Commenter Anonymous writes:
As graduate student in political theory who has just begun following this site, I find myself nonplussed by the denigration of narrative here. To complain about its prevalence in pomo won't just do; it's NOT a venture solely confined to the work of Continental philosophers practicing genealogy, but a core part of the philosophical discipline. . . . So then if you want to vindicate Scotus and set the record straight, more than a corrective for each problematical narrative is needed: an alternative one needs to be advanced. Merely clarifying his thought each time it is maligned is insufficient. How did Scotus differ from Aquinas? How did this influence Ockham? What was it about the legacy of scholasticism that lead to its abandonment by the early moderns? What had these moderns internalized from it (e.g. nominalism/conceptualism, voluntarism, etc.)? How did these intellectual developments interplay with political and social developments (e.g. the rise of science, emerging commercialism, power struggles between Church and state, etc.)? Of course you cannot answer all of the questions given the focus of your work--though I would think with a philosopher and a historian on this sight, insight could be gleamed into at least one of them, if not a full answer--but that doesn't render these questions unimportant. Rather, these questions draw people toward these moments and thinkers. The exposure to the material from a historical vantage has lead me to consider Aquinas' work on his own terms, of which I have begun reading. Similarly, I plan to eventually read many of the other scholastics as well (after I learn Latin). The point is that if you want people to seriously consider scholastics and if you unfortunately don't care about historical narrative, then use narrative as a foil to draw them into reconsidering scholastic thought on its own terms. Otherwise, most people, as I once did, will look at your work and think of it as a morbid preoccupation with extinct theories, rather than high philosophy unparalleled by anything in the last five hundred years.
Now in a way this is all fair enough. I have a couple of points to make in response. First, I don't at all insist that narrative per se is simply bad. Indeed, narrative in the sense of the reduction of disparate events to an order which can be grasped as a whole is both salutary and necessary. What I object to is a historical narrative that prefers its plot to respecting or even bothering to identify the relevant facts.
A good narrative in the history of philosophy is something like Copleston's technique: "After A we will look at B. B's positions and arguments are x and y. They are related to A's in this way: here's how they are alike and here's how they differ. I think A's arguments are better for these reasons. B's arguments were adapted by C in this way. C used B's insights to improve on A while avoiding the weaknesses in B."
I also respect the method John Deely used in his history of medieval philosophy which I read recently, in which he uses the doctrine of signs as his Ariadne's thread to guide the reader through the period and providing a unifying factor to the "Latin Age" between Augustine and John of St Thomas as opposed to ancient and modern thought. I find this sort of technique reductive and it obviously leaves an enormous amount out, but at the same time it's a valid approach to finding an intelligibility in the thicket.
Here's a bad narrative: "Plato and Aristotle were real philosophers, the Stoics were sort of dumb but had some good ideas, the neoplatonists succumbed to the growing religious atmosphere of late antiquity, then the fundies took over. They hated reason and produced a dark age of a thousand years. Nothing interesting happened. Then Descartes was a light shining out of the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not, for they loved their angels on pinheads and their Inquisition and Crusades too much. Then real philosophy started. No, I haven't read any of the books from that millenium, but I certainly have heard of one or two."
Here's another bad narrative: "Medieval philosophy was a golden age of the synthesis of faith and reason in which man's natural and spiritual sides reached a harmony and equilibrium. It's a marvelous gothic arch leading up to the point of Thomism, the supreme achievement of human rationality. The five ways are the best things anyone has ever said about anything, they're right at the tip of the arch. After that point the arch goes back down, sinking into decadence, modernity, and heresy. The golden age thus lasted about twenty-five years, though it was recaptured occasionally by the better of Thomas' commentators. No, I haven't read any of Thomas' non-Dominican successors, but I've certainly read Anselm and have glanced at a few early 20th-century manuals."
The problem with the second two is not that they are narratives, although they do make for more gripping stories than the first two. The problem with them is that they are a) false, and b) produced with little or no concern with actually happened in the time whose story they purport to tell. What happened in philosophy in a given period is what people thought in that period, and unless you grasp that first your story is BS.
This leads me to my second point, which is that the wrong kinds of narrative lead to the instrumentalization of philosophy, which destroys it. All the questions Anonymous brings up are valid questions. But they're not the questions that Scotus deals with in his works. If your primary concern is how "intellectual developments interplay with political and social developments (e.g. the rise of science, emerging commercialism, power struggles between Church and state, etc.)", then, frankly, Scotus isn't for you. Because Scotus doesn't talk about and doesn't care about these things. When I finish writing this post I'm going to go read a 30-40 page question on the ontological status of relations. I may or may not write a blog post on it. This is because I'm interested in relations as a part of metaphysics, and so is Scotus, who has profound and interesting things to say on the matter. But if you don't care about metaphysics for its own sake, what are the chances you're going to slog through the 1,200 pages of the Metaphysics questions or the thousands of pages of the Ordinatio with a keen enough attention and interest to figure out what Scotus cares about and how he argues for his positions? Very, very low.
The Reformation as a historical event is very interesting, and enormously complicated, and had millions of causes of various kinds which can be adduced to explain one factor or another. There are of course political and economic and theological and demographic and linguistic and other elements to how it played out. But what Scotus is interested in is metaphysics, and using metaphysics to explicate the doctrines of the Catholic faith. That's pretty much it. (Yes, I'm being reductive myself here.) If you don't approach Scotus with that in mind first of all, you're going to misunderstand him. Because of what he's doing, the proper way to read him is to ask: What is he saying? Why does he think this? What is this argument? Is this argument any good? A narrative which doesn't do this first, as a way of establishing its ground, will fail to have any relationship to Scotus as he actually lived and thought. Now perhaps there is a way that Scotus' dense and complex and subtle web of thought could be related in a meaningful way to the nexus of causality of the Reformation. But it seems that most of the people who are willing to actually study him are less interested in that than in understanding the metaphysics of the trinity or the incarnation, i.e. the things Scotus himself was interested in.
So let's look at some of Anonymous' questions. "How did Scotus differ from Aquinas?" This question can largely be answered, and we've said a great deal about it on this blog. But it's necessary first to know what Aquinas said and what Scotus said, but also to know a lot of other things. Until fairly recently Scotus was systematically misread because ever reader forced him into a false dialogue with Aquinas, neglecting the fact that much of the time Scotus is unconcerned with Thomas and his interlocutors were other scholastics. The Thomocentric narratives that required all scholastic discourse to revolve around the concerns of the Common Doctor produced endless misconstrual of Scotus' thoughts and their motivations. You can't read Scotus by asking, first, "Is Scotus enough of a Thomist to be orthodox?" You have to ask, "What is the principle of individuation? Is this account of the divine ideas sensible? Do we really need an intermediate distinction between the real and the rational?"
"How did this influence Ockham?" It's still hard to say. We can relate much of Scotus to Ockham, but Ockham is also in dialogue with a lot of lesser-known figures. But, more importantly (to me), how many people wanting to know just what made Ockham into such a villain have actually read enough Ockham to figure out what he was doing? Do they even care? Why do they care so much about the etiology of something they're not really interested in? Moreover nebulous talk about "influence" is suspect to me. Everyone is influenced by everything they read and hear; Scotus was the biggest genius just before Ockham, so of course Ockham was influenced by him. Of course he addresses Scotus' arguments and distinctions, accepting or rejecting them in turn. But Ockham's nominalism was caused by Ockham's thoughts, and those are what have to be addressed. Scotus is responsible for them only insofar as Ockham thought what Scotus thought and because he got it from Scotus, and in order to evaluate this we have to understand what Ockham thought and what Scotus thought and compare - which means, again, caring about the actual issues they discussed prior to polishing our narrative. If we do this we will see that everything his enemies hate about Ockham is related to Scotus just insofar as Ockham came up with it by rejecting Scotus' most distinctive thoughts, which (granted) wouldn't have been possible without Scotus as a foil.
"What was it about the legacy of scholasticism that lead to its abandonment by the early moderns?" This one is pretty easy, I think. Scholasticism produced works and methods which became extremely complex and difficult and voluminous, to the extent that its tradition seemed frustrating and boring and pointless to those who did not share its driving concerns. So instead of arguing with it they mocked it and ditched it. Yes, there are political and cultural and ecclesiological factors, and yes, to the historian these are worth pursuing, but for us I think they are not germane. For instance, the resistance of many late scholastics to the new counter-Aristotelian physics, which set so many people against them, is in my opinion a relevant but not essential point.
But to return to the main issue. For a philosopher history is a subordinate science, to be instrumentalized in the search for wisdom, while philosophy itself exists for its own sake (in the natural order). People who value philosophy primarily (rather than subalternately) for its capacity to illumine history are, in the philosopher's opinion, misguided. People who neglect, ignore, or distort philosophical arguments, and thus the facts about the history of philosophy, for the sake of a broader (even if otherwise well-intentioned) historical narrative are pernicious and deadly to philosophy. If a non-philosopher wants to investigate the effect of a philosophical idea on historical events, well and good; although this is not the correct disposition towards philosophy simpliciter it is permissible secundum quid insofar as the historian's profession is also licit. But in order to be even a good historian, he must at this point - even if only temporarily - stop caring about history as much as he cares about philosophy, and become at least enough of a philosopher to understand the ideas and arguments in themselves, not as historical facts but as approaches to ahistorical truth, before applying them to his narrative.
In the same thread Commenter Mark writes,
I don't see how history of philosophy is itself (as history) necessary to doing philosophy. Can't someone be a philosopher without knowing much of anything about the history of philosophy?
My answer is that it it is possible to be a philosopher without knowing the history of philosophy, but it is not possible to be a good philosopher. The reasons are the same as those outlined in an early chapter of Aquinas' Summa contra gentiles: although philosophical truths are those which can be known through reason and common experience alone, the life of any given man is too short and his intelligence too weak to discover all naturally-knowable truths himself. The progress of human wisdom then must be cumulative. But since philosophical knowledge is not a collection of facts that can be simply learned, but a body of truths which must be thought through and intuited through insight and argumentation, every philosopher who wishes to progress beyond the most rudimentary stages has to recapitulate the history of philosophy in his own mind, by thinking through the thoughts of his predecessors.
If this post isn't long enough, here are some past posts on these and related topics, handily collected:
http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/04/education-liberal-arts-and-philosophy.html
http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/05/gilson-on-history-vs-history-of.html
http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/03/around-net.html
http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/01/pope.html
http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2010/05/sokolowski-on-ancient-philosophy.html
http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2009/05/thomism-as-protestantism.html
http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2009/04/historiographical-fiction.html
16 comments:
I get the weight behind what you are saying. Maybe no one is smart enough, or if they are, just doesn't have enough time to accomplish much on their own.
I didn't spell this out, I was using history to denote the 'narrative', with the complicated connections one posits between societies, between ideas, and between ideas and societies, and vice versa. These connections kind of connecting the different characters in a story- like Jack yelled at Bob, causing Bob to scream at Mary, and this made the part really uncomfortable and so nobody managed to enjoy themselves. Maybe there are such connections (not the yelling, but other ones that connect characters in casually relevant ways), I don't know.
But, my question is, what does the narrative aspect itself contribute to philosophical truths?
My idea is that the narrative contributes insofar as it just exposes us to true facts, good reasons, and many good examples of how to arrive at true facts via good reasons.
So, the 'history' that I was describing as unnecessary, was really the richer aspects of narration that go on in the history of philosophy. A concept that, for example, somebody would say that I lacked, EVEN IF I knew all the arguments that anybody had ever given, and I could perfectly evaluate them, and I had benefitted greatly from doing so. Maybe this is fictitious, and people don't have as rich an idea of 'philosophy of history' as I am painting. Maybe it's not fictitious.
That clear anything up, and make my thought look more reasonable? Have a go at it.
.Mark
Mr.Sullivan, really good post. I agree pretty much with everything, really. Thanks.
This is the anonymous that prompted this post. Thank you for taking the time to give attention to me post; it was unexpected, but welcomed. I have a few responses.
Your first point is very well received. The prior post seemed a bit too dismissive toward history and this qualification was salutary, both the affirmation of historical work--when pursued meticulously, honestly, and with respect to the concerns of philosophers and the content of their study--and the breadth of historical work you mentioned.
Similarly, your concern over the instrumentalization of philosophy is equally well taken and never in dispute by me. Rather, my concern was what I (mis)perceived to be a dismissal of historical inquiry. However, I'm not sure what to make of your stronger claim on the distinctions between philosophical and historical work. This would imply that many people in highly regarded philosophy departments are not philosophers, but, in fact, historians that are incognito. But I suppose that was a part of the point of the prior post: philosophy has strayed in its abandonment of metaphysics, particularly Aristotelianism, and its turn toward foundationalism, historicism, and everything in between and afterward. But this will continue to pose problems for you, particularly given the direction of the Church. Take Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, who has a rather postmodern flair to his advocacy of Aristotelian virtue ethics; or even consider Pope Benedict who, despite his lamentation over the dehellenization of Christianity and the West, flirts with history as a philosophical and theological category, which is an approach foreign to Greek and Medieval philosophy.
One brief point of clarification before I conclude: my concern was not only about the Reformation, but also many other developments, such as the conceptualization of both political and ecclesial authority as that of a sovereign, unitary, and volitional lawgiver, that is, a voluntaristic entity, which, pending further developments, coalesced into the modern state and the monadic rights-bearing individual--or at least that's the story as it has been related. Perhaps it is a glib and specious "bad narrative;" perhaps there is some truth to it. Thankfully, this is only my first year in my doctoral program, which will afford plenty of time to pursue these themes further, if I chose to do so, as well as delve into Greek and Latin texts.
Again, thank you for your lengthy response. It has certainly provided grist for reflection.
This is the anonymous that prompted this post. Thank you for taking the time to give attention to me post; it was unexpected, but welcomed. I have a few responses.
Your first point is very well received. The prior post seemed a bit too dismissive toward history and this qualification was salutary, both the affirmation of historical work--when pursued meticulously, honestly, and with respect to the concerns of philosophers and the content of their study--and the breadth of historical work you mentioned.
Similarly, your concern over the instrumentalization of philosophy is equally well taken and never in dispute by me. Rather, my concern was what I (mis)perceived to be a dismissal of historical inquiry. However, I'm not sure what to make of your stronger claim on the distinctions between philosophical and historical work. This would imply that many people in highly regarded philosophy departments are not philosophers, but, in fact, historians that are incognito. But I suppose that was a part of the point of the prior post: philosophy has strayed in its abandonment of metaphysics, particularly Aristotelianism, and its turn toward foundationalism, historicism, and everything in between and afterward. But this will continue to pose problems for you, particularly given the direction of the Church.
. . . Take Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, who has a rather postmodern flair to his advocacy of Aristotelian virtue ethics; or even consider Pope Benedict who, despite his lamentation over the dehellenization of Christianity and the West, flirts with history as a philosophical and theological category, which is an approach foreign to Greek and Medieval philosophy.
One brief point of clarification before I conclude: my concern was not only about the Reformation, but also many other developments, such as the conceptualization of both political and ecclesial authority as that of a sovereign, unitary, and volitional lawgiver, that is, a voluntaristic entity, which, pending further developments, coalesced into the modern state and the monadic rights-bearing individual--or at least that's the story as it has been related. Perhaps it is a glib and specious "bad narrative;" perhaps there is some truth to it. Thankfully, this is only my first year in my doctoral program, which will afford plenty of time to pursue these themes further, if I chose to do so, as well as delve into Greek and Latin texts.
Again, thank you for your lengthy response. It has certainly provided grist for reflection.
What is he saying? Why does he think this? What is this argument? Is this argument any good?
As I recall, pretty much what Adler says about how to read any book.
One more quick point: I've noticed that you have a link to Edward Feser's blog and that he has a link to this one. In addition, after a search, I found that this site has apparently referenced him a few times. You should know that his book, The Last Superstition, makes use of many of the narratives I have mentioned on pages 167, 168, and 170. Below are the relevant excerpts:
" . . . John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347), who, though scholastics, rejected Aquinas's synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christian theology. Their reasons for doing so anticipate certain key themes of modern philosophy . . . [these themes] led to the undoing of the Scholastic tradition, which had reached its apex in Aquinas's thought."
"Both Scotus and Ockham denied the possibility of the sort of knowledge of God Aquinas claimed could be had through reason, . . ."
"The motivation for Scotus's skepticism was an excessive emphasis (as Thomists see it) on God's will over His intellect. Aquinas, in Scotus's estimation, makes God and His actions too comprehensible, too rational, too open to our puny philosophical investigations. So radically free is God's will, in Scotus's view, that we simply cannot deduce from the natural order either His intentions or any necessary features of the things He created, since He might have created them in any number of ways, as His inscrutable will directed."
"Meanwhile, Scotus's and Ockham's tendency toward voluntarism (i.e. their emphasis on will over intellect), and the related idea that morality derives from arbitrary divine commands, became secularized in the notion that all law rests ultimately on the sheer will of a sovereign, rather than in a rationally ascertainable natural order. Combine these themes and you are not far from Thomas Hobbes's view that man's "natural" condition is to be at war with his fellowman, and that this unhappy situation can be remedied only by agreeing to submit to the will of an absolute ruler."
These ideas are pervasive. I've encountered variations of this in the writings of philosophers and theologians, whether atheist or Christian--Roman Catholics, an Orthodox, and a few Protestants--and in both the Analytic and Continental traditions.
But, my question is, what does the narrative aspect itself contribute to philosophical truths?
I think a distinction needs to be made between philosophical truths and philosophical truth here. Philosophical truth is just what is true: considered on its own, it just is what it is, and is unaffected by the narrative aspects. But thinking of philosophical truth on its own is clearly an abstraction, and one we simply do not start with at all: we only get to philosophical truth by way of philosophical truths, i.e., by particular attempts to formulate what is true in particular contexts as relevant to the human concerns that are most salient in those contexts. And the richer narrative is necessary to these. It simply is important in reading Plato's Republic to know what the Bendideia is, or to know that the dialogue is set in the house of a Syracusan arms dealer in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, apparently on the verge of the expedition against Syracuse, or to know that several of the characters will later die in the struggle between oligarchs and democrats. It really does matter for understanding many of Scotus's arguments that he is arguing against Henry of Ghent and not, as some people had once thought, Thomas Aquinas; the miracle of the thorn really does matter for what the Jansenists were and were not able to get away with doing and saying in their philosophical works, and Jansenist-Jesuit politics does have an influence on what arguments and ideas a given thinker could even be aware of at any given time; as Gouhier argued for Malebranche and religious sentimetn, the attitudes people take to different things shape the course of their arguments; and it has mattered from the beginning how philosophers have died, even if only for understanding why other philosophers think the way they do.
We only find philosophy in finding philosophizing; but philosophizing, from the nature of the thing, is all narrative, and rich in detail, because it is affected by many factors (including relations with other people and social institutions). And while angels can no doubt have philosophy without philosophizing, human beings cannot.
I was unaware of this passage in Feser, never having examined his books. But I suppose fair is fair, since I've devoted two posts to Barron and various other narrativisits I'll have to devote a few to Feser.
Brandon,
Pointing out the context in which philosophizing takes place does not prove that the context contributes to the content of the philosophizing in a way that we couldn't do without; e.g. the context is sometimes necessary just for understanding what the content actually is, but it's clear that sometimes elaborations of context really just don't contribute any substantial data (premises, definitions, distinctions, logical form) to the philosophizing.
Nor does it prove that the context, when it does contribute, is (philosophically) important for anything else. In other words, if finding out just what is meant by a certain argument requires looking at who the argument is aimed towards, then the context is (philosophically) important only insofar as it contributes to our knowledge of the argument. But again, many people who do history of philosophy are interested in providing explanations and accounts of matters that don't exactly contribute to knowledge of the arguments themselves.
In conclusion, we could have just as much knowledge of all the important philosophical discussion, without knowing anything interesting about the history of philosophy. We could know that so-and-so was reacting to so-and-so's argument, but history of philosophy goes much further than this, no?
Also, I respect history of philosophy, just like I respect history of anything else. It's not trivial, unimportant, or uninteresting. I just think that it's good to keep philosophy and history of philosophy (as a discipline interested in more than just helping us get the content of the arguments) as, at least, distinct concepts.
.Mark
Pointing out the context in which philosophizing takes place does not prove that the context contributes to the content of the philosophizing in a way that we couldn't do without; e.g. the context is sometimes necessary just for understanding what the content actually is, but it's clear that sometimes elaborations of context really just don't contribute any substantial data (premises, definitions, distinctions, logical form) to the philosophizing.
Nego, on both counts: this is a distinction that only makes any sense at all if we are still equivocating between philosophical truth and philosophical truths, and I deny both that it is clear that elaborations of context don't contribute any substantial data to the philosophizing and that the only substantial contributions to philosophizing are 'data'. In fact, we know for a fact that there are substantial contributions to philosophizing that are not data anything like your listed examples: desiderata, biases, sensible experiences, authority of testimony (as opposed to what is testified to), the ends of argument, causes affecting accessibility of what you are calling 'data', attitudes like Aristotle's wonder or Stoic resignation, etc. I think the account of philosophizing you are giving is quite common; I don't, however, think it's coherent, requiring as it seems to require equivocation between philosophizing and what is discovered and constructed in and through philosophizing, and I don't think it fits the actual facts of the human experience of philosophizing.
Likewise, I think that the claim "we could have just as much knowledge of all the important philosophical discussion, without knowing anything interesting about the history of philosophy" is certainly false, and virtually guarantees misunderstanding of actual arguments. It treats philosophy as if it really existed only in some Platonic heaven to which we had some kind of direct access; but human beings in fact find philosophy immersed in the world, as a human activity and its results, within the context of the unity of human life and society.
It can well happen that in a particular contextual account it is unclear how a particular element is really relevant. Likewise, its real relevance may be extraordinarily general and quite unsurprising, and so unable to explain any distinctive features. Further elements may be misidentified as parts of the relevant context when they really aren't. But none of this really tells against contextual accounts generally; they are merely common problems in explanation generally.
Brandon,
Since we disagree, and it seems I'm not successful at clarifying my view in such a manner that it just seems true, I'm join to have to ask you for an argument for your view that history of philosophy is important for doing philosophy in ways other than what I've so far granted.
You could just say that the burden of proof is on my view, and not yours. But this just looks really implausible. At the very minimum, we all accept that arguments which are logically valid, and have sound premises, lead to true conclusions.
But now, someone comes along and tells me that it's important that I know the story too. That if I don't understand the interaction between societies and philosophers, and between ideas and people, then I just am missing something important about doing philosophy. Well, this claim is not self-evident, and it's not clear to me why it's true.
Hope I'm not coming off as too argumentative. It's just that at we can go on forever talking past each other if we don't engage each other's actual views. In short, it's time for real philosophical arguments if we're going to make controversial claims.
.Mark
I've already given you several arguments, albeit in summarized form: I've given several things that are uncovered contextually that plausibly fall outside of your account that are important for argument (certainly every single one of the ones I listed has been proposed by philosophers as important); I have also pointed out the equivocation I think you are making. So suggesting that I have given no argument is quite odd; the real question is, what part of the argument do you need me to expand for you?
Just to comment on the OP...
I admit, I come from the land of Feser-sympathetic commenters, but I now and then check in here because I'd love to learn more about Scotus. And I have nothing wrong with dry writing, or anything else mentioned.
Though I do think now and then it would be interesting to talk about the practical applications of Scotus' thought to everyday or modern life, if there are any. There seem to be some for Aquinas' and Aristotle's thought, and Feser and company tend to talk about those now and then. I see it less here - maybe I missed it.
Anonymous,
I never meant to suggest that you were only or primarily interested in the Reformation, it was just a handy example.
I'm very far from wanting to pick on Dr Feser. He may at times repeat the narrative we're complaining about, but he's just relying on the common wisdom which we think was produced by decades or more of inadequate or even bad scholarship. Dr Feser himself has been unfailingly kind and polite to us at The Smithy personally, and in general in his remarks he is tolerant and open to a diversity of viewpoints within the scholastic tradition (reserving his polemical wrath for atheists and idiots of every stripe), even if he tends to stay firmly in the Thomist camp. That's a wholly respectable position as far as I'm concerned.
Crude,
Faber and I definitely tend to stay on the more theoretical and abstruse end of things. In the absence of requests from a vast and hungry audience, we tend to write mostly for ourselves and each other, and so follow our interests of the moment (it always surprises me to find, as in the last week or so, that we actually have a number of readers! It generally feels like I'm sending my arcana out into the void). There was that pretty substantial exchange on Intelligent Design last year, but that happened because Dr Feser explicitly invited our input. I wasn't and generally am not actively searching for ways to make my studies "relevant". That may be a character flaw on my part.
I for one am truly appreciative of this blog and the discussions it provokes. I teach Theology, primarily Thomas, but I also need to teach my students Scotus, and at the very least, I don't want to make things up, so I read along and try to get to the heart of what is at stake in each of these conversations.
I am sympathetic to the question of history in these matters, as no philosopher or theologian investigates the eternal and unchanging truth from an eternal and unchanging perspective; they are rather dropped into the midst of a lively debate, in which certain questions stand out in need of resolution while others hang in the back of the pack, often completely unnoticed.
I have come to appreciate this when teaching my students the Theology of St. Thomas; while some matters may be perennial, others are more occasional, generated by the contingent events of his day.
I have spent enough time around guys like Richard Cross and Tim Noone to recognize the silliness of the "Ockham to Auschwitz" narratives, and the presumed complicity of Scotus, that pervade certain circles, but I am still working hard on trying to "get" what Scotus is on about.
That is why I appreciate this blog, as it sets out Scotus on his own terms, rather than as a foil or a villian.
Yet I still am not "on" to the concerns that manifest themselves in Scotus' works. First, I am a newcomer to his work; all I've seriously taught was an independent study with an interested student on his moral thought, basically using Wolter's text as our guide. Second, I am a theologian, so perhaps some of complexities of the primarily metaphysical arguments elude my grasp (or interest). Third, I only have a thumbnail sketch of Scotus' immediate predecessors, and the arguments and conclusions he heard from them; what did they teach that was so repugnant to Scotus, such that he felt he had to correct them by teaching something different?
And what did he *not* challenge or consider teaching differently? That is the question that the question of historical situation raises for me, for as comprehensive and thorough as philosophers like Scotus were, they did not construct a coherent philosophy ex nihilo, but rather repeated in large part the inheritance they received, inasmuch as it was unproblematic, but reconsidered and revised what they did deem unsatisfactory.
That's about as much as I can add this evening, as I just got in from walking a group of continuing-ed students through Anselms' Cur Deus Homo...
Post a Comment