1 ᇻᇺᇹ FACULTATIVE LOGIC THE OPERATIONS OF THE MIND acultative logic has been defined as the science of “the principles Fof the habituated regulation of the mind in the apprehension of truth and the acquisition of knowledge and properly grounded opinion.”1 Although divided on the question of identifying its origin, scholars generally agree that it is a new early-modern conception of logic. Its rise, for James Buickerood, may be traced to the publication of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), in which the ideas were the result, the product of the operations of the human cognitive faculties of perception, imagination, memory, and judgment in their relation to the world.2 This opinion is supported also by Paul Schuurman, who nevertheless stresses the importance of Malebranche as the first philosopher to build a new logic around human cognitive faculties,3 and René Descartes, who provided the basis and first principles, but left it to his followers to apply his new insights in the field of facultative logic.4 Instead, Sylvain Auroux and Frederick S. Michael trace the birth of facultative logic back to the Logique de Port-Royal (1662).5 Logic, according to Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, consists in the “reflections of men on the four operations of mind, conceiving, judging, reasoning and ordering.”6 Facultative logic thus concerns the operations of mind, serving to rightly conduct human reason to the knowledge of things. A closer 19 © 2016 State University of New York Press, Albany 20 KANT AND ARISTOTLE view, however, shows that this conception comes from Bartholomeus Keckermann’s Systema Logicae (1601), where logic is defined as the “art of directing mind in the cognition of things,” in particular, in “understanding, knowing, and thinking,”7 which in turn is derived from Renaissance Aristotelians, in particular from Jacopo Zabarella’s logical writings. For this reason, in this chapter I propose to contex- tualize the origin of facultative logic within the Aristotelian tradition. The subjects of facultative logic are concepts rather than terms, judg- ments rather than propositions, reasonings rather than syllogisms.8 It emerged from the combination of psychology and logic at the end of the sixteenth century, departing from Scholastic syllogistic.9 In this sense, facultative logic differs from both “epistemic logic” and the “logic of ideas.” “Epistemic logic” does not cover the psy- chological dimension of the problem of knowledge, rather it “has to do with necessary and sufficient conditions of knowing and with the inferential relations involving epistemic and other propositional- attitude statements.”10 The “logic of ideas,” on the other hand, con- cerns the various possible combinations among the manifold mental contents, rather than the certainty and the truth of the discourse, as epistemic logic does.11 Instead, facultative logic is concerned with the origin and the logical use of the natural powers of the mind in knowing an object. It was born from the discussions on the theory of habits, especially the habit of understanding, which became the main faculty of the human mind for knowledge, namely, that which differentiates human beings from animals.12 In particular, I support the provocative thesis that the real Copernican revolution in the field of epistemology was possible only from a reconsideration of Aris- totelian logic in early modernity with a new understanding of the dialectic between the knowing subject and the known object. In this chapter, I would like to suggest the impact of this revolution on Kant’s logic. There was no genuine facultative logic in Ancient Greece because, to start with, there was no corresponding concept to that of “faculty.” The term most widely used to define it, δύναμις, denoted in a most meaningful way a force more than a capacity, for which at least an “intentional” activity of the subject is necessary. In Republic IV, 440E, Plato deals with three parts of the soul: (1) the rational part, which thinks and suppresses the instincts; (2) the irrational or concupiscible part, which rules the impulses and needs; © 2016 State University of New York Press, Albany FACULTATIVE LOGIC 21 and (3) the irascible part. Thereafter, in the fifth book, Plato out- lines a distinction between two different cognitive powers or forces and their objects,13 ἐπιστήμη and δόξα, “by which human beings are able to do what they are able to do.”14 Plato uses the term δύναμις to denote these kinds of cognitive faculties, but he often uses the cogni- tive verbs γιγνώσκω and νοέω in its place. Clearly Plato does not use terminology in a careful and technical way, but sometimes “he uses more than one term to refer to the same element in the theory, or the same term to refer to different elements in the theory.”15 In Aristotle, things change quite drastically. First of all, Aristo- tle does not deal with parts, but with functions of the soul: vegeta- tive, sensible, rational, and locomotive. All these functions have in themselves a characteristic force thanks to which the human being can grow, sense, think, and move. Only the rational part of the soul, however, is properly called “faculty.” Aristotle in fact states that “to think depends on the subject, when it wants to exercise his knowl- edge, but sensation does not depend upon itself because a sensible object must be there.”16 Imagination itself, which mediates knowledge between sensation and understanding, is a force, not a faculty. On the one hand, Aristotle states, imagination “is not of the same kind of thought of apprehension,”17 because it does not depend totally on the subject but on the affection of the sensation; on the other hand, however, it seems to involve active thought.18 Imagination is prop- erly a force or disposition in virtue of which human beings discern and judge whether something is erroneous or not, and is not of the kind of sense, opinion, science, intelligence.19 Imagination cannot be sensation, because sensation is in all animals, whereas imagination is not. It is neither science nor intelligence, because these are always true, while imagination can be false. Imagination cannot be opinion because it is in some animal, while opinion is not. It must be a force, that is “a movement resulting from an actual exercise of a power of senses.”20 If facultative logic in Aristotle was not primarily concerned with either sensation nor imagination, it would deal with the understand- ing. In On the Soul, however, Aristotle describes physiologically how the sensible object becomes intelligible, and he outlines only a few epistemological reflections. Kant himself defines Aristotle’s attempt as a kind of physiology, which is akin to Locke’s standpoint, as we will see later in this chapter (17: 554). © 2016 State University of New York Press, Albany 22 KANT AND ARISTOTLE The only place in the entire Aristotelian corpus where an attempt at drafting a facultative logic is made is the thirty-nine lines inPos- terior Analytics, II.19.21 Aristotle states that there “exists a discrimi- native innate force in all animals that is sensation.”22 Sensibles then, Aristotle adds, in some animals, rest in the mind. If sensibles do not rest in the mind for these animals, there is no other knowledge than the sensible one. In other animals, the sensible object rests in the mind, and after various sensations a kind of conceptualization is possible. From this kind of sensation originates memory and, sub- sequently, experience. From experience a general concept (καθόλου) is formed that rests in the mind. In this way, it is possible to acquire the disposition for scientific knowledge. The mental process, which infers from the various particulars to what is the same in all of them, is a kind of induction (ἐπαγωγή). The mental process of assent to the product of this induction is called intellection (νοεῖν). The process of acquiring general concepts and principles is therefore twofold: on the one hand, we have the formation of knowledge, which relies on experience and is mainly discursive; then, on the other hand, we have the actual cognition, which is a kind of an intuitive act of grasp- ing what is given and generated by experience. The inductive process is necessary for the cognition of immediate and first principles, from which every scientific demonstration begins, and which is at the out- set qualitatively different from the cognition after the conclusions of the demonstration. This marks a passage from a general indeter- minate concept to a determinate universal concept. In fact, the for- mation and intellection of general concepts and principles produces only temporary knowledge, which must be proven discursively by means of demonstration to make of it scientific knowledge. Aristotle’s “facultative logic” plays with the discriminative force of sensation and with memory, on the one hand, and on the other hand, with understanding, so as to determine how sensible knowl- edge could become universal and epistemic. Aristotle’s brief outline of facultative logic was almost the only example in the Aristotelian tradition until the Renaissance on which the Greek commentators first, and then the medieval thinkers, based their investigations. The question of the intel lectus adeptus, acquisitus, and speculativus, for example, first outlined by Alexander of Aphrodisias and then fully developed by Averroes, is a development of Aristotle’s theory of the understanding.23 © 2016 State University of New York Press, Albany FACULTATIVE LOGIC 23 In Germany, the problem of facultative logic in the Renaissance reemerges with Philipp Melanchthon and his Liber de anima. Mel- anchthon writes that the mind is usually credited with three opera- tions: (1) simple apprehension; (2) composition and division; and (3) discourse.24 They correspond, within the Aristotelian canon, to (1) induction (simple term); (2) synthesis and analysis (proposition); and (3) reasoning (syllogism).