Abstract

De Anna’s book rotates around two notions, the ones of metaphysical realism and mental representation, and around two thinkers, Hilary Putnam, and John Haldane. De Anna’s background is always and only Aquinas, however, and he keeps reconstructing the issues by means of Thomistic arguments with the same tenacity shown by Brian Shanley in his famous paper he dedicated to Haldane. In the first chapter De Anna shows that the conjunction of metaphysical realism and naturalism brings about a form of semantic realism, in the second chapter he reviews the arguments set forth by Putnam to refute semantic realism and per modum tollentem also the conjunction of metaphysical realism and naturalism. The third chapter is dedicated to Putnam’s interest for the interpretation of Aristotelian psychology advanced by Martha Nussbaum, the fourth to Haldane’s response to Putnam, and the fifth recapitulates the whole discussion by going back to what Aquinas says on the reception of sensible forms. For long years, naturalism seemed the inevitable consequence of metaphysical realism. To renounce naturalism would have meant to accept “magical theories” of reference and mental representation like the one proposed by Brentano. In the early 1990s, however, Putnam realizes that intentionality is a property of human beings that cannot be reduced to a natural context. Also for Haldane, of course, intentionality is an irreducible property, but this does not bring him to accept either a panpsychist understanding of matter or the dubious thesis that mental properties are added to inert matter in a way that Putnam would have called magic. Haldane goes back to Aquinas’s position that not only do concepts have a necessary connection with their extension, they also find their explanation as intellectual dispositions, habits, which are used when we state judgments, and De Anna does indeed a great job at clarifying this important discussion.