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BibliografíaPutnam, Hilary. "Thoughts addressed to an Analytical Thomist." Monist 80, no. 4 (October 1997): 487.

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THOUGHTS ADDRESSED TO AN ANALYTICAL THOMIST[*] I cannot claim to be an "Analytical Thomist" for two reasons: first, I am a practicing Jew, andThomism is a philosophical tradition within the Roman Catholic Church. (Perhaps I could be an"Analytic Maimonidean"?) But not only do I philosophize within a different religious tradition thanThomists do, there is also the fact that my own approach to philosophy is, I think, quite different.My purpose here, however, is not to reject Analytical Thomism, or even to criticize it, but ratherto enter into a dialogue with it. Thus, even if I do not put the remarks that follow in the form ofquestions, they are intended in a sense as a set of questions (of the form: "What do you think ofthis?") addressed to those who do consider themselves to be Analytical Thomists.

I shall organize these remarks around two topics: (1) the question of "proving the existence ofGod"; and (2) the question of "predication with respect to God".

"Proving" the existence of God"Can one prove the existence of God?" seems to me less a clear question than a tangle ofquestions which are rarely if ever sorted out and carefully distinguished. To most secular (i.e.,atheist) philosophers who consider the question at all, the question seems clear and the answerseems all too obvious: the traditional (e.g., Aquinas' or Maimonides') "proofs of the existence of

God" are one and all fallacious, and the very idea of proving the existence of God is absurd.Moreover, the majority of these philosophers take it to be quite clear what a "proof" is: ademonstration that something is the case using the standards (or supposed standards) of, if notscience, then, let us say, analytic philosophy. In addition, it is supposed that a sound proof oughtto be able to convince any rational person who sees it. (Why the arguments of analyticphilosophers themselves­­not even the philosophical, as opposed to technical logical,arguments of Frege, or Russell, or Quine, or Davidson, or David Lewis­­all fail to meet this testis not something that analytical philosophers discuss a great deal.)

Of course I cannot in this short space do what I just called for, that is disentangle and carefullydistinguish all the strands of the nest of questions hidden in the seemingly simple question, "Canone prove the existence of God?". (Perhaps there is no limit to the number of strands that couldbe distinguished.) Instead, I will respond to the familiar secular answer to the question justmentioned (and the construal of the question that it presupposes).

The view that the traditional proofs are fallacious rests, I think, on a straw­man idea of whatthose proofs are. As readers of this issue of The Monist are likely to know, each one of thoseproofs can be put into a form which is clearly valid (although the premisses, are, of course,nowadays controversial). For example, the causal argument for the existence of God does not,as has often been supposed (even by some medievals) presuppose that an infinite temporalregress of causes [a sequence... A­[3], A­[2], A­[1], A[o], such that for each natural number n,A[­(n + 1)] is the cause of and prior in time to A­,] is a logical impossibility.: Of course thearguments have premisses that are unacceptable to an atheist; but the idea that they are oneand all invalid, that they proceed by invalid reasoning from their premisses, is just wrong.Indeed, each of the traditional proofs can be stated in a form in which it proceeds validly from itspremisses (ones which an atheist cannot of course accept, but which, I shall argue, are notsimply question­begging).

To take the causal proof as an example. It is quite true that there is no logical contradiction inthe idea of a universe in which there is an infinite regress of causes backwards in time.However, from the point of view of the philosopher who accepts the causal proof (e.g., Aquinas,or Maimonides) that entire sequence, and indeed the entire physical universe of which themereological sum of .... A[­3], A[­2], A[­1], A[o] is a proper part, is itself a paradigm case of anutterly contingent being. But (as Immanuel Kant recognized), even if it goes beyond what wehave come to call "scientific thinking" to apply this to the universe as a whole, there is somethingin the human mind itself that makes us want to think that there is a cause for anything whoseexistence is contingent (and ultimately makes us want to posit an "unconditioned" cause foreverything that is "conditioned," to put it in Kantian language). Properly stated (although I willnot do it here),2 that intuition can be expressed as a formal premiss from which (withappropriate additional premisses) the existence of a Self­caused Cause can be derived(although the argument I have in mind is far from trivial). Needless to say, the "Proof" does notyield the existence of a Being with all of God's "attributes"; but it does yield­­for one whoaccepts the premisses!­­the existence of a Necessary Being (in the sense of a Being which is itsown sufficient ground for existence) of everything that is contingent. Certainly, this is not a

"proof" in the (absurd) sense of an argument which will convince everyone who reads it, for thevery simple reason that the premisses will not be accepted universally; it does nevertheless do acertain service­­a service, I think, which even the atheist should grant­­namely the service ofbringing out one source of our present idea of God,3 a source which is deep in a very naturalconception of reason itself. The fact that one philosopher felt that he had to end a bookvigorously defending atheism4 with the words, "Still, why is there something rather thannothing?" testifies to the depth of this intellectual urge, or idea, or intuition, or whatever youwant to call it. If anything, it was the triumph (at least in secular thought) after David Hume[5] ofthe idea that there is nothing problematic about the idea that the universe as a whole shouldexist wholly contingently that represented an enormous break with what was long taken to be afundamental principle of human reason as such.

To repeat: in addition to rejecting the idea that the traditional proofs are "invalid," I reject theidea that they are simply "question begging." On the contrary, even if in the end you reject theview of reason which is implicit in the proofs­­that is, the view according to which reason itselftells us that contingent existence requires a cause outside itself, and tells us, moreover, thatthere have to be necessities which are not simply "conceptual"­­you ought, I think, to recognizethat that view of reason speaks to and expresses intuitions which are very deep in us (and theidea that those intuitions are ones which have been "refuted" by the modern scientific way ofthinking is one which deserves critical examination).

What of the other element of the critique of the traditional proofs that I alluded to, namely thatthey do not produce universal assent (in the way in which, say, proofs in mathematics produceuniversal assent among those who understand them)? If Analytical Thomists agree with theirsecular critics that proofs of the existence of God ought to produce universal assent in this way(and I hope they don't), then I have to differ with them too, or rather I have to ask the question:"How are we to understand the notion 'among those who understand them' in the religiouscase?".

Two things seem obvious. First, in order to understand talk about God, whether or not that talktakes the form of a "proof," one must be able to understand the concept 'God'. But there arevery different possible conceptions of what it is to understand the concept 'God', in a way thathas no analogue in the mathematical case. Secondly, even if one understands the concept'God', to accept any of the traditional proofs one has to find a connection between that conceptand the highly theoretical philosophical principles involved in those proofs, such as the ones justmentioned (about conditioned and unconditioned existence, and about what sorts of necessitythere can be). Some of the most profound religious thinkers of the last hundred years have hadno use at all for this sort of philosophizing; and I would be the last to say that they lacked theconcept 'God'. What the traditional proofs of the existence of God in fact do is connect theconcerns of two different salvific enterprises: the enterprise of ancient and medievalphilosophy,6 which, after all, is the source of the materials for these proofs, and the enterpriseof monotheistic religion. While it is certainly possible to have a deeply worthwhile religiousattitude which combines these two elements­­indeed, the effort to do so has contributedprofoundly to Judaism as well as to Christianity and Islam­­it is also possible to have a deeply

fulfilling religious attitude while keeping far away from metaphysics. Speaking for myself, I wouldsay that while I do conceive of God as a "transcendent Being," as a "necessary Being," as an"unconditioned ground for the existence of everything that is contingent," I feel that insofar as Ihave any handle on these notions, I have a handle on them as religious notions, not as notionswhich are supported by an independent philosophical theory. (Certainly not by the theory ofAristotle's Metaphysics.) For me the "proofs" show conceptual connections of great depth andsignificance, but they are not a foundation for my religious belief. (In spite of Maimonides' greatprestige, they have never played a very important role in Jewish belief.) Nor are "proofs" theway in which I would try to bring someone else to Judaism, or to religious belief of any kind.

Predication with respect to GodI just remarked that there are many different conceptions of what it is to understand the concept'God'. On some conceptions the concept 'God' is straightforwardly definable in familiar terms' tobe God is to be powerful, knowing, good, etc., without limit, where the terms "powerful" (i.e.,able to bring about what one "wills"), "knowing" (i.e., having justified true beliefs7), etc., mean inthe Divine case just what they do in the human case. But such conceptions have long beenchallenged by religious thinkers, including, of course, Alfarabi, Avicenna, Maimonides, andAquinas.

On my own view[8] religious language and the languages of ordinary empirical description andscientific theorizing are, in a way, incommensurable.[9] The religious believer (qua religiousbeliever) is not­­or should not be­­engaged in the prediction of empirical phenomena, andreligious faith is not refuted by this or that empirical happening or scientific discovery. Tosuppose, as many people nowadays do, that "science has refuted religion," is to have a deeplyconfused understanding of what real religious belief is.

As I emphasized in Renewing Philosophy (168ff.), this does not mean that religious belief isimmune from criticism (although I am saying that one sort of criticism is utterly misguided). Onemay find what the believer says unintelligible: for instance, one may find that it violates one'ssense of what life means; or one may find that religious belief has lost its hold on one (or onehas lost one's hold on it), and it now appears as something strange and alien; but what oneshould not do is claim that one's view, whatever it is, is mandated by "present day science".[10]Norm or so I argued in Renewing Philosophy­­should one hope that philosophy of language, oranalytic philosophy, will be able to tell one whether religious language makes sense and, if so,what sort of sense it makes. There is simply no uncommitted place to stand with respect to thereligious dimension of human life.[11]

This thought was beautifully expressed to me as long ago as 1960 by Elizabeth Anscombe,when, in the course of a conversation, she compared the difference between the atheist view ofreligion and the view of the believer to the difference between "seeing the stained glasswindows from the outside and seeing them from the inside." But the fact that religious languageis in this way incommensurable with ordinary descriptive language does not mean that it issimply a self­enclosed "language game." On the contrary, as Cora Diamond has written,criticizing this very idea, "The questioning expressed in [great religious questions] is anyone's;

the possibility of such questions belongs to language itself, and not to any particular languagegame. The tendency to ask them does not depend on any form of life other than speech itself; itis as much something primitive, something given .... as responding to other people (and indeedfound in small children)."[12]

Putting together these remarks­­Elizabeth Anscombe's and Cora Diamond's­­I am inclined tosay something like this: that while the potentiality for religious language, the possibility of makingit one's own, is a basic human potentiality, the exercise of that potentiality is not a real possibilityfor every human being at every time. For some human beings it seems never to be a possibility(although something deeply spiritual in them may find another mode of expression). I myselfbelieve that it requires something experiential and not merely intellectual to awaken thatpossibility in a human being. Indeed, if I met a person who had been a diehard atheist, and whoone fine day came to believe in God simply on the basis of a metaphysical argument, I do notknow what I should think. It could be, of course, that the metaphysical argument was simply thetrigger that released something deeper. But what if the belief in God were simply a belief in thestrength of a certain philosophical argument? (As David Lewis claims to firmly believe in theexistence of real possible but not­actual worlds on the basis of a philosophical argument?) Onthe supposition that that is all that was going on, I would say that this was not belief in God atall, but a metaphysical illusion.

To say that there is this sort of gap between what the believer means and understands andwhat the secular critic thinks he means and understands, does not, of course, mean that nofruitful dialogue between a religious thinker and a secular thinker is possible. It may be perfectlyappropriate for an atheist philosopher and a religious philosopher to explore together thearguments that each offers. Indeed, it seems to me an important task, not just for religiousphilosophers but for religious intellectuals generally, and one that John Haldane performsextremely well, to try to show secular philosophers of a so­called "naturalist" bent that theirattempted "naturalizations" (i.e., reductions) of such notions as "intentionality," "causality,""justification," "truth," are failures in their own terms. In the same way, it is appropriate for asecular thinker to try to convince a religious thinker that some of his or her views areindefensible in the thinker's own terms. But that is a very different thing from trying to explainwhat it means to be religious in a purely intellectual way.

I titled this section "Predication with respect to God," and what do these remarks have to dowith that ancient topic? They have everything to do with it, for the following reason: even ifHaldane, or I, or someone else could succeed in convincing someone as intelligent and honestas J. J. C. Smart[13] that his views on the topics just cited ("intentionality," "causality,""justification," "truth") do not work, that the world is mysterious in a way that he has tried todeny,[14] still that thinker, as long as belief in God remains something external, as long as he orshe sees the stained glass windows from the outside, will feel that the notion 'God' is tooproblemtic to represent a possible way out of any intellectual problem­­feel, indeed, that it isonly dubiously intelligible. There is an enormous gap between anything one could "show" theatheist philosopher by arguments he must accept from his own standpoint (and even the ideathat one can do that is tremendously optimistic, of course), and belief in God. And the atheist's

feeling that the concept 'God' is problematic is not without good reasons. For once themonotheistic religions passed­­irreversibly, I believe­­from thinking of God in anthropomorphicterms to thinking of God as a transcendent being, the notion of God did become deeplyparadoxical. (Not that it was not paradoxical before!, but that the paradoxical character of thenotion became more profound, as most religious thinkers recognized.)

Not all religious thinkers agree that it is paradoxical. A few years ago a distinguished Christianphilosopher told me that he thought that the problem of predication with respect to God was theresult of a sort of "hang­up" that the medievals had about God's "unity," and that we shouldsimply drop the idea that we have to think of God in that way. I was somewhat surprised, and Irecall that I asked him, "Well, do you think that God is literally a mind (or literally has a mind),i.e., that He has states of consciousness that succeed one another in time?" (A question Iremember encountering in Bertrand Russell's writings somewhere.) My interlocutor replied,"Why not?" I replied that time, we now know, is something whose properties are contingent; forexample, according to General Relativity, whether there is a finite or an infinite amount of futuretime depends on such things as the average mass­density of the physical universe, and I askedwhether putting God in time wouldn't amount to abandoning utterly the idea of God'stranscendence. He did not reply. Frankly, this conception of God­­if it really was myinterlocutor's­­the conception of God as a being undergoing change in time­­seems to meunacceptably anthromorphic. It certainly would have seemed so to Maimonides or to ThomasAquinas. But what I want to discuss is not my interlocutor's conception of God as a being intime,[15] but his very interesting remark that the medicvalse6 had a "hang­up" about God'sUnity.

What I want to suggest is that, even if some of the reasons these thinkers had for thinking thatGod must be a Unity may no longer seem compelling, there are good reasons­­good religiousreasons­­for at least moving in this direction. The idea of Unity is not simply something thatNeoplatonism, as it might be, foisted on the theologies of the monotheistic religions.

Consider, for example, the supposition that God has a faculty of Knowledge and a separate anddistinct faculty of Will. On such a view, for God to think that something exists and for Him todesire that it exists are two utterly separate things. Such a separation of the faculties makesperfect sense in the case of finite beings, who may well think (or even know) that somethingexists although they do not desire it to exist, think (or even know) that something does not existalthough they desire it to exist, etc. But for God to think that something exists is for it to exist,and for God to desire that something exists is for it to exist. The links, that is, between God'sthinking that something exists, His desiring that it exist, and its existing are necessary links.

Of course, what I have given is not a metaphysical proof of Divine Unity, and, indeed, a numberof answers have been proposed to this sort of argument. Leibniz, for example, may be read asproposing that God's Intellect is distinguished from His Will precisely by the fact that what hisIntellect grasps is the whole realm of Possibility: what makes a possible thing into a real thing isprecisely an act of the Divine Will. The distinction between Possibility and Actuality, is thus, onthis account, what points to the difference between Divine Intellect and Will.[17] (But it is

certainly not true that human will guarantees the existence of what is willed!) Again, some haveargued that even Divine Omnipotence does not extend to responsibility for what is broughtabout by human Free Will, and so God may, after all, desire something which is not actualized(although traditional theology draws back from concluding that the created world as a whole isor can be less good than it might have been).

Thus, it is clear that while we can easily explain what it is for will and knowledge to be distinctattributes in the case of human beings (and analogously for knowledge and perception to bedistinct, etc.), the explanations are not ones that can simply be carried over to the case of Godwithout modification. What I desire to be the case and what I know to be the case have nonecessary connection, but if there is a difference between what God knows to be the case andwhat He desires to be the case, it is a difference between states which­­apart from the cases inwhich Free Will is involved­­are necessarily related, and not just necessarily related butconceptually related, since if anything is part of the traditional concept 'God' it is Omniscienceand Omnipotence. The problem, for one who tries (as the great medieval philosophers tried) totheorize about GOd is that the attributes cannot really be thought of as functioning in the case ofGod as the "analogous" attributes do in the case of creatures we understand, in particularourselves; and this problem, I claim, is not simply the artifact of some dubious metaphysicaldoctrine. The danger that faces one who tries to give up the notion that God's attributes are insome way One (or at least that each necessarily implicates all of the others) is that one beginsto threaten the idea of God's Transcendence, and that idea is a religious and not merely ametaphysical idea. Moreover, abandoning the idea of God's Transcendence also threatensanother religious idea, the idea of God's Necessity; for to the extent that we make God"intelligible" by giving in to the temptation to think of him as having a lot of separate "states" withfunctional relations (or as a lot of separate "experiences," as in William James's explicitly anti­transcendental theology in A Pluralistic Universe), then he begins to seem like­­as Haeckelnotoriously charged­­a "gaseous vertebrate"; and a vertebrate, however immaterial, isn't thesort of thing that can exist necessarily, on any conception of necessity.

We are then­­or at least I am, and I assume "Analytical Thomists" are as well­­stuck with aparadoxical conception of God. I shall close with a word about how one might think about theconsequences of that fact (consequences beyond the remark that the notion of proving theexistence of GOd to an atheist seems problematic).

I have discussed Maimonides' (and, briefly, Aquinas') solutions to the problem of ascribing"attributes" to God elsewhere? and I won't repeat that discussion here. But I will say this much:neither Maimonides' solution (his so­called "negative theology") nor Aquinas' solution (via thenotion of analogia) seem to clearly resolve the problem. The problem with negative theology isthat it leaves it unintelligible why we should say the things we do about God. What the doctrineof analogia comes to is itself a question on which interpreters of Aquinas disagree; but oneproblem I find with it is that it isn't clear that it really is a different solution from another ofMaimonides' solutions (namely, that we are "permitted" to predicate "attributes of action" to theDeity[19]; a solution which seems[20] like a failure to carry through his negative theology to theend). For example[21] discussing the application to God of such terms as `being' and `good'

and `wise', after having said that these terms are neither applied univocally nor equivocally, butanalogically, Thomas writes,

It should be said therefore that names of this kind are said of God and creatures according toanalogy, that is, proportion. This occurs in two ways in naming: either many things have aproportion to one, as "healthy" is said of medicine and urine insofar as each is ordered to thehealth of the animal, of which the latter is the sign and the former is the cause; or one isproportioned to another, as "healthy" is said of medicine and animal, insofar as the medicine isthe cause of the health that is in the animal. And in this way some things are said analogically,and not purely equivocally or univocally, of God and creatures. We can only name God fromcreatures as was said before. Thus, whatever is said of God and creatures is said insofar asthere is a certain order of creature to God as to its principle and cause in which preexist in anexcellent manner of all the perfections in things.

The analogy between medicine and health in the animal that Aquinas employs seems to meanthat when we call God "good" or "wise" or a "being" we so refer to him not because he is goodor wise or a being in the sense that a creature is, but because God is the "principle" or groundof (what we call) goodness and wisdom and being in creatures. And this is exactly Maimonides'account of the attributes of action!

On the other hand, if (following a different interpretation) analogia is understood by takingliterally the notion of "proportion," that is by employing such a formula as:

(1) God's Knowledge is that F which is to God exactly as Socrates' knowledge is to Socrates

­­then the explanation seems to be wholly inadequate. There is no clear sense of "A is to B asC is to D" that I am aware of which will justify supposing that such a formula as (1) has a uniquesolution. Just to consider the right hand of the formula, is there a single way in which Socrates'knowledge is to Socrates? Surely God's knowledge isn't to God in every way just as Socrates'knowledge is to Socrates!

My own view is certainly not Aquinas', but it does seem in keeping with something at leastsuggested by the following words:22

. . . some words are used neither univocally nor purely equivocally of creatures, but analogically,for we cannot speak of God at all except in the language we use of creatures .... this way ofusing words lies somewhere between pure equivocation and simple univocity [Et iste moduscommunitatis medius est inter puram aequivocationem et simplicem univocationem], for thewords are used neither in the same sense, as with univocal usage, nor in totally differentsenses, as with equivocation.

To put the thought in my own words, it is possible for us to think about God and to talk aboutGod, but doing so essentially involves uses of language which are sui generis (medius interpuram aequivocationem et simplicem univocationem).

Obviously there are deep philosophical problems (as well as confusions) in this area. I will only

mention two:

First, we have a tendency to believe (and philosophers are professionally inclined to believe)that such notions as `univocal' language and `literal' language are themselves clear andunproblematic. I would argue that, on the contrary, `literal' and `univocal' are themselvescontextdependent notions, and that there is no one form of discourse which is in some absolutesense "literal."[23]

Secondly, and perhaps this rests on the foregoing tendency, philosophers have a professionaltendency to believe that even if "non­literal" forms of language are useful and evenindispensable for certain purposes, it must be possible to give a "theory" of these non­literalforms, where the notion of "theory" involves two further assumptions:

(1) That "theory" means "scientific theory;"[24] and

(2) That scientific theories can, of course, be stated in literal language.

In my view, if there is one thing that there isn't going to be a scientific theory of (either in theAristotelian or in the contemporary sense of "scientific theory") it is how religious languageworks, and how it connects us to God.

But how does this speak to the problem of predication with respect to God? In this way: we canagree that when we call GOd Wise, or Good, or All­Powerful, we are using these terms in aspecial way (I would not say "non­literal," because, as I have already remarked I don't thinkthere is a single way of using them which is the "literal" way. And while God's Goodness andKnowledge are inconceivably different from human goodness and knowledge, I would not saythat the difference either is or isn't a difference in the "meaning" of the words). And I would saythat I cannot explain how that way works except in religious terms, by showing how the use ofthose terms figures in my religious life, showing how projecting those terms from my non­religious to my religious life is an essential part of that life. And neither can I explain what I meanby 'God', except by showing how my use of the term figures in my religious life­and that is notsomething I can do at just any time or to any person. Of course, this disbars me from claimingthat I can "prove" that God exists to an atheist. But I have already indicated that that is not aclaim that I think a religious person should make.

I said at the outset that the present remarks are intended as a set of questions (of the form:"What do you think of this?") addressed to those who do consider themselves to be AnalyticalThomists. It is time to stop, and hope that eventually they will respond. I am sure I will learnfrom the responses.

NOTES[*] My thanks to Ruth Anna Putnam for constructive and extremely helpful criticism of an earlierdraft.

For a reconstruction of the argument which is compatible with the existence of such causalsequences see Robert K. Meyer, "God Exists!," Nous 21, pp. 345­61 (Sept. 1987). The idea of

the proof­­particularly the use of zorn's Lemma­­was, as Meyer points out, suggested by myself.See paper cited in previous note.Of course, our present idea of God has itself developed in the course of time, partly under theinfluence of philosophy itself; but it is none the worse for that.W. Matson, The Existence of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).Even Hume contents himself with saying that it is useless to speculate about a cause forexperience as a whole.For the reasons for seeing "philosophic antique" (ancient and medieval philosophy) as a groupof salvific enterprises, see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwells,1995).N. B. God does not have Gettier problems!Cf. ohs. 7 and 8 in my Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1992).My use of the word "incommensurable" here is not meant to be an invocation of Kuhn's or anyother "theory" of science or of language; the problem of understanding the phenomenon I referto is the problem of understanding religious discourse itself, and that is not something oneachieves by theorizing about language. See Renewing Philosophy, pp. 148­53.Cf. my "God and the Philosophers," forthcoming in Midwest Studies in Philosophy.This paragraph and the one that precedes it are adapted from my "Negative Theology,"forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy.Cora Diamond, "Riddles and Anselm's Riddle," reprinted in her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge,MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991), p. 287­88.I use Smart and Haldane as examples not only because they are philosophers I admire, butalso because I so much admire their way of engaging one another in Atheism and Theism(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).The way in which the world is mysterious is not a way that has to do with the idea, which Iwould not employ, of "limits to natural science." Saying that the world is mysterious isn't sayingthat there is this or that thing that natural science could attempt to explain that it cannot explain;it is, among other things, saying that not all questions are scientific questions.To be fair, my interlocutor didn't actually put forward the conception of God as a being withchanging states of consciousness, but he did ask why shouldn't we accept it.One can cite representative thinkers from all three of the Jerusalem­based monotheisticreligions as upholders of a strong doctrine of God's Unity: e.g., Alfarabi and Avicenna fromIslam, Maimonides from Judaism, and Aquinas from Christianity.This reading of Leibniz was suggested to me by Abraham Stone.In "Negative Theology."Guide for the Perplexed, I, 52.I say "seems" because I am convinced that Maimonides was aware of the difficulty and thoughtthat he could meet it, perhaps by an element of mysticism.Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 13.Summa Theologiae, Ia. 13.5, responsio.For a view of language which supports this claim, see Charles Travis's important book, TheUses of Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

A version of this assumption is in play in medieval philosophy as well, I would claim, althoughthe paradigm of "science" was, of course, different.~~~~~~~~by Hilary Putnam, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

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