The Mind-as-Being Problems.

The Mind-as-Being Problems – Conceptual Transversalities in the History of Philosophy

An Interview with Therese Scarpelli Cory

by Eduarda Sousa Machado

December 2023 – IPM presents an interview with one of the most significant international figures in Thomism and in the work of systematising theoretical transversalities in the history of philosophy. Therese Cory, in addition to her kind soul, has an entrepreneurial spirit in research that intersects the study of mind, existence and self-knowledge in the History of Philosophy and today’s cutting-edge philosophical problems

About Therese Scarpelli Cory

The Interview

Eduarda Sousa Machado: Since this interview will be published in December, I suggest we start with the light and warmth of the Christmas season. How important is this festivity for you?

Therese Cory: I love Christmas, and hate the way that it comes right at the end of the fall semester in the US.  The end-of-semester craziness makes it hard to enjoy the peace of Advent and prepare for this beautiful feastday.  However, it is still one of my favorite times of year.  Our family has some beloved traditions from my Italian great-grandparents, like making and sharing ravioli, that I look forward to every year.  My husband and I lived in Germany during one Christmas, and I must say that it was some kind of Platonic Form of Christmas.  All those markets hung with stars illuminated in every color, and heaps of carved wooden toys, with Glühwein and gingerbread and Stille Nacht everywhere!  We even roasted a goose for dinner that year, a totally new experience.  It was as though a gallon of grease exploded in the kitchen, and at one point there was so smoke I had to open the window.  But it was delicious.  I think of German Christmas fondly every year.

EM: I believe you recently took place as director of the Jacques Maritain Center, that is something important. How does this new phase impact on your life and what are your prospects for this new position?

TC:  Thank you!  It is a real honour for me to be directing the Jacques Maritain Center, named for a truly great Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, a famous proponent of global human rights, who lived and breathed the thought of Thomas Aquinas.  The Center’s mission is inspired by Maritain’s “integral Christian humanism,” which embraces the intrinsic value of each human person, oriented towards communion with one another and with God.  We are currently developing a series of partner initiatives in areas that elevate essential dimensions of the life of the human person.  Already, through an exciting new partnership, the Center will now provide funding to support Notre Dame’s History of Philosophy Forum, recognizing the historically-grounded dimension of the human knower, and the ongoing value of historical traditions of reasoning for our lives today.

EM: The History of Philosophy Forum is a vital project. How did the idea for this project come about, and what is its relevance?

TC: The History of Philosophy Forum originated in many conversations among colleagues, about how to break down the barriers that divide scholarly projects from each other in studying historical philosophers.  Probably the seed was planted when my then-colleague Katharina Kraus and I were co-teaching a grad seminar called “A History of Self-Consciousness.”  We covered a new philosopher every week, from Plato through to Kant.  As it turns out, it is incredibly difficult to build a common vocabulary on a single theme across different historical authors—but extremely rewarding!  We both found that by studying figures outside our usual “period,” we were each able to take back new insights and questions to use in interrogating our own major figures.  It was the kind of experience that fundamentally changes how you think about your research.

So we began to ask: How can we stimulate more of these kinds of “cross-boundary” conversations?  Notre Dame has a tremendous community in the history of philosophy here at Notre Dame; it turns out that there are over 60 scholars in different departments here who are experts in the thought of one or more historical philosophers.   From there, we got the idea of creating an initiative that would not focus on just one historical period, but embrace the whole history of philosophy–and do so in a way that would try to overcome as much as possible the standard barriers to conversation, such as historical periods and intellectual traditions, as well as disciplinary methodologies and academic department affiliations, and even the geographical locations of scholars scattered across the globe.  That is how the History of Philosophy Forum came into existence.

One of our signature activities is an annual colloquium which covers one theme across a variety of historical periods and traditions (we are currently working through a cycle of three themes connected to our research project, “Modeling the Mind in the History of Philosophy,” which will result in three volumes).  Another is our active visitor hosting program, which is connected to our grants program.  We love to welcome visitors to our community!  For three years now we have been running a successful program of grants for international researchers to work on a project and share their research with us here at Notre Dame for a period of 2 weeks to 2 months.  Last year, we added a new grant, for scholars to spend a month here in the summer, working on a writing project.  In addition, we organize a variety of activities such as lectures, a weekly works-in-progress group, reading groups, and more.  My hope is that the History of Philosophy Forum will eventually anchor and support a global network of scholars who are invested in the history of philosophy.  Come visit us!

EM: Would you like to expand on what moves your work? What kind of philosophical problems are you concerned with?

TC: Since my college days, I’ve been interested in the mind and how it works.  I fell in love with medieval philosophy through studying Thomas Aquinas as a college student, and his account of human cognition absolutely intrigued me.  The stranger the puzzle, the better: e.g., Why does Aquinas compare the intelligible species to the form of sharpness enabling a knife to cut?  What does the light of the agent intellect do?  Why is intellectual reflexivity a prerequisite for freedom?  What is the point of this language of “turning” to phantasms?  In attempting to clear up these problems, much light can be shed by putting Aquinas back into conversation with his sources–not just Aristotle and Augustine, but the intervening authors who shape his understanding of their philosophical systems, such as Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, and the Liber de causis.  As an early career scholar, I was lucky enough to get involved with the “Aquinas and the Arabs International Working Group,” which played a huge role in my intellectual formation.  It was through attending conferences and having discussions with the members, that I learned how to read medieval figures in a way that is informed by their sources.  

Lately I have also been returning over and over to Albert the Great, who is a fascinating thinker, endlessly creative and challenging.  With Albert, you can never take anything for granted.  Whatever you think you know about, say, form and matter, substrate and accident, universals, the vegetative powers of the soul, first and second actuality, Albert has a way of upending your expectations.  Many of us began our training in medieval philosophy through reading Thomas Aquinas, so it is natural to have a “Thomistized” version of basic “medieval” philosophical concepts in mind when reading other authors.  But Albert reminds us of the gorgeously multifaceted nature of medieval philosophical reflections, and opens up so many interesting new ways to conceptualize what it can mean to engage “Peripatetic” philosophy in the medieval context.

EM: Your work has been awarded over the years; that must have a special meaning to you. The one you were appointed as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2019 is particularly interesting. Can you tell the readers why you received it and what it meant?

TC: Being nominated to the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas was a most unexpected honour.  There are fifty ordinary members, both philosophers and theologians, and it is a lifetime appointment.  At the time, there was only one other woman in the Academy, and she is now deceased, so I am now the only woman member!  Our yearly meetings usually take place at the Vatican, and are basically ordinary conferences, with the members presenting papers to each other which are subsequently published.  However, we try to select themes that fit with the priorities of the Holy Father, and that can highlight how Thomas Aquinas’s thought can continue to be of service to Catholic philosophers and theologians today.  Pope Leo XIII, the founder of the Academy in 1879, was known for promoting the thought of Thomas Aquinas, to the point that Thomism became normative for Catholic education and theology in the period before the Second Vatican Council.  Today, of course, the Catholic intellectual scene has expanded greatly to include a variety of philosophical systems.  But Aquinas is still regarded by many Catholics and Christians around the world as having a special stature.  For me, it is a special privilege and responsibility to work on a figure who continues to play such a role in the life of faith today.

EM: You are working on two books Knowing is Being: Aquinas’s Metaphysical Model of Mind and Mind in World: A Medieval Metaphysical Approach. The second is a continuation of the first.  Is this correct? How did the idea for the first book arise? What does this book consist of?

TC: Yes, originally it was going to be one book, and eventually grew into two.  The inspiration developed out of something I noticed in Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge many years ago: namely, Aquinas thinks that when it is actually thinking, the intellect is aware of itself.  Nothing else is needed for self-awareness besides actual thinking about anything whatsoever.  So I started wondering: What is it about thinking that makes it be essentially self-aware?  It seems as though self-awareness is just a feature of the very being of thinking itself.  At the same time, I was also doing some work on Aquinas’s agent intellect, and discovering that it functions, not as a sorting mechanism to separate the essential from the non-essential, but rather as a universal active principle of intelligibility, just as, for instance, for Aquinas, the sun is a universal active principle of terrestrial form.  All this suggests that Aquinas’s theory of cognition is really a metaphysics of intelligible (or intellectual) being.  So the first book project is on that topic: If we take thought to be a certain kind of being, what are the broader implications for what it means to offer a theory of cognition?  What kind of being is thought, what are its essential features, which kinds of entities have or can receive it, and what are its causes?  And then building on this interpretation, the second book project considers how Aquinas understands various aspects of the mind-world relation in light of this metaphysics of thought, e.g., topics such as intentionality, attention, and the “mental word.”

EM: What kind of problems arise from this new view?

TC: For me, one important question arising from this reconceptualized “metaphysics of intellectual being” is whether a view like this really needs to take any interest at all in the classic problem of the Mind-World relationship.  If intellectual / intelligible being is just a kind of being like any other, its relationships with other beings is not particularly interesting. It’s as though one were to make a special metaphysical problem about the Tree-Fish relationship.  Nevertheless, our cognitive experience does have a strongly directional and relational “feel,” phenomenologically speaking.  It feels as though I am looking at a tree and thinking about treeness.  So it seems dissatisfying if Aquinas leaves us only with the idea that thinking is, say, a “treeish experience,” without explaining why it feels as though my thinking is directed at the nature of trees.  In contrast, Augustine very clearly emphasizes the dynamic, directional character of thinking, in which the “intention of the will” joins the mind to its object.  So I think there is a tension  here that has not been sufficiently explored, between static vs. directional accounts of cognition.  Part of the goal of the second book is to show how Aquinas does try to incorporate some of these dynamic and directional elements into his intellectual metaphysics.  More broadly, though, I suspect that the tension between the static vs. directional aspects of cognition is a fundamental problematic that thinkers in the 13th century have to grapple with. I hope we can see new research in this area.

EM: Do you plan to continue this work? If yes, what are the future steps and goals?

TC: After finishing these books on Aquinas, I would love to write a broader history of the diverging paradigms of mind and mental acts among thirteenth century thinkers.  At the same time, I am also keen to write more on Albert’s cognition theory.  So many exciting topics, so little time!

EM: In the past three years, you had a financed project alongside Katharina Kraus and Denis Robichaud, Modelling the Mind in the European History of Philosophy (2020-2023)? Clearly, this project is related to the line of investigation you described before. Would you like to develop what the project consists of?

TC: The goal of the “Modeling the Mind” project is to uncover and elevate historical approaches to mind that offer an alternative to the dominant conception of mind that has come to be associated with Western / European philosophy: i.e., the conception of mind as a private inner realm containing impressions or ideas.  The project focuses on three themes: (1) thinking as being; (2) the life of the mind; (3) minds in dialogue.  The first theme highlights historical accounts of the mental in terms of the being of thought or conscious experience–including views for which all being is thinking.  The second theme highlights “organic” approach to the mental as a mode of living.  With the third theme, we want to explore approaches that emphasize intersubjectivity, co-consciousness, and reciprocity in the life of the mind.  In addition to working on these themes in our own research, we are organizing a conference each year (as the History of Philosophy Forum annual colloquium) in 2023, 2024, and 2025, on each of the themes, and collecting the papers into three volumes.  In addition, the project supports individual research projects of scholars visiting Notre Dame to engage in collaborative discussion, through the Forum small grants program.  It has been particularly illuminating to experience how scholars connect their own research interests to the project, stimulating many unexpected discussions of how these themes appear in, e.g., the Presocratics, Themistius, Baroque Scholastics, Margaret Cavendish, Ficino, Lotze, and many others.  I am happy to say that we are planning to extend the project for two more years, and looking forward to all we have yet to learn about these intriguing alternative conceptions of the mind.

EM: Last question. Do you have any other interests besides philosophy?

TC: Playing the piano and gardening are my two favorite activities after philosophy.  Before college, I wanted to become a professional pianist.  Of course dragging around a piano isn’t very compatible with the transient academic life, so I had to stop playing for many years.  But now we have a piano in our house finally, and I try to play every day, preferably Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy.  During the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home, I also took up gardening.  Now my favorite way to spend the summer in South Bend is to sit outside all day with my laptop in the garden, alternating between writing and pulling weeds.