. In this book, we present the Aristotelian-Thomistic vision of the human and suggest that this view meets these two criteria.

We attempt to develop this suggestion in two ways. First, we describe the A-T view of the human person. This is more difficult that it might seem. The problem is not so much with the A-T view itself, as the view as a whole is strikingly coherent and will resonate in various ways and in various aspects with most psychologists. The problem is, rather, that we will have to try to “think our way back” to the A-T view itself, on its own terms. This is rather difficult for psychologists, in particular, as psychology has, in many ways, adopted ideas from the early modern philosophers that would be entirely foreign to Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas themselves. So, we have to try very hard to take Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on their own terms, rather than in terms of the various early modern interpretations of their work. As Feser (2009, p. 8) puts it, “While most contemporary philosophers would probably not identify themselves as Cartesians, Lockeans, Humeans, Kantians, or the like, their thinking…nevertheless tends, however unconsciously, to be confined within the narrow boundaries set by these early modern thinkers. Hence when they come across a philosopher like Thomas Aquinas, they unthinkingly read into his arguments modern philosophical presuppositions he would have rejected.” Importantly, even contemporary philosophers who have been influential in some areas of psychology, might reject the A-T approach on the basis of claims made about that approach by early modern philosophers, even though those claimed positions would be quite unacceptable to Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, and even though in other ways there are deep connections to the A-T tradition (see, e.g., Kugelmann, 2005, for a review of how some Neoscholastic psychologists and philosophers turned to phenomenology in the mid-twentieth century). In short, contemporary philosophy has not, generally, carefully engaged with the A-T tradition, but rather with that tradition as filtered through the quite distorting lens of the Moderns.

Second, having described the A-T view of the human, we then show how this view has various similarities and differences with several areas of modern psychology. There are many areas of psychology, including some that have just recently come (back) into prominence, that have clear and interesting precursors in the A-T view. Again, the point of this approach is not to replace modern psychological theories or dispute the empirical findings of modern psychology, but to show that there are possibilities of a unified underlying philosophical vision of the human to which, and within which, modern psychology can be organized and related.

Philosophical Foundations

So, what are the philosophical foundations of modern psychology? This is a very difficult question for a number of reasons, as we have already suggested. First, different areas of psychology seem to rely on very different philosophical foundations. Experimental psychology tends to take as a given a kind of positivistic approach to knowledge, while some of social and personality psychology (as well as some other areas) tend to take a more phenomenological approach, and so on. The positivistic approach, in turn, tends to assume a strongly reductive materialism, while the more phenomenological approach sees no value in and no evidence for such a reductive materialist approach and indeed suggests that such an approach loses almost everything that makes psychology a separate discipline (Hovhannisyan, 2018). In recent years, functionalism (or computationalism), the underlying philosophical underpinning for cognitive psychology, has become more widespread, at least on the experimental side of the discipline. Similarly, a version of Scientific Realism is somewhat common in these areas, though scientific realism in psychology tends to rely on functionalism as a way of dealing with the mind–body problem, which in turn again takes the Cartesian dualistic analysis as a starting point to define the issue to be solved. Unsurprisingly, given this starting point, however, scientific realism (and functionalism) in psychology tends to reduce to a more or less mechanistic and reductionist materialism (see, e.g., Stedman, Kostelecky, Spalding, & Gagné, 2016). One of the most critical points here is not simply that the different areas have somewhat different philosophical approaches, but that these approaches are mutually incoherent and indeed antagonistic. As Henriques puts it (2011, p. 3) “… there is no generally accepted framework in psychology, but instead profound disagreement, confusion, and almost limitless opinions about the foundational issues. Moreover, camps in psychological theory and practice are too often defined against one another, both conceptually and politically. For example, the extreme anti-mentalistic stance of the behaviorists in the middle part of the twentieth century was defined in part against the mentalistic excesses of Freudian theory. In contrast, the humanistic psychologists were defined against the mechanistic and deterministic views of both the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts.” Thus, it is not just that the different areas of the discipline proceed differently in an empirical sense, or that they have differing underlying presuppositions, but that these presuppositions cannot be unified.

Second, it is, in some ways, unclear what psychology, as a discipline, actually is. Is it a natural science? Is it a social science? Is it actually more like a discipline in the humanities? Ultimately, psychology seems to be all three of these. It is very much like biology, when considering topics such as the role of neurotransmitters or brain structures, but it is much more like a social science when considering topics such as social psychology, or political psychology, and several others. Finally, in its consideration of topics such as love or esthetics or many other topics, perhaps it is more like a part of the humanities. Importantly, most disciplines fall within one of these three great fields of intellectual endeavor, and as such they tend to adopt the prevailing philosophical underpinnings common within those fields. Therefore, most disciplines, although they include many theoretical disputes, relatively rarely have true, deep philosophical disputes. What then, makes psychology a single discipline, if it crosses into each of these three great fields? What makes it a single discipline is that it has as its topic of investigation, first and foremost, the human person. It crosses into each of the three great fields precisely because there is much to learn about the human person in natural science, in social science, and in the humanities. A corollary of this point, however, is that any philosophy that is specialized to natural science, or to social science, or to the humanities will have an extraordinarily difficult time providing a unified underpinning to psychology. In a sense, then, although we opened this chapter by suggesting that the reader might be surprised that we would champion such an “old” philosophy’s value for modern psychology, the fact that the A-T vision predates the division of intellectual effort into the three-way division of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences may well be an advantage.

Third, modern psychologists rarely make clear their own philosophical presuppositions. In part, this reluctance to talk about philosophy probably arises from psychology’s long history of attempted separation from philosophy. In short, some psychologists still seem to feel that in order to be a separate discipline, and in particular to be a “real science,” it must repudiate any connection to philosophy. Similarly, as part of this attempted separation, psychology seems to have made a bit of a fetish of late 1800s and early 1900s physics. For example, operationalism, which arose in physics, but was very quickly abandoned there, held on much longer in psychology and is arguably still a major part of how psychologists (particularly experimental psychologists) tend to think about what it means to be a science (Stedman, Hancock, & Sweetman, 2000). Another reason why psychologists rarely talk about philosophy may simply be that we all know, at some level, that our presuppositions are simply incoherent and incompatible with each other. So, what is there, really, to talk about?

Thus, psychology’s underlying philosophical foundations are murky at best. Nevertheless, it is clear (see, e.g., Robinson, 1981) that most of the current philosophical approaches in psychology trace back, in one way or another, to a Cartesian approach, either in accepting or rejecting one of the two forks that arise from collapsing Descartes’ dualism to just one aspect (e.g., accepting a mechanical materialism as the only “real” solution, or accepting a rather severe rationalism as the only “real” solution), or that respond to the difficulties raised by Cartesian dualism by attempting to avoid the dualist conclusion by integrating mind and body in some way (most notably, the functionalism or computationalism that underlies the information processing approaches, though as we have argued in the past, this approach often does collapse back into a mechanistic materialism) (Stedman et al., 2016). Several recent discussions of the philosophy of mind (e.g., Feser, 2006, 2008, 2015; Madden, 2013) have shown that none of these solutions work particularly well as philosophy, and hence none of them are likely to work particularly well as underpinnings for psychology.

Our contention is that, on the one hand, it is only by being clear about our philosophical presuppositions that we can actually see where the problems of the field really are, so we do need to be thinking and talking about our philosophical positions. On the other hand, we have great sympathy with psychologists who see no prospect of getting any agreement, so long as the discipline is mired in the kind of modern philosophical positions that are currently on offer in the field (even if they are often in inchoate forms). We believe that the key to a unified philosophical psychology is, precisely, to step outside of the current positions, and instead to consider that each of the positions currently on offer are fatally flawed. But if these current positions are derived from various streams of modern thought (and they are), perhaps the underlying issue is, in fact, that the modern positions themselves were fatally flawed and that psychology has simply inherited those flaws. Thus, in our view, a unified discipline will require getting beyond (or behind) the modern approaches that have found their way into psychology.

Why A-T Philosophical Psychology?

As we turn to the main purpose of the book, to introduce A-T philosophical psychology, it is good to articulate just what we mean by “A-T,” from which we can then give some of the primary reasons why we have opted for this sort of approach. Clearly, the “A” and the “T” stand for Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, respectively, but noting that obvious fact is not particularly informative. Rather, we should give a very brief account of what is going on in the Aristotelian tradition, such that “A-T” is more clearly spelled out. Aristotle bequeathed a rich patrimony of philosophical thought, which was itself subject to different schools of thought and was the focus of intense scrutiny and development during the seventeen centuries that separate Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. As such, Thomas Aquinas was himself the inheritor and beneficiary of a remarkably robust and creative Aristotelian commentary tradition, and as a result, his account of, say, cognition is more technical and sophisticated than what one finds in the texts of Aristotle himself. While Aristotle started a whole research program, his thought is open to myriad interpretations or perhaps even underdeveloped. We have opted for the specification of the Aristotelian tradition provided by Thomas Aquinas because of its (in our opinion) concordance with Aristotle’s thought, which—at the same time—proceeds to make clear several issues that are left ambiguous in Aristotle’s thought itself. Moreover, we think that the specification and greater sophistication of this thought by Thomas Aquinas (and the commentary traditions that he is relying on) have more to say to contemporary psychology. When we say “A-T,” then, what we mean is the Aristotelian tradition as that tradition is started by Aristotle and then specified by Thomas Aquinas.

There are three primary reasons why A-T is an interesting possibility for a unifying philosophical underpinning to psychology. First, as we discussed briefly in the previous section, psychology, to the extent that it has philosophical underpinnings, subscribes to an incoherent mixture of early modern philosophical positions and their derivatives, including a number of contemporary philosophies that arose out of a backlash against the modern positions, but that nevertheless often adopt aspects of modern philosophy that would be quite foreign to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (see, e.g., Stedman et al., 2000, p. 25). As we argued, many of the problems of psychology derive directly from the problems with those philosophical positions. Hence, a successful philosophical underpinning must either transcend or avoid most of the basic modern and postmodern philosophical positions. Looking to the A-T tradition allows us to consider positions free from those particular modern philosophical problems and their derivatives, though of course, there may be other problems. Indeed, Wundt, after reviewing the options then on offer, believed that the Aristotelian vision of the human was the most likely to meet the needs of psychology for a philosophical underpinning (Mercier, 1918, p. 159), as did several other psychologists up to the middle of the twentieth century (Brennan, 1941; Maher, 1909), though it was always a minority position. Thus, although some psychologists might feel that turning to the A-T tradition is odd, we believe that we are in good company.

Second, as we have already mentioned a few times, in the A-T tradition, the vision of the human is integrated with the rest of nature by virtue of the fact that A-T philosophical psychology is based on the same metaphysical principles as the rest of the A-T philosophical approach. This is a striking contrast with the early modern philosophies. A-T philosophical psychology, then, provides at least the possibility of a vision of the human that is integrated and coherent, both on its own terms and in terms of its relation to the rest of nature. As Titus (2006, p. 77) puts it, “Aquinas beneficially provides a theoretical, ethical, and theological standpoint to integrate insights found in other human and psychosocial sciences. The wisdom of his approach involves integrating the truth and relevance of apparently divergent positions in nuanced ways.” We believe that this coherence is critical so that psychology can be both unified in itself, and part of a larger and coherent understanding of nature.

Third, the A-T vision of the human is not only coherent in the sense that we describe above, but it is also complete. In ways that are particularly important for a unified understanding of modern psychology, the A-T vision of the human is a vision of the individual human as one complete, individual substance, but one that has many different powers and abilities. Importantly, though, those distinct powers and abilities all arise from an underlying unity, and from related and cooperating principles. Consider the contrast with, for example, modern philosophy of mind , where the topic is nearly exclusively a kind of disembodied, abstract cognition (and hence, in recent years, there has been a strong push back to include aspects of embodiment). The A-T tradition has something to say about all aspects of the human, but without sacrificing the fundamental unity of the human person. Furthermore, within that fundamental unity, it recognizes the necessity of keeping human cognitive and emotional activity non-abstract and non-disembodied. Again, in our view, if there is to be a unified philosophical underpinning to modern psychology, it will require a philosophy that itself sees all the aspects of the human as its domain.

An additional reason for reconsidering the A-T vision is that, as briefly noted above, from the beginning of psychology as a separate discipline in the late 1800s through the 1950s, there were a significant number of psychologists who adopted a version of the A-T approach (specifically an approach called Neo-Thomism or Neo-Scholasticism). Hence, reconsideration of the A-T approach is, at least to an extent, a reconsideration of psychology’s own largely ignored intellectual history. We will return to the Neo-Scholastic approach to discuss why it disappeared from psychology, and how our own approach differs in emphasis from the Neo-Scholastic, in Chap. 8.

In short, the A-T tradition has the characteristics that are required of a system that can underpin modern psychology. The A-T vision of the human is integrated and coherent, both horizontally across what are now different (and divided) areas of psychology, and vertically (if you will) with respect to the relationship of the human to the rest of nature and being. We should note here that, although our main purpose is to discuss how the A-T tradition might contribute to modern psychology, it is fair to say that modern psychology might also have much to say to the A-T tradition, as well! We believe that the application of the A-T tradition to modern psychology has potential for the development of psychology, but it is just as true that such application could also lead to further development of the A-T view, not just as a historical entity, but as a living philosophical possibility (for a similar approach with respect to other sciences, see Feser, 2019; Simpson, Koons, & Teh, 2017).

Science and the A-T Tradition

We hope that we have begun to make a persuasive case, on the basis of the breadth, internal coherence, and fundamental unity of the A-T approach, that it should at least be investigated. However, many psychologists might believe that our call to consider an A-T approach to the human as a possible unifying framework for modern psychology is misguided, based on what they believe about modern science. In particular, many psychologists believe (if they think about it at all) that science, through its own development, has shown that the A-T philosophy is wrong in general, and its view of the human is wrong, specifically. A common belief (perhaps particularly in some areas of psychology) is that science has shown that a thorough-going reductive materialism is the true (or best) understanding of the natural world. If this were true, then the A-T approach would be ruled out. In this section, we review a bit of the history of thinking around this question and show that these beliefs about science are not, in fact, true, and that the A-T approach is a live option.

Psychologists, as portrayed in introductory textbooks or texts on the history of psychology, have a fairly fixed and confident view of the history of philosophy and science in early modernity. In general, psychologists tend to believe that Science (definitely with the capital S) took the place of religious, and particularly superstitious, ways of understanding the world. In this rather simplified view, the change to Science was a completely beneficial, completely revolutionary, break with the past, and this break occurred because Science had shown the earlier philosophies to be wrong. Although this is a bit of a caricature of Psychologists’ acceptance of the standard caricature of how early modernity happened, it is not that far off.

Now, the problem with this view is not that it is entirely wrong, but that it misses a lot of important aspects of early modernity. Unfortunately, by missing a lot of those aspects, it also tends to lead to some very unfortunate consequences, which we will briefly discuss here (for much more detailed expositions, consult Brown, 2006; Burtt, 1925; Feser, 2006, 2008). Two of these unfortunate consequences are particularly important for this book. The first is, by over-emphasizing the “revolutionary” aspects of early modernity, one is tempted to simply dismiss everything that came before. Indeed, if there is one characteristic of the early moderns, such as Bacon or Descartes, that has been adopted wholesale in the modern world, it is the notion that one can start completely fresh on any problem and that one need not pay any attention to what has come before. This temptation has seemingly become even stronger over time, with a virtual dictatorship of the recent taking hold in many areas of modern life. The second is the establishment of scientific methodology (which is a very good thing in its proper domains) led to a kind of transition in which the method became a metaphysics and an epistemology. In short, Scientism, the belief that Science is the only way in which anything can be known, has turned out to be an extraordinarily tempting position to the modern mind, as has the notion that only those things that can be investigated by Science (i.e., those things that can be quantified) are real. In the history of psychology, we see these temptations reflected very strongly. Interestingly, of course, one cannot establish that Science is the proper method for epistemology using the scientific method—it can only be established via philosophical argument. This is, perhaps, most obvious when we consider a full-blown Scientism, which claims that Science is the only way to know anything, yet of course Scientism is not established via Science! So, Scientism is ultimately self-refuting.

What problems arise from these two consequences? The first consequence—a belief in a complete break from the past during the scientific revolution—leads to a rather unthinking dismissal of all philosophy, which is, after all, not Science. But more particularly, we see the dismissal of any pre-modern philosophy, under the presumption that Science has proved them wrong. Thus, the philosophical underpinnings of modern psychology are not often carefully engaged by psychologists—we psychologists rather like to think of ourselves as not dependent on any philosophy. The second consequence—the switch from science as a method to Science as a metaphysic and/or epistemology—leads to a radical limitation on what questions can be asked in psychology, and in how they can be answered. This was seen most obviously, historically, in the way that Behaviorism, when it was the dominant paradigm within psychology, attempted to rule out whole areas of psychology, on the basis that the questions asked in those areas cannot be answered (i.e., the questions introduce concepts and use methods that are “unscientific”). While there is no current area of psychology dominant enough to attempt to actually suppress all other areas, this way of thinking is still quite pervasive, leading to greater divisions between areas of psychology, such that there is little to no interaction or mutual enrichment across those areas.

In short, the caricature of early modernity and the scientific revolution that is common in psychology is a bit of a myth, and a self-serving myth at that, in that it purportedly frees psychology from its own history and from any need to have real philosophical foundations for the discipline. It is beyond the scope of this book to delve more deeply into the scientific revolution and the many modern (mis)interpretations of it, but there are several good recent discussions (Brown, 2006; Feser, 2006, 2008). Importantly, however, the recent re-evaluation of the scientific revolution is not limited to psychology. Rather, a general re-appraisal of the relationship of Aristotelian ideas to modern science is underway (see Koons, Simpson, & Teh, 2017, p. 2 for a discussion and pointers into this literature). Simpson et al. (2017) and Feser (2019) provide very recent discussions of how Aristotelian thought is applicable throughout modern science. Of course, this does not mean that Aristotle already knew everything or that modern science is to be discarded! Instead, the claim is that Aristotelian ideas can be applied to, but also developed with, modern science. The Aristotelian perspective is, on our view, a uniquely flexible framework, especially when compared with any other approach with which we are familiar. As we will explain in greater detail in subsequent chapters, any number of empirical research programs and whole scientific disciplines can be placed into the open-ended and flexible character of the A-T approach, from physics to psychology to sub-disciplines within those disciplines. As such, the critical point here with respect to psychology is simply that it is valid and worthwhile to “suspend disbelief” long enough to really consider the A-T vision of the human, and not to assume that these philosophical approaches have been ruled out.

Overview of Chapters

The rest of this book focusses on a few broad areas of modern psychology and attempts to lay out the areas in which the A-T vision of the human overlaps or does not overlap with modern psychological thinking. Obviously, to exhaustively consider even one broad area of modern psychology would require a book-length treatment, so our descriptions are meant to be brief and suggestive, in terms of how the A-T approach might be fruitfully applied to the various areas, rather than an attempt to show all the possible relations, or to consider the relation to every theory or empirical finding within any area of psychology.

Chapter 2 begins by presenting the A-T vision of the human person in some detail and showing how the vision of the human person is coherent with the rest of the A-T philosophical approach. Critically, we show that the A-T vision of the human person is largely derived from a set of metaphysical commitments that are established prior to any consideration of the human person. In other words, the A-T vision of the human is, unlike modern psychology’s view of the human, already thoroughly integrated into a coherent, well-structured metaphysical approach. Thus, the aspects of the A-T vision of the human that are unique to the human are developed out of the already existing philosophical understanding of, for example, all of nature, of living things, of non-human animals, only to the extent that there appears to be a need for aspects unique to the human.

Chapter 3 further develops our description of the A-T approach, focusing particularly on human and non-human cognition. To anticipate just a bit, one of the interesting aspects of the A-T view of the human person is that it is deeply integrated with the A-T view of non-human animals, avoiding the extreme views of both humans as simply being animals, full stop, and humans as sharing nothing critical with non-human animals. This relationship is, of course, critical in modern psychology, yet it is one of the most fraught areas in the history of psychology, with the discipline swinging rather wildly between different interpretations of how the human to non-human relationship ought to be conceived. As Henriques (2011, p. 32) describes it, “the relationship between animal and human behavior has simply gone unresolved in theoretical psychology, and it has been one of the major impediments to coherently defining the field.”

Chapter 4 focusses particularly on the recent resurgence of work on embodiment in humans. We include here both work on embodied cognition and behavior drawn from the current revival of notions of embodiment that come to psychology via cognitive science and cybernetics and work from the more experiential, humanistic approach to psychology, both of which adopt or adapt philosophical underpinnings from existentialism and phenomenology. The A-T view of the human person has a strong aspect of embodiment (which follows quite naturally from the way that human and non-human cognition is conceived and related in the A-T view), while also emphasizing more abstract, less embodied aspects in their proper proportion. Again, the A-T approach avoids extreme approaches where all cognition is completely embodied, but also avoiding the extreme approach in which all cognition is somehow abstracted from human nature as a physical animal.

Chapter 5 takes the A-T approach as described in the preceding chapters and builds into the relationship between cognition and emotion. In modern psychology, cognition and emotion have been largely separate parts of the discipline, and despite the widespread recognition of the need to integrate the two, modern psychology has trouble presenting these two major areas in a coherent way. The A-T view, on the other hand, analyzes cognition and emotion using much the same conceptual framework and principles, leading to a much more coherent view of the interface between cognition and emotion. In particular, both cognition and emotion are analyzed with respect to the sensory/intellect distinction, and both are understood teleologically (i.e., as directed toward certain purposes or outcomes).

Chapter 6 describes how the A-T vision of the human naturally lends itself to a view of human flourishing that has both similarities and differences from modern psychology. Importantly, human flourishing, in the A-T view, is derived largely from behaving in ways that are congruent with the highest and best principles of the human, as seen in the A-T vision of the human person. Thus, human flourishing follows from understanding how human cognition and emotion leads to behavior that is congruent with the best in human nature, understood as virtues. Conversely, the failure to either understand human nature or behave in accord with the best in human nature will tend to lead to failures of human flourishing. This approach has important similarities with some modern views of human flourishing (including relatively recently discovered topics such as resilience and positive psychology), yet overall has a very different emphasis from most modern views.

Chapter 7 looks at the way in which the A-T vision of the human is situated within its proper social context. Beginning from Aristotle’s view of the human as a political (not just social) animal, we describe ways in which the A-T view of human flourishing is naturally conceived as flourishing within a social context and show how this relates to aspects of modern social psychology. Importantly, the notion that the virtues are critical to human flourishing flows naturally from individual flourishing to flourishing within a social context, precisely because the virtues, in the A-T approach, are themselves oriented toward what is outside the individual human, that is, the transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful. Furthermore, failure of the social context to orient toward human nature will interfere with human flourishing, just as does the failure of the individual to orient toward human nature.

In Chap. 8, we briefly review the many places where the A-T view of the human relates to modern psychology, and some areas where the A-T view might suggest fruitful development of modern psychology. We consider how modern psychology might move forward in a more fruitful, integrated, and coherent way, by adopting aspects of the A-T vision of the human person, and also how psychology might contribute to the development of the modern A-T vision of the human person.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_2

2. The Metaphysical Foundations of the Human Person

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceCognitive powersAppetitive powersWillIntellectSensitive powers

In this chapter, we outline what the human being and human psychology look like from the A-T perspective and, especially, show how that perspective flows out of a larger picture of the world. We will provide a general sense of some of the vocabulary we will be using throughout the book, as well as state some of the larger commitments of the A-T view. The most critical commitment taken by the A-T view, for our purposes, is that the human being is a part of nature. A consequence of this is that while there are real and important differences between humans and other animals on the A-T accounting, there is no fundamental rupture between humans and other parts of nature. Rather, the picture is one of continuity between, for example, non-human animals and humans, with that continuity serving as the backdrop for saying that there are differences among these things that need to be accounted for. As a result, the same basic terminology and approach that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas use to account for reality, especially regarding how things undergo change, are also used to account for human biology and for a variety of human activities that are explored within modern psychology. Readers who wish to go beyond our description will find quite readable recent expositions of the A-T approach to metaphysics and its application to the human person in Feser (2009) or Madden (2013). Many older, and much more detailed, accounts are also available (e.g., Mercier, Nys, Halleux, & Wulf, 1950/1917).

In the remainder of the chapter, we flesh out three consequences of this large and holistic perspective that are especially relevant for building up a picture of the A-T vision of the human person and which will serve as a foundation for applying this understanding of humans to contemporary psychology. First, we describe how there is a basic consistency between A-T’s metaphysical commitments and its account of human psychology that arises because the same causal language that is used to account for change in the world is also used to account for what the human being is and for human psychology. Second, we discuss the similarities and differences between humans and non-human things. Third, we provide an A-T account of the capacities of living things.

Causality and Consistency Between Metaphysics and the Account of the Human Being

As any contemporary psychologist will know well, causality is a very tricky thing to pin down. Psychologists draw a clear distinction between causation and correlation. Indeed, a common mantra is “correlation does not imply causation” referring to the fact that demonstrating that two or more variables are correlated with each other does not mean that a strict cause/effect relationship has been established. This is quite well known and rigorously followed in current methodology within psychology, and for good reason.

However, perhaps more interesting is that just what is meant by the term “causality” or for that matter “cause”, is not as well established in psychological methodology or even in meta-reflections on methodology. However, a cause is generally taken to mean something that makes a change in the state of affairs in the world such that an effect, B, would not occur in the way it does if its cause, A, had not occurred and interacted with B. We can see a clear example of this in how we might account for how billiard balls interact on a billiard table. The force of billiard ball A is imparted to ball B, causing the motion of B to be such and such, and, with the aid of basic Newtonian physics, we can calculate with notable precision what has occurred. Moreover, remarkably, we can predict what will occur if we know the mass of the relevant objects, the coefficient of rolling friction, etc., before the event even takes place. This notion of causality is useful, is open to empirical inquiry, is testable, and, indeed, is at the heart of much contemporary science.

The A-T approach to causality allows for this use of the terms “cause” and “effect” and sees this use as indispensable to its own explanation of causality as well. However, the story on the A-T account goes beyond this notion to a wider conception than is captured in the example of two balls interacting on a billiard table. Instead of constraining the focus to how A might affect (or even cause) B, the Aristotelian tradition starts with “change” or “motion,” which are synonymous, as the important or fundamental beginning point. Indeed, it takes change in the world as obvious, for things in the world are regularly undergoing changes of various sorts. For instance, as we look out our window, we see people walking, that is, changing place—a type of motion. With a larger perspective of time, we see a sapling elm tree grow into a mature elm, which will include the shedding and re-growing of leaves as the seasons and years pass, and, finally, we see the tree die through natural processes—a different kind of motion than walking. We might witness the change that occurs should a fire come upon the tree and consume it entirely, which is yet again a different sort of motion. The A-T approach will have resources to account for all of these sorts of change and many others, including what occurs between billiard balls on a felt table, but the A-T tradition attempts in the first instance to give an account of change as such, of which the imparting of force from billiard ball A to ball B is but one kind.

Starting with change as the beginning point, the A-T tradition accounts for change in what have become the watchwords of Aristotelian physics (or what some readers might think of as “metaphysics”), “potentiality” and “actuality.” Simply put, these terms denote what a thing can do over and against what it is doing. To illustrate, a sapling elm might be actualizing its ability to photosynthesize but has the potentiality to undertake other actions (such as shedding leaves). Similarly, a human being might be actualizing the ability to read a book, but possesses any number of other possible or potential activities (such as running, reflecting on a childhood memory, or eating).

Different kinds of things have different sorts of actuality, but they also have different kinds of potentiality. A given thing’s actuality is closely related to its potentiality and vice versa. Take for instance the different actualities and potentialities that are contained in an open barrel of diesel and an ordinary slab of polished marble, both at room temperature. We know very well how these two things will act in normal conditions, but notice that they contain very different capacities, or potentialities, to act. If we bring a lit match over the diesel and over the slab, we know that the potentiality of the diesel is markedly different than that of the marble. The diesel has the potentiality to respond explosively, whereas the marble does not. They will also obviously respond differently to the chisel of a sculptor, for they have different potentialities in that respect as well. The examples here are so obvious that the insight may actually be missed: different sorts or bundles of actuality will yield different potentialities and understanding what a thing is entails understanding something of how a thing is currently acting and what it has the capacity or potentiality to do.

The A-T tradition is trying to account for change as such, and to do so it turns to accounting for a thing’s actuality and its potentiality, and the whole of physical nature is accounted for through those lenses. Now, to go from a state of potentiality to actualizing that potentiality is itself the definition of motion or change for the A-T account. If we return to the example of the sapling growing into a mature elm, as it grows, the sapling is actualizing a potentiality unique to that kind of thing. Only a sapling of the right sort will contain the potentiality to mature into an elm, whereas other things (e.g., diesel, marble, humans), obviously, do not. What we have so far, then, is a very wide concept of motion, defined as going from potentiality to actuality, which is much broader than our usual contemporary conception of motion, which is often taken to be simply changing place, like walking from here to there, or a billiard ball rolling down a table.

To account for how change or motion occurs, the A-T tradition posits four kinds of cause. We are already acquainted with one of these kinds from the example of the billiard balls, which the A-T tradition usually calls the “efficient cause.” In addition to that there are the “material cause,” the “formal cause,” and the “final cause.” Contemporary science proceeds mostly by way of focusing on the efficient cause and disregarding the other three, because the efficient cause is the one that is most amenable to mathematization.

A classic example that nicely presents these four causes is that of a bronze statue. In this case, the material cause is “that out of which” the statue is made, bronze. The bronze has the potential to be molded into this or that shape, to melt at a certain temperature, and so on. The formal cause is the structure or shape that is in the sculptor’s mind, the figure of Abraham Lincoln, say. The formal cause is what determines the bronze to be shaped in this particular way. The efficient cause is the artist herself as she goes about her work and changes the bronze accordingly. The final cause is “the reason why” the sculptor is creating the statue in the first place, perhaps to honor Lincoln and his achievements. The material cause, and thus the “matter” of the thing, correlates to potentiality, whereas the formal cause, and thus the “form” of the thing, correlates to actuality. The matter, bronze, has the potentiality to be shaped this way and in a way that other material substrates do not (e.g., ivory, cotton, wood, diesel, whatever). The form brings the potentiality of the matter to exist in a particular way, such that it looks like Lincoln. If either the matter or the form were otherwise than bronze or Lincoln’s likeness, one would have a very different final product. Likewise, if the reason why the artist made the statue were different, perhaps to dishonor Lincoln, the statue could well be different as well, for this affects the form that the sculptor chooses to imbue onto the bronze.

The point here is to show that there is an immediate connection between potentiality and matter, on the one hand, and actuality and form, on the other. Because the A-T tradition is interested in accounting for change in the world as such, at times “form” will be used in place of actuality and “matter” for potentiality, especially once one moves to talking about the various potentialities and actualities that we see in things that are alive, like humans.

For the A-T tradition, physics is quite simply the discipline that studies motion, and everything that we sense is undergoing motion of some sort. When that tradition turns to things that are alive and tries to describe the sorts of motion that go on there, we have moved into a greater specification of physics rather than a whole new domain. This specification of physics is called “psychology” by later thinkers in the A-T tradition, though not by Aristotle himself. Psyche is the Greek word for “soul,” a term with many, often ghostly, connotations for us today. For Aristotle, by contrast, the term “soul” at its most basic level is a way to demarcate the distinction between things that are alive and things that are not. Indeed, to engage in psychology, on this account, just is to engage in biology. This is nicely seen if we focus briefly on the Latin word for soul, anima, from which we get our English word “animated.” Something that is animated, i.e., alive, has a soul, whereas things that are not animated are not alive and do not have a soul. This means that all plants and animals (human and non-human animals alike) have a soul, whereas rocks, water, billiard balls, cars, etc. do not.

The soul, for Aristotle and the whole tradition he began, is the “form” of a “material body,” which is to say that it is the organizational principle of matter that is alive. In contrast to things that are not alive, alive things, i.e., organisms, have an internal principle of motion, the soul. The soul is, thus, correlated with form, which is, in turn, correlated with actuality. In a similar way, the “body” is correlated with matter, which is in turn correlated with potentiality. When the A-T tradition turns to talk about any aspect of human biology and psychology, it will do so with reference to this couplet of terms:

A

B

C

1

Actuality

Form

Soul

2

Potentiality

Matter

Body

The terms in row 1 above are not equivalent to each other, nor are the terms in row 2 equivalent to each other. Rather, there is overlap in meaning in the terms of each row. The terms in column A are always related to each other as flip sides of the same coin, as are the terms in columns B and C.

The A-T tradition begins by way of taking motion or change as obvious and then accounts for everything undergoing change through the lenses of actuality and potentiality. It then specifies how different things are in actuality and potentiality through the other technical terms described above, like form/matter and soul/body. The human being clearly undergoes various processes of change, which is to say, we commonly go from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality, whether that be in terms of moving about a room or growing or sensation, cognition, concept formation, emotions, character development, or any other psychological feature we are interested in accounting for.

Not only will this approach to causal language mean that we will use vocabulary like matter/form or actuality/potentiality when turning to discuss human psychology, it also yields one of the primary benefits that we see in the A-T approach to human psychology, especially in contrast to what is on offer in contemporary psychology: a coherent picture between the A-T tradition’s metaphysical commitments and its description of human psychology. Given the wide terrain we have just canvassed, this coherence is likely not much of a surprise. Indeed, it may even be a bit misleading to say that there is a coherence between the two, because the A-T description of human psychology is, in some basic ways, not really different from its metaphysical commitments. They are of a piece, since the starting point is that the human being is a part of nature and that all change in nature is accounted for through the lenses of actuality and potentiality. As soon as we begin to account for psychological processes (and “processes” imply change) via actuality and potentiality, we are engaged in a project of applying the Aristotelian metaphysical terminology to the psychological.

Another consequence of the A-T approach to the human being is that it allows the picture of the human being to be, at its most basic level, unified. This may strike a contemporary reader as odd, since we are using a word like “soul,” which may immediately raise the specter of a Cartesian mind/body split, which generates a problem of mind/body interaction, or of a Platonic dualism , wherein the soul can depart from the body like a sailor can depart a ship. For the A-T tradition, however, “soul” is a kindred term to both “actuality” and “form,” though “soul” is employed as we begin to look into how organisms, that is, things that are alive, undergo processes of change, or look into how they are constituted. Think for a moment of the “form” and “matter” of a statue: its structure or shape (its form) and then that out of which it is made (its matter), like bronze. In this case, one’s mind does not immediately infer that there is an inherent dualism present, because one is analyzing different aspects or constitutive features that comprise the statue. The statue is one thing, not two, even though we can investigate its structure in one instance and its materiality in the next. Similarly, we should not—simply because we see the word “soul”—think that for the A-T tradition there are really two things present, a soul thing and a body thing, in human beings. There is, rather, one thing present—the human being—that is analyzable into form (or soul) and matter (or body). As Aristotle says at one point, “… we can dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: it is as meaningless as to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one … (De anima, II, 1).” Thomas Aquinas explicitly argues against a Platonic form of dualism since that approach does not yield something that is, in his words, “one thing without qualification” (unum simpliciter).

Rather, on the A-T account, the soul is the “actuality” of a body, perhaps as one might consider, by analogy, a flame to be the “actuality” of a lit candle, the body of which is made up of wax and a wick (and all of the compounds that go into those). The actuality, the flame, requires the material substrate of the wax and wick, while the wax and wick are organized in the way they are in order to be set alight.

The account of the human being on the A-T perspective, then, is an outgrowth and greater specification of the larger conceptual lenses that this tradition uses to account for change or motion in nature at all, which provides for a metaphysically coherent view of the human being, and one that elides the dualisms of either the Platonic or Cartesian approaches, the latter of which has had profound impacts on the discipline of psychology. As we will discuss in more detail below, this means that what we today call “embodiment” is a principle from which A-T accounts of the psychological begin and toward which they work. We discuss the concept of embodiment in more detail in Chap. 4.

How to Talk About Similarities and Differences Between Humans and Non-human Things

So far, we have emphasized the continuity among all things in nature in the A-T approach, which has allowed us to introduce some basic terminology, how that terminology is specified toward the human, and highlight in a preliminary way what we take to be some benefits of this approach. There are, however, real and important differences between humans and other things that are not human. For the A-T tradition, a difference is always predicated on and presumes a greater similarity, without which “difference” makes little sense. The common English expression, “Well, that’s just apples and oranges,” highlights this A-T presupposition nicely. This common expression is meant to explain that two things do not really have much to do with each other, for apples and oranges really are different from each other. However, there is clearly a greater similitude between these two kinds that allows the expression to work: they are both fruits. The expression could just as easily compare “fruit” and “nuts” to the same effect, though those are more different from each other than are apples and oranges, and, again, are united by a greater similarity; for example, they are both means by which some plants propagate.

The key in saying that there is a difference between two things is finding an important factor that makes one thing different from other things that share an underlying and greater similarity. As such, in the A-T approach to the human, the human is fitted into consecutively larger groupings or categories of things, called a genus (or genera in the plural). For Aristotle, the genus ranging immediately over the human species is “animal,” which is, again, grouped by a larger genus, “life,” which is again grouped into the larger genus of things that have a body (the technical name for this genus is usually termed “corporeity”). Thus, we progress from the lowest species, say, human, to its genus, animal, to its genus, life, to its genus, corporeity. At the point of corporeity, one might study rocks or minerals or humans or a planet, or, really, anything with a material makeup, and that study will proceed by looking at what unites this very broad category of things—that all of these things have a body and undergo change accordingly.

The A-T tradition, then, differentiates the human “species” from its “genus” by latching onto what it takes to be an important differentiating factor: rationality or living in a community of animals that reason. These are highlighted in what have become two famous slogans of Aristotelian thought: “The human being is a rational animal” and “The human being is a political animal.” We return to these points in Chaps. 3, 4, and 7. Note the structure of both sentences. In both cases, there is a difference of a species, the human species, that is predicated based on the larger animal genus by way of a distinctive and differentiating factor, reason. The first sentence explicitly claims reason as the important differentiating factor. In the second one, it is implicit in the word “political,” since humans are the only animals that arrange themselves into cities, with laws, customs, and conventions (the Greek word polis is how we get the word “political”). To be sure, the A-T tradition is well aware of other animals that live gregariously with other members of the same species, but they do so in basically the same way. Bees are a common example referred to in this tradition. Humans, by contrast, tend to live in community with laws and customs that are somehow expressions of rationality.

This means that to account for what a human is, how psychological processes function, and, especially, what human flourishing is, it is not enough to apply the metaphysical terms of actuality/potency, form/matter, or soul/body to the human. These terms are the background causal language that will be employed, but they are not sufficient on their own to account for the difference between humans and other animals. Clearly, we will also have to be attentive to some of the features that distinguish humans from non-human animals, even though the human being is, on the A-T view, a part of nature and is examined through the same basic lenses used to account for any change at all.

A Schematic Account of the Powers of Living Things

We turn now to discussing the soul, briefly but in earnest, in order to be able to bring the A-T tradition into discussion on the topics of cognition, embodiment, emotions, character development, and social psychology, that is, the primary topics of the chapters that follow. These “powers” are activities that living things can engage in or do and are construed as broadly as possible. As we proceed, we will focus in on the human being and, more precisely, on human psychology, but in order to do that, we have to begin with as wide of a view of “life” as possible. Again, for readers who wish to go beyond our discussion, very readable explanations exist of how Aristotle (Robinson, 1989) and Thomas Aquinas (Brennan, 1941) describe these powers.

As noted, the word “soul” can carry ghostly connotations for us today, whereas for Aristotle, there is no such connotation at all. For him, applying the term “soul” is a way to demarcate the difference between things that are alive and things that are not and, once that distinction is established, then be in a position to distinguish different kinds of life, based on what they are able to do or, as he says, based on their “powers.” This approach not only represents an immensely influential taxonomy of life (Aristotle seems to have been the first to articulate such a comprehensive categorization of life forms), but also shows again that the human being is articulated in the A-T view in the first instance in concert with other things, and then with differentiations being added at a later or higher level of analysis and only in order to account for perceived important functional differences.

Things that are not alive are pushed and pulled only by extrinsic causes. For instance, wind pushes dead leaves, a stream cuts terrain, billiard balls impart movement to each other, and fire heats a nearby rock. All these, both the causes and the effects, are differently disposed to moving and being moved, and their dispositions in this regard depend on their material makeup and current act. There is, however, no need to make recourse to an internal principle of motion to understand the causal interaction or even what the things themselves are. Contrast dead leaves, lying loosely on the ground to a fragile sapling, both being acted upon by the same strong gust of wind. Both are clearly affected by the wind, but to account fully for the sapling requires recourse to something causal happening internal to it. The A-T approach to this internal causality is that there is an internal organizational principle of motion that the sapling has, its soul, which is not present in the dead leaves. This internal principle of motion, which directs the sapling’s structure such that it has leaves, roots, bark, etc., allows for basic biological functions, like nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Clearly, the sapling is affected by the wind—perhaps, it is damaged or uprooted or simply bends under the force—but the external causes acting upon material makeup of the sapling do not suffice to explain it, especially in terms of its structure and biological functions. There is no similar organizational principle (i.e., a principle that causes organs), in lifeless matter. Anything that is alive has the three powers or has the potentiality to have the powers (the sapling cannot yet reproduce), just mentioned: nutrition, growth, and reproduction. All these powers are performed by the organism, which has been properly organized to act by the causal interaction of form and matter or, since we are talking about something that is alive, by the causal interaction of the soul over matter.

The A-T tradition jointly calls the powers of nutrition, growth, and reproduction the “vegetative powers,” for while they are found or potentially found in all life, plants have only this bundle of capacities and nothing beyond. The next bundle of powers is referred to as the “sensitive powers,” for those speak to the capacity to sense external stimuli through the senses and the various actions that seem to occur upon sensation, like desire and locomotion. If plants are the paradigmatic form of life for the vegetative powers, animals take the same role with respect to the sensitive powers, for all animals, in principle, sense. At this level, things become substantially more complex, because the phenomena being described are more complex. At their most basic level, the sensitive powers are just what one might expect them to be: different organs acting in concert with each other to be able to produce sensations and internal perceptions of external objects. This capacity, which will be explained more fulsomely in Chaps. 3 and 4, is called “sense cognition.” To cognize in this way requires a host of organs interacting with each other and powers corresponding to those organs. Thus, the power of sight requires the organ of the eye, hearing requires the ear, and so on. On this account, there are five external senses, each of which has a corresponding organ that is required to carry out initial sensation. If an organ receives stimuli of the right sort (colored light for the eye, sound waves for the ear, etc.), that stimuli is communicated internally in the cognizer, at which point various internal sense powers come into play. The result of this cognitive process is the cognition of an external object, as that singular, external object is represented internally to the animal, followed by a decision of whether to avoid, pursue, ignore, etc. the perceived object.

Sense cognition is a complex process, though what we have described so far is fairly skeletal or schematic. It is helpful to pull back for a moment and remember that the A-T tradition begins its account of the world by looking at motion through the lenses of actuality and potentiality, and that it accounts for change of any sort through these lenses, including cognition, which is clearly a kind of motion. For instance, a wolf does not see its prey, a sheep, but could do so if the sheep comes into its field of view. Assuming this happens, when the wolf sees the sheep, there is a change in the wolf: the wolf sees the sheep whereas before it did not. Since this is a change of some sort, the A-T tradition will account for it through those Aristotelian watchwords of actuality and potentiality. An animal has the potentiality (or power) to receive sense data through the proper organs and powers and can respond accordingly. On this account, there is something causally active, the sensed object (the sheep), and something that is brought into actuality, the capacity to sense and then perceive (the wolf seeing the sheep). Importantly, the external object is causally capable of producing the interiorly held sense image.

Much if not most cognition that humans engage in is reducible to sense cognition as just described, but not all of it. We turn, then, to the last of the “powers of the soul,” namely the intellective powers. This is the point at which the A-T tradition sees a need to mark an important distinction between humans and non-human animals, for only human animals engage in this activity. It should be kept in mind that we are not arguing for the distinction between humans and non-human animals rigorously at this point. Rather, we are simply giving a descriptive account of what this tradition takes to be different powers, which are differentiated by way of focusing on different sorts of operations, following on the common-sense view that there are important differences between capacities of nutrition, of sensing external objects, and of concept formation.

What we have, then, are three generic powers of the soul: vegetative, sensitive, and intellective. All life has the mixture of activities included in the first, but plants have only those. Animals have both sensitive and vegetative powers, but only those, whereas humans have all three. So, what are these intellective powers and why is there a need to posit a distinction in kind, not degree, in humans in contrast to all other forms of life?

When we look at sense cognition through concepts of actuality and potentiality, here is what is occurring at the most basic level: there is an animal standing in potentiality to receiving the actuality, or form, of the sensed object though its sense powers. The actuality of that sensed object, its form, is the primary determining factor in causing cognition, and the animal is receptive to that sensible form, whereas plants are not receptive in that way. By contrast to what is accomplished in sense cognition, i.e., a representation of the external thing as a particular, humans are able to range intellectually across a very wide range of things and understand what is universal about that particular object. A brief explanation is in order.

Say there is an object, a triangular wooden block, in the field of vision of both a mature wolf and an adult human being, whom we will call Sally. The wolf will cognize the block through its senses and then decide whether to pursue it, ignore it, flee from it, or take some other action. Sally will do the same, but can pause for a moment and think about the triangularity of the block. That is, Sally understands something universal about this particular thing: it is a three-sided polygon. Moreover, at one point, this triangular block did not exist, and at one time in the future, it will again not exist, since it is a material thing and all material things eventually pass out of existence. At this point, Sally can playfully ponder the fact that while this triangular thing is temporary (and so is Sally and so is the wolf), her notion of triangularity is not. Triangularity, defined as a three-sided polygon with the sum of all three angles equaling 180°, is different than any particular triangular thing—for it does not, and cannot, pass away like materially constituted things necessarily do. Also, any triangular thing, at any point in time or space, whether today in Los Angeles or in fourth century BCE Athens, is a triangle insofar as it meets this definition, and this definition does not undergo change. It is permanent and not capable of passing out of existence, unlike the triangular object in the wolf’s and Sally’s field of vision. Sally is, thus, able to cognize something that cannot undergo change, and she does so through a concept. It is the capacity to do so that requires a difference to be made between humans and non-human animals.

On the A-T account, sense cognition cannot account for this capacity to see the universal in the particular, an action that is usually, especially by later Aristotelians like Thomas Aquinas, called “abstraction.” Moreover, in sense cognition, the external object is capable of causing the sense image in the animal, for what is present in the animal is a representation of the individual sensed object. Intellectual cognition, by contrast, goes beyond the sensed particular object to the universal definition, which is not present in the external object. The notion “three-sided polygon with the sum of all three angles equaling 180°” is content provided by the human being, not the external object. As such, while sense cognition is solely a receptive power, the A-T tradition posits something active in the human mind that itself is a crucial part of the causal story of how we can produce concepts that range over a multitude of particular objects. This active component is called the “active intellect” by Aristotle and the “agent intellect” by Thomas Aquinas. Now, the A-T tradition builds intellectual cognition off of sense cognition until the point where it sees a need to posit something different. As noted, sense cognition is fundamentally receptive and human understanding is itself for the most part receptive. We humans stand in potentiality to knowing much more than we actually know, or to put that another way, there is much more that we do not know than what we do. When focusing on human understanding in terms of its potentiality to understand, the term employed is the passive or possible intellect. Thus, the fundamental lenses through which the A-T tradition accounts for change in the world is also applied to human understanding, such that it itself is articulated in terms of actuality and potentiality.

This section gives a schematic, descriptive account of the sorts of powers that, according to the A-T tradition, organisms have. In what has been covered so far, once this account progressed past plants and nutritive powers and arrived at the level of non-human animals and humans, it turned to treat how those sorts of organisms represent external objects via sense cognition and intellectual cognition. While the tradition sees differences between sense and intellectual cognition (and we have only given a brief sketch of that), it groups these powers of internal representation together as “cognitive” powers. There are, however, other kinds of powers that fall to things that cognize, namely appetitive (or affective) powers and locomotion, which is the capacity to move around in order to satisfy desire. We will take these in turn, but put more emphasis on the former sort of power, because these appetitive powers, which are oriented toward and account for appetite or desire and fright, will become vital in any attempt to incorporate the A-T tradition to contemporary psychological accounts of motivation, decision, flourishing, character development, and emotion.

The appetitive powers are very closely integrated with their respective cognitive powers and are really only separable from them in thought. In reality, anything that has cognitive powers also has appetitive powers (and vice versa), for these powers interrelate continuously for their functioning. For instance, in order for a wolf to desire a particular sheep, the sheep has to come into the wolf’s field of sensation and the wolf has to cognize it (i.e., think about it). Upon such a cognition, the wolf may or may not desire it. If it does desire it, it can plan an attack, problem solve to overcome an obstacle that stands in the way, determine the weakest sheep if several are present, and elect whether to pursue.

Cognition of a desirable object is, then, a necessary though not sufficient condition for a particular desire to be elicited (the wolf may not desire the sheep for any number of reasons—perhaps it is not hungry, perhaps something else). Now, when we analyze the relationship of the wolf to the sheep in terms of sense cognition, the sheep, as perceptible object, plays the role of the efficient cause to that cognition: the (form of the) sheep causes the wolf, which has the appropriate sensory apparatus, to cognize a sheep. If we analyze the relationship of the sheep to wolf in terms of the appetitive powers, i.e., via desire, the sheep is the final cause of the wolf’s activity. The sheep is that toward which and “for the sake of which” the wolf sets into motion to satisfy its desire. Generally, anything that desires also has the proper organs at its disposal in order to, at least potentially, satisfy those desires. Thus, the wolf has the capacity to run and pursue the sheep and, should it capture it, to consume it. Conversely, the sheep will also have a desire should it cognize the wolf: to avoid the wolf’s pursuit. In such a case, the wolf is also the efficient cause of the sheep’s cognition and the final cause of its activity: the wolf has caused the sheep to flee.

The cognitive powers allow the subject to be aware of what is “out there” in the external world. The appetitive powers are also ordered to what is “out there,” but not simply in terms of representing an external object internally. Rather, the appetitive powers deal with how or whether the external object is “good” for the subject. As such, while the cognitive powers account for internal representation of the exterior world, the appetitive powers are meant to account for activity and agency in the world by a cognitive subject. Just as the A-T tradition marks a distinction between sense and intellectual cognition based on whether the object under consideration is a particular thing or a universal concept that ranges over a multitude of particular things, so too does the A-T tradition mark a distinction between sense and intellectual appetitive powers. In the example of the wolf and the sheep, what is at stake is a particular good (and it should be noted that what is good for the wolf is bad for the sheep, and vice versa). Since humans are able to cognize intellectively, by recourse to concepts and reflection upon what it is to have a concept, they will also have a wider and more explicit conception of the good than that which occurs simply in sense cognition. Take, for instance, the decision a human might take in terms of eating mutton. A host of factors is immediately present, from how that meal adds to or detracts from “health,” from economic and environmental considerations, to whether it is ethical to eat animals at all. Humans regularly engage in considerations of how a particular action fits into the larger conception of what is “good” and that notion of good is an abstract concept that ranges across a multitude of goods.

This conception of appetitive powers demands further explanation and even argumentation, as does the account of cognitive powers. At this point, however, the aim is to provide the reader with a schematic account of the sorts of powers organisms, on the A-T account, possess. As such, there are many details that remain as yet untreated and many critical questions that the careful reader could present. This tradition is well aware of these questions, and we will treat as many of these as we can in the course of what follows. In a sense, we ask the reader to forebear momentarily from expecting a full accounting of every possible question or even in demanding that this account follow strict argumentation. Instead, we are presenting a picture in broad outlines—we have traversed a wide terrain, from broad metaphysical suppositions to an account of cognition demanding recourse to a sense image to a brief discussion of desire—that will serve as the basis for later discussions. As the book continues, we will make reference to aspects of this discussion of the powers of the soul and then push that discussion beyond this schematic account, and we will rely on the notion that the human being is understood, first, as a part of nature and that distinctions between humans and non-human animals are only made in order to account for important differences. For instance, the next chapter presents the mechanics of cognition in more detail than in the account just provided, because of the general aim of this chapter. An image that comes to mind, which may be useful for the reader to consider, concerning how we are proceeding is that of a rising tide. Each wave is pushing a bit higher than the previous one, but by way of receding and then re-treading some of the same ground again. This approach responds to the overall systematic approach the A-T tradition uses with regard to articulating the human being, wherein no one aspect is entirely separate from another.

Chapter Summary

It may be useful to conclude this wide-ranging chapter with a sort of summary of the picture we have provided: all organisms have powers of nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Plants have these capacities and only these capacities. Some organisms, humans and non-human animals, are able to sense external objects and navigate the world accordingly. The ability to cognize like this is called sense cognition, and the attendant capacity to navigate the world is accounted for by sense appetite. In addition to sense cognition and appetite, humans have intellectual cognition and the attendant intellectual desire, which is called “will.” In intellectual cognition, humans are able to produce concepts and reflect on the fact that they are capable of producing concepts. In willing, humans are able to conceive of a universal conception of the good (and we do this automatically without being instructed in the finer points of A-T metaphysics) and then decide on a course of action with respect to that conception. In this sort of cognitive activity (and willing is a sort of cognitive activity), we are thinking about issues like “what is best for me to flourish?” “what kind of political organization is best?” and “what is the right action to do in this particular circumstance?” All these powers of the soul are placed in the larger A-T framework of accounting for how things, be they rocks, plants, animals, or humans, are in motion.

With this material as background, in the next chapters we describe this general A-T framework in somewhat more detail as we apply it to several broad areas of modern psychology, beginning with modern thinking about cognition, and in particular the relationship between human and non-human animal cognition. In each chapter, we will be returning to the vocabulary and the structure of the powers of the soul that are laid out in this chapter, but will also try to make clear the ways in which these ideas relate to the vocabulary and structure of modern psychology’s approach. Each chapter will also emphasize to some extent both the “vertical” continuity of the particular human powers under consideration (e.g., the continuity of human cognition with non-human animal cognition, or the continuity between the A-T view of the human and its approach to human flourishing) and the “horizontal” coherence among the different powers (e.g., the close relationship between the cognitive and appetitive powers). It is these vertical and horizontal connections that make the A-T vision of the human a real potential philosophical underpinning for a unified psychology.

References

1. Brennan, R. E. (1941). Thomistic psychology: A philosophic analysis of the nature of man. New York, NY: Macmillan.

2. Feser, E. (2009). Aquinas: A beginner’s guide. Oxford, UK: Oneworld.

3. Madden, J. D. (2013). Mind, matter & nature: A Thomistic proposal for the philosophy of mind. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.Crossref

4. Mercier, D., Nys, D., Halleux, J., & Wulf, M. (1950/1917). A manual of modern scholastic philosophy (Third English ed.). St. Louis, MO: Herder Book.

5. Robinson, D. N. (1989). Aristotle’s psychology. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Crossref

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_3

3. Human and Non-human Cognition

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceCognitionAnimal cognitionCognitive psychologyArtificial intelligence

Chapter 2 outlined the A-T philosophical approach and set the scene for the A-T approach as applied to human and non-human animal cognition. As we suggested in Chap. 1, contemporary psychology is quite unclear about the relation of human cognition and non-human animal cognition, and in fact, the presumed relation appears to differ fairly radically across different areas of the modern discipline. As we suggested in a previous paper (Stedman, Kostelecky, Spalding, & Gagné, 2017), the way in which psychology, as a discipline, has conceived of this relationship has taken fairly radical shifts over time, including conceiving of humans as just animals (that is, taking non-human cognition as a starting point, and asserting no special characteristics in human cognition), to conceiving of animals as being just like humans (that is, taking human cognition as a starting point, and asserting that all aspects of human cognition extend to all non-human animals), as well as many intermediate positions.

In this chapter, we will focus in more detail on how the A-T model treats the external and internal senses because these processes overlap with the animal processes of sensation, perception, and memory. Thus, the A-T approach to cognition has a “built-in” set of relationships between human and non-human animal cognition. We will then move to a discussion of the specifically human aspects of cognition in the A-T approach. Finally, we discuss some aspects of contemporary psychology’s philosophical understanding of cognition and relate those to our discussion of the A-T approach.

In moving from the metaphysical background to accounting for animal and human cognition on the A-T model, perhaps the most important feature to underscore is the fundamental continuity between humans and non-human animals for most of cognition. Indeed, the so-called “higher” non-human animals (such as the great apes, for example) and humans have the same general powers of sense cognition, from initial sensation to the capturing of sense data, to using those images to navigate their environment and everything in between (though, importantly, each species has its own specific versions of these general powers, such that not all non-human animals are taken to have exactly the same abilities). There is an important and principled difference between humans and animals in cognition, but only at the point of concept production and symbolic manipulation (i.e., at the point of transition from sensory to intellectual cognition, as described in Chap. 2). The continuity between animal and human cognition here is what bears emphasis. Indeed, the A-T account of human cognition is explicitly taken to extend how animals are seen to cognize and a difference is introduced only when there seems to be something fundamentally different happening, namely in the production of abstract universal concepts and the symbolic manipulation of those concepts in various ways. This might be quite surprising to most psychologists, because, to the extent that they are familiar at all with the A-T tradition, they are most likely to be familiar with what the tradition has to say about humans specifically and in distinction from other animals, and this can distort our notions of the fundamental structure of cognition within this tradition.

A-T Cognition

Before we can move to a more detailed discussion of the cognitive powers, we must first begin with two preliminary issues that are helpful to understand the more general framing of the A-T approach to cognition. First, we need to look into the question: What is the object of cognition? Second, we need to discuss the relationship between the A-T approach and modern notions of epistemology. Then we will move on to the sensory powers, and then specifically human cognition.

The Object of Cognition

A question that is, perhaps, too rarely asked in the study of cognition is: What is the object of cognition? This question has two distinct meanings: First, what is the purpose or aim of cognition? What role does cognition play for a given organism? As it is easy to see, the answer to such a question will depend to some (perhaps a large) extent on the philosophical approach that underlies the particular approach to cognition. If one takes as one’s philosophical approach a primarily materialistic approach, one might say that the object of cognition, or thinking, is successful reproduction, say, or successful action in the environment. If one had an idealistic philosophical approach, one might say that the object is to uncover ideas. If one had a phenomenological or humanistic approach, one might say that the purpose of cognition is to allow the organism to fulfill that particular organism’s potential (though this would mostly be an understanding of human cognition, of course, given the philosophical approaches that underlie those research programs in psychology). In the A-T approach, the object of cognition (in this first sense) is to internally represent external things such that the cognizer “knows” the things that he/she senses. Knowing, in the A-T approach, entails or at least is not opposed to, the purpose of cognition as conceived in these other approaches (successful action, for example, or even, as we discuss later, human flourishing). Of course, the fact that cognition has “knowing” as an object or goal does not entail perfect or even good knowledge in all cases or in all ways. Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were well aware of the fallibility and weakness of human cognition.

This question has an important second meaning: What is cognition about? The answer to this question, too, depends greatly on the approach one takes. Here, though, it seems that, to a large extent, the question does not really arise in many approaches in contemporary psychology. If the purpose of cognition is successful reproduction, for example, what does this tell us about what cognition is “about?” Presumably, cognition is “about” something real (and in this sense, given the materialist philosophical underpinning, something material), but it is unclear exactly what this something is: it is unclear in what way cognition, so understood, is related to the particular, singular physical objects encountered in the world, if cognition is fundamentally oriented toward successful reproduction. More radically, though, if the purpose is reproduction, say, it is unclear that cognition needs to have any object at all in this sense: Cognition does not need to be “about” anything in particular at all and would instead simply be whatever processes allowed successful reproduction, and the object in this sense (of intentionality) would not really enter into the discussion.

In the A-T approach, cognition is primarily about individual physical objects in the world (e.g., this particular computer), which is to say that cognition is an event by which the cognizer is related to physical objects in the world. However, to fully understand this particular material object, the A-T approach argues that we must understand its causes (the four causes), and this in turn means that we have to understand this particular material object as an example of a universal, by grasping the form of this particular object. That is, an important part of human understanding of this particular computer is exactly understanding that it is an example of a computer, despite all the idiosyncrasies of this particular computer (in addition, of course, to all the idiosyncratic sensory information about this particular computer). This explicit, two-way (individual object to universal and back to individual object) aspect of cognition drives a lot of the A-T approach to cognition: That cognition (even human intellectual cognition) must always rely on sensory experience, to at least some degree, but also that cognition surpasses sensory experience in various ways and in various cases. Critically for the current chapter, it is this aspect of A-T philosophy that sets the relationship between human and non-human animal cognition as one of a continuum with an enormous amount of overlap.

A-T Philosophy and Epistemology

Given that we have said that the object of cognition in the A-T approach is knowing via a sort of internal “representation” of external things (more on this below), there must be a theory of knowledge embedded in the A-T approach to cognition. Today, when we think of a theory of knowledge, we tend to think of the modern notion of epistemology and to take on (at least to some degree) a bit of philosophical skepticism. That is, epistemology is often today conceived to have a justificatory role, rather than simply an explanatory role. This is, perhaps, particularly true in psychology where the influence of Descartes looms large, even though Cartesian dualism is rejected by contemporary psychologists. While both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas long pre-date the concerns about skepticism that we now associate with the term epistemology (indeed, the term “epistemology” is of modern provenance), the A-T approach lays out a quite detailed theory of knowledge, and in particular, as we noted in the last section, describes how knowledge arises out of, and in a sense returns to, our interactions with particular objects. In a very brief summary, knowledge of every sort and variety arises from sensations of individual objects, which are then combined and evaluated in various ways, which (in humans) are then taken up in their universal aspects, and then return to make judgments about, and take actions with respect to, the individual objects. Humans and non-human animals have quite parallel powers throughout the realm of the sensory powers (in a general sense—each species has its own special sensory apparatus, which gives rise to differing aspects of sensation, and hence somewhat different sensory powers). Hence, human and non-human animals share a great deal of their cognitive powers including, as we will see, some aspects of self-consciousness, a point which is often misunderstood by those who are not very familiar with the A-T view. In the A-T view, it is only at the point where the intellect becomes involved and where the activity of the intellect feeds back into judgments about particular things that humans are truly seen to differ from non-human animals in terms of cognition. It is perhaps important to note here that intellect and intelligence are not equivalent constructs: The claim that non-human animals lack intellect does not in any respect mean that they are unintelligent; they can be very clever, can easily adapt to changing circumstances, can solve problems, and so on.

A second critical aspect of the A-T theory of knowledge is, perhaps, unintuitive to modern readers: knowledge is really about, quite literally, things in the world. This contrasts strongly with the sorts of notions that have arisen particularly since Descartes (but perhaps even more strongly since Locke), that the object of cognition is something “inside” the mind (particularly, an idea, but in modern psychology often a representation). It is important not to drag such “representational” ideas from modern thought backward in time to Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. This is made more difficult because the early moderns took the term representation from the A-T tradition, but made it something quite different: The modern representation is a thing (of some sort, say a pattern of brain activation), while in the A-T tradition, it is generally an event, literally a “representation” of something from the world to the mind. This is true for both sense cognition of particular objects and intellectual cognition of universal concepts, for in both cases there is a fundamental concordance between external things and thought about those things. There is, for example, a critical distinction which in the A-T tradition is often pointed out: Concepts are not that which the the person knows, but that by which the the person knows things in the world. Thus, the famous problem of the bridge (the question of how one can know anything real, if one only has access to that which is “in” the mind) does not arise in the A-T approach. An important corollary of this arises for psychologists, as explained by Adler (1990): Early work in psychology used the method of introspection, taking early modern philosophical understandings of representation as their base, which led to the (correct) demolition of this version of introspection as a valid method by the behaviorists. In the A-T approach, although one can have reflexive awareness and understanding that one is perceiving, one cannot, by introspection, “see” the percept in the mind. The percept itself is simply what you actually see (e.g., the computer on the desk), not something in your mind that could potentially be introspected. Our percepts (and indeed concepts) are that by which we see things, not that which we see.

A third aspect of the A-T approach to knowing that is rather different from modern thought has to do with the issue of intentionality (see Spalding, Stedman, Hancock, & Gagné, 2014 for a more in-depth discussion). In modern terms, intentionality is the “aboutness” of, for example, thoughts. In modern philosophy it is quite mysterious just how “thoughts” could come to be “about” anything, particularly if one takes a relatively materialistic approach to cognition. The difficulty (or at least, a difficulty) is that no physical patterns are intrinsically about anything at all. Indeed, all “aboutness” of physical things is only in terms of the interpretation of some observer who is able to have intrinsic aboutness. For example, the physical shapes of the letters and words of this book, in and of themselves, are not about anything—it is only when someone who knows the language interprets them that they are about something (see Feser, 2019 for extensive discussion of these kinds of issues in modern thought).

A second difficulty about intentionality in modern psychology is why just thoughts (and things derived from or linked to thoughts, such as words) should have this special ability to be about something. Importantly for our present purposes, modern discussions of intentionality focus heavily on human cognition—on the aboutness of our thoughts. In the A-T approach, it is not just “thoughts” that have this characteristic; sensations also have “aboutness.” And, this in turn means that animal sensations (because they are the result of the same kinds of powers) also have intentionality. The cognitive powers receive the forms of things in the world, and it is this reception of the form that creates the intentionality, the aboutness, of a given thought or sensation. Thus, whereas intentionality in modern philosophy tends to be rather uniquely an aspect of human thinking, and furthermore deeply mysterious in terms of how it could arise uniquely in human thinking (Spalding et al., 2014), in the A-T view, it is neither completely unique to human thoughts nor mysterious (at least, no more mysterious than any other aspect of the A-T approach to cognition).

A final point about epistemology that is worth noting: There is a well-known Aristotelian dictum that different sciences admit of differing degrees of certitude. Thus, one should not expect that, say, conclusions drawn about politics should have the same degree of firmness as conclusions drawn about mathematics. Indeed, in the A-T view, to demand the same degree of certitude about differing domains of knowledge is to deeply misunderstand the nature of knowledge. We raise this point here in the context of epistemology because skepticism of all kinds (including, most famously, Cartesian skepticism) arises when one ignores this dictum. Thus, to require absolute certainty about things that are, by their nature, not susceptible to such certainty leads inescapably to skepticism and to the inability to have any true knowledge at all.

Senses, External and Internal

As discussed in Chap. 2, and in the preceding sections, cognition in the A-T framework commences with sensory information regarding things in the environment. Every sensible object is itself a composition of form and matter. The form is communicated to the sense organ through the relevant medium (e.g., air or water) while the matter is left behind. The sense organ is predisposed to receive that form, visually, orally, olfactorily, and so on. The organ thus stands ready to receive this form in a way peculiar to it or, to phrase it differently, each organ is ready to be informed by the form of the external object. For instance, if I shut my eyes in a lit room, my eyes have the potentiality to receive the forms (actualities) of external objects in a way that other parts of me do not and clearly in ways that, for instance, a nearby chair does not. I then open my eyes, and this potentiality to receive external forms is actualized, and I am really sensing the forms of objects in my environment. The potentiality, sight, is brought into actuality, and I am really seeing. This reception of the forms of external things by organs is the same for humans and non-human animals (to the extent that the sensory organs and powers themselves are the same). The sameness does not stop there. The process continues from these external senses to internal senses, in which cognition of particular objects continues to be fundamentally the same for animals and humans alike. The five standard external senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) are the same in the A-T tradition as in modern psychology.

Cognition is certainly more than reception of information of external objects, on the A-T account or, really, any satisfactory account. Upon initial sense reception of the external object, the A-T approach moves inward, as it were, and proposes four internal senses: the common sense, imagination, memory, and estimative or cogitative sense. Each of these senses has a causal role to play in accounting for the rich cognitive life of all animals and humans.

Common Sense

It is important to know that the common sense, in the A-T tradition, is not like our modern notion of common sense. The term does not mean “good judgment” but rather is a technical term applying to the power of distinguishing and combining information from various external senses or from various objects. In short, the common sense integrates and distinguishes different acts of sensation, and it does so by sensing those acts of sensation. Thus, the common sense is what allows us to be aware that we are seeing, or that we are hearing, etc. It is also the sense that allows us to perceive our own (physical) activities and motions. It can discern something seen as white from something seen as green or distinguish in something that is white and sweet and rough (like a white sugar cube) the color white from the sweet taste from the rough texture, or alternatively it can combine the color white, the sweet taste, and the rough texture as applying to this one particular object. In both the cases, the external senses are not capable of fulfilling these distinguishing or combining roles. They are capable of sensing in the way that they are disposed to do, and such distinguishing between different sensed colors or disambiguating the sense experience of seeing white from being sweet is accomplished by the common sense, to which these different sensations are referred. This sense is common insofar as it integrates different sensations and is able to distinguish among different external sensations and also insofar as sensation is directed toward this sort of discriminating activity.

Importantly, as the common sense is what allows awareness of our sensory activities, such awareness is common to humans and, generally speaking, animals, on the A-T view. Thus, a common question that arises when modern psychologists consider, for example, notions of consciousness, or particularly self-consciousness, is: Are other animals (self)conscious? In the A-T view, the answer is a qualified yes. To the extent that the modern psychologist is asking whether other animals have some awareness of their own sensory activities (or, more generally, of the application of their sensory powers) or bodily actions, the animal does indeed have self-awareness (see the discussion in Sanguineti, 2013). The answer is a qualified yes because in humans, we also have intellectual awareness (the awareness of myself as a human person, for example) that takes on the character of, or makes use of, universals, which other animals would not have.

Imagination

The next internal sense is the imagination. In the A-T approach, the power of imagination refers to the capacity to produce and manipulate images. A particular sensation of an external object occurs by impacting the proper organ; the imagination (phantasia in Greek) produces an image (a phantasm ). The trouble with the word image in English is that it conjures up a picture, whereas the idea here is that any sensation proceeds “inward” and the externally sensed object is present to the mind. Instead of simply a picture of the thing, this image is also supposed to capture the taste of vinegar or the sound of a violin. As such, sometimes the transliteration phantasm is used instead of image to avoid the overly pictorial connotation of image. The key thing, though, is that the externally sensed object is reproduced internally and formally via a capacity called imagination, the product of which is an image or phantasm. The phantasm is essential to cognition according to the Aristotelian model; without the phantasm there will be no cognition of any sort.

Importantly, imagination is not just a “place” where a phantasm is created directly from sensory experience. First, the phantasm is not a direct result of the sensation, but rather is the outcome of the operations of the common sense. Thus, it is the presentation of the external object to the mind, in all its aspects as described in the above section on the operation of the common sense. Second, phantasms need not be something that is exactly or currently perceived, as the common sense allows one to combine various sensory materials (e.g., the common sense could combine an image of a dog with the color purple, even if no such purple dog had ever been seen). In addition, in combination with the power of sensory memory, the imagination (with the common sense) can retrieve previously created phantasms. Hence, the imagination is a quite powerful aspect of sensory cognition.

Memory

The phantasm is stored in the memory (called the storehouse/treasury of forms) and can be recalled as necessary. Again, this capacity to remember is seen in humans and non-human animals alike. I can recall an image of my childhood home or where I left my keys this morning, and this same ability allows my dog to recall where the food is or what I look like.

Again, although the memory is taken to be largely a storehouse, and this sounds quite static, it is important to remember that the memory works in concert with all the other internal sense powers such that any phantasm might be stored, whether it is the more or less direct production of an external sensed object, or a combination of other sensory information from the common sense, or whether it is a phantasm (created by the common sense) of an imaginary thing. So, another potential parallel with modern psychology is that it seems that it is not just raw sensory information that is stored. Instead, the phantasm encapsulates the version of the form of the thing that resulted as a product of the common sense and the imagination operating with the raw sensory information.

Estimative or Cogitative Sense

The estimative or cogitative sense is given different names based on whether non-human animals or humans are using this capacity. This is the point where one sees the beginnings of a differentiation between humans and non-human animals in their respective cognitive stories, but even here there is a basic similarity. Regarding animals, when a wolf pursues its prey or the sheep flees its predator, it is via the estimative faculty. This estimative faculty is a deeper level of cognition than mere form reception or image construction or even memory, because this cognition goes well beyond the information contained in collecting sense data alone. It is what allows some animals to cognize what is good/useful or bad for them. This, in turn, is what allows for a movement of the sense appetite toward or away from this particular object (e.g., it is the recognition that the sheep is good to eat that allows for the wolf’s sense appetite to be engaged toward the sheep). Moreover, it allows for something like emotion to accompany the perception of a perceptible object, like horror (as when the sheep sees the wolf), desire (as when the wolf sees the sheep), or a kind of friendship (between sheep, say) or enmity. For instance, the notion horror is not explicitly contained in sense image of the wolf. It is, rather, the sheep’s complex cognitive life that allows it to perceive the wolf, recognize it as bad for the sheep, shirk in horror at the sight of the wolf, and then set about a course of action to avoid what is cognized as bad. The A-T tradition (specifically Thomas Aquinas) holds that the estimative power even allows for a kind of prudence to occur in the animal, since prudence is understood as a sort of making plans for the future. On this account, only animals that have a fairly robust capacity of memory make such provision for the future, for futurity and memory are clearly bound up with each other. Not only do some animals engage in a sort of foresightedness through the estimative faculty by which they set about a particular course of action, but it is also through this estimative faculty that the A-T tradition accounts for animal learning and problem-solving.

Two additional important points about the estimative power must be kept in mind. First, the estimative power’s operations depend upon the disposition of the body. For example, whether it is, or it is not, the mating season has a strong effect on the extent to which the estimative power would identify a conspecific as appropriate for pursuit (or, similarly, the level of hunger of the wolf also has a strong effect on whether the estimative power presents the sheep as good to the sensory appetite). Second, some of the operations of the estimative power are taken to be innate, and some are created or sharpened by experience: So, a wolf pup might instinctively eat meat brought to it, but might only learn in time that the sheep it sees can be good to eat, or, for that matter, how best to hunt for sheep.

Finally, although the estimative power does not consider universals (so that, for example, a wolf cannot consider a particular sheep exactly as an example of a sheep in the way that a human can), it can and does recognize things that are highly similar to each other, and hence can generalize from experience with one particular thing to another (hence, a wolf can learn, by eating one particular sheep, that another particular sheep—and indeed anything else that is, in sensory terms, highly similar to that first delicious sheep—is likely to be good to eat, but it cannot form a universal proposition such as All sheep are good to eat).

The correlate inner sense for humans is called the cogitative sense, and it is that by which humans collate different phantasms and organize them. It does all that the estimative sense does in other animals, but it also begins to move toward some specifically human actions. It is, as it were, a bridge between the sensory and intellectual powers, for example, thinking through (or cogitating) different particular items held in the mind and preparing the phantasm(s) for abstraction into a universal concept. Importantly, the bridging function (from sensory to intellect) of the cogitative power also operates in the opposite direction, as well, as when one reasons about a particular from a universal: Humans are mortal. This (Socrates) is a human. Hence, this (Socrates) is mortal. This cogitation is clearly understood to occur in the brain, or, as Thomas Aquinas himself phrased it, in a central cell in the head.

Summary of Sensory Powers

The most critical points about the A-T thought about the sensory powers for our purposes are (1) they are shared between human and non-human animals, (2) they all work together, and (3) they are much more flexible than one might think, and account for a much greater proportion of human cognition than one might otherwise have thought. The upshot of this is that a great deal of cognition is shared between human and non-human animals (again, one must recognize that all non-human animals also differ among themselves in terms of their exact versions of sensory powers—every species has its own set of particular sensory powers).

One final point in this section: Why is it that so many people in modern psychology have found animals’ cognitive abilities surprising? Why was it taken as a default that animals would not have such cognitive abilities, if such an old approach as the A-T approach already said that animals would have these cognitive abilities? Some might say that this surprise is due to an inappropriate view of the specialness of the human due to religious beliefs that science has now disproved. But, Thomas Aquinas was certainly more religious than most! Yet, as we have argued here, he clearly believed in a great deal of cognitive ability in animals. So, that does not seem to be it. We believe that the underlying cause is actually a kind of hidden Cartesianism. In particular, it was Descartes (not people such as Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas) who thought of animals as mechanistic, as automata, and hence as unable to think at all, and hence as not having, for example, any degree of self-consciousness (just as, of course, he thought of all matter as mechanistic and hence without final or formal cause). And, in this Cartesian world, all “mind” was only human, not animal. Thus, it seems that part of the problem of understanding the relationship between human and non-human animal cognition is that thinking about this problem might still be infected by some Cartesian influences.

Human Cognition

At this point, we have (we hope) established the extent to which the A-T view thinks of human and non-human animal cognition as being very similar. This is probably quite confounding to those who believe that there is a bright line between the human and non-human. Now, we must turn to the question of what is actually different about human cognition in the A-T view. This will, no doubt, be confounding to those who believe that there are no fundamental differences. Both of these groups will, no doubt, think the A-T approach to be obviously wrong, definitely proven false, and so on. But, of course, each group would think the same of each other’s position, as well. This is one of the main points that we brought up in Chap. 1: The different areas of psychology tend to have completely incompatible philosophical underpinnings and assumptions, and this is quite true when one turns to the relationships between human and non-human animal abilities and characteristics.

So, if the A-T view sees human and non-human animal cognition as so largely overlapping, what exactly are the differences, and do they matter? As one might expect, we cannot truly do justice to this question in a chapter, and certainly not in one brief section of one chapter. Indeed, Mortimer Adler worked on this specific question, from a broadly Aristotelian perspective, across a series of three books and about 25 years (see Adler, 1967/1993, 1990, 1991). Here, we can only point to the distinction, as suggested by the A-T approach. It will not be satisfying to most readers, and all we can do is to suggest that before the reader dismisses the answers proposed by the A-T approach, they might take a look at some of the more detailed works available (indeed, the works by Adler, cited above, are written for intelligent non-specialists, and in our view are an excellent place to start, especially for contemporary psychologists). Before we get to the differences, however, there are two points identified in Adler’s work in particular to which we wish to draw attention. First, the answer to this question has enormous consequences for areas beyond cognitive psychology. Adler (1967/1993) works through some of the consequences for our understanding of human flourishing, of human (and animal) rights, and of politics, and much of his other work explores the consequences for education and for international relations, among other things. Second, Adler provides a very strong argument that this question is what he calls “mixed.” That is, it is a question that by its very nature requires the cooperation of philosophy and science, and that no purely philosophical position that ignores the science can give a complete answer, nor can any purely scientific position that ignores philosophy. Importantly, in our view, this is an area of A-T thought that can be developed and corrected by comparative psychology. At the same time, many interpretations of comparative psychology’s experimental results include or assume deep philosophical commitments, usually without recognition or concern about how those commitments condition the interpretation, and hence are generally not treated to proper criticism. In short, this is a potentially fertile area not just for the A-T tradition to contribute to psychology, but for psychology to contribute to the continued development of the A-T tradition.

In a sense, the difference has already been introduced: Human cognition is different in that it involves the intellectual powers, rather than just sensory powers. But this is not very helpful, since to understand the intellect, one must understand the role that it plays in human cognition! Importantly, intellect and intelligence are not the same thing, so asserting that humans have intellect and other animals do not, is not to suggest that other animals are unintelligent (we hope this would be clear from what we have already said about the sensory powers, but it is important to be completely clear on this point). Furthermore, the intellect is proposed in the A-T tradition precisely as a way of accounting for the powers and activities that (at least seem to) differentiate humans from other animals.

Difference in Kind Versus Difference in Degree

Now, in one sense, it is just blindingly obvious that there are huge differences: No non-human animal is sitting in a university writing a book and considering how humans might differ from other animals. But this is not really the question. The question is: Are the differences, both obvious and subtle, differences in kind or just in degree? To differ in kind is to differ in a discontinuous sense: One thing is capable of X and the other just is not. Robins can fly, but cows cannot. Hence, robins and cows differ in kind (in terms of their mode of locomotion). To differ in degree is to differ in a continuous (or potentially continuous) sense. So, two species of bear might differ in size, but there can be overlap between individuals of these species, or there might be other species that are intermediate in size.

This distinction between differing in kind or in degree is usually taken to be fairly obvious, but there are some complications (see Adler, 1967/1993). First, a sufficient difference in degree can have the appearance of a difference in kind. As a kind of simplistic example, one might see a 180 kg bear and a 0.5 kg bear and conclude from this that the two bears differ in kind. But what if the 0.5 kg bear is recently born and the 180 kg bear is its mother? In this case, we then have strong reason to believe that the difference, though dramatic, is only a difference in degree, not kind. Note the critical point that the determination of degree or kind rests entirely on some information or assumption external to the comparison of interest (i.e., it depends on the causal understanding of the difference). Second, a difference in kind could be what Adler calls superficial or radical. A superficial difference in kind occurs when there is an underlying dimension of difference, and particularly when there is a kind of “threshold” between the two levels that are seen to differ in kind. So, if we think of ice and water, the observed difference is rather discontinuous in many respects, but the discontinuity is explained by the underlying difference in temperature, and controlled by a threshold—the freezing point of water. So, there is a real difference in kind (with respect to many characteristics of water and ice), but it is superficial in Adler’s terminology. Note that superficial here does not mean small or unimportant, but only that it is a surface difference that is driven by a deeper, underlying difference. Finally, there are radical differences where the difference in kind is not related to an underlying factor or threshold level—robins fly and cows do not. There is not a “cow flight threshold.” So, there are then four possible answers to the question of how humans differ cognitively from other animals: In degree, in kind apparently (but really in degree only), in kind superficially, and in kind radically.

The main question then, is this: Are cognitive differences between humans and non-human animals differences in kind or not? If they are differences in kind, are they differences in kind superficially or radically? Note here again that superficial differences in kind are differences in kind. Assume for the sake of argument that some specific human ability is not shared with other animals. This is a difference in kind with respect to that ability, even if that ability is controlled by some other factor: Humans can do X and other animals cannot. This is a difference in kind, even if the explanation of that difference is that, say, the ability to do X requires a threshold level of brain complexity, or it requires as a threshold some particular organization of neurons, or whatever the particular explanation might be. Note that most things that have been identified as potential differences in kind do not have any smoothly varying underlying function that is known to generate the differences—to use a simple example raised earlier, no other animal is writing a book about human and non-human cognition. It is not the case that other animals are writing short research articles on the topic and only humans can write the book. Nor is there an existing, continuous underlying known difference that varies smoothly across all animals with humans at one end that gives rise to book writing. This does not mean that there are no such underlying differences. It does mean that at the moment, many of these identified differences could be radical differences in kind.

Radical differences in kind are easy to understand, at least in principle: Robins fly, cows just do not, and there really is not an explanation of this difference that could make it only an apparent difference in kind, nor is there a clear way of constructing a “threshold” to underlie this difference. Note, of course, that having a radical difference in kind in one respect does not mean that there are no other differences of degree, or that the two things are required to differ in all other respects. Note also that although this is a radical difference in kind (with respect to locomotion), this does not mean that robins and cows are completely different in all ways (i.e., even radical differences in kind are differences in some respect, not in all respects).

In the question of human versus non-human animal cognition, the most common question is whether some seemingly obvious difference is a difference in kind or only apparently so (because differences that are clearly only differences of degree are not in dispute as to their cause or meaning). It takes very little effort to find examples presenting some animal behavior X as a “rudimentary” form of human behavior Y; this is a claim that the difference between X and Y, no matter how large, is only apparently a difference in kind, but really a difference in degree. In many cases, this is undoubtedly true. But, this judgment might also have been made without any real evidence, perhaps because the person making the claim is already committed to the proposition that there are no differences in kind. The critical point here is that the assignment of the term “rudimentary” does all the work and hides the exact nature of the assertion: Labeling X as a rudimentary form of Y assumes, but does not show, continuity. Furthermore, it ignores the possibility of an intervening threshold, which would make the difference between X and Y a superficial difference in kind, but a difference in kind, nonetheless. And, in some cases, the labeling could be based on a more or less completely false notion of the relation between X and Y: One might say that a cow hopping over a small stream is a rudimentary form of flight, but labeling it in this way hardly establishes continuity.

Abstract, Universal Concepts

The A-T approach sees human and non-human animal cognition as differing in degree in many cases, as being superficial differences in kind in some cases, but as involving a radical difference in one important respect: The ability to use abstract, universal concepts, and the kinds of behaviors that appear to depend on those concepts: the human language abilities and cultural, political, esthetic, magical/religious practices, among others. So, many differences in cognition could be due to something that only differs in degree, some could be differences in kind, but superficial in that, perhaps, a certain level of brain complexity is necessary and sufficient for a particular kind of behavior. But the A-T approach also sees the ability to use and manipulate abstract, universal concepts as a radical difference in kind. This difference might well involve a necessary level of, say, brain complexity, but brain complexity, in and of itself, is not taken as sufficient.

One difficulty for thinking about the use of abstract, universal concepts is that they are not easy to see. And this includes the fact that they cannot be “seen” introspectively—to take a rather stock example, any image of a triangle (including a mental image) would have to have some definite shape and size and thickness of lines, and so on, rather than being abstract and universal. Indeed, the A-T approach to universals does not rely on introspection. We can, of course, be given examples of our own use of abstract universal concepts, and this can be somewhat convincing (e.g., we each understand that we can think of, say, triangularity, in an abstract and universal sense). But, if we take it from the point of view of a purely objective, observable thing that we can use to compare to other animals, that kind of evidence is not really on point for the current purposes, as we cannot beg the question with respect to whether or not animals have that same notion of triangularity. However, we can note that other animals do not seem to be able to make use of such notions to develop other complex behaviors—e.g., chimpanzees can be trained to respond discriminatively to triangles, but not to develop plane geometry, for example, nor do they seem to develop from the notion of triangularity the notion that no diagonal can be drawn in a triangle, or that the angles sum to 180°. Similarly, baboons can be trained to discriminate legal letter strings in a given language, but that does not mean that they read or understand the language (Grainger, Dufau, Montant, Ziegler, & Fagot, 2012). Such examples can be multiplied endlessly.

The A-T approach infers the possession of abstract and universal concepts from a whole complex of complicated behaviors, such as propositional language (and indeed figurative language such as metaphor and irony and sarcasm), cumulative cultural practices, spirituality, differing political organization across neighbor populations, and many others. Now, it is not particularly controversial that people engage in these complicated behaviors. It is somewhat controversial whether they require abstract, universal concepts (though, there is little explanation for how such practices arise without them). It is also not all that controversial that animals do not, in general, engage in such complexes of these kinds of behaviors. For example, arguments are sometimes made that the communicative function embedded in bee “dance” behavior is a “proto-” or “rudimentary” version of human language. But, bees do not seem to have any cumulative cultural practices or spirituality, or any other evidence of truly symbolic or propositional behavior. Bottle-nosed dolphins are sometimes thought to have something approximating a rudimentary language, and some have suggested that chimpanzees might be able to learn languages, but they do not seem to have figurative language, or cumulative cultural and political practices, figurative and representative art, systematic use of pigments, etc. The key point, with respect to A-T thought about the intellect, is that any one or a small number of such behaviors might be carried out in some way not requiring abstract universal concepts (e.g., a non-human animal species might develop, say, a very complex communicative system without having abstract universal concepts), but they will not develop the wide range of such behaviors that are seen in humans. So, a species might demonstrate behavior that looks like one aspect of complex human behavior, but not the range of behaviors seen in humans (so, they might develop, say, a very complex communication system, but not a political system or a religious system or figurative language or trade networks, etc.). It is the combination of all these very different kinds of complex behaviors that tend to indicate the need for abstract universal concepts. So, in general, it does not seem likely that other extant animal species have or use abstract universal concepts, even in rudimentary forms (though this is open to future research results). Note again, though, that the abilities of other animals are important in their own right, and DO provide important insight into human abilities, even though these particular sets of abilities might differ in kind. Many non-human animal abilities are conserved in humans, so understanding those abilities is critical to understanding humans. Similarly, the lack of abstract, universal concepts does not mean that animals are unable to behave in complex ways, or that they are unintelligent: We say again, non-human animals (particularly, the higher animals) have a full range of sensory powers that allow them to behave in very effective ways.

What about other hominids? What about Neanderthals, for example? There is some evidence that Neanderthals engaged in spiritual practices such as burials, or figurative art, though the evidence for such things is not completely uncontroversial (Burdukiewicz, 2014). Importantly, though, if, say, Neanderthals could be shown definitively to be using abstract, universal concepts, then the A-T response would have to be that Neanderthals also then, must have intellectual, rather than just sensory, powers. Given the emerging evidence of fairly widespread interbreeding with anatomically modern humans (e.g., Sankararaman et al., 2014), this might make good sense.

In addition to suggestions that other hominids might have some ability to have abstract universal concepts, there is disagreement about how quickly many of the complex behavior systems emerged with the arrival of anatomically modern humans, with a consensus view that the emergence of the whole complex of behaviors was faster than one would expect from an evolutionary process, but not as fast as one would expect from a kind of “single massive genetic mutation” kind of event. Instead, the whole complex of behaviors seems to have arisen in a moderately quick way, suggesting that the complex of behaviors is, itself, an example of cumulative cultural development dependent on an ability to have and use abstract universal concepts. Nevertheless, the general agreement seems to be that anatomically modern humans are unique in their ability to engage in this enormous complex of complicated behaviors that are taken to require abstract universal concepts.

Here again, we run into an interesting issue about what one should expect when comparing humans and non-human animals. Expectations that there should be no examples of similarity between humans and other animals (be they extant or extinct) seem to be a kind of baseline, in that examples of animal “cleverness” are always taken as surprising, and perhaps more important, as deeply meaningful. Again, we think this might be a holdover from thinking about “mind” and “body” in a Cartesian way, such that other animals are merely automata. But in the A-T approach, as we have been trying to make clear, a great deal of similarity should exist, and the similarity should be greater when the species being compared are more similar in, for example, brain complexity. Let us take the general idea of communication systems to make this point. Let us assume the following: (1) Many animals communicate. (2) The complexity of communication is in part dependent on brain complexity. (3) More complex communication will look more like human language, because human language is (or seems to be) the most complex system of communication that we know of. Now, clearly this is going to mean that even when there are large gaps, as in the difference between human and, say, dolphin communication systems, it is going to appear that there is some kind of continuum, such that the gap, even though large, must not represent a true difference in kind, and certainly not a radical difference in kind as defined above. But this way of thinking ignores the A-T approach’s basic orientation: The sensory powers are shared, and hence anything that can be done by the sensory powers can be done, in one way or another, by another animal, presuming that that animal has sufficient powers (and this in turn is likely to rest on something like brain complexity). Thus, in the A-T view, there is no problem with both maintaining that there is a radical difference in kind (in particular, a difference involving the possession and use of abstract universal concepts), between humans and dolphin’s communication systems, and at the same time recognizing that dolphins have very powerful communications systems in their own rights. Similar points could be made with respect to many other complex behaviors or other properties, such as self-awareness. As we pointed out above, the sensory powers confer at least some degree of self-awareness on animals (at least those with sufficient sensory powers of the appropriate sort) due to their possession of the common sense, imagination, and memory. But, where we are self-conscious of being, for example, humans and animals and persons and parents, and on and on (i.e., we are self-conscious of being examples of a large number of abstract, universal categories, each of which gives license to further inferences and reasoning), there is no evidence for such kinds of self-consciousness in other animals, though many higher animals seem to be self-aware in the sense that they might be able to recognize themselves in a mirror, and they are certainly aware of sensory events, just as expected by the A-T approach.

Abstraction

The A-T approach sees the possession and use of abstract universal concepts as the primary difference between human and non-human animal cognition. How, though, do such concepts arise? Looking back over this account, clearly there is a fundamental similarity in cognition that attains between human and non-human animals in terms of sense cognition. From the initial sensation all the way through to memory and even, to a point, to the manipulation of an internally held image, the process is the same. This similarity, however, breaks down once concept formation occurs, a process which the A-T approach does not see happening in non-human animals. The key difference between sensible cognition and what occurs in concept formation is a move in going from the particular phantasm to an abstract universal concept. This leap from the particular to the universal, as seen clearly in the move from sensation of a triangular thing to understanding the Pythagorean theorem, is a move from a particular, sensed (or imagined) triangle to a universal conception of that thing in terms of the properties of triangularity. Note here that generalization of a response is not automatically an example of a universal concept, nor is the representation of an average. For example, suppose that one came to represent the average of all the triangles one had ever seen. This average triangle representation would still have a particular shape, a particular size, and so on, even if no specific triangle exactly like it had ever been seen. Also, consider the case of the sheep into whose field of vision a wolf enters. The sheep immediately perceives that the wolf is evil for the sheep and then the sheep can make a decision regarding how to proceed. In spite of this rich cognitive experience, the sheep does not reckon from its experience of this evil thing to what it is to be evil, or have an account of evil, or decide to create a political system to protect future generations from evil. Nor does the wolf have an account of the good. For humans, by contrast, this sort of abstractive thought occurs naturally and such universal concepts clearly play an important role in our own cognitive lives.

The whole process of sense cognition is fundamentally receptive: the sense organs and internal powers have the capacity of being informed by the particular objects in the environment. The causal story goes from the external, sensible object to that object being internally represented and that the external object is sufficient to cause the internal representation of the particular. Sensation is, for the most part, in potentiality to or receptive of the external sensible object. The story changes upon the introduction of the concept, since the particular does not, on this account, seem to be adequate to cause a universal notion/concept. As such, at this point A-T cognitive theory posits something active in the intellect itself causing a concept to occur. This process of going from a particular to a universal by way of the agency of the human intellect is called by the A-T tradition and, especially by Aquinas, abstraction. Once the universal nature is held in the human intellect, the intellectual cognition still needs sensation in order to be able to apply that universal concept back to really existing, tangible objects. This act, sometimes known as the existential judgment, affirms the existence of this particular dog specifically as a dog, as in, “The dog (universal) is my dog, Tippy (the existent dog).”

Critically, in the A-T view, the possession of abstract universal concepts, along with their reliance on sensory powers both in the generation of such concepts and in the application of the concepts to actual existent objects, affects human cognition both at the intellectual and sensory levels. This is why the A-T approach differentiates the estimative power in non-human animals and the cogitative power in humans: Our evaluation of things in the world is partially influenced by our concepts, in a way that (by hypothesis) does not occur for non-human animals. Thus, we can bring to bear everything we know about “dog” in general to the particular dog in front of us (as a simple example, we can bring to bear the notion that the dog is a mammal, such that we can make inferences based not on specific examples of this or other dogs—thus, we need not have seen a dog give birth to know that this dog was generated via live birth). Similarly, though, our intellectual operations are deeply affected by our sensory powers as well. An obvious example of this is that our reasoning, which in, for example, a Cartesian approach should be purely abstract, is deeply affected by our sensory processes, introducing many deviations from normative, abstract reasoning.

Summary of A-T Approach to Human Cognition

In short, the A-T view places human cognition on a continuum with non-human cognition in many respects, with just one major difference, albeit a difference that gives rise to many distinctly human behavioral patterns. This fundamental orientation toward continuity strongly suggests that most animal cognition and most human cognition should be similar, and hence, the A-T approach is less surprised (and less troubled) by evidence of non-human animal cleverness compared to many philosophical conceptions of the relation between human and non-human cognition. Nor, of course, is it surprised or troubled by evidence of clear differences. Thus, the A-T approach provides a strongly principled account of both the similarity and difference of human and non-human cognition.

Modern Psychology’s Approach to Cognition

The study of cognition, in modern psychology (and allied fields), is highly variable in its underlying philosophical commitments, both in the sense of having different commitments for human cognition and non-human animal cognition and in the sense of having different commitments within the study of human cognition. In this section, we will describe the two most common approaches, currently and historically. In particular, we will focus on the behaviorist/positivist approach and the computationalist/functionalist approach, as these are the most well-known approaches to cognition (broadly conceived). The behaviorist/positivist approach assumes complete continuity between the human and the non-human, and has a clear directionality (from non-human to human), while the computationalist approach is somewhat less clear, but generally assumes (though rarely makes use of) a complete continuity but with the opposite directionality (i.e., it takes notions primarily developed in human psychology and extends them to non-human animals, such as attention, memory, etc.). As we will see, both of these approaches have proven to be incredibly productive and important ways of thinking about cognition. Yet, they are very different from each other in terms of their philosophical underpinnings.

In Chap. 4, we will turn to two more recent approaches, the embodied and the humanist, which arose largely in reaction against the behaviorist and computationalist approaches, which take on rather different notions of what cognition consists of, and which have quite different philosophical underpinnings, compared to either behaviorism or computationalism. To foreshadow a bit, we will argue that each of these four approaches makes use of insights that were inherent in the A-T approach, and hence the A-T approach holds out hope for creating a more coherent understanding of cognition as a whole.

Behaviorism

While it might seem a bit odd to discuss behaviorism in the context of cognition, given that behaviorism generally refused to discuss such “metaphysical” notions, it is important to see two points. First, behaviorism was intended to explain what we would now label cognition, though the explanations were not, of course, in what we would think of as cognitive terms (i.e., behaviorism intended to explain the behaviors associated with higher cognitive activity without positing anything beyond the learning mechanisms that were thought to account for the behavior itself). Indeed, behaviorism was a totalizing program, such that all psychological phenomena were intended either to be subsumed under the behaviorist explanatory approach or else eliminated as non-scientific. Second, specifically for the purposes of this chapter, behaviorism had a specific set of philosophical presuppositions (both in terms of metaphysics, mostly implicit, and philosophy of science, often quite explicit) and a specific set of assumptions about the relationship between human and non-human cognition (or behavior, if we do not want to seem to beg the question about “cognition” as something separate from the behaviors themselves).

Let us first consider the relationship between human and non-human cognition in behaviorism (see Stedman et al., 2017 for a discussion). As Robinson (1981) shows, the early years of psychology as a separate discipline involved a wide array of approaches to the relationship between human and non-human cognition, with approaches varying both in terms of the degree of continuity and the nature of the directionality of the relationship—by this we mean, the direction of extension of characteristics from human to non-human or from non-human to human. For example, some early psychologists believed in relatively complete continuity, but differed in terms of whether the proper approach was to extend human characteristics to other animals or to consider humans in terms of the characteristics of other animals (see Robinson, 1981, Chap. 11). Behaviorism, clearly, opted for complete continuity and the directionality was clearly from non-human animals to humans. Thus, the same principles of learning that applied to non-human animal learning were held to be sufficient for all human behaviors as well.

As Robinson demonstrated, the expected relation between human and non-human characteristics was driven primarily by the philosophical approaches that the early behaviorists absorbed, sometimes without much explicit argument, from the intellectual atmosphere (rather than, for example, being driven by particular results from science, per se). In particular, there was a strong consensus in the nineteenth century that all science was to be thought of in terms of a mechanistic materialism. Because psychology was just becoming a separate (or semi-separate) discipline in the late nineteenth century, and to a large extent wanted to be clearly understood as a science, many early psychologists (and particularly the early behaviorists) took on a mechanistic materialism as a bedrock metaphysical assumption. Similarly, behaviorists adopted operationism from physics as a default position on the ontology of scientific entities. However, philosophy of science was already moving beyond a purely mechanistic materialism just around this time (particularly due to developments within physics (see, for example, Feser, 2019), a development that continued over the course of nearly the entire twentieth century), and operationism was maintained only for a very short time even in physics, where it had initially arisen (Stedman et al., 2017).

The main stream of psychology, however, having decided early on that mechanistic materialism was the sine qua non of science, has proven difficult to move off that particular bedrock (though we will be reviewing some recent challenges), perhaps in part because relatively few psychologists have treated deeply these kinds of questions, and in part because the day-to-day work of the mainstream psychologist is relatively insulated from such deep philosophical questions. Another possible reason why psychology has been so resistant to moving away from a mechanistic materialism as an unexamined assumption is that psychology has been particularly influenced by Cartesian thinking, as we have mentioned several times already. The critical point in the current context is that Descartes had (or so he was interpreted consistently) a purely mechanistic materialist approach to the physical (which matched with the nineteenth-century philosophy of science) and then added onto it an immaterial mind. So, in psychology, the only alternative to mechanistic materialism has been seen to be a completely immaterial mind, with all of its problems. In any case, mechanistic materialism became quite entrenched. Nevertheless, there have always been important psychologists (and philosophers) who were not convinced that mechanistic materialism would be sufficient to understand human cognition, and other aspects of human psychology. Robinson (1981, pp. 373–374) presents a brief discussion of reservations by James, Wundt, Peirce, and others. Feser (2019) provides a much more detailed discussion of mechanistic materialism in science. Indeed, behaviorism faced many philosophical and psychological criticisms, even in its heyday (see Robinson, 1979).

We should note, of course, that there have been and are numerous behaviorisms, rather than just one monolithic approach (see, e.g., Robinson, 1979). For example, some versions of behaviorism have been tightly tied explicitly to physical mechanisms, whereas others have been committed to behavior explicitly as a separate level of analysis, not requiring connection to neural processing. Now some versions of behaviorism are approaching computationalism and much psychology research on animals has taken on computationalist notions of information processing systems and goes by the name “animal cognition.” Yet, all researchers have largely maintained the same philosophical underpinnings. Given what we have said above, it is perhaps unsurprising that the early behaviorists, in taking on the mechanical materialism of the nineteenth century as a method (i.e., that science by its nature can only detect mechanistic effects and therefore can only treat phenomena inasmuch as they reflect mechanical, materialist effects), also adopted the nineteenth-century science’s tendency to translate that methodological maxim into a metaphysical maxim (i.e., that only mechanistic mechanical phenomena exist). This is perhaps most obvious with the behaviorists who tended to lay down explicit maxims that anything that could not be subsumed by behaviorist techniques was not to be included in psychology, and this distinction (though softened with the rise of cognitive psychology in the middle of the twentieth century) has been maintained as a kind of science versus non-science schism within psychology to the present day.

None of this is to say, however, that the behaviorists did not contribute greatly to modern psychology, or that the empirical work done within this tradition is not valuable. Indeed, many of the most durable and valuable contributions of psychology as a whole trace their roots to behaviorism. In addition, of course, much of this empirical work can be thought of as specification of the notion of “habit” that was developed by Aristotle (and continued in Thomas Aquinas, as well as being the heart of associationism in early modern philosophy). Obviously, then, the notion of simple learning mechanisms in common between human and non-human animals as the heart of learning and behavior is extremely congenial to a thinker in the A-T tradition. As has been (and will be) repeated quite often in this book, the A-T thinker’s problem with behaviorism is the unnecessary addition of metaphysical assumptions and presuppositions.

Computationalism/Functionalism

In the middle of the twentieth century, as is well known, psychology underwent the “cognitive revolution.” This change was largely a response to the long dominance of behaviorist approaches, with a more widespread rediscovery of many other aspects of psychology that had quietly continued during the time when behaviorism was dominant. In particular, it was once again considered appropriate to posit mental structures and functions that could not be seen directly as overt behavior. Importantly, however, this was not a return to the kind of introspectionism that was so effectively critiqued by the behaviorists, but was intended to be fully scientific (in the modern sense of “science”). The behaviorists had, as we have seen, largely accepted a positivist epistemology, and did so within an operationalist approach, and indeed claimed that this was the only way that psychology could be a science. However, outside of psychology, the operationalist approach had disappeared from physics very quickly, where it was rather quickly seen to be untenable as a grounding for physical science. The cognitivist turn, somewhat implicitly, took on a more scientific realist epistemology, such that the mental structures and functions are now to be considered as hypothetical constructs, which correspond (at least at the limit) to real structural or functional entities. This view is now common in most branches of modern science, where there is little concern about positing hypothetical constructs when needed to explain observable data. This scientific realism is still a more or less implicit assumption of most psychologists working within the cognitivist approach, generally. Critically, the computationalist critique of behaviorism was driven by arguments that the behaviorist-approved learning mechanisms were computationally limited in ways that would not allow the full range of human behaviors and particularly human language use (see Dawson, 2013 for an extensive discussion).

So, modern cognitivist psychologists see themselves as scientists, and largely work within a philosophical approach of scientific realism with hypothetical constructs such as memory, attention, etc. However, scientific realism is a philosophical approach to science, not directly to epistemology or ontology. In short, scientific realism is about how one goes about science; it is not a philosophical underpinning to the psychological things that the science of psychology is intended to study. What is it that philosophically underpins modern cognitive psychology? In particular, how are we to conceive of the system within which the hypothetical constructs of cognitivists operate?

Not coincidentally, the cognitive revolution arose at the same time as the development of the digital computer, and all the associated philosophical and theoretical work on computation (see Dawson, 2013 for a very detailed, but readable, exposition). Hence, the primary underpinning for the cognitivist approach to psychology is computationalism (sometimes called functionalism, sometimes called information processing). The fundamental importance of computationalism to the psychology of cognition is this: Computationalism claims to show how intelligent activity that seems “mind-like” can arise from purely physical computational mechanisms, with the digital computer as a paradigm example. Thus, the fact that humans seem to think about things and that, for example, words seem to have meanings that affect our thought—indeed, that the meanings of words determine, for example, whether a particular thought would be true or not, whether one does or does not go on to the next step in a chain of reasoning, and so on—can be accounted for in a mechanistic way, based on a syntax-based series of transformations of representations. As a simple example, consider addition: What makes 2 + 2 = 4? Clearly, the reason why adding 2 and 2 gives 4 has to do with the nature of 2, 4, +, and =. And, critically, people, in doing addition, use the meanings of 2, 4, +, and = in order to do so. How can we account for the fact that the meanings of such symbols affect thinking?

Perhaps the most fundamental claim of computationalism (with respect to its role in psychology) is that computation with an appropriate syntax is meaning preserving. Consider the simple calculator: The computations of the calculator are organized by a syntax (a set of rules of transformations), such that the meanings of the numbers are preserved across the transformations. Thus, when you add 2 + 2 on your calculator you get 4. So, the meanings of the numbers are preserved across the transformations that are carried out in the calculator—indeed, the meanings come for free, if the syntax is appropriately structured. The big claim of computationalism is that this kind of meaning-preserving transformation scales up to all human thought. Hence, the mind is a particular kind of computer, such that meaning comes along for free, based on the syntax of the computational system. As a corollary to this point, the person using the calculator is interested in the semantics of the numbers and does not worry about the syntax of the calculator (just so long as that syntax does, in fact, preserve the meanings correctly). Thus, the point is that the syntax and the semantics can operate together such that one can either look at the meanings or at the syntax, without worrying much about the other.

Another critical aspect of computationalism is that the method of analysis underwrites hypothesizing structures (or sub-processes) of cognition, such as memory, attention, and so on. Just as a modern digital computer has various internal structures to carry out particular functions (e.g., memory, firmware, controllers for memory storage devices), the human can have different cognitive functions carried out by different sub-processes. Clearly, this kind of analysis of different functions (powers, in A-T terminology) is highly consistent with the A-T approach, as shown, for example, in the A-T delineation of the different sensory powers. Furthermore, just as a scientist could, if presented with a modern digital computer without any previous knowledge, use the scientific method to investigate the computer’s functions and structures, so too can a cognitive scientist investigate the structures and functions (including the cognitive) of the human.

Fundamentally, this claim is intended to underwrite a purely materialistic philosophical approach: Computers are strictly physical objects, and they are existence proofs that there can be purely physical computational devices with meaning-preserving syntax. If humans are fundamentally computational devices, then all human cognition can be understood in the same way. Notice that the fundamental drive to materialism is not a result of work on cognition or computation, but rather it is an assumption (or desideratum) of this work. Notice also that here we have a very strong connection with the behaviorism that computationalism largely replaced: Behaviorism attempted to simply rule out anything “cognitive” that could not be immediately cashed out into physical terms of stimuli and behavior. Computationalism instead keeps cognition and its various (hypothetical) sub-processes, but tells us that all cognition can be aligned to the (purely) physical human via the computational connection between the physical and the functional, just as we see in modern digital computers.

As can be seen through the preceding discussion, the computational approach clearly arose primarily in the context of explaining human cognition and was relatively uninterested in cognition in non-human animals. Interestingly, though, one of the main tenets of computationalism is precisely that the very same computational processes can be carried out in different physical instantiations; Dawson (2013) provides a particularly clear explanation of this aspect of computationalism. Thus, one of the main points of computationalism is precisely that computationalism underwrites the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI), whether that means artificially intelligent modern digital computers or any other system that could be functionally (computationally) equivalent. While artificial intelligence was initially a focus of computationalism, non-human animal intelligence was not a particular focus. Nevertheless, computationalism clearly can be applied to non-human animal cognition. In fact, much modern comparative psychology, as we noted previously, often adopts or adapts cognitive notions from humans (e.g., memory or attention) to non-human animals.

At the same time, some areas of modern AI research are taking approaches from behaviorism and using them as fundamental processes giving rise to intelligent behavior in computer systems. For example, Danks (2003) created a set of equations allowing a computer to simulate Rescorla–Wagner learning models, and this has proven to be an extremely powerful computational approach to learning and behavior for Artificially Intelligent systems (see, e.g., Sutton & Barto, 2018). So, computationalism has, in at least one sense, demonstrated continuity between human and non-human cognition in that computationalism itself can be applied to both. On the other hand, the rise of reinforcement learning AI at the same time suggests that much of the classical approach to computationalism (see Dawson, 2013, Chap. 3 for a full explanation of this approach) might not be needed for intelligent behavior. Finally, the point must be made that the computational approach does not (yet) make any strong claims, per se, about continuity (or not) between human and non-human cognition: It remains an open question how much continuity or discontinuity there might be, because to demonstrate this continuity or discontinuity, one must first carry out a full computational analysis of the behavior in question. One must ask: What computational problem is being solved by the system? What algorithm is solving that computational problem? What is the architecture that instantiates that algorithm? And, finally, what physical system gives rise to that architecture (Dawson, 2013)? Any or all of these questions might be answered in ways that are continuous or discontinuous between human and non-human animals.

In recent years, the “classic” version of computationalism (symbolic processing based on the serial processing of a modern digital computer) has been challenged by connectionism, a different version of computationalism which emphasizes the coordinated processing of very many, very simple processors modeled on neurons (see Dawson, 2013, Chap. 4, for a very readable discussion). While connectionism (in Dawson’s terms) represents a different architecture of computation than the classical version of computationalism, it is critical to see that connectionist processors are highly abstract, relative to real neurons, and in this sense still amodal (i.e., processing is of abstract information) and the different architectures can be instantiated on the same physical system, as is shown clearly by the fact that current computational models, whether of the classic or connectionist architecture, are instantiated on serial digital computers.

In the next chapter, we will discuss some of the criticisms of the computational approach, particularly those from the embodied cognition and humanistic psychology perspectives. There are also, of course, criticisms of the computational approaches more directly from the A-T perspective (Madden, 2013; Spalding et al., 2014; Stedman, Kostelecky, Spalding, & Gagné, 2016; Stedman, Spalding, & Gagné, 2016). However, as with the behaviorist approach, it is important to point out just how impressive the fundamental ideas of computationalism really are. We have, of course, barely touched on the depth of thought and insight that computationalism/functionalism represents (see Dawson, 2013 for a much more in-depth presentation). As Madden (2013, p. 131, emphasis in original) says, “… I hope the reader will stop to ponder the elegance and sheer genius of functionalism. It is, whatever its vices, a very good idea!”

Chapter Summary

The A-T approach, then, provides a clear and principled continuity between human and non-human animal cognition that derives from the difference between sensory and intellectual processes (and in Chap. 5 we shall see the same principled continuity with respect to the appetitive powers, which give rise to emotions). Modern psychology, on the other hand, incorporates quite different, and in many ways incompatible approaches that can be continuous or not, and that can be closely tied to the biology, or not, and that can fundamentally move from human to non-human or from non-human to human (in terms of explanatory direction).

We have mentioned a few of the similarities between the A-T approach and modern psychology approaches as we have discussed these different approaches. In one sense, the most critical difference is that many aspects of human (and non-human) cognition that are integrated in the A-T approach become separated in modern approaches, which then “totalize” their approach. For example, as we have mentioned, the A-T approach integrated the notion of habit as a fundamental learning mechanism that occurs across the non-human to human spectrum, which is fundamental to behaviorism, but also the notion of different powers, which aligns nicely with modern cognitive psychology’s approach to analyzing the sub-functions of systems that support cognition. As we will see in later chapters, this same movement from A-T integration to modern separation is true of the splits between cognition and other areas of psychology.

It needs to be said that the two “totalizing” approaches (behaviorism and computationalism) are extremely powerful ways of conceiving behavior (in a very general sense), but also that they are extremely powerful precisely in that they are extremely abstract, such that they are not tied directly to the “machinery” of the system. For example, modern artificial intelligence work making use of the Rescorla–Wagner equations is completely free of specific machinery (so, the claim is that the very same processes are exactly computed by both brains and electronic computers). Importantly, this aspect of modern AI combines philosophical assumptions of both behaviorism and computationalism. This abstractness is an important consideration in recent developments in psychology of cognition outside the behaviorist and computationalist approaches. In the next chapter, we will engage with some of the critiques of some of the dominant modern approaches to cognition, and discuss how the A-T approach relates to these critiques, as well as how the A-T approach relates to a (very small) sample of the (very many) empirical studies of various aspects of human and of non-human animal cognition.

Before we move to that topic, however, we want to re-emphasize one of the major difficulties modern psychologists might find in thinking about the A-T approach. As we mentioned in the Introduction, one major difficulty is getting “behind” all the ways in which philosophers after Thomas Aquinas (and particularly in the early modern philosophical era), have changed the way that people interpret the very terms that were used by Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. Nowhere is this more true than in the understanding of the relationship of human and non-human cognition: Modern psychology has tended to adopt a view of the questions about human cognition that is very heavily influenced by a Cartesian understanding of the issue. This is why so many disputes about the nature of non-human animal cognition consist of claims that animals are much cleverer than they should be if a human/non-human discontinuity existed. The nature of the discontinuity, in Cartesian terms, is more or less total: Humans have minds, animals do not; Animals are automata, humans reason out everything with little or no preservation of non-human cognition. It is easy to see, given this (admittedly, caricatured) belief about the relationship between human and non-human cognition, that one might expect that animals would not be clever, would only be able to do things by pure instinct, etc. And, it is easy to see why a modern comparative psychologist (of any theoretical stripe) might believe that all previous views were rather easily ruled out by showing examples of animals in experiments or in the wild behaving intelligently. Indeed, it is our view that modern comparative psychology (again, of whatever theoretical stripe) does certainly rule out this kind of Cartesian discontinuity. But, as we have shown, the discontinuity suggested by the A-T approach is far more subtle than that suggested by Descartes, and it assumes far more intelligence on the part of non-human animals, the existence of a non-human “mind”, and of (at least some forms of) self-consciousness, and so on, and hence would be a valuable perspective in understanding comparative psychology (see also, Brown & Abramson, 2019; Stedman et al., 2017). There is an interesting similarity here in the relationship between the classical computationalism approach to artificial intelligence and the reinforcement learning approach to AI: Classical computationalism is a kind of inheritor of Cartesian thinking about the disembodied and fully separate mind (Dawson, 2013, pp. 56–59), such that classical computationalism in some ways seems, at least historically, to “devalue” the power of non-human cognition, whereas the reinforcement learning approach to AI emphasizes the power of those learning algorithms that are found throughout the animal kingdom.

Acknowledgement

The section “A-T Cognition” was adapted, in part, and with permission from the Institute of Mind and Behavior, from the section The Aristotelean-Thomistic Philosophical Model, pp. 195–200, in Stedman, J. M., Kostelecky, M., Spalding, T. L., & Gagné, C. L. (2017). Animal cognition: An Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective. Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 38, 193–214.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_4

4. Embodied and Humanistic Views of Cognition

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceEmbodimentHumanistic psychologyExistentialismPhenomenology

In the previous chapter, we touched on behaviorism and computationalism during our discussion of cognition. In this chapter, we focus on two additional major areas of psychological research and theory that touch, in very different ways, on cognition, namely embodied and humanistic psychologies. These approaches grow out of a different set of philosophical positions than did the behaviorist and computationalist approaches, primarily phenomenological and existential approaches developed in the late nineteenth and throughout the middle of the twentieth centuries just as psychology itself was developing as a separate discipline. Both embodied and humanistic psychologies have underlying connections to the A-T approach, in that the phenomenological and existentialist philosophies themselves have important underlying and historical connections to A-T philosophy.

Embodied psychology is of particular interest because it is, at the same time, philosophically quite different from behaviorism and computationalism (at least of the classical variety), but methodologically, and in terms of the kinds of behavior it is interested in, quite similar to behaviorism and computationalism. Indeed, embodiment is the most recent large-scale development that could be considered as “within” modern psychology research on cognition (though embodiment approaches extend beyond cognition, as well). Furthermore, of all modern approaches to psychology, embodiment has perhaps the most obvious connection to the A-T tradition in that embodiment is so completely integrated into A-T thinking that it would never be seen as a separate approach—the A-T approach simply assumes embodiment, due to the understanding of the human person as one thing (i.e., combination of soul and matter) which we discussed in Chap. 2.

Humanistic psychology is of particular interest because it is both philosophically and methodologically almost entirely different than the behaviorist and computationalist approaches. Indeed, many psychologists might be surprised that we are even discussing humanistic psychology alongside other approaches that more specifically focus on cognition, as the humanistic approach is more often associated with clinical and personality psychology. Yet, the humanistic approach to psychology is deeply concerned with human thinking, and in our view, this makes discussion of such a different approach worthwhile (just as, in the previous chapter, we included behaviorist approaches even though they too can be said to reject much about “cognition” as modern cognitive psychologists think of it). Furthermore, as we shall see, some of the central concerns of humanistic psychology developed out of existentialism/phenomenology, and so in some ways they reach back to insights in the A-T tradition. Thus, by choosing the embodied cognition and humanistic approaches to psychology, we can build on our discussion from the previous chapter and demonstrate the deep differences among the behaviorist, computationalist, embodied, and humanistic approaches.

We begin by discussing how the philosophical developments associated with existentialism/phenomenology led to new approaches to psychology and how those developments were related to the A-T tradition. We then discuss humanistic psychology and embodied psychology and their overlap with and relationship to the A-T approach. We will then end our discussion of cognition with suggestions for how an A-T approach to cognition would be valuable to modern psychology, and how modern psychology can be valuable to the development of the A-T tradition. Fundamentally, we will argue that each of the four modern approaches that we have reviewed takes insights that were present in the A-T tradition and develops them. Unfortunately, in our view, the modern approaches tend to take a totalizing approach, such that each insight is taken to be the only principle by which human cognition is to be explained, to the exclusion of other alternative approaches. Importantly, an underlying approach that can maintain the multiple insights as separate, yet not contradictory, holds out the hope of a more complete and integrated view of cognition. Hovhannisyan (2018), for example, already suggests that the embodied approach holds out some hope of integration with humanistic psychology, and we argue that the A-T approach holds out good hope of integration across all four of these quite disparate modern approaches to psychology.

Philosophical Developments

As we have emphasized several times, the behaviorist and computationalist approaches are both reactions to, and partially acceptances of, Cartesian dualism, a point also emphasized by Dawson (2013). In particular, both behaviorism and computationalism accepted Descartes’ mechanistic materialism, but differ in terms of how they dealt with Descartes’ immaterial mind. Behaviorism simply ruled out anything smacking of “mind,” a priori, as inconsistent with “science.” Computationalism, on the other hand, kept the notion of “mind,” at least as a description of human abilities, but attempted to show how it could be cashed out into materialist terms. Interestingly, as Dawson (2013) points out in several places, computationalism’s overall approach strongly maintained the separation of “mind” from matter, conceptually, and it is this separation that warrants computationalism’s largely amodal (i.e., abstract, not tied to any sensory modality) conception of cognition.

As behaviorism and computationalism were reacting against (and with) Descartes in one way, other philosophical approaches were developing that more fundamentally rejected the Cartesian worldview. In particular, phenomenological and existential approaches (broadly speaking of a range of related specific philosophies) attempted in some ways to reject the entire Cartesian framework, developing in response to, and rejection of, the streams of philosophy that developed from Descartes and led both to idealism and to mechanistic materialism.

Logical positivism in psychology came in for particular critique from psychologists influenced by phenomenology. Some problems with logical positivism in its more radical forms were fairly quickly apparent: The base claim of logical positivism, that the only true knowing comes directly from the facts of the world, is not itself something that can come to us directly from the facts of the world, for example. So, this claim that logical positivism provides the only way to truly know something itself cannot be something we truly know, by this verificationist account of knowing, and so on. The psychologists influenced by phenomenology, however, were more interested in a different kind of critique. In particular, they pushed the claim, in contradistinction to the logical positivists, that we only have direct access to the facts of consciousness. Hence, true positivism would consist in accepting as knowing, only that which is directly available in consciousness. And, there are many things directly available in consciousness (e.g., universal ideas, logical relations such as implication, and so on) that do not seem at all to be the kinds of things that the logical positivists were interested in (individual facts of sensation, with the further assumption that those facts of sensation related to something real). Psychologists influenced by existentialists further developed such ideas by pointing out that much of what we are conscious of is our bodily interaction with the world and our social interaction with other people. Thus, we are not deeply conscious of much of what we actually do, in the common sense of consciously “thinking about” (the classical example here being hammering a nail—the body simply seems to do the action, rather than the person consciously thinking about doing the action).

Obviously, reviewing the full history of these philosophical developments is far beyond the scope of this work. However, it is important to at least appreciate that the phenomenological and existential movements presented two general developments that deeply influenced some areas of psychology.

Phenomenology emphasized the subjective nature of thinking, broadly conceived. According to phenomenology, we have a unique relationship with our conscious experiences, namely that we actually experience them. Other objects or events in the world can be seen, touched, and smelled. They can be studied or engaged in other ways. But, they are not experienced, or lived, or performed. This, according to the phenomenologist, has deep implications for understanding our own thinking.

The existentialists emphasized the “being-in-the-world” of the human. Importantly, this is not simply the fact that the human lives in a physical and social world, as this is, of course, true of other animals, as well. Rather, it is that humans know that they live in such a world and that the meanings to humans of the things in the world depend on that world and the way that the human is part of that world. In this respect, then, the human also stands out from that very world in a way that is not true of the rest of the world.

Unsurprisingly, then, both the phenomenological and existential approaches strongly emphasized the human as human, and thus tended to relatively sharply distinguish the human from the non-human. Together, and as applied to psychology, the emphasis on subjectivity and on the “human in the world” contrasted strongly with the behaviorist and computationalist approaches, which took objectivity as a basic need of any “science” and which took the world largely as a source of “stimulus,” without much serious attention to the way in which the human is immersed in, and integrated into, the world (both physical and social). Furthermore, the specifically human focus of the phenomenological and existential approaches is quite different from the behaviorist and computationalist approaches. The insights of these philosophical developments, as they were adopted into psychology, took on particular characteristics. Humanistic psychology, in particular, took on the importance of the subjective human experience, while embodied psychology took on the notion of human being in the world (and particularly as a body) as critical.

Relation to A-T Approach

It is important to understand that the phenomenological and existential approaches were, to some extent, inspired by a return to Aristotelian and medieval Scholastic (including Thomistic) thought (we are, of course, certainly not the first to note the relation of the A-T tradition with existentialism and phenomenology or to note the potential for psychology inherent in that relationship) (see, e.g., DeRobertis, 2011). For example, both Brentano and Heidegger were deeply affected by Aristotelian-Scholastic thought: Brentano, at one point a Catholic priest, had studied the works of Thomas Aquinas specifically, and Heidegger had deeply studied Aristotle and the Scholastic philosophers, among other things having written his Habilitationsschrift on a later contemporary of Aquinas. Thus, many philosophers in the phenomenological and existential approaches had read deeply the A-T tradition and saw that line of thought as a definite alternative to both the empiricism and the idealism that were, at the time, the philosophical traditions most represented in the universities. In addition, though, there were still a reasonable number of philosophers working in the A-T tradition in the universities of that time. Hence, some of the underlying themes in phenomenology and existentialism have some of their impetus in A-T thought, though these themes were developed in directions that are not necessarily completely consistent with A-T thinking. It is also important to remember that, just as today, much thinking about the A-T tradition—and even some thinking generally in the A-T tradition—was infected with interpretations of that tradition that arose in the early modern period. Not surprisingly, then, the main kinds of philosophies that phenomenology and existentialism rejected are also at odds with the A-T approach, with both the empiricist and idealist traditions being seen as developments from the fundamentally flawed dualist notions of mechanistic materialism and completely immaterial mind introduced by Descartes (see Feser, 2008, Chap. 5).

However, the humanistic and embodied approaches’ adaptations of these philosophical approaches into psychology did not themselves make much use of the A-T approach. So, the A-T approach is in many ways only latent in these psychological approaches. Nevertheless, these latent aspects provide opportunities for us to see how some of the important aspects of the humanistic and the embodied approaches can be integrated with some aspects of the behaviorist and computationalist approaches, providing a more complete, consistent, and coherent understanding of cognition, by using the A-T view. One way of thinking about these different and seemingly incompatible psychological approaches is that each adopts certain insights, insights that are generally incorporated in the A-T approach, but that each modern approach exaggerates the individual insights into complete, or totalizing, psychologies.

One of the important points about both phenomenology and existentialism is that they reject the notion that our conscious, lived experiences are representations to be “processed” or presented to some kind of inner observer. Beyond this point, different theorists disagree about the exact nature of these experiences, but many have suggested that they involve a higher order reflection on our own thinking, much as the A-T view has suggested that although our thoughts are primarily about the things we are thinking about, they can be, secondarily, about our own thinking. Similarly, the phenomenologists and existentialists identify many aspects of behavior as not involving much, if any, conscious awareness under normal circumstances, and this is also similar to the A-T approach to much behavior, particularly those driven by well-formed habits.

Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic psychology developed to a large extent out of the continental traditions of phenomenology and existentialism (though there were also influences from personalism, and from many other areas, as well). It presented itself as an alternative to the behaviorist and psycho-analytic approaches to psychology in the early to mid-twentieth century. This was mostly prior to the development of the computationalist approach, though in recent years humanistic psychologists have not been particularly impressed with the computationalist approach either, as its adoption of the computer as a driving metaphor is at least as inconsistent with the humanistic approach as the behaviorists’ adoption of the lab rat as their driving metaphor. In particular, humanistic psychology rejected the determinism inherent in the mechanical materialism of the other approaches (in addition to rejecting Freudianism, for the same reasons), as well as what the humanists saw as a failure to deal with much of what made humans truly human: the self, creativity, love, hope, etc. Importantly, humanistic psychology is more oriented toward and more developed in terms of personality, therapy, social work, and so on, and treats of cognition within those areas of interest much more than it considers cognition as a separate topic of investigation. Obviously, this in itself can give rise to a difference in approach. Nevertheless, both the behaviorist and computationalist approaches also give rise to areas within the more applied branches of psychology, including schools of therapy and counseling, and so it is worthwhile to consider the relationships among the approaches. In addition, of course, as we have discussed in Chap. 1, psychology as a discipline has both professional and academic branches, and we should not pre-emptively surrender to the presumption of a necessary schism between the two.

Humanistic psychology criticizes the behaviorist and computationalist approaches on several grounds. First, these approaches are seen as literally dehumanizing—treating the human as no different in principle from other animals (or digital computers) is precisely to remove from consideration all that is distinctly or specifically human. Second, humanistic psychology emphasizes the freedom of the human to choose, and hence rejects anything that smacks of determinism or reductionism. Third, in a sense, humanistic psychology sees behaviorism and computationalism as highly complicated ways of answering the wrong questions. While it might be of some limited interest to see exactly how a principle of learning, or a computational architecture, can give rise to some limited, specific kind of behavior, neither behaviorism nor computationalism generally asks about the specifically human behaviors that are of most interest, according to the humanistic psychologist. Hence, in the view of the humanist, even when behaviorist or computationalist approaches are applied to areas such as therapy, they are believed to miss the most important underlying issues.

Humanistic psychology, coming from this philosophical background, developed with a strong focus on development, growth, change, and actualization of self. Behind these specific foci was a deep interest and acknowledgment of human consciousness and choice: Humans are aware (and aware of being aware), and they have the ability to make choices, and therefore have responsibility for the development and path of their own lives. This notion goes beyond simply a denial that humans are directly controlled by simple stimuli in their environment (though it includes this claim), extending in some cases to strong claims that humans make their own meanings in all cases. This in turn leads to a quite different understanding of the nature of science and of psychology (see Stedman, Sweetman, & Hancock, 2008, for a discussion) and a clear rejection not only of the value of the objective, but even of the possibility of the objective when it comes to understanding the human.

Thus, in humanistic psychology’s understanding of cognition, several points stand out. First, and perhaps most obviously, there is little interest in non-human cognition, and indeed, there is a more or less total disconnect between human and non-human cognition. Humanistic psychology does not deny that there may be some latent aspects of non-human cognition that are maintained in the human, but these are not of much interest in the humanistic approach. Indeed, to the extent that there is any connection, a humanist might suggest that the role of the truly human thinker is to overcome such influences. Second, human thinking is conceived of as, on the one hand, being more free from control by simple physical environmental stimuli (deriving from the strong emphasis on the human ability to choose) and, on the other hand, being deeply influenced—but not controlled—by the social environment (deriving from the strong emphasis of human being in the world). Third, the critical role of choice in human thinking leads humanistic psychology to incorporate more emotional and appetitive influences in human thinking—making cognition less “purely” cognitive, in a sense. Indeed, one might say that the humanistic approach to cognition is more about the “why” of someone’s thinking, whereas the computational approach in particular is much more about the “how.” Fourth, as we discussed in Chap. 1, the philosophical differences represented by humanistic psychology, compared to behaviorism or computationalism, are not driven by complementary systems, but instead are in contradiction to each other, involving rejection at very basic levels of the other approaches. For example, both behaviorism and computationalism simply reject humanism’s focus on the subjective.

One might feel, given the discussion above, that the humanistic psychology simply has nothing to say about cognition. And, certainly, we agree that there is a deep divide between the humanistic approach and the other approaches to cognition that we have discussed so far. Nevertheless, the humanistic approach is very concerned with cognition in the sense of understanding how people make choices, adopt beliefs, and so on. But, the approach even to these topics differs in two respects from, for example, the computationalist approach. First, the emphasis is on the motivation for the choices, and how those choices relate to the person’s life (hence, the humanist is generally not very interested in the kinds of laboratory decision tasks that are the bread and butter of the computationalist approach). Second, there is much more emphasis on the experience of choosing or of believing, whereas the computationalist approach would emphasize how the choice is made, or what the content of the belief is and what information drives that belief content. In short, the humanistic psychologist might say that the other approaches might tell us something about cognition, but not about human thinking.

Relation of Humanistic Psychology to the A-T Approach

Humanistic psychology emphasizes the motivation of thinking more than the behaviorist or computationalist approaches, and hence comes closer to bringing together the cognitive and appetitive/affective systems (the next chapter will discuss how the A-T approach does this, and what it means for our understanding of the relation between cognition and emotion). The humanistic approach, in particular, re-introduced to psychology a deep concern with human flourishing and the development of the self, as well as other kinds of “truly human” concerns, and we will see in Chap. 6 how the A-T approach provides strong grounding for thinking about human flourishing. Let us simply say here that when one considers that Aristotle’s work on ethics, politics, and rhetoric are as developed in his philosophy as his logic or metaphysics, it should be clear the A-T approach maintains the connection between cognition and the appetitive/affective nature of the human.

As we have seen, the humanistic approach, in particular, emphasizes the holistic nature of the human, emphasizing that the human is more than the sum of the parts, and that therefore the human cannot be understood by investigating the parts. As we have noted several times, the A-T approach presents the integrated human person, and in particular, it does not accept a division into mind and body or any other such division. The human person is one complete substance, neither the body nor the soul is a substance, nor is the mind, nor are any other possible “parts.” So, in this sense, certainly, the A-T approach emphasizes the holistic nature of the human. On the other hand, the A-T approach is deeply interested in enumerating, investigating, and describing the powers of the human person, and so clearly the A-T holism does not prevent or preclude analysis as a valuable path to understanding the human. The important point here for the A-T approach is that the powers of a substance flow from the nature of the substance, but we can only know the substance by way of the powers, which are themselves manifested by the substance’s activities—we have no independent ability to simply intuit the nature of a substance.

Embodiment

Embodied psychology developed to some extent out of (or at least in sympathetic parallel with) the phenomenological and existential concern with the “human in the world,” and particularly with Merleau-Ponty’s work attempting to resist the Cartesian division between mind and body by emphasizing the role of the body in action (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 2013). However, it also, and perhaps more directly in areas of psychology more closely related to computing science, developed from early cybernetic work that was concerned with the tight integration of animal (and human) behavior with the demands and the affordances of the immediate environment (Dawson, 2013, Chap. 5).

Hence, embodied psychology is in some ways less in contrast to the computationalist or behaviorist approaches than is humanistic psychology: It need not, for example, suggest a serious split between human and non-human animals, except in the sense that every animal’s behavior will be driven by their environment and their body, and therefore, differences in body and immediate environment will give rise to different behaviors. Hence, humans will behave differently from other animals in as much as they have different bodily capacities, and in as much as their environment differs. In the terminology from the last chapter, behavioral differences between human and non-human animals could represent only apparent, or at most superficial, differences in kind. On the other hand, to the extent that the embodied psychologist truly believes that the human body drives human cognition (and behavior), then to the extent that the human body is different in kind from another animal, those differences could even be radical differences in kind. Again, as we saw in the previous chapter, whether a difference is a difference in kind, and whether it is radical or superficial depends on one’s beliefs about the drivers of those differences. Most psychologists taking an embodied viewpoint would tend to come out of traditions that assume continuity between the human and the non-human, but it is important to understand that embodiment itself is neutral on this point. Indeed, as we will discuss in a later section, some extensions of embodiment, particularly to the role of the extended mind and the social and cultural environment, may lend themselves more naturally to a position in which there is more of a discontinuity between human and non-human animals.

In other respects, embodied psychology more strongly contrasts with the computationalist approach than does humanistic psychology (at least in its more phenomenological forms), in that it focuses more on the body and the external environment and less on what is in the head. That is, much of humanistic psychology focuses strongly on the internal, subjective experience of the person, and at least in contrast to embodied psychology, that internal focus is more similar to the computationalist focus on internal cognitive mechanisms. On the other hand, embodied cognition is in some ways more similar to behaviorism, at least in the sense that the environment has an important role in driving behavior, and perhaps in the sense that cognition need not be as complex as might be assumed in a more representationalist account. However, there are other aspects of the embodied approach that are clearly not in line with the behaviorist notion of removing all mind (for example, as we will discuss later, much work in embodiment has replaced notions of representation with notions of simulation—and it is not at all clear that this leads to a less “cognitive” understanding of human behavior and cognition).

Physical Environment and the Body

The fundamental insight of the embodied cognition approach is that complex behavior is better explained by assuming a simple organismic response to a complex environment, rather than a complex organismic response to a largely un-analyzed environment. This, in turn, makes it impossible to maintain the methodological solipsism (i.e., the notion that the states of the individual are to be understood only in terms of their functional relations to other states of the individual) of classical computational approaches. Instead, the critical relations are between the capacities of the organism and the affordances and demands of the environment. Simon (1969) introduced a parable that has been deeply influential. Paraphrasing, suppose that you watch an ant walking over a sandy beach, and you want to describe the cognitive system driving the ant’s walking behavior and the complex path that the ant follows. The path itself (as well as the highly specific motor movements carried out by the ant in traversing that path) is highly complex. Hence, if we wish to explain this behavior in classical computationalist (i.e., representationalist or “cognitive”) terms, we have to ascribe a quite complex cognitive system, with various goals, decisions, and other processes. But, if we include a detailed description of the surface of the sand, all the various chemical trail indicators, and, in short, everything in the environment that we know the ant can perceive, we find that the actual cognitive determinants of the ant’s walking behavior can be described relatively simply: The complexity is in the environment and in the relationship between the environment and the ant’s physical capabilities. Dawson (2013, Chap. 5) presents many interesting examples of such environmental analyses explaining seemingly complex animal behavior in terms of much simpler behavioral rules than would be expected by a more “cognitive” approach.

As discussed by Dawson (2013), theorists differ from each other in terms of what they take embodiment to mean. Nevertheless, there are a few common characteristics that tend to be shared to some degree or other among the supporters of embodied approaches to cognition (see Shapiro, 2019). One point that many theorists agree on is that the way we understand the world depends, at least to an extent, on how we interact with it, and that in turn depends on the physical nature of our bodies (see, e.g., the discussion in Dawson, 2013, pp. 219–221). A second point that many agree on is that when the environment is immediately available, we have less need to represent the environment: The immediately perceptible environment can replace the need for representations (see, e.g., Chemero, 2011, for a version that is highly anti-representationalist). A third point is that the entanglement between environment and organism is so tight that it makes no sense to think of the “mind” as something that is limited to the individual organism (see, e.g., Noë, 2009). Clearly, each of these ideas constitute continua such that some embodied theorists take fairly radical positions, and others treat these points as relatively less radical additions to classical computationalist approaches.

One area of work that has been of particular interest in the field of embodied cognition is the role of simulation in cognition. Beginning in the late 1990s (e.g., Barsalou, 1999), researchers studying areas that were and are central to the classical computational approach, such as concepts and language, began to think more deeply about embodied approaches. There is now much work showing that perceptual information, including perceptual information about how one’s body interacts with objects, strongly influences behavior that previously would have been described as “cognitive” such as categorization and property verification (see Barsalou, 2009, for some examples and an overview) and language tasks (e.g., Siakaluk, Pexman, Aguilera, Owen, & Sears, 2008). There are many other examples in this quite vast and recent literature, but the point is made even with these two examples: classically “cognitive” tasks and information are strongly influenced by bodily information.

The importance of these demonstrations of perceptual influences in tasks that had been taken to be central to the classical computationalist approach is clear. They show that the classical computationalist approach’s continuation of a Cartesian-influenced, dis-embodied, amodal, functionalist “mind” cannot be fully maintained: Perceptual information of many types is used even in tasks that were previously not considered perceptual in nature.

Social and Cultural Environment

Importantly, some proponents of embodied psychology emphasize that the human environment must be taken to be not only the physical environment but also the entire cultural and social environment. The point here is that how we respond to a given physical environment is largely determined by our social and cultural knowledge, experience, traditions, and so on. Only rarely is our behavior really driven only by the physical environment, partly because our physical environment itself has been so highly modified by our social and cultural environment, and partly because our cultures have created specific expected ways of interacting with our physical environments.

On the one hand, this is a critically important point for understanding human behavior and cognition in any given physical environment. On the other hand, while this is consistent with the notion of “extended mind” that arose from the movement toward embodiment, it is interestingly rather distant from the notion of actual physical embodiment. For example, as we noted above, one idea that is important in embodied cognition is that the person can, in many respects, use the world directly rather than using a cognitive representation of the world: If the characteristics of the environment are rapidly available to support cognition, one can simply use those characteristics rather than a stored representation of those characteristics. It is more difficult to see exactly how this would apply to our whole social and cultural environment—we can, of course, interact with those people who are immediately present to us, and we can use our interaction with them and feedback from that interaction to help direct our action with respect to them, but it is not entirely clear how the whole cultural and social environment can be present to us in the same way, nor is it clear how we can interpret our interaction or the feedback from it without having something other than just the interaction itself. For example, if we interact with someone, and that interaction does not go well, we are likely to get feedback from that interaction to indicate that something is wrong. But, it is unclear how we can interpret that feedback in a more specific way with respect to particular social or cultural expectations, for example, without something that maintains for us those social and cultural expectations against which we can compare the recent interaction. In short, the social and cultural environment does not seem to be immediately perceptible in the same way as the immediate physical environment.

We also note that, to the extent that an embodied psychologist accepts that the whole social and cultural environment is a critical driver of human behavior, they are likely pushed to a position in which there are differences in kind between human and non-human behavior and cognition. As we noted in the previous chapter, the role of culture in behaviors that at least appear to be specifically human is one of the critical differences between human and non-human animals. To the extent that the embodied approach integrates the cultural environment directly into controlling human cognition and behavior, then, this is going to build toward differences in kind between human and non-human animals.

Relation of Embodiment to A-T Approach

As with humanistic psychology , the embodied approach also emphasizes the holistic nature of the human, but in a rather different way—more as a unique, individual, creature interacting with its environment, and indeed, in more extreme forms of embodiment as literally constituted in part by its environment. As discussed in the section on Humanistic psychology, the A-T approach certainly emphasizes the holistic nature of the human. However, it is unlikely that the A-T approach would stop making the distinction between the person and the environment, even while recognizing the importance of the environment in human behaviors and abilities. This kind of radical extended mind hypothesis is incompatible with the A-T approach, in a few senses. Importantly, “mind” is not actually a thing to be considered in the A-T approach, except as a kind of verbal shortcut to the thinking person. There is the person, a complete substance (i.e., a combination of form and matter). That complete substance has various powers such as the sensory powers and the intellectual powers. Hence, in this restricted sense, the A-T approach does not have “mind” either internal to the person or extended to include the environment. However, the person is a complete substance, and the things in the environment are other complete substances. Thus, while it is easy to conceive of the A-T approach putting more emphasis on, for example, how the sensory powers make use of the external world, there is nothing in the A-T approach that could map onto the “mind” of the radical extended mind hypothesis. Also, importantly, in the A-T approach, there is no separate thing from the person that does the thinking. The person thinks. They do so using sensory and intellectual powers, but the intellect does not think. Nor do the senses. Hence, again, there is no “mind” to be extended beyond the person.

As we emphasized in the previous chapter, the A-T approach takes very seriously the sensory powers, in a way that neither behaviorism nor computationalism have, but in a way that does bear some striking similarities to the embodied approach to cognition. As we have mentioned previously, for the A-T approach, nothing is known that was not first in the senses, in some way, and additionally, all knowing of the individual thing has to return through the sensory powers (and particularly the phantasms, as we discussed in the previous chapter). Critically, because it is the person (body and soul as a unity) that thinks, the influence of the body on thinking (the central unique principle motivating the move to embodiment) is built directly into the A-T vision of the human.

Similarly, the embodied approach does not generally accept the “representationalist” aspects of computationalism, and as we have mentioned a few times, the A-T approach also does not include representations of the same type as in computationalism. Indeed, the A-T approach does not include representations as “things” at all, but rather as something like events. The concept, or to use the technical term, “intelligible species ” literally is taken to represent the thing, in its universal aspects, to the thinking person. The sensible species (or sensible forms internally held) represent the thing in its sensible aspects (color, shape, etc.). This is much closer to the embodied notion of simulation than to the computationalist notion of rather static symbolic representations that are “processed.”

A-T and Modern Cognition

Now that we have reviewed both the A-T approach to cognition, and some of the major modern psychology approaches to cognition, in this section we want to address two questions. First, what can modern psychology learn from the A-T approach? Second, what can the A-T approach learn from modern psychology?

What Can the A-T Approach Contribute to Modern Approaches?

To this point, we have emphasized the contribution that the A-T approach can make, philosophically, to the understanding of cognition in psychology. In particular, we have emphasized the consistent philosophical approach from metaphysics to cognition, the principled relation between human and non-human animal cognition, the introduction of contrasts such as sense and intellect rather than mind and body, and so forth. Furthermore, we have tried to be clear that our suggestion of adopting the A-T approach as a philosophical underpinning need not mean any particular criticism of specific empirical work.

In this section, though, we want to just give some examples of how the A-T approach can also provide some guidance in empirical work as well. We will attempt here to show, for one area of research in some detail, how the A-T approach can help understand modern psychology research, and then very briefly discuss some other research areas within cognition.

The area of work we will discuss in some detail is the modern psychology of concepts. Spalding and Gagné (2013) discuss the ways in which developments in the psychology of concepts are anticipated in the A-T approach, as well as how the A-T approach is misunderstood as the so-called classical view of concepts. The important topics in concepts that Spalding and Gagné (2013) discuss include essentially all the central issues in the psychology of concepts, which is generally a development within the computationalist approach and largely is limited to human concepts.

Among other things, Spalding and Gagné (2013) discuss prototypically effects (i.e., the fact that robins are better examples of birds than are penguins, and that this fact impacts human psychology of concepts), natural kind versus artifact categories, essentialism (i.e., the belief that some aspects of a concept seem to behave as essential, rather than simply frequent properties) and related issues of properties denoting “kinds” (e.g., Prasada & Dillingham, 2006, 2009), the role of specific exemplars and of background knowledge or “theories,” the processing of generics (i.e., statements that are acceptable to language users even though they apply only to a small percentage of the category members, such as “birds lay eggs” even though, of course, only adult female birds would lay eggs), and the general relationship between “features” and concepts. In short, most of the important work in human concepts research, including the most recent developments, are consistent with the A-T approach, and some of them developed from A-T notions (see, e.g., Prasada & Dillingham, 2006).

In addition to covering the main topics of concepts research from the computationalist approach, Spalding and Gagné (2013) briefly discuss both animal categorization work (i.e., the non-human animal analog of concepts research) and recent human concepts research from the embodied approach. We will begin with the embodied approach. A great deal of recent work in concepts has been driven from the embodiment approach to cognition (see, e.g., Barsalou, 2009). In particular, much of the work explicitly investigates the ways in which perceptual information is used in making conceptual judgments (e.g., Barsalou, Solomon, & Wu, 1999). For example, making a decision about a property of, say, an animal concept (e.g., dog) is easier when the property being verified is easily perceptible if one were actually looking at a member of the category, suggesting that the property judgment is, at the least, recruiting perceptual information rather than relying purely on amodal, abstract relationships between properties and concepts. As Spalding and Gagné (2013) point out, in the A-T approach, it is exactly the case that dealing with decisions about specific, individual cases requires the use of the sensory powers, so these kinds of effects are exactly what the A-T approach predicts. Similarly, categorization itself depends on the sensory powers as well, so the fact that our ability to categorize things is not abstract and amodal is again exactly what the A-T approach predicts. On the other hand, the role of concepts as universals is rather unclear in the embodiment approach, but is clear and principled in the A-T approach. Hence, the A-T approach potentially provides a new area that could be an area of continued development in the embodied approach to concepts.

With respect to the behaviorist approach to concepts, things are a bit different, largely because the behaviorist approach denies that concepts exist (or at least, suggests that they do not play any role that can be acknowledged by psychology). Instead, what the computationalist (and even the embodied) approach considers the use of concepts, the behaviorist approach only considers the behavior. So, for example, the only thing that the behaviorist considers is the fact that non-human animals can apply the same response to members of the same category (e.g., both dogs and cats get “yes” and birds and turtles get “no” responses in a task that is intended to discriminate mammals from non-mammals). Spalding and Gagné (2013) point out that the A-T approach makes full use of the sensory powers, such that human and non-human animals will share many abilities in discriminating members of different categories, and that this conforms well to much research on animals’ discriminative abilities. Furthermore, the sensory powers provide the ability to engage in activities requiring memory and association, recognizing contingencies, responding to particulars in ways that are driven by perceptual similarities, and so on (see, e.g., Maher, 1909, for a discussion of how the sensory powers relate to non-human animal behavior across a wide range of abilities). As with the embodiment approach, the behaviorist approach has difficulty with the ways in which humans can use concepts, beyond simple discrimination tasks. For example, behaviorist approaches simply have little to say about how, for example, human concepts can be used in a wide range of tasks, seemingly without needing a conditioning history with respect to those tasks (e.g., the ability of the human to use category membership to draw inferences about category members in a broad range of specific tasks, beyond simply categorization). Interestingly, the A-T approach makes use of a great deal of sensory information (which would potentially be available to a researcher from the behaviorist approach to use in an explanation) even in human use of concepts, and in addition draws principled distinctions between those conceptual tasks requiring intellectual content (which would be the only ones to differ in kind from non-human animal uses of sensory powers). In a sense, then, the A-T approach offers a way of integrating the insights of the behaviorist approach with the other approaches in a way that offers a better chance for those insights to have a broader impact on the whole discipline, precisely because the A-T approach’s connection of human and non-human behavior and sense and intellect makes it difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of the non-human behavior as something completely different from, and of no interest to, human behavior.

Humanistic psychology has had little to say about concepts or categorization research specifically. Thus, as we noted earlier in the chapter with respect to cognition in general, it might seem odd to include humanistic psychology in this section on concepts research, but we have chosen to do so precisely because considering the humanistic approach shows just how disparate the underlying understandings of different areas of psychology really are. Concepts and categorization research is a major focus in behaviorist, computationalist, and embodied approaches to cognition (with variations in emphasis and understanding, obviously, that track with the assumptions of the general approaches). Humanistic psychology, on the other hand, for the most part simply does not engage in this topic of research. And yet, there are many aspects of concepts that need to be taken into account in order to get the full picture of human life and experience that the humanistic approach strives for. Social categorization (i.e., the ways in which we categorize other people) plays a huge role in our social relationships, the extent to which we feel connected to others (or not), the ways in which we judge ourselves relative to other, and so on. So clearly, the humanistic approach needs to understand these behaviors, and doing so in terms of our concepts more generally has been shown to be highly fruitful. Rothbart and Taylor (1992), for example, suggest that much social categorization research and theory are adopted more or less directly from the ideas developed in the computationalist approach. If we think a bit about the humanistic critiques of behaviorist and computationalist approaches in general, we can see some aspects of what the A-T approach could offer. Most importantly, the humanist approach sees the behaviorist and computationalist approaches as literally dehumanizing. The A-T approach, with its consistent emphasis on the human person, cannot seriously be taken to be dehumanizing in that way, and yet as we have seen does include much that is important in the other approaches to concepts. Hence, the A-T approach offers the humanist a way to incorporate much of the psychology of concepts without giving up their fundamental orientation and commitment to a truly human understanding. Furthermore, the A-T approach (as we will see in the following chapters) provides connections between the cognitive and the affective, the individual and the social, and the nature of the human and human flourishing that respects the individual, truly human person.

Although we have here used concepts research as an example, there are many other areas of modern psychological work that could also benefit from adopting the A-T approach. For example, reasoning is another area that has tended to treat the A-T approach in a rather cavalier fashion, such that most that even mention Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas tend to deeply misunderstand the A-T approach, as was the case in concepts research (e.g., Spalding & Gagné, 2013), and often, for example, focus only on the normative points of Aristotle’s logical work, or only on the intellectual (i.e., non-sensory) to the exclusion of all else, or only on the logical to the exclusion of the ethical, and so on. However, many of the kinds of issues that arise in concepts research that we discuss above would have similar effects in reasoning research. To mention just a few, there are effects of habit in reasoning that could be of interest to a behaviorist psychologists, certainly effects of perceptual information in reasoning would be of interest to embodied approach psychologists, effects of motivation and meaning, as well as ethical concerns, in reasoning about personal decisions would be of interest to humanist psychologists, and important topics such as the relationship between induction and deduction (see, e.g., Groarke, 2009) that should be of great interest even to psychologists from the computationalist approach.

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas also have much to say about memory, the uses of language (including figurative language such as metaphor), attention (particularly as driven by the appetitive powers), learning and understanding and education, and many other topics that touch on various areas explored in the modern study of cognition. Obviously, it is beyond the scope of this small section to investigate all the many different, enormous literatures on cognition to identify every case where the A-T approach has something to contribute. But, we hope that the kinds of examples we have given here make clear that many areas would benefit from thinking through the A-T approach in much more detail than is usually the case in cognition research.

What Can Modern Approaches Contribute to the A-T Approach?

As we have said several times, the main point of our book is to convince psychologists that the A-T approach has much to offer to the modern discipline of psychology, and the previous section tried to lay out some advantages for modern psychology in thinking about the A-T approach specifically with respect to cognition. As we also mentioned in Chap. 1, however, this is not a one-way street. Modern psychology also has much to offer to the A-T approach, and in this section, we want to briefly mention some of the contributions of modern cognition work that could be of value in further developing the A-T approach.

First, of course, it should be abundantly clear that the A-T approach, because it is a philosophical approach and not an empirical research project, does not in itself consider specific empirical investigations in anything like the detail that is developed in modern cognition research. So, in this sense, even if one were to take everything in the A-T approach completely for granted, modern work would provide much more detailed and well-structured empirical investigations of cognition.

Second, a point that we made earlier in this chapter is that each of the modern approaches that we have discussed seems to take on some particular aspects that were and are present in the A-T approach, but then tends to exaggerate just these aspects, to the detriment of everything else. We have emphasized the damage that this does to our ability to have a coherent discipline of psychology, and the same is true of the study of cognition. Thus, as we have argued, the A-T approach provides the possibility of a unifying underlying philosophical approach. However, we should not overlook the point that deep investigation of particular insights (e.g., of the power of habit in the behaviorist approach, or the importance of sensory information in the embodied approach) leads to much more detailed development of our understanding of exactly how those insights play out in cognition. For example, as we noted earlier in this chapter, the notion of simulation developed in the embodied cognition approach seems highly compatible with the A-T approach’s emphasis on sensory information affecting cognition, as well as with the A-T approach’s understanding of “representation.” But that does not mean that it is of no value to carry out further theoretical and empirical investigations of exactly what such simulations consist of and what role they play in cognition and perception. Clearly, such work could lead to theorists in the A-T tradition developing more fully their own notions of “representation” and the role of the sensory powers.

Third, despite our own belief that the A-T approach has much to say to modern psychology (and that same belief held by many previous theoretical psychologists influenced by the A-T approach that we cited earlier or in Chap. 1), recently the A-T approach has not been widely known in psychology, particularly in North America (outside of explicitly Catholic institutions in the first half of the twentieth century, see Kugelmann, 2005). One way that modern psychology, and perhaps particularly the embodied and humanistic approaches, can help the A-T approach is by leading psychologists to appreciate the importance of factors (the immediate environment, the human experience) that were of less importance historically in the A-T approach to human psychology. For example, DeRobertis (2011) suggests that the relatively well-established place of existential-phenomenology in broadly humanistic psychology provides an opportunity to develop the aspects of the A-T approach that are in close connection with humanistic psychology, but are less developed than in modern work (examples given by DeRobertis include the role of language and imagination in creating meaningfully human interpretations of the world). In short, the humanistic critiques of behaviorist and computationalist psychology can both create a space for psychologists to recognize the possibilities inherent in the A-T approach and identify areas of the A-T approach that could be further developed.

In sum, we want to be clear that our call to rediscover the A-T approach to the human person is not meant to deprecate the work on cognition being done in modern psychology. That work is valuable in itself and would also be valuable in developing the A-T approach more fully. Somewhat ironically, this very same point has been made by many earlier philosophical psychologists who worked in the A-T tradition such as Maher (1909) or Mercier (1918) or Brennan (1941), but there was a definite difference in emphasis, such that some A-T theorists seemed to believe that the A-T approach’s theoretical psychology was less open to revision than we believe (see Kugelmann, 2005). However, the main point that people such as Mercier, Maher, or Brennan were making was that A-T metaphysics could not be overturned by empirical work, but only by philosophical work, a point still made repeatedly by, among others, Feser (2019), with respect to science in general.

Chapter Summary

We have reviewed two areas of modern psychology that have engaged in serious critique of the behaviorist and computationalist approaches to cognition: the embodied approach and humanistic psychology. The embodied approach mostly criticized the behaviorist and computationalist approaches for the lack of recognition of the role of the body in the environment in cognition, while the humanistic approach offers a more thorough-going critique that the behaviorist and computationalist approaches to cognition miss most of what is most important in human thinking. Both of these approaches developed to some extent out of existential-phenomenological philosophical critiques, and despite their apparent differences, they are actually related to each other at that deep level. In addition, because the existential-phenomenological critiques themselves were in part derived from some aspects of the A-T approach, both the embodied and humanistic approaches to psychology share certain affinities with the vision of the human in the A-T approach. Our claim has been consistent with the overall thesis of the book that each of these four seemingly very different approaches to cognition develops particular insights that are found in the A-T approach. Unfortunately (in our view), each of these areas tends to take those insights and exaggerates them into total explanations. The A-T approach keeps the insights in a productive balance, such that the different insights can still be held as different insights within one coherent view of the human person and his/her cognitive abilities.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_5

5. Emotion and Cognition

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceEmotionPassionsAppetitive powersWill

To this point, we have mostly focused on the A-T view of the human person in terms of the cognitive powers, both sensory and intellectual. And, we have strongly emphasized the tight coordination of those powers as an advantage of the A-T view, relative to modern psychological views, which have inherited, however unwillingly, a large dose of Cartesian separation. However, although the cognitive powers are important to the A-T view, they are not the full picture of the human person. In particular, as briefly discussed in Chap. 2, the A-T view also includes the appetitive powers. The appetitive powers are critical in the A-T understanding of the human person in two important ways. First, the appetitive powers drive human behavior—they are the wellsprings of action, with the cognitive powers providing direction to the actions. Second, as the drivers of action, in the A-T view, the appetitive powers are critical in generating emotions. In this chapter, we move to the consideration of the appetitive powers, both sensory and intellectual, and how they interact with the cognitive powers to give rise to the emotions, as well as how the cognitive powers then deal with the emotion (e.g., anger). We will then discuss how the A-T view relates to some modern research on emotion. Finally, we will discuss some of the ways that the A-T view, although in many respects similar to modern views of emotion, provides interesting opportunities for thinking about emotion.

A-T Emotion

The A-T view of the human person, as noted above, includes both cognitive and appetitive powers. We have argued, in the context of the cognitive powers, that the tight interrelationship between the sensory and the intellectual provides the A-T view with a certain set of advantages over more modern views. This same tight coupling between the sensory and the intellectual occurs with the appetitive powers, as well, which, as we will see, again provides a set of advantages to the A-T view in thinking about how emotions come to involve both cognitive events and bodily feelings (see, e.g., Gorevan, 2000). There is another aspect of tight coupling in the A-T view that we will discuss here, as well. The appetitive and cognitive powers themselves are tightly coupled in the A-T view. This tight coupling also provides some different ways of thinking about emotions, compared to modern psychology. In particular, in modern psychology, a main question of interest is how emotions relate to cognition, while in the A-T view, the emotions arise at the intersection of the appetitive and cognitive powers. We should note that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas used a word that translates to “passion” rather than emotion. However, some of the passions do not correspond to what we now call emotions. We will use the term emotion to be more consistent with what is used in modern psychology. In this section, we provide an overview of the A-T view of the emotions, both in terms of their genesis and in terms of a basic classification scheme, and we then discuss the relation between “mind” and body implied in this system, to set the stage for the comparison to modern psychological understandings of emotion.

Appetitive Versus Cognitive Powers

What exactly are the appetitive powers? And how do these powers interact with the cognitive powers? As a quick review (see also Chap. 2), the appetitive powers are those that give rise to appetites, or desires, in response to external things or situations. They range from the purely bodily, such as those that drive the need for water or food or sleep or sex in non-human and human animals, to the purely intellectual drive for truth in humans. Importantly, even the most basic desire, in order to be properly satisfied, must be directed by the cognitive powers. Thus, although an animal might have an appetite for food, in order to choose the appropriate thing to satisfy that desire, there must be a cognitive power that presents that thing, specifically as food, to the appetite. That is, in order for an animal to have an appetite to eat specifically directed to a particular thing, that thing must be identified as a type of food (or more simply, as something good to eat), and it is a cognitive power that performs this identification (i.e., the estimative power in non-human animals). Thus, the appetitive powers motivate and drive action in response to certain things (e.g., hunger motivates eating) and the cognitive powers direct the appetitive powers to proper things to meet the desire (e.g., the cognitive power presents a particular thing as, say, bread), and the appetitive power is then satisfied by the thing (e.g., the person eats the bread to satisfy their hunger), and the satisfaction of that appetitive power gives rise to an emotion (we will discuss later as to which emotions arise in which kinds of circumstances).

Appetites, Sensory and Intellectual

According to the A-T view, emotions arise as a response to the satisfaction (or not) of the various appetites that arise, as well as the ways in which the appetitive powers interact with the cognitive powers that help to direct the appetites to things that can satisfy those appetites. As noted previously, non-human animals have sensory, but not intellectual powers, while humans have both sensory and intellectual powers. Although we have discussed this primarily in terms of cognitive powers, it is also true of the appetitive powers. Thus, human emotions arise in the complex interplay among the appetitive and cognitive powers, at both the sensory and intellectual levels. Because the sensory powers, both appetitive and cognitive, are tightly tied to physical processes, human emotions have important physical components. However, because the intellectual powers rise to some extent above the physical processes (e.g., it is unclear how to account for a desire for truth on a purely physical process basis), human emotions also involve complex social and cultural effects.

Importantly, the will and the intellect are involved in human emotions, even when considering how the human responds to sensory appetites. Sticking with our example of the need for food, humans do not simply eat whatever food is available, but instead our decisions around eating are driven by the intellectual powers as well. For example, when hungry, we might also consider whether the food is “healthy” for us. This is not, generally speaking, a sensory aspect of the food—it is not a matter of taste or of smell—but rather a fairly abstract and intellectual notion of what is good in terms of human health. So, the will (as the intellectual appetite) directs one toward not just eating, but eating well (where this notion is built upon a whole conceptual apparatus that includes concepts of human well-being, of the needs of human physiology, of perhaps the latest diet fad, and so on), and the intellect directs us to foods that are believed or known to fulfill this particular, abstract understanding of “healthy food.” Notice here the complex interplay between the will and the intellect: The will must direct the intellect, in that it is the will that pushes toward eating well, but it is the intellect that has built the concept of eating well, and has presented that concept to the will, in addition to determining whether some particular thing satisfies the needs of eating well. As Cates (2009, p. 63) puts it, “For Aquinas, emotions are appetitive motions that cannot be aroused or sustained apart from particular acts of cognition; yet emotions are not themselves forms of cognition.”

Notice also the complex interplay between the sensory and the intellectual powers: While the will is directing the person toward eating well, the sensory appetite is directing the person simply toward eating. Hence, the intellectual and the sensory powers can come into conflict in any particular case. In this case, for example, a food that is a good considered purely as something to eat (i.e., it is, in fact, a food) is considered an evil when considered in the light of an appetite for healthy food. Hence, one might need to resist the appetite to eat a particular food, in order to fulfill the appetite to eat something healthy, and the emotion that arises in this complex situation is itself complex and related to the varying appetites and their satisfaction (or not). Thus, the A-T view understands human emotions as structurally similar to non-human animal emotions, except that the human emotions are also affected and directed by non-sensory-based cognitive and appetitive processes, i.e., the intellect and the will. This involvement of the intellect and will entails that human decisions will often reflect on both the particular thing being desired, and how that thing fits into the larger, more universal notion of the Good. In our previous example, it is the intellectual powers that allow the person to see how it is that healthy food is better, as a goal, than simply food.

Aristotle Versus Thomas Aquinas

Aristotle describes the emotions (e.g., anger or fear) in terms of the events that give rise to them (e.g., insult), and the purpose they can fulfill (e.g., retribution). However, the focus of Aristotle’s discussion is on how emotions can interfere with good decision-making. This should not be terribly surprising, as Aristotle’s discussion of the emotions arises primarily (though not exclusively) in the Rhetoric and the ethical works, where avoiding negative effects of emotions is an important focus. It should also be noted, however, that the emotions also drive good decision-making, in that the emotions are motivators, so that the effort needed to make good decisions is driven also by the appetitive need for truth, for example. So, although the Rhetoric and the ethical works tend to focus on the downside of excessive emotions, it is quite incorrect to think of Aristotle as indicating that people would be better off, or even that they would make better decisions, without emotion. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, although discussing the emotions’ role in ethics (as well, of course, in terms of how they can impact on sin—he was, after all, a theologian as well as a philosopher), provides a quite detailed categorization of the emotions and their relationships to each other, as well as detailed discussion of how the emotions depend upon both the appetitive and cognitive powers. We now turn to describing Thomas Aquinas’ classificatory scheme for the emotions, and we then summarize the relationship between body and “mind” that is implicit in his scheme, which in turn will set the stage for our comparison to modern psychology’s understanding of emotion.

Classification Scheme

Thomas Aquinas’ classification of the emotions derives from a pair of principles derived from his view of how the appetites operate, a way of classifying emotion that may seem strange to modern eyes. In particular, what he does not do is to start with the “feeling” of different emotions and attempt to classify them into groups on the basis of their subjective feeling. Instead, Thomas Aquinas considers the emotions as arising due to the powers of the individual animal (or human). As always, for Thomas Aquinas, the powers and activities of a thing tell us about the nature of the thing. A brief description and discussion of Thomas Aquinas on the emotions is available in Brennan (1941) and a much more detailed discussion is available in Cates (2009).

What are these principles of operation? The first is fairly straightforward: Appetites are directed to things in the world, which can be good targets of an appetite or not. So, the first principle is that emotions will arise with respect to things (whether those are physical things, or situations, or ideas, etc.) in either a positive or a negative way, depending on how those things relate to the appetite under discussion. Thus, water is a good target for the satisfaction of the appetite giving rise to thirst, but sulfuric acid is not. Of course, as we noted before, the relation between the appetite and the thing must be understood as perceived by a cognitive power—thus, although water is good for dealing with thirst, it is only by perceiving some particular stuff as water that it can become the target of desire, in order to slake one’s thirst. If one thought that the beaker contained sulfuric acid, one would not desire to drink it, even though the liquid was actually water. Similarly, one might drink sulfuric acid if one mistakenly thought it was water.

Second, appetites can involve some degree of difficulty, or not. That is, a particular thing, say a glass of water, can present to the appetite (in the case of thirst, say) as an immediate good, while a glass of sulfuric acid presents to the appetite as an immediate malum, to use Aquinas’s term (which can be translated as either “evil” or “bad,” the point being that it presents to the appetite as something to be avoided). The immediate good creates a kind of attraction while the immediate evil creates a kind of repulsion. On the other hand, in some cases, an appetite might lead to a period of struggle or difficulty in order to obtain some good or avoid or endure some evil. Thus, as a simple example, one might need to walk through the desert for some distance in order to obtain water. The point is that there must be powers that allow both the immediate responses to goods and evils (with respect to the appetites), as well as allowing behaviors for delayed, or difficult, or otherwise non-immediately present goods and evils. Now, Thomas Aquinas derives these principles not in order to classify human emotions, but in order to understand motivations of behavior, and indeed often uses examples of non-human animal behaviors to illustrate the need for such principles. But, the combination of these two principles gives rise to a set of “types” or categories of emotions, which are known as Passions. It is worth noting at this point that the labels of the emotions are, of course, translations, and do not always map exactly to modern English emotion labels. Nevertheless, if the classification scheme is kept in mind, most of them will make sense.

Concupiscible

Let us begin with the situation in which the target of the appetite is available (or present) without struggle or difficulty. Thomas Aquinas calls this the Concupiscible appetite. Now, if the target is good with respect to the appetite, this gives rise to the emotion type he designates as Love. Love in this particular sense is a feeling of attraction, an inclination. If the target is good, but you do not yet have it (though it still does not take a lot of effort to get it), then you have the emotion designated Desire. If the target is good, and you already possess it, then the emotion is designated Joy. Exactly opposed to these are Passions relating to evil targets: Hatred (paired to Love) is the basic sense of disinclination or repulsion, Aversion (paired to Desire) is the retreat from the evil, and Sorrow (paired to Joy) arises in the actual suffering of the evil.

Irascible

When the target in question involves some struggle (either to gain a good or to avoid an evil), Thomas Aquinas calls this the Irascible appetite. In this case, when the target is good and ultimately attainable, the emotion is Hope. However, if one struggles for a target that is good, but unattainable, this gives rise to Despair. The other emotions that arise from the Irascible passion involve evils. When the evil must be struggled against, but is ultimately defeatable, the emotion is Courage (paired with Hope). If the evil is ultimately not defeatable, the emotion is Fear (paired with Despair). When the evil to be struggled against is actually realized (e.g., the thing feared actually comes to pass and must be endured), the emotion is Anger. Unlike Courage or Fear, Anger is not paired to any other irascible emotion in Thomas Aquinas’ scheme, because the difficult good, once fully obtained, no longer involves any struggle, and so is not one of the Irascible passions, but instead is converted to Joy (as the good that was struggled for, is now possessed), a Concupiscible passion.

Interim Summary

The A-T view of the human person sees emotions as fundamentally related to the satisfaction (or not) of various appetites. The emotions (in humans) arise at the vortex of four forces, created by the distinction between the cognitive and appetitive powers crossed with the distinction between sensory and intellectual powers. This way of looking at the emotions emphasizes three aspects of emotion that (as we will see) relate to modern psychology’s view of emotion. First, the emotions themselves tend to be categorical, with some being closely related and others less closely related. Classifications of emotions have, historically, been a fairly major area of effort in psychology. However, in modern psychology the emotions tend to be approached more from the perspective of attempting to use the “feeling” of the emotions—or their bodily expressions—as a basis of classification, where the A-T view attempts to use the analysis of the powers that underlie emotions to create a classificatory scheme. An interesting point about the A-T classification is that emotions with quite different “feelings” to them might be classified together. For example, as noted above, when an appetitive power is satisfied, the emotion that arises is Joy (again, these are translations and so the exact terms might not match very well). However, one can easily imagine that the Joy experienced as a result of say, satisfaction of hunger, feels quite different from the Joy experienced as the result of satisfaction of an appetite for beauty provided by a great symphony. If they are both Joy, in the A-T view, what might account for the difference in feeling? The difference in feeling might arise due to the quite different admixture of the sensory and the intellectual in both the appetitive and cognitive powers involved. Thus, in the A-T view, the differences in the feeling of the emotions also derive from the differences in the powers that are involved, even when the basic classification of the emotion is the same.

Second, there are close relations between emotion and cognition (though there is also the distinction between them). This point relates directly to modern thinking that either distinguishes or conflates emotion and cognition (we will return to this point in a later section). Critically, it is not simply that emotion somehow clouds cognition, and that cognition sometimes needs to overcome emotions (though that happens, too). Rather, the appetitive and cognitive powers cooperate in all human actions, and emotions arise as a result of the joint actions of the powers, as well as affecting later actions of both the appetitive and cognitive powers.

Third, a point emphasized by Aristotle but also taken up by Thomas Aquinas concerns the ways in which emotion affects cognitive judgment. This last point is a major area of puzzlement in modern psychology, giving rise to several ways of thinking about what such effects might mean (e.g., hot vs. cold cognition, fast vs. slow cognition, motivated cognition). Fundamentally, because there is no truly principled relation between cognition and emotion in modern psychology, the effects have to be treated as some sort of interaction, but the why and the how are just not clear. In the A-T view, on the other hand, emotions affect cognitive judgments in various ways, including both by providing information to the cognitive processes, much as in some modern explanations (e.g., the fact that I am angry provides information to cognitive processes evaluating some situation), and by interacting with the appetitive powers to direct the cognitive powers in various ways (e.g., my anger stokes an appetite for vengeance, and that appetite guides the cognitive powers to determine ways to exact vengeance).

We should note that our treatment of the A-T view of the emotions is extremely brief, and is intended only to give a flavor of how the powers involved give rise to the emotions, and how the emotional and the cognitive interact, as these are topics that are relatively closely related to modern psychology’s approach to the emotions, and as such should be of interest to psychologists (see Cates, 2009, for a much more detailed description). However, there are many more aspects of the A-T approach that could be investigated from a psychological perspective. For example, Pilsner (2006) describes six stages of willing identified by Thomas Aquinas, as well as discussing in much more detail the relationship between the intellect and the will. Indeed, there is much more that can be explored within the A-T approach to emotions. For now, however, we turn to a question of much interest in modern psychology and discuss the relation between “mind” and body that is implied by the A-T approach.

Relation of Mind and Body Implied by A-T

The final topic that we need to cover, before we move to modern psychology’s view of emotions, is the relation of body and mind implied in the A-T view (remembering that “mind” as such is not actually a part of the A-T view). As we will see, modern psychology’s view of the emotions has often hinged on its view of the body/mind duality. As discussed in Chap. 2, the A-T view does not subscribe to this kind of Cartesian or Cartesian-influenced duality, but instead adopts a hylomorphic view: the human being is fundamentally unified. Nevertheless, it is useful to consider this topic prior to discussing the various views in modern psychology.

First, as always with the A-T view, the basic unit of analysis is the individual human. As we have mentioned several times, there are sensory and intellectual powers, but importantly these are just powers of individual humans, they are not separate sensory and intellectual substances. Hence, the human experience of an emotion is a unified experience, even though it arises via the interaction of multiple powers. That experience has sensory and bodily components, and also intellectual components, yet it is still one experience of one individual human person.

Second, because the emotions arise from both sensory and intellectual powers, emotions have bodily components (both appetitive and cognitive), but the emotions are not completely tied to those bodily components (so that, for example, one might have an appetite for truth that is not a bodily appetite in the way that hunger is). Similarly, the emotions have bodily expressions that are important or even essential to the emotion (Brennan, 1941, p. 160), but not completely uniquely identifying, or constituent of, individual emotions. Importantly, sensory and intellectual powers interact in principled ways in the A-T view, while modern psychology, largely lacking this distinction in general, still tends to try to separately analyze, in one way or another, cognitive and emotional phenomena.

Third, the distinction between sensory and intellectual appetites and the distinction between appetitive and cognitive powers have major implications in ethics, as discussed, for example, by Cates (2009), precisely because these distinctions mean that emotions affect cognitive judgments (and, of course, cognitive judgments affect emotions), and hence behavior. Importantly, as described by Leighton (1982) emotions can affect thinking in a large number of ways. For example, sensory appetites may conflict with intellectual appetites, leading a person to behave in ways that are, in some sense, not what they might intend to do. So, to return once again to a food example, the emotion of desire driven by a sensory appetite might overwhelm an intellectual intention to only eat healthy food. Similarly, conflicting appetites at the same level (i.e., two conflicting sensory or two conflicting intellectual appetites) might also lead to decisions that are perhaps not what one might have done, if neither emotion had been in play. Notice here that part of the emotion just is the judgment about what is good to do (see, e.g., Leighton, 1982, p. 147), indicating that for the A-T view the emotion incorporates, to at least some extent, behavior driven by the appetite. Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas suggest a number of other ways that emotion and cognition interact. Determining precisely how such interactions occur is part of the province of modern psychology.

Modern Psychology

In this section, we briefly discuss modern psychology’s view of emotion, and then consider how this might relate to the A-T view of emotion, and what the A-T view might add to modern psychology’s understanding of the nature of emotions, the relation between emotion and cognition, and how emotion might influence human flourishing (a topic that is taken up more fully in the next chapter).

Theories of Emotion

It is fair to say that emotion has been central to psychology from the very beginning: Indeed, the psychological study of emotion is highlighted in the work of James (1890), along with so many other psychological questions and issues. James considered emotion to be generated by an emotionally arousing stimulus, followed by cortical activity and arousal, primarily in the autonomic nervous system, and terminated in action. Later, a person reflects on this series of events and constructs an emotional experience with a name and explanation (Joe insulted me. I hit him. I must have been enraged). Much later, Schachter and Singer (1962) developed the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion. Their claim was that emotions arise from autonomic arousal from any sort of stimulus, followed by a labeling emotional word that describes the experience for the person in context. The context directs the labeling. One context, a car hurtling toward you, would generate a high state of arousal and you would label your response as fear. Another context, someone giving you a car, generates strong arousal also, but you label yourself happy.

As can be seen even from this very simple description of two of the classic psychological theories of emotion, the fundamental combination of emotion and cognition is at the basis of emotional experiences, just as was true of the A-T approach. Indeed, James’ work missed at least one critical point that was true of the A-T approach, namely, that no stimulus could be identified objectively as “emotional,” though of course some could be identified as relating to particular biological needs. But, generally, to a priori determine that some stimulus is “emotional” is precisely to beg the question with respect to what actually causes an emotional response to some stimulus.

Current comprehensive theories of emotion generally include the same elements as James’ and Schachter and Singer’s theories, but are more elaborate. They cluster around three types of approaches: evolutionary theories, appraisal theories, and psychological constructionist theories. Each type is differentiated by what they say about the antecedent causes of an emotion, the part played by biological factors, primarily the brain, and how these components come together to generate a subjective emotional experience (I am mad, sad, happy, etc.). Importantly, many of the main questions about emotions have been explored within these theoretical parameters. Across theoretical perspectives, the main disagreements are about the timing of the different contributing factors (e.g., whether cognition enters the emotional process early or late), and about the mutability or immutability of emotions across species or cultures.

We will very briefly describe each of these modern approaches, so that we can see how they contrast with each other and with the A-T approach.

Evolutionary Theories

Darwin regarded basic emotions, such as disgust and happiness, to be correlated with facial expression common to the species and to be passed on as adaptive within the group. Psychologists holding for the evolutionary approach organized theory around signal stimuli, a stimulus signaling a problem or need, elicitation of a particular common emotional response related to the signal, and a tendency toward action. Many of these bodily and facial responses occur cross-culturally (Ekman & Rosenberg, 2005) and among primates (Waller & Dunbar, 2005). Postulating the need for a biologically based common emotional response led a number of theorist-researchers to suggest a small set of basic emotional responses that are innate, rapidly elicited by certain signal stimuli, and automatic. As discussed by Ortony and Turner (1990), a number of these responses, such as fear, disgust, anger, surprise, joy, and sadness, are commonly included in lists of basic emotions, though researchers differ among themselves in exactly which sets should be considered basic (see Ortony & Turner, 1990, p. 316), and indeed in what the criteria are for “basicness” of an emotion. In sum, the evolutionary approach claims that an emotion is primarily a biologically based affect program set off by signal stimuli and assures adaptation of the organism, human, or otherwise.

The A-T approach shares some important similarities with the evolutionary approaches (though, of course, neither Aristotle nor Thomas Aquinas would have discussed the issues as evolutionary). First, both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas see emotions as primarily driven, at the sensory level, by biological needs of various sorts, and at least at the sensory level, as driven by needs that are at least abstractly consistent across species. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas, as we have seen, often explains emotions in humans by drawing examples from non-human animals. Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas insists that these needs and the emotions that arise from them are critical in motivating action, an approach with more than a little resonance in the evolutionary view of the “purpose” of emotions. Second, the A-T view sees those needs as having, inherently, things toward which they are directed, and this is clearly true of the evolutionary approach, as well. Third, as we mentioned previously, in the A-T view, the emotional response is often discussed as part of the emotional experience as a whole. Fourth, the lists of basic emotions are often somewhat similar to those outlined by Thomas Aquinas, though they often do not make clear the nature of the principles that give rise to those basic emotions.

The A-T view departs somewhat from the evolutionary approaches, in that the evolutionary approaches generally provide little help in understanding two issues that are central to the understanding emotions from the A-T view. First, the evolutionary approach emphasizes a more automatic emotional response (to the degree that such a thing exists), at the expense of understanding how cognition might play a role. Second, and for much the same reasons, the evolutionary approach says relatively little about how emotions might impact cognition, beyond their motivating aspects (e.g., fear might motivate, say, increased attention to a sound behind you on a dark street). Third, the categories of emotion in Thomas Aquinas do not seem to be “basic” in the same way as the “basic” emotions of the evolutionary approach. It is difficult to say exactly how the approaches differ here, because the evolutionary approaches differ quite considerably among themselves (Ortony & Turner, 1990). Nevertheless, the categories of emotion in Thomas Aquinas’ work are not “building blocks” of other emotions. Nor are they always (or even often) driven by similarities of behavior across species or cultures (though some such similarities are acknowledged to exist, of course). Fourth, the evolutionary approach has little to say about differences between sensory and intellectual levels of either appetitive or cognitive powers. Indeed, the evolutionary approach tends to assume that all human emotional responses are simply learned, or generalized approaches to the more basic or appetitive (e.g., anger in humans becomes generalized to any kind of insult or problem via social learning or conditioning). Finally, the evolutionary approach emphasizes the communicative or signaling function of emotional responses as a biological system in order to coordinate group activity, while the A-T approach emphasizes these functions more in terms of rhetoric and persuasion.

Appraisal Theories

Appraisal theory starts with a stimulus but postulates that persons quickly note environmental circumstances and evaluate their personal significance (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Frijda, 1986). Hence, appraisal theories introduce a cognitive process as central and can explain variation in individual emotional reactions, such that similar stimuli can evoke shame in one person and anger in another. Also, appraisal theories include a dimension of intensity, allowing the individual to report levels of emotion from weak to strong. Theorists have proposed a number of appraisal dimensions varying around four variables: novelty, goal/needs, agency, and norms/values. Specific emotions result from different patterns of appraisal. Research has confirmed this to a degree. For example, studies have shown that the emotion of fear emerges when the person evaluates circumstances as novel, negative, uncontrollable, and inconsistent with experience.

Appraisal theorists differentiate primary and secondary appraisals. Primary appraisals are somewhat similar to the emotional responses in evolutionary theory, in that they occur quickly and more automatically, such as fear of a snake. In particular, the primary appraisal is believed to evaluate whether the stimulus is a threat. Secondary appraisals involve reflection, appear to be learned, and involve consideration of more viewpoints, such as judging that the snake is a harmless one (Scherer, 2001). In addition, secondary appraisals evaluate the extent to which the threat, for example, is one that can be dealt with effectively. Primary appraisals are thought to be more associated with “old brain” systems such as the amygdala, are present in newborns and animals, and govern whether the stimulus can be approached or should be avoided, while secondary appraisals are thought to involve far more knowledge.

Appraisal theorists differ regarding whether emotions are elicited as a package or occur as a composition of different cues (facial expression, arousal, behavioral reaction) leading to more subtle appraisals (Scherer, 2009). These approaches are still being debated; however, both agree that cognitive reflection creates the verbal description of the emotion. Theorists also agree that the expression of the appraised emotion will vary according to cultural norms and according to age and stage (Eisenberg & Morris, 2002).

As with the evolutionary approaches, the A-T approaches share some important similarities with Appraisal theories. Most importantly, the emphasis on cognitive evaluation of the environmental circumstances is similar to the A-T view: The appetitive powers rely on the cognitive powers for the proper identification of their targets, as we have mentioned several times. In addition, the difference between primary and secondary appraisal relates to the A-T approach to emotions in a few different ways. First, the primary appraisals’ emphasis on fast, potentially unconscious, evaluations seems closely related to the A-T approach’s emphasis on the distinct sensory-based cognitive powers (e.g., the estimative power in non-human animals or the cogitative power in humans), which specifically evaluate a situation at the sensory level, and which evaluate the usefulness or threateningness of stimuli. Second, the secondary appraisals’ emphasis on the person’s ability to deal with the situation is related to the A-T approach’s evaluation of the extent to which a particular situation calls forth the concupiscible or the irascible powers: Is there a simple, easily obtained solution, or is this a situation that must involve struggle? Third, the appraisal theory approach to the role of cognition in emotion, in which the cognitive system is applied to the whole of the situation and circumstances, rather than just to the focal stimuli or to the person’s response to the stimuli, is quite similar to the A-T approach, where the cognitive powers are applied to the whole of the situation, not just the focal stimuli.

The A-T approach differs somewhat from the Appraisal theories in that, although the appraisals are dependent upon much cognitive input, it is less clear in this approach how the emotions should contribute to cognition. Thus, while the A-T approach has a somewhat more symmetric approach to the relation of cognition and emotion, the appraisal theories tend to take on a more asymmetric approach, with cognition feeding into emotion, but with relatively little (explicit) flow in the opposite direction. Relatedly, the cognitive work that is done in appraisal is specifically, and seemingly only, directed toward that appraisal. In the A-T approach, the cognitive powers tend to have their effects on emotion as a by-product of their normal function of identifying things and their properties, and presenting those to the appetitive powers. In short, the cognitive work done in appraisal is specialized to emotional appraisal, whereas the cognitive impact on emotion in the A-T approach is largely driven by the normal operation of the cognitive powers, not something specialized to emotional thinking. Second, the A-T approach’s emphasis on appetition is quite different from appraisal theory’s emphasis on threat evaluation, such that, again, the A-T approach has a much more symmetric approach between the positive and negative sides of emotion, while Appraisal theories tend (at least to a degree) to emphasize the negative. Third, and quite interestingly, although the Appraisal theories emphasize the need for speed in threat appraisal, and hence the difference between primary and secondary appraisal with their presumed differences in brain location, there is much less emphasis in the Appraisal theories on the motivating power of emotion or its relation to appetite, in general, compared to the A-T approach. Thus, in some respects, the A-T approach occupies a kind of middle ground between evolutionary and appraisal-based approaches.

Constructionist Theories

Psychological constructionist theorists attempt to explain the large variation, both within the individual and across many individuals, of emotions and their expression (Barrett, 2006; Widen, 2013). These researchers view emotions as psychological realities which start as emotion arousing stimuli affecting brain states, followed by action. Mental reflection on this process leads to labeling of the emotion. This theory has ties to James (1890) and Schachter and Singer’s (1962) Two-Factor Theory but emphasizes learned knowledge as the process shaping variations of expression. In particular, the theory claims that the perception of emotion (in oneself or in others) depends upon the perceiver’s cultural understanding of emotions. That is, people use their existing knowledge to both anticipate and recognize emotional responses to particular situations and stimuli. Fundamentally, then, emotions are constructed via inference based on interoception (the perception of an affective state involving both valence and level of arousal), and on one’s learned, embodied, and culturally conditioned understanding of the nature of emotions and emotional responses to stimuli and situations.

Constructionist theory notes that, for example, if a child observes a parent become fearful during a storm, the child learns that storms generate fear. Hence, constructionists think particular emotions are caused by application of learned categories to situational stimuli. These categories provide structure and meaning to the event, which may or may not be described as an emotion by the individual. These mental categories carry many semantic meanings, including information about causes of feelings, likelihood of a given emotion in a given situation, sets of bodily changes related to the emotion (e.g., facial expression related to anger), cultural expectations regarding the emotion, and so on. As mentioned above, constructionists do recognize brain processes as essential in this process and think that different structures provide activation and positive or negative valence.

Again, we see important similarities with the A-T approach to emotion. In particular, the Constructionist theories assume that the cognitive powers (though they would not speak of them in this way) are continuously active and providing input to the affective powers. This is clearly seen in the Constructionist view that one’s concepts (including emotion concepts themselves) are both learned and critical to the production, experience, and interpretation of emotions. In the A-T view, it is clear that one’s lived experience is critical to the experience of emotion. For example, consider how one might experience, say, hope. As we described earlier, the A-T approach claims that hope occurs when (a) there is some good that is (b) difficult to obtain, but (c) ultimately attainable. Now, note that lived experience enters into this classification in all three points. First, in order for there to be some good to be obtained, the cognitive powers must identify that particular thing, situation, person, or whatever as a good. Lived experience (including, for example, things that are culturally specific) determines this—thus, for example, one might hope for a birthday party, if parties are a good thing in the culture, or alternatively, if one had had a terrible experience with birthday parties, one would not look on a possible birthday party as a good. Second, lived experience identifies what is difficult versus immediately available (irascible versus concupiscible). That is, the cognitive powers must determine HOW to obtain something, and in order to do this they must bring to bear experience and knowledge of the world and of one’s own abilities. Third, exactly as with the distinction between the irascible and the concupiscible, it is one’s lived experience that determines the judgment as to whether something is ultimately attainable or not (thus making the difference between hope and despair).

In addition, the Constructionist theories assume that, at the least, affective properties of experience (valence and arousal) are continuously operative, much as the A-T approach assumes that both cognitive and affective powers are continuously operative.

There are also differences, as the Constructionist theories do not seem to include the distinction between the concupiscible and the irascible in their understanding of emotion, though, of course one might add them by noting that most cultures would include cases that require struggle (or not) and that the emotional responses to those cases differ. It does not, however, seem to be a major division or focus of interest in the Constructionist understanding of emotion. Nor do the Constructionist theories include the more general role of the affective powers in motivating and generating all action (not just the emotional). It is less clear, on the Constructionist account, how the emotions influence cognition. On the one hand, judgments are assumed to be affected by, for example, fear. On the other hand, the focus for the Constructionist theory is how the fear came to be conceptualized as fear, rather than on how the fear, per se, can affect the cognitive process of judgment. Modern theories of emotion and cognition have some difficulty in accounting for the relationship between affect and cognition, perhaps at least in part because they do not generally have a clear conceptual separation and relationship of affective and cognitive powers of the person. We will return to this point below.

Interim Summary of Theories of Emotion

As we have seen, many of the major psychological approaches to emotion share some important points with the A-T approach, but they also all differ from the A-T approach. There are three points that we want to make here. First, the modern approaches are far more narrow in scope than the A-T approach—they tend to take as competing explanations, characteristics that are united in the A-T approach. Second, the modern approaches are relatively tightly focused on the experience of emotion; that is, on how people understand themselves (or others) to be experiencing particular emotions, rather than on what emotions are, or on the role emotions play within a more integrated vision of what it is to be a human person. Third, these modern approaches tend not to have a clear, bi-directional relationship between cognition and emotion, while in the A-T approach the affective and cognitive powers work together, and their interaction produces the emotions. Importantly, though, the affective and cognitive powers always work together in this same way, rather than only being something pointed at creating emotional experience. It is this deeper relationship between the affective and cognitive powers that makes more clear in the A-T approach why the relationship between emotion and cognition is a two-way street.

Finally, we should note that much modern emotion research focuses on the role of particular brain systems and sub-systems. The A-T approach, unsurprisingly, has little to say about which brain systems are involved in emotion. However, it is important to understand that the A-T approach would expect that the brain is deeply involved: As we have previously described, all of the sensory powers (both affective and cognitive) would be bodily systems, and even when the intellectual powers are involved, they operate with (not instead of) the sensory systems.

Cognition and Emotion

We now turn to the consideration, in general, of the relation between cognition and emotion. In modern psychology, as we have noted, the role of cognition in emotion is unclear, and different theories posit quite different roles for cognition in emotion. Similarly, most theories of cognition have little role for emotion, such that emotional effects on cognition have become more or less separate areas of investigation. Of course, it is quite clear to anyone who reflects for even a moment, that emotion affects cognition. Indeed, Aristotle was quite clear on this point, making it a focal point of his treatment of emotion in the Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics, most obviously with respect to such emotions as fear and anger. Inappropriate responses to emotions such as fear or anger are shown to be important vices, and the ability to respond appropriately to such emotions is an important virtue. But the nature of these effects, and their source, is still an area of active investigation in modern psychology. We will very briefly review a few of these areas of research and then suggest what the A-T perspective can bring to the modern science.

Effects of Emotion on Cognition

Emotion clearly affects attention, memory, judgments, decisions, and so on. People pay more attention to emotional events or objects (see Yiend, 2010 for a review). Why? Perhaps because emotional events or objects are more likely to be important to our survival or to our social standing. For example, people might focus their attention on a weapon in a video. These attentional effects then carry through to other aspects of cognition.

Memory for events or objects is affected by strong emotion. How do such effects arise? Apparently, in several different ways. As noted above, emotion appears to affect encoding by affecting attention, but it also seems to affect consolidation, at least in part due to the hormones released by the emotional experience (Tambini, Rimmele, Phelps, & Davachi, 2016) and perhaps by extra rehearsal (i.e., people are more likely to think about emotional events multiple times), it seems to affect retrieval by providing extra cues, and so on. Clearly, memory and emotion are closely intertwined.

Emotion also affects judgment and decision in a number of ways (see, e.g., Blanchette & Richards, 2010 for a review). Judgments are affected both by general emotional states, like mood, but also by more specific emotions, such that judgments (of many types) are congruent with the emotional context of the judgment. Furthermore, emotions affect the nature of processing during judgment and decision, with emotions affecting the focus of attention, relational versus item-specific processing, and a number of other particular effects uncovered by experimental research.

Despite such experimental evidence of the effects of emotion on cognition, modern psychology as a whole tends to see these as quite separate areas of theoretical interest. For example, it is quite common to see textbooks on cognition or memory that do not even include emotion as a topic. One can see why: The most accepted model of explanation, known as Affect-As-Information, claims that individuals in a particular emotional state (happy, sad) activate memories associated with that mood state which includes information, and use that information when making evaluative judgments (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007). Thus, the effects are framed as cognitive effects, which happen to take into account the internal emotional state as another piece of information entering into the cognitive process. This should remind us of the theories of emotion discussed above, in which the cognitive processes enter into emotion largely as separate processes that, for example, evaluate or construe the internal state as a response to some external stimuli (e.g., in the constructivist approach, and to a large extent in the appraisal approach). Thus, the relation between cognition and emotion in general is one in which the cognitive systems can either give rise to emotions by evaluating stimuli (including internal states) as emotional, or the cognitive systems can take emotional states as given and apply them as information within the cognitive system, as it processes other information. There is a clear unresolved tension here, in which the cognitive system both gives rise to the emotion and takes the emotion as a given.

Emotions and Flourishing

Why do we have emotions? What are they for? Contemporary psychology considers emotions to be functional in the sense that they promote, or can promote, well-being for the individual, the dyad, and the group. This general characterization is also true of the A-T view of emotions. Of course, negative emotion can also be quite disruptive for all three units, again a fact clearly recognized in both contemporary psychology and the A-T view. We will again very briefly review some of what contemporary psychology has to say on this point and then discuss how the A-T view approaches the issue of the function or value of the emotions.

Emotion and the Individual

Quite a lot of psychology’s work on emotion focuses on the ways in which emotions are important, or related, to the self, and in particular what functions they serve for the self. For example, psychologists are, of course, interested in happiness. At the theoretical level, psychology’s view of happiness is intertwined with Greek philosophy. Theorists have advanced two main positions, hedonism and Aristotelean virtue theory. Hedonism, as proposed by Epicurus, argues that happiness is composed of momentary pleasures as they occur in daily life plus pleasures as they have accumulated during one’s whole life. This position, known in psychology as subjective happiness, has been put forward by several theorists (e.g., Diener, Kahneman, & Helliwell, 2010). The Aristotelean model of eudemonia (see Chap. 6), known in psychology as psychological well-being, has been formulated as self-actualization based on the expression of values, personal fulfillment, and finding meaning (Keyes, Shmotkin, & Ryff, 2002). Research shows that happiness, as a trait, predicts many positive outcomes, such as physical and mental health, success in work, and likelihood of marriage (Marks & Fleming, 1999). This is precisely what is expected in the A-T understanding of the role of emotion in living a good life, a point we develop in much more detail in Chap. 6.

Psychologists are also deeply interested in self-evaluative emotions, such as shame or pride, and social comparison emotions, such as envy or jealousy. For example, psychologists differentiate guilt and shame. Guilt is an emotion felt by individuals when, by their behavior, they violate personal or societal standards. Cognitive appraisal occurs, such that the person sees themselves as responsible for the action and this often involves a desire to make amends (Wicker, Payne, & Morgan, 1983). Shame is an emotion characterized by hopelessness, an appraisal of self that is marked by a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness, and tends to arise from public threats to social esteem, status, or acceptance (Kemeny, Gruenewald, & Dickerson, 2004). Guilt and shame have been found to have useful roles in regulating conformity to societal norms, increasing individual development of self-control, and restraining individuals from enacting immoral and self-incriminating acts (Tangney, 2002). In addition, guilt has been found to motivate behavior oriented toward making amends; shame leads to self-focus and withdrawal, sometimes leading others to forgive the public offense (Keltner, 1995). Embarrassment is a lesser emotion than shame and tends to happen when a person appraises her behavior as foolish, as opposed to an appraisal leading to a sense of pervasive worthlessness (Buss, 1980). Embarrassment tends to have typical bodily expression, such as blushing, touching of the face as if to hide, and gaze aversion. Signs of embarrassment often lead others to reassure the person exhibiting the emotion. Pride emerges early in development in response to social reinforcement and is associated with a positive appraisal of self, a sense of achieving goals, and generally performing at or above one’s internalized standards. Authentic pride (as opposed to hubris) has been associated with good citizenship, creativity, altruism, and high motivation for success (Fredrickson, 2001). Hubris, more of a smug sense of self, is negative and associated with highly variable self-esteem depending on social approval or disapproval (Rhodewalt, Madrian, & Cheney, 1998), hostility, and an inflated sense of worth (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998).

The social comparison emotions of envy and jealously become more prevalent with age. Benign envy involves disappointment with self and a desire to be more like the other person. This form of envy can have positive effects in terms of the person trying harder to match the envied other; but, of course, it can also be disruptive. Malicious envy involves ill will and aggression toward the other in order to “bring them down.” This feeling state is most often based on the idea that the envied other had unfair advantages (Smith, Parrott, Ozer, Moniz, & Bulletin, 1994).

Jealousy occurs in three-party interactions when the jealous person believes that his relationship with another is threatened by a third person. This occurs in romantic relationships but also in work and sibling relationships (Harris, 2003). The evolutional approach explains jealousy by noting its adaptive feature in protecting offspring, at least on the male’s part, and suggesting that it leads to the creation of family units. Research (Buss, 2000) has demonstrated that lower levels of jealousy might motivate the jealous person to try harder in the relationship.

This focus on emotions and the self, however, also includes work on the ways in which the emotions help one to be successful in relations with others. For example, emotional intelligence allows the individual to attend to one’s own emotional state, to attend to and understand the emotional state of another, and to use these processes to guide one’s behavior and decision-making. Research has demonstrated that individuals with high emotional intelligence are more successful generally, less likely to bully, and more interpersonally sensitive, among other things (see, e.g., Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2011; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2008 for reviews).

Emotion and Dyads

With regard to dyadic interactions, both verbal and non-verbal expressions of emotion serve functional purposes. Much research has shown that facial expressions and voice tones communicate information to another: parent–child interaction to convey nurturance (Klinnert, 1984), fear or punishment (Mineka & Cook, 1993), social affiliation conveyed by smiling (Cashdan, 1998), and smiling to indicate social dominance (Tracy & Robins, 2007).

Emotion and Groups

In group settings, emotions serve many purposes, including building group identity (Spoor & Kelly, 2004), setting boundaries (Scheff, 1988), and motivating action (Berndsen & McGarty, 2010). It should be noted that both positive and negative emotions can serve these functions, depending on the situation. For example, fear can motivate one to stay within boundaries and even build group identity.

Interim Summary of Emotion and Flourishing

Finally, in all of these cases, emotional adjustment, the extent to which emotional responses are, in one way or another, appropriate to the situation, is a core need for human flourishing. As we will show in Chap. 6, the A-T view also sees proper emotions as central to human flourishing, though the ways in which the A-T view thinks of emotions as proper (i.e., as related to virtues) is somewhat different from modern psychology.

It is particularly interesting in reading through the modern psychological descriptions of these emotions to see just how similar the analyses are to the analyses carried out by Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. One difference is that the A-T approach tends to discuss many of these emotions, particularly as they contribute to the formation and maintenance and characteristics of the self, in the context of understanding virtue/vice (and in Thomas Aquinas’ case, in the analysis of the types and severity of sins). The A-T focus is truly on the self, and how the emotions contribute to the development and character of the person, rather than on the emotions per se.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have provided an overview of the A-T view of emotions and their relationship to cognition. We have discussed how modern psychology deals with these topics and have shown a number of similarities and differences between the two approaches. We have suggested that the A-T approach has something to add to the modern approach, particularly in terms of how affective and cognitive systems are interrelated, an aspect that we have suggested is relatively weak in modern psychology (see, for example, Gorevan, 2000, for a discussion of how modern approaches to emotion are infected by a kind of Cartesian split that leads to difficulty in integrating bodily and cognitive aspects of emotion).

At this point, we wish to make explicit some of the ways in which the A-T view might add to (not replace) our psychological thinking about cognition and emotion. First, we should note that in the A-T view, it is not precisely the relationship between cognition and the emotions that is the primary focus. Instead, the emotions arise at the intersection of the appetitive and the cognitive powers. Thus, where we have suggested that the modern approach has a difficulty in resolving how the cognitive system both gives rise to and takes for granted (as information) emotional states, this is less of a difficulty in the A-T approach: Because emotions arise from the intersection of appetitive and cognitive powers, it is less surprising that cognition could play both roles with respect to emotional states, because the information that the emotions provide in addition to that already held by the cognitive system comes from the appetitive powers.

Second, while the modern view of emotions takes a functional approach, such that emotions are taken as serving a purpose related to promoting well-being, either biological or social, it makes the emotions serve this function in a special way, by affecting cognitive processes. While the A-T view would, more or less, accept this notion, the A-T view goes much further, in that the appetitive powers generally direct the cognitive powers to their ends. That is, the appetitive powers (partially) direct what the cognitive powers should be attempting to do, not just in the case of emotionally related processes but in all their operations. The modern psychological view, on the other hand, suggests that the cognitive processes are partially affected by emotional states, for example, but how they are directed to particular ends in non-emotional cases is left as a bit of a mystery.

Third, the A-T view of the relationship between the appetitive and cognitive powers takes into account the relationship between sensory and intellectual powers, while the modern view is somewhat more limited by considering instead only the biological versus social functions of the emotions. Although these two sets of conceptions overlap to some extent, they are also rather different. In particular, the A-T view addresses rather specifically why emotions arise in similar ways when, for example, either biological or social needs or wants are blocked by another, while in the modern view, one must posit particular learning pathways to make clear how the original biological need became generalized to social needs, or alternatively one must posit a separate evolutionary story for the biological and social needs. Many, many human wants or needs that give rise to emotional responses are both very far from biological needs and very difficult to bend into a convincing evolutionary story.

Fourth, and most generally, the A-T view paints a picture in which the appetitive powers and the cognitive powers are closely related, and intimately intertwined, with each set of powers both partially directing and partially responding to the other. Thus, the appetitive powers both direct the cognitive powers to the good and respond to the cognitive powers’ presentation of particular things as goods. Similarly, the cognitive powers both take direction from the appetitive powers, in terms of what to pursue (i.e., in a sense, what to think about), but also present to the appetitive powers the understanding of the current situation that allows the appetitive powers to make a choice among the many partial goods present in any situation. Modern psychology, by and large, has no such understanding. How the cognitive system comes to think about particular things or how people choose (to the extent that they do choose) to attempt particular things is largely left outside of any consideration in modern psychology, or else it is something that is mechanistically integrated into the cognitive system (e.g., goal-setting in theories of problem-solving). However, even in the cases where something about the purpose of thinking is integrated into the cognitive systems, as with the case of goal-setting in problem-solving, the goals are often in at least some sense taken for granted. Thus, the goals tend to be about “how” to do the thing, but the fact that the system is directed toward doing the thing in the first place is taken to be outside the scope of the system. But what is outside the scope of the system, what is it that directs the cognitive system in the first place? On this, modern psychology is largely silent.

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T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_6

6. Human Flourishing

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceFlourishingVirtueEthicsPractical wisdomDevelopmental psychology

In this chapter, we return to the topic with which we closed the previous chapter, human flourishing. Human flourishing is a governing theme within the A-T tradition. Indeed, this tradition does not describe the cognitive powers of the human being, or account for various human affections, without relating them back to the overall issue of how humans can best live. This issue of “living well” is grounded in Aristotle’s term eudaimonia, which is a concept that does not translate directly into any single English term and thus has been translated into English as “happiness,” “prosperity,” “welfare,” “well-being,” or “full human flourishing,” among other terms. Indeed, the difficulty of translating the term speaks to the complexity of this central idea which exerts an influence on every aspect of the A-T account of the psychology of the human being. Although some contemporary philosophers use the term “eudaimonistic,” in this chapter, we will use “human flourishing” or, at times, simply “flourishing.”

We have already seen in Chap. 5, briefly, the way in which the A-T view saw emotions as contributing to human flourishing, and a few of the ways in which emotions could be problematic. In the current chapter, we step back to consider more broadly the ways in which the A-T view sees the development of a successful human person. We will then consider some of what modern psychology offers with respect to this issue, and consider what the A-T view might add to the modern approaches. Importantly, in the A-T view, human flourishing always involves others, and so after we have discussed individual human flourishing in this chapter, we will continue our discussion of human flourishing, particularly in the context of the human in society, in Chap. 7.

A-T Approach

Before we discuss how modern psychology views the issue of human flourishing, we must first consider why it was such a central theme within the A-T tradition. Human flourishing is central because in the A-T analysis, it is central to all human action: Human flourishing is always chosen for its own sake, not for the sake of something else. Thus, human flourishing is an ultimate end of human action: We choose other things in order to be happy or to flourish. Importantly, though, flourishing is more a series of activities that jointly constitute what it is to flourish, rather than a state (as it is more typically viewed in modern psychology). Therefore, reason and understanding, as well as emotion/passion, all are directly tied to the notion of flourishing in as much as they are tied to human action.

The A-T approach to human flourishing approaches the question of human flourishing from the perspective of formal and final causes: What is it to be human? What is the end of being human? In the A-T view, true human flourishing can only happen when the human is aiming at the true end of being human, and when the human is living in accord with their nature. As noted in previous chapters, Aristotle holds that the human soul incorporates all of the capacities of vegetative and animal life, but is differentiated from lower species by rationality. Therefore, in his view, the end of being human must involve reason, as the capacity of reason is what distinguishes the human from other animals: Aristotle concludes that humans can use reason to discern what goals are subordinate and what is ultimate for human flourishing.

Thus, the activities of reasoning and understanding are necessary for flourishing. However, they are certainly not sufficient for flourishing. Rather, one also needs to be able to moderate passions/emotions, have base levels of health and material prosperity, be in a healthy political situation, have had a good upbringing, and have good social relationships, among other things. Thus, full human flourishing is partly determined by activities of the individual as well as by elements of chance (one does not have much control over one’s upbringing, for instance). Once base levels of health, political stability, upbringing and suchlike are met, then much depends on how one behaves in one’s circumstances.

To behave properly in a given set of circumstances requires practice from a young age in moderating passions/emotions and having a notion of what it is one is seeking by a given course of action. Thus, to be virtuous requires an integration of appetites and emotions, an awareness of one’s surroundings, and how one’s actions will fit into those surroundings, and that one is developing one’s character by one’s choices and actions. While there are some actions that cannot be undertaken virtuously (Aristotle says that one cannot commit adultery or thieve virtuously), for the most part, this account of virtue is a flexible framework for undertaking decisions, given that human social situations (and our own fit in those situations) are infinitely variable. It is this pattern of behaving well in the given circumstances that will be the focus of this chapter.

Virtues

If it is the specific nature of the human to have and use reason, what does this lead to, with respect to the question of human flourishing? As we noted above, Aristotle noted that flourishing is not simply a matter of knowledge but is a matter of action, of acting with self and others in the real world. Importantly, as we have discussed several times, in the A-T view, the human person integrates different powers, and this is critically true in Aristotle’s understanding of the virtues and of flourishing. In particular, one of Aristotle’s great innovations in this area is the recognition that because flourishing is a matter of action in the world, all human abilities must be integrated in our understanding of flourishing. Virtues, then, depend not just on a theoretical understanding of the good, but on both cognitive and affective appreciation of multiple goods, integration of both sensory and intellectual goods, and most importantly, of a constant inculcation of those goods in actual life. Fundamentally, one must learn to behave virtuously, not just learn what it is to be virtuous. Critically, such virtue ethics differ dramatically from a “duty ethics” in which one must simply learn a set of abstract ethical rules, and then force oneself to behave in accordance with those abstract rules. Thus, one of the most important points of virtue ethics, for psychology, is precisely that one must learn how to live in, and with regard to, the full, complicated, messy, social life of the human. In the A-T view, this involves the inculcation of practical wisdom. It is the ability to live virtuously, via practical wisdom, that leads to human flourishing.

To flourish, then, one needs to have the right sort of “character” (or Aristotle’s “êthos,” from which we get our word “ethics”), because character is the stable aspect in a person that allows him/her to behave in the right way, at the right time, and in the right circumstance. Character allows a person to know when and how to employ reason, to contemplate larger issues, to decide what to do in both mundane day-to-day decisions and in larger life-affecting decisions, and to interact with the variety of people one encounters in life. According to Aristotle, character is a sort of disposition that we have due to the sorts of actions we undertake, which, in turn, yields the habits we have. How then does character develop? The progression is as follows: from individual actions can come habits and from habits can come character. The question then becomes one of which actions to do at which times, because the actions we undertake bear directly on the character we possess, which has a determining impact on whether we are able to flourish.

The notion of character is closely connected to the notion of virtue because for Aristotle, virtue (arête) is similar in many respects to a skill-like ability to perform the right action in the given circumstances. The virtues of a human being are tied to the general account of human nature, such that what it is to be an excellent human being is different than what it is to be an excellent horse. Humans deliberate about actions and how those actions impact attainment of the various goals they have set for themselves, so reasoning clearly is a vital, if difficult, action for flourishing. An ethical virtue, a virtue that corresponds to and develops character, is an intermediate condition between two extremes. A famous example is the virtue of “courage,” which would be employed differently in different contexts. To be courageous is not to charge heedlessly into battle nor to run at the first sight of danger, but to assess the particular situation, avoid the extremes, and seek, as it is sometimes popularly called “the golden mean.” The ethically virtuous person will know, based on their skill-like ability to determine the proper course of action, what to do in the particular circumstances as they present themselves, much in the same way as a skilled carpenter knows both how to generally make use of materials in order to build a good cabinet and how to alter the usual procedures to deal with the various issues that inevitably crop up, such as imperfections in the lumber or whatnot.

What, then, are these virtues? And, how do we acquire them? The rest of this section is devoted to these two questions. Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas identify and discuss many specific virtues. Here, we will limit ourselves to an overview of some of the classifications of virtues that are particularly relevant to human flourishing. Importantly, many of the virtues either themselves cross over these categorizations, or have analogs in the different categories. We begin with Aristotle’s most broad categorization: Aristotle identifies two types of virtues, the intellectual virtues and the moral virtues, or virtues associated with character development.

Intellectual Virtues

The intellectual virtues are, just as one might expect, excellences in the operation of the intellect. Thus, one way of dividing up the intellectual virtues involves identifying specific excellences relating to the various ways in which the intellect operates. Thus, there are specific virtues relating to the ability to reason well or correctly, others relating to the ability to grasp conclusions or to understand, others to evaluating particular evidence, and so on. Clearly, these virtues have some relation to modern psychology’s understanding of cognition, intelligence, and so on, and this would be another interesting connection to explore. However, although they are important in understanding how one reasons properly, their connection to human flourishing is relatively remote, and so we will not consider them in any detail here.

However, the intellectual virtues also apply to reasoning pertaining to everyday action, varying from how to build something, to how to act in situations calling for virtuous action related to character, e.g., whether to assert oneself with courage when threatened. The operation of these virtues is sometimes referred to as practical wisdom (see, e.g., Fowers, 2005) and is very closely tied to human flourishing. In addition, as can be seen even in this very brief example, practical intellectual virtues (and therefore practical wisdom) are very closely tied to the moral virtues (e.g., courage) to which we now turn.

Moral (Character) Virtues

Moral virtues such as courage, temperance, or seeking justice are related to character traits and develop over time. They develop from childhood as children are placed in situations calling for action and emotional control. As these character virtues develop, so too do increases in practical reasoning regarding how to express character virtues. As practical intellectual and character virtues are practiced over time in the context of family and other social situations, they become habits, dispositions to act virtuously in later situations. So, virtue can be characterized as a habitual disposition to act, with courage when it is called for, with temperance when that is called for, and so on, and to do so in accord with practical reason. Again, because action involves both intellect and will, we again see that, although there is reason to analyze the intellectual and the moral virtues separately to some degree, we must never forget the close connection.

Cardinal Virtues

Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas accepted the importance of certain virtues to human flourishing, and these have become known as cardinal virtues. The cardinal virtues are categories or generalizations of numerous more specific virtues, and they bring together most obviously the intellectual and the moral aspects of human virtue. We will describe them in a bit more detail here, as a clear understanding of the cardinal virtues will help in understanding the similarities (and differences) between the A-T and the modern psychological approaches to human flourishing.

Prudence

Prudence is described as an intellectual habit (virtue) enabling the person to deliberate properly in order to choose the virtuous course, the right means of action in any here and now situation. As such, it is primary over the other cardinal virtues. There are many more specific virtues associated with the cognitive activities related to making good choices, some of which are relatively well known to the modern reader, such as memory, caution, or foresight, but others may require definition. For example, docility, or the virtue of being teachable (by others or by experience), is very important in choosing the right action, as is sagacity (the ability to distinguish cases), valuation (the ability to judge the worth of something with respect to proper ends), inventiveness (the ability to use the imagination productively—closely related to the modern notion of creativity), and circumspection (careful consideration of all possible outcomes). Prudence is critical to practical wisdom across all areas of endeavor—it is as important in directing oneself as it is in public affairs or in family decisions.

Justice

Justice is a familiar virtue to most of us and can be defined as rendering to others his/her rights. There are many contexts in which the virtue of justice is necessary. Obviously, in modern terms, we think of legal justice (as did Thomas Aquinas, for example, in his great works on the law), but also commutative justice and distributive justice. Commutative justice has to do with the exchange of rights between individuals measured by equality of goods. Distributive justice, on the other hand, deals with the exchange between a whole (such as a group, a family, or a state) and a part (such as an individual).

There are many other related specific virtues. Liberality refers to open mindedness as to what is just; fidelity is a sense of what is right or appropriate in a situation related to justice. More generally, though, justice, because it is fundamentally relational, pertains in any situation where there is some obligation, and each situation gives rise to its own set of specific virtues: religious piety, respect to parents or siblings, friendliness, patriotism, gratitude, fidelity, trust, and so on.

Temperance

Temperance is the habit of moderation in the use of pleasurable things. Again, there are many associated specific virtues, some of which are somewhat unfamiliar to modern ears. For example, modern readers are likely to think of frugality or sobriety; they might not think of dignity (appropriate reserve—hence moderating the pleasure of emotional expressions) or meekness (enduring injury with patience), or propriety (meeting social standards in conduct or speech). The difficulty for modern readers (other than just the shifting meanings of specific terms used by the Scholastic philosophers of the middle ages) has to do with the very broad way of construing “pleasurable things” in the definition of temperance. Thus, meekness is an example of temperance because it involves the habit of moderating one’s natural wish to revenge injury, and thus to forego at least some of the pleasure that would arise in seeking such vengeance.

Fortitude

Fortitude enables a person to stand firm against and endure the hardships of life, to restrain fear, or to moderate fear in the face of danger, all done in accordance with reason. Fortitude includes perseverance and patience in the face of difficulty, but also magnanimity (the ability to bear trouble calmly and to disdain seeking revenge), munificence (generosity in giving—and thus in not having those goods for oneself), and magnificence (the doing of great things, usually public). This last is not often thought of as a virtue in modern terms (and certainly is not thought of as an example of fortitude), but when one thinks of it in A-T terms, the connection becomes much more clear. Magnificence is the doing of great things, by great effort, generally for the public good, and in this context then, we see that it is clearly related to fortitude, in that it involves a great sacrifice of energy or effort or other goods, and therefore that the magnificent person (whatever other rewards might come along) must bear the loss of the goods that are sacrificed.

Summary of Cardinal Virtues

As noted above, the cardinal virtues are each categories or sets of related specific virtues, and as we noted above, they are generally moral virtues, but they are also intellectual virtues, in that practical wisdom demands each of these virtues in order to engage in virtuous action in a particular set of circumstances here and now.

To give a more intuitive feel for how these virtues relate to intellect, let us consider an intellectual activity (in the modern sense), such as earning a degree, and then consider how the virtues relate to that activity. Fortitude is likely obvious to anyone who has attempted any difficult undertaking, such as earning a degree. There are many difficulties that arise during a degree program, which must be endured. Specifically, one must have fortitude in order to work through the intellectual difficulties inherent in trying to understand a complicated topic. Justice might also be pretty clear; obviously, one must try to be honest and fair in taking exams, to fairly give credit where it is due (e.g., to sources in writing a term paper), and so on. Temperance is critical in the obvious sense that studying and other work associated with learning limit the pleasurable activities that one might otherwise be engaged in, but also in all the things that one must do to meet the requirements of getting a degree, such as treating instructors with respect even when you are frustrated, and so on. Finally, prudence (the “master virtue” of this set) is involved in nearly every aspect of learning in order to get a degree—docility, for example, as the virtue of being open to being taught by authors who have worked in the discipline, or inventiveness in bringing an appropriate creativity to assignments, rather than making it just a copy of what has come before.

The critical point of this example is simply that these virtues, though moral, are also intellectual precisely because of the very tight relation between the appetitive and the intellectual in all human action. Thus, all human action, to be good, requires the combination of virtues, and practical wisdom is the ability to see (via the combination of the virtues) what action is best in the current circumstances. As we have previously described, human flourishing in the A-T view consists of living well (i.e., virtuously). Hence, the cardinal virtues are central to human flourishing.

Development of Virtues

Having established the way in which the A-T view understands virtue, and having shown how central this understanding is to the A-T view of human flourishing, we now consider how the A-T view understands the development of virtues, as well as some of the impediments to that development.

Aristotle famously stated that virtues are best expressed “at the golden mean,” at neither extreme. Temperance calls for eating and drinking neither too much nor too little. Fortitude calls for being neither foolhardy nor cowering. However, Aristotle was careful to point out that the doctrine of the mean is subject to circumstances and does not provide a set pattern of rules by which to live. Hence, there are times when one must be angry and aggressive but not so angry that the emotion undercuts reason; at other times, one must avoid anger entirely. Here, we see the interplay between character virtue and intellectual virtue. Critically, then, practical reason is crucial in directing action toward good ends or goals, and hence, the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues are tightly intertwined. This point leads to the main question of this section: How do people come to reflect the virtues in their actions?

As we noted above, the virtues are gained over time. They develop from childhood as children are placed in situations calling for action and emotional control. As these character virtues develop, so too do increases in practical reasoning regarding how to express character virtues. As practical intellectual and character virtues are practiced over time in the context of family and other social situations, they become habits, dispositions to act virtuously in later situations. So, virtue can be characterized as a habitual disposition to act, with courage when it is called for, with temperance when that is called for and so on, and to do so in accord with practical reason.

Habit

Clearly, the A-T understanding of virtue depends on its understanding of habit (for a general exposition of the approach, see Chap. 10 of Brennan, 1941). To understand the A-T approach to habit, we must take a step back and remember that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas analyze all things by their powers. Now, powers are abilities to act in certain ways that are available by the nature of the thing. When we consider humans, there seems to be an infinity of “powers” if we were to take it that every action is some distinct power. Furthermore, there seems to be an oddity in that many actions that are possible (or easy) at some times are less possible or easy at other times. How can this be if the powers are in the human by nature?

The answers to these questions lie in the notion of habit. Power leads to action, and actions lead to habits, as the power maintains something of the previous actions. Importantly, this means that our powers develop as actions become habitual, so that the once difficult action becomes easier. Thomas Aquinas identifies three characteristics of habits, as they become fixed in the person. First, they begin to display a kind of uniformity—what is originally variable, difficult, and slow to perform becomes smooth, easy, and quick. Second, they begin to exhibit a propensity to action—as an action becomes more habitual, it takes less to propel the person to the action. Indeed, once a habit is fully engrained, it may take a conscious effort of will to stop the action, when the appropriate circumstances are present. For this reason, habit is sometimes called second nature. Third, they begin to result in pleasure—people find the smooth and certain operation of habit to be pleasurable, such that actions that were once perhaps difficult and unpleasant become a pleasurable opportunity for the operation of the habit. Critically with respect to practical reason and the virtues, choice is one of the actions that are susceptible to habit development. Thus, virtue is a habit of choosing well among the possibilities in any given situation.

Critically, however, not all virtuous behavior is the result of habit, and certainly not of ingrained habit—we all encounter many situations that are not so similar to previous situations that we can simply rely on habitual actions to be virtuous in the new conditions. Instead, we must reflect on our actions sufficiently to develop our practical reason in order to guide us to virtuous actions in new situations.

Conditions for the Development of Virtue

One reason we need practical reason is that just as one might develop a habit of choosing well, one might just as easily develop habits of choosing poorly! Aristotle noted a number of variables that can enhance or hinder the development of virtues. In order to develop higher levels of virtues, a person must have the good fortune to be in circumstances that favor the enhancement of virtue. Perhaps most importantly, Aristotle recognized that virtues spring from appropriate socialization within the family and, thus, have a strong developmental underpinning. Children learn virtuous character traits by specific training in those dispositions, ideally accomplished in a strong family unit. He believed that one of the impediments to acquiring virtue was the lack of a family structure capable of such training, and on this basis, was a strong advocate of intact family structures.

Clearly, Aristotle believed that childhood training was necessary for the full flowering of virtue. However, childhood training is not sufficient by itself. Mature virtue requires cognitive processes that are developed enough to reflect on one’s goals in life. Critically, our childhood training leads to sets of likes and dislikes, or perhaps specific habitual actions that may, in themselves, be virtuous. But, it is certainly not the case that every childhood (or perhaps any childhood) offers a wide and rich enough set of experiences to inculcate a disposition to behave in ways that are generally virtuous, and hence that lead to human flourishing. A good, “virtuous” child is not the same thing as a good, virtuous adult. Importantly, the adult must develop a systematized understanding of what it is to be a flourishing human, so that the virtues can be aimed at and developed. In addition to this normal cognitive development into adulthood, Aristotle recognized numerous other variables that influence our ability to develop virtues, including the culture in which one lives, sufficient income and power to avoid being dominated by the less virtuous, parents who live long enough to raise you, and peer support and good friendships.

In addition, Aristotle recognized “internal disorders” similar to various psychopathologies in today’s understanding. These virtue deficits occur when emotions or appetites, such as an appetite for pleasure, or powerful emotions of anger, fear, or depression, exert pressure on the rational expression of virtue. According to Aristotle, there are two kinds of people who generally behave virtuously, and two who show general virtue deficits (see, e.g., Fowers, 2005, pp. 71–73). People might behave virtuously either by being what he referred to as “virtuous” or as “continent.” The truly virtuous have developed the habit of will that leads them to seek the virtuous: They know how to act well and do so gladly; indeed, their goals and actions match, such that they have a generally harmonious relationship between will and intellect. The continent, on the other hand, act well, but they do so as a decision that may fly in the face of their desires. Among those who do not generally act virtuously, the first type, the “incontinent,” are less able than the continent to resist the pressures of emotion and conflict. This can relate to a number of mental disorders, such as anxiety disorders, or to extreme values on personality characteristics, such as neuroticism. Persons affected would present with a plethora of combinations of neuropsychological negatives and histories of family dysfunction. The second type, the “evil” or the “vicious,” refuses to behave according to virtuous standards. Aristotle suggests that they see the virtues as having no value; and, therefore, they seek domination of others and sensual pleasures. Critically, these people see the immediate goods (pleasure, power, money, or whatever) and fail to see the goods aimed at by the virtues; hence, this is generally a failure of intellect, in that the intellect fails to present the proper hierarchies of goods to the will.

Finally, it is worth noting that the notion of “character” in the A-T approach is sometimes given excessive weight, as if Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas proposes that the virtuous person makes the maximally virtuous choice in every situation, and as if any failure to do so would invalidate the A-T approach. But this is deeply wrong, for at least three reasons. First, it is critical to remember that human actions are taken in complicated, messy, real-life situations, and every such situation presents possibilities for actions that are not maximally virtuous, or even not virtuous at all, and many such situations are new, either in their entirety or in important respects. Humans are not automata, and no habit is so strong that it dominates every possible situation. Second, recall that in the A-T approach, people are not primarily responding to abstract ethical rules, but to the dictates of the practical reason in the here and now. Obviously, the human intellect is fallible, so every situation presents the opportunity for failures of practical reason. Hence, failures of practical reason are expected and no more invalidate the A-T approach than occasional arithmetic errors would invalidate mathematics (another point worth considering in relation to virtue and mathematics is: the more complicated the problem, the more likely a person will make an error, and real-life ethical choices tend to be very complicated). Third, both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas are very clear that people differ in their level of virtue, both by various aspects of their natures (stronger appetites or weaker intellects might lead to less virtuous behavior, for example), as well as by their experiences and circumstances in life.

A-T Summary

In summary, Aristotle and later Thomas Aquinas conceptualized human flourishing as a lifelong pursuit organized around habits of virtue developed over the lifetime. Importantly, the A-T view of flourishing as being habits of virtue is a direct development of the A-T view of the human. Thus, there is a clear and well-supported continuation from the sensory and intellectual nature of the human (both appetitive and cognitive) to flourishing. Critically, some contemporary psychologists might be tempted to equate the A-T view of human flourishing as virtue-based with modern trait theories of psychology, and hence treat Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as if they saw the virtues as some kind of all or nothing, unmodifiable, permanent, “character” of the person. As we have made clear, however, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were very clear about both the fact that the habits depend deeply on experiences and circumstances (and, indeed, that what specific behavior is virtuous is dependent on practical wisdom applied to the particular circumstances) and furthermore that no human is completely virtuous, such that they can always behave in the best possible way. Hence, to expect perfect virtue (or simply complete consistency) of any individual is a misreading of the A-T view of human flourishing.

Modern Psychology

Modern psychology interfaces with A-T virtue theory in a number of areas (Fowers, 2005). We have selected three areas to discuss: lifespan development, direct studies of moral development, and positive psychology. Lifespan development does not usually address flourishing, per se, but does consider healthy growth and development over one’s lifetime. As we discussed in the previous sections, the A-T concept of flourishing, and hence the development of the virtues, requires such normal development of cognitive, emotional, and social abilities. Psychology’s theory and research on moral development and expression also do not generally address human flourishing, but have obvious roots in all of the major ethical theories, including deontology, utilitarian, and perhaps most prominently virtue ethics. Recently, the movement known as “positive psychology” has attempted to recapture human flourishing as a valid area of investigation for psychology, and this approach has explicit connections with virtue ethics, and specifically with A-T virtue ethics. There is a vast psychological literature relating to all these approaches. Hence, it will be possible to present only a few highlights of each topic in order to demonstrate comparisons and contrasts with the A-T approach.

Human Lifespan Development

According to the A-T view, human flourishing depends on the acquisition of habits of virtue. For a human to acquire the virtues, as described above, the person must have sufficient cognitive, emotional, and social abilities. In addition, the person must possess an enduring sense of self. These factors will be considered within the traditional developmental frameworks according to Piaget (1930) and Erikson (1993/1950), as many psychologists will be at least generally familiar with these frameworks. This method of exposition also allows us to highlight the ways in which the development of habits of virtue depends on various abilities at various ages across the lifespan.

Infancy and Toddler: Birth to 2 Years

Physical development progresses in the brain at a very rapid rate in the first 2 years with concomitant rapid development of the sensory and motor systems, perceptual discrimination, and learning capacities. These developments set the stage for large increases in cognitive capacity. Piaget (1930) characterized this as the sensorimotor stage, involving sensory and motor actions early and culminating with spoken language by 24 months. An interesting connection to the A-T view is that during this stage, the child is generally limited in terms of the use of the intellect, with difficulties arising in using universals, and other uses of the intellect, such as abstract reasoning.

Physical and cognitive maturation accompany and are necessary for emotional and social development during this phase. Erikson (1993/1950) included two stages during the first 2 years, trust versus mistrust in the first year and autonomy versus shame in the second. Infant trust occurs with “good enough parenting” (Winnicott, 1971) and secure attachment (Bowlby, 1982/1962). Basic emotions appear in the first few weeks (Izard et al., 1995) and build toward more complex emotional states by age two, including self-conscious emotions: shame, embarrassment, pride (Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Goldsmith, & Stenberg, 1983; Lewis, 1992), and emotional self-regulation, incorporated by the child through interaction with caregivers. Temperament factors, with probable biological substrates (Chess & Thomas, 1977; Dilalla, Kagan, & Reznick, 1994), affect how these processes are expressed. Emergence of self-awareness toward the end of the second year is correlated with the ability to form primitive social categories, including goodness and badness, and provides the basis for of sense of self, and the foundation for self-conscious emotions such as empathy, compliance, and self-control (Kochanska, 1993; Kopp, 1987).

Child development researchers (e.g., Kochanska & Thompson, 1997; Thompson, Meyer, & McGinley, 2006) have demonstrated that emotional, temperamental, cognitive, and relational variables interact in the development of conscience, moral reasoning, and conduct, just as expected in the A-T view. Hence, the foundation of virtuous habits begins with such early development.

Early Childhood: Ages 3 to 6 Years

The ability to develop virtuous habits goes hand in hand with the expansion of cognitive, emotional, social, and personality (the self at this stage) capacities, and this era in child development is one of rapid and vast expansion in all these arenas. Piaget described cognition during this stage as preoperational, meaning that it is egocentric, rigid, limited to one item of attention at a time, and momentary; however, recent research has established that early operational thinking, characterized as more logical, flexible, and organized, is present during early childhood and gets more elaborate as the child approaches age 6 (Halford, 1992). Memory (recognition, recall, and even autobiographical) expands, and the child begins to construct a “theory of mind,” a recognition that there are mental activities in themselves and in others (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1995). Receptive language explodes to as much as 24,000 words by age 6; basic grammar is mastered, and preschool children conduct face-to-face conversation. These achievements set the cognitive framework for development of virtues.

Erickson’s third stage, initiative versus guilt, emerges and involves an expansion of task involvement, exploration, and activities, often with peers. A strong sense of self emerges characterized by self-descriptions (Keller, Ford, & Meacham, 1978) and an ability to cooperate (and fight) with peers (Brownell & Carriger, 1990). Emotional development progresses so that the child can judge the causes of others’ emotions (Levine, 1995), use emotional language to influence others, and manifest increased emotional regulation (Thompson, 1990).

Of particular note, and correlated with gains in cognitive, emotional, social, and self-capacities, is the child’s sense of morality, often manifested in terms of virtuous behavior by self or others. Hence, early in this era, children comment on their rule breaking—“I was naughty,” or that of others—“Joe hit me. He’s bad,” reflecting early notions of justice, as well as an initial understanding of good or proper behavior.

Middle Childhood: Ages 6 to 12 Years

From ages 6 through 12, the child manifests substantial cognitive growth, entering what Piaget labeled the concrete operations stage. The child can reason about concrete factual information, can engage in reversal of thought (i.e., thinking back through steps in a process), can categorize effectively, can order things in terms of two or more quantitative variables (e.g., height and weight), can make mental inferences about objects, and can show special reasoning by giving directions, arranging blocks to match a model, and so on. As implied by the stage label, children do less well with very abstract concepts.

Erickson labeled this stage as Industry vs. Inferiority. Industry implies emerging skills in managing a great number of tasks, particularly the demands of school-based learning which progresses with ever-increasing cognitive demands. The sense of self shifts toward more elaborate self-description and a social orientation in which one compares self to others (Livesley & Bromley, 1973). Depending on success in school and social relations, esteem can become enhanced or deteriorate. There are also growth demands emotionally. Children become much more aware of their own emotional states and those of others (Eder, 1989) and are expected to exercise increasing emotional control (Band & Weisz, 1988). Inferiority involves varying levels of failure to meet these demands.

This vast gain in cognitive, emotional, and social capacity and definitive sense of self is directly related to flourishing in the A-T model. The obvious relationship is a greatly empowered practical intellect allowing the child to exercise prudence in choosing the right means to ends in education, social relations, and behaviors related to justice, temperance, and fortitude.

Adolescence: Ages 13 to 19 Years

Piaget noted structural changes in cognition beginning in early adolescence, which he labeled the formal operational stage. He demonstrated that adolescents were capable of abstract thinking of a hypothetical-deductive form, starting with general information of possible factors and proceeding to deducing specific outcomes. Additionally, Piaget described propositional thought, meaning that adolescents can evaluate the logic and truth or falsity of more abstract statements without referring to concrete evidence (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958/1955). Recent research has affirmed that adolescents do demonstrate improved reasoning, information processing, abstract and multidimensional thinking from late childhood into adolescence (Keating, 2013), thus generally confirming Piaget’s observations. From the perspective of the A-T view, the formal operations stage reflects the person’s ability to fully make use of their intellectual powers (though, of course, the more the person builds the habit of using the intellect, the better they are at it, so the role of the intellect can continue to expand into adulthood).

Erickson called this stage Identity vs. Identity Diffusion. Adolescents who successfully cope with the emotional, social, and self (personality) demands of this phase achieve Identity. Those who do not, and there are multiple factors militating against success, fall into Identity Diffusion. However, as Collins and Steinberg (2006) pointed out in their review of adolescent development, researchers have shifted away from sweeping, stage-based theories and have focused on “mini-theories” incorporating ecological (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), interpersonal (Laursen & Bukowski, 1997), and biosocial (Plomin & Daniels, 1987) perspectives. Nevertheless, the tasks of adolescence continue to be seen in the context of separation and individuation, coping with sexual interests and behavior brought on by puberty, educational achievement, and vocational preparation, and negotiating peer relationships, including romantic ones.

The separation task of adolescence is now seen as a gradual process of achieving emotional autonomy as adolescents rework views of themselves and parent–child relationships (Josselson, 1980), of behavioral autonomy, as they renegotiate rules and seek more freedom (Collins, 1995), and of value autonomy, as they question the religious, political, and moral beliefs given to them by parents or other authority (Eisenberg & Morris, 2004). All of these tasks vary according to culture (Chun & MacDermid, 1997; Feldman & Quatman, 1988). Each aspect of separation involves prudence and exercise of virtues such as prudence and justice, and each will be regarded differently by different cultures, just as A-T virtue ethics would expect.

One particularly prominent area of modern adolescence research has to do with sexuality. Sexuality is a predominant feature of romantic peer relations, and adolescents are faced with management of this biological and psychological drive. Romantic relationships, combined with biological drives, lead to the following task requirement regarding sexuality. As Crockett, Raffaelli, and Moilanen (2003, p. 1045) put it: “… adjusting to a sexually maturing body, managing sexual desires, forming sexual attitudes and values and learning about others’ expectations, experimenting with sexual behaviors, and integrating these dimensions into one’s sense of self.” Every element of the quote involves possible exercise of all the cardinal virtues.

Research demonstrates that sexual behavior varies considerably across Western nations (Fine, 1988). Nevertheless, adolescent sexual behavior is still regarded as a source of developmental problems and risk, particularly in relation to sexual exploitation, teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted disease (Savin-Williams & Diamond, 2004). Maccoby (1998) found that females often experience social condemnation and stereotyping if perceived as sexually active and that this interferes with positive development. Several studies have shown that adolescents report negative sexual experiences if they feel undue pressure to engage in sex or if they feel unready. Guilt and self-doubt ensue (Moore & Rosenthal, 1993; Savin-Williams, 1996; Zani, 1991). Clearly, these modern studies show the relationship between human flourishing and (in this case, sexual) behavior, but somewhat surprisingly, modern psychology research has less to say about how to avoid such problems, or how to achieve flourishing. This suggests that a virtue ethics approach might still have a place in understanding optimal adolescent development.

Early Adulthood: 20 to 40 Years

The basic building blocks for cognitive, emotional, social, and self are established by the end of adolescence; however, developmental tasks do not cease. In fact, there are at least three theories of cognition that assert important changes in the structure of adult thought. Perry (1981) found that university students demonstrate dualistic thinking in their early stages and relativistic thinking at the end of studies. Dualistic thinking divides learning into dualisms (e.g., good and bad, right and wrong) while relativistic thinking is less absolute and more contextual. Schaie (1978) acknowledged that Piaget’s formulation covered most human cognitive capacities, but argued that situations create new demands on cognition. In the early adult stage, people shift from knowledge acquisition to knowledge application with respect to life needs, particularly marriage, family, and vocation/career. Emphasis shifts to long-term goals. Labouvie-Vief (1980) echoes Schaie, but places cognition in the philosophical context of pragmatism: Thought solves problems. These extensions have some impact on how humans formulate virtue expression but do not change the basic formulations of Piaget and Kohlberg. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, these extensions are closely related to the A-T view’s notion of practical intellect, with the primary tasks now located around applying one’s knowledge flexibly in the context of actual, complicated life situations.

Erickson referred to this stage as Intimacy vs Isolation, with the primary concern being finding a mate. Research confirms that intimacy is a central concern of this period (Ryff & Migdal, 1984). Isolation results in negative affect: loneliness and self-absorption. Levinson (1978) proposed “life structures,” consisting of stable and transitional phases. Early adult structures are organized around marriage, family/parenthood, and career. There are multiple developmental tasks: leaving home, marriage for many, consolidating marriage, dealing with parenthood, and adapting to career/work. All of these tasks call on previously established virtuous habits in order to flourish and cope with the ups and downs of marriage, family, and career. Prudence, patience, perseverance, frugality, good temper, gratitude, fidelity, and other subdivisions of the cardinal virtues enter in. Psychological research on these tasks does not frame questions in this manner; however, investigators do study variables that seem highly related to virtue expression such as personality characteristics related to happy versus unhappy marriage (Levenson, Carstensen, & Gottman, 1994), variables related to parenthood, such as equitable sharing of parenting responsibilities, and personal characteristics related to career progress (Lopez, 1989).

Middle Adulthood: 41 to 65 Years

Much psychological research on cognition at this stage involves crystallized versus fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence involves accumulated knowledge and experience, mastery of social expectations, and increases in good judgment, which is directly related to the practical intellect and virtues such as prudence, and which generally increases with age throughout adulthood, as the habits of virtue are more and more established. Fluid intelligence involves speed of information processing, capacity of working memory, and ability to detect relationships among stimuli. Although fluid intelligence slowly declines after age 30, the exercise of the practical intellect is not very dependent on fluid intelligence, and declines in fluid intelligence can be offset by increases in crystallized intelligence. This is just what the A-T approach would expect: As one ages, the habits of virtue (or of vice, for that matter) play a larger and larger role.

Erickson framed this stage as Generativity vs. Stagnation, although research has shown that generativity starts well before this age/stage. He viewed generativity as the person seeking to accomplish beyond self and literally to generate things and processes that will outlive him or her, such as children, ideas, products, art, and so forth. Stagnation occurs when the person stops after attaining the goals of early adulthood. Valliant (1977) called middle-aged persons “guardians of the culture.” In work, these adults seek to increase meaning and direction but also face stagnation and burnout. Expression of generativity, of course, varies across many factors, such as socioeconomic level, ethnicity, heath issues, and culture, to cite a few. However, the same underlying set of pre-established habits of virtue are at work. McAdams (2013) illustrates this process very elaborately in his research related to personality development reported in his book, The Redemptive Self.

Late Adulthood: 65+ Years

Cognitive capacities in crystallized and fluid intelligence decline at more advanced age; however, there are great individual differences in decline and many continue to function well into their 80s or beyond. Of course, the various dementias can cut cognitive capacity short, and this in turn affects all of one’s abilities.

Erickson characterized this last stage as Ego Integrity vs Despair, with integrity occurring when the person feels satisfied with his or her life achievements in spite of a mix of success and failure. Despair happens to those who see their lives as lacking in a variety of ways and who become bitter and hopeless. Peck (1968) elaborated Erickson’s schema by proposing that older adults must come to grips with retirement, not become too preoccupied with deterioration of body functions, and cope with impending death. Indeed, just as suggested by Aristotle, a lifetime of developing and living virtuously enables continued flourishing well into the later years.

Summary of Lifespan Development

In summary then, developmental psychology is congruent with the A-T model of virtue incorporation and flourishing over a lifetime, both in the sense that the A-T view identifies, in a general way, that the habits of virtue necessary for flourishing develop and change over the lifespan, and in the sense that modern psychology shows that flourishing, particularly in middle and later adulthood, is tied to living in ways that are generally consistent with the habits of virtue identified in the A-T view.

Aristotle’s observation that positive family and social factors are essential in promoting virtue development has been thoroughly supported by modern psychological research: Child rearing patterns are strongly associated with educational achievement, for example. Specifically, authoritative parenting, which combines warmth with strong limit setting, predicts better grades and higher levels of achievement motivation across many studies (Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987; Dornbusch, Ritter, Mont-Reynaud, & Chen, 1990; Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch, & Darling, 1992). These parents are also involved in tracking school progress, making sure that their children take higher level classes, and communicating with teachers. Parent involvement is also associated with peer support for education, in that teens with involved parents tend to have friends who also value achievement (Grolnick & Slowiaczek, 1994). Teachers who are warm and supportive as well as skilled predict better outcomes; however, these variables are often lacking in large departmentalized high schools (Eccles, 2004). When these support variables are insufficient, educational achievement falters and vocational opportunities are fewer.

Importantly, developmental psychology’s theory and research regarding cognitive, emotional, social, and personality/self provide many details of the development of the capacities (e.g., cognitive, social, emotional) that are required for the development of the virtues, but that were not available to Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. Thus, modern developmental psychology also offers the opportunity of further developing the A-T view of virtue development and expression at each stage and across the lifespan.

Moral Development

The previous section considered the relationship between A-T virtue theory, as it is expressed over a person’s life, and psychology’s detailed consideration of the stages of a person’s lifespan. As was pointed out, psychology does not specifically formulate these developmental stages in virtue theory terms, but much of what is found in the modern research is closely related to the virtues, as described in the A-T approach.

The psychology of moral development, however, addresses virtues (or at least behaviors that would be deemed virtuous in A-T terms) more directly. However, as Turiel (2006) points out in an extensive review, modern theory and research have moved away from a more internalized habit-based approach and now stress a number of different perspectives. As we will see though, most studies involve the virtue of justice, both communitive and distributive. Some psychological results are interpreted as related to the common good in ways that sound utilitarian but could also be interpreted as distributive justice.

The most widely known psychology of moral development comes from the stage theories described above. In particular, cognitive ability also promotes advances in moral reasoning , observed by Piaget (1932) and elaborated by Kohlberg (1969). Piaget proposed two stages of development, the “heteronomous morality” stage (from about 5 to 10) in which children absorb rules handed to them by authority and judge rightness or wrongness based on consequences rather than intent. At about age 10, children transition to “autonomous morality” in which they come to understand intent as crucial in judging moral outcomes and to see that moral viewpoints vary among people. Kohlberg agreed with Piaget’s understanding of the factors driving cognitive moral understanding, specifically, dealing with moral issues in one’s life over time and increased ability to deliberate about moral conflicts (the essence of prudence) to produce better outcomes. However, he proposed 6 stages of moral development paralleling Piaget’s stages of cognitive development as follows:

- Stage 1. The punishment and obedience orientation: Moral reasoning is based on fear of authority and punishment avoidance. Associated with preoperational and early operational cognition.

- Stage 2. The instrumental purpose orientation: Moral choice is determined by satisfying personal needs. Associated with concrete operations cognition.

- Stage 3. The “good boy-good girl” orientation: Moral choice is determined by the need to maintain affection and approval of friends and relatives. Associated with early formal operations cognition.

- Stage 4. The social-order-maintaining orientation: Moral choice is determined by understanding that laws and rules are separate from the need for approval from others. They apply to everyone, must apply to each equally, and each person has a duty to uphold the rules and laws (justice). Associated with formal operations cognition.

- Stage 5. The social contract orientation: Moral reasoning becomes more abstract and flexible with emphasis on both individual rights (justice) and the good of the community (utilitarian perspective). Associated with formal operations cognition.

- Stage 6. The universal ethical principle orientation: Moral reasoning is based on ethical principles (such as virtue theory, utilitarianism, deontology) that are valid for all humanity and guide moral decisions. Associated with formal operations cognition.

Both Piaget and Kohlberg focused on the cognitive changes leading to differences in moral reasoning about moral dilemmas, the best known of which is the Heinz dilemma which asks for a choice between stealing and saving a person’s life. A typical Stage 1 response reflects concern for punishment and negative reactions from authority. Although this response is taken to be at the lowest level of moral development, there is a hint of practical reason (prudence) implied and perhaps obedience and respect for authority, potential aspects of justice. By Stage 4, responses reflect advances in the practical reason reflected in an understanding of “golden rule” reciprocity, again manifesting justice and the integral part of temperance, a sense of shame or guilt. Though able to solve abstract moral dilemmas better, more recent research (Kuther & Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2000) has shown that in everyday life, adolescents are likely to define moral issues as they relate to personal choices and interests rather than moral principles (e.g., defining drug use as a personal rather than moral issue). Hence, advances in practical reason do not guarantee prudent choice. Ultimately, although the stages are seen as linked to cognitive development, in the A-T view, the stages would be understood more as a development of both the cognitive and affective powers, as well as the developing habits of the various virtues.

While moral development certainly depends to some degree on cognitive development, that is not the only factor at play, nor would the A-T approach be limited to cognitive factors. Several of the factors that we discussed in laying out A-T virtue ethics have been picked up on in modern psychology research on moral development: cultural differences, the role of emotions and emotional control, and parenting, as a few examples. Some modern work has also focused on the roles of virtues, particularly aspects of the virtue of justice. We will briefly discuss some of these developments.

Cultural theory (Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987) has also been a major focus in work on moral development. Cultural theory proposes that moral viewpoints vary across cultures and that internalized and universal virtues do not exist across cultures. Culture theorists assert that this split occurs along Western individualist and Eastern collectivist lines and that children in Western cultures are taught a rights-based morality, whereas Eastern cultures train children in a duty-based moral system. However, it is important to note that in both of these systems, rights and duties are related to the overall concept of justice. Shweder et al. (1987) investigated differences between items reflecting social conventions versus items reflecting moral judgment in Indian and US samples. He found some agreement between Indians and Americans regarding moral issues (primarily clustering around justice) and much disagreement regarding social convention. In fact, later studies of cultural differences (Bedouin women of Egypt, Chinese) have found similar patterns. Some differences of moral expression do occur across cultures when associated with religious belief systems (Hatch, 1983; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987). Nevertheless, such findings lead Turiel (2006, p. 838) to state the following: “The research with the Druze and in China, along with other research in Non-Western cultures, indicates the concepts of rights, welfare, and justice are found across cultures.” Here, we note again that A-T virtue ethics includes an understanding of the “fitness” of particular behaviors in particular situations within particular cultures as a critical aspect of the development of the virtues (as opposed to, for example, pure and universalist abstract rules of justice). Thus, such cultural differences would not be terribly surprising within the A-T tradition.

Some psychologists have stressed emotion as basic to moral development. Early theory focused on shame, fear, and guilt and their avoidance as explanatory in learning moral control. Later theory focused on positive emotions and affiliation as mechanisms for moral development (Dunn, 1987). Hoffman (2001) proposed that internalization of social norms, as well as moral principles of care and justice, is based on empathy and that empathy has evolutionary roots in human biology. His formulation includes four stages from the first year of confused feeling state and no distinction between self and other to a fourth stage of empathy for another’s life condition. There is some empirical support for young children showing empathy for another’s distress (Zahn-Waxler, Robinson, & Emde, 1992). Other studies show that children aged 5–12 attribute negative emotions to victims of aggression (Arsenio, 1988). Hoffman stressed biological roots for empathy but also described a moral act as “a disposition” to do something for another. A disposition in psychology is usually described as a habit, so this formulation is compatible with the A-T model of virtue acquisition of justice and related phenomena.

Parenting, of course, has been seen as paramount in generating moral development in children, as the basis for interactionist models of moral development, and has a vast literature examining positive and negative effects. Studies have established that the authoritative parenting style, stressing discussion, communication, and explanation, is more effective than authoritarian or permissive styles in moral development and other outcomes (Baumrind, 1991; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). The interactionist model has been expanded to peers (Damon, 1981, 1988) showing how peer interaction promotes the concept of justice and how peer conflict develops notions about consideration of the rights of others (Berkowitz & Gibbs, 1985). Much of children’s growth in ideas about distributive justice comes from discussion with peers (Damon, 1981).

Gender has been a controversial issue in moral development. Gilligan (1982) distinguished two injunctions as the basis of moral development, that of justice and that of care for another. Gilligan then argued for separate developmental pathways for male and females; males follow justice and females follow care for others. Further, she asserted that Kohlberg’s model held for males and her model held for females. The original empirical studies by Gilligan and her associates were criticized based on methodology and analysis (Mednick, 1989) but did receive some support (Haste, 1993). A meta-analysis by Jaffee and Hyde (2000) showed that there is no sharp distinction between men’s and women’s reasoning based on care and justice, although there is some tendency for females to use care more than men. Whatever the case, both care and rights-oriented justice can be formulated as aspects of communitive justice, what is owed to another. Care perhaps contains an element of munificence as well.

Other studies, related primarily to justice, cite Aristotle as a source. For example, Damon (1975, 1988) showed that children’s concept of sharing progresses through four levels from toddler to elementary school and involves equality, merit, and benevolence. Research on prosocial moral judgments by Eisenberg (1986), again reflecting a justice disposition, resulted in five levels: hedonistic, an orientation to the needs of others, stenotypes of good/bad persons, a more reflective concern for others, and finally, internalization of norms and responsibilities and more abstract reasoning about those issues. Turiel (2002, p. 828) summarizes these studies and other research as follows: “Judgments about moral issues, based on these criteria, are structured by concepts of welfare, justice, and rights. Justifications for these judgements entail preventing harm and promoting welfare, fairness, and rights.”

In summary, the theory and research in moral development are largely compatible with the A-T view, and, in fact, these investigators sometimes refer directly to Aristotle as the basis. Some disagreement may occur in emphasis, of course. However, when examined at a deeper level, these discrepancies often are reduced if not eliminated. One other point that is worth pondering is that, just as in our discussion of cognition, we find that modern theories tend to focus on one or another point made within the A-T approach, but exaggerate the role of that individual point, rather than taking in the whole of the virtue ethic approach. Hence, different insights of the virtue ethics approach are represented in conflicting psychological approaches to moral development.

Positive Psychology

Positive psychology, initiated by researchers such as Seligman, Csikszentmihalyi and Peterson (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Peterson & Seligman, 2004; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005), in contradiction to most of modern psychology has direct ties to virtue theory and particularly to Aristotle, as does a related set of approaches emphasizing resilience (see, e.g., Titus, 2006 for an extensive discussion of the relation of resilience to the virtue of fortitude, particularly as conceived by Thomas Aquinas). In fact, positive psychology describes itself as the scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing on multiple levels, and directly seeks to promote happiness in a person’s life. It has roots in clinical psychology and sees itself as a reaction to behavioral and psychodynamic focus on psychopathology and “mental illness.” In addition to Aristotle and the ancient virtue theories, positive psychology sees itself rooted in the humanistic psychology movement (Maslow, 1954; Rogers, 1961).

The ties to Aristotelian virtue theory are clear in any exposition of positive psychology. In fact, positive psychology is focused on eudaimonia, defined as both the good life and as flourishing. Achieving the psychological state of happiness necessary for flourishing is guided by six core virtues and 24 associated strengths described in the Character Strengths and Virtues handbook (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and these core virtues are the following: Wisdom and Knowledge (creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, perspective, and innovation), Courage (bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality, and zest), Humanity (love, kindness, and social intelligence), Justice (citizenship, fairness, and leadership), Temperance (forgiveness, mercy, humility, prudence, and self-control) and Transcendence (appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality). Positive psychology theorists believe that these virtues are the product of evolution and are biologically based, rather than being simply relativistic or purely culturally determined.

Positive psychology is oriented toward enhancing human well-being in general but also is utilized in the treatment of various psychological problems, particularly depression. A meta-analysis of 49 studies of positive psychology interventions (PPI) showed increased measures of well-being and lowered levels of depression. PPI interventions included such interventions as writing gratitude letters, learning positive thinking, replaying positive experiences, and socializing with others (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). Other research on well-being (an outcome measure of flourishing) demonstrates relationships with optimism, marriage, extroversion, religion or spirituality, social class, leisure, sleep patterns, and subjective evaluation of one’s health (Boniwell, 2012).

Obviously, Positive Psychology is closely tied to virtue theory, classical as well as modern humanistic formulations. As such, it is compatible with the A-T approach, showing that the A-T approach can be both acceptably scientific and effective in practice. However, there would be areas of dispute regarding the degree to which virtues are biologically based and what to include in the list of virtues and their subdivisions. Yet, there are, indeed, similar disagreements within any given tradition of virtue ethics. Furthermore, it is unclear what specifically, positive psychology gets from the notions of biologically based virtues that is actually different from the A-T notion that the virtues (and human flourishing more generally) are dependent on human nature (i.e., that for a human to flourish just is to live a life most in accord with true human nature). To see whether there are differences that matter, of course, would involve taking the A-T approach seriously on its own terms and investigating the similarities and differences—just what we have been suggesting throughout this book!

Chapter Summary

It is worth briefly recapping how it is that the A-T view of the virtues is integrated within the rest of the view of the human. Why must we have a virtue ethics, rather than, say, a duty ethics, within this view? What makes the virtue ethics integral to the human? First, we must recall that all truly human action requires the cooperation of the intellect and the will (the cognitive and the appetitive powers), as we discussed in the previous chapter. Second, a duty ethic sets up a constant conflict between the appetitive and the cognitive because the abstract ethical rule is only cognitive, and the appetitive power, under such a conception of ethics, would have no way of being trained or adapted to the good. Thus, while the A-T approach allows that there are sometimes conflicts between desires and actions, the duty ethic approach creates and necessitates permanent conflict. A virtue ethics approach to human flourishing, then, looks to a point when the appetitive powers are attuned to the goods, in concert with the cognitive power, which presents the highest good as the end to which the appetitive powers move (with practical wisdom determining what highest good can be attained in the current circumstances). A duty ethics, on the other hand, looks to a point when the cognitive power dominates the appetitive power, such that action is driven by whatever highest abstract ethical rule is followed. Third, given what is said above, it should be clear that human flourishing in the A-T view requires excellences (virtues) of both an intellectual and an appetitive sort. Fourth, as we will discuss in part in the next chapter, the virtue ethics view of human flourishing (as opposed to a duty ethics) leads to an understanding of the human in society such that the role of social groups is to lead people to know and thus embrace virtuous goods. In a duty ethics view of human flourishing, on the other hand, the role of social groups is largely to force individuals’ behavior to conform to the group’s rules. Hence, the underlying ethics that are viewed as leading to human flourishing have critical consequences for one’s views of the role of the human in society.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_7

7. The Human in Society

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceVirtueEthicsSocial psychologyFriendship

The previous two chapters, on Emotion and Cognition and on Human Flourishing, considered, in part, the ways in which a person must relate to and connect with others. In this chapter, we consider more generally the ways in which the A-T view sees the human in society. How do we, or should we, relate to others? Aristotle, famously, pointed out that the human being is a political animal—that is, an animal who must live in the polis (city or state or community) and who lives with laws and customs, and hence an animal who must live via the expressions of rationality that the laws and the polis represent. Indeed, at one point in the Politics, Aristotle says that the human being who lives alone is either a beast or a god (and thus not truly human). But, the notion of the political animal, in the A-T approach, is far more capacious than the modern understanding of politics (or political science, as an academic topic). Aristotle’s understanding of politics includes many aspects of how the individual relates to others, certainly the state, but also the community more generally. Furthermore, as we saw in the previous chapter, Aristotle’s ethical works also consider how individuals do, and should, relate to others, including particularly important discussions of friendship. Finally, Aristotle’s work on rhetoric considers how we are influenced by others. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas considers many of the same issues, with the addition of the consideration of the law, both natural and divine. His consideration of the natural law is based on Greek and Roman ethical notions, while his consideration of the divine law is, of course, based on the tenets of Christianity. Here, we will only consider his work on the natural law and its relation to human law, since those are clearly within the provenance of human reason. This (partial) enumeration of A-T work on the relation of the individual to others obviously shows that there are significant A-T resources to bring to this issue. However, those resources are spread across many different areas of work. There simply is not a single A-T analog to modern social psychology. Nevertheless, there is much that can be drawn from these resources to the benefit of modern social psychology (Fowers, 2005; Sullivan, 2016).

A-T Approach

Chapter 6 examined Aristotelean ethics in some detail, so in this section we will focus on A-T work on politics, rhetoric, and law. It is important to keep in mind, however, that in the A-T view, human flourishing is a central concern, and indeed is the end, of politics, rhetoric, and law. Thus, the A-T approaches to these topics take a more normative approach than modern psychology. One might think that this is problematic: Modern social psychology takes what it finds regarding how people relate to each other as it is, not as it should be, and therefore the A-T approaches would not be able to add anything. There are several reasons why this is not true, however. First, although the A-T view considers the ends of these human relationships, it also deeply considers the means by which such relationships are pursued, cultivated, maintained, and so on. Second, as pointed out by Sullivan (2016), the strong focus of modern social psychology on looking at power relationships leaves out much human social behavior that is more oriented toward the group good (as the recent movement toward positive psychology, briefly discussed in Chap. 6, has shown). Third, in the A-T view, each polity has human flourishing as its end, as well. Thus, not only does it consider the ways in which the end of human flourishing relates the individual to the group, but also how human flourishing as an end gives rise to particular social practices. The law, for example, is taken to be promulgated in order to increase the virtue (or to set the conditions for the possible increase in virtue) of the members of the polity.

Of course, as we saw in our discussion of A-T ethics, existing social relationships do not always meet the ends of human flourishing, and this is sometimes taken as a weakness of the A-T approach, as if Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas were so naive that they presumed that everyone always acted perfectly virtuously. Nothing could be further from the truth! The analysis of breakdowns and failures of virtue occupies a great deal of the A-T thinking in all of these areas. Critically, while the virtues are personal virtues (i.e., they adhere in particular people), they are also social. Indeed, they identify social duties, expectations, and even social graces that allow individuals to live their best lives within a social context. As we discussed in Chap. 6, the individual must know these virtues in order to pursue them, but knowing is not enough: The individual must live the virtues in order to truly flourish, and the social group (at whatever level) must support and encourage and teach the virtues in order to meet their ends of promoting human flourishing.

Friendship

Although the previous chapter considered A-T ethics in some detail, one important area with respect to social relations was not covered: friendship. Aristotle’s ethical works contain important analyses of friendship. Indeed, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that virtually all of the questions about friendship that arise in modern psychology are at least addressed by Aristotle. There is a difference of emphasis, in that the A-T view of friendship is again oriented to human flourishing, whereas modern psychology tends to emphasize more the instrumental effects of the friendship, but this is probably the area where the A-T view and the modern social psychological views are most in agreement, at least in terms of the observable aspects of friendship. There is also a major difference in that the Aristotelian approach to friendship is much broader than the modern notion, indeed, “friendship” for Aristotle is about the general notion of person-to-person social connections, some of which represent friendship as we would recognize it in the modern usage, but others are more like social association, and can be based on utility or pleasure, such that we moderns might not think of the social relationship as necessarily being a friendship.

Friendship is a very useful topic to consider in understanding the general A-T approach to human relationships of all kinds (such as the political, to which we will turn in a moment). As Robinson (1989, p. 116) points out, “Even relationships of lesser scope than that between citizen and government come to shape and to express the moral qualities of the participants…Friendship reveals in an intimate and simplified form the principal (or, alas, unprincipled) grounds of affiliation that operate at the level of citizenship and statesmanship as well.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the A-T approach to friendship is the extent to which it both identifies an ideal and integrates the less than ideal. Perfect friendship (which is very rare) is not based on usefulness or pleasure, but on reciprocal love for the other in and of themselves. Importantly, also, this best form of friendship is between those who are both virtuous. Thus, we see the deep role of Aristotle’s virtue ethics in supporting or enabling the relationships between people that most fully allow human flourishing. This is not to say that usefulness or pleasure is not permissible in such friendships. Indeed, they would be typical and common. However, they are not the basis of the friendship. Furthermore, (non-perfect) friendships based on usefulness or pleasure do not generally imply anything about the character or moral worth of the people involved. A person of vicious character might find another person of use, whether that other person is of good character or not. Or, they might get pleasure from another, whether that other person is of good character or not. A perfect friendship, however, expresses one’s judgment of the moral worth of the other: One judges that the other is worth loving in and of themselves. Because of this, perfect friendship requires people who are good, and similar in virtue. When this is not true, according to Aristotle, the one of lesser virtue should love the one of greater virtue more than the one of greater virtue would love the one of lesser virtue, because the one of lesser virtue sees more to love (i.e., more virtue) in the one of greater virtue.

At first blush, this notion that the difference in virtue should determine the level of love in the friendship might sound somewhat harsh to modern ears. This is a particularly interesting example, relative to modern psychology, in which friendship tends to be conditioned more on usefulness or pleasure, than on friendship as an end in itself. Furthermore, the inequality in virtue as indicated above would certainly fit in the modern view, if we were talking about usefulness or pleasure: Modern psychology would certainly agree that the one who gets more use from a friendship is likely to be more strongly invested in the friendship than one who gets less, and the same would be true of pleasure. The A-T view perhaps seems harsh simply because we are unused to thinking of others (or ourselves) in terms of virtue as a central personal characteristic. Yet, in the A-T view, the appetitive powers, when functioning properly and in concert with the cognitive powers, should be proportioned to the excellence of the object (i.e., the target of the powers’ operation). Thus, we see once again the extent to which the A-T approach maintains a philosophical consistency across widely divergent topics, with the social relationship depending on virtue theory, which in turn depends on the conception of the appetitive and cognitive powers, which in turn developed from the metaphysical analysis of change.

Politics

Aristotle’s political theory incorporates his moral philosophy, in that “political science” is oriented toward the final cause of the good or flourishing of the individual (at least of the citizen and indirectly others). The lawgivers have the duty to develop laws that are in conformity to human nature and that are conducive to the development of virtue in the citizens. Using these principles, Aristotle concludes that (a) humans are by nature social and, hence, naturally form governing bodies; (b) that the principles of justice should dictate the constitution of the body politic; (c) that tyranny, oligarchy, and even pure democracy are defective forms of government; and (d) that individual ownership of private property is superior to government ownership of all resources. Thomas Aquinas accepts Aristotle’s notion that human nature is ordered toward communal living but considers an expanded sense of groups when discussing the common good, such that there is the common good of a family, of a social organization, a city, and a state. Indeed, any grouping of individuals is ordered toward the common good of the group. Following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas asserts that governments have the duty to promote virtue in the citizen but also to protect individuals from crime and from attack by other states.

To a large extent, the A-T view of the relationship of the individual to the group is determined by many of the same considerations as the relationship of individuals to individuals in friendship. Thus, the good polity is seen as virtuous by its (committed) members, and the good citizen must be virtuous, as well. Now, within the political context, one should be rewarded in accord with one’s virtue, but what virtues? Aristotle makes clear that one’s worth in the political context is proportional to one’s contributions to the polity. In particular, the state’s role is to reward the kind of lives that it wants and to discourage the kind of lives that it does not want. Obviously, this goes back to the principle that the life of virtue must be lived and developed (as we discussed in Chap. 6), and to the point that the state exists to encourage and enable human flourishing. Now, Aristotle is quite realistic about some of these points: For example, wealth is not a virtue (though it is necessary to have a base level of material possessions to achieve eudaimonia and may in some cases be helpful in living a life that develops some virtues—e.g., if you do not need to work for a living, you might have more time to develop virtues around learning). However, a reasonable generosity to your fellow citizens is a virtue that the state has an interest in encouraging, and because that generosity depends on a certain amount of wealth, the state also has an interest in setting conditions by which at least those citizens who seem likely to be generous are able to accumulate some wealth to be generous with. Aristotle came to his political view partly based on his prior commitments (e.g., his approach to virtue), but also to a large extent from his study of the constitutions of actual states that were more or less successful. Hence, his approach to political needs of states is quite different from, say, Plato, where the considerations are nearly totally theoretical or allegorical.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric, defined as the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, will obviously be involved in many subdivisions of social psychology. After all, Allport (1985) defined social psychology as the study of “influence.” Aristotle wrote carefully and systematically about rhetoric in order to counter the charlatans of his day. He distinguished three types of deliberative speech: (a) public speech in which the speaker addresses an audience to advise them about action or to warn them against action; (b) judicial speech in which the speaker, in court, either accuses someone of something or defends self or others; and (c) epideictic speech in which the speaker praises or blames another in order to honor or shame the person. Aristotle also distinguished three species or types of persuasion, such that others can be influenced by the character of the speaker, the emotional state of the listener, or by the argument itself. As noted above, these categories of rhetoric can be spoken or written; and the audience can be an individual or a group, political or otherwise.

Aristotle argued that rhetoric is itself neutral but can be used by the virtuous for good or by the “depraved” for evil. Of course, he urged that rhetoric be used in virtuous ways, particularly according to justice. He also defended the need for rhetoric at a time when it was often taught as a means of concealing truth, manipulating the masses, and outwitting others. Aristotle pointed out that often rhetoric is essential when addressing an audience or group of ordinary people for these reasons: (a) they often cannot follow proofs of exact science; (b) they may get distracted by non-essential details that do not have to do with the substance of the topic; and (c) they may be subject to flattery and misperception and, hence, easily manipulated. Again, Aristotle applied these principles primarily to the state and noted that, if the state has a virtuous constitution, the ordinary citizens are more protected from misuse of rhetoric.

As mentioned above, persuasion involves three elements: the speaker, the emotional state of the audience, and the argument. For Aristotle, the speaker must, above all, appear credible, so the audience will accept what is stated. As always, Aristotle frames the speaker in terms of virtue, such that the speaker should show practical intelligence, virtuous character, and good will. Of course, the non-virtuous speaker can seem to have these traits (but in reality does not), and can use this persona to manipulate others. For example, a speaker with high social status or wealth might be perceived as more credible, even though those characteristics are irrelevant to the issue at hand. Furthermore, rhetoric often is aimed at the emotions in order to affect the judgment of the receiver(s) and this form of persuasion can be used by the credible speaker to shift individuals or groups toward good or evil ends, regardless of the quality of the content of the argument. We might also note here that this focus on the misuse of rhetoric leads Aristotle to focus to an extent on negative effects of emotion (as we mentioned in Chap. 6). Finally, there is the argument itself, which in rhetoric is often an enthymeme, where one of the premises is missing, unlike the true syllogism that Aristotle identified as critical in science. Of course, in a true syllogism, the validity of the conclusion depends on the structure of the syllogism, and the truth of the conclusion depends on the validity, but also on the truth of the premises. A hidden, or missing, premise that is controversial is a good way to persuade an audience that would not be persuaded if that premise were made explicit. On the other hand, such missing premises, if they are widely accepted within a group, might be a way that group members think similarly about issues without explicitly coordinating their beliefs. Implicitly shared beliefs within groups are, of course, a key concern in modern psychology.

Law

In the A-T tradition, just human laws are edicts formulated according to reason by proper authorities for the good of the people who fall under the law. There are three critical points here in determining whether the law is just: First, the end of the law must be directed toward the common good. Second, the law must be in accord with reason. Aquinas famously ties the propriety or justness of a law to whether it fits into the “natural law,” which itself occurs in virtue of human rationality. Just as humans can make true statements about theoretical things (like in the sciences or mathematics), so too can humans make true statements, in virtue of their rationality, about moral matters. Thus, even if intended by the promulgators to lead to the common good, a law that does not fit in some basic way with what is right, as determined by reason, is not just (for a famous and very clear invocation of this conception of the relation of human to natural law, see Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”). Third, the authorities must be proper: Not just anyone promulgates law, and in particular, it is not the case that simply having power makes the authority proper.

Importantly, the A-T tradition sees law differently, perhaps, than it looks to modern eyes. While modern people (at least in the west) might see law as primarily something that limits individual freedom, the A-T tradition sees law more as a guide to good living. As we noted in the last chapter, virtues must be learned and lived, and this must happen within a cultural and societal context. The totality of the law, both formal and informal, of any group or polity, provides guidance toward the way of living that is best, as this is understood by that group. On the one hand, this might seem to mean that the best life is purely socially constructed (or totally relativistic). However, the role of reason (as well as natural law) ensures that there would always be some commonalities across groups’ understanding of the best, at least in those cases where the laws are actually just. It is, of course, possible for a particular group to come up with totally depraved laws, but this would be a failure of reason or of choice. Just as with an individual making a choice, a group might promulgate laws that do not actually tend toward the good, either by a failure of reason, such that they have mistaken the good, or by a failure of choice, such that they have chosen a lesser good, such as power for the leadership, over the common good.

The A-T understanding of law, then, relates to modern social psychology, in that it is drawn from deep consideration of how the formal and informal acts of a group or polity are related to the individuals in that group. In addition, it provides an important consideration of the justice of the laws, and how the justice (or injustice) of those laws affects the relationship of the individual to the group. Furthermore, because the law is promulgated within a community, it also matters greatly in the relationship between members and nonmembers of the group. Finally, Thomas Aquinas, in particular, has a very subtle account of the relationship of the propriety and necessity of law, on the one hand, and the wide differentiation of human laws in different contexts, on the other, and there is a great deal of psychological content in these considerations.

Summary of the A-T Approach

In summary, A-T writings on ethics, friendship, politics, rhetoric, and law interact. Virtue theory serves as an underpinning for all of the other areas, and virtue theory itself is founded on the nature of the human person. We wish to note here the strong degree of coherence between these “higher” topics that are specific to the relations among people to the “lower” topics of the nature of the human, which in turn is based on the even “lower” topics of metaphysical principles. This is the strong coherence of the A-T approach that we have emphasized throughout this book. As stated above, these philosophical topics (friendship, politics, rhetoric, and law) all relate, directly or indirectly, to influence of others on one’s behavior and thought. As has been mentioned several times, because the A-T view of the relation between the individual and society is conditioned on the central ethical concern of human flourishing, the A-T view proceeds from quite a different starting point than modern social psychology. This difference in starting point will lead to the possibility of supplementing the kinds of concerns that are usually foregrounded in modern social psychology, to which we now turn. Obviously, given that the A-T approach to each of the areas we have mentioned above has resulted in literally a small library’s worth of books, we can only point out the relationships to modern psychology, and we cannot really provide even the briefest of outlines of the contents of the A-T tradition. However, one point that is worth making here is that the A-T approaches to politics, rhetoric, and law, in comparison to the more general philosophical aspects that we have been dealing with in the prior chapters, are still very much live, and relatively well-known, philosophical areas of work, and hence they are, perhaps, areas where it would be easiest for psychology to take up the A-T tradition’s insights.

Modern Social Psychology

“Social Psychology is the scientific study in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people: parents, friends, employers, teachers, strangers—indeed by the entire social situation” (Allport, 1985, p. 3). Unpacking this definition, we first note that social psychology employs the scientific method to examine these relationships. Second, we see that social psychology focuses on how others, even imaginary others, influence or modify individuals’ activities.

Social psychology expanded in the 1950–1960s with a focus on attitudes and group processes. Through the 1970s and 1980s, along with psychology in general, social psychology became oriented toward cognitive phenomena; and currently, its scope includes evolutionary psychology, culture, and social neuroscience. Along with other subdivisions of modern psychology, social psychology approaches the individual person via affect, behavior, and cognition. However, the general focus of social psychology continues to fall within Allport’s definition as the study of the influence of others and specifically focuses on the interplay between persons and social situations. As we have already suggested that the A-T approach provides a good philosophy of these three human characteristics (affect, cognition, behavior), we will now consider a sampling of how these characteristics are applied and conceived in modern social psychology, and ultimately how the aspects of the A-T view concerning the relation of the individual to others can add to our modern approach.

We begin with two areas, social cognition and social affect, which adapt theoretical and empirical research from, respectively, cognition and emotion research to social behavior. The relationships between the A-T approach and modern psychology that we identified in Chaps. 3–5 generally apply directly to these adaptations to social behavior. We then discuss research on the self, which we briefly discussed in the context of development and flourishing in Chap. 6, and again, much of how the A-T view relates here is similar to our previous discussion. Finally, we discuss four areas of work that are more uniquely investigated in social psychology: attitudes, conformity, prejudice, and competition and cooperation.

Social Cognition

Social psychology recognizes that human affect, behavior, and cognition come about through learning and, hence, incorporates the three basic models of learning common to all psychology: operant conditioning , classical or associational conditioning, and social/observational learning. Operant conditioning occurs early and often in the forms of positive reinforcement of desired behavior, such as parents praising their child for conforming to social norms in public situations (stores, restaurants) or negative reinforcement in the form of avoidance training (threat of withholding the car if curfew is broken again). Operant conditioning accounts for complex learning like social norms and broader culture. Classical or associational learning exercises strong persuasive power by associating neutral stimuli with naturally positive or negative stimuli. Research has shown that associational learning influences our knowledge and judgments about others. For example, Sigall and Landy (1973) found that subjects viewed men and women more favorably if they were associated with more attractive people than if they were associated with persons of average attractiveness. And, of course, such associational learning is a hallmark of marketing and advertising (Hawkins, Mothersbaugh, & Best, 2013), such as in an ad depicting a great party on the beach that happens to feature a particular brand of beer. Similarly, association with fear-producing images (pictures of lung cancer surgery) has been found to reduce smoking (Perloff, 2003), and media images of violence by certain groups have been shown to spark general prejudice toward members of those groups despite the fact that only a limited number show violence (Lewicki, 1985). Finally, social cognitive theory (e.g., Bandura, 1986) accounts for much of our learning about our social world, including aggression, social efficacy, moral development, and academic motivation.

Social psychology’s account of social cognition has also adopted from the study of cognition a more computationalist understanding of learning and postulates that over time these forms of learning accumulate and produce stored knowledge in the form of schemas. These schemas are then recalled as categorical forms that are used to label groups or individuals. Schemas shape future learning and expectations (see, e.g., Crocker, Fiske, & Taylor, 1984) and new knowledge can be either incorporated into the schema, a process known as assimilation, or schemas can change, a process known as accommodation. Of the two, assimilation is stronger and often leads to confirmation bias, leading people to favor information that confirms their schematic expectations, or engage in self-fulfilling prophesy (Nickerson, 1998). Existing schemas can impact and distort memory (Darley & Gross, 1983), confirm information, including erroneous information, about social groups (Fyock & Stangor, 1994), and influence how stereotypes are used (Stangor & Duan, 1991).

Schemas create expectations and influence judgments about others, and this social cognition is subdivided into automatic and controlled. Automatic social cognition occurs rapidly, without much awareness or effort and can lead to error. However, it is mostly useful in dealing with everyday life (Ferguson & Bargh, 2003). Controlled social cognition is the opposite: we consciously think about others to evaluate them or categorize them. Controlled social cognition, our ability to know about these biases and try to counter them with more accurate judgments, helps prevent sometimes serious errors in assessing others. Nevertheless, both types of social cognition can lead to a number of errors, just as any other cognitive judgment can be susceptible to errors based on, for example, a reliance on salience, or representativeness, or availability, etc. In general, then, social cognition is conceived of in ways that are very similar to the general approach to cognitive psychology, but it is cognition directed toward social entities (e.g., social groups or social behaviors, etc.). To a large extent, then, the A-T approach to cognition will simply carry over to social cognition: the interplay of sensory and intellectual cognition, habit and reasoning all play the same roles in social cognition as in cognition in general.

Social Affect

Social psychology is deeply interested in affect in the form of emotional states and mood, and largely accepts the modern view of emotions, which we outlined in Chap. 5. Here, we will present a very brief elaboration of the aspects that take on particular salience in the context of social psychology.

Emotions, although experienced by an individual, are deeply social and emotions are shared with others through verbal and non-verbal means (Hertenstein, 2002; Oatley, 2003). In general, affect is a major influence in our social lives. Emotions provide information about ourselves in terms of well-being or lack thereof, and about our social relations with others, positive or negative. Emotions can also vary cross culturally, with Western culture focusing more on self-concern and individuality and Eastern culture on concern for others (Kitayama, Mesquita, & Karasawa, 2006). Emotion can also vary by gender, with women being more articulate in describing feelings and more open to feelings in general (Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001).

Emotions also play a crucial role in physical and mental health and social relationships are central to both. The most widely researched variable is social support, which has been found to influence happiness (Diener, Tamir, & Scollon, 2006), the ability to cope with stress (Koopman, Hermanson, Diamond, Angell, & Spiegel, 1998), and other aspects of mental and physical health (see, e.g., Ashton et al., 2005).

To sum up, social psychology theory and research on emotion present an elaborate picture of the interaction between the human person’s emotional life in relation to all forms of social stimuli. In particular, affect plays an important role in social interaction, but social interaction also plays an important role in driving affect, and in maintaining physical and mental health. In general, however, social psychology sees emotion in much the same way as the rest of modern psychology, just with more emphasis on social functions, sources, and differences. Hence, the relationship of A-T thinking to modern psychological notions of emotion that we presented in Chap. 5 largely applies here, as well. One point that is worth emphasizing, however, is that the A-T distinction between the appetitive and cognitive powers and its careful development of the role of the affective powers in terms of social relations (e.g., in politics, in rhetoric, and even in law) provide potential areas of thought that could be brought into conversation with modern work on the social aspects of emotion (and the emotional aspects of social behavior).

The Self

Social psychology focuses on social influences, as Allport described, but correctly identifies the self as the center point and foundation of that influence. Hence, the self is one of the most researched topics in social psychology (Taylor & Sherman, 2008). This research has focused on three aspects of self: self-concept, self-esteem, and the self in relation to others.

As discussed in Chap. 6, humans demonstrate a unique sense of self during infancy, and by school age have a firm self-concept, including personal knowledge of values, traits, roles, physical characteristics, and so on. As cognitive growth and social interactions progress through the lifespan, the self-concept becomes more complex and abstract. Social psychology regards the Cognitive Self as a self-schema which includes the variables named above and also awareness of our past narratives, projections about future possibilities, roles we play in social groups, and awareness of our unique personality traits (Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Social psychology has also been interested in self-awareness as a variable related to social behavior. This construct relates to peoples’ willingness to violate social norms if the unique self is masked within a group (Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952) and to differences in private self-awareness, related to an individual tendency to introspect, and public self-awareness, related to how we see ourselves in public situations and how we are meeting the standards of those groups (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975).

Self-esteem has received extensive attention from social psychology, developmental psychology, and clinical psychology and is thought to be a relatively stable trait. Self-esteem is generally related to how we reflect on our performance, appearance, and satisfaction with relationships with others (Tafarodi & Swann, 1995). In fact, positive self-esteem is so important that we try to preserve and enhance it, even if it means distorting reality: taking credit for success but blaming others for failure, seeing ourselves as above-average drivers, more humorous, and less prejudiced than others (Crocker & Park, 2004). Another important variable is self-presentation, aimed at increasing social status and presenting ourselves positively to others. This varies by gender, with men likely to be more assertive and women likely to be more affiliative. Self-monitoring is related to self-presentation and those able to size up social situations and predict the demands of social situations have better outcomes (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000).

Finally, work on the social self identifies the fact that self-concept is not developed in isolation but is created in interaction with others, particularly by a process called social comparison in which we literally compare ourselves with others (e.g., Festinger, 1954). One important variable is upward or downward comparison and its relationship to self-esteem. Downward comparison in which we see ourselves as better off than others is associated with elevations in self-esteem (Morse & Gergen, 1970), upward comparison, the opposite (Collins, 2000). Most importantly, social groups provide a social identity associated with positive or possible negative self-concept (Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, & Ethier, 1995). Individuals generally are granted membership by birth or seek it later in life and may bask in the glory of group accomplishment.

Social psychology’s research on the self has some parallels with the A-T tradition. Perhaps most significantly, much of what is unique within psychology about this particular area of research is that it makes some contact with the tradition of deep concern with human flourishing as an organizing principle of understanding the relation of the individual with others. In addition, there is the connection to self-reflection, the close connection of affect and cognition, and the development over time of the habits of virtue, though social psychology, very much like the rest of psychology, does not discuss virtue much, unfortunately (Fowers, 2005). Perhaps most clearly, the work on the social self has close ties (or at least very similar fundamental ideas) to Aristotle’s discussions of the relation of the individual to the polis
, but also very clearly to the development of the virtues, as we discussed in Chap. 6.

Attitudes

Social psychologists define attitudes as relatively enduring evaluations of something; the “something,” the attitude object, can be a person, group, product, or anything subject to evaluation. Attitudes are influenced by direct experience with the attitude object, but also by indirect experience, such as media (see, e.g., Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2003), and even by genetics (Olson, Vernon, Harris, & Jang, 2001). Attitudes can be either shared with others or highly individualized. Attitudes have cognitive, affective, and behavioral components, and research has determined that often the affective component is the strongest determinant (Stangor, Sullivan, & Ford, 1991). Attitudes are useful, in that they enable rapid choice among alternatives (e.g., which brand of car to shop for, which ice cream to buy) and what to avoid or approach (e.g., skunk = avoid; dog = approach).

Not all attitudes are explicitly social, of course. Social psychology’s interest in attitudes is very focused on attitude manipulation by persuasion, such as advertising goods, influencing voters during elections, convincing people to donate to charities, encouraging people to live healthy lifestyles, and so forth. Research includes many variables: the communicator, the message recipients, how messages are processed, message effectiveness variables, and even how to resist persuasion.

Effective communicators make recipients feel good about themselves, are attractive, are similar in various ways to the group they are addressing, are often publicly trusted, well known in the media, arts, or sports, appear to be expert on the topic they are addressing, speak quickly and confidently, appear to have no personal gain coming from the issue they address, and appear to present both sides of an issue (Priester & Petty, 2003; Wood & Eagly, 1981). However, communicators who appear untrustworthy may still achieve attitude change or fixation by what is known as the “sleeper effect.” Here, the recipient discounts the message initially, remembers the content of the message, and gradually comes to accept the message (Kumkale & Albarracín, 2004).

Messages themselves are processed spontaneously or thoughtfully, and thus messages may be framed in ways to encourage or be particularly effective with spontaneous or thoughtful processing. Most ad messages are processed spontaneously and count on props such as music, characteristics of the communicator, humor, and even fear, to attract attention and help recipients retain the message to some degree (Chaiken, 1980; Perloff, 2003). Thoughtful messages attempt to present cognitive material (pros and cons) important to recipients with the goal of creating positive thoughts about the product or person.

Methods of preventing persuasion have also been examined. Studies have shown that some individuals have strong attitudes and can resist persuasion; hence, one way to bolster resistance is to strengthen attitudes, for example, to resist messages designed to influence attitudes about smoking, drinking, and drug use. One approach to attitude strengthening has been “inoculation,” having children and adolescents practice resistance to peer and other pressures to use drugs and other substances (Compton & Pfau, 2005).

Finally, self-perception, the behavioral component of attitude formation, happens when individuals use their own behavior to formulate attitudes (Bem, 1967). For example, research participants asked to shake their heads up and down rather than side to side agreed with an argument more at the end of the experiment (Wells & Petty, 1980).

Had Aristotle lived in the twentieth century, he might have dominated the attitude manipulation industry. In his analysis of rhetoric, he pointed out that the speaker must seem credible, trustworthy (framed by Aristotle as having virtuous character and as being of good will), and as possessing practical intelligence, meaning expertise. He showed that “public speech” (which now takes the form of ads, political messages, and so on) is designed to persuade an audience toward or away from some action. His analysis of how to present the message according to the capacities of the “ordinary” people underpins the spontaneous messages of today. Hence, he anticipated most of the principles used by modern “persuaders.” However, given that he argued that rhetoric should be used to serve virtue, he might well be appalled by today’s attitude manipulation standards and methods. Nevertheless, the modern work on persuasion and the resistance to persuasion draws deeply from Aristotelian notions like habit and reasoning. At a deeper level, our discussion of attitudes makes a very interesting connection back to the A-T approach: Attitudes are one area in modern psychology where the close coordination between the cognitive and affective powers is very clearly acknowledged, even though psychology as a whole has tended to lose those close connections as we discussed in Chap. 5.

Conformity

Social psychology defines conformity as social influence that leads people, at times against their will, to consent to and cling to the opinions of others. Conformity involves cognition, affect, and behavior, and can be adaptive, as reflected in social groups of similar views working together (Coultas, 2004) or coercive, as reflected in totalitarian states.

Conformity is subdivided into simple imitation of another, informational conformity, normative conformity, conformity to the majority group, and non-conformity by the minority group. Informational conformity occurs when individuals change beliefs or behaviors because we accept information from someone we believe to be an expert and can be adaptive or not (Turner, 1991). Normative conformity occurs when individuals hold opinions or behave in ways that are similar to a group in order to gain acceptance or prevent rejection. Often, this occurs as public conformity though the person may hold different views privately (Turner, 1991). Conformity to the majority happens when the beliefs and behaviors of the majority prevail and the minority members go along (e.g., Asch, 1955), at least publicly. Finally, non-conformity by the minority happens when an individual or a few go against prevailing norms. This has been demonstrated in science, politics, religion, and other areas, leading to changes even to the level of paradigm shifts. All of these types of conformity vary depending on the size of the majority (Mullen, 1983), unanimity of the majority (Allen & Levine, 1968), and importance of the task (Baron, Vandello, & Brunsman, 1996).

Of course, social psychology has been particularly interested in the construct of social power, defined as a person’s ability to create or force conformity even when others may resist change. The classic studies by Milgram (1974) demonstrated that the social situation (following orders given by an authority figure) led student subjects to impose punishments (fake electric shocks) at extreme levels despite getting feedback that the persons being “shocked” were in extreme pain. Milgram believed that these studies provided a model to explain how powerful dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin, could order subordinates to kill millions of innocent people and be obeyed.

French and Raven (1959) identified five types of power: reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, and expert forms of power. Reward power is the common experience of one person or organization being able to offer rewards to another, e.g., teachers—students and grades. Coercive power occurs when a person or organization has the ability to cause negative outcomes for others and can come in many varieties: dictatorships over citizens, bosses over employees. Legitimate power involves persons appointed or elected to authority positions: elected officials, teachers, judges, and such. People in society recognize and accept their authority as long as that authority is exercised according to the norms, values, and traditions of the society and is judged to be relatively fair. Referent power happens when an individual can get others to identify with his/her viewpoints, values, and behavior. Variables include the person being a member of an important reference group, a charismatic and persuasive leader, or a particularly famous person. Finally, expert power is influence based on information provided by an expert and is likely to be accepted both publicly and privately.

The A-T view interfaces with the social power construct at several points. Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’ writings on legitimate power are extensive. In the Politics, Aristotle’s “political science” is embedded in his theory of virtue; and, as pointed out earlier, asserts that the lawgivers should develop legal systems that (a) are in conformity to human nature (human nature as described in Chap. 2); (b) are just; and (c) favor individual ownership of property and responsibility. He classifies types of government into correct and deviant forms. Under correct, he places one ruler (kingship), few rulers (aristocracy), and many rulers (polity). Under deviant, he locates tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. From this grouping, he concluded that the best constitution is polity of a “mixed” form in which power is granted to a middle group of citizens located between the rich and poor. His constitutional theory is based on justice, individual justice oriented toward the flourishing of every citizen and justice that is oriented toward distributive justice, in which citizens have some claim on common assets. Given the fact that Western institutions flow from Greek and Roman sources, it is not surprising that there is significant overlap.

With regard to social power studied by Milgram, the A-T model would explain the results in terms of the interplay between intellect and will. As noted in previous chapters, the intellect deliberates and determines the good; the will then chooses the good, the good action in this case. Milgram’s paradigm sets up cognitive dissonance, to obey the authority or to obey one’s common moral sense. This dissonance is sufficient to lead a large number to conclude that following authority is good or, at least, better. Hence, the subject chooses to shock. More deeply, of course, the A-T tradition would point to the commitment of the individual to the polis
: The citizen owes some level of obedience to the community, the law, custom, and so on, and this commitment is a constant point to which the practical intellect must be applied in order to make the best decision for human flourishing (as we discussed in Chap. 6).

Prejudice

Social psychology conceptualizes prejudice under three categories: prejudice itself, stereotyping, and discrimination. It examines these categories in terms of affect, behavior, and cognition. Prejudice consists of unjustifiable negative attitudes toward in-groups or out-groups (us vs. them), complete with negative beliefs, affect, and behavior. Stereotyping’s cognitive component consists of positive or negative beliefs we have about members of social groups (All ___ are X) and these beliefs generate feelings and behavior. Discrimination flows from prejudice and stereotyping and leads to unjustifiable beliefs, feelings, and behaviors toward members of out-groups based only on their membership in an out-group.

Social categorization is a natural cognitive process through which we place individuals into groupings (Allport, 1954/1979). This process occurs spontaneously, without much cognitive processing, and includes grouping according to gender, race, social roles, academic status, and many other social categories (Fiske, Haslam, & Fiske, 1991). Social categorization is useful and necessary in providing needed information (that person is a doctor and I need medical information). Generating social categories is closely associated with stereotyping, and stereotyping often contains some kernel of truth and allows more efficient social functioning (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994) but also often produces unjustified prejudices and discrimination (Hirschfeld, 1998; Linville & Jones, 1980). Because stereotypes are formed early, are highly cognitive in nature, are somewhat useful, are quickly activated, and are tied to social norms that are part of culture, they are very difficult to change (Bargh, 1999).

As noted above, prejudice involves positive and negative judgments about members of groups, characterized as in-groups and out-groups. Brewer and Caporael (2006) have argued that these categories were formed as part of evolution because members of different groups were dangerous and a threat to survival. Hence, these divisions are seen as naturally occurring processes but ones that lead us to strongly prefer members of our in-groups and many times judge out-groups negatively and unfairly. Research has demonstrated that in-group favoritism is associated with increased self-esteem (Henri, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971), starts by age 3 (Aboud, 2003), and favors positive evaluations of the in-group by in-group members and negative evaluations of the out-group by in-group members (Hewstone, 1990).

Finally, as noted, prejudice and stereotyping can lead to discrimination which occurs in employment, housing, financial opportunities, education, and medical care. As might be expected, social psychology has studied ways to reduce discrimination. Increased intergroup contact, particularly the existence of close relationships between an in-group member and an out-group member (e.g., Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, & Ropp, 1997) can reduce prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination.

The A-T approach to such issues again involves the interplay of intellect and will, and in this case, the practice of virtue, particularly justice. In particular, virtue, as discussed in this chapter and the previous chapter, calls for all people to use their intellects to discern injustice and to change. Again, however, the A-T approach sees the connection to one’s own group as a deep aspect of human nature. Thus, in a sense, in the A-T approach, there is little need to ask why prejudice might exist. The modern assumption that all people would naturally see all other peoples as equal (or even equivalent) is utterly at odds with the notion of the human as a political animal: The human naturally makes a deep and fundamental connection to their own polis at the expense of making deep and fundamental connections to other polities. As we noted earlier there are a set of widening concentric circles of social relationships for someone like Thomas Aquinas, in which affinity and allegiance among individuals are most intense at the beginning and dissipate as the relations widen, which begins with the common good of a family, a social organization, a city, and a state. Thus, to avoid prejudice requires an extensive development of the habits of virtue. This development can only occur under the proper conditions, as we discussed in Chap. 6.

Competition and Cooperation

When individuals or groups interact, they can cooperate or compete based on a number of factors, including self or other concern, compatible or incompatible goals, misperception of intentions of others leading to conflict, and potential rewards. Cooperation tends to occur when a group trusts and communicates with the other group and anticipates sharing benefits of joint action. Competition occurs when individuals or groups seek to gain a limited number of rewards for themselves and may include actively trying to reduce success of the other party or parties. Competition can lead to severe conflict when one group believes that another group has unfairly deprived them of goods (De Dreu, 2010).

Social dilemma is the construct social psychology uses to understand conflicts in which individuals, groups, cultures, or societies are in conflict over public goods, defined as benefits shared by the community at large. Social dilemmas often pit individual or group needs against other individual or group needs involving use of public goods, such as public land versus developers, or the use of public transportation versus using one’s own car. Social dilemmas often lead to conflict, but can lead to resolution and cooperation guided primarily by moral beliefs. Social psychology defines those beliefs as principles, ideals, rights, duties used to judge our own actions and the actions of others, and subdivides morality into two types, social conventional morality and harm-based morality (Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987). Social conventional norms are those that appear culture-bound and are viewed by individuals in the culture as appropriate. Harm-based norms are principles related to harming others, either physically or by violation of their rights. Harm-based moral principles are believed to be universal, non-culture bound, punishable if violated, and rewarded if upheld (Helwig & Turiel, 2010), and are focused primarily on justice, distributive and procedural. As described in Chap. 6, distributive justice relates to individuals and groups receiving their fair share, particularly of the common goods. Procedural justice relates to beliefs about the fairness of procedures used to distribute goods. Research has shown varied reactions to justice dilemmas. Some low-status persons judge that they deserve only what they have (Major, 1994), some justify lower status to remain identified with their peers (Spears, Doosje, & Ellemers, 1997), and some attempt to improve their status through peaceful or violent means (Ellemers & Barreto, 2009).

Social psychology has investigated ways to promote cooperation and reduce conflict, including reinforcing cooperation (Samuelson, Messick, Rutte, & Wilke, 1984), electing leaders dedicated to convincing individuals to cooperate for the common good (Tyler & Lind, 1992), and increasing the capacity to identify violators (Siero, Bakker, Dekker, & Van Den Burg, 1996). While this is a relatively small area of social psychology, some overlap with the concerns of the A-T model is immediately apparent and occurs in relation to virtue theory and prudent deliberation regarding means of cooperation and avoidance of injustice. Thomas Aquinas’ expanded discussion of groups and the common good of the group adds dimensions which apply to the family as a group up to government’s duty to promote the common good for citizens. Importantly, however, most social psychology work, even in this area, generally focuses on approaches that emphasize exchange or mutual value, as opposed to the virtue ethics approach.

Summary of Modern Social Psychology

Social cognition, social affect , and the self all have some ties to Aristotle’s writings on virtue and rhetoric but are related more generally to A-T’s metaphysics of the human person, primarily the intellect and appetites. Social cognition elaborates the intellect’s reflection on itself and others as the person is impacted by the social environment. Social affect elaborates action by the environment in activating emotions. The self is composed of intellect in interaction with the senses, both external and particularly internal, and involves what philosophers know as the subjective self. Critically, each of these areas shows the need for an underlying philosophy of the human that accommodates and sheds light on the close connection of the appetitive and the cognitive, the sensory and the intellectual.

Social psychological work on attitudes, conformity, and prejudice tends to emphasize the role of power over others and individual utility. As we noted, these topics receive extensive treatment in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, though often under different names or topics. However, the A-T approach is relatively tightly tied to the underlying view of the human person, the close linkage of appetitive and cognitive powers, the sensory and the intellectual, and with virtue ethics. The modern view, on the other hand, tends to eschew the virtues and thereby tries to adopt a fact/value distinction, even though it is quite clear that prejudice, conformity, stereotypes, etc., are to be taken as bad. Fowers (2005) discusses the weakness of psychology’s attempts at removing “values” from the discipline.

As we have indicated several times in this chapter and the previous chapter, modern psychology could benefit from the consideration of A-T virtue ethics as a contributor to thinking about human flourishing and the ways in which humans relate to each other. The work on competition and cooperation is one area of modern psychology that sometimes includes notions of virtue (in often inchoate forms), and would benefit from the detailed, if philosophical, investigations of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (see Fowers, 2005, for a detailed consideration of how virtue ethics could contribute to modern social psychology).

Chapter Summary

We have given a brief overview of how, in the A-T view, the individual relates to others, and how these relations are to be understood. We then very briefly discussed several areas of modern social psychology, and have shown their relations to the A-T view. In this final section, we consider more broadly the relation of the A-T approach and modern social psychology.

The first thing to notice is that the A-T approach is fundamentally driven by prior commitments to the philosophical understanding of the human being as fundamentally unified, of the appetitive and cognitive powers, both sensory and intellectual, and with a particular eye to the governing role of virtue in attaining flourishing. This is quite different from the approach (or approaches) in modern social psychology. Work on social cognition largely borrows the approach of modern cognition and simply applies it to social topics, and social affect research does the same, but by borrowing and adopting the approach of modern theories of affect. Work on the self, attitudes, conformity, prejudice, and competition and cooperation largely adopts an approach in which there is explicitly or implicitly an emphasis on what the individual gets from social relations (e.g., social exchange theory, or various evolutionary theories to explain cooperation, etc.). So, the A-T approach has a consistent vision of the human individual in relation to others, whereas social psychology takes fundamentally different approaches depending on the specific social phenomenon under consideration.

The second thing to notice is that the A-T approach is, in many ways, much wider in scope than social psychology. As we have discussed, the A-T approach covers the relation of the individual to the group in many different registers, of which we have sampled some: friendship, politics, rhetoric, and law. But in other ways, modern social psychology focuses on particular kinds of effects that crosscut the A-T topics (e.g., attitudes are formed in friendships, and in politics, and with respect to the law, and so on). Thus, the A-T approach and modern social psychology simply divide up the social world in different ways.

A third point to notice is that, as we have seen in previous chapters, modern psychology also has much to offer to the A-T view. In general, the A-T approach identifies principles that drive behavior but, as a philosophical approach, and pre-experimental, it does not generally have the resources to identify all the many specific factors that can drive behavior, even when those factors are very much in accord with the principles identified by the A-T view. For example, although the A-T view provides an important philosophical starting point in understanding conformity, and a way of reducing and controlling conformity by developing habits of virtue, modern social psychology has certainly identified many areas in which conformity operates, and more importantly, specific variables that affect the likelihood and strength of conformity effects.

A final point to recognize is that social psychology sometimes sees its own philosophical underpinnings and/or its research results as directly in conflict with notions derived from virtue ethics akin to what we find in Aristotle or Aquinas. For example, there is a small tradition of work in social psychology seeking to refute the notion of character, which in turn is assumed to come from Aristotelian thought. The work by Milgram (1974) discussed earlier is often taken in this sense: People of generally good character could not possibly have been so easily convinced to administer electrical shock to strangers. But in many respects, the notion of character seemingly embedded in this claim is not one that would be very recognizable to Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, who were very sensitive to both the fact that virtue has to be built up as a habit, and that even strong habits do not control every behavior every time. A second way in which social psychology might see itself as being in opposition particularly to virtue ethics is that modern psychology in general and social psychology in particular sees itself as embodying the fact/value distinction. However, as Fowers (2005) points out, social psychology actually embeds values quite pervasively, both in terms of its view of itself as a discipline and in the specifics of many of the social phenomena it studies. Hence, a more thorough consideration of the A-T approach would potentially enrich the whole field of social psychology.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

T. L. Spalding et al.The Human Personhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8_8

8. Summary and Conclusions

Thomas L. Spalding[1] , James M. Stedman[2], Christina L. Gagné[1] and Matthew Kostelecky[3]

(1) Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(2) The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

(3) St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Keywords

AristotleThomas AquinasPsychologyScienceNeoscholasticism

As we suggested in the opening chapter, every chapter here could easily be a book in itself. And so, we believe that there is much to be done, and much progress potentially to be made. Nevertheless, we hope that we have demonstrated that the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach has something to offer modern psychology, and if we have convinced readers that the A-T approach is worth thinking about, we would consider the book a success.

In this final chapter, we want to review, at a higher level of abstraction, what we have tried to show about why thinking about the A-T approach can benefit modern psychology, and then to discuss, at least briefly, how modern psychology might contribute to a rejuvenation of A-T thinking.

Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Science

We have attempted to show that the A-T approach, despite what some modern stereotypes or caricatures might suggest, is compatible with modern science in general, and with psychology in particular, though not with the philosophical positions that some scientists and psychologists adopt. Furthermore, we have attempted to show that its compatibility with psychology extends across the full diversity of the discipline, from animal and human cognition, to emotions, and through to social relations and human flourishing. Critically, psychology as a discipline has aspired to be a science from the very beginning, and current work supported by the American Psychological Association claims that psychology is a STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) field, but that this claim is not as widely accepted as it should be (Gurung et al., 2016, p. 9). In a sense, because of the disputed extent to which psychology is a science, many psychologists are particularly sensitive to any suggestion of anything “unscientific” being allowed to infect the discipline. Hence, our initial emphasis in Chap. 1 and here is on the compatibility of the A-T tradition with science.

As we have discussed in Chap. 1, perhaps the most surprising aspect of our book, to some people, might be the very idea of taking the A-T approach as a whole as a live possibility for understanding anything. There are many reasons for this. First, and most importantly for psychologists, the common, if stereotypical, understanding of science is that it arose only by destroying the “medieval” thinking that came from Aristotle. Indeed, there is a rather common notion that science “disproved” this medieval philosophy. As we have discussed a bit previously (and many others have done with vastly more detail and erudition), this stereotypical understanding of the rise of science is deeply flawed. Nevertheless, such stereotypes are very strong. A related problem is a generalized stereotype of all medieval things as bad, dark, superstitious, and so on. So, to the extent that the A-T approach is associated with the medieval, it is automatically discounted, regardless of whether the person actually knows anything at all about the A-T approach. Critically, of course, in the A-T tradition science does not mean quite what it means today—there was no discipline of “science” as such in the days of Aristotle, for example. For Aristotle and the tradition he began, science is more of a habit of thought, via structured reasoning, rather than a method of falsifiability, so, in that sense, of course, the A-T approach is “unscientific.” Yet, in the A-T tradition, science meant, in general, knowing, and specifically it meant knowing the causes of a thing or event. So, in that sense, the underlying, aspirational meaning of science is not much changed, though our methods have certainly improved. In both contemporary science and the A-T approach, however, empirical data or sense experience is the basic starting point for new knowledge and discovery.

A second reason why our belief that the A-T approach is a live option might be surprising is that, to the extent that A-T thinking has been taught in universities since, say, the 1950s, it has been taught almost entirely from a historical perspective, except in a few institutions. Yet, we are far from alone in treating the A-T approach as a truly live philosophical option. We have already cited several other works that similarly take the A-T approach as a live option, including both philosophical and scientific works, but there are many others (the interested reader can look at the hundreds of citations listed in the books that we have cited in previous chapters).

A third problem for modern people thinking seriously about the A-T approach is that there is a mix of philosophy and (bad, wrong) science in both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Clearly, these have to be separated in order for anyone to take the philosophy seriously. The critical point about this is that both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas used examples that were current in the “science” of their times to illustrate metaphysical and other philosophical claims. The fact that the examples were wrong does not mean that the philosophical claims are wrong. In one sense, this is a very simple point, but it requires people with substantial expertise in the philosophy to disentangle the philosophy from the science, so it is not surprising that people who are not expert in the philosophy see strange claims and tend to dismiss the whole thing. This issue is made even more difficult because of the misinterpretations of the A-T approach that have become part of the general intellectual culture since the early modern philosophers. Yet, as can be seen in our use of the A-T tradition, we need not incorporate any of the medieval (or earlier) “science” that is objectionable: the philosophical claims stand (or fall) on their own merits.

A fourth reason that some philosophers and scientists avoid the A-T tradition has to do with the conflation of philosophy and religion that many expect to find in the A-T tradition (and particularly in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who was, of course, a theologian as well as a philosopher). Thus, some expect to find that the philosophical positions depend critically on theological presuppositions and therefore will be difficult or impossible to integrate within the secular or a-religious approaches taken within other frameworks used within psychology. But, this simply is not true. As with the issue of the mixture of philosophy and mistaken empirical claims in the A-T tradition, much of the post-Aristotelian A-T tradition does contain a mixture of philosophy and theology, with Aquinas standing out as a particularly robust example. But the philosophy and theology of a thinker like Thomas Aquinas can be separated. For one thing, even in Thomas Aquinas’ work, the basic metaphysical framework (notions like act and potency, change over time, etc.) are adopted, and developed, from Aristotle—obviously not a religious figure in the modern sense. For another, as can be seen in the previous chapters, none of our usage of the A-T tradition relies on any theological notions. Even in the cases where the philosophy and theology are most closely associated (e.g., Thomas Aquinas’ application of Aristotelian understanding of virtue, and particularly of virtue as habit, to sinful behavior), it is not impossible, especially in the level of analysis we have been engaged in throughout this book, to see and separate the philosophy from the theology. In the example of virtue, habit, and sin, for example, the critical philosophical points have to do with establishing degrees of responsibility for behavior, and hence appropriate allocation of blame, the degree of damage to social relationships, how habits lead to more problematic behavior, and so on.

It can be difficult for many people to get beyond these issues to get a clear look at the philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. And, of course, as we have mentioned before, the A-T approach is not very widely taught, so many people simply will not have much idea about what the approach offers. When one does get a clear look at the A-T approach, however, one sees (as we hope we have shown) a great deal that is of interest.

Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Psychology

Once one gets beyond the concerns with the A-T approach’s ability to relate to science in general, then one can look seriously at what that tradition has to offer to psychology. The advantages of the A-T approach help both in terms of situating psychology with respect to the rest of modern science, and in terms of situating the various areas/topics/approaches of modern psychology with each other. Finally, the A-T approach, by both integrating psychology and situating it within the intellectual landscape of science, holds out hope of psychology holding a more central place within the broader intellectual landscape.

Understanding Psychology as Science

Critically, and unlike modern psychology’s underlying philosophical approaches, the A-T philosophical approach is consistent across the whole discipline, such that the A-T approach to each of these areas is driven by and depends on the same sets of metaphysical commitments, which, once understood, are not particularly outlandish. For example, in modern psychology, the most common philosophical approach underlying animal work is materialistic reductionism, while human cognition is mostly underpinned by an odd blend of reductionism and functionalism/computationalism (see, e.g., Spalding, Stedman, Hancock, & Gagné, 2014; Stedman, Spalding, & Gagné, 2016), while much work in social psychology and human flourishing is existentialist/phenomenological or humanistic. These are utterly incompatible philosophical groundings. Because of these incompatible philosophical groundings, scholars from one area tend to discount or completely ignore or (in the most extreme cases) hold in contempt, the work of scholars in other areas: some behaviorists think that humanistic psychology is meaningless babble, while some humanists think that behavioristic psychology is dehumanizing and simply misses the point altogether. As we have tried to show in various places throughout this book, the A-T approach is, in a sense, broader and more open to application in various ways that overlap with all of modern psychology.

As we have pointed out in Chap. 1, due to the specific history of the discipline of psychology, these metaphysical differences have become bound up in very problematic disputes about what is science and what is not science. For example, Smedslund (2016) claims that psychology cannot be an empirical science, but it is not clear to us whether the requirements that Smedslund identifies for an empirical science are in fact truly required to be a “science,” or indeed whether many other sciences could truly count as “science” under these requirements. Nevertheless, the critical point is that what counts as a “science” is not a question of science but of philosophy. So, depending on one’s philosophical orientation, psychology is a science, or is not a science, or some of it is and some of it is not, or it mostly is not but should be, and so on.

Thinking seriously about the A-T approach can help psychology with this problem in several ways. First, as we have emphasized repeatedly and tried to demonstrate throughout this book, the A-T approach provides a philosophical underpinning that takes seriously, and is capable of supporting, all the modern topics and empirical approaches in psychology (though obviously not incorporating all the philosophical baggage currently associated with those empirical approaches). Hence, if one takes the A-T approach as a starting point, one need not divide psychology into science and non-science. No empirical approaches or theoretical notions or topics are ruled out a priori.

Second, the A-T approach to science in general (e.g., Feser, 2019) allows psychology to take a place within the spectrum of modern science. In particular, once psychology does away with an understanding of science based on nineteenth-century physics (an understanding that physics itself, ironically, has largely done away with), then psychology no longer stands out as potentially non-science in the way that it does in the current atmosphere. In short, as Feser (2019) shows in great detail, Aristotelian philosophical positions are still strong contenders in underpinning modern science, and indeed many areas of modern science actually implicitly adopt Aristotelian notions. Feser (2019) and Simpson, Koons, and Teh (2017) provide extensive treatments of this topic.

Third, if it is true that modern science in general is compatible with, and indeed may require, A-T underpinnings, then taking the A-T approach to the human person seriously positions psychology in continuity with the other sciences, in a way that no other philosophical position has been able to. That is, Feser (2019) claims that modern science needs to rest on an Aristotelian philosophy of nature, which itself is derived from Aristotelian metaphysics. As we have discussed, the A-T view of the human person is based on A-T metaphysics, but also on the A-T view of the natural world, of which the human is part. So, putting these two points together, the claim is that all of science (including a science of the human person) rests on an A-T philosophy of nature, which in turn is derived from A-T metaphysics. Thus, in this view, psychology is firmly entrenched within science and firmly based all the way down to the very basic metaphysical principles of the A-T approach for understanding existence and change.

Finally, a more general problem that one encounters when attempting to understand psychology’s place in the intellectual landscape has to do with the fact that psychology’s empirical work is more variable, and vastly more impacted by reactivity (i.e., the changeableness of the subject of the scientific investigation due to that investigation), than the other sciences. These factors make empirical generalizations in psychology much less precise than in, say, physics. This raises tricky questions for understanding how psychology can be a science, under the usual philosophical positions found in psychology. In the A-T tradition, on the other hand, there is a well-known dictum (which we mention in Chap. 2) that a science can only have the level of certitude that is admitted by the topic of that science. Hence, logic and mathematics have more certitude than physics, which would have more certitude than, say, biology, and so on. Thus, on the A-T view, the variability and reactivity of the human do not mean that psychology is not a science, but simply that we must understand that we will never attain the kind of certitude that is seen in mathematics or logic, or even physics. No matter how frustrating that is for psychologists, in the A-T view, it is expected and understood.

Psychology as a Coherent Field of Study

Throughout this book, we have argued that taking the A-T approach seriously has the potential to help psychologists to create a more coherent discipline. We have pointed out advantages particular to the various areas individually in each chapter, but here, we want to take a step back and summarize some of these different advantages.

The first and biggest advantage is one that came up clearly in the chapters on cognition, but that is also implied by our application of the A-T approach to so many different areas of psychology in this book, namely, that because of the breadth of the A-T approach’s vision of the human, all areas of modern empirical and theoretical work can be seen as part of the whole, coherent discipline. With A-T as a philosophical underpinning, people interested in specific types of empirical work are, of course, free to focus on those particular types of work, but there is no need for them to try to rule out any other area as not scientific, or as not “really” psychology, and so on. In addition, many problems within psychology require combining insights from multiple areas of psychology. That is, while we have largely focused on academic psychology, we should not underestimate the extent to which having some degree of community and communication across areas is critical to solving larger problems. Problems that arise in society, in people’s lives, in international relations, and so on require insights from many areas of psychology. When the underlying philosophical approaches are incoherent, it is much more difficult to generate or integrate such insights to solve complex problems.

The second large advantage is that the A-T approach can provide us with interesting topic areas that are underresearched in modern psychology. For example, as we have seen, the notion of human flourishing has been somewhat de-emphasized in modern psychology as a whole until very recently. Similarly, although the embodied cognition approach has, in recent years, attracted significant attention, had the A-T approach been more widely known, issues of embodiment would have been more central to psychology earlier. A similar claim can be made with respect to much of humanistic psychology. Another example is the relationship between concepts and their properties, an area of thinking that is deeply developed in A-T philosophy, but that is fraught with difficulties in modern psychology.

The third advantage is that the A-T approach can suggest different ways of thinking, theoretically, about psychology. This is particularly true at the very deep level of fundamental powers of the human. For example, psychology has been fundamentally plagued by questions and problems of the mind vs. the body. In the A-T view, this kind of problem does not arise. However, there are important differences that are open to investigation: the sensory/intellectual powers or the appetitive/cognitive powers. One of the important differences in the A-T approach is that there is a fundamental “and” in the A-T approach to distinguishing powers. That is, the sensory and intellectual powers work together in very fundamental ways, even though they can be distinguished. Similarly, the appetitive and cognitive powers work together in very fundamental ways. Clearly, this is deeply different from the kind of opposition of mind vs. body that has plagued psychology from its very beginnings. A second example that we identified earlier, the fact that the A-T approach adopts an ethics virtue approach, provides a quite different underpinning than we see in modern psychology. Modern psychology, to the extent that it adopts an ethics, tends to adopt a kind of duty ethics. So, the A-T approach raises deep theoretical issues that are largely ignored in modern psychology. A third example has to do with the deep philosophical understanding of the relationship between human and non-human animals. As we have seen, modern psychology seems to take essentially every possible position on this relationship, with each approach pronouncing anathemas on any other approach.

These are only a few examples of potential benefits to psychology that could arise from thinking seriously about the A-T approach. Obviously, the more people think deeply about the A-T approach and how to apply it to modern psychology, the more potential connections will be seen. In addition, of course, the more people apply the A-T approach to psychology, the more the A-T approach itself will be sharpened in terms of its psychological insights (we will return to this point in a later section).

Integrating Psychology with Other Disciplines

On the one hand, psychology has had a great deal of influence in some other disciplines. Think of, say, Freudian influences in the study of literature, social psychological influences in marketing and in industrial organization, the emerging field of behavioral economics, the entrenched field of psycholinguistics, and many others. We also see psychology influencing the understanding of the human that is embodied in contemporary society, such as Wright’s (2011) general notion of the “therapeutic society” in which societal problems are conceptualized within the framework of people needing some form of therapy, or indeed, the widespread use of psychologizing explanations of all kinds of disagreements (i.e., the suggestion that people who disagree with one do so for psychological reasons in general, and due to psychological problems of some sort, in particular).

On the other hand, one of the things we see, even in these few examples, is that each field is simply adopting isolated insights from individual areas of psychology. Obviously, this tends to mean that they do not adopt insights, no matter how powerful or relevant, from other areas of psychology, and the insights that they do adopt are, in a sense, uncorrected by competing psychological insights. We might point to, for example, Piaget (1979), who briefly notes a number of areas that have benefited or could benefit from psychological insights. Each, however, is seen as benefiting from isolated insights from isolated areas of psychology. Thus, the influence of psychology does not necessarily reflect the full understanding that psychology as a whole discipline has to offer on the topic.

One problem that we have already discussed is the fraught understanding of psychology’s relationship to science, but this issue also raises its head in this particular context. In one sense, psychology is often seen as “not science” and this leads to some areas not being as interested as they should be in psychology. In another sense, some areas see psychology as “science” and hence as not reflecting the truly human, and hence seeing psychology (for the most part) as irrelevant to, for example, the humanities. Thus, we believe that psychology does not have the impact that it could, and that when it does have an impact, it often has an impact that is not, perhaps, what most psychologists would want (think here again of the deep influence of Freud in literary studies in recent years).

What led to this state of affairs? Is it only our view that it is a weakness of philosophical underpinning? Bruner (1990, p. 101), in discussing early cultural psychology and the notion of the Self, but with an insight that, to us, is a pretty good statement of psychology’s general failure to truly penetrate other areas of intellectual work seeking to understand the human, said: “I think that what kept psychology from continuing to develop steadily along these promising lines was its stubborn anti-philosophical stance that kept it isolated from currents of thought in its neighboring disciplines in the human sciences.” We might modify this statement slightly, though: We believe that psychology has not been actually “anti-philosophical” so much as implicitly committed to multiple, incompatible philosophies, while explicitly denying such commitments.

Developing the A-T View

As noted previously in this chapter, the A-T tradition is not widely used or even known within modern psychology today. In contrast, as we have mentioned a few times throughout the book, the early years of psychology included some people who were very clearly working in the A-T tradition. Here, we want to raise two issues that anyone interested in how the A-T tradition might best be applied to psychology might be thinking about. The first is to ask, why did the earlier version of the A-T approach disappear from psychology and how is our view different? The second (which is related to a degree) is how can psychology be brought to bear in developing the A-T approach?

What Happened to A-T Psychology?

Aristotelian-Thomistic thinking had a relatively solid, though always a minority, place within the discipline of psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kugelmann, 2005, 2009, 2011), including well-known and relatively widely used texts such as Maher (1909) and Brennan (1941). By the 1960s, it had largely disappeared. How did this happen? And, how does what we are proposing differ from that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Neoscholasticism, as it is generally known?

To understand the role of Neoscholasticism in early psychology requires an understanding of several factors outside psychology that contributed to both its rise and fall. First, it is critical to understand the relationship of Neoscholasticism with Catholic education. As Kugelmann (2000, p. 234) put it, “Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 Aeterni Patris helped to ignite a Catholic Renaissance in the second quarter of the twentieth century.” One major aspect of this development was the re-discovery or re-emphasis of Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy and theology, and its application to higher education. Neoscholasticism, then, was the main carrier of A-T thinking within the broader context of philosophy, psychology, and theology at this time. However, due to its initiation from and association with Catholic education, Neoscholasticism was largely, though not exclusively, limited to Catholic institutions.

As Leyssen and Mülberger (2018) point out, the central intent of Neoscholasticism, as an intellectual movement, was to open Catholic scholastic philosophy to the modern sciences (that was what made it “Neo”). There is no question that the early Neoscholastics saw the potential of combining the A-T tradition with modern science. Mercier, Nys, Halleux, and Wulf (1950/1917), for example, present a Neoscholastic interpretation across all areas of then current science. Particularly with respect to psychology, Neoscholasticism made a strong distinction between empirical and theoretical psychology, such that empirical psychology was taken to be neutral with respect to a philosophical position, and theoretical psychology (of the Neoscholastic brand) was to interpret the empirical results and provide the philosophical structure, and in particular to correct empirical psychology when it slid into materialistic conceptions of the human (Kugelmann, 2000). Importantly, the Neoscholastic approach accepted empirical psychology’s own self-description as a “pure” natural science (i.e., as a completely non-philosophical discipline). This had an unfortunate effect of suggesting that empirical psychology could not have any impact on the understanding of Neoscholasticism itself—the results of empirical psychology were presumed to be entirely neutral with respect to the philosophy. Of course, this self-description was not really correct, as empirical psychology then, just as now, had very strong, if implicit, philosophical commitments. Nevertheless, it is critical that even though the Neoscholastic approach had the unfortunate effect of differentiating too strongly between empirical psychology and philosophical psychology, the Neoscholastic psychologists were deeply interested in and involved with empirical psychology. The empirical work they did was just as scientific as work done by psychologists from different philosophical approaches.

As Kugelmann (2000, 2005, 2009, 2011) has shown, in many ways, the application of Neoscholasticism to higher education was fighting the prevailing winds. In particular, the Neoscholastic approach to education was designed to create a solid liberal arts education, just at the time when institutions of higher education were taking on the structure, divisions, and specializations of the secular modern research university. Nevertheless, many Catholic institutions of higher education did take on (at least aspects of) the Neoscholastic approach, as did Catholic professional and academic associations, such as the American Catholic Psychological Association. The focus of the Catholic institutions and associations, particularly in the years after World War II, was twofold: to assimilate Catholics to the broader field of psychology (i.e., to get Catholics to participate in the wider field of psychology) and to bring Catholic (Neoscholastic) insights to the discipline of psychology. Critically, given that psychology at that time was dominated by approaches that conceived of themselves in terms of nineteenth-century natural sciences, assimilation was only possible by adopting the standard psychological approach. This tended to drive a further wedge between empirical and philosophical psychology.

The Neoscholastic approach to higher education was fighting the prevailing winds in a broader cultural sense as well, in that the Neoscholastic approach was reactive to its context, saying that there is something fundamentally wrong with modernity tout court. But the timing of this reaction to modernity fairly quickly fell out of step with the movements in the broader society. In particular, in the years after World War II, Catholics, in general, were transitioning from a somewhat separate, recent immigrant group to a more socially integrated group in North America, where psychology was developing most rapidly as a central academic and also applied discipline. As such, Catholic institutions and associations rapidly became less and less distinct, such that, for example, the American Catholic Psychological Association became Psychologists Interested in Religious Issues in 1970. At roughly the same time, Neoscholasticism lost its “official” status in Catholic philosophy and theology. Thus, Neoscholasticism, rather than being shown to be wrong or unworkable as a philosophical underpinning for psychology, lost the cultural and institutional supports that might have allowed it to play that role. Thus, Neoscholasticism’s failure was as a kind of social movement, rather than as a philosophical position.

A third kind of intellectual headwind that was not favorable to Neoscholasticism in psychology (and philosophy, for that matter) was the extent to which ontological realism had fallen into decline and the way that epistemology had arisen as a kind of counterpart to realism in the early-to mid-twentieth century (Bruner, 1990, p. 100). Obviously, these philosophical developments fit very well with psychology’s self-description as non-philosophical, and particularly as anti-metaphysical, at the same time. Of course, this particular cultural moment did not last, and, as we have discussed in earlier chapters, different kinds of psychologies, with very different philosophical underpinnings arose shortly thereafter (Bruner, 1990), and these areas, such as humanistic psychology and phenomenology, attracted many former Neoscholastic scholars.

In short, Neoscholastic psychology, though explicitly committed to combining philosophical and empirical psychology, in some ways drove a wedge between the two by accepting empirical psychology’s own claim to be completely non-philosophical. In addition, Neoscholasticism as a whole could not overcome the broader cultural and intellectual changes of the time. Finally, Neoscholastic psychology, given its origins, was never able to break out of the view that it was only a Catholic intellectual approach, and when it lost that “official” status, it did not have an institutional home.

How Does A-T Differ from Neoscholasticism?

Is our championing of the A-T tradition simply an attempt to return to Neoscholasticism? No. One important difference between the Neoscholastic psychology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and our proposal is the degree to which we believe that the A-T tradition, to fulfill the role we have suggested it can play for psychology, needs to be a living philosophy, rather than a relatively fixed approach, leaving only the empirical details to be filled in. This is, of course, something of a caricature of Neoscholastic psychology and of Neoscholasticism more generally (Heynickx & Symons, 2018). After all, many Neoscholastic psychologists saw their empirical work as providing important information that helped to further develop philosophical psychology. But, as in every caricature, there are some elements of truth. As Kugelmann (2005, p. 144) points out, Neoscholastic theology, as the “official” Catholic theology, was in some ways relatively intolerant of theological and philosophical criticism, and this produced a backlash in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of this probably spilled over into Neoscholastic psychology. Perhaps more important, though, was the acceptance of the notion that empirical psychology was completely non-philosophical, and that therefore it could not really contribute to the development of the philosophical approach.

A second important difference, of course, is that the Neoscholastic philosophy and psychology of the early twentieth century is only one thread in the broader A-T intellectual tradition. Importantly, much recent work in the A-T tradition and in other philosophical traditions that have picked up on various insights from the A-T tradition is not tied to Neoscholasticism. Fowers (2005), for example, of which we made heavy use in an earlier chapter, is primarily a direct adoption of Aristotelian notions of virtue, with no use of Neoscholastic work (indeed, Thomas Aquinas does not even appear in the index). Similarly, Simpson, Koons, and Teh (2017) focus on neo-Aristotelian work, again ignoring the Neoscholastics (Thomas Aquinas here gets exactly two mentions in the index). The critical point here is that our use of the A-T tradition, along with other modern uses of it, is not dependent on the Neoscholastics.

A third important difference is simply that the intellectual culture is very different now. There are now competing philosophical approaches to psychology, rather than the relative monolith of the early twentieth century, for example. Many new developments in psychology have created an opening for a new (old!) way of thinking about the human. Much new work in A-T philosophy has also created an opening for seeing the A-T tradition not as just an historical development of philosophy, but as a living approach.

How Can Psychology Develop the A-T Approach?

If A-T philosophy is to be a living approach, how can psychology contribute to its further development? As we mentioned in the previous section, most of the modern applications of the A-T tradition that we have cited throughout this book (and others that we have not) do treat the A-T tradition as a living philosophical possibility. This is in contrast with two other possible approaches: One might think of the A-T tradition as purely a historical, and now superseded, school of thought, or (as in our caricature of Neoscholasticism) as a definitive, final word, such that the only point is to explain to people how the A-T tradition has actually already solved all the problems. Clearly, we opt for neither of these. Instead, we hope that we have shown that the A-T tradition has much to say to modern psychology, and that there is much we can take from that tradition. At the same time, although Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and others in the tradition said many important things, they obviously did not have all the answers, and some of the answers they had are undoubtedly wrong. And so, we want to end this book by encouraging modern psychologists not just to think about what the A-T tradition has to contribute, but also to think about how modern psychology can further develop that tradition.

Nearly all applications of the A-T tradition, no matter what discipline it is being applied to, have to start by explaining what the tradition actually has to say: Most modern intellectuals, in whatever discipline, simply do not know much about the A-T tradition, and even then, much of what they think they know might be wrong, simply because our thinking is conditioned to a very large extent by the current intellectual world that we inhabit. But, at the same time, nearly all the applications we have seen also attempt to build on that tradition. For example, while Feser (2019) has a strong focus on explaining how Aristotelian ideas still fit with modern scientific thinking, he also spends significant effort developing, for example, Aristotelian ideas about time and space and motion. Those ideas would be part of the A-T tradition, but they are also clearly a development from Aristotelian roots, rather than ideas directly of Aristotle. Similarly, Simpson, Koons, and Teh (2017) include applications of Aristotelian thought to areas ranging from quantum mechanics to biological systems to human psychology and neuroscience. In every case, these are not simply applications of pure “off the shelf” ideas directly from Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, but developments of ideas from the A-T approach, sometimes subtle developments and sometimes quite distinctive developments. This is what we mean when we say that the A-T tradition is a living philosophical possibility: Scholars study the A-T tradition, apply the ideas to various modern questions, and modify the ideas in response to those applications. Other scholars then study these new ideas in the context of the approach, and the cycle carries on.

We believe that this cycle of development is important if the A-T approach is to serve as a unifying philosophical underpinning for psychology. There are some examples of this already. For example, Jaworski (2016, 2017) has presented a new description of Aristotelian forms, as a proposal that solves the mind–body problem and applies it to modern psychology. De Haan (2017) develops the notion of hylomorphism in directions that allow a closer relation to the new mechanist philosophy of science that is a relatively recent development that takes into account actual scientific practice (NB: the new mechanist philosophy of science is not the mechanism of nineteenth-century physics!). Fowers (2005) makes the important point that Aristotelian virtue ethics are not, and were not intended to be, universal claims of the good life, but rather reflections on how best to live within the cultural milieu of his times. Hence, modern psychology, to the extent that it deals with modern life (as it certainly does in its considerations of social relations and human flourishing), will necessarily have much to say about how the virtues can play out and best be pursued in the modern world. As Cates (2009, p. 261) describes it, she has “offered an interpretation of Aquinas on the emotions—one that I find compelling, but not without problems, and not without need for supplementation.” We believe that the work on embodied cognition has much to say about how the sensory powers play their roles. Modern comparative psychology has enormous contributions to make to the understanding of the sensory powers, as well. Indeed, each area of modern psychology can more deeply inform and develop the A-T tradition. Again, this is the sign of a living philosophical approach.

Conclusion

We have argued that the A-T approach offers modern psychology a vision of the human person. What does this mean? In the A-T approach, the human person both exists as a part of nature that can be analyzed in the same way as other parts of nature, and stands apart from nature, analyzing, experiencing, extracting meaning. The human person is a unity of soul and body, form and matter, not a division of mind versus body. The human person is a unique, complete substance that has distinct powers, sensory and intellectual, appetitive and cognitive. The human person is an animal, yet rational. The human person is an integrated, single substance, yet embedded in, and in some ways constituted by, physical, social, and political relations. The human person has a nature common to all, yet individually wills, behaves, chooses, develops, flourishes, and contributes to society. It is this complex, yet coherent, integrated human person that makes psychology such a difficult, fascinating discipline. Because the human person is so complex and yet coherent, psychology absolutely requires a vision of the human person that matches both the complexity and the coherence.

References

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Index

A

Abstract

Abstraction

Accommodation

Active intellect

Acts

Actuality

Agent intellect

Anger

Animal cognition

Appetitive powers

Appraisal theories

Artificial intelligence

Assimilation

Association

Attention

Attitudes

Automata

Autonomic nervous system (ANS)

B

Behaviorism

Body

Body/mind dualism

Brentano

C

Cardinal virtues

Cartesianism

Categorization

Causality

Causes

Certitude

Character

Circumspection

Classical computationalism

Classical conditioning

Cogitative sense

Cognition

Cognitive powers

Cognitive psychology

Common sense

Commutative justice

Competition

Computational

Computationalism

Concept

Concept formation

Concrete operations stage

Concupiscible

Conditioning

Conformity

Connectionism

Consciousness

Constructionist theory

Continent

Cooperation

Courage

Crystallized intelligence

Cultural theory

D

Democracy

Deontology

Descartes

Desire

Despair

Determinism

Developmental psychology

Dignity

Distributive justice

Dualism

Duty ethics

E

Effects

Efficient cause

Ego integrity

Embodiment

Emotion

Empathy

Envy

Epideictic speech

Epistemology

Erickson

Essentialism

Estimative power

Estimative sense

Ethics

Eudemonia

Evil

Evolutionary theory

Existentialism

Existential judgment

Extended mind

External causality

External senses

F

Fear

Final cause

Flourishing

Fluid intelligence

Formal cause

Formal operations stage

Fortitude

Freud

Friendship

Frugality

Functionalism

G

Generativity

Genus

Golden mean

Good

Group processes

Guilt

H

Habits

Hatred

Hedonism

Heidegger

Hope

Human cognition

Humanistic psychology

Human person

I

Idealism

Identity

Imagination

Incontinent

Industry

Inferiority

Intellective powers

Intellectual appetites

Intellectual goods

Intellectual virtues

Intelligence

Intelligible species

Intentionality

Internal causality

Internal senses

Intimacy

Inventiveness

Irascible appetite

Isolation

J

Jealousy

Joy

Judicial speech

Justice

K

Kohlberg, L.

L

Learning

Legal justice

Liberality

Locke

Logical positivism

Love

M

Magnanimity

Magnificence

Material cause

Materialism

Materialistic reductionism

Meekness

Memory

Merleau-Ponty, M.

Metaphysics

Mind

Mind/body split

Moral virtues

Motion

Munificence

N

Natural law

Nature

Neoscholasticism

Nicomachean ethics

Non-human cognition

O

Observational learning

Oligarchy

Operant conditioning

Operationism

P

Passions

Patience

Perceptual discrimination

Perseverance

Persuasion

Phantasms

Phenomenology

Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of science

Piaget, J.

Polis

Politics

Positive psychology

Positivism

Potency

Potentiality

Powers

Practical wisdom

Prejudice

Preoperational stage

Pride

Property

Propriety

Prudence

Psychopathology

Public speech

R

Reason

Representation

Representationalist

Rhetoric

S

Sagacity

Schemas

Scholastic

Science

Scientific realism

Scientism

Self

Self-awareness

Self-concept

Self-control

Self-esteem

Semantics

Sense appetite

Sensitive powers

Sensory experience

Sensory good

Sensory motor stage

Sensory systems

Shame

Skepticism

Sobriety

Social affect

Social cognition

Social cognitive theory

Social dilemma

Social exchange theory

Social learning

Social neuroscience

Social power

Social psychology

Solipsism

Species

Stereotypes

Substance

Syntax

T

Temperance

Therapeutic society

Traits

Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

Tyranny

U

Universal concepts

Universals

Utilitarianism

V

Vegetative powers

Vice

Virtue

Virtue ethics

W

Will