The Discarded Mind: From Divine Ideas to Secular Concepts

SummaryThis article proposes an overdue corrective to declinist genealogies of modernity that trace a trajectory from the participatory ontology of late-antique and high-scholastic metaphysics – in which created reality is taken to exemplify patterns in God’s creative blueprint – to a nominalist ontology of discrete, singular particulars whose unity and intelligibility is grounded only in the linguistic capacities of the human subject. It does so by advancing two connected historical claims. First, the shift should be understood less in terms of the substitution of universals for vocal signifiers, as historical accounts of the rise of nominalism have tended to argue, but rather in terms of the slow substitution of divine ideas for human concepts. Second, from the earliest origins of the split between continental and analytic philosophy, the shift from divine intellectualism to secular conceptualism generated sceptical threats both for the phenomenological tradition – crystallized most dramatically in the dilemma of ‘correlationism’ that variously occupies Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Quentin Meillassoux – but equally acutely for analytic metaphysics, from Frege’s concepts and Russell’s universals to Michael Dummett’s semantic verificationism. The article concludes that for all the differences between these stances, they are forms of ersatz participatory realism that each endorse an intellectualist account of reality free of the theological commitments that once underpinned it, even though this came at the cost of a wholesale rejection of realism.